3 ideas to become less brain-bound.
There are a few lovely ideas I’ve heard recently in the world of brain science that I’d like to share with you guys, particularly as they relate to some concepts of the brain and thinking that are steeped in the burnout-heavy work culture we’re recognizing more and more today. Concepts like:
- your brain is a muscle, use it or lose it, and work that sucker hard.
- your brain is a computer — cram information in and produce quality work.
- put your blinders on, that’s how you’ll get the most and best work done
I believe in using your mind to its full potential and digging into my work, however, to produce quality work, we may need to think differently about thinking itself.
Ezra Klein recently interviewed science writer Annie Murphy Paul who has just written The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, a book thinking, common misconceptions about thinking, and how society and culture, especially work culture, have built systems and expectations around these ideas of “brain-bound” thinking, when in fact so much of it occurs and exists outside of the space inside of our skull. These ideas challenge existing, rigid structures — such as sitting at your desk, being quiet and just drilling into your work, whether in classroom or office — and show how we can move towards healthier productivity in a way that feels natural, intuitive and human.
These ideas are:
Looping
Off-loading
Soft fascination
1. Looping
Your brain is not a muscle, nor a computer, and even though it’s just a metaphor, it’s one we use too commonly to make sense of how we’re intended to operate. In doing so we’ve lessened our ability to extend our thinking outside of the silos of our brain.
These ideas as brain as muscle, or brain as computer lead to this kind of very rigid, repetitious, linear thinking about well, how we think.
Brain as muscle — yes, it’s good to “work out your mental muscle” or “train your brain.” Reading, writing, brain games or apps like Elevate, I love these things, and without a doubt, they’re important in maintaining and even increasing mental capacity. However, within this eco-system of high-intensity workloads and expectations, the idea of our brain as muscle fails continuing to “work out” the brain simply will not make it big and powerful, but will in fact lead to a similar result as a overworked muscle: eventual fatigue leading to a drop in performance.
Brain as computer — yes, our brains are amazing, but, as Paul says, if you put the same kind of information into a computer, at any given time, in any environment, no matter how long it’s been at work, it will process it the same way, and produce the same result. It is an input/output machine, tasked mostly with efficiency. Debates about computer learning and AI aside, our brains don’t work that way. How we think is significantly affected by: where we are, who we’re with, what we’re thinking about, how we slept, how long we’ve been at work, if we’re inside or outside, and myriad other factors that will cause different answers to be produced. We are not input/output machines.
We are loopy.
Neuroscientist Andy Clark uses the term looping when referring to human modes of thinking because we are in fact so different from computers. We are not input/output; we are iterative. We are constantly in communication with our environment and other people. We are always taking information, storing it, cataloguing and scrap-booking it, blending and connecting it.
We loop in all kinds of ways:
- in and out of public and private spaces
- in and out of working alone on an idea and then sharing it with others
- in and out of physical spaces, different environments, inside or outside, sitting at our desk or going out for a walk, having a shower or exercising at home or in the gym
- being still and meditating on an idea, or gesturing with our hands while talking about it out loud.
We are not one-dimension, linear, or optimal when we are brain-bound, drilling rep after rep into our “mental muscle.” We need to mix it up.It’s intuitive, and we’ve experienced this — like how an idea or solution will come to us suddenly when we’ve finally stopped thinking about it, sometimes in the shower, sometimes in the gym or out for a walk. Our non-conscious mind is still looping information and stimuli both in our head and in our body, and bringing us answers when we’ve finally gotten our hard-edged analytical thinking out of the way.
Repeat — mix it up. Want to work your mind? Excellent. But remember, your brain isn’t a muscle — it’s more like a magpie nest — it wants to be made up of all kinds of random, seemingly arbitrary stuff that is constantly looping in and out, getting you places your own mental weightlifting never will.
2. Off-loading
When we’re doing all that work, looping in various ways, mixing it up, consciously and non-consciously, our brains are going to get stuffed with information. Even writing this article I am thinking about:
- Annie Paul, Ezra Klein, their interview and key ideas.
- Andy Clark and his ideas that got Paul to where she is.
