Your Brain at Work

A great book I just finished reading is David Rock's Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long.

Here are my notes:

1. Problems and Decisions

• The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain which is responsble for high-level thinking and decision-making
• Metaphor: the "stage" (of a theater)
• Prioritizing is an energy-hungry yet crucicial task
• Using visuals is often useful
• Get things out of your head (e.g. to paper)
• Schedule most attention-rich tasks to time slots with a fresh mind
• Simplify, group big problems/tasks into chunks
• Focus on only one conscious task at a time
• Multitask only with embedded, automated routines
• Stop external distractions
• Veto internal distractions early on
• Find zone of peak performance: right amount of stress
• to increase stress: small does of fear (e.g. visuals), novelty, new perspective, humor
• to decrease stress: activate other brain regions: walk, relax, music
• To gain insights e.g. for creative tasks: take pressure off. do something fun, think of big picture instead of details.

2. Staying cool under pressure

• Emotions are controlled by the limbic system
• The limbic system connects emotions with thoughts, objects, people, and events
• Over-arousal reduces performance
• Once emotion kicks in, don't supress but apply
• labelling (give names to emotions)
• reappraisal  (reframe the situation)
• Find ways to create choice and perceived autonomy
• Four ways to practice reappraisal:
• reinterpret (look from different angle, give situation a different meaning)
• reorder values (e.g. value working with people higher than in the past)
• normalze (look for an explanation)
• reposition perspective (look through eyes of other person)
• Set lower expectations and exceed them. Will trick brain into "reward" mode.

3. Social interactions

• The one thing that makes people happy is the quality and quantity of their social connections
• Social connections are actually a primary need, such as food and water at times
• Healthy collaboration with others require safe connections.
• Anytime you meet someone new, make an effort to connect on a human level as early as possible. 
• In the absence of positive cues, people are classed as foes and not friends.
• A sense of fairness can be a primary reward for the brain (and unfairness a thread).
• Increasing perceived fairness can make you very happy, e.g. volunteer work, donating money
• Status is a significant driver of human behavior. Sense of status going up activates reward circuits in brain. Similar, sense of status going down is perceived as threat.
• Trick your own brain into "status rewards" by playing against yourself. E.g. improve your golf handicap, bet against yourself.
• Reduce status threats by admitting mistakes, sharing humanity.
• 5 major social domains = SCARF: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness

4. Change

• Most people don't like "feedback" conversations.
• Instead of suggesting people what to do, bring people to their own insights. Help them think about their thinking process.
• Change in the brain is possible and can be permanent.
• Focused attention is a good way to change the brain.
• Move people to "toward" state and to focus on solutions instead of problems. Repeat.

Cool things I learned from the book "You are not so smart"

A pretty entertaining book I just finished reading is You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself by David McRaney.

In short, the book contains a collection of common misconceptions about ourselves, and what we can learn from them.

After reading, I felt like writing down some the key points, so I might as well share them in a blog post. The bullet points written in italic are my own 2 cents.

1. "Priming":

• Most of the time, we are unaware that we are being influenced. Reason is that only a small fraction of our subjective experience happens at the conscious level, the rest happens on "autopilot" and is subject to influence without being noticed.
• We can be more successful by taking this into account, in particular when we want to change our own behaviors ("prime ourselves"). E.g. by creating environments where we get desired stimuli even when our brain is on auto-pilot.
• Alright, I'll add a few pictures of healthy food and people doing work-out to my desk.

2. "Confabulation":

• We often create "stories" in our head to explain our own decisions and behaviors, and even our own history. In other words, we're lying to ourselves without being aware of it.
• Keeping this in mind and acting on it can help us make better decisions. 
• I guess this means we should be open to double-checking even those facts that we know "for sure", in particular when making important decisions.

3. "Confirmation Bias"

• We typically like to be told what we already know or believe. 
• To form well-rounded opinions, we shouldn't only look out for validation; but also seek evidence for what is contrary to our current point of view.
• Ok - I'll watch "Fox News" once in a while from now on... 

4. "Hindsight Bias"

• We tend to forget that we changed our mind. I.e. we sort of "edit" our memory and erase the parts where we didn't know something or had a different believe that we have today.
• Knowing this, we should be skeptical when other people state that they've "always known" something. 
• Also, knowing this will help us being more constructive in discussions and arguments - by keeping in mind that due to hindsight bias, the other person might really believe he/she is right and never was wrong in the past.
• Makes sense to me, although I wonder how to argue with a person who is convinced to be right. Certainly I wouldn't wanna say "You're wrong! That's called hindsight bias!"...

5. The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy

• We tend to see patterns and meanings in purely random events.
• Accepting that the world is full of random conincidences can help us focus on things that have real meanings.

6. Procrastination

• We're often subject to the "present bias": we ignore that what we want now is different from what we will want later. 
• To avoid procrastination, our "now-self" needs to outmaneuver our "future-self".
• There's nothing wrong with admitting not to have a "strong will" when it comes to implementing resolutions. It's perfectly fine and actually a smart thing to do to trick our future-selves. Examples:  ask a friend to remind us to go to the gym; use software which disables internet access to spend less time at the computer. 

7. Normalcy Bias

• In a disaster scenario such as an earthquake or plane crash, we tend to mentally "freeze". Instead of acting, we pretend everything is normal and do nothing. 
• This can be avoided by thinking ahead about the necessary steps.
• It can make sense to think of what we would do in certain emergencies. For example: what if a car accident happens right in front of us? what if we're in a building that's on fire? We think that we'll be able to quickly identify the right steps and act accordingly, but often that's not true. For example, building on fire -> right thing to do is "get out", but people will often do stuff like "shut down computer" first.

... will continue this later. The book has 48 chapters in total, many of them are pretty interesting.