It’s what you use when you need to hold something in mind for a few seconds-for example, remembering that six-digit confirmation code, composing a phrase in your mind as you tap out a text, visualizing the route to a new location as you drive. Working memory is an essential partner to attention: It’s what allows you to do something with the information you focus on. Your attention is limited-and so is your working memory During this protracted pandemic, we’re all experiencing a heightened sense of threat, new and constant stressors, anxious feelings, and more. COVID is producing circumstances that accelerate the rate at which attention is degraded as it jacks up attention’s kryptonite. And these are things that occur quite regularly in VUCA conditions like fire season, military deployment, corporate bankruptcies and restructuring, or a global pandemic. But like many superpowers, it has kryptonite: threat, stress, and poor mood will rapidly degrade your capacities. Your attention is vulnerable to stress, threat, and poor moodĪttention is, in some ways, your brain’s superpower.
It determines the moment-to-moment experience of your life-what you perceive, feel, remember, think, and do. So realize this: Your attention is powerful.
During COVID, your attention is what allows you to hold, at the front of your mind, the new rules for living to successfully keep yourself and others safe. We can narrow our sights onto our conversation partner and boost her voice in a crowded room while dimming down other sights and sounds it allows us to focus on a particular problem or happy memory from our past. It allows us to select and direct our brain’s computational resources to a smaller subset of the information. The attention system is like a flashlight. Without a way to filter, the relentless sensory input would leave us overloaded, incapable of functioning effectively. The reason we have “attention” is to solve one of the brain’s big problems: There is far more information in our environment (and in our own minds!) than the brain can fully process.
So here are 10 things you need to know about your attention-and how to protect it-that will serve you not only through this crisis, but for the rest of your life. Your attention system is complex and multifaceted, but the more you know about how it works, the more able you will be to navigate VUCA events. This minimally invasive technology presents with applications for localized and long-lived enhanced intracranial drug delivery.From the GGSC to your bookshelf: 30 science-backed tools for well-being. In conclusion, H-FIRE is capable of permeating the BBB in a spatiotemporal manner via cytoskeletal-mediated TJP modulation. Ingenuity pathway analysis revealed significant dysregulation of claudin genes, centered around claudin-6 in H-FIRE treated rats.
By 72–96 h, cytoskeletal and TJP expression recovered to pretreatment levels, temporally corresponding with increased claudin-5 and zonula occludens-1 gene expression. A decrease in the F/G-actin ratio, decreased TJP concentrations, and increased ubiquitination of TJP were observed 1–48 h post-H-FIRE compared to sham controls. Cytoskeletal and TJ protein expression were further evaluated with immunofluorescent microscopy. Cytoskeletal proteins and native and ubiquitinated TJ proteins (TJP) were evaluated using immunoprecipitation, Western blotting, and gene-expression arrays on treated and sham control brain lysates. Intracranial H-FIRE was delivered to Fischer rats prior to sacrifice at 1-, 24-, 48-, 72-, and 96 h post-treatment. We hypothesized that H-FIRE mediated BBB disruption (BBBD) occurs via cytoskeletal remodeling and alterations in tight junction (TJ) protein regulation. H-FIRE is a novel tumor ablation method that transiently disrupts the BBB through currently unknown mechanisms. Its location behind the blood–brain barrier (BBB) presents a therapeutic challenge by preventing effective delivery of most chemotherapeutics. Glioblastoma is the deadliest malignant brain tumor.