25/11/2015
You are smart, but something is wrong with you- this is it!
Experts from the book an organised mind.
His research found that being in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on a task, and an email is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points.
Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot‑smoking.
If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve.
Make no mistake: email-, Facebook- and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/18/modern-world-bad-for-brain-daniel-j-levitin-organized-mind-information-overload
Human Brain is random access memory
“ Our ability to randomly access our memory from multiple cues is especially powerful. Computer scientists call it relational memory”
“Thinking about one memory tends to activate other memories. This can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. If you are trying to retrieve a particular memory, the flood of activations can cause competition among different nodes, leaving you with a traffic jam of neural nodes trying to get through to consciousness, and you end up with nothing.
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“Conscientiousness comprises industriousness, self-control, stick-to-itiveness, and a desire for order. And it, in turn, is the best predictor of many important human outcomes, including mortality, longevity, educational attainment, and a host of criteria related to career success.”
“ Conscientiousness is associated with better recovery outcomes following surgery and transplants. Conscientiousness in early childhood is associated with positive outcomes decades later. Taken together, the evidence suggests that as societies become more Westernized and complex, conscientiousness becomes more and more important.”
“For your high-priority endeavors, the old-fashioned pursuit of excellence remains the right strategy”
For others- just be satisfied
“All this ignoring and deciding comes with a cost. Neuroscientists have discovered that unproductivity and loss of drive can result from decision overload.”
“It’s as though our brains are configured to make a certain number of decisions per day and once we reach that limit, we can’t make any more, regardless of how important they are.”
“One of the most useful findings in recent neuroscience could be summed up as: The decision-making network in our brain doesn’t prioritize.”
“Our brains do have the ability to process the information we take in, but at a cost: We can have trouble separating the trivial from the important, and all this information processing makes us tired.”
“ Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.”
“Attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism.”
“ For this to happen, millions of neurons are constantly monitoring the environment to select the most important things for us to focus on. These neurons are collectively the attentional filter”
“Successful people—or people who can afford it—employ layers of people whose job it is to narrow the attentional filter. That is, corporate heads, political leaders, spoiled movie stars, and others whose time and attention are especially valuable have a staff of people around them who are effectively extensions of their own brains, replicating and refining the functions of the prefrontal cortex’s attentional filter.”
“ I’ve repeatedly been struck by how liberating it is for them not to have to worry about whether there is someplace else they need to be, or someone else they need to be talking to. They take their time, make eye contact, relax, and are really there with whomever they’re talking to. ”
Multitasking is an essential skill in the era of email, text messages, Facebook and Twitter. But, argues neuroscientist Daniel J Levitin, it’s actually making us less efficient
