Why We are More Creative When We are Tired, And Other Surprising Things About How Brains Work
You
may be hardwired as an introvert or an extrovert. But don't worry, there are
ways to change how our brains work.
One
of the things that surprises me time and time again is how we think our brains
work and how they actually do.
On
many occasions, I find myself convinced that there is a certain way to do
things, only to find out that actually that’s the completely wrong way to think
about it. For example, I always found it fairly understandable that we can
multitask. Well, according to the latest research studies, it’s literally
impossible for our brains to handle two tasks at the same time.
Recently,
I came across more of these fascinating experiments and ideas that helped a ton
to adjust my workflow towards how our brain actually work (instead of how I
thought it does).
So
here are 10 of the most surprising things our brain does and what we can learn
from this information.
1.
Your brain does creative work better when you’re tired.
When
I explored the science of our body clocks and how they affect our daily
routines, I was interested to find that a lot of the way I’d planned my days
wasn’t really the best way to go about it. The way we work, in particular,
actually has a lot to do with the cycles of our body clocks.
Here’s
how it breaks down:
If
you’re a morning lark, say, you’ll want to favor those morning hours when
you’re feeling more fresh to get your most demanding, analytical work done.
Using your brain to solve problems, answer questions and make decisions is best
done when you’re at your peak.
For
night owls, this is obviously a much later period in the day.
On
the other hand, if you’re trying to do creative work, you’ll actually have more
luck when you’re more tired and your brain isn’t functioning as efficiently.
This sounds crazy, but it actually makes sense when you look at the reasoning
behind it. It’s one of the reasons why great ideas often happen
in the shower after a long day of work.
If
you’re tired, your brain is not as good at filtering out distractions and
focusing on a particular task. It’s also a lot less efficient at remembering
connections between ideas or concepts. These are both good things when it comes
to creative work, since this kind of work requires us to make new connections,
be open to new ideas, and think in new ways. So a tired, fuzzy brain is of much
more use to us when working on creative projects.
This
Scientific American article explains how
distractions can actually be a good thing for creative thinking:
Insight
problems involve thinking outside the box. This is where susceptibility to
“distraction” can be of benefit. At off-peak times we are less focused, and may
consider a broader range of information. This wider scope gives us access to
more alternatives and diverse interpretations, thus fostering innovation and
insight.
2.
Stress can change the size of your brain (and make it smaller).
I
bet you didn’t know stress is actually the most common cause of changes in
brain function. I was surprised to learn this when I looked into how
stress affects our brains.
I
also found some research that showed signs of brain size decreasing due to
stress.
One
study used baby monkeys to test the effects of stress on development and
long-term mental health. Half the monkeys were cared for by their peers for six
months, while the other half remained with their mothers. Afterwards, the
monkeys were returned to typical social groups for several months before the
researchers scanned their brains.
For
the monkeys who had been removed from their mothers and cared for by their
peers, areas of their brains related to stress were still enlarged, even after
being in normal social conditions for several months.
Although
more studies are needed to explore this fully, it’s pretty scary to think that
prolonged stress could affect our brains long term.
3. It is
literally impossible for our brains to multitask.
Multitasking
is something we’ve long been encouraged to practice, but it turns out multitasking
is actually impossible. When we think
we’re multitasking, we’re actually context-switching. That is, we’re quickly
switching back and forth between different tasks, rather than doing them at the
same time.
Research
shows your error rate goes up 50%, and it takes you twice as long to do things.
The
problem with multitasking is that we’re splitting our brain’s
resources. We’re giving less attention to each task and
probably performing worse on all of them:
When
the brain tries to do two things at once, it divides and conquers, dedicating
one-half of our gray matter to each task.
Here
is how this looks in reality. While we try to do both Action A and Action B at
the same time, our brain is never handling both simultaneously. Instead, it has
to painfully switch back and forth and use important brainpower just to switch:
When
our brains handle a single task, the
prefrontal
cortex plays a big part. Here’s how it helps us
achieve a goal or complete a task:
The anterior part of this brain region forms
the goal or intention--for example, “I want that cookie”--and the posterior
prefrontal cortex talks to the rest of the brain so that your hand reaches
toward the cookie jar, and your mind knows whether you have the cookie.
A
study in Paris found that when a second task was required,
the brains of the study volunteers split up, with each hemisphere working alone
on a task. The brain
was overloaded by the second task and couldn’t perform at its full capacity,
because it needed to split its resources.
When
a third task was added, the volunteers’ results plummeted:
The
triple-task jugglers consistently forgot one of their tasks. They also made
three times as many errors as they did while dual-tasking.
4.
Naps improve your brain’s day-to-day performance.
We’re
pretty clear on how
important sleep is for our brains, but
what about naps? It turns out, these short bursts of sleep are actually really
useful.
Improved memory
In one
study, participants memorized illustrated cards to
test their memory strength. After memorizing a set of cards, they had a
40-minute break wherein one group napped and the other stayed awake. After the
break, both groups were tested on their memory of the cards, and the group that
had napped performed better:
Much to the surprise of the researchers, the
sleep group performed significantly better, retaining on average 85% of the
patterns, compared to 60% for those who had remained awake.
