How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

THE HARD WORK OF RESTING AND REFLECTING
Even when our brains aren’t busy with a task—when they’re in what
neuroscientists call a “resting state”—they are highly active.
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What they’re
doing in this state has become the focus of an exciting emerging field of
research. Researchers are finding that when we allow our brains to take a break
from a task, they appear to do important work in encoding and consolidating the
information that we’ve just absorbed—and this reflection time results in
enhanced learning and insight.
Neuroscientist Saber Sami, of Birmingham University and Harvard Medical
School, is one of those seeking to map the activities of our “resting” brains. In
one of his experiments, volunteers were asked to lie inside an MRI scanner while
holding a keypad, and then were asked to push buttons that matched various
images flashing before their eyes. They were given several rest periods during
the task, during which their brains were scanned. Everyone got faster at the task
over the course of six hours, and the researchers could see which brain areas
were engaged as they got better at it. But the key finding was that researchers
saw new and stronger connections developing between those brain areas during
the volunteers’ rest periods, suggesting that their brains continued to process all
that they were learning while not actively engaged in the task.
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In other words,
they didn’t just improve because they had more practice. Their downtime played
an important role in their improvement, too.
In Sami’s study, volunteers weren’t aware that they were reflecting on the task
during their breaks. But a two-part study by Giada Di Stefano and her Harvard
Business School colleagues neatly demonstrated the power of 
consciously
taking

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a step back to gather our thoughts. The researchers first asked volunteers to
complete puzzles where they had to find the two numbers in a given set that
added up exactly to ten. Which sounds easy, but the challenge was that the
numbers ran to two decimal places. The researchers found people were better at
the task after being asked to take a moment to reflect on which strategies were
working for them.
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 That was already interesting.
Then, working with employees in a call center in India, Di Stefano and her
colleagues found real-life results that were even more marked. At the call center,
new employees were given an initial four weeks of training. They all received
the same training, but some of the new hires were asked to spend fifteen minutes
writing about two or more key lessons they’d learned that day. The result? The
employees who took the time to pause and reflect did 23 percent better on a
post-training test. A small amount of reflection resulted in a big boost to
performance.
In fact, giving our brain the chance to step back from a task and consolidate
our experiences is a little like what happens when we’re asleep, according to
cognitive neuroscientist Jessica Payne, head of the Sleep, Stress, and Memory
Lab at the University of Notre Dame. As she says, “It’s clear that it’s helpful for
us to go online and then offline in bursts, if we’re to maximize the brain’s ability
to make good use of the information we’re absorbing.”
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