Multitasking- we all know it, we have all done it. Chances are, you’re doing it right now. But do you know which region of our brain is involved in this art? And how would it would affect our multitasking ability if certain regions of our brain are tampered with?

Earlier this week, researchers at New York University published a paper in the journal Nature saying they identified one small region of the brain—the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN)—as the one that controls our ability to multitask. This region of our brain handles all the stimuli we receive, and carefully filters out the rest to keep the most vital up in the front to focus on. Other all stimuli and response continue to take place in the backdrop of our mind. Solving the mysterious working of TRN in a healthy mind would help researchers to study diseases in which multitasking or sensory overload goes awry—autism, schizophrenia, and ADHD, for example.

“We have identified the [TRN] as a station. That is something that hasn’t really been described in the past, says Michael Halassa, a neuroscientist at NYU who led the research. “Now we can answer questions like whether individuals with autism have a broken TRN or potentially develop drugs that target [it].”

Francis Crick, one of the scientists involved in the identification of DNA structure, had long before pointed out the connection of the TRN with multitasking. But sadly, he had little evidence to back him up.

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The researchers at NYU tested his long ignored hypothesis by running game-like experiments on mice. Some mice were trained to respond to light stimulus in a certain way to receive the reward of milk. As they completed the tasks with light stimulus, they were made to be distracted with sound stimulus too. In mice who were able to overcome the distractions, the TRN neurons that control hearing were highly active, meaning that they were suppressing sound signals so that the mice could focus more intensely on the light. The opposite was observed for other mice trained to respond sound stimuli for rewards.

Now, for the prefrontal cortex, when lasers stimulated this region of the brain, the TRN completely lost control and failed to suppress stimuli effectively. The prefrontal cortex is the area of the brain responsible for higher level functioning and this shows that the prefrontal cortex stores incoming sensory information, which the TRN then uses to suppress or not suppress certain senses, much in the same way that a switchboard works, explains Halassa.

“One commonality in patients with these disorders is that they have a really hard time suppressing [distracting stimuli],” says Halassa.

Halassa wants to use to information gained to find drugs that would help autistic and ADHD patients to gain better control over filtering out of unimportant stimuli.

Author:Technology Blog