Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long
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One reason for your wandering attention is that the nervous system is constantly processing, reconfiguring, and reconnecting the trillions of connections in your brain each moment. The term for this is ambient neural activity.
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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.
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Maintaining a good focus on a thought occurs through not so much how you focus, but rather how you inhibit the wrong things from coming into focus.
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One specific region within the prefrontal cortex keeps showing up as being central for all types of inhibition. It’s called the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), and it sits just behind the right and left temples.
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Our braking system is part of the most fragile, temperamental, and energy-hungry region of the brain.
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One poignant implication of your braking system being located in the prefrontal cortex is that your capacity to put on the brakes decreases each time you do so.
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When you get the nerve to talk to the attractive person across the room, your brain was being bold three-tenths of a second before you.
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After this point, there are 0.2 seconds during which you are aware of being about to move, but haven’t yet taken the action. This 0.2-second window is a decent amount of time, long enough for the mind, with some practice, to notice an urge and perhaps intervene.
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without an awareness of the separation of these processes—“brain signal, desire, movement”—it’s likely you will go directly from brain signal to movement, the way most other animals do.
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you have only a small window in which to inhibit a response. And, of course, if your stage is too full, you may not have the space to hold the concept of inhibition there. It’s starting to become clear why, when you’re tired, hungry, or anxious, it’s easier to make mistakes and harder to inhibit the wrong impulses.
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Inhibiting distractions is a core skill for staying focused.
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When you develop language that describes an activity, at least in this experiment, it’s more likely that you can catch yourself about to do something before taking the action. Having explicit language gives you more veto power.
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this whole book is about helping you develop explicit language maps within the prefrontal cortex for experiences that until now have occurred only implicitly.
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To inhibit impulses, you must veto them before they turn from impulse into action. And you are more likely to be able to veto an action if you have explicit language for the mental processes involved.
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Speaking about ideas activates more circuits than merely thinking about those same ideas, which makes it easier to stay focused: the network is more robust.
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When we get distracted it’s often a result of thinking about ourselves, which activates the default network in the brain.
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Distractions exhaust the prefrontal cortex’s limited resources.
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Each time you inhibit something, your ability to inhibit again is reduced.
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Inhibit distractions early before they take on momentum.
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the last significant limitation of the prefrontal cortex: that it’s fussy. The prefrontal cortex needs just the right level of arousal to make decisions and solve problems well.
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whether a synapse in the prefrontal cortex fires correctly depends on having just the right levels of two neurochemicals present. These chemicals are dopamine and norepinephrine.
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If your alertness is too low, you can generate adrenaline by imagining something going wrong in the future,
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Where norepinephrine is the chemistry of alertness, dopamine is the chemistry of interest.
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dopamine level rises when the orbital frontal cortex detects novelty, something unexpected or new.
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If you have ever noticed that saying something the first time is easier than repeating it, you are noticing the pleasant buzz of new circuits being activated for the first time.
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Just changing the height of his chair could be enough of a fresh perspective to release more dopamine. Or he could speak out loud about his project to someone, allowing him to get a novel perspective again. Or he could listen to some jokes, call a friend he likes to have a laugh with, or just read something interesting and entertaining.
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Humor and positive expectations activate both dopamine and adrenaline.
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TOO MUCH AROUSAL IS NOT A GOOD THING
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Over-arousal may be more of a serious problem than under-arousal.
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Over-arousal means there is too much electrical activity in the prefrontal cortex.
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To reduce this arousal, you might need to reduce the volume and speed of information flowing through your mind.
Vijay Gopal
good techniques for reducing arousal
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When you can’t seem to think, writing ideas down to get them “out of your head” can help.
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Another strategy involves activating other large regions of the brain, which tends to deactivate the prefrontal cortex. One example is to focus your attention on the sounds around you,
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You could also activate the motor cortex, by doing anything physical, such as taking a walk, which makes oxygen and glucose flow to more activated areas of the brain such as the motor cortex.
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Too much arousal involves not only experiences such as fear or anxiety. It can also refer to more positive arousal, such as excitement or lust.
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the prefrontal cortex is fussy. To function at its peak it needs just the right levels of two neurochemicals, at just the right point within billions of circuits. These chemicals relate to being alert and interested.
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Bring your adrenaline level up when needed with a small dose of visualizing a mild fear.
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Bring your dopamine level up when needed, using novelty in any form, including changing perspective, humor, or expecting something positive.
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It’s well established that you remember, without knowing why, words or concepts you have seen recently and that these automatically influence your actions, subconsciously. It’s a quirk of the brain called priming.
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Emily has followed most of the principles in this book so far. She schedules work when it is easier to get the actors onstage, she clears her mind to reduce the amount of information she has to hold, she does one thing at a time, she reduces external distractions, and she vetoes internal distractions.
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Emily is discovering another surprising finding about the prefrontal cortex. Sometimes the prefrontal cortex itself is the problem. This is especially the case in creative situations.
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(Walt Disney is reported to have said that if he tested a new idea out and people were unanimously against it, he knew he might be on to something.)
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One of the fascinating aspects of the insight experience is how much you need to switch off your stage to have one. In many cases, an overactive prefrontal cortex can be the cause of the roadblock itself.
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the solution from the past gets in the way, stopping better solutions from arising. The incorrect strategy becomes the source of the impasse.
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Ohlsson’s research shows that people have to stop themselves from thinking along one path before they can find a new idea. “The projection of prior experience has to be actively suppressed and inhibited,” Ohlsson explains. “This is surprising, as we tend to think that inhibition is a bad thing, that it will lower your creativity. But as long as your prior approach is most dominant, has the highest level of activation, you will get more refined variations of the same approach, but nothing genuinely new comes to the fore.”
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The ability to stop oneself from thinking something is central to creativity.
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Here’s an opportunity for a personal experience of the impasse phenomenon. It’s a word puzzle that is exceptionally obvious when you see it, yet nearly everyone hits an impasse when they try to solve it. The puzzle goes like this: What does the array of letters H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O stand for?
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Getting around an impasse is like trying to change the direction of traffic on a bridge: you have to stop the traffic from going one way before it can go the other.
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sometimes the prefrontal cortex, your conscious processing capacity, is itself the problem. Get it out of the way, and the solution appears. This quirk of the brain also explains why other people can often see answers to your problem that you can’t.
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Knowing a problem too well can be the reason you can’t find a solution.