Different brain regions synchronize their activity to enable concentration on a task

Different brain regions synchronize their activity to enable concentration on a task 
Scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that different regions of the brain synchronize their activity, which allows us to focus on a specific task.

One of the key features of attention is the brain's ability to ignore irrelevant stimuli in favor of important ones. In work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers studied the brains of seven epilepsy patients who had grids of electrodes implanted in their brains as the first step in brain surgery to relieve their seizures. This enabled the scientists to observe changes in brain activity on a millisecond scale. The researchers found that when the study participants were asked to pay attention to a visual stimulus, the excitability of areas of the brain involved with paying attention to visual stimuli began to synchronize. When two regions of the brain synchronize their activity, it's more likely that a signal gets through. In this case, it means that a person is able to pay attention to a particular stimulus. The results are potentially important in helping individuals recover from stroke or brain injury, since difficulties concentrating and paying attention commonly affect these people.

Source:
https://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/26356.aspx
Journal article: Frequency-specific mechanism links human brain networks for spatial attention. PNAS, 2013. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1307947110
Story via Neuroscience Research Techniques
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