Have you ever found yourself physically exhausted after a long day at work, even if you just sat behind a computer desk?
Scientists have discovered that there is a reason for this: After being active for a long time, a toxic chemical begins to build up in the brain. So the brain turns to actions that don’t require the same amount of effort to keep this chemical, glutamate, out of circulation.
Neuroscientists from the University of Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris, France, say that this manifests as a lack of desire to work or cognitive fatigue.
The study led by Dr. Matthias Besiglione said: “Effective theories suggest that fatigue is a kind of illusion created by the brain to allow us to stop what we are doing and move on to a more enjoyable activity. But our findings indicate that cognitive work leads to real changes in performance – the accumulation of harmful substances – hence fatigue. it’s actually a signal to stop working, but for a different purpose: to keep the brain working.
Physical fatigue is a direct result of heavy manual labor, but thinking too much for long periods of time instead causes mental fatigue, resulting in symptoms such as lack of motivation and lack of ability to focus.
In the study, published in Current Biology, researchers began to understand what mental fatigue really is and why it manifests itself.
To do this, they used magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to monitor brain chemistry for two groups of study participants over the course of a workday.
They divided the group into easy and difficult computer memory tasks that involved remembering and matching a series of letters in different colors for about six and a half hours.
The results showed that people with more difficult tasks gravitated toward options that offered smaller rewards with less effort or yielded faster results.
Next, the scientists analyzed glutamate levels at synapses in the brain’s prefrontal cortex and found that it was higher for the group with mentally exhausting tasks.
Researchers say this supports the hypothesis that the accumulation of glutamate causes the brain to engage in less stressful actions.
This is your way of avoiding cycling or increasing the buildup of this toxic chemical that can impair brain function.
The researchers hope that this finding will provide a new way to detect acute mental fatigue and inform learning agendas to help prevent burnout.
In future studies, they hope to better understand why the prefrontal cortex experiences glutamate accumulation and fatigue after neural activity.
They also wonder if the same symptoms of brain fatigue can predict recovery from health conditions such as depression or cancer.
Source: Daily Mail
Source: Arabic RT
