from many large organizations and many technical people. I find my day job is kind of translating

what might be thought of as soft skills for a technical audience to, to understand how

to optimize processing.

So that's enough about me.

I want to talk about these four surprises.

The rational is overrated; massively overrated.

The emotions, we got emotions backward.

Social issues are primary; literally primary.

And attention actually changes the brain.

We're gonna spent most time on the probably the first and second and a bit, and a bit

on the third.

I'm gonna stop after each and see if you have questions or comments. And if I go too fast,

you can slow me down. If you want me to speed up, it's Google. I can speed up as well. Just

say: "get to the point." We can do whatever you like.

All right.

The rational is overrated. What do I mean by that? Let's do, give you a little, a little

metaphor.

When you're trying to hold information in mind; you try and actually hold information,

you're gonna start using your prefrontal cortex, PFC for short. I shorten it so it takes less

space in your PFC.

When you try to hold information in mind which is to understand, decide, recall, memorize,

inhibit; when you try to do that, you've gotta use your prefrontal cortex, which is a very

limited region of the brain.

Those of you who drove to work today, you didn't really use your prefrontal cortex to

drive here. You're using deeper regions that you can use without thinking. Like you can

drive without having to think about where you're going, if you've gone somewhere a lot.

If you're actually consciously thinking, you've got to use your prefrontal cortex. And this

is where the trouble begins.

Let me do a little experiment. What's - just call back, call an answer

out - what's one plus one?

>>Voices in audience: Two.

>>David Rock: No prefrontal cortex, right? No effort.

What's ten plus ten.

>>Voices in audience: Twenty.

>>David Rock: No prefrontal cortex.

What's 56 plus 175?

[pause]

[laughter]

>>David Rock: Laughter. No one wants to do it.

[laughter]

Okay. Do you get that - like why don't you want to do it? Why don't you wanna do it?

Because you've got to put in a bit of effort. You've gotta actually stop other things you

might be thinking about because when you use this process it becomes a serial process;

you can do one thing at a time.

You've gotta use effort and did you sense like a little bit of like a "Uh, oh. Don't

take me there." Like "I'm not going there?"

It's a subtle threat. The reason it's a subtle threat to have to think, is we evolved at

a time when resources - metabolic resources - were really limited; war and famine; we

lived to 20 at best; and so we're, we're kind of rewarded for minimizing mental resources.

It's very easy, in this country in particular, to make an absolute fortune basically helping

people put in less and less effort into any particular thing. Have you noticed that?

It's really difficult to kind of do the opposite. And in many ways Google exists because it

helps people find things with less effort, as well.

Okay. And you can measure that in milliseconds.

So using this cortex in, when you have to do an addition, we sort, we sort of avoid

it. We go: "I don't really wanna do that." It's a threat response. And that threat response

does something. So we kind of don't do it very much. And this is a bit of a, bit of

a challenge.

Now let me give you the metaphor to understand it.

If the amount of information you can hold in your prefrontal cortex at one time - sometimes

it's called working memory and it has other titles - if the amount of information you

can hold in this region is equivalent to say a cubic foot; a cubic foot, then the amount

of information that the rest of your brain holds is equivalent to about the Milky Way.

[laughter]

So they're kind of different. Do you get that sense? Right.

It's a little, disambiguous to say, but they're really massively different and this explains

a tremendous number of life's experiences. 'Cause what we do is we, we firstly try to

avoid using this region of the brain. We do things that we know how to do well, rather

than doing something differently.

And anything that we do do a few times, we quickly start to embed the pattern so we don't

have to think about it. And essentially when you're tryin' to make someone think, like

tryin' to change a pattern or change a system or install some software or do anything, you're

gonna get this threat response, because people are gonna have to think and we, they're attuned

not to.

So it explains a tremendous amount. But this is, this rational resource is what people

put so much kind of credence into. We've really got to be rational and Spock, Spock was all

about really being deeply rational. It turns out that rational is really, really overrated.

And it's overrated in two ways: firstly, what you can do with it; and secondly, it's actually

not how we solve most problems. The rational is not how we solve most problems, which I'll

come back to.

But there's some studies showing that every time you do a little math puzzle like that

or any conscious decision, you actually use up a limited bucket of resources.

Every time you make a decision, solve a problem, your blood glucose goes down and you performance

on the next task goes down. So it's a really of limited resource that depletes very quickly.

And you can actually start to look at this and, and sort of pull apart three types of

thinking that we do. And start to treat this resource of your, your prefrontal resource,

as something that you've got to kind of manage.

So Level 1 thinking is, is basically stuff like one plus one. You don't have to think.

And isn't it fun deleting emails? Does anyone else get joy deleting emails?

[laughter]

It's wonderful, isn't it? It's like: "Ah." You know I fly a lot and one of the things

I love to do when I'm flying, if I really can't do anything else, is delete. And one

time I was on a long flight. I saw the bottom of my email inbox.

[laughter]

Isn't that incredible? Just like never happens.

Anyway so you can do that without thinking.

Level 2: scheduling a meeting. You've got to hold things in mind: what time; where;

who; when. Maybe five seconds, ten seconds.

We're at writing a pitch; writing some coding; building a plan; building a strategy; that

takes a lot of glucose and it takes a lot of effort energy.

