We are off-loading a great deal of the processing that our neurons would normally do to an external device that then becomes an extension of our own brains, a neural enhancer. (Location 82)
These external memory mechanisms are generally of two types, either following the brain’s own organizational system or reinventing it, sometimes overcoming its limitations. Knowing which is which can enhance the way we use these systems, and so improve our ability to cope with information overload. (Location 83)
two of the most compelling properties of the human brain and its design: richness and associative access. (Location 93)
Richness refers to the theory that a large number of the things you’ve ever thought or experienced are still in there, somewhere. Associative access means that your thoughts can be accessed in a number of different ways by semantic or perceptual associations—memories can be triggered by related words, by category names, by a smell, an old song or photograph, or even seemingly random neural firings that bring them up to consciousness. (Location 94)
It might be helpful to learn how our brain organizes information so that we can use what we have, rather than fight against it. It is built as a hodgepodge of different systems, each one solving a particular adaptive problem. Occasionally they work together, occasionally they’re in conflict, and occasionally they aren’t even talking to one another. (Location 153)
Two of the key ways that we can control and improve the process are to pay special attention to the way we enter information into our memory—encoding—and the way we pull it out—retrieval. (Location 156)
An organized mind leads effortlessly to good decision-making. (Location 193)
Our “computing machine” has become a large, inglorious, and fantastically disorganized kitchen drawer full of electronic files, some of indeterminate origin or function. (Location 232)
Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing, a term coined by the Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, one of the founders of the fields of organization theory and information processing. (Location 304)
Happy people engage in satisficing all of the time, even if they don’t know it. (Location 316)
Warren Buffett can be seen as embracing satisficing to an extreme—one (Location 317)
he lives in Omaha, a block from the highway, in the same modest home he has lived in for fifty years. (Location 318)
But Buffett does not satisfice with his investment strategies; satisficing is a tool for not wasting time on things that are not your highest priority. For your high-priority endeavors, the old-fashioned pursuit of excellence remains the right strategy. (Location 320)
In 1976, the average supermarket stocked 9,000 unique products; today that number has ballooned to 40,000 of them, yet the average person gets 80%–85% of their needs in only 150 different supermarket items. That means that we need to ignore 39,850 items in the store. (Location 325)
Neuroscientists have discovered that unproductivity and loss of drive can result from decision overload. (Location 329)
One of the most useful findings in recent neuroscience could be summed up as: The decision-making network in our brain doesn’t prioritize. (Location 336)
In 2011, Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986—the equivalent of 175 newspapers (Location 343)
During our leisure time, not counting work, each of us processes 34 gigabytes or 100,000 words every day (Location 344)
We have created a world with 300 exabytes (300,000,000,000,000,000,000 pieces) of human-made information. If each of those pieces of information were written on a 3 x 5 index card and then spread out side by side, just one person’s share—your share of this information—would cover every square inch of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. (Location 351)
The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second (Location 358)
In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second. With a processing limit of 120 bits per second, this means you can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time. (Location 363)
our brains evolved in a much simpler world with far less information coming at us. Today, our attentional filters easily become overwhelmed. (Location 389)
Two of the most crucial principles used by the attentional filter are change and importance. (Location 416)
If you’re in a crowded room, at a party for instance, certain words to which you attach high importance might suddenly catch your attention, even if spoken from across the room. If someone says “fire” or “sex” or your own name, you’ll find that you’re suddenly following a conversation far away from where you’re standing, with no awareness of what those people were talking about before your attention was captured. (Location 432)
Due to the attentional filter, we end up experiencing a great deal of the world on autopilot, not registering the complexities, nuances, and often the beauty of what is right in front of us. (Location 436)
You’ve just come home from grocery shopping, one bag in each hand. You’ve balanced them sufficiently to unlock the front door, and as you walk in, you hear the phone ringing. You need to put down the grocery bags in your hands, answer the phone, perhaps being careful not to let the dog or cat out the open door. When the phone call is over, you realize you don’t know where your keys are. Why? Because keeping track of them, too, is more things than your attentional system could handle. The human brain has evolved to hide from us those things we are not paying attention to. In other words, we often have a cognitive blind spot: (Location 443)
