Brain Archives - Page 19 of 29

Consciousness Is Like a Jar of Marbles

June 19, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 7 Comments

jar of marbles Imagine your conscious attention, which really is a limited resource, is a jar and all the thoughts inside it are marbles—or, as I call them, things taking up headspace. The more marbles you have in your jar:

♦ the less conscious attention you have available
♦ the less you’re able to focus
♦ the more easily you’re distracted
♦ the less you’re able to cope with difficult or trying circumstances
♦ the less you’re able to maintain balance or equanimity
♦ the less you’re able to think clearly
♦ the greater your chances of forgetting something or making a mistake
♦ the less you’re able to grasp the bigger picture
♦ the more likely you are to be chronically anxious, stressed, depressed, or irritated
♦ the less joy you’ll experience

You can’t keep adding more marbles to the jar indefinitely. Your brain needs breathing room (headspace) to work efficiently. Otherwise, your thinking and your life are likely to become claustrophobic. If you want to be able to access as much of your conscious attention as possible, you need to develop the intention and the habit of removing marbles from the jar.

First, take care of business. Complete outstanding projects or tasks, resolve issues, fix what needs to be fixed, and get rid of as much clutter and excess baggage as possible.

Second, stop indiscriminately adding new marbles to the jar. Continue taking care of business, don’t take on new stuff or new obligations unless you have to or they are truly meaningful to you. Recognize the allure of these colorful shiny objects and inure yourself to their appeal. You can do it!

Brain & Mind Roundup 2

June 16, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

This time, Brain & Mind Roundup focuses on articles about writing and the brain, specifically how taking notes by hand (instead of by computer) actually facilitates learning and how learning cursive stimulates the brain.

The pen compels lucidity. –Robert Stone, novelist

A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop

Cindi May (Scientific American)

Because students can type significantly faster than they can write, those who use laptops in the classroom tend to take more notes than those who write out their notes by hand. Moreover, when students take notes using laptops they tend to take notes verbatim, writing down every last word uttered by their professor.

But new research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer demonstrates that students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more. Those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops.

Mueller and Oppenheimer postulate that taking notes by hand requires different types of cognitive processing than taking notes on a laptop, and these different processes have consequences for learning. Writing by hand is slower and more cumbersome than typing, and students cannot possibly write down every word in a lecture. Instead, they listen, digest, and summarize so that they can succinctly capture the essence of the information. Thus, taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in some heavy “mental lifting,” and these efforts foster comprehension and retention. By contrast, when typing, students can easily produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning, as faster typing speeds allow students to transcribe a lecture word for word without devoting much thought to the content.

What Learning Cursive Does for Your Brain

William R. Klemm (Psychology Today)

Scientists are discovering that learning cursive is an important tool for cognitive development, particularly in training the brain to learn “functional specialization,” that is capacity for optimal efficiency. In the case of learning cursive writing, the brain develops functional specialization that integrates sensation, movement control, and thinking. Brain imaging studies reveal that multiple areas of brain become co-activated during learning of cursive writing of pseudo-letters, as opposed to typing or just visual practice.

The benefits to brain development are similar to what you get with learning to play a musical instrument. Not everybody can afford music lessons, but everybody has access to pencil and paper.

Brain Research and Cursive Writing

Dr. David Sortino*

Rand Nelson of Peterson Directed Handwriting, believes that when children are exposed to cursive handwriting, changes occur in their brains that allow a child to overcome motor challenges. He says, the act of physically gripping a pen or pencil and practicing the swirls, curls and connections of cursive handwriting activates parts of the brain that lead to increased language fluency. That is, cursive writing ability affords us the opportunity to naturally train these fine motor skills by taking advantage of a child’s inability to fully control his fingers. This means cursive writing acts as a building block rather than as a stressor, providing a less strenuous learning experience.

Moreover, cursive handwriting stimulates brain synapses and synchronicity between the left and right hemispheres, something absent from printing, typing or keyboarding.

*Dr. David Sortino holds a Master’s degree in Human Development from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Clinical/Developmental Psychology from Saybrook University.

Reduce the Clutter in Your Life

June 9, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Clutter

Even before I fully understood the limits of the brain’s conscious attention, I created a list titled “things taking up headspace.” I wrote down every single I could think of that needed to be started, needed to be finished, or needed to be attended to in some way.

I had already recognized that these things were occupying precious mental space. I thought about them repeatedly—sometimes daily or even more frequently. I wanted them taken care of, I wished they would get taken care of, I occasionally had an impulse to take care of them, yet they remained unattended to. Unfortunately, thinking about doing something is not the same as actually doing it.

Making the list was sobering. So I set out to cross as many things off as I could, going at it with a vengeance. As I worked on the initial list, a few new things popped up and were duly added. I found that the time period in between identifying something that needed to be dealt with and taking care of it shrank considerably. When I was done with almost everything on the original list—which included items I’d been renting headspace to for up to three years!—I no longer had a massive headspace list. I had…some clarity!

