Prolonged concentration may cause a compound called glutamate - which can be harmful at high levels - to accumulate in regions at the front of the brain
Prolonged concentration may cause a compound called glutamate to accumulate in the brain, leading to mental fatigueThinking hard for several hours can leave us feeling mentally tired – and now we may know why. Prolonged concentration leads to the build-up of a compound calledThis may provide an explanation as to why we avoid difficult tasks when mentally fatigued: the glutamate overload makes further mental work difficult.at the Paris Brain Institute in France, who led the research.
The team asked 40 people to do memory tasks while lying in an MRS scanner. These included watching sequences of numbers appear on a screen and stating if the current number was the same as a previous one. Twenty-six of the participants did a harder version of this task, while the other 14 were given an easier one.
Among the participants doing the harder tasks, their glutamate level rise tallied with dilation of the pupils in their eyes, another broad measure of fatigue. Those doing the simpler task reported feeling tired, but had no glutamate rise or pupil dilation. As the participants doing the harder task felt more tired and had an accumulation of glutamate, they shifted to options that gave a small reward immediately. This could be an example of us avoiding difficult mental tasks, such as calculating which choice to make, to prevent the accumulation of potentially harmful glutamate levels.
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