When you're at work, be fully at work. And let your leisure time be what it's meant to be - restorative and fun.
Critical thinking is not something you do once with an issue and then drop it. It requires that we update our knowledge as new information comes in. Time spent evaluating claims is not just time well spent. It should be considered part of an implicit bargain we've all made.
The obvious rule of efficiency is you don't want to spend more time organizing than it's worth.
The phrase 'fake news' sounds too playful, too much like a schoolchild faking illness to get out of a test.
Healthy breaks can hit the reset button in your brain, restoring some of the glucose and other metabolic nutrients used up with deep thought. A healthy break is one in which you allow your brain to rest, to loosen its grip on your thoughts.
If you're making a bunch of little decisions - like, do I read this email now or later? Do I file it? Do I forward it? Do I have to get more information? Do I put it in the spam folder? - that's a handful of decisions right there, and you haven't done anything meaningful. It puts us into a brain state of decision fatigue.
Music can be thought of as a type of perceptual illusion in which our brain imposes structure and order on a sequence of sounds. Just how this structure leads us to experience emotional reactions is part of the mystery of music.
Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.
There are not two sides to a story when one side is a lie. Journalists - and the rest of us - must stop giving equal time to things that don't have an opposing side.
Approximating involves making a series of educated guesses systematically by partitioning the problem into manageable chunks, identifying assumptions, and then using your general knowledge of the world to fill in the blanks.
Neurons are living cells with a metabolism. And they need glucose in order to function. Glucose is the fuel of the brain, just like gasoline is the fuel of your car.
Music and dance have also always been a communal activity, something that everyone participated in. The thought of a musical concert in which a class of professionals performed for a quiet audience was virtually unknown throughout our species' history.
Even though we think we're getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.
Many of us feel as though we are overloaded and overwhelmed by all the things that are happening, and we can't stop work for even five minutes or we'll fall behind: the idea that if we don't take breaks, we're being more productive.
Of the thousands of ways that humans differ from one another, turns out there's this one cluster of traits called conscientiousness that predict a whole host of positive life outcomes, such as longevity over our health, life satisfaction.
When it comes to snowing people, one effective technique is to get a whole bunch of verifiable facts right and then add one or two that are untrue.
That walk around the block, that fresh air, is going to help you work more quickly and effectively when you get back.
The state-of-the-art techniques really allowed us to make maps of how Sting's brain organizes music. That's important because at the heart of great musicianship is the ability to manipulate in one's mind rich representation of the desired soundscape.
Unscrupulous writers often count on the fact that most people don't bother reading footnotes or tracking down citations.
Brain extenders are anything that get information out of our heads and into the physical world: calendars, key hooks by the front door, note pads, 'to do' lists.
