People who are distracted by a fly and barely manage to keep theattention on one thing can blame a group of neurons in the superiorparietal lobe, according to a study published in the Journal ofNeuroscience. Specifically, the results reveal that distractedpeople often have a greater volume of gray matter in this brainregion, a seemingly contradictory, since in theory have moreneurons should help to maintain concentration.

In the era of information overload, ”attention is a challenge, “saidRyota Kanai, a researcher from University College London and coauthor of the study. But some people are especially susceptible to being distracted by looking at the email, your Time Line ofTwitter or the Facebook wall. To determine whether an anatomical basis for the ”red herring, Kanai studied the brains of 145 subjects who had previously completed a questionnaire to calculate theirtendency to distraction in everyday life” have mental lapses,forgetting what they have gone to buy when they arrive to the supermarket or where they parked, etc .-. The results showed thatthere were some differences in the brain that were related to the ability to maintain attention. Specifically, the greater the number ofneurons in the superior parietal lobe of the left hemisphere of asubject, the greater their tendency to distraction.

The hypothesis that handle Kanai and colleagues is that as the brain matures destroys some neurons and neural connections, andthat process helps control attention. According to this idea, peoplewith more gray matter in the cerebral cortex would also be a littlemore ”childish” and, therefore, somewhat distracted.