Newly discovered from the brain neurons act as bouncers at the doors of the senses, leaving in only the most important of the trillions of signals that receive our body. Problems with these neurons may be the source of some symptoms of illnesses such as attention deficit disorder and schizophrenia.
"The brain doesn't have sufficient capacity to treat any information that is entered in your sense,", said the study researcher Julio Martinez-Trujillo, of McGill University in Montreal. "We found that there are some cells, some neurons in the prefrontal cortex, which have the ability to remove the information that you are not interested in". "They are like filters."
Humans are constantly take in the huge stream of each of our senses. Our brains have an apparent magical ability to filter for only the most important signals (such as "Ouch, burning!" or "ooh, brilliant!"). Without the ability to filter us suffer from sensory overload, with all stimuli constantly fighting for our attention.
A cluttered mind
This "brain congestion", or the inability to filter out the unnecessary information, is a possible mechanism of illnesses such as attention deficit hyperactivity (ADHD) disorder and schizophrenia. For example, when a student cannot filter the majority of sensory stimulation in a classroom, they become easily distracted and unable to concentrate on the task at hand. The physical symptoms of schizophrenia, which include the clumsiness and random movements, they could be linked to an inability to filter outgoing motor signals. [Marijuana exacerbates schizophrenia]
Previous research have linked this process to the prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in external information and transforming them into complex filtering behaviors.
Martinez-Trujillo and his team discovered that specific neurons in this area take on the task of filtering. They are minimizing unnecessary information that you receive.
"These cells allow you to focus on the things you are interested in and remove all the rest," Martinez-Trujillo told LiveScience.
Conscious monkeys
The researchers found these neurons by training monkeys to recognize an order of colors. The monkeys could look at a screen with two points of different color, moving on both sides. The colors were arbitrarily classified of lower importance (gray) at the top (turquoise), and monkeys have been taught which colors are more important.
When the points of the most important colour changed direction, the monkey would release a button. To run the task properly, the monkeys needed to understand that the colours were most important and ignore the movements of other, less important points. After that monkeys have learned this task, the researchers scanned their brains to see which neurons have been fired, noting a certain subset the before lighting up brain.
The researchers also noted that the task was more difficult the closer together on the rank-order scale were the two colors. This phenomenon is observed also in the treatment of mental health issues. Humans respond more quickly when asked whether 9 is greater than 1 that when asked if 2 is greater than 1.
The mechanism by which they are doing this important task is not clearly identified, but when it could help researchers to understand and treat these disorders of attention. Improve the ability of these cells to filter unwanted information could help to focus the attention of children with ADHD. "It would allow these children to focus on the teacher and not be distracted by everything else around them because they can filter these things," said Martinez-Trujillo.
The study is published in issue 13 April of the journal Neuron.
You can follow LiveScience staff writer Jennifer Welsh on Twitter @ microbelover.
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