The Power of Forgetting (3 page)

When you come back to the book, don’t let your eyes see any of the words again. Do what you can to write them all down, giving yourself just half a minute to do so. How many words did you remember? This exercise is much harder than
it appears at first, and I’ll make you feel better by saying that it’s nearly impossible to remember all ten items if you don’t employ some strategy (as I quickly realized when I first heard this list at a cocktail party long ago). So don’t feel stupid if you didn’t come close to writing down all ten. And if you did, then did you get them all in the original order? Now, that’s an added challenge!

Most people get about half of the words. If you recalled at least seven, you’re way above average. But if you knew the secret here, you could have scored a perfect ten.

Later in the book, I’ll teach you how to remember lists of items easily without rote memorization. In doing so, you’ll be “forgetting” the actual words on the list and remembering something else about them that instantly commits them to memory.

How It’s Possible to Develop a Clear, Quick Mind Regardless of IQ

Take a moment to imagine what it would be like to finish projects on time, keep track of to-dos without waking at 3:00 a.m. stressing over everything that’s on your plate, quickly find stuff that you misplace, manage time like a pro, stay on task no matter how many distractions rush into your head, and enjoy many moments of total relaxation. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’d call someone who can do this a productive thinker. It’s the person who seems to have everything under control despite the frenzy of modern life and who doesn’t let anything get in the way of keeping priorities
in check and accomplishing what matters. It’s someone who rarely seems to be overwhelmed yet manages to complete an enormous number of projects. And it’s the individual who uses his or her brain to its highest, most efficient capacity.

The average worker today wastes about three hours per eight-hour workday, not including lunch and scheduled break time. Not surprisingly, the Internet interferes the most with our ability to stay focused, followed by coworkers, socializing, and just plain old spacing out. Although humans have always weathered hardships and taken on enormous numbers of responsibilities through the ages, I think it’s fair to say that today’s high-tech world presents unique challenges to our brains, which just haven’t had the luxury of time to evolve to meet them. The amount of information that we try to process is astronomical, and this is a recent phenomenon. Just consider the difference between how much information you dealt with daily before you had e-mail (and a cell phone) and the volume you shoulder now. Add to that the number of technologies at our fingertips and it’s easy to see why many of us are lacking in focused attention. And while it’s nice to think that we can create better habits around limiting those constant distractions, let’s face it: It’s a hard thing to do.

I have a friend who keeps a large water bottle on her desk as a reminder to herself about how much energy she has left to get through her day. She sees the bottle as a symbol of a limited supply, and as she drinks the water throughout the day it’s emblematic of used brainpower. She can’t get through half of it before noon or she’ll run out of gas before the day is over. She has to allocate her resources wisely to deal with all that’s on her plate and save room for unexpected responsibilities, too. Granted, the water bottle is more or less an
analogy, because my friend will drink to her heart’s desire if she’s thirsty. But when she explained to me how she allocates her energy throughout the day with the help of her trusty water bottle on display as an example, it made perfect sense to me. Her brain can easily handle the 34 gigabytes of daily data.

If you’re like most people, the idea of being a productive thinker is an enticing one. We all wish for this capability yet feel increasingly challenged by the realities of modern life. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t feel overwhelmed by information, stressed to the max, and physically and emotionally exhausted at least once during a “normal” week. But what if you could cultivate the habits of a productive thinker easily and quickly and dramatically lower your chances of feeling buried by your responsibilities? Is this possible? I’m going to prove to you in this chapter that this is indeed achievable, setting the groundwork for what’s to come in your journey to becoming the smartest, sharpest brain in the room.

Productive thinkers are all around you. If we didn’t have productive thinkers in the world, we’d be in serious trouble when it comes to innovation and just plain getting things done. And you don’t have to be a CEO of a
Fortune
500 company to qualify as someone who has an amazing ability to accomplish a lot and make excellent decisions at a moment’s notice. Productive thinkers inhabit every facet of our world, from the corporate one to the home front, where they take charge and keep the proverbial trains running on time. They are the minds that drive the births of new ideas and flourishing companies
as much as they are the force behind well-run families that enjoy more health and happiness than average.

Society has relied on productive thinkers for millennia, but I’m going to guess that you already knew that. You just want to know how to cultivate your inner “PT.” But before I get to how exactly you’ll do that, let’s start with some basic facts about attention, productivity, and the culture of distraction.

There’s a reason they call it “attention-deficit” disorder. When there’s a shortage of anything, that generally means endless supplies of that particular thing just don’t exist. And this is certainly true when it comes to mental attention. In fact, this is true for just about every biological transaction we force our bodies to make. One can only run so fast so far, sleep for so long, burn so many calories per hour, and think intently on a single subject for so many minutes or hours. Whether you’re trying to complete a marathon or absorb Leo Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
in a sitting, you have a limited supply of physical resources to complete the task—only so much glucose and other metabolic substances to get you through to the finish line. It’s well documented that when you perform a task that requires focus and attention, the next task immediately following cannot possibly be done as effectively, since fewer resources are available. Of course, different tasks demand different levels of focus and attention. Taking the trash out is one thing, but engaging in high-energy undertakings—especially those that entail concentration, critical thinking, self-control, creativity, planning, decision making, and mental
and/or physical exertion—is another thing. And distractions can really take their toll when demanding chores are in play.

