Your Small Clever Brain

February 2, 2019

Your Small Clever Brain

Most people know that the brains has different sections, and that those different sections have different purposes. We might not know what the parts are called or exactly what they do, but most of us know that some areas of the brain deal with conscious thoughts, some deal with emotions and some deal with things we do unconsciously like breathing or heat control.

Without getting too technical, one of the things I often end up talking about with my clients is just how relatively small the ‘clever’ bit of your brain is. By the ‘clever’ bit I mean the part that deals with conscious thought, or ‘cognitive function’ to use a technical term. Our cognitive functions are the things we do consciously – learning new things, memorising and then recalling, making sense or understanding, deciding between alternatives, imagining what could happen and making predictions, and – last but by no means least (because it is exhausting) – controlling inhibition. This part of the brain is also responsible for trying to avoid those things that we know aren’t useful or helpful, but that we can’t seem to resist doing . . .

The technical term for this ‘clever’ part of your brain is the prefrontal cortex. It surprises lots of people I talk to, given everything that it is responsible for, that this hard-working bit of tissue makes up less than 5 per cent of the volume of your brain.

Clients often tell me that they are feeling overwhelmed. They describe their impossible workload and how they are far too busy to cope. They might tell me that their brain feels ‘too full’ and they can’t think.

One of the first things I do is reassure them that this is quite normal, given how small the part of the brain is that they are using to complete to most of their to-do list.

Take a moment to think about the things you are going to do today. It’s extremely likely that you will require this small part of your brain for all of them. You will move between learning something, memorising something, remembering something, deciding upon something, making sense of something, imagining what could happen to someone or something. You might even use it to resist a biscuit.

Not only is the area of your brain that processes all these things really small – in our human evolution, it was also the last bit to develop. When I describe it to a burnt-out client, I get them to imagine a simplified version of our human history so that they can more easily visualise the impact of those thousands of years.

The human brain we have now took thousands of years to evolve. It was 95 per cent finished and then, right at the last minute, we discovered a need to be intellectual and to think. There was just a tiny space left at the front where this ‘clever’ bit could be squeezed in. There’s no real room for it to grow and develop, which is why it can only do one thing at a time. It might evolve in the future, but for now the prefrontal cortex is a bit like an old-style light bulb that requires a lot of energy. It is also the last in the queue for any energy we have spare – we can’t decide to stop breathing or pause our heartbeat to give us more thinking space.

Our whole body requires metabolic energy to operate. In simple terms this ‘fuel’ derives from blood, oxygen and glucose. Those resources are limited – we don’t carry an infinite supply – hence we need to replenish our stocks by resting.

We understand the metabolic impact of energy reserves and their use about other parts of our body that we can see, feel and touch – for example we don’t find it strange that our legs can’t sprint hard for more than about ten seconds without needing a rest. We would think bizarre the suggestion that anyone could run at this pace for hours – we would simply understand it was impossible.

When we think about our brain in this way, it starts to make sense that we struggle sometimes to juggle all the things we have to do in a day. We are trying to do all those different tasks using one tiny part of our brain that is shoehorned in, not yet efficient enough to do two things at once and that takes far more blood, oxygen and glucose to run than other parts of the brain. The clever bit is doing the best job it can; however, with limited room and finite resources, it is simply not as efficient as we would want it to be, and we can’t force it to be more efficient by working harder. Our biology means that is impossible.

It doesn’t matter how smart you think you are – ask this part of your brain to do two things at once and it can’t do both with the accuracy it could achieve by doing one at a time. You will know this for yourself – have you ever tried to remember a song whilst another song is playing in the background? Or – try this now – perhaps recite the alphabet backwards and then see if you can do it whilst typing out an email. Or next time you are using a hammer to put a nail in a wall to hang a picture – or maybe not . .

This is not new science. One of the first experiments in this field was conducted in the 1890s by a scientist called J. C. Welsh. She measured the strength of people’s grip using a dynamometer (you can buy these online as we speak – apparently gripping one daily is a scientifically proven way to reduce your blood pressure!) She asked people to grip as hard as they could and measured what happened to the strength of the grip if she gave people a mental task to do at the same time. She showed that the strength of the grip reduced dramatically when people were thinking about something else – commonly by as much as 50 per cent.

My favourite piece of research to provoke thinking about distraction, multitasking and the modern trend of always being ‘switched on’ comes courtesy of a controversial study by Glenn Wilson, a psychologist from King’s College, London. He found that constant access to email and texts as a way of ‘multitasking’ reduces the IQ of men by fifteen points and women by five points. This might be part of the reason why there is a myth that women can multitask ‘better’ than men . . . But the truth is no one can multitask without the quality of the result suffering and no one can keep making good decisions without a break.

