when I'm not talking about the brain I'm working with senior executives from many
large organizations and many technical people I find my day job is kind of
translating what might be thought of as soft skills for a technical audience to
understand how to optimize you know processing so that's enough about me I
will talk about these four surprises the rationale is overrated massively
overrated the emotions we've got emotions backward social issues are
primary literally primary and attention actually changes the brain we're gonna
spend most time on the probably the first and second and a bit and a bit on
the third I'm going to stop after each and see if you have questions or
comments and if I go too fast you can slow me down if you want me to speed up
it's Google I can speed up as well just say you know could get to the point we
can do whatever you like alright the rationale is overrated what
do I mean by that let's do a give you a little a little metaphor when you're
trying to hold information in mind you try to actually hold information you're
going to start using your prefrontal cortex PFC for short I shortened it so
it takes less space in your PFC when you try to hold information in mind which is
to understand decide recall memorizing here but we try to do that you've got to
use your prefrontal cortex which is a very limited region of the brain you
know those of you who drove to work today
you didn't really use your prefrontal cortex to drive here you're using deeper
regions that you can use without thinking like you know you can drive
with without having to think about where you're going if you've gone somewhere a
lot if you're actually consciously thinking you've got to use your
prefrontal cortex and this is where the trouble begins
let me do a little experiment what's just call back corn answer out what's
1+1 know prefrontal cortex right no effort what's ten plus ten no prefrontal
cortex what's 56 plus 175 laughter no one wants to do it okay do you get that
GE like why don't you want to do it why don't you want to do it because you've
got to put in a bit of effort you better actually stop other things you might be
thinking about because when you use this process it becomes a serial process you
can do one thing at a time you've got to use effort
did you sense like a little bit of like oh don't take me there like I'm not
going there it's a subtle threat the reason it's a subtle threat to have
to think as we evolved at a time when resources metabolic resources were
really limited you know war and famine we live to 20 at best and so we we're
kind of rewarded for minimizing mental resources you know it's very easy in
this country in particular to make an absolute fortune basically helping
people you know putting less and less effort into any particular thing if you
notice that it's very difficult to kind of do the opposite and many ways Google
exists because it helps people find things with less effort as well okay and
you know can measure that in milliseconds so using this cortex when
you have to you know do an addition week sort we sort of avoid it we go I don't
really want to do that it's a threat response and that threat response does
something so we kind of don't do it very much and this is a bit of a bit of a
challenge now let me give you the metaphor to understand it if the amount
of information you can hold in your prefrontal cortex at one time sometimes
it's called working memory and it has other titles but if the amount of
information you can hold in this region is equivalent to say a cubic foot okay a
cubic foot then the amount of information that the rest of your brain
holds is equivalent to about the Milky Way so the kind of different you get
that sense right it's a little ambiguous to say but they're really massively
different and this explains a tremendous number of life's experiences because
what we do is we firstly try to avoid using this region of the brain we do
things that we know how to do well rather than doing something differently
and anything that we do do a few times we quickly start to embed the pattern so
we don't have to think about it and essentially when you're trying to make
someone think like trying to change a pattern or change a system or install
some software words or anything you know you're going to get this threat response
because people are you know gonna have to think and we you know they're attune
not to so it explains a tremendous amount but this is this rational
resource is what people put so much kind of credence into you know and we've
really got to be rational and spock's you know Spock was all about really
being deeply rational it turns out the rational is really really overrated and
it's overrated in two ways firstly what you can do with it and secondly it's
actually not how we solve most problems the rationale is not how we solve most
problems which I'll come back to but there's some studies showing that every
time you do a little math puzzle like that or any conscious decision you
actually use up a limited bucket of resources every time you make a decision
solve a problem your blood glucose goes down and your performance on the next
task goes down so it's a really a limited resource that depletes very
quickly and you can actually start to look at this and sort of pull apart
three types of thinking that we do and start to treat this resource of your
prefrontal resource as something that you've got to kind of manage so you know
level 1 thinking is basically stuff like 1+1 you know you don't have to think and
isn't that fun deleting emails does anyone else get joy deleting them us
it's wonderful is this like ha you know I fly a lot and one of the things I love
to do it I'm flying for a really can't do anything else is delete and one time
I was in a long flight I saw the bottom of my email inbox isn't that incredible
