Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long
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people who solved a problem with insight had more activation of a brain region called the right anterior temporal lobe, a region underneath the right ear.
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“About a second and a half before people solved the problem with insight, they had this sudden and prolonged increase in alpha band activity over the right occipital lobe, the region that processes visual information coming into the brain.”
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Beeman has also found a strong correlation between emotional states and insight. Increasing happiness increases the likelihood of insight, while increasing anxiety decreases the likelihood of insight.
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Just prior to insight, the medial prefrontal cortex tends to become active. This is part of your default network, and it relates to being aware of your own experience.
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They were looking closely at the problem, but they were not aware of how they were looking.
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The “insight machines,” those whom Beeman can pick based on brain scans before an experiment, are those who have more awareness of their internal experience.
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PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR INNER ARIA
Vijay Gopal
Exploration = Awareness + Reflection
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spent more than ten years working on this challenge, which resulted in the development of the ARIA model. ARIA stands for Awareness, Reflection, Insight, and Action.
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Awareness is a state in which the brain focuses lightly on an impasse. In the awareness state, you want to put the problem on the stage, but ensure it takes up as little space as possible so that other actors can get on.
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A good way to simplify a problem is to describe it in as few words as possible. Saying to yourself, “I want more energy,” creates a fair bit less activation in the brain than saying, “I want more energy to focus more on my work and family and make time for exercise and fun.”
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In the reflection phase, you hold the impasse in mind, but reflect on your thinking processes, rather than on the content of thoughts.
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At the moment of insight, there is a burst of gamma band brain waves. These are the fastest brain waves, representing a group of neurons firing in unison, forty times a second.
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People in deep meditation have a lot of gamma waves.
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To be effective at work I have proposed that you need to get a minimum of actors on the stage, in the right order, a few at a time, with the right level of arousal.
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Resolving an impasse requires letting the brain idle, reducing activation of the wrong answers.
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Having insights involves hearing subtle signals and allowing loose connections to be made. This requires a quiet mind, with minimal electrical activity.
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Take the pressure off yourself, get an extension on your deadline, do something fun, reduce your anxiety any way you can. Take a break and do something light and interesting, to see if an answer emerges.
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Try quieting your mind and see what is there in the more subtle connections.
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Many of the brain regions your brain uses to understand other people are the same as those used for understanding yourself.
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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.
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the Mindful Awareness Attention Scale (MAAS). The MAAS is now the gold standard for measuring an individual’s everyday mindfulness.
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“There were significant differences between the two groups after only five days of training,” Tang explains. The mindfulness group had almost 50 percent greater immune function on average, based on saliva samples. Cortisol levels were also lower in the mindfulness group.
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A series of other studies has found that these two circuits, narrative and direct-experience, are inversely correlated.
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This occurs with people who practice types of mindfulness mediation. They get better at noticing the difference between directly experiencing something and the interpretation added by the brain. And doing these types of exercises regularly thickens the circuitry involved in observing internal states.
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A study by Kirk Brown found that people high on the mindfulness scale are more aware of their unconscious processes. Additionally, these people have more cognitive control, and a greater ability to shape what they do and what they say than do people lower on the mindfulness scale.
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if you can activate your director at will, you perceive more information about your own mental state at any given time. You can then make choices to change what you pay attention to.
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By understanding your brain, you increase your capacity to change your brain.
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Mindfulness isn’t difficult. What’s difficult is to remember to be mindful.”
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It doesn’t matter so much what you use to practice. The key is to practice focusing your attention on a direct sense, and to do so often.
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My wife and I built a ten-second ritual into the evening meal with our kids that involves stopping and noticing three small breaths together before we eat.
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the brain has an overarching organizing principle, which is to classify the world around you into things that will either hurt you or help you stay alive.
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The limbic system is constantly making toward or away decisions. These decisions happen automatically, about half a second before you are consciously aware of them if you become aware of them at all.
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Your hippocampus doesn’t just remember facts; it also remembers feelings about facts.
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The amygdale does have an interesting quirk that has helped make it famous: it tends to become aroused in proportion to the strength of an emotional response. It’s like the brain’s thermometer for feelings.
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The toward emotions are more subtle, more easily displaced, and harder to build on, than the away emotions. 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.
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When overly aroused by real or imagined dangers (or the rarer strong rewards), the limbic system impairs your brain functioning in a number of significant ways. This reduced functioning often occurs without conscious awareness, and can even generate false confidence.
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When the limbic system gets overly aroused, it reduces the resources available for prefrontal cortex functions.
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When there are not enough resources for conscious processing, the brain becomes more “automatic,” drawing on either deeply embedded functions or ideas close to the front of your audience, such as recent events. Essentially your brain is just doing what it can with minimal resources, so it’s using low-resource tools.
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It’s bad enough that an over-aroused limbic system gives you less space on the stage, and makes you more negative. But it gets worse. An aroused limbic system increases the chance of making links where there may not be any.
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When the amygdale is aroused it makes “accidental connections,” misinterpreting incoming data. This misinterpretation happens through a rule of “generalizing.”
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the amygdale holds memories, which is at “low resolution,” holding only a small amount of data. In the same way that it’s faster to email a thumbnail of a photo than a large picture, by working at low resolution, the amygdale can respond to potential threats in milliseconds.
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Studies are showing that a high allostatic load can kill existing neurons, and stop the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus, important for forming memories. Clearly, being able to regulate your emotions well is not a “nice skill to have.” It’s essential for success, not just in work, but in life overall.
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One is called labeling. It’s when you take a situation and put a label on your emotions. The other is called reappraisal, which involves changing your interpretation of an event.
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people who tried to suppress a negative emotional experience failed to do so. While they thought they looked fine outwardly, inwardly their limbic system was just as aroused as without suppression, and in some cases, even more aroused.
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when people try to suppress the expression of an emotion, their memory of events is impaired, as if they are consciously focusing their attention elsewhere.
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When your limbic system becomes aroused, the resources available for your prefrontal cortex decrease. However, this works the other way, too. Increasing the arousal of the prefrontal cortex can dampen down the arousal of your limbic system. The two work like a seesaw.
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find the right word to identify an emotional sensation, a technique that is called symbolic labeling.
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FMRI scans showed that when the participants labeled the emotional faces using words, less activity occurred in the amygdale. Interestingly, the part of the brain activated in this situation is the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, the region that is central to any type of braking in the brain,
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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.
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“In the people who are more mindful, we see an amygdale deactivation—it’s actually turning off the amygdale completely,”