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by
David Rock
Some Things to Try When you need to focus, remove all external distractions completely. Reduce the likelihood of internal distractions by clearing your mind before embarking on difficult tasks. Improve your mental braking system by practicing any type of braking, including physical acts. Inhibit distractions early before they take on momentum.
Researchers have known for one hundred years that there is a “sweet spot” for peak performance. In 1908, scientists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson discovered a fact about human performance that they called the inverted U.
“Estrogen promotes the stress response. This is now me describing the story of my lab—the women get everything done a week ahead of time, as they don’t want the pressure, the increased arousal, of the deadline. The men wait till the last minute so they have enough dopamine and norepinephrine to actually push them to finish.”
Surprises About the Brain Peak mental performance requires just the right level of stress, not minimal stress. Peak mental performance occurs when you have intermediate levels of two important neurotransmitters, norepinephrine and dopamine, which relate to alertness and interest. You can consciously manipulate your levels of norepinephrine and dopamine in many ways, to improve your alertness or interest. Some Things to Try Practice being aware of your levels of alertness and interest throughout the day. Bring your adrenaline level up when needed with a small dose of visualizing a mild fear.
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According to Professor Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, more than 50 percent of workers today do creative work. They write, invent, design, draw, color, frame, or tinker with the world in some way. Creative people are all about putting together information in a novel way.
While a little novelty on the one hand can generate a positive dopamine response, too much novelty can be frightening.
Consider the other 50 percent of workers who are not “creative.” Whether you work at a bank, make sandwiches, manage a currency exchange, or captain a tourist yacht in the Bahamas, you probably spend most of your day executing codified routines stored in your basal ganglia.
Beeman is an associate professor at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. He won’t tell you this himself, but Beeman is one of the world’s experts on the neuroscience of insights.
This intellectual quest led to a fascination with the insight experience. In 2004, Beeman, along with colleagues John Kounios and others, undertook some groundbreaking neuroscience studies that explored what happens in the brain before, during, and after an insight experience.
“There is a famous old quote from William James on attention: ‘Everyone knows what attention is until you try to define it,’” Beeman explains in an interview at his lab. “I think a similar thing could be said about insight. Everybody has insights. It’s usually not some great scientific theory; it could just be about how to rearrange the garage so the car actually fits.”
According to research on priming, when someone is told an answer to a problem that their subconscious has already solved, they read that answer faster. Beeman found this was the case. (This is the “a-duh” experience, a term coined by Jonathan Schooler, from the University of California, Santa Barbara, for when someone else tells you the answer to a problem you were working on. The “a-duh” experience is different from the more positive “aha!” experience, when you solve a problem with insight yourself.)
“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.”
When you assume that an acronym is the answer, this assumption pushes out other possible solutions. The map for “acronyms” is active in your brain, and the electrical activity holding this in place inhibits other circuits from easily forming. 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.
next time you’re working on a crossword or other word game, when you get stuck, do something totally different for a few seconds (anything as simple as tying your shoes or stretching; the main thing is not to think about the problem). Then come back to the problem and see what happens. I predict you may notice how 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. Others are not locked into your
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Knowing a problem too well can be the reason you can’t find a solution.
He found that 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.
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.
Here’s what Beeman found. People who have more insights don’t have better vision, they are not more determined to find a solution, they don’t focus harder on the problem, and they are not necessarily geniuses. 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. They can observe their own thinking, and thus can change how they think. These people have better cognitive control and thus can access a quieter mind on demand.
With all this research put together, in theory it should be possible to develop techniques and practices that increase insight. I 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. The model both describes the stages of an insight, so you can recognize the process in real time, and provides practical techniques for increasing the likelihood of insight.
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.
In the reflection phase, you hold the impasse in mind, but reflect on your thinking processes, rather than on the content of thoughts.
The insight stage is fascinating. At the moment of insight, there is a burst of gamma band brain waves.
Insights also come with an energetic punch. You can see it on people’s faces, hear it in their voices, and see it in their body language.
An insight is a moment when things change.
The action phase is your opportunity to harness the energy released upon the formation of an insight. This energy is powerful but short-lived.
Surprises About the Brain It’s astonishingly easy to get stuck on the same small set of solutions to a problem, called the impasse phenomenon. Resolving an impasse requires letting the brain idle, reducing activation of the wrong answers. Having insights involves hearing subtle signals and allowing loose connections to be made. This requires a quiet mind, with minimal electrical activity. Insights occur more frequently the more relaxed and happy you are. The right hemisphere, which involves the connections between information more than specific data, contributes strongly to insight.
