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

by David Rock

As I mentioned in scene 1, the main mental processes relevant to getting work done are understanding, deciding, recalling, memorizing, and inhibiting. To understand why the actors can play only one scene at a time, let’s explore these processes further. Understanding a new idea involves creating maps in the prefrontal cortex that represent new, incoming information, and connecting these maps to existing maps in the rest of the brain. It’s like holding actors onstage to see if they connect with the audience. Making a decision involves activating a series of maps in the prefrontal cortex and making a choice between these maps. It’s like holding audience members onstage and deciding between them, as with an audition for a chorus line. Recalling involves searching through the billions of maps involved in memory and bringing just the right ones into the prefrontal cortex. Memorizing involves holding maps in attention in the prefrontal cortex long enough to embed them in long-term memory. Inhibiting involves trying not to activate certain maps. It’s like keeping some actors off the stage.