Autopilot (4 page)

In one experiment, Professor Nass showed a pair of red triangles surrounded by two, four, or six blue rectangles for a brief moment to both high multitaskers and low multitaskers (people who don't normally try to do more than one thing at a time). Then he showed the same picture again, sometimes altering the position of the red triangles.

The subjects were told to ignore the blue rectangles and to judge whether the red triangles had changed position. What he found was the low multitaskers had no problem with this task. However, the high multitaskers performed horribly. They could not ignore the blue rectangles and they could not tell if the red triangles had moved. What this means is that multitaskers cannot filter out irrelevant information because their attention is overloaded with whatever tasks they are not doing. In other words, a multitasker cannot actually distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information because the multitasker does not really know what they are doing at any given moment.

The clearest evidence of this that is an estimated two thousand six hundred deaths and three hundred thirty thousand injuries are caused each year by drivers talking on their cell phones while driving. Multitasking is compulsive behavior that actually leads to a condition very similar to adult ADHD.

Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell dubbed this condition “attention deficit trait” to describe what happens to chronic multitaskers. He also argues that the way we run our modern work environments contributes to this problem in which normally high-functioning people have difficulty organizing tasks, get easily distracted, and become absentminded. Modern information workers are interrupted on average every three minutes by instant messages, email alerts, or phone calls. It has been estimated that at work you spend anywhere from twenty-five percent to fifty percent of your day just recovering from interruptions, asking yourself “where was I?” A study by Intel found that the effects of interruptions cost them a billion dollars per year in lost productivity. Modern technology can literally make us dumber.

We can decide to become aware of our limitations and live within them. Removing such stressors makes life enjoyable, leading to a further reduction in stress. As Klingberg points out, “when we determine our limits and find an optimal balance between cognitive demand and ability … we not only achieve deep satisfaction but also develop our brain's capacity the most.” This process is a positive feedback loop, which also is a feature of nonlinear systems. A big part of this process is to be idle.

Our bodies were designed for protein-rich diets and long periods of low-intensity physical activity, like walking or jogging, interspersed with idleness. Continually stretching our mental capacity beyond its limits leads to worse job performance, fatigue, and eventually chronic psychological and physical disease.

The life of a Cro-Magnon was actually more leisure than work. Back then, work was defined as hunting or gathering food. It is generally accepted that the Cro-Magnon ability to be idle led to the “creative explosion” in human evolution. In biological terms, our brains are almost identical to Cro-Magnon brains. Once basic needs are met—food, shelter, protection from elements and adversity—it is no longer necessary to work.

What follows is an exploration of what our amazing brains are doing when we are doing nothing. My goal is to offer bullet-proof scientific excuses for laziness. But I also present possible neuroscientific insights into the relationship between idleness and creativity. Finally, I hope to hammer the first nails into a coffin for the insufferable time management industry.

2

“Uncovering the mysteries of natural phenomena that were formerly someone else's ‘noise' is a recurring theme in science.”

—Alfred Bedard Jr. and Thomas George

Let us return to our resting brain. The discovery of a resting state network in the brain is very recent. It has been likened to the discovery of the pervasive “dark energy” in the universe.

Just as it is unsettling to imagine there may actually be a “dark side of the force” that we know almost nothing about, it is spooky to think our brains are doing all this stuff while we sit and stare into space. For much of the history of modern science, what has appeared to be noise actually represents a deeper truth that we do not yet comprehend. In neuroscience and psychology, the brain's spontaneous activity has been considered noise until very recently. But it could turn out that this noise holds the key to truly understanding our minds.

Scientists like Buzáki and Raichle estimate that as much as ninety percent of the brain's energy is used to support ongoing activity. This means that, regardless of what you are doing, your resting brain represents the vast majority of your brain's total energy consumption. This is also known as the brain's intrinsic activity. When you activate your default mode network by doing nothing, it becomes robust and coherent. So, somehow our brains seem to violate the second law of thermodynamics which states that left unattended, things in general get messy and lose heat. This is called entropy. It's why your kitchen just gets messier and messier the longer you don't clean it. However, the old adage that “the dishes don't do themselves” does not apply to the brain.

On the contrary, when you leave important parts of your brain unattended by relaxing in the grass on a sunny afternoon, the parts of your brain in the default mode network become more organized and engaged. In your brain, the dishes do wash themselves if you just leave them alone. It turns out your brain is never idle. In fact, it may work harder when you're not working at all.

Eventually, physicists had to accept that if our knowledge of the universe is not completely wrong, then the universe is mostly made from dark energy. Similarly, it is possible that much of the brain is being ignored by cognitive neuroscience and psychology.