The BBC programme Twinstitute carried out an experiment in a similar vein in January 2019. The premise of the show, which is presented by two medical doctors who are also twin brothers, is to take pairs of identical twins and scientifically test two different ways of improving health by assessing two different ways of doing something head to head.

One of their experiments involved splitting the twins into two groups and getting them to do an IQ test. One group did the test with their smartphone on the table. The second group had their phone taken away from them at the door to the examination room. It was found that the twin with the phone on the table performed on average ten points worse than the twin who couldn’t see their phone.

It was not the distraction of an actual call or text that was responsible for the lower IQ results – no one actually used their phone during the test – but the sheer presence of the phone. Being reminded by association that something might have happened on social media they’d like to know about, for example. Our brains are less efficient (so use more energy and need to think about something for longer) when we ‘switch’ from one task to another and try to do two things in parallel rather than completing one and then moving on to the other.

Remember, the small ‘clever’ part of our brain is not just responsible for answering an exam question and deciding if the answer is A, B or C; it is also responsible for imagining who might call or remembering that you need to order something online. When it is doing one of those activities, it can’t do another one efficiently. It is likely that the twin with the phone on the desk was inadvertently switching between tasks – between doing the IQ test and wondering briefly what was the latest news headline. The results of this experiment showed just how easily we get distracted – and how simple it can be to ‘allow’ our brains to be less efficient.

There might be a few differences on the edges – some people might be able to focus for longer than others, but those differences are marginal. We all have the same biology. We all have basically the same brain, of which just 5 per cent is given over to conscious ‘clever’ thought. To imagine that some people have found a way around this limitation is like being told that someone can run at Usain Bolt’s pace for six hours. You simply wouldn’t believe them.

Another more recent experiment showed the potentially dramatic impact on our decision making when we refuel our tired brains. In a paper published in the National Academy of Science USA in 2011, Kurt Danziger, who studied at Oxford and Melbourne, did a study to look at the impact of rest and refuelling on the decisions made by a parole board. His experiment found that the last prisoner to be seen before the mid-morning break had an almost 0 per cent chance of obtaining parole. Immediately after the break, during which the judges ate a sandwich and piece of fruit, their chances of parole increased to around 65 per cent.

As ever, science is evolving, and there have been subsequent studies that have questioned whether all of this 65 per cent differential can be attributed to a rest and a sandwich. For our purposes, we don’t need to get involved in the academic debate. Safe to say there is a significant connection proved by this study and many similar ones between our decision-making capabilities and whether we have taken a break to replenish our glucose levels. We can be confident that once we have made one decision, we have significantly less resources to make the next decision unless we stop to refuel. You can’t just keep the quality of your thinking going by telling it to power on. You have to stop and refuel, or you will simply be unable to do your best thinking. Just as you would have to stop after one sprint and take a breather before you were able to do another.

If we accept what the science has proven – that you can’t do two things at once without diminished quality, that you have to refuel to do your best thinking, that the tiny ‘clever’ bit of your brain is energy hungry, not very efficient or far too easily distracted for our own good – what can we do? Does it mean that you can’t actually have a busy job, loads of family commitments and a social life? Can you really not have it all?

I don’t think it does mean that. I think you can ‘have it all’. You just have to find ways to get your best game-brain on.

Before you tell yourself that your workload is impossible and that you will never be able to get everything done today, or that you can never be both a good parent and a high flyer, or you don’t have time to get fit . . . Pause. Stop. Think. The science doesn’t say that. It does, however, tell us that to win the Game of Life, you will benefit from living it with some new and more productive ‘brain-tricks’ up your sleeve. When your brain pitches you a curve ball, some of these tricks will enable you to bat it back.

Got It – Now What?

Minimise distractions

It sounds obvious and simple, but most of us don’t actively look to avoid distractions as much as we should. In my experience this happens less often when we know we have a big job to do that requires our full attention – most of us will at some stage have locked ourselves away to work on something important in peace. However, if you have accepted that your brain can’t multitask, that it takes energy to switch from one thing to another and that your brain loves a distraction, then hopefully you will accept that some of the small daily things that ‘help’ your brain to get distracted are worth thinking about too.

Some of the distractions are technological and initially seem helpful – until you know about this science. If you have an email pop-up, for example, there is no doubt that it will help you not to miss an important notification, but every time a notification pops up we have to accept that we will expend additional brain energy as we glance at it before focusing back on the job at hand. Turning this function off – even if you only do so whilst you are working on a task that requires your full focus, will mean that you save brain energy and time. We can then choose to reinvest that time and energy into something else.