Cognitive psychologists have called this blind spot various names, including inattentional blindness. (Location 449)
A large part of this feeling of being overwhelmed can be traced back to our evolutionarily outdated attentional system. (Location 528)
Multitasking is the enemy of a focused attentional system. Increasingly, we demand that our attentional system try to focus on several things at once, something that it was not evolved to do. (Location 535)
Companies large and small have off-loaded work onto the backs of consumers. (Location 583)
Collectively, this is known as shadow work—it represents a kind of parallel, shadow economy in which a lot of the service we expect from companies has been transferred to the customer. (Location 589)
it’s not that we need to take in less information but that we need to have systems for organizing it. (Location 602)
Our brains focus on vivid, social accounts more than dry, boring, statistical accounts. (Location 627)
Successful people are expert at categorizing useful versus distracting knowledge. (Location 820)
One thing HSPs do over and over every day is active sorting, (Location 824)
Nevertheless, one way or another, it is an essential part of being organized, efficient, and productive. (Location 828)
Active sorting is a powerful way to prevent yourself from being distracted. (Location 846)
After you have prioritized and you start working, knowing that what you are doing is the most important thing for you to be doing at that moment is surprisingly powerful. Other things can wait—this is what you can focus on without worrying that you’re forgetting something. (Location 847)
The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world. (Location 850)
there are four components in the human attentional system: the mind-wandering mode, the central executive mode, the attentional filter, and the attentional switch, which directs neural and metabolic resources among the mind-wandering, stay-on-task, or vigilance modes. (Location 1021)
Externalizing memory is an idea that goes back to the Greeks, and its effectiveness has been confirmed many times over by contemporary neuroscience. (Location 1093)
One current view among some memory theorists is that a very large number of the things you’ve consciously experienced in your life is encoded in your brain—many (Location 1098)
As Patrick Jane of The Mentalist described it, rather eloquently, “Memory is unreliable because the untrained brain has a crappy filing system. (Location 1100)
How is this possible? When we experience any event, a unique network of neurons is activated depending on the nature of the event. (Location 1105)
Each of our thoughts, perceptions, and experiences has a unique neural correlate—if it didn’t, we would perceive the events as identical; it is the difference in neuronal activations that allows us to distinguish events from one another. The act of remembering something is a process of bringing back on line those neurons that were involved in the original experience. The neurons represent the world to us as the thing is happening, and as we recall it, those same neurons re-present the thing to us. Once we get those neurons to become active in a fashion similar to how they were during the original event, we experience the memory as a lower-resolution replay of the original event. (Location 1109)
Memory is fiction. It may present itself to us as fact, but it is highly susceptible to distortion. Memory is not just a replaying, but a rewriting. (Location 1117)
An additional problem is that memories can become altered (Location 1121)
Perhaps the biggest problem with human memory is that we don’t always know when we’re recalling things inaccurately. Many times, we have a strong feeling of certainty that accompanies an incorrect, distorted memory. This faulty confidence is widespread, and difficult to extinguish. (Location 1125)
The relevance to organizational systems is that the more we can externalize memory through physical records out-there-in-the-world, the less we must rely on our overconfident, underprecise memory. (Location 1126)
A key principle, then, is that memory retrieval requires our brains to sift through multiple, competing instances to pick out just the ones we are trying to recollect. If there are similar events, it retrieves many or all of them, and usually creates some sort of composite, generic mixture of (Location 1141)
them without our consciously knowing it. (Location 1143)
if there are no similar events, the unique one is easily distinguished from others and we are able to recollect it. (Location 1145)
Evolutionarily, it makes sense for us to remember unique or distinctive events because they represent a potential change in the world around us or a change in our understanding of it—we need to register these in order to maximize our chances for success in a changing environment. (Location 1151)
The second principle of memory concerns emotions. If something made us incredibly frightened, elated, sad, or angry—four of the primary human emotions—we’re more likely to remember it. (Location 1153)
This is because the brain creates neurochemical tags, or markers, that accompany the experience and cause it to become labeled as important. (Location 1155)
This makes evolutionary sense—the emotionally important events are probably the ones that we need to remember in order to survive, things like the growl of a predator, the location of a new freshwater spring, the smell of rancid food, the friend who broke a promise. (Location 1157)