Psychological brain imaging experiments are designed to test brain activation levels during specific tasks in order to find out what certain brain structures are doing during those specific tasks. I previously pointed out that an assumption in brain science is that any activity detected that is not affected by experimental manipulations is just noise. Until its existence was verified, the brain's resting state network was usually considered someone else's noise. Do not confuse this with the myth that we only use ten percent of our brains. What science has revealed is that we use all of our brains, just not in the ways many people assume.

Only minor perturbations occur in the brain's ongoing activity during a mental task like adding something to your to-do list. For example, the neural energy required to press a button whenever a red light appears in a laboratory experiment is only a small fraction (as little as 0.5 percent) of the total energy that the brain expends at any moment.

In contrast, the default mode of your brain uses a far higher percentage of your brain's total energy. Figuring out just what the brain is doing while consuming all that energy when you are spacing out is precisely what Marcus Raichle and other neuroscientists are beginning to do.

One of the striking things about our brains is that in terms of energy consumption they are as greedy as Goldman-Sachs. The brain represents about two percent of your total body weight, yet it consumes twenty percent of your body's energy. It is the biological equivalent of the one percent. In other words, your brain is a pig and it is selfish. This may be why ultra-endurance athletes can start to hallucinate after running fifty miles, or when participating in the grueling bicycle contest such as Race Across America during which cyclists ride almost non-stop from California to Maryland.

When blood sugar gets low during some insane endurance challenge, for example, and you are sleep deprived, your conscious awareness is the first thing in your body to start experiencing problems. This is true in general and especially during exercise.

Unnecessary-for-immediate-survival brain operations like having coherent thoughts are sacrificed in order for the brain to be able to maintain vital functions like respiration during a drop in glucose, electrolytes, or water. Confusion and hallucinations are also warnings from our brain that we are dangerously close to doing damage to our bodies. The next step is passing out. This is the brain's last-ditch way of protecting our bodies from exercising to death.

It doesn't always work. Every year several participants in marathons die because they inadvertently pushed their brains and bodies beyond certain critical limits. The brain will keep trying to consume its disproportionate share of your body's energy. That's why when your body runs out of energy you become a drooling zombie.

Now imagine that running yourself to death in a marathon is a compressed version of your entire life.

During the marathon, as you approach the limits of your body's capacity to withstand stress, your brain will keep giving you warnings. Your muscles will feel fatigued, and you will start to have an overwhelming urge to stop. You may become disoriented and have momentary lapses in awareness.

Some people can override these warnings and push themselves past the point of no return. Over the long term in a less intense, but no less insidious way, our brains are constantly warning us that we work far too much. On the time-scale of a lifetime, constant stress from overwork raises your risk of depression, heart-disease, stroke, and certain kinds of cancer. It's a long, horrible list.

Yet we feel obliged to risk our long-term health in order to work extremely hard at jobs we don't particularly enjoy in order to buy things we don't particularly want. This is otherwise known as free-market capitalism. According to politicians, CEOs, and bankers, this is also supposedly the highest form of social organization that human beings have attained.

Few people fear being overweight as much as they fear terrorism, even though statistically being obese is much more of a threat to your life than terrorism. We do not know how much stress and overwork contribute to shortened life-spans. But we do know that obesity and sitting all day at your desk with a low level of constant stress are related. If you knew being idle (preferably while lying down on a blanket under a tree with a nice bottle of wine) for more hours of the day could add years to your life, what would you do?

The amazing thing about the default mode network (and the point of this book) is that its activity
increases
when we are doing nothing. What exactly does this mean? From the perspective of a brain imaging scientist using fMRI, it means that activity in this network spikes when subjects are just lying in a scanner doing nothing.

More blood is delivering oxygen to the default mode network. More glucose and other brain metabolites are being consumed by this network. And the activity in each region of the network becomes correlated. Scientists can measure how well information is flowing in your default mode network using what's called “graph theory.”

Graph theory is a branch of mathematics that was invented in the 18
^th
century. Recently, it has been remarkably useful in analyzing all kinds of complex networks, especially the brain.

Networks are made up of nodes. The nodes are connected by things called edges, which are just abstract (or physical) lines drawn between nodes. An edge between two nodes means that there is a relationship between the nodes—i.e., information can flow between these nodes. Sometimes, information can only flow in one direction. This is called a directed edge. In other cases information can flow back and forth between nodes. This is called a non-directed edge. The really useful thing about graph theory is that it can be used to study things as different as air traffic, the internet, and social networks. When parts of a system form a complex network, what matters more than their actual microscopic structure is the relationship among the parts.

