My 3 favorite ways to maximize your brain power (backed by neuroscience)

My favorite read of 2020 was David Rock’s Your Brain at Work — which accomplishes the astonishingly useful task of making complex neuroscience findings practically applicable. In particular, he emphasizes something I didn’t know, and thought you might not know either:  

Your prefrontal cortex is fussy.

Ever heard of the “prefrontal cortex”? It’s the brain region where all conscious thinking happens — analysis, planning, prioritizing, problem-solving, and more.

And yet, the prefrontal cortex is fussy. It can’t hold much information at once, it takes a lot of energy to run, and once you use that energy, the less energy you have for future thinking.

This blew my mind:

“Doing energy-hungry tasks with your [pre-frontal cortex], such as scheduling meetings, might exhaust you after just an hour. In comparison, a truck driver can drive all day and night, but his ability to keep going is limited only by his need for sleep. Driving a truck doesn’t require much use of your prefrontal cortex (unless you are a new driver, in a new truck, on a new route).” 

Truck driving — for an experienced driver — is controlled by a brain region called the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia are used for routine activities, are energy-efficient, and have far better endurance than the pre-frontal cortex.

In contrast, Rock says, “Your best quality thinking lasts for a limited time. The answer is not always just to ‘try harder.’ “

Think of your mental capacity as a “limited resource,” like money. If you manage your brain like someone with a very, very limited budget manages their spending — saving it for what is most important, using it extremely carefully — you’ll be (paradoxically) far more productive.  

Here are three simple, yet potent, ways Rock recommends to do so:

1. Don't hold ideas in your brain.

The more ideas you are “holding” in your brain — which just means keeping them top-of-mind — the less cognitive capacity you have to “compare,” or analyze, those ideas.

The extremely simple solution to this is to write things down. If you’re trying to think or problem-solve about four ideas (or even one idea!), write each one down on paper. Then, more of your cognitive resources can be devoted to the analysis or prioritization or problem-solving you want to do with those ideas.

And, if there’s something you’re trying to remember (like something you should buy at the grocery store tonight), write that down, too! It’s taking up valuable cognitive capacity that you could use for something else.

Most of us do this anyway, to some degree — but once you know the neuroscience behind it, I think you’re more likely to do it far more often.

2. Simplify concepts.

When you’re writing down ideas, it’s better to use as few words as possible. Seeing “work on presentation” creates far less mental activation than “Get edits from Liz about the presentation, and send to Hannah to revise before end-of-day.”

Another fun one? Even if written down in a simple way, your brain can’t effectively compare more than 3-4 concepts at a time. So don’t plan on looking at a list of 16 things — it will go better if you pick the top 3-4, and go from there.

3. Recognize prioritization for the energy-sucker that it is.

Rock says that “doing ten minutes of emailing can use up the power needed for prioritization.”

Is your jaw dropping, too?

Prioritization involves a bunch of things that are very energy-intensive for the brain. First, you have to imagine a bunch of abstract things that haven’t happened yet — it turns out that abstract, future-oriented thinking is extremely tiring to the brain. Then you have to compare those things, while also inhibiting other ideas (yet another brain process). Rock calls prioritization “one of the brain’s most energy-hungry processes.”

And once the brain is too tired to do something, Rock says, it will try to avoid doing it. Ever noticed how you seem to open up Instagram just when you’re about to do a cognitively challenging task?

So if you don’t prioritize thing in the day (or better yet, the night before), you may never actually do it.

…

Want a quick, brain-friendly summary?

1.  Write things down

2. Use fewer words to describe an idea

3. Prioritize first
   

Which of these ideas is most surprising to you? Which would you try?

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As always, I’m rooting for you. You’ve got this.

Katie