When you need to focus on a task….
Working Memory: They Found Your Brain’s Spam Filter Blogs Scientific American Community
This new work ties together several converging lines of evidence indicating that your working memory capacity is closely related to how well you can keep irrelevant information out of your mental inbox. In particular, it suggests that this filtering mechanism is determined by coordinated activity in the basal ganglia and prefrontal cortex — with the prefrontal cortex providing details about the current task goals and the basal ganglia providing the muscle to block out information that doesn’t match these goals.
This role for the basal ganglia in helping to control the flow of information into working memory is quite similar to one of the basal ganglia’s other major functions, which is selecting which motor movements to use in a given context and suppressing the movements that we don’t want. Particularly intriguing is that the basal ganglia is an evolutionarily ancient brain structure that has been highly conserved across species; even lizards have them. Consequently, what is thought to be our uniquely human ability to engage in abstract reasoning and problem solving appears to be dependent upon brain structures that have been around for far longer than humans have. The ability to filter out irrelevant spam, it appears, is critical for lizards as well as humans.
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