Thanks for this interesting article, Ian.
"Ian Goddard" <igoddard at erols.mom> wrote in message
news:3d624c5c.49424128 at news.erols.com...
>http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/pnas.html>> Duke University - Duke News Service
>> MRI Studies Provide New Insight Into How Emotions Interfere With
> Staying Focused
>> DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke University researchers have shown how emotions
> such as fear or horror travel along separate paths through the brain
> and are more likely than simple distractions to interfere with a
> person's efforts to focus on a task such as driving.
>> Using functional MRI to watch human brains in action, the researchers
> showed that emotional stimuli and "attentional functions" like driving
> move in parallel streams through the brain before finally meeting up
> in a specific part of the brain's prefrontal cortex.
>> The results, published in the August 20 issue of The Proceedings of
> the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), help explain why a person who
> suddenly feels a pang of emotion is especially likely to lose focus.
> They also may lead to new avenues of research for treating depression,
> attention-deficit disorder, post-traumatic stress syndrome and other
> disorders.
>> "We've known for a long time that some people are more easily
> distracted and that emotions can play a big part in this," said Kevin
> S. LaBar, assistant professor at Duke's Center for Cognitive
> Neuroscience and an author of the study. "Our study shows that two
> streams of processing take place in the brain, with attentional tasks
> and emotions moving in parallel before finally coming together." The
> two streams are integrated in a region of the brain called the
> anterior cingulate, which is located between the right and left halves
> of the brain's frontal portion and is involved in a wide range of
> thought processes and emotional responses.
>> LaBar and his colleagues used functional MRI devices to study the
> brains of neurologically healthy subjects who tried to pay attention
> to specific visual targets on a screen. The test subjects were
> distracted in various ways, sometimes by images that were likely to
> evoke an emotional response. The results confirmed previous findings
> that emotional stimuli are more likely to cause a person to lose
> focus. However, they also shed light on the long-standing mystery of
> how the brain juggles different kinds of signals, and how the signals
> travel.
>> The Duke study indicates that the brain segregates attentional and
> emotional functions into parallel streams that extend into the
> prefrontal cortex. Emotional processing tends to occur in the ventral,
> or lower, part of the brain's front, while attentional tasks occur
> near the top. Surprisingly, an increase in one type of function is
> accompanied by a noticeable decrease in the other.
>> "This study is part of our larger effort to identify parts of the
> brain that are associated with emotional processing," said Gregory
> McCarthy, director of the Duke-University of North Carolina Imaging
> and Analysis Center, who headed the research study. "These findings
> are important because diseases that involve distractability, from
> Alzheimer's to attention-deficit disorder, always seems to involve the
> prefrontal cortex. Understanding the biology of this will speed
> efforts to develop drugs or therapies that may influence these
> systems."
>> The research team is now carrying out a similar study with subjects
> diagnosed with clinical depression to see how their brain activity
> might differ. The study reported in PNAS was supported by the
> Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Institute of Mental
> Health, the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and
> Depression and the Japan Foundation for Aging and Health.
>>>>http://IanGoddard.net>> Out-of-Body Explanation: http://iangoddard.net/paranorm.htm>>>
