David Rock in Your Brain At Work has touched upon this fascinating topic.
Arriving at an “insight” is purely a right brain activity to connect the dots as against going through a checklist of items.
Activities that give us peace of mind for e.g. meditation results in activation of right anterior temporal lobe to aid in arriving at an “insight” or an “eureka” moment.
Thus in order to arrive at insight we need to detach ourselves from hustle and bustle for peace of mind.
An optimum level of arousal or stress is needed to fire up the neurons in the prefrontal cortex of brain to result in high performance.
Instilling fear and increasing stress levels results in the flow of chemical noradrenaline to hike performance.
A much better way involves using humour and conmunication of positive outcomes.This results in flow of dopamine as well thus being a much more effective way to increase mental performance.
This is the reason why mentoring is a much more effective technique compared to Carrots & Sticks to hike performance.
David Rocks in Your Brain at Work makes a mention of the inverted U plot of performance vs Arousal.
This means stress/arousal should reach a perfect balance to trigger great mental performance of the brain.Anything more than this threshold proves detrimental causing burn out due to over stress.
The neural circuit of the prefrontal cortex of our brain fires absolutely perfect when there is an appropriate combination of two neural chemicals i.e. dopamine & noradrenaline.
By training our minds in the right manner it is indeed possible to generate the right amount of these chemical for optimal brain performance.
David Rock in his book Your Brain at Work very scientifically explains the natural tendency of human brain to get distracted.
Our brain is attracted by anything novel , with the Anterior Cingulate Cortex primarily responsible for detecting anything novel.
There is a braking mechanism though that inhibits our brain towards distractions and helps to focus better.This is known as Ventro Lateral Prefrontal Cortex and this needs to made use of judiciously to remove negativity and focus better.
Thus knowing the working of brain helps focus our energies in the right direction.
David Rock in his book Your Brain at Work, clearly explains the limitation of working memory capacity of the new rational human brain i.e. Prefrontal Cortex
As a result of this trying to perform more than one conscious task at a time can be detrimental in terms of performance.
Yet few people effectively multi task.They practice and practice to create habits out of mundane tasks e.g driving a car.The habits sit in long term memory i.e. Basal Ganglia and have nothing to do with working memory.This is precisely the reason that few have mastered the art of driving as well as taking conference calls at the same time.
David Rock in his book “Your Brain at Work” , very scientifically explains the fact that our rational brain i.e. Prefrontal Cortex is not capable of performing more than one conscious task at a time.
This syndrome named “Dual Task Interference”.
David Rock in his book “Your Brain At Work” states that smaller the information the prefontal cortex(processes thoughts , decisions etc.)is loaded with better the efficiency.
Chunking of information into manageable pieces results in efficient brain processing with less energy drainage.
David Rock in his book “Your Brain At Work” makes a mention of the fact that parts of the brain involved in thought related processing e.g problem solving , creativity make most use of energy e.g. glucose , oxygen.
As a result of this “Prefrontal Cortex” involved with this function needs to be used optimally once when most needed.
For this to happen meticulous white board planning needs to happen to determine the prioritized list of tasks to engage this part of the brain with.
Generally this planning should happen at times when we are least loaded e.g. early morning , late evening vefore bed.
Dan Pink’s book “Drive” emphasizes the importance of “intrinsic motivation” for a modern day knowledge worker.
He makes a mention of the iconic company named Atlassian(invented Jira ,Confluence etc. agile software lifecycle tools).
To encourage creativity as a drive towards intrinsic motivation one day every quarter is celebrated as “FedEx Day” wherein anyone can develop anything of his or her choice provided something is shown as a deliverable.
Amazing thought process!!