Research
indicates that when a memory is first recorded in the brain--in the
hippocampus, to be specific--it’s still “fragile” and easily forgotten,
especially if the brain is asked to memorize more things. Napping, it seems,
pushes memories to the neocortex, the brain’s “more permanent storage,”
preventing them from being “overwritten.”
Better
learning
Taking
a nap also helps to clear information out of your brain’s temporary storage
areas, getting it ready for new information to be absorbed. A study from the
University of California asked participants to complete a challenging task
around midday, which required them to take in a lot of new information. At
around 2 p.m., half of the volunteers took a nap while the rest stayed awake.
The
really interesting part of this study is not only that at 6 p.m. that night the
napping group performed better than those who didn’t take a nap. In fact, the
napping group actually performed better than they had earlier in the morning.
What
happens in the brain during a nap
Some recent
research has found that the right side of the brain is
far more active during a nap than the left side, which stays fairly quiet while
we’re asleep. Despite the fact that 95% of the population is right-handed, with
the left side of their brains being the most dominant, the right side is
consistently the more active hemisphere during sleep.
The study’s author, Andrei Medvedev,
speculated that the right side of the brain
handles ‘housekeeping’ duties while we’re asleep.
So
while the left side of your brain takes some time off to relax, the right side
is clearing out your temporary storage areas, pushing information into
long-term storage and solidifying your memories from the day.
5.
Your vision trumps all other senses.
Hear a piece of information, and three days
later you’ll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65%.
Pictures beat text as well, in part because
reading is so inefficient for us. Our brain sees words as lots of tiny
pictures, and we have to identify certain features in the letters to be able to
read them. That takes time.
In fact, vision is so powerful that the best
wine tasters in the world have
been known to describe a dyed white wine as a
red.
Not only is it surprising that we rely on our
vision so much, but it actually isn’t even that good. Take this
fact, for instance:
Our
brain is doing all this guessing because it doesn’t know where things are. In a
three-dimensional world, the light actually falls on our retina in a
two-dimensional fashion. So our brain approximates viewable image.
6.
Introversion and extroversion come from different wiring in the brain.
I
just recently realized that introversion and extroversion are not actually
related to how outgoing or shy
we are, but
rather how our brains recharge.
Research has actually found that there is a
difference in the brains of extroverted and introverted people in terms of how we process rewards and how our genetic
makeup differs. For extroverts, their brains respond more strongly when a
gamble pays off. Part of this is simply genetic, but it’s partly the
difference of their dopamine systems as
well.
When
the gambles they took paid off, the more extroverted group showed a stronger
response in two crucial brain regions: the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens.
The
nucleus accumbens is part of the dopamine system, which affects how we learn
and is generally known for motivating us to search for rewards. The difference
in the dopamine system in the extrovert’s brain tends to push them towards
seeking out novelty, taking risks and enjoying unfamiliar or surprising
situations more than others. The amygdala is responsible for processing
emotional stimuli, which gives extroverts that rush of excitement when they try
something highly stimulating, which might overwhelm an introvert.
More
research has actually shown that the difference
comes from how introverts and extroverts process stimuli. That is, the
stimulation coming into our brains is processed differently, depending on your
personality. For extroverts, the pathway is much shorter. It runs through an
area where taste, touch, visual, and auditory sensory processing takes place.
For introverts, stimuli runs through a long, complicated pathway in areas of
the brain associated with remembering, planning, and solving problems.
7. We
tend to like people who make mistakes more.
Apparently,
making mistakes actually makes us more
likable, due to something called the Pratfall
Effect.
Kevan
Lee recently explained how this works on the Buffer blog:
Those
who never make mistakes are perceived as less likable than those who commit the
occasional faux pas. Messing up draws people closer to you, makes you more
human. Perfection creates distance and an unattractive air of invincibility.
Those of us with flaws win every time.
This
theory was tested by psychologist Elliot Aronson. In his test, he asked
participants to listen to recordings of people answering a quiz. Select
recordings included the sound of the person knocking over a cup of coffee. When
participants were asked to rate the quizzers on likability, the coffee-spill
group came out on top.
So
this is why we tend to dislike people who seem perfect. And now we know that
making minor mistakes isn’t the worst thing in the world--in fact, it can work
in our favor.
8.
Meditation can rewire your brain for the better.
Here’s
another one that really surprised me. I thought meditation was only good for
improving focus and helping me stay calm throughout the day, but it actually
has a whole bunch of great benefits.
Here are a few examples.
Less anxiety
This point is pretty technical, but it’s
really interesting. The more we meditate, the less anxiety we have, and it
turns out this is because we’re
actually loosening the connections of particular neural pathways. This sounds bad, but it’s not.
