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 behaviourally for many decades there is very little knowledge about how attention works in the brain unexplored territories include identifying brain regions that allow us to sustain attention on particular objects brain regions that suppress irrelevant information and brain processes that are disrupted in disorders of attention the researchers saythe group dst said is employing combinations of cuttingedge non invasive technologies including functional and diffusion magnetic resonance imaging fmridmri electroencephalography eeg and transmagnetic and electrical stimulation tmstes to both record and perturb human brain activity in a targeted mannerin his recent work devarajan 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 in another recent study dst said the group has shown that perturbing activity in a particular region in the neocortex the parietal cortex can affect participants ability to pay attentionto analyse and simulate how attention works in the brain they also developed detailed mathematical and computational deep learning models of the neocortex and midbrain this research has been published in various prestigious journals including plos computational biologywhile these studies from our group and others have hinted at the role of several brain regions in attention very few have experimentally established these links directly as part of the swarnajayanti fellowship our lab will seek to understand causal mechanisms of attention in the brain we will follow a threepronged approach devarajan saysfirst the group will track changes in the structure activity and connectivity between specific brain regions neuroplasticity when participants are learning to pay attention the dst said adding that measuring such neuroplastic changes in the brain may have key implications for testing the effectiveness of interventions for managing attention disorders both in children and adultssecond they will develop brainmachine interface technologies that can be used to train participants to voluntarily control activity in attentionrelated brain regions neurofeedback they will then try to find out whether achieving such neurofeedback control improves participants attention abilities this type of interface may be developed into a noninvasive tool for training