Summary: “By understanding your brain, you increase your capacity to change your brain.” Your Brain at Work, Page 96 Drawing upon interviews with thirty leading neuroscientists from all over the world and more than 300 research papers based on thousands of brain and psychological studies conducted in the last 25 years, Your Brain At Work is an extremely valuable resource that helps readers learn about how the human brain works. More importantly, David Rock focuses on creating and implementing practical strategies from these findings that will help you overcome distractions, become more focused, and work more effectively. With increasing distractions and information overload, this book is a must-read for the 21st century working professional. Written like a drama, Your Brain At Work follows two central characters (Emily is an executive for a company that runs large conferences and Paul is a freelance IT consultant) as they navigate through various challenges at work and home. Each scene begins with a description of how they handle a challenging situation, followed by related research about the brain that explains their behaviour. Finally, it ends with a “Take 2” that re-imagines the initial scenario with Emily and Paul behaving differently by putting what they’ve learned about the brain into action. Golden Egg The Myth of Multitasking “Despite thirty years of consistent findings about dual-task interference, many people still try to do several things at once. Workers of the world have been told to multitask for years.” Your Brain at Work, page 36 Making decisions and solving problems relies heavily on a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. There are five main mental processes relevant to getting work done: understanding, decision-making, recalling, memorizing, and inhibiting. Each process involves manipulations of billions of neurological circuits, and here’s the key: one operation must finish before another can begin. When engaged in conscious activities, the brain works in a serial pattern: one thing after another. Hundreds of experiments demonstrate 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. This phenomenon is referred to as “dual-task interference.” The myth of multi-tasking is that you are not really doing two cognitive tasks at the same time. Instead, you are switching attention between tasks very quickly, which drains essential brain energy and makes it even more difficult for you to accomplish either task. Rock describes several strategies that can help you work more effectively than the myth of multi-tasking, including: Prioritize Information & Decisions – A serious implication of the serial nature of the prefrontal cortex is the formation of bottlenecks. “A bottleneck is a series of unfinished connections that take up mental energy, forming a queue” (pg. 41). This means it’s important to make critical decisions first because they impact and cascade downwards to other decisions. For example, it doesn’t make sense to send wedding invites without first deciding on a date and venue; yet it’s possible to spend hours worrying about the little details such as paper texture and font. Mix Up Your Attention – If you have several things to do at once, decide how much time you are going to spend on each task and stick to those timelines. This is more effective than continuously flitting across several tasks. GEM # 1 Prioritize Prioritizing “Your best-quality thinking lasts for a limited time. The answer is not always just to ‘try harder.’” Your Brain at Work, page 9 The prefrontal cortex requires a lot of metabolic fuel and goes through it very quickly, much like a gas-guzzling SUV. This means that if you make a complex decision, your brain depletes significant fuel and making yet another complex decision becomes much more difficult. Think about the first thing you do on a Monday morning.
