The point at the heart of this book, is that our brains are not designed to be in a constant state of stimulation. Multitasking means not only that we don’t do any of the tasks that we’re engaged in well, but also that we push our brains well out of their comfort zone.
Our brains have two modes of operation, the task positive mode which is active when we’re engaged in directed activity, and responding to outside stimulus, and the default mode which is active when we’re seemingly idle. We need periods of mind wandering every day, where there is little or no stimulation from the outside so that our minds can turn inward and engage what is called the default mode network. This is the part of the brain that becomes active in our periods of quietness.
Like the heart, the brain is never truly idle, but it needs to switch between these two modes on a fairly regular basis in order to be healthy, to consolidate memory, to keep stress at a healthy level and to be creative. Constant stimulation increases stress, affects our ability to do things well, makes it harder to focus and impedes our ability to be creative.
We live in a world that makes a virtue of busy-ness. We’re urged to fill our lives with activities, and to constantly be on the go, doing several things at once. This book argues that filling our lives with activity at work and at home actually hurts our brains. It makes us unhappy and it makes it harder to be at peace with ourselves.
All this is of course made worse by the endless of stimulation of social media that has made addicts of so many of us. We take in so much information on a daily basis that we’re seriously over-stimulated.
And we don’t realise that just like our bodies have to process every bit of food we ingest, so too our minds have to process every bit of information, every emotion, thought and experience that we encounter every day, so being on the go all the time, gives our minds too much to process when we sleep at night and this turns us into insomniacs and restless sleepers.
The idea is to step back a little, build periods of quietness into our lives, times when we’re truly not doing anything with our minds, not watching TV, not reading, not listening to an audio book or a podcast, maybe just sitting out in the balcony or the garden in the morning, going for a walk, looking out of the window in between periods of work, and just being for a bit.
between the pages 