Your prefrontal cortex is the biological seat of your consciousness
interactions with the world. It’s the part of your brain central to thinking
things through, instead of being on “autopilot” as you go about your life.
Five functions, understanding, deciding, recalling, memorizing, and
inhibiting, make up the majority of conscious thought. These functions are
recombined for plan, problem-solve, communicate, and other tasks.
Prioritize prioritizing, as its an energy-intensive activity.
Use the brain to interact with information rather than trying to
store information, by creating visuals for complex ideas and by listing
projects.
It’s hard to think about new ideas unless they connect to existing
ideas.
If accuracy is important, don’t divide your attention.
Being “always on” (connected to others via technology) can drop your
IQ significantly, as much as losing a night’s sleep.
Each time you inhibit something, your ability to inhibit again is
reduced.
Increasing happiness increases the likelihood of insight, while in creating anxiety decrease the likelihood of
insight. This relates to your ability to perceive subtle signals. When you are
anxious, there is greater baseline activation and more overall electrical
activity, which makes it harder for you to perceive subtle signals. There’s too
much noise for you to hear well.
An insight is a moment when things change.
It’s astonishingly easy to get stuck on the same small set of
solutions to a problem.
Having insights involves hearing subtle signals and allowing loose
connections to be made. This requires a quiet mind.
Insights occur more frequently the more relaxed and happy you are.
Becoming self-aware, having a meta-perspective on ourselves, is
really like interacting with another person. Without this ability to stand
outside your experience, without self-awareness, you would have little ability
to moderate and direct your behavior moment to moment. Such real-time,
goal-directed modulation of behavior is the key to acting as a mature adult.
Without [self-awareness] you are a mere automaton, driven by greed,
fear, or habit.
Noticing more real-time information makes you more flexible in how
you respond to the world. You also
become less imprisoned by your past, your habits, expectations or assumptions,
and more able to respond to events as they unfold.
The more you notice your own experience, whether it’s the small
capacity of the stage, the dopamine high of novelty, or the way you need a
moment to gather an insight, the more opportunities you have to become mindful,
stop, and observe.
Your ability to regulate your emotions instead of being at the mercy
of them is central to being effective in a chaotic world.
Emotions such as curiosity, happiness, and contentment are toward
responses. Anxiety, sadness, and fear, on the other hand, are away responses.
Power, to me, is first and foremost the capacity to make things
happen. It is the active form of love, the quality which shapes forms out of
formlessness.
Responsibility means an ability to respond.
One of the reasons why change is so hard: doing things differently
can bring about a negative spiral that can feel overwhelming.
Watch for a feeling of reduced autonomy creating a sense of threat;
practice knowing this.
An expectation is an unusual construct, as its not an actual reward,
but rather a feeling of a possible reward.
Expectations alter the data your brain perceives.
Fairness is a big driver of behavior, more than most people expect.
Giving feedback is rarely the right way to create real change. While
there are many "techniques" to improve the performance of feedback,
people miss the basic reality of this approach: feedback creates a strong
threat for people in most situations.
Creating long-term change requires paying regular attention to
deepen new circuits, especially when they are new.