In the brain, these nodes are made of anatomically distinct structures. The nodes are connected by edges which take the form of axons. Areas of the brain that are physically connected are called “structural networks.” Just as the body has different parts—the heart or lungs, for example—so too does the brain. These different brain parts are connected via alien-finger-like structures called fiber pathways. The brain's structural network is dense with local clusters that are interconnected to each other and to the global network. You are likely familiar with well-known brain regions like the prefrontal cortex.

We can think of nodes as airports, and we all know hub airports: Chicago, Heathrow, or Frankfurt. These airports are huge compared to regional airports and receive much more air traffic than smaller airports. Have you ever been able to fly direct from Portland, Oregon to Columbus, Ohio? Usually you would have to fly over Chicago (or maybe even to some out-of-the-way hub like Atlanta).

The brain works the same way. There are certain structures in the brain that receive many more connections than other parts. These are the hubs. When you are idle your “brain hubs” light up with activity. More blood carrying oxygen and sugar flow to the hubs in your default mode network when you relax and start daydreaming.

Over the last twenty years, technologies like the MRI and PET (Positron Emission Tomography) have allowed scientists to look inside the living brain and take snapshots of its activity or measure how much energy certain brain parts are consuming while subjects perform experiments. We now know that each anatomically distinct brain structure is specialized to do different things.

Consider the heart. It is a specialized body part that circulates blood. Within the heart there are smaller parts and each performs a more specific function. For example, the left atrium pumps oxygenated blood to the aorta, which pumps it out to the rest of the body.

Similarly, in the brain, the prefrontal cortex is involved in so-called “high-level” cognition like reasoning, short-term memory, controlling your emotions, planning activities, and bringing relevant memories to consciousness. Another brain region called the hippocampus (parts of which are active during rest) is responsible for creating long term memories and storing them in another part of your brain called the neocortex.

The prefrontal cortex decides when it is relevant to recall certain memories or information stored in your neocortex. Each of these regions can again be subdivided into smaller sub-regions which, in concert, perform larger tasks like “remember the name of that woman who also has a child in my son's daycare and who I see every day and who knows my name.”

For example, let's say you meet your Aunt Lisa. You have stored in your neocortex all kinds of information about your Aunt Lisa. This information is distributed throughout the cortex and has to be reassembled when you recall it. When you meet her, you remember that she has Basenjis, she lives in Milwaukee, and she is married to your Uncle Jim. Your prefrontal cortex helps bring all this information into your awareness because it's suddenly relevant when you're talking to your Aunt Lisa.

Conversely, any new information that you get from Aunt Lisa, including the current episode during which you met her, goes from your awareness (which involves many parts of the brain) to your hippocampus. Then if you get a good night's sleep, relax for a while, or even take a nap, the hippocampus more or less writes these new memories to your neocortex, which houses your long-term memories. This is called memory consolidation. It is especially important when you are learning new ideas or skills. So the best thing to do after learning new information is to take nap, or at least be idle.

The prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus, and parts of the neocortex have to talk to each other in order to accomplish all of this. One of the ways in which neurons and brain regions send and receive information is through synchronization of their oscillatory electrical activity. In ways we do not fully understand, when information needs to travel between nodes, this information gets coded into different frequencies which then ride on top of each other like ocean waves.

High frequency waves can only travel short distances, but low frequency can travel much farther. Thus, it appears that information coded in higher frequencies “rides” on top of lower frequencies, which can carry the information to distant brain regions. A fascinating example of perceiving far-traveling, ultra-low frequency waves was when the elephants and other animals in Thailand reacted to the approaching tsunami in 2004. Hours before any humans noticed the ultra-low frequency vibrations of the giant wave, the elephants could feel it and they headed to the hills well in advance of the destructive wave. This is because elephants can hear and feel frequencies far below the human threshold. These low frequency sound waves can travel hundreds of miles.

Human neurons typically oscillate between 0.5 Hertz and upwards of one hundred Hz. However, it seems that most of our brain's activity occurs at frequencies between one and forty Hz. The dominant frequency is called “alpha” which is around ten Hz. In the brain's networks, the node receiving information needs to be oscillating in at least partial synchrony with the node sending the information.

For example, when the prefrontal cortex needs to retrieve some associations from semantic memory, it will instantaneously synchronize its oscillations with parts of the temporal lobe, the place which stores the meanings of words. How this synchronization is achieved is still a mystery.

The precise timing and spatial extent of this synchronization forms what's known as the “neural code.” This is the brain's own secret language. The holy grail of neuroscience is to crack the neural code which uses electrical and chemical signals in complex patterns that allow us to speak, read, think, remember, walk, become authors, make babies, and of course be idle.