Autopilot: The Art and Science of Doing Nothing
Language: English
Pages: 0
ISBN: 1491589000
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Andrew Smart wants you to sit and do nothing much more often―and he has the science to explain why.
At every turn we're pushed to do more, faster, and more efficiently: That drumbeat resounds throughout our wage-slave society. Multitasking is not only a virtue, it's a necessity. Books such as Getting Things Done, The One Minute Manager, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People regularly top the best seller lists, and have spawned a considerable industry.
But Andrew Smart argues that slackers may have the last laugh. The latest neuroscience shows that the "culture of effectiveness" is not only ineffective, it can be harmful to your well-being. He makes a compelling case―backed by science―that filling life with activity at work and at home actually hurts your brain.
A survivor of corporate-mandated "Six Sigma" training to improve efficiency, Smart has channeled a self-described "loathing" of the time-management industry into a witty, informative, and wide-ranging audiobook that draws on the most recent research into brain power. Use it to explain to bosses, family, and friends why you need to relax―right now.
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state network was usually considered someone else’s noise. Do not confuse this with the myth that we only use ten percent of our brains. What science has revealed is that we use all of our brains, just not in the ways many people assume. Only minor perturbations occur in the brain’s ongoing activity during a mental task like adding something to your to-do list. For example, the neural energy required to press a button whenever a red light appears in a laboratory experiment is only a small
perspective. Recent analysis using graph theory also indicates that the precuneous is a hub node, in addition to being part of the default mode network. Like O’Hare or Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport, it has a lot of traffic. During experimental tasks, or in real life when your attention is directed to a PowerPoint about risk management, the precuneous shows less activity. When you are stressing at work about the slip in the project schedule or doing “deep-dives” to find out why a product failed,
environment, Ngai’s study found small acts of resistance among the workers such as stealing products, slow-downs, stoppages, small-scale strikes, and sometimes even sabotage, which really delays production. Then there are of course the suicides, the final option for workers to exert control over their lives. The system—in this case, the worker’s brain—tries to inject variation into its life—the stealing and sabotage—to find a more stable space in which the intrinsic dynamics of the system are in
strategy that requires culture change in the organization.” After going through a few weeks of Six Sigma training, I basically learned how to write my name on a piece of cardboard, how to draw on flipcharts, and how to pass pieces of paper to other members of my group. All while the instructor gave us questionable information about statistics. I learned too that questioning him about the statistics led to long digressions about his dog in Arizona. Where did Six Sigma come from? Is it a secret
function normally our brains also need to be idle—a lot of the time, it turns out. We are too purposeful, too directed; we should let ourselves go on autopilot more often. In aviation, an autopilot is a system for controlling airplanes without input from pilots, developed because flying an airplane manually requires absolute, constant attention from the pilot. As flying got higher, faster, and longer, manual flying caused serious (and dangerous) levels of pilot fatigue. The introduction of
