Do these kinds of things ever happen to you?
You come up with a great idea at work, and you get through maybe 20 percent of the way through executing it before coming up with a second great idea shows up. The original one gathers dust, and the second one dies on the vine as well.
You sit down to answer emails — but then you also reorganize a folder, look up a flight to somewhere you’re probably not going, and forget why you opened your inbox in the first place.
You’re in a meeting, technically present, your brain quietly quickly checks out to think about something completely unrelated. When you finally catch yourself, you’re panicked trying to get back on track.
And, well — this exact newsletter. I started it, got partway through, got distracted, then didn’t touch it again for three days and completely forgot.
Then I opened my laptop to do something unrelated and thought, wait, didn’t I have something I was writing?
I’ve never technically been diagnosed with ADHD. Frankly, from what I understand, doctors get pretty reluctant to prescribe medication for it once you’re past your early 40s or so — the theory being if you’ve made it this far in life figuring out workarounds, you probably don’t need the RX.
Still, attention and focus are both an abstract subject for me and something I actively work on. So, a new study out of Johns Hopkins caught my attention (pun very much intended).
Researchers found a cluster of neurons tucked deep in the brainstem that appears to control the ability to focus by actively suppressing distractions. It’s in a part of the brain so evolutionarily old, that it’s shared across essentially all vertebrates.
Writing in Nature Communications, the team, led by neuroscientist Shreesh Mysore and postdoctoral fellow Ninad Kothari, found that when they temporarily shut off these neurons in mice, the animals became dramatically more distractible.
“A hallmark of ADHD is that even faint distractors draw attention away—and that’s exactly what we see here when these neurons are silenced,” Mysore said. “But the very next day, when the neurons are turned back on, the same animal can ignore distractors again, even very strong ones.”
Apparently, the scientific working assumption has been that attention is mostly a function of the prefrontal cortex, which is a brain region that’s only highly developed in humans and other primates.
However, plenty of other animals are perfectly capable of focusing and filtering out distractions.
“If we really go back in evolution, for hundreds of millions of years, birds have had this ability, fish have had this ability,” Kothari said. “And they do not typically have a highly developed prefrontal cortex, so how does the brain solve this problem?”
To test the theory, the researchers trained mice on a human-like attention task: focusing on visual information straight ahead, ignoring distracting information off to the side. The mice were good at it — until the researchers switched off the relevant brainstem neurons.
The researchers ruled out simpler explanations, like impaired vision or motor control. The only thing that broke was the mice’s ability to weigh competing pieces of information and decide what to actually pay attention to.
Next step: seeing for sure if the same mechanism works in the human brain.
“All the evidence to date suggests that these neurons exist in humans too,” Mysore said. “But are they responsible for selective spatial attention in humans? An exciting hypothesis is that they play a crucial role.”
If that pans out, it could eventually point toward more targeted treatments for attention disorders.
It’s early. It’s mice, not people. But it’s an interesting finding I’m paying attention to.
At least until the next fascinating and totally unrelated thing comes along.
Other things worth knowing …
WSJ: The Army’s new drone assault battalion — established in January to master fighting with drones and ground robots — is being phased out as part of a “back-to-basics” approach ordered by Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the acting Army chief of staff closely aligned with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Experts say the decision will slow the Army’s push to excel in the kind of drone warfare that has transformed the battlefield in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Fox Business | PBS: The U.S. national debt crossed $40 trillion for the first time in history on Wednesday amid persistent federal budget deficits. “The federal debt is already raising the cost of living and choking out other spending and investment, threatening our economy and Americans’ long-term prosperity,” said Margaret Spellings, president and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center.
AP: Liberia has agreed to accept up to 1,200 third-country deportees from the United States, authorities in the West African country said Tuesday — one of the largest such arrangements under the Trump administration’s broader immigration crackdown. The deportees will include Africans as well as nationals from North America, South America, and the Caribbean, with the first batch of 20 expected Thursday.
Futurism: Teen boys are using Meta AI Glasses to harass and bully girls at middle and high schools, a Futurism review found — with large numbers of videos recorded in school hallways, cafeterias, and classrooms, often without subjects’ knowledge or consent, and shared to TikTok and Instagram to humiliate them further.
CNBC: Amazon said Wednesday it plans to offer drone deliveries in nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of the year — a sixfold increase from its current footprint, and a sign of momentum for a project that’s been slow to develop since Jeff Bezos first laid out his vision for it almost 13 years ago.
NYT: Prince Harry, his wife Meghan, and their children are moving back to Britain in the upcoming weeks, according to two people familiar with their decision. The move comes six years after they left for the United States amid a clash with other members of the royal family, ending a self-imposed exile that brought international attention to warring factions inside Buckingham Palace.
NYT: As cruising reaches new levels of popularity, river cruises offer travelers an opportunity to explore multiple cities in one leisurely trip. Unlike huge liners, the smaller river boats dock right in the middle of port cities and often stay longer, encouraging passengers to get off and explore.
Thanks for reading. Photo by Bharathi Kannan on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!