The brain had a very big problem.

And this is actually, frankly, one of the most exhausting things you can do to your brain.

The metaphor I like to use that really is tied to the term you said, focus, is of a flashlight.

If you're in a darkened path, you know, you have this beautiful ocean view here, you want to go for a little walk in the evening, you might take a flashlight with you.

Why?

Because wherever it is that that flashlight is pointing, you're going to get privileged access to that information.

So same thing with attention.

When we attend to something, like right now, if I'm looking at your face, I'm getting granular information regarding your face.

And everything else is sort of becoming fuzzy in the same way that wherever we point that flashlight, everything else is darkened around it.

Same idea.

And that's a very active process that the brain is doing.

The brain is enhancing the neural activity of the part of space I'm focusing on and actively suppressing everything else around it.

Yeah, that's good.

So that part is, I think most people can understand the term focus is a very common thing.

The cool thing about this flashlight, though, is it's not only about the external environment, but it's about the internal environment as well.

So if I say, think about what you had for dinner last night.

Can you do that?

I can.

You can do that, right?

So what happened in that moment?

Before I said that, probably it was not on your mind.

Oh, so good.

So you had it come to mind in your memory.

And then basically, you were shining the flashlight on the memory.

And all of a sudden, it's in your conscious experience.

The focusing is one piece of the puzzle.

But attention is this multifaceted component.

And the other system is something I call the floodlight.

And it really is formally called the alerting system of the brain.

It's almost, you could say, the exact opposite of the flashlight.

Whereas the flashlight is narrow and selective, the floodlight is broad and receptive.

There is nothing you should be privileging.

The only thing you're privileging is what is happening right now.

So you're privileging time.

Like right now, in this moment, what is the most important thing?

And we use this system all the time.

You're driving down the road.

You see a flashing yellow light near a construction zone or a weird traffic pattern.

You know what that feeling is of broad and receptive.

I don't know what weirdness is going to happen.

But I'm here for it because I might need to take action like that.

And now I'll be able to direct the flashlight where it's needed.

And then the third system, it's actually something called executive control.

So the analogy I use there is a juggler.

So essentially, all the balls need to be in the air.

As a leader in an organization, you know that you're not going to go in and do every task, but you need to make sure there's a rhythmicity, there's an appropriateness to all the things that are being done.

We need all three systems and they need to be functioning together fluidly.

Like they don't function at the same time.

In fact, technically in the brain, they battle each other for prominence.

So you can't be in both a floodlight and a flashlight mode.

And we know this, right?

So you're immersed in reading something or listening to something.

Somebody walks in the room and says your name.

You're like, it takes you a second.

Because the floodlight is essentially being dampened down.

The receptivity to the environment is dampened down.

Is there such a thing as multitasking or is that a fallacy?

In other words, can the brain do more than one thing at one time?

If more than one thing is intentionally demanding, you cannot do more than one thing at one time.

The term multitasking is actually a myth.

The correct term would be task switching.

Task switching.

Yes.

So what you're doing, and this is actually, frankly, one of the most exhausting things you can do to your brain.

Is engage your attention and then have to disengage it, move it to the next thing, come back and move it over and over again. Yeah.

Okay.

And when we ask, when we tell people this, you know, it's people always get it's like, yeah, it takes me a while to get back into the thing I was doing.

So don't do that to yourself.

My main like guidance for people.

Don't have your alerts on when you're trying to actually do deep work and focus because you're disadvantaging your ability to actually do the task that you're trying to do.

I mean, if already the baseline is 50% and now you've got to deal with things pulling you away, the chances of it actually being successful are even reduced more.