What if you could put a cap on someone’s head, measure the electrical signals it gives off, and determine if they have ADHD? Scientists are working on it.
It turns out that both my colleagues hadn’t just noticed that they sometimes have difficulty paying attention to lectures , they had gone in for formal evaluation by a psychologist. They had been asked questions about their symptoms , but then they had what they referred to as the “real test”: a computerized test of attention where they were asked to sit for an extended period responding to tones and images with rapid button presses.
For many years, neuroscientists have been looking into just that. One key indicator they’ve researched is the ratio of slow brain waves to fast brain waves at the front of the head. Since the slow waves in question are typically referred to by the Greek letter theta, and the fast waves referred to by the Greek letter beta, the quantity is called the Theta Beta Ratio . For over 20 years, different types of studies have explored whether the TBR can tell us something about a person’s attention.
In one study, participants had to respond to a series of images by deciding whether to press a button or not. Their TBR response was related to measures of how complex they found the stimulus to be, suggesting that TBR might indicate how much “cognitive capacity” was being used.
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