The Power of Forgetting (4 page)

When we zoom out to connect some dots here, it’s easy to see how we evolved to compartmentalize the management
of our attention. After all, reflexive attention—reacting to a charging bull, for instance—is a primitive survival tool. But the ability to concentrate for any length of time is a much more advanced skill. In Miller’s words: “If something leaps out of the bush at me, that’s going to be really important and I have to react to it right away. Your brain is equipped to notice things salient in the environment. It takes a truly intelligent creature to know what’s important and focus.”

The exact mechanics of how our brains make snap judgments to distinguish between truly life-threatening distractions and just plain nuisances is a popular area of study today. When the old parietal part of our brain identifies an attention grabber, how does it figure out what should be ignored and what’s important enough to focus on and invite other, more advanced regions of the brain to chime in about? We don’t have all the answers yet, but one thing is certain: We are innately equipped to handle both inconvenient interferences and high-concept ideas that require high-level thinking, often at the same time. And that, my friends, is probably what makes humans so unique and indeed intelligent. It’s also what can create chaos in our brains when we’re trying to process a confluence of ideas simultaneously. Conducting both high- and low-level thinking at the same time can generate a conflict of interest, so to speak, in the brain. Just recall the last time you meant to do something important, such as respond to a colleague’s critical e-mail about a deadline, and realized after several minutes or even hours that you never tackled that chore because a series of diversions pulled you off task. We can have the best intentions of addressing certain responsibilities but then become easily and quickly thwarted by trivial pursuits as our brains
try to juggle warring factions. Or consider a time when you were fully engaged in a creative endeavor, such as writing an article or brainstorming ideas for an upcoming meeting, and within seconds your train of thought was broken by a phone call or someone walking into your office. It takes you a long time to return to that same train of thought once the distraction is over, and for some, those insightful thoughts that were moving through the brain when the interruption occurred are impossible to retrieve. They are gone.

Later in this book, I’ll discuss the notion of multitasking. Although we like to think we can manage multiple tasks at the same time, the brain doesn’t do that. Instead, it handles tasks sequentially, switching between one task and another. But brains can juggle tasks very quickly, thus giving us the illusion that we can perform two things at once. In reality, though, the brain is switching attention between tasks, albeit fast enough for us to barely notice consciously.

So I just finished explaining how the brain can work as a unit to juggle competing demands that want our immediate attention and thinking processes that call on our advanced ability to focus intently. A good question: How do we stay focused? In other words, how can we prevent distractions from encroaching on the neural circuitry built to facilitate concentration? It depends on how well we can stop those distractions from gaining too much attention.

One of the most famous tests used to study the act of focusing is called the Stroop test, named after John Ridley Stroop, who published an article describing the “Stroop effect”
in 1935. It has since become a widely used test in psychology circles to study how fast people can identify colors and words when those words and colors don’t necessarily match up. For example, if you were given words printed in different colors and asked to say the color of the text—not the word itself—chances are you’d find it much harder to say the color than to read the word. In the simple example below, the brain has a strong desire to answer “gray” for option
c
, rather than “black.” And that’s the Stroop effect.

If you were to successfully say the word “black,” then you would have inhibited an automatic response in your brain, which is not an easy thing to do. We know now from scans performed by neuroscientists that people who can block their natural responses are relying on one particular region of their brain to do so. It lies within the prefrontal cortex, tucked behind the right and left temples, and appears to be key to all types of restraints. (For those interested, it’s called the right and left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, or VLPFC.)

In everyday life, we intentionally foil a lot of our brain’s natural, reflexive responses, and this ability rests chiefly on this little area in our prefrontal cortex. When we prevent our hand, for instance, from catching a dropping object, or inhibit mental or even emotional response, this tiny region becomes active. It helps to think of it as our internal braking
system. Although the brain encompasses various accelerators to command myriad activities—from movement and language to emotions and memories—it apparently has only one centralized braking system. And our ability to utilize this braking system effectively seems to correlate closely to how well we can focus. Put simply, focus requires that we teach ourselves how to stop the brain from veering down the path of utter distraction, where braking becomes hard if not impossible. What’s more, our internal braking system isn’t as strong as we’d probably like it to be, especially given the forces we’re dealing with today and the high level of distractions that can send any brain into overdrive. Because our internal braking system is housed in the prefrontal cortex, it’s part of the most delicate, impatient, and energy-hungry region of the brain.

The good news, however, is that by virtue of our humanness, we can in fact gain control of this region and learn how to more effectively process incoming information so we can filter out the clutter and home in on the important. And I’m going to be helping you do just that with the help of my six skills.

Technology makes our lives so much easier. We can communicate with people in a nanosecond using slick devices that we carry around in our pockets, and we can conduct extensive and comprehensive research today by letting our fingertips do the walking online as we use search engines like Google. But this wonderful accessibility engenders laziness. Computers do the work for us—and the thinking, too, in some cases. Our cell phones retain the phone numbers we
need, so we don’t have to remember them. Calculators cover most of our math, and apps on our smartphones tell us how much tip to leave at a restaurant. Even the art of longhand writing, which employs creative parts of the brain, is being lost to the keyboards.

