As sure as the brain is prone to distraction, it can also return its focus to the task at hand. A new study in animals by scientists at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory of MIT shows how that seems to happen: Coordinated neural activity in the form of a rotating brain wave puts thought back on track.

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Mathematical 'rotations'…

In the study, animals were given a visual working memory task, but sometimes they experienced one of two different kinds of distractions while they tried to remember an object they saw. As one would expect, the distractions affected the animals' performance on the task—sometimes causing them to make mistakes or at least slowing down their reaction time when the task called on them to act. The researchers, meanwhile, kept tabs on the electrical activity of a sampling of hundreds of neurons in the prefrontal cortex, a brain region responsible for higher-level cognition.

To analyze how the neural activity varied as the animals performed the task over hundreds of sessions—with or without either of the distractions and in cases where the animals performed well or not so well—the researchers employed a mathematical measure and visualization that measures their degree of coordination over time called "subspace coding." Subspace coding shows that the activity of cortical neurons is highly coordinated.

"Like starlings murmuring in the sky," Miller said.

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