Scientists identify brain circuit that decides when to abandon a failing strategy

Patients with cognitive inflexibility disorders (TDAH, depression, OCD, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's) and those in coma or vegetative states from traumatic brain injury may benefit from future therapies based on these findings.

Somewhere between expectation and disappointment, the brain makes a quiet decision: persist, or pivot. Researchers at UC Riverside have now traced that decision to a specific dialogue between the brainstem's locus coeruleus and the prefrontal cortex, where noradrenaline signals reorganize neural patterns to release an old strategy and embrace a new one. This discovery, published in eLife, illuminates a mechanism whose failure appears across some of the most burdensome conditions of the human mind — from ADHD and depression to schizophrenia and Alzheimer's — and points toward therapies not yet

Scientists identify brain circuit that decides when to abandon a failing strategy

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