Attention Disorders: IISc team studying ‘how brain regions contribute to attention’
BENGALURU: A team led by Prof Sridharan Devarajan which is studying brain regions and mechanisms that mediate human attention so as to develop therapies for treating attention disorders, in its recent work, has identified how particular brain regions – both in the neocortex (outermost layer of the brain) as well as in the deeper midbrain – contribute to attention. Devarajan is currently an associate professor in the Centre for Neuroscience and associate faculty in Computer Science and Automation at IISc. His group has shown that human participants with asymmetric wiring between the midbrain and the cortical hemispheres also show marked asymmetries in the way they pay attention. Devarajan, a recipient of the Swarnajayanti fellowship granted by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) for 2021, says the human brain has the remarkable ability to pay attention to important objects and locations in our world while ignoring irrelevant ones. Although attention has been studied behav...