Thinking Too Much Can Harm Your Brain

A few weeks ago I attended a cracker barrel event sponsored by the B.C.Organizational Development Network. I found myself drawn to a session called, “I’m trying to think and nothing happens!” which was facilitated by Adrienne White. Adrienne focused on two things:

1. thinking in a way that does not harm your brain
2. expanding your potential for innovation

Let’s look at #1 today. Adrienne started the session by asking us what we knew about multitasking. Although humans have always found ways to do more than one thing at a time, scientists are just now learning how this phenomenon impacts how our brain functions.

Psychologists, in particular, are concerned about the increase in short-term memory loss and the difficultly we have concentrating when we multitask.

Introvert and author Marty Olsen Laney refers to this as “brain locking” when our mind goes “blank”. And when this happens it appears as if we don’t know what we are talking about and this can be both frustrating and embarrassing.

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So, why does this happen? It might be because multitasking causes our frontal lobes to become overworked and then the brain can’t function properly.

The frontal lobe is the part of the brain responsible for problem solving, planning, judgement, and attention.

Now, getting back to Adrienne; she asked us an interesting question, “What can you do to give this part of your brain a break?” Not surprisingly, rest and exercise were high on the list of answers.

One final thing, I believe that we also need to understand and limit the amount of multi-tasking that we engage in. What do you think?