What if We’ve Created the Wrong Environments for our Brains?

Jonah Lehrer makes an intriguing argument that in high pressure situations, rather than exerting every last ounce of energy on concentrating, people should take breaks and focus on something else. This is one of several arguments I’ve seen in the last week or so suggesting that some aspect of how we structure our work lives–from creating high stakes incentives to managing multiple streams of information at once–is fundamentally at odds with how our brains actually work. Which is to say, we’ve designed our work lives based on theories about human nature; empirically, it looks like many of those theories may be wrong.

via Link: What if We’ve Created the Wrong Environments for our Brains? | Institute For The Future.