Weekly Roundup: How Your Brain Tries to Combat Fatigue, Growing New Brain Cells, Manipulating Brain Waves During Sleep, Boosting Motivation

When I scour the web and various research sites for these roundups I sometimes come across other older research that is fascinating and this is the case this week wen I will not start off with a recent piece of research but an older one on how the brain responds to fatigue during intense cognitive activity.

Your Brain Tries to Compensate Neural Fatigue

This was only a small study with 16 participants but nevertheless fascinating.

These students at the University of Florida underwent a monitored repetitive cognitive task over 160 minutes. That’s 2 hours 40 minutes working straight at the computer!

During this they had EEG measurements of their brains. We know that performance decreases over time and this is more or less linear — basically the longer you are cognitively active the higher the fatigue and the lower the performance.

But the researchers found an interesting compensation mechanism. This seems to be the brain recruiting additional areas and resources the more it gets fatigued.