Brain Connectivity Predicts Procrastination

Posted on October 10, 2016

A recent study published in Personality and Individual Differences by Wu and colleagues provides some insight into the neural underpinnings of procrastination by looking at a specific type of brain connectivity, resting state functional connectivity (rsFC), and investigating how this relates to individual levels of procrastination. This approach looks at how different regions of the brain are functionally connected, as opposed to anatomically (structurally) connected. When the brain is at “rest”, there is still some activity going on; it is always spontaneously firing at low-frequency fluctuations.

Recent research has shown that there are distinct brain networks that fire together at rest, and these patterns have been linked to variations in cognitive abilities and behaviors.

The researchers hypothesized that procrastination is a result of failure in self-regulation, and thus brain regions involving impulsivity control and self-monitoring may have less functional connectivity in individuals who procrastinate more. They used measures of trait procrastination and self-control to assess procrastination tendencies and collected resting state fMRI data during which participants were instructed to lie quietly in the scanner, close their eyes, and let their mind wander for about 6 minutes. After careful analysis, Wu and colleagues were able to confirm that the functional connectivity between the hypothesized brain regions were indeed related to procrastination behavior.

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Source material from Brain Blogger