Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

by David Rock

She needs new neural circuitry for managing a significantly larger and more complex to-do list.

The cortex is the outer covering of the brain, the curly gray stuff you see in pictures of brains. It’s a tenth of an inch thick and covers the brain like a sheet. The prefrontal cortex, which sits behind the forehead, is just one part of the overall cortex. The last major brain region to develop during human evolutionary history, it is a measly 4 to 5 percent of the volume of the rest of the brain.

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.

Daniel Gilbert’s 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness, dives deeply into the implications of this finding, illustrating how human beings are terrible at estimating emotions in the future, a concept he calls affective forecasting. Gilbert shows how people define how they will feel in the future based more on the way they feel today, instead of correctly assessing the mental state they might be in at a future date.

First, they are highly information-efficient constructs. If you picture your bedroom, when you hold the image in mind, that image contains a huge amount of information involving complex relationships among dozens of objects, their sizes and shapes, their relative positions, and so on.

Visual processes evolved over millions of years, so the machinery is highly efficient, especially in comparison to the circuitry involved in language.

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.

getting comfort from "your brain at work". For example, science behind prioritizing prioritizing.

Save mental energy for prioritizing by avoiding other high-energy-consuming conscious activities such as dealing with emails. Schedule the most attention-rich tasks when you have a fresh and alert mind. Use the brain to interact with information rather than trying to store information, by creating visuals for complex ideas and by listing projects.

Use the brain to interact with information rather than trying to store information, by creating visuals for complex ideas and by listing projects.

When you embed a repetitive task, you are pushing routines down into the brain region called the basal ganglia, first mentioned in scene 1.

The brain region important for detecting novelty is called the anterior cingulated cortex (see diagram, Chapter 4).

“Four out of five processes operating in the background when your brain is at rest involve thinking about other people and yourself.”

In the absence of positive social cues, it’s easy for people to fall back into the more common mode of human interactions: distrusting others. In this brain state, with the limbic system overly activated, a joke becomes a slight, a slight becomes an attack, and an attack becomes a battle. And that can be the end of productive, goal-focused thinking for as long as humans can hold a grudge, which is a long time indeed.

When you speak to someone about an idea, many more parts of your brain are activated than just thinking about the idea, including memory regions, language regions, and motor centers. This is a process called spreading activation. Spreading activation makes it easier to recall ideas later on, as you have left a wider trail of connections to follow.