Embracing the Scatterbrain

You’re going to feel better about yourself after reading this post. Henning Beck’s Scatterbrain: How the Mind’s Mistakes Make Humans Creative, Innovative, and Successful takes a closer look at many of the things our brains do that frustrate us. He dives deep into the science behind why these things happen, and more importantly, why they happen by design.

Did you just read an email and can’t remember what it said? It’s not your fault. Did you freeze up on a call, forget the word “solution,” and then fumble to get back on track? Don’t take it so hard. Did you stand in front of the Triscuits at the grocery store trying to choose from 18 flavor choices only to decide just to get Ritz instead? That’s just your brain being a human brain. And it acts like this for a reason.

(NOT) MORE THAN A FEELING

We’ve covered in previous blogs that people make their decisions based on emotions, not facts. Beck gives us details about how this decision-making process happens inside the brain, and it helps explain why so many of us are convinced we’re making rational decisions.

First, there is no single part of the brain that’s specifically dedicated to decision-making. Making decisions involves nearly every part of the brain, and Beck explains that we build our decisions from the bottom up. We start with our emotions and the very basic question of whether we should act to receive a reward or avoid punishment. Our emotions determine the direction we’re going to take.

Next, we add facts to our feelings. The emotional feedback goes from our limbic system to our frontal lobe, where it’s compared with our plans and experiences. The emotional part of the brain and the rational part of the brain volley this emerging decision back and forth a few times, and that’s when we’re motivated to act on our decision.

It’s almost like your emotional brain is tricking the rest of your brain into thinking that it’s acting on facts and strategic calculations. Really your brain is using the knowledge it has to validate your initial emotional impulse. So, yes, you do weigh facts to make a decision, you’re just not at all objective about the facts you weigh.

That’s why, as a sales professional, it’s critical to find out your prospect’s pain points and values. We don’t generally have strong feelings about product features. Rather, we have emotional reactions to the problems we’re having and the things we cherish. The fact that we make decisions based on our emotions is why storytelling can be so effective—nothing elicits feelings like a good story, especially when your prospect can relate to the narrative’s hero.

It can seem especially odd that we make our decisions based on emotion when we now have so much information at our fingertips. But your brain did not evolve to consume and synthesize huge amounts of data. There are those people who seem to be better at “going with their gut.” Then there are those of us who weigh pros and cons, and research the topic so that we can make an “informed” decision—the exact same decision we likely would have made had we just gone with our gut.

MAYBE YOU WERE JUST BORED

I have a good friend who told me once that she didn’t remember much about her childhood. She was kind of worried about it. Did something horrible happen that she’s blocked out and that’s why she can’t remember? After reading Scatterbrain, I called to tell her the good news. Chances are much more likely that she just had an extremely boring childhood.

One of your brain’s main jobs is to filter out unimportant material. As Beck says, “… the importance of a piece of information is not determined by its contents, but rather by its variation.” We’ve all had that feeling when we drive somewhere we visit all the time and realize we don’t remember how we got there. Of course we drove there, but it feels more like we’re just suddenly at our destination, and we can’t recall any details of the trip. That’s your brain dumping information that you don’t need.

Think about this the next time you’re sending an email. We get about 120 emails a day, and hardly any of them make it onto our radar. Try a humorous subject line, or simply something unexpected. In order to impress the brain, you need to be different.

Much of our lives (and some people’s entire childhoods) are full of doing mundane things. It won’t help you in the future to remember every dish you’ve washed or mile you’ve driven, so your brain tosses it out. But what your brain does with the other information is even stranger. Information that could help you later is committed to long-term memory, and those memories are not to be trusted.

“Memories have two main functions,” writes Beck. “We use them to construct an identity with our past and to learn from our experiences in order to improve going forward. For both of these functions, our memories need to be flexible, not static. The caveat is that flexibility also implies vulnerability.”

In order to use our memories to imagine the future or to put two things we’ve learned together to come up with something new, we need our memories and systems of recall to be adaptable. That often means that they aren’t very accurate. This is another example of something everyone swears up and down does not apply to them. We all think we remember exactly what happened, but none of us do. And it gets worse.

Every time we recall a memory, we make it more susceptible to being altered with new information. The more often we think about something, the more we’re changing it from the original. Furthermore, it’s relatively easy to get people to “remember” something that didn’t happen. A 2015 study published in Psychological Science found that 70% of adult participants can be convinced that they’ve committed a crime in their adolescence. And once a false memory like this forms in your brain, your brain can’t tell the difference between it and your true memories.

THIS IS MY HEARTBEAT SONG AND I CAN’T HEAR IT

Wait, didn’t I promise that reading this would make you feel better? So far, I’ve told you that you make irrational decisions and you can’t trust your memories. Some of you may also have realized you likely had a boring childhood. Beck’s point throughout this book, however, is that, even though you think of some of these things as “bad,” they are there for a reason. Our brains evolved to survive uncertain conditions, and they do so quite well.

As useful as it might seem to notice everything and store it somewhere for retrieval, we’re not built to do so. And you don’t really want to notice everything. For one, your own heartbeat would drive you insane. Thankfully, our brains filter out the sound of our own heartbeats. They do it so well that, if there is an external stimulus like a flashing light in rhythm with your heart, you’ll have trouble identifying it versus a light flashing out of sync with your heartbeat.

While our brains are able to filter out much of our external and internal stimuli that are not important, they are primed to notice anything that has changed. Remember that the information is less important than its variation, and nothing signifies a change quite as well as an alert on your phone. As Beck explains it, “The contents of a new message on our smartphone are not nearly as interesting for our brain as the fact that something just changed.” Studies have proven this to be true. Just the vibration of a phone derails our concentration as much as if we had answered the call.

If you find yourself succumbing to a lot of distractions, however, that could be your brain’s way of telling you it’s time to take a break. Beck shares recent research that tells us our brains require breaks. “Because,” as he explains it, “we don’t learn when we think we are learning. We learn in the pauses between the thinking.” Ever wonder why you come up with some of your best ideas in the shower or on a walk? Your brain needs breaks, and I don’t mean simply switching tasks—I mean a true mental break.

Beck’s overall message is to embrace the humanness of our brains. Go ahead and trust your gut. Sure, you may have remembered something incorrectly, but that’s also what makes us capable of inventing something new. Beck points out that the things we’re not good at—e.g., memorizing long lists, storing detailed images, sifting through loads of information—are the things AI will be taking over anyway. So don’t be so hard on yourself the next time you forget something. And go take a walk.

Interested in learning more about how Maestro’s workshops and coaching can help your sales team? What does your gut say? Please reach out at mastery@maestrogroup.co.