Now what many people do, they get to work, they do number one and then number two first,

and then they've got very little energy left for number three. And their brain actually

becomes tired and noisy. And I'll talk about the noisy in a moment.

And they become really, really ineffective. So the sort intuitive approach that we have

to tackling our day is wrong from the brain's perspective.

So this is one of the first things, the rational is overrated. It would be really rational

to get to work, start working on emails and work through. That's really rational. That's

not how your brain really wants to work.

Now, there's kind of a question that I pose to people often, and it's sort of one of the

questions in the book which is: if you truly respected attention as a limited resource,

what would you do differently?

If you really accepted that you've probably only got a few hours of really quality deep

processing time, Level 3 activity, what would you do differently, if you really like thought

about that? And it's, it's quite an important conversation to, to have, I believe, in an

organization that's processing a lot mentally.

Now, here's the challenge though: most problems we solve are not solved rationally. And in

the lab we see that the PFC not only isn't the source of the solution, but it's actually

the source of not finding the solution.

The prefrontal cortex rational resources actually stop you solving problems a lot of the time.

And in the lab we see that about 60 percent of problems that people solve, they actually

can't explain how they solved them. It's just, you have that experience all the time. You,

you, you walking to work and suddenly you get an idea. Where'd that idea come from?

You weren't working on anything. Where did it come from?

You're in the shower; you're on the treadmill; you're doing something and suddenly you have

this, this answer coming to you. Why couldn't you have that when you wanted to? You know

that feeling? Why couldn't you have solved that problem when you; well you can if you

understand your brain a bit better.

And it turns out that the very thing that you normally use to solve problems, is the

inhibitor of solutions if the problems are complex. It's the inhibitor. Your prefrontal

cortex is the inhibitor.

And there's a whole framework around this that I won't go into too far, but there's

a study of insight now - about the last five years there's been a study of insight and

this was published in my last book that a few people here have been reading called Quiet

Leadership - and you can actually now understand how insights occur.

And I'll give you just the Cliffs Notes, kind of the most valuable piece: and that is that

in order for insight to happen, you actually have to stop thinking. You have to stop any

form of, of, of conscious mental deliberate process to have these insights.

And the, there's a couple of complex reasons for that, but let me give you a demonstration

of it first, and let's see, kind of how you go with this.

This is a simple puzzle - you've basically got five words there: "Time flies like an

arrow." And they, it normally means time moves swiftly in one direction. Time goes straight

ahead; time goes forward.

Can anyone think of a different interpretation of those five words? Like quite a substantially

different interpretation? Anyone think of one? Over here.

>>Voice in audience: If you are keeping track of flies, fruit flies, and you are trying

to time them using [unintelligible].

>>David Rock: Very good. So that was a record for that answer. So you guys have very good

hiring processes, because of

[laughter]

people never get so quickly to an answer like that. Anyone else get one?

Yeah. Over here.

>>Voice in audience: Some, some type of fly called a time fly [unintelligible]

>>David Rock: Very good. Okay. Anyone else get one? Absolutely.

So what does it require to come up with these different solutions? What does it require

mentally?

You've got to kind of dampen down this solution in your brain. You've got to consciously

- it's pretty easy to do with just five words - much harder to do with a complex project.

But you've got to actually dampen down the existing solution and go, and go: "I'm gonna

think about this fresh. I'm gonna unlock the word time in this sort of structure it is;

in the sentence structure. I'm gonna reimagine it." Okay? And I'll give you, I'll give you

five of them.

Check the speed of flies the way you would time an arrow.

Check the speed of flies only if they are similar to an arrow.

Check the speed of flies the way an arrow would.

Time flies (a type of fly) are fond of arrows, which you got.

And there's some more if you get subtle, but many people have tremendous difficulty with

this, because they're not experienced at dampening down their own thinking. And clearly you guys

have developed great cognitive control; you know when it's time to kind of stop thinking

one way and try thinking another way. It's a very, very important capacity for maximizing

internal processing.

So insight involves stopping thinking about the problem, and allowing a completely different

solution to come through.

And this is a summary of Mark Beeman's research on insight and they see an Alpha wave which

is, you can see the purple line up there - the Alpha wave is the brain going into idle

just for a couple of seconds. The good news is it's not two months; it's two seconds.

But when you put the brain into idle it's like putting a car into neutral, and things

just kind of can come through.

The basic signs of this is a little complex to explain in a short time, but essentially

a thought like if I say: "Picture an elephant." If I say: "picture an elephant" that's gonna

be a connection between millions if not billions of neurons. And the electrical activity given

off as that circuit creates, is quite high. It's kind of a lot, it's like a high amplitude

electrical activity on an EEG.

But if you're trying to solve a problem, the solution that your brain comes up with in

your unconscious - it's your unconscious that solves it, not your conscious mind. The solution

might involve a circuit between only a few thousand or a few tens of hundreds of neurons,

and so there's a lot less electrical activity.

And electrical activity means arousal, and it means dopamine, and you need to be able

to notice spikes of dopamine to be able to notice information.

So put all that together you basically get the fact that if you're operating really with

a loud brain all the time, you're not able to see the subtle signals. And it's like you

don't kind of hear a quiet cell phone at a loud party, if it's really, really loud.