Putting your phone away or hiding it behind your laptop is a good tip to make sure you don’t suffer from that five-point IQ drop.

Simplify

If something is quite complicated to understand or explain, try to simplify it first – so that you and anyone to whom are trying to explain it can get their head moving in the right direction first. Asking yourself or others to imagine things that are innovative takes up a lot of energy. We find it much easier to imagine something that is similar to something we are already familiar with.

In Powerful Pitching for Film & TV Screenwriters, a book he wrote to help screenwriters and other cinema and TV professionals to pitch their ideas, but one that is also a great place to start to learn the art of simplification, Charles Harris tells a story. Two screenwriters walk into a Hollywood producer’s office and say three words – ‘Jaws in Space’. Those three words won them the contract for the film Alien.

If you are confused about a task that someone has given you, use the simplify principle to clarify what they mean rather than spending hours and wasting lots of that precious brain energy trying to make sense of it. You can get to a surprising level of understanding much more quickly if you ask things at the outset such as, ‘Would you be able to draw what the finished result looks like?’ or, ‘If you were to encapsulate what a really good job looks like in two sentences, what would they be?’

Use it to clarify what you want to get done, too. Look at your diary for today. Write down two sentences that describe what your priorities are today. What are the one or two key conversations or activities that will help you get what you want? Prioritise and do those first – before you get distracted or de-energised by something else.

These simplification activities take seconds, but they can really help you to focus on what is important. Try setting an hourly alarm or just check in with yourself at points during the day. Are you doing an activity in a way that will achieve the goal you set and help you to feel how you want to feel? If not, and you have been distracted, don’t worry – that is quite usual – but use the pause to get back on track. Writing your simplified goals for the day makes it easier to dismiss emails, conversations tasks or interruptions that will take up brain space but won’t help you to get what you want today or make you feel how you want to feel.

Think: first things first

Many people have heard of ‘first things first’ as a phrase from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. That’s because it’s a great tip that works.

Remember that your brain only has limited energy before it will need a rest. Therefore, it makes sense to do the important things first. If you don’t feel you are at your best early in the day then ensure that you schedule the important things when your brain is at its best.

Many people I work with start the day by clearing their email inbox and then wonder why they feel stressed and tired. Email is undoubtedly a fantastic tool, but nearly all my clients say they receive unhelpfully many of them.

The bottom line is that if you use your brain to clear email first then you will have used up some of your best energy of the day on other people’s priorities rather than your own. This observation/tip was given to me by a hugely talented and very smart lawyer Bronagh Kennedy, now Group General Company Secretary and Counsel for Severn Trent Water, who combined having young children and an executive role. She was very open with me about how she balanced her home life whilst succeeding at the very top of a tough corporate organisation and I’ve never forgotten her wisdom and advice. I use this tip myself every day and pass it onto a client at least weekly.

The other problem with email is it doesn’t play to your brain’s strengths. To be at its best, your brain wants to finish one thing before it starts another. Email can make that feel almost impossible. Even if you turn off the notifications and don’t get interrupted, if open your inbox first and you have a hundred messages there, the first thing you are telling your brain is that there are a hundred things to deal with before you can start on your priority. You have overwhelmed your brain with a huge list of activities right at the start of the day and it is likely your brain will start to lie to you immediately: ‘Oh, I’ve had too much come into my inbox, I’m too busy to start my priority today. I’ll clear these today and get started tomorrow.’

There are many tools you can use to sift and sort your email, but it doesn’t change the baseline scientific facts. Once our brain has worked on something, it is less efficient at the next task unless it is given time to rest and fuel to recharge it. It means that once you have started to sift and sort emails, even if you only deal with the important ones, you will have a lot less brain power for whatever task you intended to prioritise.

The most simple thing I do, and something I recommend to clients, is to start the day writing down how they want to feel at the end of it and their single most important priority during it. I then suggest they actively do something about their priority in a way that will contribute to them feeling how they want to feel – and to do that before opening up email – this can be just ten minutes of uninterrupted focus on the priority to think it through or ‘doing’ something in the more traditional sense – like chunking it down into simple steps or mapping it out.

At mid-morning, lunchtime and mid-afternoon I suggest they pause for a while (some set an alarm on their phones). I ask them to think about how much time and energy they have put into their priority and whether they are in a position to feel how they wanted to feel at the end of the day.

This gives them three opportunities to put first things first, not just one at the start of the day; three chances to make a correction if their brains have allowed them to prioritise something else.

