Colzato Lorenza S, Wolters Gina, Peifer Corinna
Cognitive Psychology Unit and Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Department of Cognitive Psychology, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany.
Exp Brain Res. 2018 Jan;236(1):253-257. doi: 10.1007/s00221-017-5123-0. Epub 2017 Nov 11.
Flow has been defined as a pleasant psychological state that people experience when completely absorbed in an activity. Previous correlative evidence showed that the vagal tone (as indexed by heart rate variability) is a reliable marker of flow. So far, it has not yet been demonstrated that the vagus nerve plays a causal role in flow. To explore this we used transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS), a novel non-invasive brain stimulation technique that increases activation of the locus coeruleus (LC) and norepinephrine release. A sham/placebo-controlled, randomized cross-over within-subject design was employed to infer a causal relation between the stimulated vagus nerve and flow as measured using the Flow Short-Scale in 32 healthy young volunteers. In both sessions, while being stimulated, participants had to rate their flow experience after having performed a task for 30 min. Active tVNS, compared to sham stimulation, decreased flow (as indexed by absorption scores). The results can be explained by the network reset theory, which assumes that high-phasic LC activity promotes a global reset of attention over exploitation of the current focus of attention, allowing rapid behavioral adaptation and resulting in decreased absorption scores. Furthermore, our findings corroborate the hypothesis that the vagus nerve and noradrenergic system are causally involved in flow.
心流被定义为人们在完全沉浸于一项活动时所体验到的一种愉悦的心理状态。先前的相关证据表明，迷走神经张力（以心率变异性为指标）是心流的可靠标志。到目前为止，尚未证明迷走神经在心流中起因果作用。为了探究这一点，我们使用了经皮迷走神经刺激（tVNS），这是一种新型的非侵入性脑刺激技术，可增加蓝斑（LC）的激活和去甲肾上腺素的释放。采用假手术/安慰剂对照、随机交叉的受试者内设计，以推断受刺激的迷走神经与使用心流短量表在32名健康年轻志愿者中测量的心流之间的因果关系。在两个实验环节中，参与者在接受刺激时，需要在完成一项任务30分钟后对他们的心流体验进行评分。与假刺激相比，主动tVNS降低了心流（以专注度得分衡量）。结果可以用网络重置理论来解释，该理论假设高相位的LC活动促进对当前注意力焦点的利用进行全局注意力重置，从而实现快速行为适应并导致专注度得分降低。此外，我们的研究结果证实了迷走神经和去甲肾上腺素能系统在心流中存在因果关系的假设。