It can be tempting to try to ignore the small stuff when there are bigger things to do and to deal with. The problem is that ignoring the small stuff makes it that much harder to deal with the bigger things. For one thing, something that started out as minor might, over time, develop into something major. The bigger problem is that ignoring the small stuff becomes a habit. As a result, we consume precious conscious attention trying to not think about all those bothersome things. That leaves less conscious attention available for what really matters. As I wrote at the beginning of this year:

We can’t reach for the stars by climbing that mountain of clutter. We may manage a few steps, but inevitably we’re sucked back down into all that…stuff. We won’t get anywhere by trying to manage or rearrange our clutter, either. Let’s face it; we have developed the habit of creating clutter. We have become clutter junkies. We’re convinced we can’t live without it.

So we rationalize, justify, and explain it away.
Or we deny we have a problem.
Or we admit we have a problem but insist we’re working on it.

The result is always more clutter. Yes, our attempts to deal with our clutter add to the mountain of clutter. So do our failed attempts to Step It Up. In my experience, this is the real “law of attraction”: clutter attracts more clutter. It’s as if the mountain of clutter has magnetic properties. The more undone, unfinished, messy stuff there is in our lives (the bigger our mountain of clutter), the more likely it is that we’ll just keep adding to it.

Clutter is not innocuous; we pay a huge toll for keeping it in our lives. Clutter not only takes up physical space, it also uses precious mental resources. Clutter that preoccupies us taxes our brain’s bandwidth and can literally make us dumber, at least temporarily, by as many as 10 to 14 I.Q. points. The effect is like being sleep deprived all the time. This kind of preoccupation also negatively impacts the brain’s executive function, which results in diminished ability to focus our attention and a decrease in self-control.

The absurd thing is that whatever we’re not doing or not dealing with is likely taking up more of our attention than it would if we were actually doing it or dealing with it. But habits are hard to break. For clutter junkies, there’s only one way out: we have to get rid of the mountain of clutter. Pick a corner, start shoveling, and keep going until it’s all gone. No excuses, no rationalizations, no explanations. Just do it:

Clean it out
Fix it
Address it
Replace it
Finish it
Toss it out

Then declare yourself a clutter-free zone!

If you do, you’ll have greater clarity—and more conscious attention available—when the going gets grueling.

[NOTE: This post is the last in a series. See also When the Going Gets Grueling, Fortitude: Don’t Leave Home Without It, Focus: Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, Patience: Learn to Play the Waiting Game, Embrace Uncertainty and Know When to Get Assistance.]

How Fiction Makes Our Brains Better

June 7, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

If you need an excuse to read more fiction, here it is! Reading fiction changes your brain–in a good way!

Know When to Get Assistance

June 2, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

If you work by yourself or live by yourself (or both), you already know how much there is to do and to keep track of every single day. When there’s no one else to pick up some of the slack, the sheer volume of it all can be overwhelming. Believing that you can and should be able to do it all will not make it so. But it can wear you down mentally, emotionally, and physically.

It will wear you down mentally because our brain provides us with a limited amount of conscious attention each day, and when we’ve used it up, we can’t just shift into another gear to get more. When you are trying to do it all, you may find yourself squandering your conscious attention on things that need to be done but that don’t further what you’re trying to accomplish in life. Too many days or weeks of this and you could begin to wonder if what you’re trying to accomplish is worth it or if you’ve really got what it takes.

It will wear you down emotionally because you will inevitably fall behind, miss a target or an actual deadline, or lose track of something. And then you’ll feel bad about it. You’ll feel bad about yourself. If you believe you should be able to do it all, you’ll feel guilty and incompetent when you don’t. If you’re the rugged individualist or self-reliant type, you’ll feel like you just need to work harder to keep on top of everything. Even worse, you could lose your sense of humor.

It will wear you down physically because trying to do everything is exhausting—whether or not you actually get everything done. Mental and emotional stress creates physical tension. You may let your self-care routines go—or at least skimp on them. No time to get to the gym, no time to prepare a healthy meal, no time for a vacation or even a break. You may develop a constant low-level state of anxiety you aren’t even aware of. Trying to do it all can stress your body, weaken your immune system, and make you physically ill.

If you’re in this kind of situation, the best thing you can do is get out of it as soon as possible.

Consider making a list of all the things you do or are responsible for that can only be done by you and another list of all the things that could possibly be done by someone else, even if you have to pay for having it done. You may think you’re saving money (or being self-reliant) by trying to do it all, but that approach can break your spirit. By trying to do it all, you put yourself in jeopardy of losing it all.

I fall into the self-reliant category, and my life-long tendency is to try to figure out how to do whatever has to be done and then do it myself. Sometimes that’s paid off. But even when it has, I’ve often ended up spending an inordinate amount of time learning about something plenty of other people already know how to do. When I do that, I eliminate the amount of time I can spend doing what I know how to do that others may not.

Within the past couple of months, however, I’ve loosened the reins and have begun getting some assistance in three areas: office/organizational, website, and recreational (seriously). I’m not yet taking full advantage of the assistance that’s available to me because old habits die hard. It requires my conscious attention to bypass the tendency to just do it myself. Yet I already feel an enormous sense of relief in realizing that I don’t have to hold up my entire world…all day…every day…ad infinitum.

[NOTE: This post is the sixth in a series. See also When the Going Gets Grueling, Fortitude: Don’t Leave Home Without It, Focus: Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, Patience: Learn to Play the Waiting Game, and Embrace Uncertainty.]