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by
David Rock
This book took three years to put together, though I had been developing parts of it for several years longer.
While writing this book, I had a scientific mentor help me wade through the research, neuroscientist Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz. I also convened three summits about the brain in the workplace: in Italy, Australia, and the United States. Out of those summits, I helped create an academic journal and gave hundreds of lectures and workshops across the globe. The ideas in this book emerged out of a combination of all of these activities.
After several attempts to explain the brain in different ways, I decided to structure this book like a play.
emails. I chose the characters’ particular daily challenges by gathering information, with an online survey I created, from more than one hundred people who might end up reading this book. I then combined the resulting data with research from surveys of organizational culture.
Making decisions and solving problems relies heavily on a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. 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.
These five functions, understanding, deciding, recalling, memorizing, and inhibiting, make up the majority of conscious thought.
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. To make matters worse, the power to light the stage is a limited resource, decreasing as you use it, a bit like
Doing energy-hungry tasks with your stage, such as scheduling meetings, might exhaust you after just an hour. In comparison, a truck driver can drive all day and night, his ability to keep going limited only by his need for sleep.
Baumeister’s insight is a significant discovery about the machinery of the brain. Your ability to operate the stage has real limits because the stage needs a lot of fuel. It requires a lot of power to run, and this power drains as you use it. This explains many everyday phenomena such as why it’s easy to get distracted when you’re tired or hungry. When you get to two o’clock in the morning and can’t seem to think, it’s not you—it’s your brain. Your best-quality thinking lasts for a limited time.
That’s because prioritizing is one of the brain’s most energy-hungry processes.
One way to reduce the energy required for processing information is to use visuals, to literally see something in your mind’s eye.
There are a couple of reasons why visuals are so useful. First, they are highly information-efficient constructs.
Another reason visuals are so helpful is that the brain has a long history of creating mental imagery involving objects and people interacting.
If Emily gets a piece of paper and writes down the four big projects for the day, she saves her brain for comparing the elements instead of using energy to hold each one. The same benefits can be achieved by using physical objects, such as a stapler, pen, and ruler to represent each project. The idea is to get the concepts out of your mind and into the world, and to save the stage for the most important functions. Minimize energy usage to maximize performance.
scheduling the most attention-rich tasks when you have a fresh and alert mind. This could be early in the morning, or perhaps after a break or exercise.
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.
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Surprises About the Brain Conscious thinking involves deeply complex biological interactions in the brain among billions of neurons. 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. The most important mental processes, such as prioritizing, often take the most effort.
Surprises About the Brain The stage is small, much smaller than commonly realized. The less you hold in mind at once the better. New concepts take up more space on the stage than ideas you know well. Memory starts to degrade when you try to hold more than one idea in mind. When trying to make a decision between items, the optimal number of items to compare is two. The optimal number of different ideas to hold in mind at one time is no more than three or four.
While you can hold several chunks of information in mind at once, you can’t perform more than one conscious process at a time with these chunks without impacting performance. 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.
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
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circuits. The key here is that you have to finish one operation before the next can begin.
When engaged in conscious activities, your brain works in a serial way: one thing after another.
example, the scientist Harold Pashler showed that 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.
time.) “Always on” may not be the most productive way to work. One of the reasons for this will become clearer in the chapter on staying cool under pressure; however, in summary, the brain is being forced to be on “alert” far too much. This increases what is known as your allostatic load, which is a reading of stress hormones and other factors relating to a sense of threat. The wear and tear from this has an impact.
Whenever you multitask, and more than one task requires any amount of attention, accuracy goes down. Aside from doing only one thing at a time (which most people who receive two hundred emails a day will simply scoff at), what other options are there? 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.
When you embed a repetitive task, you are pushing routines down into the brain region called the basal ganglia,
The basal ganglia (there’s several of them) are central to how the brain stores routine functions. These functions are called routines because they are steps that fit together in a certain order, as in a dance. 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.
