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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Rock
Read between
May 18 - May 29, 2019
your brain can change by understanding itself
The stage is what you focus on at any one time, and it can hold information from the outside world, information from your inner world, or any combination of the two.
To understand a new idea, you put new actors on the stage and hold them there long enough to see how they connect to audience members—that
To make a decision, you hold actors onstage and compare them to one another, making value judgments.
To recall information, meaning to bring a memory from the past back to mind, you bring an audience member up on the stage.
To memorize information, you need to get actors off the stage and into the audience.
The process of inhibition, of keeping certain actors off the stage, requires a lot of effort. It’s also central to effective functioning in life.
The stage requires a lot of energy to function. It’s as if the lights are a long way back from the stage, so you need a lot of them, all on full, to see the actors.
Make one difficult decision, and the next is more difficult.
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).
prioritizing involves every function I mentioned earlier: understanding new ideas, as well as making decisions, remembering, and inhibiting, all at once. It’s like the triathlon of mental tasks.
One way to reduce the energy required for processing information is to use visuals, to literally see something in your mind’s eye.
No wonder metaphors have an appeal!
One technique is to break work up into blocks of time based on type of brain use, rather than topic.
Each time you changed your exercise mode, your muscles would get used in new ways, with some resting while others worked. It’s similar with mixing up types of thinking.
The bottom line to all this is one simple message: your ability to make great decisions is a limited resource. Conserve this resource at every opportunity.
Every time the brain works on an idea consciously, it uses up a measurable and limited resource. Some mental processes take up a lot more energy than others.
Think of conscious thinking as a precious resource to conserve.
Prioritize prioritizing, as it’s an energy-intensive activity.
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.
The brain must settle on one perception at any moment; you can’t see both at once.
(There is a story that the movie Alien was pitched as “Jaws in space” the pitch uses existing elements that people know well, in high-level summary form, requiring the least possible energy to get the idea onto the stage.)
When you reduce complex ideas to just a few concepts, it’s far easier to manipulate the concepts in your mind, and in other people’s minds.
the brain learns complex routines by automatically grouping information into chunks. The size of a chunk roughly relates to the time it takes you to say each item to yourself.
the best chunks take fewer than two seconds to think about or repeat aloud.
Actors often get onto the stage because they are in the front row, not because they are the most useful actors for that moment.
"Actors" is the metaphor the author uses for thoughts; the "stage" is the metaphor for the prefrontal cortex
We all often think about what’s easy to think about, rather than what’s right to think about.
The less you hold in mind at once the better.
Simplify information by approximating and focusing on an idea’s salient elements.
Group information into chunks whenever you have too much information.
We now have three limitations: the stage takes a lot of energy to run, it can hold only a handful of actors at a time, and these actors can play only one scene at a time.
It’s like using a calculator: you can’t multiply and divide two numbers at the same time.
When engaged in conscious activities, your brain works in a serial way: one thing after another.
when people do two cognitive tasks at once, their cognitive capacity can drop from that of a Harvard MBA to that of an eight-year-old. It’s a phenomenon called dual-task interference.
The lesson is clear: if accuracy is important, don’t divide your attention.
A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test.
“Always on” may not be the most productive way to work.
the idea of having access to emails 24/7 is much easier to bring to your stage than an uncertain solution not in your audience at all, such as changing your email habits.
The surprise result of being always on is that not only do you get a negative effect on mental performance, but it also tends to increase the total number of emails you get.
it’s reasonable to assume that the most energy-intensive items are those most likely to be bumped off the stage first.
There are three possible answers to this juggling act dilemma. One solution is to embed or automate more of what you do, which means you get the audience to do more work. Another possible solution is to get information onstage in the best possible order. The third possible solution is to mix up your attention.
practicing specific activities over and over until they become embedded, which means the activities are not being managed by your prefrontal cortex.
Your basal ganglia recognize, store, and repeat patterns in your environment. The basic operating principle is somewhat like the “if-then” function in software coding.
IF-THEN planning !
The basal ganglia have a big appetite for patterns. One study showed that only three repetitions of a routine is enough to begin the process of what is termed long-term potentiation, or what I call here hardwiring.
Their basal ganglia had noticed the patterns implicitly, but the volunteers could not explicitly identify them.
The basal ganglia are highly efficient at executing patterns. Use this resource every way you can.
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.
You can focus on only one conscious task at a time.
Switching between tasks uses energy; if you do this a lot you can make more mistakes.
One of the most effective distraction-management techniques is simple: switch off all communication devices during any thinking work.
