Cornflower.
Know Your Limits, Your Brain Can Only Take So Much
Michael Vaughan
Don't go out and buy a new day planner or learn a
five-step decision-making process –
- they won't work. If they did, we would all be much
happier and more effective.
The truth is that to improve our thinking abilities,
we need to understand the root of our problem -- our
brains.
Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural
Decision Making at Temple University,
conducted a study that measured people's brain activity
while they addressed increasingly
complex problems (i.e., noise). Using functional magnetic
resonance imaging to measure changes in blood flow, she found that as people received more
information, their brain activity increased in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind
the forehead that is responsible for making decisions and controlling emotions.
But when the
information load became too much, it was as though a breaker in the brain
was triggered, and the prefrontal cortex suddenly shut down.
As people reach information overload, Dimoka
explained, "They start making stupid mistakes
and bad choices because the brain region responsible for
smart decision making
has essentially left the premises."
These breaker moments are becoming more and more frequent
in most people's lives.
The underlying issue is that most of the activities we do
throughout the day contribute to the load. In any given day, you will likely
find yourself at the supermarket selecting a cereal
from among too many choices, at the office responding to
never-ending emails,
and at home multitasking on daily chores. All of these
tasks with the associated
information input begin to chisel away at your mental
resources,
leaving you flustered and even helpless when faced with
making far more important decisions.
Over the last few years, we have observed that when
participants in The Regis Company simulations become aware of some
the contributing factors to breaker moments, they do better at filtering
incoming data, helping them when they need to make tough calls.
Here is a brief
overview of some of the noise contributors and some tips to more effectively
handle them:
Choice: The
more choices we are given, the more tired and less effective we become.
The human brain has limited resources and energy to
expend to make each choice.
In the time between getting up in the morning and going
to bed in the evening,
an average person makes thousands of decisions. Each
choice we make drains a little more
from our mental reservoir. If there are days you know
you'll need to be at the top of your game, reduce the number of choices you
need to make on those days.
Multitasking: With
so many demands surrounding us all the time, it's tempting to try to do it all
and at the same time. The truth, however, is we are
optimized for task switching.
When we switch between tasks, our brains must halt any
processing of the current rule set
and load a new rule set for the next task.
This happens quickly. But halting, unloading, loading,
and restarting takes a toll.
To increase your performance or to enhance your ability
to learn,
it is important to focus on the task at hand.
Information abuse simply
means dumbing down information to the point
at which it is not questioned. Abuse is commonly seen in
tools such as PowerPoint presentations, where rich data are distilled down to a
few key messages.
On the whole, key messages that are thoughtfully
constructed and articulated can be helpful.
The danger, however, is that our brains tend to be overly
accommodating.
Public speakers, politicians and marketers count on being
able to provide information
that subtly blends into the listener's understanding of
the world without prompting questions
or analysis. To improve your decision making,
look past the nicely packaged data to the conditions that
shaped them.
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