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. The basal ganglia are also quiet eaters: they pick up patterns without conscious awareness. In
The basal ganglia are highly efficient at executing patterns. Use this resource every way you can. Once you repeat a pattern often enough, the basal ganglia can drive the process, freeing up the stage for new functions. Develop routines that can be repeated over and over again: How you call people. How you open up a new document, how you delete emails, how you schedule your time. 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. While this process is obviously not possible with higher-order tasks such as
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A bottleneck is a series of unfinished connections that take up mental energy, forming a queue. Other decisions wait in a queue behind the first decision.
Taking time to work out the right order to make decisions can save a lot of effort and energy overall, reducing unresolved issues in your queue.
Surprises About the Brain 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. If you do multiple conscious tasks at once you will experience a big drop-off in accuracy or performance. The only way to do two mental tasks quickly, if accuracy is important, is doing one of them at a time. Multitasking can be done easily if you are executing embedded routines.
Catch yourself trying to do two things at once and slow down instead. Embed repetitive tasks where you can. Get decisions and thinking processes into the right order to reduce “queues” of decisions. If you have to multitask, combine active thinking tasks only with automatic, embedded routines.
The challenge is that any distraction, however small, diverts your attention. It then takes effort to shift your attention back to where it was before the distraction, especially when a circuit is new or weak.
Distractions are not just frustrating; they can be exhausting.
Change focus ten times an hour (one study showed people in offices did so as often as twenty times an hour), and your productive thinking time is only a fraction of what’s possible. Less energy equals less capacity to understand, decide, recall, memorize, and inhibit.
One of the most effective distraction-management techniques is simple: switch off all communication devices during any thinking work. Your brain prefers to focus on things right in front of you. It takes less effort. If you are trying to focus on a subtle mental thread, allowing yourself to be distracted is like stopping pain to enjoy a mild pleasure: it’s too hard to resist! Blocking out external distractions altogether, especially if you get a lot of them, seems to be one of the best strategies for improving mental performance.
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.
Trey Hedden and John Gabrieli, two neuroscientists from MIT, studied what happens in the brain when people are distracted by internal thoughts when doing difficult tasks. They found that lapses in attention impair performance, independent of what the task is, and that these lapses in attention involve activating the medial prefrontal cortex.
This region of the brain is also part of what is called the default network. This network becomes active when you are not doing much at all, such as in between any focused mental activities.
In small doses, novelty is positive, but if the error-detection circuitry fires too often, it brings on a state of anxiety or fear. This partly explains humanity’s universal resistance to wide-scale change: big changes have too much novelty.
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. The VLPFC inhibits many types of responses. When you inhibit a motor response, a cognitive response, or an emotional response, this region becomes active. It appears that the brain has many different “accelerators,” with different parts of the brain involved in language, emotions, movement, and memories. Yet there is a system used for all types of braking, the VLPFC (while
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“Self-control is a limited resource,” says Baumeister. “After exhibiting self-control, people have a reduced ability to exhibit further self-control.” Each time you stop yourself from doing something, the next impulse is harder to stop.
It seems that you may not have much free will, but you do have “free won’t” (a term coined by Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz), which is the ability to avoid urges. However, 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.
Inhibiting distractions is a core skill for staying focused. To inhibit distractions, you need to be aware of your internal mental process and catch the wrong impulses before they take hold.
far. If you have language for the way your mental stage gets tired, you will catch this exhaustion as it happens. If you have language to describe the feeling of having too much on your stage at once, you will be more likely to notice it.
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.
Surprises About the Brain Attention is easily distracted. When we get distracted it’s often a result of thinking about ourselves, which activates the default network in the brain. A constant storm of electrical activity takes place in the brain. Distractions exhaust the prefrontal cortex’s limited resources. Being “always on” (connected to others via technology) can drop your IQ significantly, as much as losing a night’s sleep. Focus occurs partly through the inhibition of distractions. The brain has a common braking system for all types of braking. Inhibition uses a lot of energy because the
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