Learnings - Auto Pilot

Read a wonderful book titled Auto Pilot - The Art & Science of doing nothing by Andrew Smart.

Auto Pilot book is a must read to understand ourselves, our brain and our world economy. Examples, quotes are excellent. 

Last chapter Work is destroying the planet is worth reading and reproducing in total.

Contents of the book is worth treasuring. 

Select takeaways from the book is reproduced below: 

Beauty of Brain

On the contrary, when you leave important parts of your brain unattended by relaxing in the grass on a sunny afternoon, the parts of your brain in the default mode network become more organized and engaged. In your brain, the dishes do wash themselves if you just leave them alone. It turns out your brain is never idle. In fact, it may work harder when you’re not working at all.

The brain represents about two percent of your total body weight, yet it consumes twenty percent of your body’s energy. It is the biological equivalent of the one percent. In other words, your brain is a pig and it is selfish.

So the best thing to do after learning new information is to take nap, or atleast be idle.

What a busy and occupied life performs?

Even though the network your brain uses to actively pay attention only requires a small fraction of your brain’s total energy, when this attention network activates, your default mode network reduces its activity. This is what is meant by anti-correlated: when your attention network activates, your default mode deactivates. While you run around like a decapitated chicken in your daily life, trying to manage your schedule, trying to keep up with all your mobile devices, posting to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, receiving text messages, composing emails, and checking off to-do lists, you are suppressing the activity of perhaps the most important network in your brain.

Why males start performing better after 25?

In fact, in males, the prefrontal cortex does not finish maturing until about age twenty-five. I mentioned above that the prefrontal cortex is responsible for skills like decision making, planning, impulse-control, and self-reflection—skills that many males under twenty-five tend to lack.

How Newton might have got the idea?

It was during this revolution that a scientific community came into being that published journals and started having meetings much like today’s scientific conferences. In the centuries since Newton, natural science has met with astonishing success. Typically we think of Newton seeing the apple fall as some kind of serendipitous moment in the history of science. Whatever the origin of the story really is, after seeing the apple fall and after working out his theory Newton wrote one of the most significant scientific publications in history: the Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, in which the formal theory of gravity is introduced.

Newton wasn’t holed up in his study tearing his hair out trying to figure out why objects move toward earth and the planets orbit the Sun, stressing about a looming deadline. Nor was a productivity expert looking over Newton’s shoulder to make sure he was working efficiently. We can imagine that as he relaxed on a warm evening in his garden, the soothing noises of birds singing and leaves blowing in the breeze surrounding him, he either closed his eyes or looked at nothing in particular.

He would have had a feeling of well-being and sensations of positive emotions might have washed over him. All this would put him in a nice “contemplative mood.” His default mode network would have started to increase its activity. Blood would have started flowing to his precuneous, his lateral parietal cortex, his medial prefrontal cortex, and his anterior cingulate cortex as these regions began to consume oxygen and glucose at an increased rate.

This is the default mode network getting warmed up. The neurons in these regions are increasing their activity. His anterior cingulate would have signaled to his parasympathetic nervous system that all was well and his blood pressure would drop. His heart rate would slow and time between beats would start to become slightly more variable.

This physiological reaction would start to feed back to his brain and his relaxation might deepen. In this idle state and in the absence of some externally induced task, Newton’s brain starts to get to work. His mind begins to wander; his thoughts turn inward and become reflective. The nodes in his default mode network are now ready to communicate.

The millions of neurons in these regions begin to partially synchronize their oscillatory electrical activity at different frequencies so that neuronal messages from the default mode network can travel throughout his brain. Since the nodes in the default mode network are hubs they can get information from almost any brain region. Memories and associations, along with mathematical and spatial concepts, which are stored in regions connected to the parietal cortex, can also be accessed by his default mode network. These concepts now begin to bubble up into Newton’s consciousness as the medial prefrontal cortex reports to the rest of the active default network what is happening in the far reaches of his subconscious.

These reports from Newton’s vast knowledge of physics in his long-term memory, which are normally not part of his conscious awareness, can now enter his mind because his brain does not have to worry about talking, scheduling meetings, planning his day, or managing his time.

The motions of the planets, the inverse square law, attraction, mass, and acceleration: all of these concepts that Newton has learned might have begun circulating in Newton’s awareness. Prior to sitting in his garden this particular evening, Newton might not have found relationships among these concepts because they would not have the chance to enter his awareness during his everyday life. Likewise, there is also evidence that the default mode network works unconsciously so that in an idle state, the brain finds connections among concepts without awareness.

Then for reasons we do not yet understand, sometimes these thoughts reach awareness. The important thing is that during rest, the default mode network can open connections between brain regions that are normally too busy trying to keep up with your activity-filled life to talk to each other.

This is when true creativity and insight can happen. At this point, Newton’s anterior cingulate cortex, normally hard at work detecting errors and monitoring the outcome of behavior, is now freed to detect weak and strange relationships between numbers, forces, objects, and space.

In such a relaxed state, Newton might have only barely noticed the apple falling from the tree. However, his brain would have recorded the event. A seemingly trivial event in the world, an apple falling from a tree, might have triggered a cascade of neural activity which allowed the concepts Newton was contemplating to synthesize into a completely new idea. All the clocks struck at the same time because the clocks were not being wound.

Importance of resting phase of the brain?

We categorize adults who sit in contemplative moods as flakey, spacey, or lazy. But for your brain to do its best work, you need to be idle. If you want to have great ideas or if you just want to get know yourself, you must stop managing your time. At the very least, modern neuroscience is rapidly amassing more and more evidence that the resting state of the brain is vital to its health.

Problems of modern world?

In our hysterical rush to make money, gain status, compete for scarce jobs, jockey for promotions, make our kids athletic and intellectual geniuses, and organize our lives down to the second, we are suppressing our brain’s natural ability to make meaning out of experience. It is through our brain’s amazing natural meaning-making ability that real and profound creativity can happen. It is becoming clear that the resting state of the brain is essential to this process.

How nature restores balance?

Ants are among the most successful species on the planet. The number of ants alive at any given time has been estimated to be around ten million billion. And given that a human weigh approximately one to two million times as much as an ant, ants and humans have roughly the same global biomass.

Quote whose meaning I knew well

“The survival of humans and other species on planet Earth in my view can only be guaranteed via a timely transition towards a stationary state, a world economy without growth.”——Peter Custers

Job market well explained

Most of the jobs politicians are perpetually promising to create are downright awful. For people without formal education, the countless jobs that each party claims to be able to produce are demeaning and tedious service-sector jobs at places like Amazon fulfillment centers that don’t pay enough for rent, healthcare, food, daycare, phone bills, or a car. For people with more formal education there are mindless corporate jobs where the only skill required is to master the asinine business jargon in a way that makes it seem like you are doing something meaningful.