All this ignoring and deciding comes with a cost. Neuroscientists have discovered that unproductivity and loss of drive can result from decision overload.
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 stocs or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.
Two of he most crucial principles used by the attentional filter are change and importance. The brain is an exquisite change detector: If you are driving and suddenly the road feels bumpy, your brain notices this change immediately and signals your attentional system to focus on the change.
A critical point that bears repeating is that attention is a limited-capacity resource- there are definite limits to the number of things we can attend to at once. We see this in everyday activities. If you're driving, under most circumstances, you can play the radio or carry a conservation with someone else in the car. But if you are looking for a particular street to turn onto, you instictively turn down the radio or ask your friend to hang on for a moment, to stop talking. This is because you have reached the limits of your attention in trying to do these three things.
We can state the principle this way: Switching attention comes with a high cost.
Our brains are evolved to focus on one thing at a time. This enabled our ancestors to hunt animals, to create and fashion tools, to protect their clan from predators and invading neighbours. The attentional filter evolved to help us to stay on task, letting through only information that was important enough to deserve disrupting our train of thought.
When we're just walking in the front door, thinking about who might be on the other end of that ringing telephone line, we're not thinking about where we put our car keys.
Daydreaming and mind-wandering, we know now, are a natural state of the brain. This accounts for why we feel so refreshed after it, and why vacations and naps can be so restorative
A connection among genetics, neurotransmitters, and artistic/spiritual thinking appears to exist.
Memory is fiction. It may present itself to us as fact, but is highly susceptible to distortion. Memory is not just a replaying, but a rewriting.
The two most important rules are that the best-remembered experiences are distinctive/unique or have a strong emotional component.
Events or experiences that are out of the ordinary tend to be remembered better, because there is nothing competing with them when your brain tries to access them from its storehouse of remembere events.
To make matters worse, the act of recalling a memory thrusts it into a labile state whereby new distortions can be introduced; then, when the memory is put back or re-stored, the incorrect information is grafted to it as though it were there all along. For example, if you recall a happy memory while you're feeling blue, your mood at the time of retrieval can color the memory to the poin when you re-store it in your memory banks, the events get recoded ad as slightly sad.
We answer the phone, look up something on the Internet, check our e-mail, send an SMS, and each of these things tweaks the novelty-seeking centers of the brain, causing an burst of endogenous opoids (no wonder it feels so good!), all to the detriment of our staying on task.
No comments:
Post a Comment