The Brain Has a ‘Low-Power Mode’ That Blunts Our Senses | Quanta Magazine

remarkable. As you become tired, your attention will indeed blink out, for a simple reason.

Those beautiful color-dappled images are actually representations of particular areas in the brain that are working the hardest—as measured by increased oxygen consumption—when a subject performs a task such as reading a passage or reacting to stimuli, such as pictures of faces.

L’activité est passée d’une partie du cerveau à une autre – mais elle restait très forte. Étonné, il s’est alors mis à étudier ce phénomène en détail. Il a appelé la région cérébrale qui s’active quand on pense ne pas faire grand-chose «le réseau du mode par défaut». Et en l’explorant davantage, en analysant le cerveau d’individus quand ils semblai

We discovered that different deep emotional centers in the brain just above and behind the amygdala, called the striatum—associated with impulsivity and reward, and bathed by the chemical dopamine—had become hyperactive in sleep-deprived individuals in response to the rewarding, pleasurable experiences. As with the amygdala, the heightened sensitiv