Thank you to @maggie_rempe @DiconLab @BoysTown_IHN and Dr. Tony Wilson amongst other coauthors, for all of their help on this! 9/

Why does that matter? Well, when we’re navigating the real world, we have to remember things despite inevitable distractions. This helps us understand how our brain does that. 8/

When we looked at the difference in conditions between low- and high-distraction, we saw increased activity in the frontal lobe during our high-distraction condition in both alpha and beta during maintenance 6/

We saw that, over time, this activity moved from the occipital towards the left parietal, and this was a decrease from baseline (with a brief increase in occipital beta activity) 5/

While we didn’t see any behavioral differences, there was cool neural activity in the occipital lobe in the alpha and beta frequencies 4/

Participants completed viewed a grid of 4 letters, then either a second grid of 4 letters or 4 # signs. They then saw a single letter and indicated if this was in the first grid or not. The idea was that viewing letters (vs #) would be harder (high- versus low-distraction). 3/

We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to examine brain activity in 46 healthy adults. For a brief explainer on MEG, check out this blog post I wrote with @KnowingNeurons knowingneurons.com/blog/2024… 2/