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Why thinking hard makes us feel tired

Participants who spent more than six hours working on a tedious and mentally taxing assignment had higher levels of glutamate. Too much glutamate can disrupt brain function.  At the end of their work day, these study participants were also more likely than those who had performed easier tasks to opt for short-term, easily won financial rewards of lesser value than larger rewards that come after a longer wait or involve more effort.

Too much glutamate can disrupt brain function, and a rest period could allow the brain to restore proper regulation of the molecule. 

A neuro-metabolic account of why daylong cognitive work alters the control of economic decisions Curr Biol. 2022 Aug 4;S0960-9822(22)01111-3.

keywords: 

#fatigue #glutamate #reduced control of decision-making #the choice of low-effort actions #short-term rewards.

Highlights: 

•Cognitive fatigue is explored with magnetic resonance spectroscopy during a workday.

•Hard cognitive work leads to glutamate accumulation in the lateral prefrontal cortex.

•The need for glutamate regulation reduces the control exerted over decision-making.

•Reduced control favors the choice of low-effort actions with short-term rewards.

Abstract:

Behavioral activities that require control over automatic routines typically feel effortful and result in cognitive fatigue. Beyond subjective report, cognitive fatigue has been conceived as an inflated cost of cognitive control, objectified by more impulsive decisions. However, the origins of such control cost inflation with cognitive work are heavily debated. Here, we suggest a neuro-metabolic account: the cost would relate to the necessity of recycling potentially toxic substances accumulated during cognitive control exertion. We validated this account using magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to monitor brain metabolites throughout an approximate workday, during which two groups of participants performed either high-demand or low-demand cognitive control tasks, interleaved with economic decisions. Choice-related fatigue markers were only present in the high-demand group, with a reduction of pupil dilation during decision-making and a preference shift toward short-delay and little-effort options (a low-cost bias captured using computational modeling). At the end of the day, high-demand cognitive work resulted in higher glutamate concentration and glutamate/glutamine diffusion in a cognitive control brain region (lateral prefrontal cortex [lPFC]), relative to low-demand cognitive work and to a reference brain region (primary visual cortex [V1]). Taken together with previous fMRI data, these results support a neuro-metabolic model in which glutamate accumulation triggers a regulation mechanism that makes lPFC activation more costly, explaining why cognitive control is harder to mobilize after a strenuous workday.