Have you noticed, what don’t you hear, when they talk to you while playing a computer game or watching a movie? Maybe, you do not have time to record new information, while listening to a fellow student’s joke? As it turned out, inability to concentrate due to limitation, which the brain puts itself on the amount of information. The authors of the new work say, that this is due to a limited supply of energy.
British neuroscientists argue that the supply of energy to the brain is constant, and it cannot exceed the upper limit, no matter how difficult the task may be. Therefore, when the brain uses more energy to process the current task, then much less energy goes into processing the secondary.
This leads to “inattention blindness” – when the stimuli that are in the field of view are simply not recorded, even if they are very important. This may explain why a person sometimes cannot focus on what is being said when he is busy with something else. It also shows how dangerous it is to distract the driver’s attention, because the brain can simply stop processing one of the tasks.
The study authors explain that the brain constantly uses about 20% of our metabolic energy, even when we are resting during sleep. However, this supply of energy cannot increase when we begin to burden our mind with a large number of tasks.
In order to find out how the energy is distributed and when “blindness” begins, scientists have resorted to their to near infrared spectroscopy, a brain imaging technique that measures cellular metabolism. This method measures the level of oxidation of an enzyme involved in energy metabolism in the mitochondria of brain cells.
