From the course: Your Brain at Work (Blinkist Summary)

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Conserve your ability to think well

Conserve your ability to think well

From the course: Your Brain at Work (Blinkist Summary)

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Conserve your ability to think well

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- [Narrator] Blink number one: your ability to think well is a limited resource, so conserve the resource at every opportunity. We all know what it's like to burn the midnight oil. The later we work into the night, the less we're able to think clearly. And when we notice that our attention is waning, we tell ourselves that we should simply try harder. But there's reason to believe that you should give your brain a break instead. We use a massive amount of energy in all our interactions with the world, which fatigues our ability to think clearly. This indicates that our capacity for active thought is limited. Evidence for this limitation can be found as early as 1898, in the study where subjects were instructed to perform a mental task while putting as much physical pressure as possible on a machine that measures force, a dynameter. The results revealed that, when subjects were engaged in active thought, their maximum…

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