A rare brain stimulation study suggests that a brain circuit known as the “salience network” contributes to differences in our ability to overcome challenges and cope with stress.
part of the brain that drives the will to persevere.
the anterior midcingulate cortex and its surrounding network play a central role in motivation and a readiness to act.
Michael Greicius. Stanford University
its role in attention and our sense of motivation.
how the network contributes to neurological and psychiatric disorders, including dementia and schizophrenia
Greicius and collaborator William Seeley in 2007
the salience network is thought to be central in prepping the brain for action
*An object or event is salient if it is significant to an individual.*
“Our brain is constantly bombarded by sensory information, and we have to score all that information in terms of how personally relevant it is for guiding our behavior,” said Seeley, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the new study.
“The more salient something is, the more it captures our drive system, which directs behavior.”
“They have a sense of the need to act, the need to endure,” he said. “The language the patients use to describe their personal experience really resonated with what I think that structure does and what the network as a whole does: to try to detect and respond to salient challenges.”
intrinsic connectivity, which monitors brain activity as participants daydream, doing no particular task.
Examining that network activity as a whole, rather than as individual regions, helps researchers discern the brain’s complex patterns.
“I think it comes on line anytime there is a challenge to be met and allows the brain to marshal the body’s resources,” said Greicius. The fight or flight response would be an extreme example, “but low-level challenges still require marshaling of those physiologic resources,” he said.
hyperconnectivity in the network has been linked to autism.
Some people consider the salience network to be the same as another network, called the cingulo-opercular network
Scientists theorize that paying too much attention to one’s thoughts may give them undue significance.
default mode network and salience network are tightly coupled.
DMN: Internal focus
Sharp’s research shows that the link deteriorates when the salience network is damaged. People with traumatic brain injury in that network, for example, have problems switching from one network to the other.
how the salience network may relate to neuropsychiatric disorders.