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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Rock
Deep thinking tends to require more effort, so plan to do your deep thinking in one block, perhaps early in the morning or late at night.
The most important mental processes, such as prioritizing, often take the most effort.
Becoming an expert in any field seems to involve creating large numbers of chunks, which enables you to make faster and better decisions than amateurs. Current thinking is that it takes about ten years of practice to develop sufficient chunks in any new field to achieve “mastery.”
While it is physically possible sometimes to do several mental tasks at once, accuracy and performance drop off quickly. The consequences can be harsh. An investigation into a fatal train accident showed that the driver sent a text message at the precise moment that the train accidentally sped up while rounding a corner.
The more you use a pattern, the less attention you will need to pay to doing this task, and the more you will be able to do at one time.
One study found that office distractions eat up an average 2.1 hours a day.
Being “always on” (connected to others via technology) can drop your IQ significantly, as much as losing a night’s sleep.
They found that performance was poor at low levels of stress, hit a sweet spot at reasonable levels of stress, and tapered off under high stress.
It takes a certain amount of stress just to get out of bed in the morning. This type of stress is known as eustress, or positive stress. Positive stress helps focus your attention.
When Paul first drove off, he suffered from the rare phenomenon of being too happy on the job. He was feeling so good he forgot to create and hold an image in mind of where he was going. When you don’t activate the prefrontal cortex, you tend to operate on habit, and your basal ganglia take over.
Increasing happiness increases the likelihood of insight, while increasing anxiety decreases the likelihood of insight. This relates to your ability to perceive subtle signals.
A person who was aware of his internal experience seemed to heal from a tough operation faster than someone who wasn’t. This awareness of signals coming from inside of you has a technical term: interoception.
This also explains why upward spirals, where positive emotions beget more positive emotions, are less common than downward spirals, where negative emotions beget more negative emotions. Human beings walk toward, but run away.
Here’s the bottom line: describe an emotion in just a word or two, and it helps reduce the emotion. Open up a dialogue about an emotion, though, and you tend to increase it.
Suppressing an emotion reduces your memory of events significantly.
Practice noticing emotions as they arise, to get better at sensing their presence earlier.
When you sense you have choices, something that used to feel stressful now feels more manageable. Finding that you have choices in a situation reduces the threats from both autonomy and uncertainty.
Research shows that people who see life through slightly rose-colored glasses do in fact seem to be the happiest. And happy people perform better at many types of work.
Lots of research has been done, such as by Barbara Frederickson from the University of North Carolina, showing that happy people perceive a wider range of data, solve more problems, and come up with more new ideas for actions to take in a situation.
She tries to find a word for her state of mind and comes up with frazzled. Naming her state calms her down.
When your brain decides someone is a friend, you process your interactions using a similar part of the brain you use for thinking about your own experience.
One experiment showed that when people repeated out loud what they were learning, the speed of their learning and their ability to apply that learning to other situations increased.
One study showed that when you perceive someone as a competitor, you don’t feel empathy with him or her. Less empathy equals less oxytocin, which means a less pleasant sensation of collaboration overall.
Deciding someone is a foe means you make accidental connections, misread intent, get easily upset, and discard their good ideas.
A handshake, swapping names, and discussing something in common, be it the weather or traffic, can increase feelings of closeness by causing oxytocin to be released.
When you’re trying to collaborate with anyone, start with a shared goal, and everything after will be easier.
Surprisingly, when people receive five dollars out of ten dollars, their reward center lights up more than when they receive, say, five dollars out of twenty. “In other words, the reward circuitry is activated more when an offer is fair than when it’s unfair, even when there is no additional money to be gained,” Tabibnia explains. Fairness, it seems, can be more important than money.
Exclusion and rejection is physiologically painful. A feeling of being less than other people activates the same brain regions as physical pain.
These domains form a model, which I call the SCARF® model, which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness.
Just speaking to your boss or a person of higher status generally activates a status threat.
Reduce status threats in others by lowering your status through sharing your own humanity or mistakes.
When you focus on problems you are more likely to activate the emotions connected with those problems, which will create greater noise in the brain. This inhibits insight. Whereas focusing on solutions generates a toward state, because you desire something. You are seeking, not avoiding.
Sometimes reducing a problem to one short sentence can be enough to bring about insight on its own.
If you have a specific task you want someone to do, you might say, “Would you be willing to do this?” rather than “I want you to do this.” This simple change takes into account a sense of autonomy.
Toward goals have you visualize and create connections around where you are going.
Lose weight, stop smoking, don’t drink: most of the New Year’s resolutions of the world are away goals.
