Finding the perfect balance â regulating brain activity to improve attention
Researchers from The University of Nottingham have found that balanced activity in the brainâs prefrontal cortex is necessary for attention.Â
The research helps to make sense of attention deficits in people suffering from cognitive disorders â like schizophrenia â who often find it hard to sustain their attention. This has a significant effect on many aspects of their lives, including the ability to follow conversations, drive a car and hold down a job.
Activity in a healthy brain is controlled by inhibitory signals between neurons. The research shows that disrupting this healthy inhibition may be just as bad for attention as reducing neuron firing. It is often assumed that increasing brain activity has cognitive benefits, but the findings show that this is not always the case.
The research was carried out by a team in the Universityâs School of Psychology and involved inhibiting or disinhibiting the prefrontal cortex in rats and monitoring the effect. The researchers found that both of these extremes resulted in attentional deficits and that the ability to pay attention required an appropriate balance where neuron-firing was kept within a certain range.
Schizophrenia and attention deficitsÂ
Studies of the brain in people with schizophrenia suggest aberrant neuron-firing in the prefrontal cortex. There is evidence that neuron firing in this part of the brain is often too high or too low.
Dr Tobias Bast, who led the study together with first author Dr Marie Pezze, said: âThe implication of our findings is that the abnormalities we see in the prefrontal cortex of schizophrenia patients, for example, are indeed a plausible cause of the attention deficit these patients have.
âIt also means that if we want to treat this pharmacologically, we canât just boost activity of the prefrontal cortex or inactivate it, because that would actually result in an impairment. What we need to do is look at restoring balance of activity through drugs which keep the activity within a certain range.â
Cognitive deficits associated with schizophrenia
In people with schizophrenia, cognitive deficits â such as problems with attention â are less striking than other issues associated with the disorder, such as hallucinations, but are nevertheless a major problem.
Dr Bast said: âInitially people focused on the so-called âpsychotic symptomsâ, including hallucinations and delusions, so thatâs what probably comes to mind when you think of schizophrenia. They have been in the fore because they have been so striking and thatâs why referrals are made. But these can be treated, at least in a large proportion of patients, by using anti-psychotic medication, which we have had since the late 1950s.
âThe problem is that unfortunately anti-psychotic drugs donât improve cognitive deficits which are very debilitating, affecting many aspects of the patientsâ lives. Cognitive deficits are a big problem and something that is currently not treated so finding something that helps this is really important.â
