Happiness Express Read online

According to Dr Barbara Oakley, professor at Oakland University, the brain uses two modes of learning—focused and diffused. The former is when you actively learn things from the external stimuli around you, which results in the creation of neural circuits. Typically, the brain cannot sustain this mode for more than 30 minutes. Focused activity is tiring.

  The diffused mode is when you are more or less on autopilot—while bathing, driving, walking, playing with your dog, and so on. You aren’t thinking about that activity as you’re doing it, and thoughts in the brain are drifting from one to the next. This is the time when the brain processes the information it has acquired during the focused mode and gets those coveted flashes of insight.

  Have you ever struggled with a problem and given up in frustration? A difficult crossword puzzle, for example. No matter how hard you try to get that word, it remains elusive. This is your focused mode. Then, later, while you are relaxing, an Aha! moment happens, as the solution suddenly dawns upon you from nowhere. This is your brain in its diffused state. This is when it actually works to solve problems, making the necessary connections, and is at its intelligent best. However, for it to come up with insights and solutions, it needs time.

  Be careful not to confuse entertainment with the diffused mode. When you are playing Candy Crush Saga, watching a movie or surfing the net, your focused brain is engaged and you are not in the diffused mode.

  To clarify, simply staring out of your window is diffused mode. Looking for something as you stare out of the window is focused mode.

  Some of the greatest inventions in history have a certain pattern to them. It’s mostly a vision, dream or event that catalyses an insight. Kekulé dreamt of a snake eating its own tail and solved the problem of the benzene ring structure. Archimedes was in the middle of a bath when the Eureka moment happened. Everyone knows about Newton and the apple. We could go on, but you get the drift.

  Kekulé’s Dream

  The anatomy of inspiration is to persevere with a problem until the point of saturation, keeping the focused brain engaged. Then, completely let go and do something relaxing so that the diffused brain can take over. Ninety times out of a hundred, you would end up with a fantastic solution when you return to the problem. This solution, you’d realise, was always out there but you somehow never perceived it.

  Meditation is a brilliant practice for encouraging diffused brain activity. Ancient Indians knew this, and India of yore was possibly the only civilisation where science and spirituality went hand-in-hand. Science was the exploration of the outside, and spirituality the adventure of the inside. All our ancient Indian scientists were saints.

  For effortless learning, you need to engage both modes of the brain. This means never study or work on a problem for more than 45 minutes at one go. Decide how long you want to engage your focused mode. I would suggest you start with 20 minutes. Make sure, don’t exceed 45 minutes. Set an alarm and turn off all distractions. Work and focus hard on the task at hand for that time. If you use the focused mode for longer, you will usually end up wasting your time as your mind will drift off. Better to relax for a while after your focused work and let your diffused mode take over.

  To enter the diffused mode, get up from your desk, stretch and relax for about 20 minutes. This gives your brain some time off. Then return to your work and try tackling something else. This will buy even more time for your diffused mode and you have a very high chance of striking gold when you eventually get back to your original problem after a few more breaks.

  For me, a focused effort of 45 minutes, followed by playing the piano, heading out for a walk or listening to music for about half an hour, works best. Rinse and repeat and I can go on for hours.

  Don’t postpone coming back to the problem for too long. Else, those delicate synapses will dissolve and you’ll forget a lot. You will then have to start all over again. It’s quite a game, and you will need to figure out the perfect length of the break that’s suitable for you. For Dinesh, me, and most people we know, 24-48 hours is optimum. Wait longer than that, and it’s like hitting the reset button.

  Do ONE Thing

  You’re sitting at your computer, creating a presentation for an upcoming board meeting. You have to detail the work in progress of a project you are in charge of. You have various spreadsheets open, plus a couple of reports on hand and a slew of related emails from your teammates. You treat this project with paramount importance, considering you have only ten minutes to talk about a year’s worth of effort of around thirty people. You are completely involved in your work.

  While you’re doing this, millions and millions of neural connections are being forged in your brain. Some are gaining strength, while others are breaking off as you chug along with your work. This is your brain in focused mode.

  Then a notification pops up. It’s a photo from your best friend, captioned, ‘I think you’re suffering from a lack of Vitamin Me!’ You smile as you read it. You have to reply to that. You try to think of something cool and funny, but in vain. You get on to Google, and after several minutes of searching, find that perfect response in the form of a readymade quote: ‘Always remember you are my best buddy. If you ever fall, I will be there to pick you up. . . as soon as I finish laughing.’ You copy-paste it and press ‘Send’. You beam on imagining your friend’s reaction to your witty comeback.

  Meanwhile, in your brain, all those neural pathways related to your work, presentation and board meeting have been short-circuited to make way for the new networks you need to goof around with your bestie. The connections for goofing around are very different from those needed for a board meeting presentation.

  You return to your work feeling a bit distracted, awaiting a reply from your friend. The goof-around circuits are now being replaced with work circuits. Just as you finish another slide, pop comes another notification. The neurons in your head are going crazy. ‘Does he want to work or goof around?’ It’s a very different environment up there for these two modes.

