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How Electrotherapy Could Help Improve Concentration

New research on attentional brain waves shows how we suppress stimuli.
Rubin's vase. Image: Brocken Inaglory/Wikimedia

We all think we know attention. That oft-coveted, tunneled concentration on a single object. But new research led by scientists at Stanford University and Brown University suggests that attention is as much an act of muting surrounding stimuli as it is an act of turning up one particular stimulus.

Knowing how this push-pull dynamic works could help people shift attention away from destructive targets and towards productive ones, and even lead to electrotherapy that could help people regulate what to focus on and what to ignore.

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Think of that classic optical illusion, Rubin's vase. The image exists as much in the negative space as the positive. To see the faces, we must actively un-see the vase, and vice versa.

"Our brains don't just have mechanisms for focusing attention, they also need mechanisms for knowing what to ignore, or for inattention," said Catherin​e Kerr, a neuroscience and meditation researcher at Brown University and one of the senior authors on the study.

The stud​y, published in the most recent issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, identifies a specific process involving synchronized brain waves that seems to coordinate how we ignore stimuli.

Understanding how our brains perform selective attention could help generate therapies that divert attention away from harmful sensations like pain or distress, said Kerr. One possibility is to use electrical brain stimulation to manipulate attention-governing brain waves themselves. Another is to help people train their attention through focused awareness techniques or meditation practices.

"Meditation is a promising future direction because it is training of the mind," said ​Matthew Sacchet, a neuroscience PhD candidate at Stanford University and lead author on the paper. "There's a lot of room to understand how these techniques might change the brain."

In their study, the researchers asked people to respond to a random series of taps on either their left middle finger or left big toe. Participants had to push a button only when they felt a tap on their finger or only when they felt a tap on their toe, but not on the other.

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Using a brain imaging technique called MEG (the magnetic equivalent of EEG), the researchers measured the frequency of people's brain waves while they performed the task. These MEG scans revealed that certain brain waves, called alpha and beta rhythms, started to hum at the same low frequency in different brain regions. These regions were the right inferior frontal cortex, which is thought to govern attention suppression, and the regions that receive sensation in either our hand or foot.

Alpha and beta rhythms are often characterized as inhibitory, meaning they play a role in transmitting "ignore" or "stop" messages between parts of the brain. "There's a lot of evidence in the literature that these low-frequency rhythms seem to come about when you want to block something from happening—blocking a perception or stopping a movement," said Ste​phanie Jones, a neuroscientist at Brown University and another senior author on the study.

In other words, when a participant pays attention to her hand, the foot map in her brain syncs up with an attention control center via these allegedly inhibitory waves. To attend to the hand is to disattend to the foot.

The study is "a seminal contribution to human systems neuroscience," said Dani​el Baldauf, a brain researcher at MIT. It is particularly fascinating that these brain regions use rhythmic interactions to exchange important sensory information, he said.

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This knowledge could even help people who struggle with depression

Jones is now partnering with Benjami​n Greenberg, a psychiatrist at Brown University, to look into applying this knowledge to electrical brain stimulation. They think electrotherapy could potentially shift or enhance brain rhythms to manage peoples' attention in beneficial ways.

Greenberg, who has studied deep brain stimulation for obsessive-compulsive disorder, speculates that this knowledge could possibly help people who struggle with psychiatric conditions like depression.

Depressed people do seem to have different attentional mechanisms, said Kerr, pointing to studies that have shown that depressed people have a negative bias in their perception of faces, seeing neutral faces as angry or sad. "That's likely to be happening at this alpha level," she said.

Training brain rhythms through meditation or manipulating them with electrotherapy might help people process sensory information through filters that are "more equanimous, and less driven by mood and reactivity," said Kerr. "They'll be able to attend and disattend in a more even and regulated way."

This research certainly has possible implications for people struggling with conditions such as depression, ADHD or anxiety, acknowledged Sacchet. But he thinks the significance of their findings is even broader.

"We often think about the medical context of research, that is, how a given result might influence people with certain disorders. But I think it's more general than that," said Sacchet. "Just about everyone could benefit from paying better attention—paying more attention to things that facilitate their well-being, and less attention to things that don't."