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We’re bombarded with information every instant of our waking lives. The loud kabloom in the other room that suggests the family cat knocked a book off the shelf. The street scene that streams through the window, bringing us back to a summer in our youth, and eliciting a feeling of time passing too quickly.
The cat with the book is something we might recognize in a split second, while the thought about the street scene and its implications for the present will likely require more interpretation of context and meaning. These modes of thought are often described as fast and slow modes of thinking, according to an idea popularized by the late Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman.
Fast and slow thinking matter for switching tasks and coordinating activity. But how do we shift from one kind of thinking to another—and are some of us better at this shift than others?
These were the questions that Linden Parkes, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Rutgers Health, and her colleagues recently set out to answer. The team analyzed brain imaging data from 960 people, mapping the connections between neurons to model how information flowed across different regions of their brains. While most models of the brain assume that all regions operate on the same internal clock, what they found is that the brain is not a single-speed conveyor belt and these regions run at many different speeds.
Read more: “Yes, You’re Irrational, and Yes, That’s OK”
They also found that the distribution of timescales across the cortex—the brain’s outer layer, responsible for higher order functions like thought, memory, language, and consciousness—is critical to how we switch between different modes of thinking and varies widely from person to person. They published their results in Nature Communications.
“We found that differences in how the brain processes information at different speeds help explain why people vary in their cognitive abilities,” explained Parkes in a statement. “Our work highlights a fundamental link between the brain’s white-matter connectivity and its local computational properties. People whose brain wiring is better matched to the way different regions handle fast and slow information tend to show higher cognitive capacity.”
The patterns they found also matched real underlying biology: They were associated with specific genetic, molecular, and cellular signatures found in the different brain regions. They found these patterns not just in humans, but in mice as well.
The researchers now want to take the findings into the realm of psychiatry, examining how connectivity patterns may be altered in people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression.
Life is lived at many tempos and the healthiest, most nimble brains seem to have an intrinsic sense of when to change gears. 
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Lead image: Vitaly_Vision / Shutterstock
