{"id":2061,"date":"2009-08-27T09:44:37","date_gmt":"2009-08-27T17:44:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gtdtimes.com\/?p=2061"},"modified":"2014-02-03T14:38:06","modified_gmt":"2014-02-03T22:38:06","slug":"toning-up-your-thinking-muscles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gettingthingsdone.com\/2009\/08\/toning-up-your-thinking-muscles\/","title":{"rendered":"Toning up your thinking muscles"},"content":{"rendered":"

In our recent Productive Living newsletter<\/a>, David Allen talks about “Toning up your thinking muscles.”\u00a0 Here’s a letter from Frederick Ross, a graduate fellow at The Rockefeller University who shared his perspective on the brain as a muscle.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I’m something between a theoretical physicist, mathematician, and theoretical biologist by profession, so I’ve had to be on very intimate terms with my thinking apparatus for many years.<\/p>\n

The conscious, symbol manipulating part of our brain is very much like\u00a0 a muscle.\u00a0 It burns massive amounts of energy to use, it’s kind of puny for its purpose (just like human musculature — in comparison, someone once got a chimpanzee to lift a barbell, and kept adding weight…until the chimp got bored at tossed it across the room with no effort when there was 600lbs on it).\u00a0 It works with constant focus, and it can’t be worked that long.\u00a0 My experience, and that of many other mathematicians aside from the occasional freak is that four to
\nfive hours a day, five to six days a week, is the sustainable schedule for really heavy mental work.\u00a0 Not writing, or answering email, but trying to build new mathematics or similar tasks.<\/p>\n

But GTD isn’t muscle toning, it’s an exoskeleton.\u00a0 Like mathematics, the idea is to shove the difficult, energy intensive task of reasoning into an external thing that can be handled without fully powering up the Rube Goldberg contraption of our symbolic manipulation system.\u00a0 The difference is that I can still go through GTD motions very handily when my brain is already burned out from heavy mathematics.<\/p>\n

But there are other parts of our brain which are as important for what I do, but aren’t as much recognized.\u00a0 They’re kind of amorphous, but the two I rely on most heavily are these:<\/p>\n

A part that churns at problems continuously, with no effort and only a sense of background noise when it’s going full tilt.\u00a0 It goes while I’m sleeping, while I’m eating, while I’m doing heavy thinking on other things.\u00a0 I put the really sticky things in there and wait for the right connection to make them work to pop out.<\/p>\n

A sense of taste, not physically, but in the sense of “good taste” socially.\u00a0 In this case, it’s “good taste” mathematically or scientifically.\u00a0 My pleasure\/pain response has been reprogrammed over the years to make me notice things that have the characteristics of a fertile area to explore, and make me instantly averse to those which are going to be inherently intractable.\u00a0 Any practical reasons for studying anything I do are later rationalizations of judgements based purely on taste.<\/p>\n

And there are many more funny capacities.\u00a0 If I tell you a set of logical propositions, you won’t be able to reason about them except by dint of extreme effort.\u00a0 If I cast them as social relationships, you can effortlessly solve problems that would seem impossible on the face of it.<\/p>\n

And only the symbolic reasoning machinery, that unreliable, unstable contraption retrofitted onto our brain at some point in our evolutionary past, yet which essentially let us conquer the world, acts like a muscle.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For another interesting read on the science of GTD, read the study on How GTD Works<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In our recent Productive Living newsletter, David Allen talks about “Toning up your thinking muscles.”\u00a0 Here’s a letter from Frederick Ross, a graduate fellow at The Rockefeller University who shared his perspective on the brain as a muscle. I’m something between a theoretical physicist, mathematician, and theoretical biologist by profession, so I’ve had to be … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Toning up your thinking muscles”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[621,622],"class_list":["post-2061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-productivity-tips","tag-science-of-gtd","tag-the-brain","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nToning up your thinking muscles<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In our recent Productive Living newsletter, David Allen talks about "Toning up your thinking muscles." 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