tem, so they won’t be aware of the impact they’re having—positive
or negative. Give them the support they need, and don’t confuse
them unnecessarily with the big picture.
At the other end of the spectrum, experts need to have access to the
big picture; don’t cripple them with restrictive, bureaucratic rules
that aim to replace judgment. You want the benefit of their expert
judgment. Remember they think they’re part of the system itself,
for better or for worse, and may take things more personally than
you would expect.
Ideally you want a mix of skills on a team: having an all-expert
team is fraught with its own difficulties; you need some people to
worry about the trees while everyone is pondering the forest.
Since the Dreyfus model is probably new to you from reading about
it here, you’re probably still a novice at understanding and using it.
Understanding the Dreyfus model and skills acquisition is a skill
itself; learning to learn is subject to the Dreyfus model.
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DAY-TO-DAY DREYFUS
56
TIP 7
Learn the skil of learning.
Going Forward
We will use these lessons of the Dreyfus model to guide the rest of
the book. To embark on this path to expertise, we’ll need to do the
following:
• Cultivate more intuition
• Realize the increasing importance of context and of observing
situational patterns
• Better harness our own experience
To see how to accomplish these goals, we’ll start the next chapter
by taking a closer look at how the brain works.
Next Actions
! Rate yourself. Where do you see yourself in the Dreyfus model
for the primary skills you use at work? List the ways your
current skill level impacts you.
! Identify other skills where you are a novice, advanced begin-
ner, and so on. Be aware of the possibility of second-order
incompetence when making these evaluations.
! For each of these skills, decide what you need to advance to
the next level. Keep these examples in mind as you read the
remainder of this book.
! Think back to problems you’ve experienced on a project team.
Could any of them have been avoided if the team had been
aware of the Dreyfus model? What can you do differently going
forward?
! Think of your teammates: Where are they on their journey?
How can that be helpful to you?
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The human brain starts working the moment you are
born and never stops until you stand up to speak in
public.
Sir George Jessel
Chapter 3
This Is Your Brain
Your brain is the most powerful computer in existence. But it’s not
at all like the computers we’re familiar with, and in fact it has some
really odd peculiarities that can either trip you up or propel you to
greatness. So in this chapter, we’re going to take a quick look at
how your brain works.
We’ll see where intuition comes from, begin to look at harnessing
it better to become more expert, and learn why a lot of things that
perhaps you think “don’t matter” turn out to be absolutely critical
to your success.
Since we’re pretty familiar with computers, it seems useful to talk
about the brain and its cognitive processes as if they were designed
as a computer system.
But that’s just a metaphor. The brain is not a mechanical device;
it’s not a computer. You aren’t programmable. Unlike a computer,
you can’t even perform the same action exactly the same way twice.
That’s not just a hardware problem; it has nothing to do with mus-
cles. It’s a software problem. The brain actually plans out your
motion slightly differently each and every time, much to the cha-
grin of golfers, pitchers, and bowlers.1
The brain is a horrifically complicated squishy lump of stuff. It’s
so complicated that it has a very hard time analyzing and studying
itself. So, please remember that this is just an analogy—but I hope
a helpful one.
1.
A Central Source of Movement Variability [CAS06].
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YOUR DUAL-CPU MODES
58
Figure 3.1: This is your brain.
With that said: Your brain is configured as a dual-CPU, single-
master bus design, as shown in Figure 3.1.
As we’ll see in this chapter and the next, this dual design presents
some problems, but it also presents some terrific opportunities that
you might not be aware of.
3.1 Your Dual-CPU Modes
CPU #1 is probably the most familiar to you: it is chiefly respon-
sible for linear, logical thought, and language processing. It’s like
a traditional von Neumann–style CPU that processes instructions
step-by-step, in order. CPU #1 is relatively slow and uses a rela-
tively small amount of overall brain real estate.
It’s programmed with an “idle loop” routine as well. If CPU #1 is not
processing anything else, it will simply generate an internal stream
of verbal chatter. It’s that little voice in your head.2
2.
Let’s hope you have just the one.
