Performing tasks such as making coffee, while thinking about an email to send, while grabbing cream out the icebox, while making sure the coffee doesn’t burn are not as simple as they sound.
They are actions most can do without thinking about it. It’s just our brains connecting to a goal they want, but it’s really a part of a complex system called cognitive control or executive function, says David Badre, the author of “On Task: How Our Brains Get Things Done.”
“We’re able to set a goal, even a simple one. We can plan out our actions to do that, we can monitor how well we’re doing at that,” Badre said. “(That ability) allows us to implement these things on the fly and be able to do them without having to take years of evolution. We have yet to build an artificial intelligence that has that kind of generalized behavior.”
Badre will share the neuroscience behind cognitive control and what happens when that brain function is impaired during the next Sigma Series lecture Tuesday hosted by NASA Langley Research Center.
He is a professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University, and faculty with the Carney Institute for Brain Science. His research looks into what he calls “gaps” between knowledge and action. It’s a special mechanism that comes naturally, why most people can seamlessly complete a task. But in patients who have lost this ability, they may see the goal and have the desire, it’s challenging to initiate the action, or at other times, doing it in the right context.
“It’s not enough to know what you want to do. It’s not enough also to be able to act, to have the ability to do a movement, or to do, even, a long complex task, like make a cup of coffee,” he said. “The brain has to have a way of connecting those two bits.”
His research over the past several years focuses on studying this gap, something that has been missed for years.
“They didn’t consider it. It wasn’t until we started understanding more about patients who had damage to this part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, as well as, we started to understand the way computers work,” Badre said. “We realized there’s a gap to be filled there and sort of trying to understand how the brain does it.”
When the pandemic was declared last year, seismic shifts in society happened. New rules for living and surviving became the norm. People were ordered to wear masks and advised to stay indoors, if they could, except to buy food or hunt for supplies. Others had to venture out for work to meet the demands of people staying home.
“The COVID pandemic was a challenge for everyone, whether it was working from home, helping children with virtual learning, or just trying to maintain contacts with friends and family members. We all had to adapt and learn new skills and ways to be effective,” Gretchen Murri, NASA assistant branch head said in an email. “In spite of the challenges, most people seem to have adapted well.”
Badre says one reason why most were able to adapt to working and socializing differently had to do with cognitive control, but many also experienced mental exhaustion.
” … the high level of things called, like pandemic fatigue, where people become less and less willing to comply with those kinds of behaviors over time,” he said. “A lot of that is also, not fully, due to cognitive control, but partly due to the nature of these cognitive control processes, because of the price we pay for this general behavior.”
Badre holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been at Brown since 2008. His research has received numerous awards, including an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship in neuroscience.
The Sigma lecture series begins at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, is free and will be streamed at: https://go.nasa.gov/3hDx6VQ
Lisa Vernon Sparks, 757-247-4832, lvernonsparks@dailypress.com