Your Brain at Work

The books aim to give the reader a vocabulary for the behaviors, needs, and capabilities of the brain. Armed with the vocabulary, you should be able to better focus your mind on getting to the goal. It has the same goals as Switch, but I think it has better tactics because it doesn't use a metaphor. The book is always describing your brain directly.

Let's talk about some takeaways.

• Your attention is like a stage, and you can only fit a few actors on it.
• A "director" is that little voice in your head that tells you what you should be doing. Using the tactics in the book will strengthen your director and thereby make you more effective.
• Focussing on a solution will better utitlize your brains resources to get to that solution.
• Emotional supression decreasese performance, cognitive change helps. There are two main strategies to make a cognitive change. The first is labelling emotions you feel. This allows you to better control them. If that doesn't work, try reapraising, in other words find the silver lining. You probably have literally 2 seconds to do one of these before your thread response kicks in.
• Most of what drives a person can be described by the S.C.A.R.F model (status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness). Any violation of the SCARF model, and your lizard brain will object.
• Your brain runs on glucose, it can use it up. It loves its dopamine high.
• Your brain is like any other part of your body. It's just harder to describe it's status. I might know my left quad is sore because I played too much basketball. It's harder to say my pre-frontal cortex seems to be having a threat response because I've never tried that before.
• The A.R.I.A. model - awareness, reflection, insignt, action.
• There are two circuits, direct experience and narrative experience. When you're in direct experience you are one with yourself. You are in the now. When you're in narrative experince mode your mind is rambling. Meditating on a direct experience for as long as you can will increase your performance.

There's definitely more, but that's what I took away from it. I wouldn't browsing a paper copy.

Another interesting bit is that Rock illustrated each principle with a before/after scenario with a story. Obviously the stories felt a little contrived, but the before/after of the same situation worked pretty well as a teaching tool. I also like how he used his own tactics throughout the book to help the reader out a little.

Here's a TechTalk that sums up the book!

Lastly, during the first half of the book, I was ridiculously distracted, how ironic :-P

---