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YOUR DUAL-CPU MODES
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CPU #2, however, is very different. Instead of the linear, step-
by-step approach of CPU #1, CPU #2 is more like a magic digi-
tal signal processor. It’s your brain’s answer to Google: think of
it like a super regular-expression search engine, responsible for
searching and pattern matching. As such, it might grab match-
ing patterns that aren’t obviously related. It can go off searching
while you are “thinking” of something else and return a result set
asynchronously—and possibly days later. Since CPU #2 doesn’t do
any verbal processing, that means its results aren’t verbal, either.
Notice that both CPUs share the bus to the memory core; only one
CPU can access the memory banks at a time. That means if CPU
#1 is hogging the bus, CPU #2 can’t get at memory to perform
searches. Similarly, if CPU #2 is cranking away on a high-priority
search, CPU #1 cannot get at memory either. They interfere with
each other.
These two CPUs correspond to two differ-
ent kinds of processing in your brain. We’ll Two CPUs provideand.
call the linear processing style of CPU #1
linear mode, or just L-mode. We’ll refer to the asynchronous, holis-
tic style of CPU #2 as rich mode, or R-mode for short.
You need both: R-mode is critical for intuition, problem solving,
a
nd creativity.L-mode gives you the power to work through the
details and make it happen. Each mode contributes to your men-
tal engine, and for best performance, you need these two modes to
work together. Let’s start looking at the details of each of these vital
cognitive modes.
Memory and Bus Contention
R-mode is very important to your day-to-day work: it acts as your
search and retrieval engine for long-term memory and ideas that
are “in process.” But as I mentioned, R-modedoesn’t do any verbal
processing. It can retrieve and recognize verbal elements, but it
can’t do anything with them by itself because of that memory bus
contention between L-mode and R-mode.
For instance, have you ever had the experience of trying to describe
a dream when you first wake up? Many times it seems that a
crystal-clear, vivid dream evaporates from your memory as soon
as you try to describe it in words. That’s because the images, feel-
ings, and overall experience are R-mode things: your dream was
generated in R-mode. As you try to put your dream into words,
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YOUR DUAL-CPU MODES
60
Holographic Memory
Memory is stored holographically, in the sense that your
memory has certain properties of a hologram.∗
In a real hologram (made using a laser), every piece of
the film contains the entire image. That is, if you cut the
film in half, each half will still have the entire image—but
with lower fidelity or resolution. You can continue to cut the
film in half indefinitely, and smaller and smaller pieces will
continue to contain a representation of the whole image.
That’s because the whole image is stored scattered across
the whole film; each small part contains a representation
of the whole.
Scientists have studied this phenomenon in mice. Re-
searchers start by training a bunch of mice in a maze. Then
they scoop out half of their brains with a melon baller (what
better to do on a lonely Saturday night in the lab?).
The mice can still navigate the whole maze (although I
imagine somewhat spastically), but with less and less pre-
cision as the researchers scoop out more and more.†
∗.
See Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You
Think Less [Cla00].
†.
See Shufflebrain: The Quest for the Hologramic Mind [Pie81].
you experience a sort of bus contention. L-mode takes over the
bus, and now you can’t get at those memories anymore. In effect,
they aren’t verbalizable.3
You have amazing perceptual powers, many of which can’t be effec-
tively put into words. For instance, you can instantly recognize the
faces of a large number of familiar people. It doesn’t matter whether
they’ve changed their hairstyle, changed their manner of dress, or
put on ten pounds or twenty years.
But try to describe the face of even your closest loved one. How
do you put that recognition ability into words? Can you make a
database describing the faces of the people you know in such a way
3.
Verbal Overshadowing of Visual Memories; Some Things Are Better Left
Unsaid [SES90].
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YOUR DUAL-CPU MODES
61
Memory Must Be Refreshed
Remember the movie Total Recall? Well, if you can’t,
maybe your memories were suppressed by a secret spy
agency as well. It turns out that this sort of mental manipu-
lation isn’t science fiction after all. Memories can be erased
by simply repressing a specific enzyme.∗
An enzyme located in the synapses called PKMzeta acts
as a miniature memory engine that keeps memory up and
running by changing some facets of the structure of synap-
tic contacts. If the PKMzeta process in an area of the brain
stops for some reason, you lose that memory—no matter
what it is.
