A “laboratory of owls” has just been created at theJohn Hopkins University from Baltimore (United States). Not with the aim of looking at animal health but to better understand how the brain of these birds manages to sort through a multitude of external information to manage to concentrate on a single task (catching a field mouse hidden in the grass for example). This understanding should allow researchers to determine which neural circuits are responsible for control attention.
“When we focus on something we also ignore all the other information that comes to us. The question is how the brain actually helps ignore things that are not important.” explains Prof. Shreesh Mysore, who oversees the lab. For the scientist, answering this question could help people whose the brain is easily distracted. “This not only includes people with attention deficit disorder with or without hyperactivity (ADHD), he said, but also many autistic people, schizophrenics and even Parkinson’s patients“.
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