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We all know that feeling of having engaged in hard cognitive, thinking, tasks, and feeling tired. If it goes on long enough, we may feel mentally fatigued, drained, or even exhausted.
But why?
We tend to know that physical activity uses a lot of energy and so will tire you out, but mental activity less so. So why does this happen? And researchers, though they know the feelings themselves as much as the average person in the street, haven’t been able to give a clear explanation.
This latest piece of research by Wieler et al. has managed to find out the precise cause of this.
To do this the researchers measured participants over a day and used brain scanning to elucidate changes in brain functioning. This is a pretty cool research protocol because it represents real-life functioning of real-life people. There were two groups: those with cognitively demanding jobs and those with less cognitively demanding jobs. At the end of the day they were given various cognitive tasks in a brain scanner.
What did they find?
They found that a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex exhibited signs of fatigue. The prefrontal cortex is considered our “executive centre” or thinking part of the brain that is involved in control…
