THE EFFECT THAT
CONCENTRATING HARD ON STAYING DISCIPLINED HAVE ON OUR BRAIN
The human body has a finite amount of resources,
and scientists are always discovering more about how these resources are
shared, depleted, and replenished. Now a new study suggests that the areas in
your brain responsible for self-control and forming memories are closely linked
- in other words, if you're concentrating hard on staying disciplined, you're
probably becoming less adept at remembering what's happening. Researchers Yu-Chin
Chiu and Tobias Egner from Duke
University in the US asked a group of volunteers
to recognise a series of faces, both with and without the inclusion of a
self-control test in the middle. They found that having to exercise
self-control had a negative impact on the participants' ability to recall which
pictures they'd previously seen. The same experiment was then repeated with a
new set of volunteers and brain-scanning fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging)
equipment on hand.
The pair discovered that one area of the brain –
the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex - was activated frequently during the
self-control test and predicted the strength of the volunteers' memory later
on. The findings suggest that self-control and memory compete for the same resources
inside the brain, and support the theory that inhibiting ourselves can also
cause us to forget more easily. "The control demands of response
inhibition divert attention away from stimulus encoding, thereby weakening
memory traces for inhibitory cues," the researchers conclude in The
Journal of Neurosience . "These findings shed new light on the relation
between the control process of response inhibition and the cognitive domains of
perception, attention, and memory."
The self-control test used was a traditional
Go/No-Go task: these tasks work by asking participants to view a series of
items and push a button only when certain criteria are met - in the case of
this experiment, when the face shown is male rather than female. The theory is
that those who are able to hold back from a button push when necessary are
those with the strongest self-control (or "response inhibition", as
neuroscientists like to call it). The participants were not told in advance that
they would need to remember the faces they were shown. "The scans revealed
that responding to a cue and inhibiting a response produced overlapping
activation patterns in brain regions within the right frontal and parietal
lobes, a network that has previously been implicated in response
inhibition," Mo Costrandi reports for The Guardian. " Crucially,
'no-go' trials produced greater activation of this network than 'Go' trials,
and activity in one specific brain region (the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex)
predicted the strength of the participants' memory, such that the greater the observed
network activation, the more likely the participants were to forget that face
later on."
The researchers admit their theory is still
"speculative" for now, but if further study confirms the link, they believe
their discovery could be used to treat people who have problems with
self-control: those suffering from ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder), for example, or some form of addiction. One scenario put forward by
the pair is having to suddenly cancel a lane change on the motorway because a
car is already in the spot you want to move into. If they're right, the act of
having to control and inhibit your actions would make it less likely that you would
remember the details of the incident - such as the make and model of the car
that was blocking your path.
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