How many seconds or minutes do you think it takes to return to a task that got interrupted? Twenty-five minutes. That’s according to a study published in 2005, which also found that on average people spend a scant eleven minutes on a project before getting pulled away. Time is among the most precious commodities today. We all need more of it. As one
New York Times
journalist put it in an article summarizing the latest in the science of interruptions (and indeed, there is such a thing), “Information is no longer a scarce resource—attention is.” If distractions weren’t so tiring, then they probably wouldn’t be so terrible. But distractions eat up time not just during the distraction itself but also afterward, when you’re trying to get back to what you were originally doing. When you shift your focus from one task to another (or just mentally make a shift in thinking, for example, suddenly turning your attention from a project at work to weekend plans), your productive thinking time shrinks. All the while you’re losing biological ammo in the form of glucose to sustain your attention, recover from distractions, be creative, tap memory, understand new information, and tackle the next task at hand.

Distractions are appealing for a reason: The brain loves them. Our innate ability to rapidly turn our attention elsewhere
probably had survival value long ago, when we had to escape the hungry jaws of a preying tiger or run away from a life-threating foe. But today those dangers are few and far between. We are more likely to victimize and handicap our brains with meaningless interruptions that have nothing to do with our survival. We are also increasingly at the mercy of our internal dialogue—the part of us that speaks to us all day and that some have called the “monkey mind.” The brain, after all, works all the time, even during sleep.

In 2006, MIT neuroscientists Trey Hedden and John Gabrieli helped put this into perspective when they studied what happens in the brain when people are distracted by internal thoughts while doing difficult tasks. As Dr. David Rock, the author of
Your Brain at Work
, reported for
Psychology Today
, “They found that lapses in attention impair performance, independent of what the task is, and that these lapses in attention involve activating the medial prefrontal cortex. The medial prefrontal cortex is located within the prefrontal cortex itself, around the middle of your forehead. It activates when you think about yourself and other people. This region of the brain is also part of what is called the ‘default’ network. This network becomes active when you are not doing much at all, such as being in between activities while in a scanner.” Put simply, he concludes, “when you lose external focus, this default brain network activates and your attention goes to more internal signals, such as being more aware of something that may be bothering you.”

So we’ve got two baskets of potential distractions to contend with all day: those that arise from our outside world—via the Internet, colleagues, emergencies, and barking bosses—and those that originate from deep within—the
silent chatter we hear in our heads that lures us in all different mental directions.

The part of the brain that keeps us alert and able to deal with a distraction is not the same part of the brain where we concentrate. In other words, when you learn how to drive a car in a classroom setting and study a book on the rules of the road, your brain is utilizing an entirely different region from the one you use when you’re actually behind the wheel and avoiding an accident. Research in just the last decade has shown that our ability to willfully focus our attention is physically separate in the brain from our ability to deal with distracting things vying for our attention.

Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT who led a 2007 study published in the journal
Science
, was among the first scientists to discover that willful concentration and unintentional attention (i.e., having to avert one’s attention to an obvious, eye-grabbing distraction) are not one and the same and are not controlled by the same region of the brain. As beautifully described by Lauran Neergaard for the Associated Press when she reported on Miller’s study, “There are two main ways the brain pays attention: ‘top down’ or willful, goal-oriented attention, such as when you focus to read, and ‘bottom-up’ or reflexive attention to sensory information—loud noises or bright colors or threatening animals. Likewise, there are different degrees of attention disorders. Some people have a harder time focusing, while others have a harder time filtering out distractions.”

Miller performed his study on monkeys using painless electrodes to examine how these two key areas worked together when the brain was pressed to pay attention. Trained in taking attention tests on video screens, the monkeys were forced to alternately concentrate and deal with distractions. Meanwhile, Miller and his team could decipher which areas of the brain were lighting up depending on what the monkeys were trying to do. When the monkeys voluntarily concentrated (say, by picking out a left-leaning red rectangle from a field of red rectangles), Miller noticed that their brains’ center for executive function was in charge. This is the “higher order” area of the brain, which handles advanced mental processes. We use our executive function to perform activities such as planning, organizing, strategizing, paying attention to and remembering details, and managing time and space—activities that characterize sophisticated thinking seen only in primates. But when something grabbed the monkeys’ attention, their brains began signaling from another area found at the back called the parietal cortex. And then Miller observed electrical activity in both of these areas resonating together as they communicated. But their individual frequencies were not the same, suggesting that the “volume” of each signal was different. It turns out that sustaining focus and concentration entails lower-frequency neuronal activity, whereas sudden distractions involve higher frequencies. According to Debra Babcock, a neurologist at the National Institutes of Health, Miller’s study offered our first look into how these physically distinct regions of the brain interact to govern our attention, or at least part of it.