  As your neurons wrestle with themselves, your phone beeps again. This time it’s a message from the love interest of your life. Of course, you have to reply to that right away! Your neurons are now forced to enter love mode, and those poor little fellows end up in a tangled mess. Making you end up in a mess.

  The bottom line is that there is a very real chemical, electrical and physical change that occurs in the brain when we do a particular task. If we hop to another task, it triggers a full-on change. Our brain cannot and does not know how to jump between these changes effectively. Remember when your mother told you to do one thing at a time? She was right. Studies upon studies have shown that people who think they can multitask actually can’t and don’t. They have poor recall, hazy understanding, slumped productivity, and so on. Their cognitive ability is compromised.

  While in focused mode, ensure you are shielded from all distractions. One of the biggest things you can do is switch off all notifications on your gadgets. You can check your messages, emails, whatevers after you are done with what is at hand. Those little pop-up windows are the bane of creativity and productivity.

  On iOS there is a button with a half moon. It turns off all notifications, phone calls and alerts. Use it while working. Remember to turn it off when you’re done with your work. Android has a slightly more complicated Do Not Disturb feature. Google keeps changing theirs in the different versions of their OS. Read up about it to make sure it works the way you want it to. I hope that in some later iteration of operating systems, there will be a button on the screen that turns off all these pop-ups for a prescribed amount of time. Use this little trick and watch your productivity soar to unbelievable levels.

  Your neurons will definitely love you for it.

  Chew Gum, Learn Better

  Would it be easier to lift 5 kg or 10 kg? Common sense will tell you, the answer is obviously 5 kg. Common sense doesn’t quite work when it comes to the brain. It is counter intuitive, but the brain loves to be overloaded with information for it
to learn, understand and remember better. The more things sizzle, fizz and sputter up there, the better it functions. The more senses that are involved in the learning process, the more detailed and accurate the comprehension and recall.

  Our brain evolved in a very multisensory environment. Survival depended on the keenness of all the five senses. More stimulation and more activity meant better learning.

  An interesting experiment required a bunch of students to chew gum of a particular flavour while studying. These kids were then tested on the material they had worked on. If they chewed gum of that same flavour while writing the exam, they recalled better. The recall was not as good if they didn’t chew gum or chewed gum of a different flavour.

  Cognitive psychologist Richard Mayer is known for his experiments on multisensory learning. In one of them, he made a group listen to a lecture about a particular subject, made another group watch it, and allowed one more group to both watch as well as listen to it. The third group consistently outperformed the other two in its ability to cognise and recall the subject matter.

  Dr John Medina, a teacher of molecular biology, once sprayed perfume on the wall of his classroom before he took a lecture there. He then gave the same lesson to another batch of students but didn’t spray the perfume. He later tested both batches on that lecture in a room sprayed with the same perfume. The class who had studied in the perfumed room did significantly better than the other. Every time he repeated this experiment, he got the same results.

  When you involve more of your senses in the learning process, you assimilate better and your understanding of the subject matter is superior. You recall more accurately and in greater detail, and you remember things for longer.

  In the film Merry Andrew, Danny Kaye’s character teaches a bunch of kids the basics of geometry in a song-and-dance sequence. While wiggling away, he croons, ‘The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two adjacent sides.’ Many other geometrical fundas found their way into this little ditty. I watched this movie as a child and still remember the song. It helped sort out the basics of geometry for me. I wish Danny had sung a separate number on trigonometry and organic chemistry as well. My life would have been so much easier.

  Vision is our most dominant sense. It takes up more than half of our brain’s resources. No wonder visual information is such a powerful learning aid. Pictures, especially moving pictures (animations), are an incredibly powerful media for learning.

  Hollywood and Bollywood spend billions creating films that entertain and enthrall. If they’d use some of their creativity and a bit of that money to produce movies that teach physics, math and the like, the learning quotient of the planet would rise dramatically. Who wouldn’t want to see Spielberg’s Trilogy: Geometry Wars, The Polygon Strikes Back and The Return of the Triangle—a long line ago, in a dimension far, far away. . .

  Think of all the life lessons you’ve learned and never forgotten. It’s likely that a combination of 4-5 senses and a host of strong emotions were involved at the time you learned them. Add in some emotions to as big a mix as possible of the senses, and you can bet that the learning will be cemented into your system.

  WORHJKSDFGJKFDS and the Brain

  You are walking along in the jungle, admiring the scenery, thanking God that civilisation is far away, praying for some nice pizza. Then there is a sudden movement, out of the ordinary, which you spy from the corner of your eye. There is an immediate change in your entire body-mind system, as your brain gears you up to either fight whatever happens to be there or run away from it.

  You start to feel cold in the pit of your stomach, your eyes are suddenly able to see much more detail, your hands and legs begin to get warm as blood gets drained from the stomach to your extremities to prepare for fight or flight. Your heart beats faster to pump more and more blood into the system. If the brain deems the danger intimidating enough, it will release blood even from itself. This is a question of survival. While vital functions are maintained, everything else in the body and brain that could be shut down is shut down. This is what we call fear. It’s why a person who is afraid can’t think straight. They simply don’t have the resources in their system to do so.