What happens without meditation is that
there’s a section of our brains that’s sometimes called the Me Center (it’s
technically the medial prefrontal cortex). This is the part that processes
information relating to ourselves and our experiences. Normally the neural
pathways from the bodily sensation and fear centers of the brain to the Me
Center are really strong. When you experience a scary or upsetting sensation,
it triggers a strong reaction in your Me Center, making you feel scared and under
attack.
When
we meditate, especially when
we are just getting started with meditation,
we weaken this neural connection. This means that we don’t react as strongly to
sensations that might have once lit up our Me Centers. As we weaken this
connection, we simultaneously strengthen the connection between what’s known as
our Assessment Center (the part of our brains known for reasoning) and our
bodily sensation and fear centers. So when we experience scary or upsetting
sensations, we can more easily look at them rationally. Here’s a good
example:
For
example, when you experience pain, rather than becoming anxious and assuming it
means something is wrong with you, you can watch the pain rise and fall without
becoming ensnared in a story about what it might mean.
More
creativity
Researchers
at Leiden University in the Netherlands
studied both focused-attention and open-monitoring meditation to see if there
was any improvement in creativity afterwards. They found that people who
practiced focused-attention meditation did not show any obvious signs of improvement
in the creativity task following their
meditation. For those who did open-monitoring meditation, however, they
performed better on a task that asked them to come up with new ideas.
Better
memory
One of the things meditation has been linked
to is improving rapid memory recall. Catherine
Kerr, a researcher at the Martinos Center for
Biomedical Imaging and the Osher Research Center found that people who
practiced mindful meditation were able to adjust the brain wave that screens
out distractions and increase
their productivity more quickly that those who did not
meditate. She said that this ability to ignore distractions could explain
“their superior ability to rapidly remember and incorporate new facts.” This
seems to be very similar to the power of being exposed to new situations that
will also dramatically
improve our memory of things.
Meditation has also
been linked to increasing compassion, decreasing stress,
improving
memory skills, and even increasing the amount of gray matter in the brain.
9.
Exercise can reorganize the brain and boost your willpower.
Sure,
exercise is good for your body, but what about your brain? Well apparently there’s a link between exercise and mental alertness, in a similar way
that
happiness and exercise are related.
A lifetime of exercise can result in a
sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those
who are sedentary. Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in tests that measure
long-term memory, reasoning, attention, problem-solving, even so-called
fluid-intelligence tasks.
Of course, exercise can also make us happier,
as we’ve explored before:
If you start exercising, your brain recognizes this as a moment of stress. As
your heart pressure increases, the brain thinks you are either fighting the
enemy or fleeing from it. To protect yourself and your brain from stress, you
release a protein called BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor). BDNF has a
protective and also reparative element to your memory neurons and acts as a
reset switch. That’s why, after exercising, we often feel so at ease, things are
clear, and eventually we're happy.
At the same time, endorphins, which also
fight stress, are released in your brain. The main purpose of endorphins is
this, writes researcher McGovern:
These endorphins tend to minimize the
discomfort of exercise, block the feeling of pain, and are even associated with
a feeling of euphoria.
10. You can make your brain think time is
going slowly by doing new things.
Ever wished you didn’t find yourself saying
“Where does the time go!” every June when you realize the year is half over?
This is a neat trick that relates to how our brains perceive time. Once you
know how it works, you can trick your brain into thinking time is moving more
slowly.
Essentially, our brains take a whole bunch of
information from our senses and organize it in a way that makes sense to us,
before we ever perceive it. So what we think is our sense of time is actually
just a whole bunch of information presented to us in a particular way, as
determined by our brains:
When our brains receive new information, it
doesn’t necessarily come in the proper order. This information needs to be
reorganized and presented to us in a form we understand. When familiar
information is processed, this doesn’t take much time at all. New information,
however, is a bit slower and makes time feel elongated.
Even stranger, it isn’t just a single area of
the brain that controls our time perception--it’s done by a whole bunch of
brain areas, unlike our common five senses, which can
each be pinpointed to a single, specific area.
When
we receive lots of new information, it takes our brains a while to process it
all. The longer this processing takes, the
longer that period of time feels:
When we’re in life-threatening situations,
for instance, “we remember the time as longer because we record more of the
experience. Life-threatening experiences make us really pay attention, but we
don’t gain superhuman powers of perception.”
The same thing happens when we hear enjoyable
music, because “greater attention leads to perception of a longer period of
time.”
Conversely, if
your brain doesn’t have to process lots of new information, time seems to move faster, so the same amount of time
will actually feel shorter than it would otherwise. This happens when you take
in lots of information that’s familiar, because you’ve processed it before.
Your brain doesn’t have to work very hard, so it processes time faster.
Do you have another surprising fact about the
brain you’d like to share? I’d love to hear it! If you enjoyed this post, I
think you might also like our post about "10
Simple Things You Can Do Today That Will Make You Happier, Backed By Science."
By:
Belle Beth Cooper
http://www.fastcompany.com/3018084/work-smart/why-were-more-creative-when-were-tired-and-9-other-surprising-facts-about-how-our?partner=newsletter
No comments:
Post a Comment