Editorial
Tune Up Your Brain by David Robson
October 2024
The discovery that a small blue blob of neurons, the locus coeruleus, controls your mode of thinking suggests ways to increase learning, creativity, focus and alertness.
Place a finger on the back of your skull, at a point roughly level with the tops of your ears. Here, deep beneath the hair, skin and bone, near a fluid-filled cavity in the root of your brain, lies a small bundle of pigmented cells the colour of lapis lazuli. This is the locus coeruleus – Latin for “blue dot”. It measures just a few millimetres, but its diminutive size belies its power over your thoughts.
Research has revealed that the structure is instrumental in coordinating our mental processing. Sometimes labelled the brain’s “master switch”, it is perhaps better imagined as a gearbox. “It can set the pace of your brain to suit the specific kind of mental work you are doing,” says neuroscience researcher turned writer Mithu Storoni. When it is in the right gear, we feel pleasantly engaged in the task at hand. Often, however, it can get stuck in the wrong one, leading either to dreamy procrastination or frenzied frustration.
Published in the New Scientist, 12 October 2024, pp. 33-35