The Science of How to Build Our Most Powerful Brains w Dr. Immordino-Yang
What does your mind do when it wanders? Perhaps you catch yourself getting 'lost in thought'... moments of daydreaming, wondering, wandering... Do you believe that those 'lapses in attention' are helpful or hindering? Without knowing what the brain is actually doing during those moments, we might be too quick to dismiss our lapses in attention as wasted time or something to be discouraged. “Rest is not idleness.” John Lubbock, The Use of Life (1894) Looking Out and Looking In In this interview with pioneering neuroscientist Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, we explore the brain's distinctions between looking out, being outwardly and outcome-focused, compared with the brain's ability and tendency to look inward, beyond the here-and-n0w. From this research, we see how the brain's ability to shift, toggle and navigate between these inward and outward views is in fact a powerful mechanism for more complex thinking. Our brain's ability to perceive beyond the here-and-now is related to social-cognitive complexity. There are a lot of different ways we can talk about complexity. In some of her research, we see Complexity as an increasing coordination and integration of perspectives and elements. The ability to coordinate and integrate different perspectives and elements, is also reflected in increased coordination and ability to efficiently activated and toggle between networks and systems of the brain. This toggling and shifting of activity depending on context and what we are doing with our attention is part of a wider view of looking at systems that help us deal both with our external environments, our internal environments as well as what we are able to do with all of that information. Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Podcast A Bias Towards Outward Attention A lot of discussion about attention has to do with how we are attending to the outside world. When we talk about challenges with attention, we are often pointing to lapses in externally focused attention. Decades of research reflect that there are three differentiated systems that help monitor and respond to the environment around us and incoming stimuli: these are the Alerting, Orienting and Executive Control Systems (see Corbetta & Shulman, 2002; Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz, & Posner, 2002; Posner & Petersen, 1990) These are critical for cognitive development and many different domains of life, and interventions in schools for example that strengthen these skills help improve academic performance (Posner & Rothbart, 2005; Smallwood et al., 2007; Stevens, Lauinger, & Neville, 2009). What if our environments are demanding TOO MUCH of this externally-oriented attention? What if our brain needs time for inward reflection as a way to make it better at processing information? What if our assessment of brain functioning based on outward attention is an INCOMPLETE PICTURE? Rest is Not Idleness To understand this, we can look at what the brain does when it is NOT goal-directed, or paying attention to an external stimulus. Increasing amounts of research are exploring how the brain’s architecture activates according to various functions, such as Task Positive and Task Negative. TASK POSITIVE: when brain architecture is recruited with active enga...