The sought-after equanimity of “living in the moment” may be impossible, according to neuroscientists who’ve pinpointed a brain area responsible for using past decisions and outcomes to guide future behavior. The study is the first of its kind to analyze signals associated with metacognition—a person’s ability to monitor and control cognition (a term cleverly described by researchers as “thinking about thinking.”

Why aren’t our thoughts independent of each other? Why don’t we just live in the moment? For a healthy person, it’s impossible to live in the moment. It’s a nice thing to say in terms of seizing the day and enjoying life, but our inner lives and experiences are much richer than that. With schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease, there is a fracturing of the thought process. It is constantly disrupted, and despite trying to keep a thought going, one is distracted very easily. Patients with these disorders have trouble sustaining a memory of past decisions to guide later behavior, suggesting a problem with metacognition. -Marc Sommer

Source: University of Pittsburgh