I do not know if it's because I'ma child of the MTV generation because I'm getting older or because not only my brother touched her attention deficit china but I am watching every time I find it harder to concentrate on what I'm doing, especially when I try to do several things at once, what is commonly called multitasking and it is also said is something that men are inherently incapable.
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| Anything else? |
Lo and behold, a group of scientists have wanted to try to give answer to the question of what happens to our working memory with age, this being the ability to recall data or information that we are working at a certain time (either numbers or concepts but the fact that they make sense or does not affect the difficulty of retaining them.) Although it seems hard to believe these teenagers all day hooked to an iPod or Playstation in fact have better working memory than adults who look with prejudiced eyes, which we do not know is why they lost the ability to synchronize tasks with age and become more susceptible to distractions and this is what the authors of the study we discussed today to resolve.
The study signed by Clapp et al. attempted to analyze how the integration of "switches" (which is the definition of that consciously integrate distractor in our process of working memory) that characterizes the "multitasking" varies with age and experience. To do this, we used fMRI (functional MRI), brought in young adults and not so young in a scanner and subjected them to a memory test in which they were to remember a picture of a landscape that looked for 14 seconds and say whether it belonged to another that were shown below. Most of the study is that during those 14 seconds also showed them the image of a face that could be a distraction or a switch depending on whether you also had to remember this image or not. Remember well how the (s) Pictures gave his idea of \u200b\u200bmultitasking.
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| differences in the dynamics of recovery of activity in regions 2 and 3. |
As expected for both young and not so young it cost them something to remember the image of the landscape when they are distracted with something else, but in the case of talluditos when distractor was used instead of switch the remember both images efficiency was markedly lower than that of the young. Now, what brain areas seem to relate to these differences? While in the scanner researchers studied 3 specific areas: the fusiform area, related to the recognition of faces (the distractor), middle frontal gyrus (2) and half the parahippocampal area (3), these two regions are activated during the activity of working memory simultaneously and their activity is interrupted by the presence of distractors. When comparing the activity of the young people not in the area that responds to faces, but saw no differences when we look at the other two areas as they saw was not a difference in off / on when the switch but it appeared that was changing the dynamics of recovery of the "attention" to the greatest costs are more renewed focus on the main task, and therefore its ability to multitask is lower compared with young people.
This is an interesting study because it deals with how changes in cognitive abilities and even early in the "aging" but I wonder if this capacity reduction is not offset by a gain in other related more experience. Another issue that raises questions is that I like almost all studies of RMF results are only based on the study of regions of interest that are prescreened so skewed in the direction of the working hypothesis. There are also doubts regarding the statistical treatment of data collected from these scanners and has even posted a work in which a dead salmon in a scanner showed signs of brain activity.
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| Dead, but with a very active brain. Fishy! |
In any case, since the decline is unstoppable I have to assume that my days of multitasking in the laboratory are coming to an end and remove that line of curriculum. Too bad, so proud I was to do PCR, running the gel, and design primers at the same time!
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