Brainwork. David A. Sousa
items. This total well exceeds working memory’s capacity, so you could not remember the example accurately. But in the second example, the brain quickly recognized the five understandable items, and the total was within working memory’s capacity. The major difference between the two examples was how the items were chunked. Chunking improves your ability to remember the items. That ability, however, is dependent on your knowledge base. Because the letter combinations were familiar to you, you were able to chunk quickly and accurately. Recall trying to remember that ten-digit number earlier in the chapter. People who spend a lot of time calling others on the telephone often remember all the digits correctly. That’s because their brains are accustomed to chunking ten-digit numbers as the area code + prefix + extension, so 9237546302 is quickly represented in the brain as (923) 754-6302. Practice chunking by linking relevant items of information together using some common characteristic, such as their similarities, differences, advantages, disadvantages, functions, or structures.
Accept the Practicality of Satisficing
When there is just too much information and too many choices, resist the search for perfection. Realize that your competitors are in the same overload quagmire as you, and, except in extraordinary circumstances, settle for satisficing. If you do the satisficing in a rational—rather than arbitrary—way, then you have a practical and defensible approach to information management.
Value the Power of Unconscious Thought
You will recall that the studies of Dijksterhuis, Messner, and Iyengar revealed that those participants who got less information, who pondered over it, and who delayed their decisions were much more pleased with their final choices than those who amassed large amounts of data and made a quick decision.21 For the latter, regret over their choices eventually set in. These results point to the value of unconscious thought. Allowing information to settle and percolate in our unconscious system may ultimately provide the best decision. But too much data can impair the unconscious processes. Loran Nordgren and his colleagues Maarten Bos and Ap Dijksterhuis, for instance, found that when people face a large amount of complex information, they tend to default to their conscious system, a path that often results in poorer choices.22
So what’s the answer? Do you ignore some of the information and settle for satisficing? In a word, yes. But even that approach can have its challenges; when faced with an information avalanche, your brain has a difficult time deciding which items to ignore. This is especially true when you are gathering information online because every new item links to other new items and so on. Furthermore, it is often difficult to determine the validity and reliability of online information. The researchers suggest that the best strategy, then, may be to use your conscious mind to acquire and screen only the relevant information, move on to some other tasks while the unconscious processes do their work, and then make a decision. With this approach, you are taking advantage of the strengths of both the conscious and unconscious systems and limiting their weaknesses. Several of their studies confirm that the best decisions involving complex choices engage both conscious and unconscious thought and that this sequence is better than conscious or unconscious thought alone. These findings might be difficult to accept because they seem to contradict the notion that the more rational thought given to a complex decision, the better. How do researchers explain this conscious/unconscious paradox?
The Conscious/Unconscious Paradox
As we learn and develop more expertise in our work, the brain builds large and robust information and skill banks in our long-term memory. It also establishes networks that remember the feelings associated with our experiences. Because the emotional brain has a powerful and resilient memory system, we tend to remember the best and worst things that happen to us. We forget mediocre and uneventful experiences quickly. Can you remember what you had for dinner a week ago last Thursday? Probably not, unless it was a special occasion or you got sick from the food. In those instances, the good or bad emotional responses helped you to remember the meal. Whenever you have made an important decision that resulted in a spectacular success or a disappointing failure, your brain retained your feelings of joy or gloom as part of the experience. Over time, these cognitive decisions and their emotional messages form a rich pool of experiences through which you can filter a potential new decision. But that takes time.
The rational brain is very competent at making mundane decisions, such as picking a shirt to wear to work, and at solving simple problems, such as balancing your checkbook. Emotions do not really matter much here. Complex problems are a different story because of their possible consequences. We noted earlier how the prefrontal cortex becomes very inefficient when bombarded by too much information. As a result, you may overanalyze the information and select a choice that you may soon regret (see first example in fig. 1.4, page 22). However, if you use information management strategies to limit the incoming items and avoid rushing to a decision, then your rational brain has the time to explore your pool of experiences and link new information to similar emotion-laden decisions of the past. Now your unconscious thought process can examine options based on your past experiences (assuming you have had a sufficient number of them in your work domain) and render a better decision (see second example in fig. 1.4). This process honors intuition in that the final decision “feels right.” Emotional messages play a strong role here, and we will discuss much more about the power of emotions in chapter 3.
Figure 1.4: In the upper diagram, too much information overloads the prefrontal cortex, resulting in a quick and poor decision followed by regret. In the lower diagram, information management strategies slow down the process and produce a better decision.
A Final Word About Information and the Brain
This chapter has been devoted to deflating the corporate tenet that the more information people have, the better decisions they will make. The reality is that the brain’s prefrontal cortex has a limited capacity for information, and when overloaded, it is likely to make a decision that seems important but really isn’t. In short, less is more!
Another pervasive corporate tenet is that modern technology allows employees to multitask, thereby improving their efficiency. Really? Can the brain actually multitask? If so, how does that work? And can employees get better at it? If not, why not? You will find the answers to these questions in the next chapter—and they may surprise you.
CHAPTER TWO
The Myth of Multitasking
There is time enough for everything in the
course of the day, if you do but one thing
at once; but there is not time enough in the
year, if you will do two things at a time.
LORD CHESTERFIELD
IT WAS AROUND NOON, AND THE AIRPORT CLUB LOUNGE WAS PACKED. Bad weather had delayed numerous flights, including mine. People were frantically trying to get in touch with their home offices as well as the clients they were scheduled to meet at their next destination. I could not help but notice the young man sitting across from me; he was talking very loudly into his headset and complaining about the flight delay. But what really caught my attention was how much he was interacting with the items around him. In addition to his headset conversation, he was scrolling through his personal digital assistant and checking his laptop screen, periodically typing a few keystrokes. He also was trying to read a story on the front page of the USA Today that was resting on a table next to him. As time went on, he appeared to cycle his attention easily among all the items. Surely, to the casual observer, this man was multitasking. I bet even the man himself believed he was multitasking—but he wasn’t. Why? Because the brain cannot multitask.
What Does Multitasking