Feeling of mental exhaustion? These two fields may control the brain if people are giving or persevered

• Two regions of the brain may work in a formula for informing the brain when the “feeling” is tired.
• People with depression and PTSD often suffer from cognitive fatigue.
• The results of the study may provide a way for doctors to evaluate and treat people with better fatigue.

In experiments with healthy volunteers who undergo functional magnetic imaging, scientists have found an increased activity in two areas of the brain that work together to interact with the brain, and may organize it when “feeling” is tired and resigned or continues to make mental effort.

Scientists say experiments designed to help discover various aspects of fatigue in the brain, may provide a way for doctors to assess and treat people with overwhelming mental fatigue, including those who suffer from depression and PTSD.

A report on the study funded by the National Institutes of Health on the Internet was published on June 11 at Neurology MagazineDetailing the results on 18 females and 10 in good health volunteers who gave tasks to exercise their memory.

“Our laboratory focuses on how to generate (our minds) value for voltage,” says Vikram Chip, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Johns Hopkins University and research scientist at the Kennedy Crager Institute. “We understand less than the biology of cognitive tasks, including memory and summons, which we do about material tasks, although both of them involve a lot of effort.” Chib says that scientists know that cognitive tasks are tired, relatively less than the cause and how this fatigue develops and plays in the brain.

28 of the study participants, who ranged between 21 and 29, were paid at $ 50 to participate in the study, and they were said to be able to obtain additional payments based on their performance and options. All participants received the basic magnetic resonance imaging examination before the start of the experiments.

The tests of their working memory, which occurred while undergoing the subsequent MRI tests, included a series of messages, in the sequence, on the screen and remember the position of some messages. Further there was a letter in the series of messages, the more difficult it is to remember its location, which increased the cognitive effort that was spent. Participants were granted notes on their performance after each test and opportunities to receive increasing payments ($ 1-8 dollars) with more difficult recall exercises. The participants were also asked before and after each test to measure the level of cognitive fatigue.

In general, the results of the test found an increase in activity and communication in two areas of the brain when the participants reported cognitive fatigue: right isolation, a deep region in the brain that was associated with feelings of fatigue, and the dorsal side mountain dandruff, areas on both sides of the brain that control the operating memory. For each participant, the activity in both brain sites during cognitive fatigue increased by more than twice the level of the foundation line measurements taken before the start of the tests.

“Our study has been designed to urge cognitive fatigue and know how people’s options for effort change when they feel tired, as well as locations in the brain where these decisions are made,” says Chib.

It is worth noting that the Chib and his team members in the research team found Grace Steward and Vivian Looi that financial incentives should be high in order for participants to make an increasingly aware effort, indicating that external incentives stimulate such an effort.

“This result was not completely surprising, given our previous work to find the same need for incentives to stimulate physical effort,” says Chib.

“The two fields of the brain may work together to follow the example of a more perceived effort unless there are more incentives. However, there may be a difference between perceptions of cognitive fatigue and what the human brain can actually do,” says Chib.

Tiredness is associated with many nervous conditions, including post -trauma and depression. He adds: “Now that we probably identify some nerve circles of the cognitive effort in healthy people, we need to consider how fatigue appears in the brains of people who suffer from these conditions.”

Chib says that it may be possible to use medications or cognitive behavioral therapy to combat cognitive fatigue, and the current study can be the use of decision -making tasks and functional resonance imaging a framework for the objectivity of cognitive fatigue.

MRI uses blood flow to measure the extensive activity areas in the brain; However, it does not measure the activation of neurons directly, nor more nuances in the activity of the brain.

“This study was conducted in the MRI scanner and with the very specific cognitive tasks. It will be important to see how these results are generalized on the other cognitive effort and tasks in the real world,” says Chib.

Financing is provided for research by the National Institutes of Health (R01HD097619, R01MH119086).