  You have to understand that fear—feeling cold in the stomach, heart beating faster, sweating as blood moves to your hands and feet, etc.—is simply your brain readying your body for a fight or a sprint.

  Three things can happen now.

  First, you realise there was nothing to worry about. It was only a big bird. It caws at you and flies off. In a few moments, the fear recedes. You start to think clearly again and relax as blood from the extremities finds its way back to where it was withdrawn from. In a few minutes, the episode is over and you are back to normal, possibly feeling a little drained, and maybe the alertness still lingers until you reach what you believe is a safe area.

  Second, there is a threat, but something you can easily deal with. A short scuffle and an animal soul is on its way to the hereafter. Again, the same cool-down period as above. This time, you might feel drained, and strangely energised as you might start cooking up a story to tell your family. . . ‘You know what happened as I was walking through the jungle?! A worhjksdfgjkfd attacked me and I killed it. This is because I listened to my mother and drank milk and listened to my father and exercised. . .’ and so on.

  Third, it’s big and dangerous. It’s a vpmrieaghlok. And it looks hungry. You run as fast as you can to safety. Either you make it and the usual cool down is initiated again. . . or you don’t. And nothing really matters much anymore.

  Did you know that the cool down from the hyper alert state of fear to normalcy happens in a very short time frame? Just a few minutes, that’s it. This is how we have evolved over thousands of years. Our brains are wired to handle intense periods of short-term stress.

  You must have heard about superhuman feats people are capable of when they or their loved ones are in danger. This is the brain and body doing what they know best, to ensure our continued survival on the planet.

  So far, so good. Fast forward to the present.

  These days, we feel threatened too. These threats are not from worhjksdfgjkfds or vpmrieaghloks. But it could be from our bosses, mothers-in-law, or a traffic cop. You may be nervous standing on a stage or making a presentation before a bunch of people. You may feel jumpy writing that exam or appearing for a job interview. Unfortunately, our brains cannot distinguish between a worhjksdfgjkfd and a disgruntled boss. All it does is perceive danger. As soon as that feeling of being unsafe is registered, the brain goes about its business. It presses the buttons to drain the stomach of blood and send it to the extremities. And fear takes over.

  When you’re at the receiving end of your boss’s fury in their cabin, your brain and body insist that you punch them (fight) or run away (flight). Both not very good strategies in this situation.

  The brain feels cornered and still thinks vpmrieaghlok and goes about figuring out primitive survival strategies. You are overcome with fear and simply cannot perform. As the situation intensifies, the brain feels even more threat. This means that more of the thinking, coherent brain is shutting down. What happens next is irrational behaviour. You storm off, swear, stop responding. . . This is really not your fault; it is being created by evolution.

  Here’s another scenario. You are in a bit of trouble at work. Nothing serious, just a low-level threat. You then realise you have forgotten your spouse’s birthday. Depending on how long you have been married and how your relationship with your spouse is right now, this could be a low- or high-level threat. Plus, you need to finish a report, answer some important emails, pay your bills, see a dentist—all mostly low-level threats. The brain continuously churns out a cocktail of chemicals to keep you on the edge, just getting ready for fight or flight, but not quite. As you can imagine, not enough blood in some places and too much blood in other places for a prolonged period of time is going to hurt you in the long run. This is
stress.

  The brain and body can easily manage short, intense bursts of danger. But a prolonged feeling of being even a little unsafe has hazardous consequences and ravages our system. The slow boil is what finishes us off.

  If you observe our places of work and education, you’d agree that almost everyone there is on a slow boil. For most, this continues even at home. Maybe after a few million years, evolution will catch up with technology and our lifestyles, and hopefully, the brain will learn to deal with sustained low-level stress. Meanwhile, it’s a real problem that needs to be urgently addressed.

  The savage cocktail that the brain releases to combat sustained stress greatly inhibits neural activity and thus our ability to learn. Our neurons detest an atmosphere of stress and simply cannot do their jobs. They don’t have enough resources available to make and maintain those delicate synapses. When the environment is safe and you feel happy, your neurons heave a collective sigh of relief and get on with their work—to make a more productive, creative and efficient you. A brain free of stressors translates into a smarter you.

  Given that most of us don’t live in jungles anymore and are subject to these sustained stressors, the question is whether there is a way to re-programme the brain right now and bypass the dangerous evolutionary response.

  The answer is a resounding ‘Yes’.

  Ancient Indians developed certain techniques for that. They called them yoga and meditation.

  Remember, learning is only a process—a matter of growing dendrites and strengthening the connections between them. Here is a summary of the factors that influence stronger connections and enhance learning:

  Learn in a multisensory environment. Throw in a few emotions, and you will remember that lesson for a long time.

  You grow dendrites for exactly what you do. So, be aware of what you do. These dendrites wire themselves deep within your brain as you do something again and again. Make sure you want them.