An interest is based on cognitively strong involvement in and emotionally positive evaluation of certain activities, objects, or people. Interests interact with attention and are controlled in the brain, primarily by the frontal brain and limbic system. In apathy, there is no longer any interest in the external world.
What is interest?
Interest controls a person’s attention. It corresponds to the cognitive sympathy that is given to a thing or a person. Interest controls the attention of a person. It corresponds to the cognitive sympathy given to a thing or a person. The level of sympathy correlates with the strength of interest. Disinterest can increase to the point of pathological apathy. In psychology, interest is a multidimensional construct. Interests are defined in terms of concrete objects, as domains of knowledge, or in specific classes of activities. The degree of interest in a certain thing or another person is in turn defined by the respective subjective appreciation in the individual case. This positive esteem is mostly related to the intensity of positive emotionally experienced states in connection with a certain person, activity or object. For educational psychology, interest is a result of motivational emotional and cognitive connection between a certain person and an object, activity or another person. The interest to get to know new things and to be open to many things can be stimulated in childhood. If the parents allow the child to make many experiences, the child has on average more interest in continuing to make diverse experiences. The formation of interests involves specifically human abilities of cognition, which neurophysiologically are located primarily in the frontal brain and, in addition, primarily affect the brain areas for emotions and emotional processing.
Function and task
Every interest has a strong emotional connotation for the individual. This emotional connotation is predominantly positive and thus associated with positive experiences according to personal experience. Interest also plays a role in the arbitrary part of attention allocation and in automatic patterns of perception. Human perception is selective. It emphasizes certain stimuli from the environment and attenuates or even filters out others. Among the most important perceptual filters are a person’s emotional connection and interests. These filters are used to decide which of the incoming stimuli are even relevant enough to process before they are processed. For this reason, for example, even the tiniest beetle enters the consciousness of people with a great interest in animals. People with a less pronounced interest in animals would see this beetle, but would not consciously perceive it because of the automatic filtering function of perception. From a neuroscientific point of view, interests and attention networked with them thus play a central role in the work of the central nervous system. What constitutes the ego and specifically human cognition is neurophysiologically located primarily in the frontal brain. In addition, the formatio reticularis in the brainstem and the thalamus play a role in interests and attention. The right hemisphere of the brain also regulates general alertness. The left hemisphere of the brain performs specific concentration tasks as they occur in connection with a particular interest. The limbic system is the “feeling system” whose amygdala nuclei play a crucial role in emotional evaluation and are thus also relevant for interests. Interests arise predominantly from executive functions that correspond to higher-order mental processes. These include, for example, the voluntary directing of attention, as controlled primarily in the frontal brain. The frontal brain in turn has a close connection to all other brain regions. Since personality is also located in this area of the brain, certain interests can arise here on the basis of character. The limbic system as the emotional center and the mirror neuron system as the basis of empathy towards other people also contribute to this.The same applies to motivational neurotransmitters that activate the body’s reward system and the hippocampus, which is active as a novelty detector and thus evaluates, for example, what is interesting in the first place. Psychology distinguishes between situationally newly emerging interest after the situational reception of a stimulus and actualized interest, which is aroused due to an already individually existing interest. Permanent and constant interests of a person can be explained by different psychological interest models. One well-known model is Holland’s RIASEC model.
Illness and discomfort
Interests are based in large part on the excitability of attention and the emotional involvement and evaluative capacity of situations. All of this occurs on the basis of the person’s stored experiences. Apathy in medical practice describes a general apathy, a lack of excitability, and an insensitivity to stimuli from the external environment. Apathy can be a consequence of various neurological diseases. Advanced dementia in particular manifests itself in increasing apathy. For Alzheimer’s disease, the prevalence of apathy is about 60 percent. Vascular dementia is even associated with apathy in more than 70 percent of cases. Frontotemporal dementia causes the frontal brain to lose its function. For this reason, this type of dementia is associated with apathy in more than 90 percent of all cases. In addition, apathy can also symptomatically characterize mental illness. In depression, the patient hardly feels the environment anymore. When there is such insensibility to external stimuli, there can be no more interests. This is because one of the basic elements of interests is emotional positive evaluation. Physical causes for such a connection can be brain injuries, inflammations, degenerations or in extreme cases tumors in the limbic system. Also, when the projection pathways of the limbic system are no longer functional, interest in the external world and the general ability to form interests decreases. The same is true in frontal brain syndrome, as can occur in the context of various infectious diseases. Apathy may be associated symptomatically with loss of appetite, dejection, and drowsiness or changes in character and judgment.
