Neuroscience How Much Energy Does It Take to Think?

Summary

Researchers don’t know precisely how that load is allocated, but over the past few decades, they have clarified what the brain is doing in the background. “Around the mid-’90s we started to realize as a discipline [that] actually there is a whole heap of stuff happening when someone is lying there at rest and they’re not explicitly engaged in a task,” she said. “We used to think about ongoing resting activity that is not related to the task at hand as noise, but now we know that there is a lot of signal in that noise.” If food is hard to come by, [5%] could mean the difference between life and death. Much of that signal is from the default mode network, which operates while we’re resting or otherwise not engaged in apparent activity. This network is involved in the mental experience of drifting between past, present and future scenarios — what you might make for dinner, a memory from last week, some pain in your hip. Additionally, beneath the iceberg of awareness, our brains are keeping track of the mosaic of physical variables — body temperature, blood glucose level, heart rate, respiration, and so on — that must remain stable, in a state known as homeostasis, to keep us alive. If any of them stray too far, things can get bad pretty quickly. Theriault speculates that most of the brain’s base metabolic load goes toward prediction. To achieve its homeostatic goals, the brain needs to always be planning for what comes next — building a sophisticated model of the environment and how changes might affect the body’s biological systems. Prediction, rather than reaction, Theriault said, allows the brain to dole out resources to the body efficiently. The Brain’s Evolutionary Constraints A 5% increased energy demand during active thought may not sound like much, but in the context of the entire body and the energy-hungry brain, it can add up. And when you consider the strict energetic constraints our ancestors had to deal with, weariness at the end of a taxing day suddenly m...