it's just like never happens you know anyway so you can do that without
thinking level 2 scheduling a meeting you've got to hold things in mind what
time where who when maybe 5 seconds 10 seconds we're not writing a pitch
writing some coding building a plan building a strategy that takes a lot of
glucose and it takes a lot of effort energy now what many people do they get
to work they do number one and then number two first and then they've got
very little energy left for number three and their brain actually becomes tired
and noisy and I'll talk about the noise in a moment and they become really
really ineffective so there's sort of intuitive approach that we have to you
know tackling our day is wrong from the brains perspective so this is one of the
first things the rationale is overrated it would be really rational to get to
work start working on emails and you know work through that's really rational
it's not how your brain really wants to work now it's kind of a question that I
posed to people often and it's sort of one of the questions in the book which
is you know if you truly respected attention as a limited resource what
would you do differently if you're really accepted that you've probably
only got a few hours of really quality deep processing time level 3 activity
what would you do differently if you really like thought about that and it's
it's quite an important conversation to to have I believe in an organization
that is processing a lot now here's the challenge though most
problems we solve are not solved rationally and in the lab we see that
the PFC not only isn't the source of the solution but is actually the source of
not finding the solution the prefrontal cortex rational resources actually stop
you solving problems a lot of the time and in the lab we see that about 60% of
problems that people solve they actually can't explain how they solve them it's
just you have the experience all the time you know you you're walking to work
and suddenly you get an idea where that idea come from you weren't working on
anything where did it come from you know you're in the shower you're on the
treadmill you're doing something and suddenly you have this this answer
coming to you why couldn't you have that when you wanted to you know that feeling
why couldn't you've solved that problem where you well you can if you understand
your brain a bit better and it turns out that the very thing that you normally
use to solve problems is the inhibitor of solutions if the problems are complex
it's the inhibitor your prefrontal cortex is the inhibitor and there's a
whole framework around this that I won't go into too far but there's a study of
insight now about the last five years there's been a study of insight and this
was published in my last book that a few people here have been reading called
quiet leadership and you can actually now understand how insights occur and
and I'll give you just the cliffnotes kind of the most valuable piece and that
is that in order for insight to happen you actually have to stop thinking you
have to stop any form of conscious mental deliberate process to have these
insights and there's a couple of complex reasons for that but let me give you a
demonstration of it first and let's see kind of how you go with
this this is a simple puzzle you've basically got five words they're time
flies like an arrow and though it normally means the time moves swiftly in
one direction you know time goes straight ahead time goes forward can
anyone think of a different interpretation of those five words like
quite a substantially different interpretation anyone think of one over
here
very good okay so that was a record for that answer so you guys have very good
hiring processes because I've people never get so quickly to an answer like
that anyone else get one yeah up here
very good okay anyone else get one absolutely so what does it require to
come up with these different solutions what does it require mentally you've got
to kind of dampen down this solution in your brain you've got a conscious and
it's pretty easy to do with just five words much harder to do with a complex
project but you've got to actually dampen down the existing solution and go
and go I'm gonna think about this fresh I'm gonna unlock you know the word time
and in this sort of structure it is in the sentence structure I'm gonna
reimagine it okay and I'll give you I'll give you five of them check the speed of
flies the way you would time an arrow check the speed of flies only if they're
similar to an arrow take the speed of flies the way an arrow would and my
favorite time flies a type of fly are fond of arrows which you got and there's
more if you get subtle but maybe people have tremendous difficulty with this
because they're not experienced at dampening down their own thinking and
clearly you guys have developed great cognitive control you know when it's
time to kind of stop thinking one where and try thinking another way it's a very
very important capacity for maximizing internal processing so insight involves
stopping thinking about the problem and allowing a completely different solution
to come through and this is a summary of mark Beeman's research on insight and
they see an alpha wave which is you can see the purple line up there the alpha
wave is the brain going into idle just for a couple of seconds the good news is
is not two months it's two seconds but when you put the brain into idle it's
like putting a car into neutral and things just kind of can come through the
basic science of this is a little complex to explain a short time but
essentially a thought like if I say picture an elephant if I say picture an
elephant that's going to be a connection between millions if not billions of
neurons and the electrical activity