It's not just in your head.
"Influential theories suggested that fatigue is a sort of illusion cooked up by the brain to make us stop whatever we are doing and turn to a more gratifying activity," Mathias Pessiglione of Pitié-Salpêtrière University in Paris, France,.
This led Pessiglione and colleagues, including the first author of the study, Antonius Wiehler, to delve into the intricacies of mental fatigue and understand what it really is. They suspected the reason had to do with the need to recycle potentially toxic substances that arise from neural activity. They needed evidence to prove their suspicions. For this, they used magnetic resonance spectroscopy to monitor brain chemistry throughout a workday. They looked at two groups of people for the experiment: those who needed to think hard and those who had relatively easier cognitive tasks., including reduced pupil dilation, were only seen in the group doing hard work. Those in that group also showed in their choices a shift toward options that proposed rewards at short delay with little effort.
makes further activation of the prefrontal cortex more costly, resulting in tougher cognitive control after a mentally taxing day."Not really, I'm afraid," Pessiglione said. "I would employ good old recipes: rest and sleep! There is good evidence that glutamate is eliminated from synapsesThere could be practical implications. Monitoring of prefrontal metabolites could help to detect severe mental fatigue. This may help adjust work agendas to avoid burnout.
The researchers hope to learn why the prefrontal cortex is especially susceptible to glutamate accumulation and fatigue. In future studies, they also intend to learn whether the same markers of fatigue in the brain may predict recovery from health conditions, such as depression or cancer.Behavioral activities that require control over automatic routines typically feel effortful and result in cognitive fatigue.
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