Education & Career Trends: November 19, 2022
Curated by the Knowledge Team of ICS Career GPS
Content Credit:
- Article by Markham Heid, published on medium.com. Original article link.
Most mornings, rain or shine, Albert Einstein would walk the mile-and-a-half that separated his home from his office at Princeton University. In the evening, rain or shine, he’d walk home again. Einstein had a few idiosyncratic habits, but his daily walks weren’t one of them.
Many of history’s preeminent thinkers, from Aristotle and Darwin to Virginia Woolf and Daniel Kahneman, have been dedicated walkers. The German philosopher Nietzsche once wrote, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”
The power of a good walk:
I(the author) can’t lay claim to any great thoughts, but I can vouch for the clarifying power of a good walk. When my brain feels overwhelmed or discombobulated — by work, family, money, the news, the climate, the future — a walk always helps to sort me out. Ten minutes may do the job, but two hours is better. The key is not to call anyone, listen to anything, or even bring along a phone. Give your brain a break, and it will put itself in order.
Research in the fields of learning, cognitive efficiency, and attention restoration has shown that even short periods of rest, whether active (walking, gardening, laundry-folding, bicycle riding, etc.) or passive (dozing, zoning out), support many of the brain’s essential housekeeping functions.
The executive functions allow us to focus attention strategically, and to organise our thoughts in the face of distraction, complexity, and stress.
The importance of giving your brain free time:
Years ago, for a piece I wrote on the benefits of idle moments, I spoke with Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who is director of the University of Southern California’s Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education. She told me that the brain uses its free time for information sorting and storage, sense-making, and other forms of organisation.
“The deeper reflective states where you make meaning of what’s going on and connect it to self and identity and integrate knowledge together into coherent narratives — these kinds of processes only happen when you’re not focused on some in-the-moment activity,” she said.
Until recently, the average person’s day was filled with periods of mental downtime. Commuting, standing in line, going to the bathroom, eating, and many of life’s other quotidian tasks provided built-in breaks. Now nearly all of these rest opportunities have been seized by mobile media.
At the same time, many of us are also neglecting the kinds of tasks that strengthen the brain’s organisation and prioritisation skills, which are known as its executive functions. Research has shown that executive functions allow us “to focus attention strategically, and to organise our thoughts in the face of distraction, complexity, and stress.” They are the hand on the wheel, in other words — the part of the mind that pilots us through life’s choppy waters.
How the brain’s executive functioning gets hindered:
Not surprisingly, media multitasking has been associated with impoverished executive functioning abilities in both adolescents and adults. The modern media landscape is engineered to grab and hold your attention — to wrest control away from you. The more you allow this to happen, the less you are able to take back control when it matters.
What is the antidote?
One antidote may be mindfulness mediation, which is basically a form of directed attention training. Research has found that mindfulness can bolster the brain’s executive functions. Social interaction — another quintessentially human pastime that has languished in the digital age — is also associated with enhanced executive functioning (EF). “It has long been theorised that humans develop higher mental functions, such as EFs, within the context of interpersonal interactions and social relationships,” wrote a research team at New York University. In support of this theory, they found that social interaction helps enhance EF.
Finally, there’s evidence that new experiences activate and strengthen the brain’s executive functions, while a surfeit of routine tends to weaken them.
Why routine disrupts productivity?
Routines are inherently unchallenging; they allow your brain to kick back and cruise on autopilot. They may be efficient, and good routines may support your goals and productivity. But they do not exercise your brain’s big muscles. For that, you need novelty, and the more novel the better.
Try learning a new language or a new instrument. Take up baking or origami. Do new things in new places. You don’t have to abandon your routines, but you do need to shake them up.
Your brain can tidy up its own messes. But to do that it needs both rest and helpful forms of exercise. So take more walks, meet up with friends, spend time away from your devices, and mix things up. These are some of the surest ways to put your most important house back in order.
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Have you checked out yesterday’s blog yet?
Thinking Styles that Transform You Into a Relaxed Badass
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the article mentioned above are those of the author(s). They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of ICS Career GPS or its staff.)
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