Using your mind well.
“It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.”
–René Descartes
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Let me explain it the way I understand it. Anyone in the audience with better neuroscientific chops (read: “anyone in the audience”) should feel free to correct or expand on what I say here.
- The frontal lobe of the brain is the seat of human creativity. It is the place where novel thoughts arise and new relationships between things are imagined.
- The frontal lobe of the brain shuts down in the face of fear or worry, at which point the “lower” centers of our brain in the cerebellum kick in to carry out things like the fight-or-flight instinct. This is handy when you’re confronted with a tiger, but less handy when you’re wondering how you’ll pay the bill for your kid’s braces — or, more to the point, how you’ll hit your work targets for the month.
- The cerebellum is extraordinarily powerful for carrying out habitual tasks — brushing your teeth, touch-typing — but cannot generate creative thought. Yet it will take over forcefully under conditions of stress.
- If we want to balance our daily tasks in a way that harnesses the natural functions of our brains, we should form powerful habits around the parts of our days that can be made routine, while warding off anxieties so that our frontal lobes can come up with deep, creative, or cool solutions to our challenges.
If you’re responsible for just yourself in business, how can YOU form more powerful habits while warding off anxieties?
If you manage others, how can you help THEM do these things?
(This is part of what I was talking about when I talked about brain-friendly habits this morning.)
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As a consultant, actively engaging in building new relationships and bartering services, especially when things are slow, can help to keep the anxiety at bay and engage the correct lobe! I’m not suggesting that it works all the time but activity begets activity.
Thanks as always, for a provocative post Tim.
I just can’t leave this one alone. That’s a good explanation but you should add any set of thoughts turns out to be a circuit among several regions of the brain from hind to fore. Whether your emotions dominate or your logic is a matter of training, practice, discipline and experience. The military has it right after all these years – you react in emergencies as you’ve been trained and you train as you’ve thought it thru ahead of time. It’s always amused me that Bodhidharma was the founding patriarch of Chan in China and the progenitor of Shaolin Kung Fu but neither the Zen Buddhists nor the fighting monks much acknowledge the other side of the lineages. So the question is how does one train ahead of time to react well in a crisis. Well the exercise manual has yet to be developed but some recent and older work is a start. Gladwell and Colvin’s books illustrate the 10K Rule but if you want the science try Begeley’s “Train Your Mind”. Try James “Talks to Teachers” plus some of his essays on decision-making in the Everyman edition. Finally, not to go airey-fairey on you, try “Practical Guide to Buddhist Meditation” by Paramanda, which is consistent with both science, James and the Greeks :) !
I think it really depends on the level at which negative thoughts dominate. For example, if you have just lost your job and have no money for food and rent with not a soul to help you out, I’m sure the cerebellum will be left in low gear, whereas if you’re on top of things, creative thinking will be a possibility.
[...] first place. Here, Hallowell suggests something similar, and something that I’ve touched on before: that maintaining positive emotions helps you to use the frontal lobes of your brain better and [...]
Great post again. Web Design Bangkok, is so correct here, as I know someone in a situation much like the one they talk about here, and this person is so down and feels hopeless and has no energy to focus on any thing and saying that, their creative thinking is just not there,