“We know today that, just like when you open a Microsoft Word file on your computer, when you retrieve a memory from where it is stored in the brain, you automatically open it to ‘edit.’ You may not be aware that your current mood and environment can influence the emotional tone of your recall, your interpretation of events, and even your beliefs about which events actually took place. (Location 1207)
A feature of all categorization processes used by the human brain, including appearance-based categorization, is that they are expandable and flexible, subject to multiple levels of resolution or graininess. For example, zooming in on pencils, you may desire to have maximal separation like they do at the stationery store, separating them both by manufacturer and by the softness of their lead: 3H, 2H, H, HB, B. Or you may decide to separate them by how much of the eraser is left, whether they have bite marks on them or not (!), or by their length. Zooming out, you may decide to put all pencils, pens, felt markers, and crayons into a single broad category of writing implements. As soon as you decide to identify and name a category, the brain creates a representation of that category and separates objects that fall inside from objects that fall outside the category. (Location 1295)
Our ability to use and create categories on the spot is a form of cognitive economy. (Location 1347)
It helps us by consolidating like things, freeing us from having to make decisions that can cause energy depletion, (Location 1348)
Calendars, smartphones, and address books are also brain extenders, externalizing onto paper or into computer chips myriad details that we no longer have to keep in our heads. Historically, the ultimate brain extenders were books, keeping track of centuries’ worth of collected knowledge that we can access when we need it. (Location 1397)
People at the top of their professions, in particular those known for their creativity and effectiveness, use systems of attention and memory external to their brain as much as they can. (Location 1400)
When we have something on our minds that is important—especially a To Do item—we’re afraid we’ll forget it, so our brain rehearses it, tossing it around and around in circles in something that cognitive psychologists actually refer to as the rehearsal loop, a network of brain regions that ties together the frontal cortex just behind your eyeballs and the hippocampus in the center of your brain. (Location 1423)
If you want to look at this from a Zen point of view, the Masters would say that the constant nagging in your mind of undone things pulls you out of the present—tethers you to a mind-set of the future so that you’re never fully in the moment and enjoying what’s now. (Location 1433)
“Your brain needs to engage on some consistent basis with all of your commitments and activities,” Allen says. “You must be assured that you are doing what you need to be doing, and that it’s OK to be not doing what you’re not doing. If it’s on your mind, then your mind isn’t clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind. …” (Location 1437)
You might say categorizing and externalizing our memory enables us to balance the yin of our wandering thoughts with the yang of our focused execution. (Location 1523)
B. F. Skinner, the influential Harvard psychologist and father of behaviorism, as well as a social critic through his writings, including Walden Two, elaborated on the affordance. If you hear on the weather report in the evening that it’s supposed to rain tomorrow, he said, put an umbrella near the front door so you won’t forget to take it. If you have letters to mail, put them near your car keys or house keys so that when you leave the house, they’re right there. The principle underlying all these is off-loading the information from your brain and into the environment; use the environment itself to remind you of what needs to be done. (Location 1662)
many creative people find the time to be creative precisely because of such systems unburdening and uncluttering their minds. (Location 1700)
Finding things without rummaging saves mental energy for more important creative tasks. (Location 1709)
Not finding something thrusts the mind into a fog of confusion, a toxic vigilance mode that is neither focused nor relaxed. (Location 1710)
The more carefully constructed your categories, the more organized is your environment and, in turn, your mind. (Location 1711)
The standard account for many years was that working memory and attention hit a limit at around five to nine unrelated items. More recently, a number of experiments have shown that the number is realistically probably closer to four (Location 1715)
Decades of research have shown that human learning is influenced by context and by the location where the learning takes place. Students who studied for an exam in the room they later took it in did better than students who studied somewhere else. (Location 1793)
Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this has been shown to be a powerful and diabolical illusion. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says that our brains are “not wired to multi-task well. … When people think they’re multi-tasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so.” So we’re not actually keeping a lot of balls in the air like an expert juggler; we’re more like a bad amateur plate spinner, frantically switching from one task to another, ignoring the one that is not right in front of us but worried it will come crashing down any minute. Even though we think we’re getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient. (Location 1886)
Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new—the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and kittens. The irony here for those of us who are trying to focus amid competing activities is clear: The very brain region we need to rely on for staying on task is easily distracted. (Location 1892)