- Empathy as a function of looping and how we mimic others’ emotions.
- Dr. Kathryn Mannix and her book Listen about how we approach and help those going through trauma, also looping.
- The documentary The Divided Brain, and neuroscientist Ian McGilchrist, who has done ground-breaking work on the right brain vs. left brain paradigm within popular psychology and neuroscience and how those hemispheres have influenced our physical world, economy and philosophy.
That’s a lot. If only I could put it somewhere.
We all carry a lot in our brains and thinking processes, and though we’re always very impressed by someone who can play out an entire chess game, recite pi or remember countless things in a Sherlock-Holmes-mind-palace kind of way, the fact is, too much information inside our head can tire us out and drain our attention.
Annie Paul recommends off-loading that information onto physical spaces, to free up attention, and allow our thinking to extend outward.
I love doing this.
Taking ideas and chunking them onto a whiteboard, then surrounding them with smaller, detailed information is my favorite form of off-loading. Paul loves post-it notes. Ezra Klein keeps two notebooks at his desk while he’s working. At the moment of writing this, I have 3 other documents open, one I use to free-write and pick ideas from, another to collect and categorize, and a third to flesh out and crystallize things if necessary. Our brains naturally want to off-load — the important thing to determine is what method(s) work best for you.
Off-loading is also another form of looping as we begin interacting with that information in a physical space. It becomes a conversation, much in the way Paul describes how designers and artists often prefer pencil and paper for their work because they have information in their non-conscious that emerges as they think physically with their hand, loop back into their head, adjust here, change there, integrate an idea from years ago that may not have appeared had they not been in that physical, conversational type of thinking. Of course, some designers do operate very well inside of their head — all kinds of people do. But, in some way or another, we all benefit from mixing it up and extending our thinking in ways that work best for us.
Which is why before I wrote this last section I stepped out for a 30-minute walk. Splashing through a shrouded, drizzly watercolour, I talked to myself about this article, trying to clarify ideas — looping — but also relaxing, enjoying the calm and integration that one feels when they step into a forest, or a park, or any space that touches the 300,000 years of evolution our brains developed over in the wild — which is why we feel relaxed, energized and like we have more attention not only when we put informationinto physical space through off-loading, but when we put ourselvesinto spaces that look and feel like the opposite of our work space — nature. In doing so, we often slip from our keen, digging, work-centric thinking, and experience something psychologists call soft fascination.
3. Soft fascination
“this kind of diffuse attention that we’re able to spend in nature when we’re not focusing very intently on anything… allowing the soft contours of the things we see outside just entertain our attention… not a hard edged concentration… a kind of soft fascination you might experience when you’re looking at leaves rustling in the wind or watching waves on the ocean.” — Annie Murphy Paul
Easing into this state feels intuitive, and considering our brains and thinking evolved in such union with the outdoor environment it seems obvious as to why we’re calmed there.
“Our sensory faculties are kind of tuned to the kind of information and stimuli that we encounter in nature. That state restores our attention. It kind of refills the tank in a sense… even a brief look out the window can have this effect.”
Evolutionarily, biologically, even though it may feel counter-intuitive to many of us because of the brain-bound, at-your-desk paradigm that we’re now in, we are at home in nature. How else can you explain why so many retreats occur outside of urban centers? Or why people who live in cities take their vacation to relax in the tranquility of nature? Or the quiet phenomenon of shinrin-yoku — Japanese forest-bathing, that was offered as a direct antidote to those suffering from tech-boom burnout in Japan starting in the 1980s?
Simple. Because we’re not meant to stay inside any more than we’re meant to stay in our heads. We need to mix it up.
Let your brain be loopy. Fill it with everything. Dive deep into your work alone, then loop it through your friends and co-workers, out into the internet and back again.
Offload it- all of that material. Put it somewhere physical where your brain can access it through your body, and make more room for attention in your mind. Interact with it. Converse with it.
Slip away.When all of that thinking has your brain frazzled, go where home has been for 300,000 years: outside. And be filled with the soft fascination of the world you are inherently a part of and belong in.
Then return to work when you’re ready.
