The working brain: introducing the prefrontal cortex
October 10th, 2009 // 11:30 am @ David Phillips
More people than ever are being paid to think. America has moved from an industrial economy to a information economy and the result is the need for more thinkers and less manufacturing and service workers. More and more people are being paid to make decisions and process information, not do routine tasks. However, making complex decisions and solving problems are difficult because of the limitations of your brain. Simply trying to do two things at once can turn a highly productive person into a scatterbrained person.
The prefrontal cortex
The process of making decisions and solving problems relies heavily on the region of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex. The cortex is the outer covering of the brain. It is about 1/10 of an inch thick and covers the brain like a sheet. The prefrontal cortex sits just behind the forehead and makes up a small part of the cortex. It was the last major brain area to develop and is only about 4% of the entire volume of the brain.
Without the prefrontal cortex you would not be able to set any type of goal. You wouldn’t be able to control impulses. You wouldn’t be able to solve problems and would be unable to visual a situation you had never seen before. You also wouldn’t be able to think creatively.
The preforntal cortex is the seat of conscious interactions with your world. This is where your conscious thinking occurs. This conscious thought is mainly made up of five functions: understanding, deciding, recalling, memorizing and inhibiting. According to author David Rock, these “functions are recombined to plan, problem-solve, communicate, and other task. They use the prefrontal cortex intensively and require significant resources to operate.” [1]
The need for energy
Conscious mental activities require a lot of metabolic resources. They use the metabolic resources of your blood significantly faster than any of the automatic brain functions such as keeping your heart beating and your lungs breathing. Conscious mental activities can reduce your ability to physical activity. A study done in 1898 by Jeanette C. Welsh measured a person’s ability to do physical tasks while thinking. The scientist had subjects start a mental task and then were asked to exert as much force as possible on a dynamometer, a machine used to measure force.[2] Dr. Welch’s results showed that “almost all mental tasks reduced maximum force, often by as much as 50 percent.” [3]
Therefore, energy-hungry activities, such as scheduling meetings, might exhaust you after an hours. In addition, make one difficult decision and the next will be more difficult to make. This is because the prefrontal cortex uses a lot of metabolic fuel such as glucose and oxygen. This would explain the need for calories and food for those who are knowledge-workers. It would also indicate the reason so many in our society are obese. We are are working hard mentally, need energy to achieve that, so we snack on unhealthy foods and drink a lot of drinks that are high in sugar. We then become addicted to those kinds of foods.
The trick to managing our thinking is to prioritize. We will see that in our next article.
NOTES:
[1] Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long
[2] See Welch JC (1898). “On the measurement of mental activity through muscular activity and the determination of a constant of attention.” American Journal of Physiology 1:283–306.
[3] Rock, 8.
Category : Books & Personal Development