Just having the opportunity to multitask is detrimental to cognitive performance. Glenn Wilson of Gresham College, London, calls it infomania. His research found that being in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on a task, and an e-mail is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points (Location 1907)
Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot smoking. (Location 1912)
If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialized for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organized and categorized in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve it. (Location 1914)
Then there are the metabolic costs of switching itself (Location 1919)
Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task. (Location 1920)
And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. (Location 1921)
Among other things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviors. By contrast, staying on task is controlled by the anterior cingulate and the striatum, and once we engage the central executive mode, staying in that state uses less energy than multitasking and actually reduces the brain’s need for glucose. (Location 1924)
To make matters worse, lots of multitasking requires decision-making: (Location 1928)
It turns out that decision-making is also very hard on your neural resources and that little decisions appear to take up as much energy as big ones. (Location 1929)
Because our ancestors lived in social groups that changed slowly, because they encountered the same people throughout their lives, they could keep almost every social detail they needed to know in their heads. These days, many of us increasingly find that we can’t keep track of all the people we know and new people we meet. Cognitive neuroscience says we should externalize information in order to clear the mind. This is why Robert Shapiro and Craig Kallman keep contact files with contextual information such as where they met someone new, what they talked about, or who introduced them. (Location 2378)
Just how much energy does the brain use? In an hour of relaxing or daydreaming, it uses eleven calories or fifteen watts—about the same as one of those new energy-efficient lightbulbs. Using the central executive for reading for an hour takes about forty-two calories. Sitting in class, by comparison, takes sixty-five calories—not from fidgeting in your seat (that’s not factored in) but from the additional mental energy of absorbing new information. (Location 3243)
It takes more energy to shift your attention from task to task. It takes less energy to focus. That means that people who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not only going to get more done, but they’ll be less tired and less neurochemically depleted after doing it. (Location 3255)
the brain’s arousal system has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be hijacked easily by something new—the (Location 3263)
The very brain region we need to rely on for staying on task is easily distracted by shiny new objects. In multitasking, we unknowingly enter an addiction loop as the brain’s novelty centers become rewarded for processing shiny new stimuli, to the detriment of our prefrontal cortex, which wants to stay on task and gain the rewards of sustained effort and attention. (Location 3266)
the awareness of an unread e-mail sitting in your inbox can effectively reduce your IQ by 10 points, and that multitasking causes information you want to learn to be directed to the wrong part of the brain. (Location 3269)
We consider a discovery to be creative if it explores new ideas through analogy, metaphor, or tying together things that we didn’t realize were connected. (Location 3274)
If you have something big you want to get done, break it up into chunks—meaningful, implementable, doable chunks. It makes time management much easier; you only need to manage time to get a single chunk done. And there’s neurochemical satisfaction at the completion of each stage. (Location 3325)
a well-established principle of cognitive psychology called levels of processing: Items that are processed at a deeper level, with more active involvement by us, tend to become more strongly encoded in memory. This is why passive learning through textbooks and lectures is not nearly as effective a way to learn new material as is figuring it out for yourself, a method called peer instruction that is being introduced into classrooms with great success. (Location 3490)
Sleep experts Matthew Walker (from UC Berkeley) and Robert Stickgold (from Harvard Medical School) note the three distinct kinds of information processing that occur during sleep. (Location 3518)
The first is unitization, the combining of discrete elements or chunks of an experience into a unified concept. For example, musicians and actors who are learning a new piece or scene might practice one phrase at a time; unitization during sleep binds these together into a seamless whole. The second kind of information processing we accomplish during sleep is assimilation. Here, the brain integrates new information into the existing network structure of other things you already knew. In learning new words, for example, your brain works unconsciously to construct sample sentences with them, turning them over and experimenting with how they fit into your preexisting knowledge. Any brain cells that used a lot of energy during the day show an increase of ATP (a neural signaling coenzyme) during sleep, and this has been associated with assimilation. The third process is abstraction, and this is where hidden rules are discovered and then entered into memory. If you learned English as a child, you learned certain rules about word formation such as “add s to the end of a word to make it plural” or “add ed to the end of a word to make it past tense.” If you’re like most learners, no one taught you this—your brain abstracted the rule by being exposed to it in multiple instances. This is why children make the perfectly logical mistake of saying “he goed” instead of “he went,” or “he swimmed” instead of “he swam.” The abstraction is correct; it just doesn’t apply to these particular irregular verbs. (Location 3519)
