\u201cIn order to behave efficiently, you want to process relevant sensory information as fast as possible, but relevance is determined by your current situation<\/strong>,\u201d said Joy Geng, assistant professor of psychology at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain.<\/p>\n For example, a flashing road sign alerts us to traffic merging ahead; or a startled animal might cue you to look out for a hidden predator.<\/p>\n When concentrating on a specific task, it\u2019s helpful to reconfigure brain networks so that task-relevant information is processed most efficiently and external distractions are reduced, Geng found.<\/p>\n Geng and co-author Nicholas DiQuattro, a graduate student in psychology, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity in volunteers carrying out a simple test. They compared their results to mathematical models to infer connectivity between different areas of the brain. The study appeared in the Dec. 7 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.<\/p>\n The subjects had to look for a letter \u201cT\u201d in a box and indicate which way it faced by pressing a button. They were also presented with a \u201cdistractor\u201d: another letter T in a box, but rotated 90 degrees.<\/p>\n The distractor was either similar in appearance to the target, or brightened to be more attention-getting.<\/p>\n Subjects did better in trials with an \u201cattention-getting\u201d distractor than a less obvious one, and lit up specific areas of the brain accordingly.<\/p>\n The new work shows that the brain doesn\u2019t always \u201cramp up\u201d to deal with the situation at hand<\/strong>, Geng said. Instead, it changes how traffic moves through the existing hard-wired network — rather like changing water flow through a network of pipes or information flow over a computer network — in order to maximize efficiency.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the UC Davis press release: A new UC Davis study shows how the brain reconfigures its connections to minimize distractions and take best advantage of our knowledge of situations…. Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[42,85,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":713,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions\/713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Brain2.jpg\" "\\"brain\\"")
A new UC Davis study shows how the brain reconfigures its connections to minimize distractions and take best advantage of our knowledge of situations<\/strong>.<\/p>\n