Some Things to Try When You Hit a Mental Wall 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. Try quieting your mind and see what is there in the more subtle connections. Focus on the connections between information rather than drilling down into a problem; look at patterns and links from a high level rather than getting detailed. Simplify problems to their salient features; allow yourself to reflect from a high level, watch for the tickle
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In the stage metaphor, the actors represent conscious information. The audience members represent information in your brain below conscious awareness, such as memories and habits. Then there is a character I am calling your director. The director is a metaphor for the part of your awareness that can stand outside of experience. This director can watch the show that is your life, make decisions about how your brain will respond, and even sometimes alter the script.
Cognitive scientists first recognized in the 1970s that working memory, the stage, had an aspect that they called the executive function. This executive function, in a sense, sits “above” your other working-memory functions, monitoring your thinking and choosing how best to allocate resources.
The technical term many neuroscientists ascribe to the concept of the director is mindfulness. Originally an ancient Buddhist concept, mindfulness is used by scientists today to define the experience of paying close attention, to the present, in an open and accepting way.
Daniel Siegel, one of the leading researchers and authors in this area, and co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, describes mindfulness as simply the opposite of mindlessness.
You were born with the capacity to create internal representations of the outside world in your brain, called “maps.” (These maps are sometimes called networks or circuits.) Maps develop based on what you pay attention to over time, such as Paul’s map for credit cards. A lawyer would have maps for thousands of legal cases, a bushman from the Kalahari would have maps for finding water, and a young mother on her third child would have maps for how to get her children to go to sleep. We are also born with a strong capacity for certain maps to emerge automatically—such as the map for our sense of
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This default network also becomes active when you think about yourself or other people; it holds together a “narrative.” A narrative is a story line with characters interacting with one another over time. The brain holds vast stores of information about your own and other people’s history. When the default network is active, you are thinking about your history and future and all the people you know, including yourself, and how this giant tapestry of information weaves together. In the Farb study, they like to call the default network the narrative circuitry.
There’s nothing wrong with this network; the point here is you don’t want to limit yourself to experiencing the world only through this network. The Farb study shows there is a whole other way of experiencing experience. Scientists call this type of experience direct experience.
doing these types of exercises regularly thickens the circuitry involved in observing internal states. Paying attention to a director makes him stronger and gives him more power.
“Mindfulness is a habit, it’s something the more one does, the more likely one is to be in that mode with less and less effort…it’s a skill that can be learned. It’s accessing something we already have. Mindfulness isn’t difficult. What’s difficult is to remember to be mindful.” I love this last statement. Mindfulness isn’t difficult: the hard part is remembering to do it. You need to keep the director right at the front of audience, so he can jump onstage fast when needed.
“Everything you do in life is based on your brain’s determination to minimize danger or maximize reward,” Gordon explains. ‘“Minimize danger, maximize reward’ is the organizing principle of the brain.”
One study found that the brain does this even with nonsense words, which get classified as either positive or negative based on whether the phonemes, or sound units of the words, are perceived as pleasant or unpleasant.
As you experience emotions, your limbic system automatically becomes aroused. Many brain regions are part of this process, but the two more interesting ones are the hippocampus and the amygdale. The hippocampus is a large brain region involved in declarative memory, meaning memory that can be consciously experienced. Such memories are made up of billions of complex networks of neural maps, spread across the brain. The hippocampus is in charge of organizing and indexing these maps. Your hippocampus doesn’t just remember facts; it also remembers feelings about facts. The stronger you feel about
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As well as being a lot more anxious than happy, the limbic system fires up far more intensely when it perceives a danger compared to when it senses a reward. The arousal from a danger also comes on faster, lasts longer, and is harder to budge. Even the strongest toward emotion, lust, is unlikely to make you run, whereas fear can do so in an instant.
Hot spots are patterns of experience stored in your limbic system and tagged as dangerous. When the original pattern that produced the hot spot (or something similar) reappears, the danger response kicks in, proportional to the degree of danger tagged to the situation.
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. For
The third problem with limbic system arousal is that you become more likely to respond negatively to situations.
If you saw a snake recently, your brain becomes alert for objects even vaguely resembling snakes.
There are several ways to minimize arousal, all of which involve the director intervening in the show in some way.
James Gross, associate professor of psychology at Stanford University, is at the forefront in the field of emotional regulation. Gross developed a model of emotions that distinguishes what happens both before an emotion arises and once it is present. He explains that before an emotion arises, there are several choices to be made: situation selection, situation modification, and attention deployment.
Once emotions kick in, you have only three options. The first option is to express your emotions. If you’re upset, cry, as kids do. Obviously, in many social and work settings, this doesn’t work too well. The second option is expressive suppression, which requires holding the feeling down and stopping the emotion from being perceived by others. Paul tried to suppress his emotions early in the meeting. He was angry at himself for messing up with a previous client, and he tried not to let this show. The third strategy involves cognitive change. “Even after you’ve got yourself into a bad
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There are two examples of this phenomenon. 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. We will explore reappraisal in the next scene and focus here on labeling.
fMRI. Trying not to feel something doesn’t work, and in some cases even backfires.
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.