A night of sleep more than doubles the likelihood that you’ll solve a problem requiring insight. (Location 3538)
If you are only dimly engaged in your French language tapes, it is unlikely your sleep will help you to learn grammar and vocabulary. But if you struggle with the language for an hour or more during the day, investing your focus, energy, and emotions in it, then it will be ripe for replay and elaboration during your sleep. This is why language immersion works so well—you’re emotionally invested and interpersonally engaged with the language as you attempt to survive in the new linguistic environment. (Location 3548)
Perhaps the most important principle of memory is that we tend to remember best those things we care about the most. At a biological level, neurochemical tags are created and attached to experiences that are emotionally important; and those appear to be the ones that our dreams grab hold of. (Location 3552)
hallucinations. REM sleep is believed to be the stage during which the brain performs the deepest processing of events—the unitization, assimilation, and abstraction mentioned above. (Location 3562)
A preponderance of theta wave activity facilitates associative linking between disparate brain regions during REM. This has two interesting effects. The first is that it allows our brains to draw out connections, deep underlying connections, between the events in our lives that we might not otherwise perceive, through activating thoughts that are far-flung in our consciousness and unconsciousness. It’s what lets us perceive, for example, that clouds look a bit like marshmallows, (Location 3565)
The second effect is that it appears to cause dreams in which these connections morph into one another: (Location 3569)
A normal human sleep cycle lasts about 90–100 minutes. Around 20 of those minutes on average are spent dreaming in REM sleep, and 70–80 are NREM sleep, although the length varies throughout the night. REM periods may be only 5–10 minutes at the beginning of the night and expand to 30 minutes or more later in the early morning hours (Location 3580)
Most of the memory consolidation occurs in the first two hours of slow-wave, NREM sleep, and during the last 90 minutes of REM sleep in the morning. This is why drinking and drugs (including sleep medications) can interfere with memory, because that crucial first sleep cycle is compromised by intoxication. And this is why sleep deprivation leads to memory loss—because the crucial 90 minutes of sleep at the end is either interrupted or never occurs. And you can’t make up for lost sleep time. Sleep deprivation after a day of learning prevents sleep-related improvement, even three days later following two nights of good sleep. (Location 3582)
For most of human history, our ancestors engaged in two rounds of sleep, called segmented sleep or bimodal sleep, in addition to an afternoon nap. (Location 3614)
Bimodal sleep appears to be a biological norm that was subverted by the invention of artificial light, and there is scientific evidence that the bimodal sleep-plus-nap regime is healthier and promotes greater life satisfaction, efficiency, and performance (Location 3617)
by procrastination only mildly, others severely. Across the whole spectrum, all procrastination can be seen as a failure of self-regulation, planning, impulse control, or a combination of all three. (Location 3746)
By definition, it involves delaying an activity, task, or decision that would help us to reach our goals (Location 3748)
As mentioned earlier, being outside in natural settings—parks, forests, the beach, the mountains, and the desert—replenishes self-regulatory mechanisms in the brain, and accordingly, living or spending time in nature, as opposed to urban environments, has been (Location 3757)
Procrastination comes in two types. Some of us procrastinate in order to pursue restful activities—spending time in bed, watching TV—while others of us procrastinate certain difficult or unpleasant tasks in favor of those that are more fun or that yield an immediate reward. (Location 3767)
During flow, two key regions of the brain deactivate: the portion of the prefrontal cortex responsible for self-criticism, and the amygdala, the brain’s fear center (Location 3885)
Circuits in the brain have become somewhat autonomous in carrying it out and they don’t require direction from the central executive system in your prefrontal cortex. We just press START in our brain, and the bike-riding sequence takes over. (Location 3947)
The easiest way to get someone to fall off a bicycle is to ask him to concentrate on how he’s staying up, or to describe what he’s doing. The great tennis player John McEnroe used this to his advantage on the courts. When an opponent was performing especially well, for example by using a particularly good backhand, McEnroe would compliment him on it. McEnroe knew this would cause the opponent to think about his backhand, and this thinking disrupted the automatic application of it. (Location 3951)
