Attention Networks: The role of NE

Attention has been studied heavily and as per a popular model of attention by Posner et al, we have 3 systems for attention: alerting, orienting and an executive control network. Now let me propose a radical fourth network for the same, but before I do that I want to clear some misconceptions about attention. Way back in 2009 I had blogged and elaborated on a couple of posts that attention allocation and action selection utilized the same mechanisms and were conceptually similar; at that time I was not much aware of the Posner et al model of attention. Today I want to go further and claim that attention processes are involved in action initiation and selection. But lets start from first principles. We can always be in either an alert state on the lookout for stimuli or in a more sleepy/drowsy state where we will probably ignore stimulus, the extreme being when we are sleeping and ignoring all stimuli. This system is also know as arousal system and is fairly unequivocally associated with Norepinephrine (NE) system. Tonic NE levels (tonic meaning the baseline/spontaneous firing rate of NE neurons in LC (locus coerelus) ) as per one theory drive the activity of this alerting network in the brain. The higher the tonic NE and more alert you are; lower the NE and you get drowsy /sleepy. Too much NE/alertness and it actually becomes distractability where you cannot remain focused on task at hand but get distracted/ alerted by each and any irrelevant stimuli. So the relati...
Source: The Mouse Trap - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: attention neurotransmitters Source Type: podcasts