Your Brain at Work
Your Brain at Work
Your Brain at Work
from Your Brain at Work by David Rock
How well do you know your brain?
Can you explain what your brain is doing when you open up your laptop to work, open a textbook to study, or conduct a meeting?
In the book “Your Brain at Work” author David Rock uses the latest neuroscience to explain what your brain is doing while you work.
Rock says your mind is like a theater. The stage in your mental theater represents your short‐term working memory, and it's controlled by
your prefrontal cortex (the brain region just behind your forehead).
During the workday you can use your stage to perform five functions: understanding, recalling, memorizing, inhibiting, and deciding. To
remember these five functions, think of the acronym: U.R. M.In.D.
To perform these five functions, you need actors, audience members, and a stage director. Actors on stage represent objects, tasks, and
pieces of information you're focused on at any one moment. This sentence is currently an actor on your stage.
Audience members are maps of information in your long‐term memory. The audience is constantly trying to make sense of and associate
with actors on stage. Understanding, recalling, memorizing and deciding are made possible by the audience making associations to the
actors on stage.
The stage director is responsible for inhibiting unwanted actors from coming onto the stage and ruining a performance. These unwanted
actors are external distractions, like nearby conversations, and internal distractions, like afternoon food cravings.
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www.ProductivityGame.com