Related to knowing how much your time is worth is the following rule: Do not spend more time on a decision than it’s worth. Imagine you’re clothes shopping and find a shirt you particularly like, and it is just at the limit of what you decided you’d spend. The salesperson comes over and shows you another shirt that you like just as much. Here, you’re willing to invest a certain amount of time trying to choose between the two because you have a limited amount of money. If the salesperson offers to throw in the second shirt for only five dollars more, you’ll probably jump at the chance to buy both because, at that point—with a small amount of money at stake—agonizing over the decision isn’t worth the time. (Location 4056)
34 gigabytes or 100,000 words every day Bohn, R. E., & Short, J. E. (2010). How much information? 2009 report on American consumers (Global Information Industry Center Report). Retrieved from http://hmi.ucsd.edu/ (Location 7262)
120 bits per second This estimate derives independently from Csikszentmihalyi (2007) and the Bell Labs engineer Robert Lucky, who made an independent estimate that regardless of the modality, the cortex cannot take in more than 50 bits/second—within an order of magnitude of Csikszentmihalyi’s. Csikszentmihalyi explains his estimate: “As George Miller and others have suggested, we can process 5–7 bits of information in one apperception; each apperception takes at least 1/15th of a second; hence 7 × 15 = 105 bits/second. Nusbaum has calculated that understanding verbal material takes on the average 60 bits/second.” (Location 7273)
inattentional blindness: Mack, A., & Rock, I. (1998). Inattentional blindness. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. (Location 7294)
Memory is unreliable …” Harper, J. (Writer). (2011). Like a redheaded stepchild [television series episode]. In B. Heller (Executive producer), The Mentalist (Season 3, Episode 21). Los Angeles, CA: CBS Television. (Location 7524)
An additional problem is that memories can become altered Diekelmann, S., Büchel, C., Born, J., & Rasch, B. (2011). Labile or stable: Opposing consequences for memory when reactivated during waking and sleep. Nature Neuroscience, 14(3), 381–386. and, Nader, K., Schafe, G. E., & LeDoux, J. E. (2000). Reply—Reconsolidation: The labile nature of consolidation theory. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 1(3), 216–219. (Location 7526)
probably closer to four Cowan, N. (2010). The magical mystery four: How is working memory capacity limited, and why? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(1), 51–57. and, Cowan, N. (2009). Capacity limits and consciousness. In T. Bayne, A. Cleeremans & P. Wilken (Eds.), Oxford companion to consciousness (pp. 127–130). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (Location 7651)
Students who studied for an exam Farnsworth, P. R. (1934). Examinations in familiar and unfamiliar surroundings. The Journal of Social Psychology, 5(1), 128–129. and, Smith, S. M. (1979). Remembering in and out of context. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 5(5), 460–471, p. 460. and, Smith, S. M., & Vela, E. (2001). Environmental context-dependent memory: A review and meta-analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8(2), 203–220. (Location 7665)
reduce your effective IQ by 10 points Naish, J. (2009, August 11). Is multi-tasking bad for your brain? Experts reveal the hidden perils of juggling too many jobs. Daily Mail. and, Wilson, G. (2010). Infomania experiment for Hewlett-Packard. Retrieved from www.drglennwilson.com (Location 7690)
the information goes into the hippocampus Foerde, K., Knowlton, B. J., & Poldrack, R. A. (2006). Modulation of competing memory systems by distraction. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103(31), 11778–11783. and, Cohen, N. J., & Eichenbaum, H. (1993). Memory, amnesia, and the hippocampal system. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Location 7694)
the metabolic costs of switching itself Task switching causes large changes in the blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal in the prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate gyrus, as well as other brain areas, and these changes in oxygenation level almost always entail glucose being metabolized. (Location 7701)
repeated task switching leads to anxiety Nash, J. (2009, August 11). Is multi-tasking bad for your brain? Experts reveal the hidden perils of juggling too many jobs. Daily Mail. can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviors Naish, J. (2009, August 11). Is multi-tasking bad for your brain? Experts reveal the hidden perils of juggling too many jobs. Daily Mail. (Location 7706)
staying on task is controlled by the anterior cingulate and the striatum Tang, Y-Y., Rothbart, M. K., & Posner, M. I. (2012). Neural correlates of establishing, maintaining, and switching brain states. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(6), 330–337. (Location 7710)
reduces the brain’s need for glucose Haier, R. J., Siegel, B. V., MacLachlan, A., Soderling, E., Lottenberg, S., & Buchsbaum, M.S. (1992). Regional glucose metabolic changes after learning a complex visuospatial/motor task: A positron emission tomographic study. Brain Research, 570(1–2), 134–143. (Location 7712)
brain’s arousal system has a novelty bias Tucker, D. M. (1987, May). Hemisphere specialization: A mechanism for unifying anterior and posterior brain regions. In D. Ottoson (Chair), Duality and unity of the brain: Unified functioning and specialization of the hemispheres (pp. 180–193). Symposium conducted at The Wenner-Gren Center, Stockholm, Sweden. New York, NY: Plenum Press. (Location 8382)