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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Rock
More people than ever are being paid to think, instead of just doing routine tasks. Yet making complex decisions and solving new problems is difficult for any stretch of time because of some real biological limits on your brain.
These five functions, understanding, deciding, recalling, memorizing, and inhibiting, make up the majority of conscious thought.
Conscious mental activities chew up metabolic resources, the fuel in your blood, significantly faster than automatic brain functions such as keeping your heart beating or your lungs breathing.
From an evolutionary perspective, the basal ganglia are an older part of the brain.
The big difference is she would prioritize prioritizing. She would prioritize first, before any other attention-rich activity such as emailing. That’s because prioritizing is one of the brain’s most energy-hungry processes.
Picturing something you have not yet seen is going to take a lot of energy and effort. This partly explains why people spend more time thinking about problems (things they have seen) than solutions (things they have never seen). It explains why setting goals feels so hard (it’s hard to envision the future).
This of course also explains why prioritizing is so hard. Prioritizing involves imagining and then moving around concepts of which you have no direct experience.
Creating visuals for complex ideas is one way to maximize limited energy resources. Another way involves reducing the load on the prefrontal cortex whenever possible. If Emily gets a piece of paper and writes down the four big projects for the day, she saves her brain for comparing the elements instead of using energy to hold each one.
The point is, the stage works efficiently when you bring items onto it made up of elements embedded in long-term memory.
Relational complexity studies show over and again that the fewer variables you have to hold in mind, the more effective you are at making decisions.
We all often think about what’s easy to think about, rather than what’s right to think about.
The lesson is clear: if accuracy is important, don’t divide your attention.
Change focus ten times an hour (one study showed people in offices did so as often as twenty times an hour), and your productive thinking time is only a fraction of what’s possible.
One famous metaphor from Eastern philosophy involves the “Elephant and the rider,” where the conscious will, the rider, tries to control the larger and uncontrollable unconscious mind, the elephant. With the prefrontal cortex taking up just 4 percent of total brain volume, modern brain science seems to affirm the truth of this metaphor.
Or, as scientist and philosopher Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia says, we are the descendants of people who paid a lot of attention when there was a rustle in the bushes.
Roy Baumeister, from Florida University, a scientist introduced in scene 1, set up a situation where people had to resist eating chocolate while alone in a room. He found that those who resisted the chocolate gave up more quickly on a difficult task afterward. “Self-control is a limited resource,” says Baumeister. “After exhibiting self-control, people have a reduced ability to exhibit further self-control.”
It seems that you may not have much free will, but you do have “free won’t” (a term coined by Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz), which is the ability to avoid urges.
To avoid distractions, it’s helpful to get into the habit of vetoing behaviors early, quickly, and often, well before they take over.
The brain is easily distracted, and distractions have a big energy cost. Staying focused requires learning not just to switch off your cell phone. The harder part is learning to inhibit impulses as they arise.
In 1908, scientists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson discovered a fact about human performance that they called the inverted U. 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.
You can play various “tricks” on yourself to generate the release of this chemical. Visualizing an activity generates a similar metabolic response to actually doing it. One study found that picturing yourself doing a finger exercise increased muscle mass by 22 percent, which was close to the 30 percent achieved by doing the exercise for real. (For those thinking this sounds too good to be true, remember that you still have to put in the effort, a lot of effort, to keep mentally focused on doing the exercise.)
Where norepinephrine is the chemistry of alertness, dopamine is the chemistry of interest.
Scientists have also found that expecting a positive event, anything the brain perceives as a reward, generates dopamine.
“Mindfulness is a habit, it’s something the more one does, the more likely one is to be in that mode with less and less effort…it’s a skill that can be learned. It’s accessing something we already have. Mindfulness isn’t difficult. What’s difficult is to remember to be mindful.”
“Everything you do in life is based on your brain’s determination to minimize danger or maximize reward,”
He found that when someone suppressed the expression of a negative emotion, the observer’s blood pressure went up. The observer is expecting to see an emotion but gets nothing.
Because people incorrectly predict that voicing their feelings will make those feelings worse, a lot of people, especially in the business world, don’t discuss their feelings.
Over and over, scientists see that the perception of control over a stressor alters the stressor’s impact.
“The loss of prefrontal function only occurs when we feel out of control. It’s the prefrontal cortex itself that is determining if we are in control or not. Even if we have the illusion that we are in control, our cognitive functions are preserved.”
“Our emotional responses ultimately flow out of our appraisals of the world, and if we can shift those appraisals, we shift our emotional responses.”
Each of these four types of reappraisal—reinterpreting, normalizing, reordering, and repositioning—are techniques people use all the time.
In 2007, I presented the research on reappraisal to doctors at a cancer research institute. “Are you trying to say,” a senior scientist challenged me, “that success at work is based on your ability to make up false interpretations of the world instead of dealing with reality?”
“Participants in several social psychological studies have been shown to orient toward goal cues and engage in goal pursuit while being completely unaware of both actions.”
Schultz found that when a cue from the environment indicates you’re going to get a reward, dopamine is released in response. Unexpected rewards release more dopamine than expected ones.
According to Amy Arnsten, you need a good level of dopamine to “hold” an idea in your prefrontal cortex. Positive expectations increase the level of dopamine in the brain, and this increased level makes you more able to focus.
Managing your expectations is also an opportunity for your director to be more proactive, setting the scene for good performance rather than just sorting out problems when things go wrong.
Great athletes know how to manage their expectations. They don’t get overexcited about possibly winning, as this ruins their concentration. And if they are worried about losing, they try not to expect that, either.
“Four out of five processes operating in the background when your brain is at rest involve thinking about other people and yourself.”
Christian Keysers says, “If you want to collaborate well with others you have to understand what kind of state others are in.”
That’s because collaborating with people you don’t know well is a threat for the brain.
When you interconnect your thoughts, emotions, and goals with other people, you release oxytocin, a pleasurable chemical. It’s the same chemical experience that a small child gets when he makes physical contact with his mother, from the moment of birth onward. Oxytocin is released when two people dance together, play music together, or engage in a collaborative conversation.
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.
A study by the Gallup organization showed that companies that encourage water-cooler conversations exhibit greater productivity.
A sense of fairness in and of itself can create a strong reward response, and a sense of unfairness can generate a threat response that lasts for days.
Many arguments between people, especially those close to us, involve incorrect perceptions of unfairness, triggering events that activate an even deeper sense of unfairness in all parties.
Prefrontal cortex functioning tends to shrink briefly as teens hit puberty, which explains why a ten-year-old may have better emotional control than a fifteen-year-old.
Status is relative, and a sense of reward from an increase in status can come anytime you feel “better than” another person. Your brain maintains complex maps for the “pecking order” of the people surrounding you.
Eisenberger says, “What we found is that when people were excluded, you see activity in the dorsal portion of the anterior cingulate cortex, which is the neural region that’s also involved in the distressing component of pain, or what sometimes people call the ‘suffering component’ of pain.
Studies of primate communities show that higher-status monkeys have reduced day-to-day cortisol levels, are healthier, and live longer.
