ArcStone Book Club - Your Brain at Work

Your Brain at Work by David Rock was the first choice for ArcStone's book club. Over lunch, topics were brought up and debated on about Rock's book that is part fiction, part science.

Your Brain is broken up into scenes which dissect different subject matters of neuroscience. The approach David uses when writing to talk about each topic starts with a fictitious couple that struggle with everyday things in their lives and careers. Things such as procrastination, work overload, distractions, stress, and life.

Ever wonder why you get stuck in ruts when working on a project?

It's rather counterintuitive, but scientists have found that one of the best ways to understand insight is to understand what happens just before an insight occurs: the impasse experience. One of the scientists leading this research is Dr. Stellan Ohlsson, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ohlsson explains how when facing a new problem, people apply strategies that worked in prior experiences.This works well if a new problem is similar to an old problem. However, in many situations this is not the case, and the solution from the past gets in the way, stopping better solutions from arising. The incorrect strategy becomes the source of the impasse.

The ability to stop oneself from thinking something is central to creativity.

Ohlsson's principle of inhibition explains why insights come in the shower or swimming pool. It's nothing to do with the water. When you take a break from a problem, your active ways of thinking diminish. This seems to work even at the level of a few moments. Try an experiment: next time you're working on a crossword or other word game, when you get stuck, do something totally different for a few seconds (anything as simple as tying your shoes or stretching; the main thing is not to think about the problem). Then come back to the problem and see what happens. I predict you may notice how sometimes the prefrontal cortex, your conscious processing capacity, is itself the problem. Get it out of the way, and the solution appears.

From Your Brain at Work pages 77-79.

Ever wonder how your brain reacts and why menial tasks don't take as much energy?

Making decisions and solving problems relies heavily on a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. The cortex is the outer covering of the brain, the curly gray stuff you see in pictures of brains. It's a tenth of an inch thick and covers the brain like a sheet.

Doing energy-hungry tasks with your stage, such as scheduling meetings, might exhaust you after just an hour. In comparison, a truck driver can drive all day and night, his ability to keep going limited only by his need for sleep. Driving a truck doesn't require much use of the prefrontal cortex (unless you are a new driver, in a new truck, or on a new route). It involves another part of the brain called the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia are four masses in the brain region driving routine activities that don't require a lot of active mental attention. As soon as you repeat an activity even just a few times, the basal ganglia starts to take over. The basal ganglia, and many other brain regions, function beneath conscious awareness, which explains why Emily [our fictional character] can drive and think about a conference at the same time.

From Your Brain at Work pages 7-9.

While the story of the fictional characters was helpful in relation, the ArcStone group agreed that Rock could have cut out the storyline and allowed more room for the other parts of the book to breathe. The group was able to pinpoint specific times that they were reminded of the book. Joli and Lisa brought up distractions in the workplace and how they applied the book to their situations. Chris, who doesn't like the sound of crunching noises, was reminded of a particularly unpleasant time when a coworker was eating potato chips next to him and explained his reaction to that situation.

The success of David Rock's book is that he uses the tools he talks writes about to build his points. Step-by-step, he brings you along the path. At the end, you obtain an astounding amount of insight on your behaviors.