Many of my clients have reported that pausing like usually helps them realise that they have become side-tracked or distracted. They find themselves super-busy on a task-treadmill – often at the expense of the one thing they wanted to get done – and feeling nowhere near how they wanted to feel.

Without a pause, their brains help them to avoid their priorities by telling them some of the brain’s “lies” it tries on us everyday, such as, ‘I’ll just finish this first,’ or, ‘I’ll start that tomorrow when I’m fresher,’ or, ‘This workload is ridiculous – everyone says so.’ Their brains might be wasting energy on the things they can’t control or directly influence.

With a quick pause we can challenge such lies and consider whether we are working on our priorities and the things we can control. The pause reminds us to take a break to refuel our brains and make a conscious decision about what to do next. Without the pause we will be busy, but we might well be directing energy to things that weren’t first on our list – or even second, third or fourth. We can easily – unless we consciously stop and think – be working on other people’s priorities, telling ourselves we don’t have a choice and feeling nothing like we wanted to feel but resentful, stressed and overwhelmed.

It might seem counter-intuitive to stop when you are so busy, but it is only by stopping that you can refuel and refocus so that you put first things first and take control of your thinking power.

I’m not perfect. I readily acknowledge to clients that I am the queen of distractions. I love it when they call me to ask, ‘Are you busy – can I ask you a quick question?’ and so even if I am focusing on something, I will usually take their calls. However, because I know I might not focus on my priority once the day gets going, I will always try to make up for it by giving that priority at least half an hour before I open up my email or turn my phone back on from silent mode.

To give you a real (and potentially unwelcome) picture, the words you are reading right now are being typed in bed at 7 a.m. with a cup of tea made from my bedside Teasmade and the breakfast sandwich I put in foil last night. I do this so that I can fit in half an hour of writing before I get up to sort the kids out for school, empty the dishwasher, walk the dogs and get ready to go and train or coach someone exciting. After eight years of false starts, I realised that if I was waiting for ‘some spare time’ to write, or that I would ‘do it when I’ve finished this’, it was never going to happen.

Remove your hecklers

David Rock uses an image in his book The Brain at Work of the prefrontal cortex as a very small stage with space for just one performer. I build on this idea to explain to clients what happens from a neuroscience perspective when we don’t deal with issues or tasks straight away.

Imagine that you are a comedian on this small stage. You are telling a joke and partway through someone shouts from the audience. You can see how this would be distracting and how you would need to either consciously refocus in order to ignore the heckler, divert from your original joke with a witty put-down, or ask security to remove them. Whichever way it goes, the original joke is disturbed and the effort of refocusing or thinking of a retort or shouting for back-up uses brain energy that you would not have needed to expend if they had kept their mouths shut.

Things we haven’t done or things we have started and haven’t finished act like hecklers when we are trying to concentrate. The fact that you need to remember to book a doctor’s appointment or schedule a meeting with someone is likely to shout ‘Don’t forget about me!’ partway through another task you’re concentrating on.

Imagine how distracting you would find it as a comedian, and how much brain energy it would take, if there were five hecklers in the audience. It would be exhausting. Your joke would probably never get finished.

My tip if you feel overwhelmed or heckled by tasks on your to-do list is to use the comedian-on-stage imagery to help you notice. Try to spot an example of it today or tomorrow, whilst the image is fresh in your mind.

When you realise you have become distracted, pause and ask yourself ‘What is the best use of my limited energy?’ Do you think you will genuinely be able to refocus and put the distracting heckler out of your mind? Or would it be more energy efficient to use one of the 4 D’s to deal with the distracting heckler quickly and remove it from the audience? The 4Ds are Do it now, Diarise it, Delegate it or Ditch it – do a quick Google search if this is a new model for you to deal with.

I sometimes add in an extra D that’s actually a P – Post it. When clients are getting distracted by something, I suggest they put it on a Post-it note and stick in on the wall. The action of physically doing something with the idea or the distraction seems to help them to put it to one side, both literally and neurologically speaking.

Sometimes the thoughts that keep popping into our heads to distract us are things are we are putting off. Perhaps the heckler is reminding you about an uncomfortable conversation you have been putting off? Or that you still need to do that boring job you hate?

Remember that every time one of these heckling distractions happens, you are using up a little bit of brain power in order to put it to one side or to refocus. So, if that same heckler pops up more than once, you are wasting even more brain energy on it. You can create extra time and energy for yourself by dealing with your distractions decisively the first time they heckle you. If it’s Done, Diarised, Delegated, Ditched or Posted on the wall it is a lot less likely to interrupt you.

