The human brain's ability to focus on an important issue, process, or decision, while ignoring everything else has puzzled neuroscientists for a long time, who could not understand how this mechanism worked. They had a few hints as to the brain regions involved in the process, but concrete scientific pieces of evidence were missing altogether. Now, in a new study, experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have managed to establish that, in order for us to remain attentive to something, a number of regions in the brain have to “fire up” their neurons in sync.

More specifically, they explain in a recent paper published in the journal Science, the control center of the brain actually syncs up with the visual cortex, which is responsible for receiving most of the information from the outside world. When we are poised on doing something, the visual cortex reacts at commands coming in from somewhere else in the brain, and focuses the eye on that certain thing, completely oblivious to others around it. The research team has succeeded in demonstrating that the prefrontal cortex manages to successfully redirect attention in such a manner, that we focus it better on the object of interest.

“It’s been known that the prefrontal cortex plays an important role in focusing our attention, but the mystery was how. Now we have some insight into how it has that focusing role – through this synchrony with our sensory systems,” the MIT neuroscientist who led the new research, Robert Desimone, explained. The expert added that the correlations between the prefrontal (PFC) and the visual cortices were done via high-frequency brainwaves.

As they've now managed to identify the control center in the brain, as well as its actual acting mechanism, in the future, experts might be able to create new and improved medicines for conditions such as the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which is believed to be caused by various regions of the brain firing out of sync. When this happens, sufferers cannot concentrate, and the symptoms of the condition appear, Wired informs.

The conclusions “provide a possible explanation for how attention-dependent synchrony might be brought about by the [PFC], and how the communication between distant neurons might be facilitated by attention. This is an important step indeed,” Stanford University Neurobiologist Tirin Moore, who has not been part of the recent investigation, concluded.