Visual Intelligence: Sharpen Your Perception, Change Your Life

by Amy E. Herman

No two jobs, classrooms, crime scenes, customers, students, patients, people, or problems are the same. There is no such thing as the same pneumonia, the same second-grader, or the same business deal. Every person and situation is unique. To treat them otherwise is to deceive them and ourselves.

But after completing his first year, Sloan concluded that the students’ poor grades weren’t due to their lack of intelligence. Instead he realized their problem-solving deficiencies came from their difficulty focusing on an extended task and attending to details, both necessities when solving multiple-step mathematical problems.

Stanford professor Clifford Nass takes it one step further and argues that “multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking.” After using fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to study the brain while it was in juggling mode, he found that people who regularly multitasked were “terrible at ignoring irrelevant information, terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized, and terrible at switching from one task to another.”

Psychologists believe that we can keep our cognitive control system from losing vigilance and help retain long-term focus by simply taking breaks. The formula recommended by experts is twofold. First, take a brief mental break every twenty minutes: just a momentary deactivation from your singular focus. The key is to pick an activity completely different from what you were doing. If you’ve been reading a report, don’t switch to reading emails, switch to something that uses a different set of skills, like talking to someone face-to-face. Second, relax for ten minutes for every ninety minutes worked. Take a walk, outside if possible; exercise, even if that means only doing at-your-desk yoga; do something that gives you pleasure; or take a power nap.

He did a great job, except that he failed to mention the table and chairs on top of the bridge. He left them out not because he didn’t see them but because he “didn’t know what to make of them.” That is not a valid reason for omitting a fact. It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand it; someone else might. Ignoring the unknown can be dangerous.

concession, since chances are you’re more than sorry to be stuck in this situation with them. Also keep in mind Mary Poppins’s famous advice: “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.” Coating our words with sweetness can help the other person receive them more easily.

While I admit to doing this in practice, I’m angry at how it is expected in women and considered exceptional or weak in men.

The search for closure stems from the brain’s preference for efficiency. A completed task is a closed loop. An incomplete one is an open loop that uses up cognitive energy searching for a solution or worrying that there isn’t one yet.