The active ingredient in Tylenol might make it harder for people to notice mistakes, according to a new study.
Researchers from the University of British Columbia discovered that acetaminophen, a common painkiller in pills like Tylenol, could be blocking the brain response previously linked to making errors.
"Past research tells us physical pain and social rejection share a neural process that we experience as distress, and both have been traced to [the] same part of the brain," said Dan Randles of the University of British Columbia, who co-authored the research.
Researchers explained recent studies suggest that the acetaminophen may block pain the same way it blocks evaluative responses. Randles and his team previously found that the painkiller makes people less reactive to uncertain situations.
"The core idea of our study is that we don't fully understand how acetaminophen affects the brain," said Randles. "While there's been recent behavioral research on the effects of acetaminophen, we wanted to have a sense of what's happening neurologically."
The latest study involved 60 participants who were asked to play a target-detection task called Go or No Go. Participants were divided into two groups: one group received 1,000 mg of acetaminophen and the other group received a dummy pill.
In the game, participants had to hit a Go button every time the letter F appeared on a screen and avoid hitting the button if an E flashed on the screen. The point of the game was to see how quickly participants were able to capture all the Gos while avoiding the No Gos. Researchers also used electroencephalogram to measure participant brain activity.
Electroencephalogram results revealed that participants on acetaminophen showed a smaller Error Related Positivity (Pe) wave when making mistakes than those who didn't receive the painkiller.
The study also revealed that participants on acetaminophen missed significantly more of the Go stimuli than those that weren't on the painkiller.
"It looks like acetaminophen makes it harder to recognize an error, which may have implications for cognitive control in daily life," explained Randles.
"Sometimes you need to interrupt your normal processes or they'll lead to a mistake, like when you're talking to a friend while crossing the street, you should still be ready to react to an erratic driver," said Randles. "The task we designed is meant to capture that since most of the stimuli were Go, so you end up getting into a routine of automatically hitting the Go button. When you see a No Go, that requires cognitive control because you need to interrupt the process."
The findings were published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
