MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging 2016 | Page 26

new insights into the brain

The Neuroscience Of Paying Attention (Or Not)
New insights into mind-wandering and attentional fluctuations could also have important implications for the treatment of neurological and psychiatric conditions
roscience perspective. We can see
spontaneous activity in people’s
brains, said Kucyi, a postdoctoral
fellow in the Center, but we don’t
fully understand the dynamics at
play. “We don’t know what patterns
of neural activity are most relevant
to ongoing changes in attention.”
In a paper published online in February 2106 in the journal Cerebral
Cortex, Kucyi and colleagues shed
some light on this question.

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Do you find your thoughts straying—a lot—from whatever it is you
need to be focusing on? If so, you’re
not alone. Studies show that we
spend 30 to 50 percent of our waking hours engaged in mind-wandering.
Researchers have been working to
understand better why this happens,
trying to uncover the brain mechanisms of mind-wandering. This can
be difficult, though—not least because the studies typically rely on
subjects telling the researchers when
their thoughts begin to drift and this
self-reporting is considerably slower
than the underlying neural processes.

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