There is a time and a place for all this technology, but there’s also a time and a place for good old traditional problem solving—for letting your brain do all the work, which has benefits you wouldn’t believe. One way for me to convey this to you is to offer the following analogies. Let’s say you need to undergo serious heart surgery. Do you want the surgeon who learned all of his skills through an inanimate computer, or would you prefer the doctor who gained his expertise through hands-on training with real patients? My guess is that you’d pick the surgeon with the “real” experience. You want the one who has been challenged to use his brain in all sorts of ways to solve problems in the operating room. He’s the one who has been doing what’s called scaffolding for a long time. “Scaffolding” is a term used in educational circles to describe how we synthesize our experiences, pulling aspects from one experience into another in order to build our knowledge base and solve new problems using a combination of what we already know and what we’re presently learning or confronted with.

In everyday problem solving, it helps to be book smart or to use technology to arrive at results, but the person who can cull from myriad lessons in life is often the one who will find a better or more precise and accurate answer. It’s just like flying. You don’t want the pilot who hasn’t flown a real plane and who only recently graduated from flight-simulation school. You want the pilot who has successfully clocked thousands of real flying hours in a variety of circumstances.

So imagine this idea applied to the realm of productive thinking. Productive thinkers don’t get to where they are in life by relying on technology or by being just book smart. They certainly take advantage of technology and textbooks, but they depend on their innate brainpower first and foremost, including the part that triggers them to ask questions, challenge the norm, and refuse to accept “I can’t.” They access and utilize “real” skills obtained from a combination of background knowledge and experience that allows them to stand out and make a difference in the world, to adapt and respond to new needs and circumstances.

A couple of years ago, I hunted down kids I’d taught more than a decade earlier. I had trained them on many of the very lessons found in this book, all of which were intended to help them effortlessly learn anything that they’d encounter on their road to success in life.

I wanted to know what had happened to them. Did my tools help them sail through the rigors of developing bright, creative minds that could effortlessly tackle tough challenges? Did they mature into productive thinkers, excel in their academic pursuits, and graduate with honors from high school? Did they make it to college? To elite ones? Or did they fizzle out and mirror the average dropout rates nationwide?

Granted, this wasn’t meant to be a scientific experiment, and the group of students was small, but I thought it would be worthwhile to see what had become of people I had encountered and trained early on. We managed to find a handful of those first students, and the outcomes astounded even me. All of them had not only graduated from high school but
gone on to prestigious universities, from MIT to Berkeley. So I then had to ask myself: How much of their potential was innate and how much was shaped in those formative years? Could the lessons I taught them in how to become quick, efficient thinkers have had a tremendous impact on their overall success? Did I have anything to do with their achievements?

With much humility, I’m happy to report that these kids, who are now adults, had some very nice things to say about me and my strategies. Many of them attributed much of their success to those techniques, which helped them cruise through all sorts of different classes and subjects. One woman said she had to learn all of the bones in the body during a particularly tough college course, and she did so using the tactic she’d learned from me more than a decade before. Suffice it to say, I was very proud.

Now, you’re probably assuming that I taught a highly gifted group of kids who were well on their way to grand futures regardless of my lessons. Perhaps that’s true, though I will say that these were not kids enrolled in gifted programs, and I was not targeting private or prep schools. But for just a moment, let’s consider what kind of impact I might have had on these students’ developing brains.

It’s long been known that brainpower is largely inherited. Experts believe that upward of 70 percent of our brain’s processing speed is a factor of our genes, which leaves 30 percent to the environment.

But that 30 percent is much more significant than most people think. In fact, it can be the proverbial pièce de résistance—the whole heart of the matter.

For argument’s sake, let’s consider the following analogy, which may seem wildly unrelated, but bear with me. In the general population, anyone’s chance of becoming obese is 33 percent based on the environment and 67 percent based on genes. No one would disagree that genetics plays a role in body type, size, metabolism, and propensity to gain or lose weight. But doesn’t it seem a little counterintuitive to attribute just a relatively scant 33 percent of one’s overall risk of becoming obese to the environment? Don’t exercise, diet, and general lifestyle factors weigh into that equation a bit more? After all, we hear plenty of success stories from people who lose massive amounts of weight and escape the fates of their overweight family members just by changing how they live, what they eat, and how they move their bodies. For them, the percentages should be reversed—they may be saddled with an unlucky set of genes that makes it harder to maintain an ideal weight, but that doesn’t render it impossible or prevent them from doing so. They defy the odds by working on their bodies every day and making every percent of that environmental factor count. Put simply, that 33 percent can be significant, really big (no pun intended).

I believe that the same holds true when it comes to the brain’s capacity. We tend to overestimate how much is determined by our genes and forget that a lot of our mental processing power is a product of self-discipline, education, and a commitment to training and using our minds to work a certain way. It’s like that old Thomas Edison saying: Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. Those are percentages I can agree with!

Besides, if intelligence were so dominated by genetics, then I probably wouldn’t be so effective at helping to transform
the lives of thousands of students—and adults—every year. I don’t say this to gloat or to toot my own horn. I say this because, in working with the general public, I encounter an enormous mix of talent and inherited intelligence across the spectrum, from those who struggle mightily with learning and performing math to highly gifted whizzes who are the envy of the average students.

And if there’s one thing that my experience has demonstrated to me over and over again, it’s that no matter what kind of brain you’re born with, and regardless of genetic intelligence traits, the brain is highly pliable, much in the way a muscle can be made stronger with exercise. And neuroscientists agree. Let’s take a quick tour of how the brain can biologically grow and change. It’s yet more proof that you can develop into a productive thinker, because your brain function is far from fixed.