Secret to the ultimate productive life

 Waqar Ahmed | The Productivity Science

This blog is based on the interpretation of the TEDx speech of two great intellectuals - writer Lisa Genova and Neuroscientist Amishi Jha. They work in the field of neuroscience towards behavioral cognitive science and have helped millions navigate their way towards the great riches in today’s competitive and skilled labor-intense world. Their recent publication on the functioning of human memory has provided a great insight in further elaborating the perception that it’s not the memory that humans lack, instead it’s the limited attention factor that makes us forget the most important things in our day to day life.

Due to the complex neuroscience of the brain and external surrounding that influences human consciousness, this topic is enriched in content quantity. So to make it simple to digest, this blog is divided into two sub-blogs for the reader's comfort. In this particular blog, we will delve into the understanding of what influences our memory and how it impacts our daily life. And also what is that we likely think incorrectly about memory?

Every time I get together with my friends, most of the common discussion we have is about books that we have been reading at that current moment. The most embarrassing moment in those conversations at my side is when I tell my friends about the applications of the book but couldn’t recall the accurate name of that book or forget the author’s name. I quickly blame memory for that incident to compensate for my embarrassment. But the truth is, I have no issue with my memory, it is just that I haven’t paid enough attention to the book cover while I started reading it.

As Lesa Genova in her talk says, “You may not have a memory problem – just an attention problem.”

In normal life, we get almost 12 hours to work. These 12 hours contain 720 minutes and 43,200 seconds. You cannot take information all the time and if you do, it’s not possible to retain all the information each day. The problem gets worse when we often don’t remember the most important events in our lives. Lack of retention might create huge problems especially when we’re working in a competitive field like science, mathematics, the Internet, etc.

There are two ways in which we remember things: 

1. Perception
2. Attention

Perception is important in human life because it helps us in creating a worldview. Few things are required to build a perception in our minds, such as seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling.

Attention is the secret that you can see I have hinted at in the title of this blog. When we pay attention to anything, it becomes the greater asset in our lives.

Lisa in her research TEDx talk narrates that the visual that we see with our eyes have the highest impact on our memory. In other words, what we see from our eyes lasts longer in our heads. It is also the reason why neurons inside our brain form a network and create visuals about every topic we learn. And neurons behave in this way to help us remember the information for a longer period of time. She puts, we take the visuals of things like shape, the color of lights – through receptors called rods and cones in the retinas of our eyes.

When we take the visual for the information purpose, that information is transferred into the signal form and it travels to the human visual cortex that lies at the back of the brain. It is here in the visual cortex where the image is processed and actually seen. Once it recognizes the visuals, it then further transmits those signals to other brain regions for recognition, meaning, comparison, emotion, and opinion.

If we don’t pay attention to any object, the active neurons inside our mind won’t be able to connect and form a network, and memory will not be formed. Chances are that after some time we won’t even remember seeing it.

Lisa Genova says it clearly if we want to remember something, we must pay attention to it.

“We tend to pay attention to –and therefore remember – what we find interesting, meaningful, new, surprising, significant, emotional and consequential.”

The most significant part of her speech is when she affirms that, “once the name of any object is spoken, we'll have the sound of it available in our brain for about 15 to 30 seconds. If we don’t add the neural input of our attention, that object’s name will quickly disappear into the ether. It will never be consolidated by our hippocampus and stored as a memory.”

From this amazing research-oriented content, it has become pretty much clear to our brain that attention is everything. And unless we pay attention to important things in our lives, we would not be able to recall them later anytime in our life. Attention requires serious conscious effort.

To improve attention span in our lives, we need to eradicate distractions. And this is a tough nut to crack. But nonetheless, it is absolutely possible to achieve in this life. There are two internal and external distractions that hold us back from developing the attention factor in mind. And it badly affects our attention, which results in poor conversation and business reputation.

In the next part of this continued blog on memory and attention, we will deep-dive further into the topic and come up with some reasonable solutions. We will start from the internal and external distractions that put us away from seeking genuine attention in our life.

To be continued…