It had long been thought that memory was somewhat
like flash RAM; memory was somehow recorded by neu-
ron configuration with a physical persistence. Instead, it is
actively maintained by an executing loop.
Even with volatile static RAM, data sticks around as long
as power is applied. It turns out your brain doesn’t have
static RAM, but instead it has dynamic RAM that needs
constant refreshing or it fades. That means even riding a
bicycle isn’t something you can take for granted. It means
you can unlearn anything. It means no matter how horrible
or wonderful some experience is, you can lose it.
So, your brain is not like software. Software never ages and
never degrades. But wetware must be refreshed, must be
used, or it is lost.
If your brain stops running, it forgets everything.
Thanks to Shawn Harstock for this tidbit and write-up.
∗.
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YOUR DUAL-CPU MODES
62
that you could recognize them based on that description? No. It’s a
great ability, but it isn’t rooted in the verbal, linguistic, L-mode.
And to compound problems, the R-mode
isn’t directly
search engine isn’t under your direct con-
control able.
scious control. It’s a bit like your periph-
eral vision. Peripheral vision is much more
sensitive to light than your central vision. That’s why if you see
something faint out of the corner of your eye (such as a ship on
the horizon or a star), it can disappear if you look at it head-on.
R-mode is the “peripheral vision” of your mind.
Have you ever had the solution to a vexing problem (a bug, a design
problem, the name of a long-forgotten band) come to you while
you’re in the shower? Or sometime the next day, when you aren’t
thinking about it? That’s because R-mode is asynchronous. It’s
running as a background process, churning through old inputs,
trying to dig up the information you need. And there’s a lot for it to
look through.
R-mode is quite diligent at storing input. In fact, it’s possible that
every experience you have, no matter how mundane, is stored. But
it is not necessarily indexed. Your brain saves it (writes it to disk,
if you will) but doesn’t create a pointer to it or an index for it.4
Have you ever driven to work in the morning and realized with
a start that you have no memory of actually driving the last ten
minutes? Your brain recognizes that this isn’t terribly useful data,
so it doesn’t bother to index it. That makes remembering it a little
difficult.
&nbs
p; However, when you’re trying hard to solve a problem, R-mode pro-
cesses will search all your memory for matches that might aid in
the solution. Including all this unindexed material (and perhaps
that lecture in school that you half-dozed through). That might
really come in handy.
We’ll see how to take advantage of that and look at particular tech-
niques to help get around some of the other problems with R-mode
in the next chapter. But first, let’s take a look at a hugely valu-
4.
Technically, of course, there is no indexing going on, so it’s more like being at the end of a very long hash bucket with decreasing activation energy at each link.
But metaphorically, just think of it as an index.
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CAPTURE INSIGHT 24X7
63
Who’s in Charge Here?
You might think that the narrative voice in your head is in
control and that the voice is your consciousness, or the real
“you.” It is not. In fact, by the time the words are formed in
your head, the thought behind them is very old. Some con-
siderable time later those words might actually be formed
by your mouth.
Not only is there a time delay from the original thought to
your awareness of it, but there is no central locus of thought
in the brain. Thoughts rise up and compete in clouds, and
the winner at any point in time is your consciousness. We’ll
look at this in more depth in Section 8.2, Defocus to Focus,
on page 225.
able but very simple technique to deal with the fact that R-mode is
asynchronous.
3.2 Capture Insight 24x7
R-mode is unpredictable at best, and you need to be prepared for
that. Answers and insights pop up independently of your conscious
activities, and not always at a convenient time. You may well get
that million-dollar idea when you are nowhere near your computer
(in fact, you’re probably much more likely to get that great idea
precisely because you are away from the computer, but more on
that later).
That means you need to be ready to capture any insight or idea
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, no matter what else
you might be involved in. You might want to try these techniques:
Pen and notepad
I carry around a Fisher Space Pen and small notepad. The
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