You may have come across tips before, perhaps if you have ever done a time-management course about only touching a piece of paper once or only reading an email once – i.e. dealing with things straight away rather than putting them in a ‘to be dealt with later’ pile. I like to think of this habit as stopping the heckler at the door. Getting into the good habit of using one of the 4 Ds on an email the first time it comes into your inbox can stop it from turning into a heckler in the first place – and the fewer of those in your audience, the less likely you are to be distracted by their interruptions.

In summary, the trick is to notice hecklers, pause to deal with them and, if at all possible, keep them from even getting through the door. Notice when you are being distracted. Pause to use the 4 Ds (or 1 P) to deal with the distraction. Try to avoid the distraction by dealing with it sooner rather than letting your current-moment bias allow to you put it off for later.

Chunk things up

Your brain remembers and processes things better if the information or ideas are presented in chunks. For an easy way to prove this to yourself, say your mobile phone number out loud. Chances are you will separate out the 07XXX bit and then chunk the last six digits into pairs or groups of three.

You can use this same trick to plan your work better and therefore better harness your brainpower.

If you have a big job to get done and start to think ‘I don’t know where to start . . .’ don’t just dive in. Your brain might find any sort of momentum difficult to sustain. Or you may find that the whole thing feels too intimidating to tackle and therefore you lie to yourself to feel OK about putting it off until tomorrow. Instead, try to divide the job into three or four chunks. Writing down those chunks seems to help too.

Zoom out before you zoom in

Your brain is not only easily distracted, but also very good at going down a rabbit hole and getting stuck – if you let it. We can be prone to overthinking and going into too much detail on the first part of a task or zooming in on a problem we find whilst doing a task and giving it too much attention. If you go down those rabbit holes, you can find that you have not left enough time to complete the overall task properly. This can particularly be the case if there is a part of a task that we enjoy. Our brain is likely to help us feel that this is the most ‘important’ part and that we are right to be spending time on it. For example, if you like problem solving and you find a problem to solve, you can spend hours on it before realising that, in the wider scheme of things, it is actually not that important a problem.

When you have done the ‘chunking’ exercise above, look at how much time you have to complete the task. It can help to give yourself a rough deadline to complete each chunk.

If you find yourself stuck on a problem, ask yourself how much time you realistically have to fix it. If you have all the time in the world, great. This means that you can really get into the detail and come up with your very best solution. But let’s say you have five minutes to proofread a report before you send it to your boss or to a client. If you find that your second paragraph doesn’t make sense you could easily spend that five minutes working on it – only to find it doesn’t leave you the time to proofread the rest, which might also contain errors. Just pause before you zoom in to fix paragraph two. Zoom out first.

 If you don’t read the rest, how will you know that the issue in paragraph two is the most crucial thing to fix?

 If you quickly proofread the rest first, how long would that leave you to rework paragraph two?

 Is paragraph two crucial? If not, could you lose it altogether and use the five minutes to proofread the rest?

Just a few seconds spent zooming out can mean that the small, clever part of your brain is focused on what it really needs to – particularly when you are short on time and you start to panic.

Use your full brain

There is an exception to the rule on multitasking. If you practise something long and hard enough, you can ‘move’ that skill from the prefrontal cortex to a different part of your brain called the limbic system. An easy way to explain how this works is to think about learning to drive. At your first driving lesson, the ‘mirror, signal, manoeuvre’ instruction would have been going around the small, clever bit of your brain because you would need to have consciously thought about it and you were trying to memorise it. You would have found it very hard at that driving lesson to have repeated the alphabet at the same time as concentrating on which pedal to use. However, after a few years you become very used to driving and can happily talk, sing, listen to the radio and so on as you drive along. That is because driving is not something you ‘think’ about any more – the responsibility for the task has been shifted into the limbic system. This releases the small, clever bit of your brain to do other things. You would find it quite easy now to recite the alphabet whilst driving.

You can use the same techniques to reduce the load on your brain at work. For example, one of the things that I have trained myself to do is touch type. I can now type out virtually word for word a conversation I am having and still focus on that conversation – because I am not having to think about the typing. In Your Brain at Work, David Rock gives an example of a quick email response that he has trained into his limbic brain. He has trained his brain to automatically use just three key taps to send a message that includes an emoji to clearly say to anyone who receives it, ‘I’ve read your email, thanks and yes I will do that.’

Have a look at tasks you do on a regular basis. Is there a way that you can move some of the responsibility for how you do that task into your limbic brain by repeating it in such a way that you can do it without really ‘thinking’ about it?