Training can help control absent-mindedness

TRAINING THE right side of your brain could help reduce absent-mindedness and lessen the symptoms of attention- deficit disorder (ADD).

The right hemisphere of your brain plays a particular role in your self-awareness, or how the brain builds a picture of yourself, explained Ian Robertson, professor of psychology at Trinity College Dublin. Later this week, he will deliver a keynote address about self-awareness to the British Psychological Society, which is holding its annual conference in Dublin for the first time.

"People who are scatty are less likely to be aware they are scatty and this can make them more accident prone," he said. "They have a particular deficit in the right hemisphere and their response to errors is blunted."

His team has successfully used biofeedback methods to show people with ADD or with normal scattiness how to recognise when their brain is going into an inattentive mode and to rouse themselves out of it. "We essentially train them to control the level of alertness in the brain, and nine out of 10 people become less absent-minded when they do that," he said.

In other experiments to confuse the brain's awareness of the body, researchers at Trinity asked subjects to look at a fake, rubber hand while their own hand was out of sight. If the rubber hand was stroked while next to their other, real hand, they felt an uncanny sensation of the inanimate hand being a part of their body, according to Prof Robertson.

The right hemisphere of the brain was less easily tricked than the left side into distorting the brain's awareness of the body, according to their research, and conditions such as stroke, head injury or dementia which affect the right side of the brain can impair self-awareness, explained Prof Robertson.

"The most dramatic would be sometimes following a stroke, people can be paralysed on one side of the body, but they deny that is the case. They believe and talk as if they can use their arm, even though they are completely paralysed on that side," he said.

Other conditions that distort self-awareness can lead to a person believing that they are dead, or that their family has been replaced with imposters, noted Prof Robertson.

The British Psychological Society's 2008 conference runs from tomorrow until Friday at the Royal Dublin Society in Dublin