Stimulant drugs like Ritalin work by “fine-tuning” neuron activity in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for filtering out distractions and helping people to focus on tasks, new research in rats suggests.
Little is known about how Ritalin and related drugs actually work, researchers point out in the journal Biological Psychiatry.
To investigate, Dr. Craig Berridge of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleague David Devilbiss attached tiny electrodes to individual neurons in the brains of normal rats and watched how different doses of the drug affected neuron activity.