Our brains only constitute 2 percent of our total body weight but they consume around 20 percent of our energy resources. For chimpanzees, whose brains are roughly one-third the size of our own, the energy used is closer to 12 percent and for most other mammals it is between 5 and 10 percent.
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As base, MacLean shows that creative ability lives not only in the right hemisphere of the neocortex but also in the lower parts of the brain. Other evidence indicates that we are maximally creative when there is an integration between right and left brain, the neocortex, as well as the two lower centers. Imagine the inner creative resource housed in this ancient remnant of this prehistoric lower brain: the feeling, motivation, and ancestral lore of the species.
As a result of this and the appropriation of other mammalian habitats for agriculture and human settlement, people and their domestic animals now comprise a remarkable 96 percent of all mammalian biomass on the planet. Humans account for 36 percent of that total, and the livestock that we nurture, nourish, and then send to the slaughterhouseâmainly in the form of cattle, pigs, sheep, and goatsâaccount for 60 percent. The remaining 4 percent are the ever-diminishing populations of wild animals who now cower in our hedgerows, pose for tourists, and dodge poachers in our nature reserves, national parks, and a dwindling number of wild refuges. Wild avifauna have not fared that much better. With around 66 billion chickens being produced and destroyed for human consumption every year, the total living biomass of domesticated fowl at any one time is estimated to now be triple that of wild birds.
It does, though. Obviously, our brains are in our bodies, and thus depend on body chemistry in order to work. Too much sugar, sluggish brain. Too much wheat, compliant brain. Too much artificial stuff, fearful brain. Too much alcohol and drug stuff, collapsed brain. But the impact of our bodies on thinking goes beyond this chemistry question. When we try to think inside a body we disrespect, it can hear only, âYou donât matter.â And that assumption practically anaesthetizes the cortex.
The body, then, is the place where we think, not only because it contains our brains, but also because it tells us whether we matter.
What to do?
Consider these questions.
About the room:
What are three things you can do before your next meeting so that when people arrive they feel, just from the room, that they matter?
About the listener:
How can you communicate to your listener the importance of their keeping their eyes on your eyes so that their eyes and their face respond accurately to the micro signals of change in your thinking?
About your body:
What one thing do you know you need to do so that your body can say to you, âYou matterâ?
Nowadays, many of us are knowledge workers, and we use our brains to do the heavy lifting. The brain is a very energy-hungry organ. Of the roughly two thousand calories we consume a day, five hundred go to running our brains. Thatâs astonishing: the brain represents only about 2 percent of our body weight, and yet it takes up 25 percent of the energy we consume every day. Itâs no wonder that the way we invest our attention is critical to whether or not we feel high or low energy.
This cognitive ability to remember the past and anticipate the future is one reason some of us feel so busyânot because of the number of tasks we have to complete in the day, but because of the sheer number of things competing for our attention. What is commonly called âdistractionâ is probably better understood as overstimulation.
Recent findings in neuroscience have shown that our conscious minds cannot do more than one thing at a time. It may feel like you are able to multitask and think about two (or more) things at once, but really your mind is switching between them. This is a costly process neurologically speaking. Switching from one task to another takes energy and a measurable amount of time. Then, when we switch back, it takes another period of time to really wrap our minds around the original object of attention. And itâs not only about the time cost; itâs about the quality of our attention. If we are always switching from one thing to another, then we are never able to truly focus and experience the pleasure and effectiveness of a focused mind. Instead we live in a state of constant recalibration, or what the writer Linda Stone perceptively calls âcontinuous partial attention.â
Human awareness is not the speedy, nimble creature some of us believe it to be. Our brains have evolved to be more like owls than hummingbirds: we notice something, turn our attention to it, and focus in. It is in this state of intense, solitary focus that we are in possession of our most uniquely human and powerful mental faculties. When we focus on one thing, we are at our most thoughtful, creative, and productive.
But in the screen-heavy environment of the twenty-first century, our mind-owls, large and unwieldy, are treated like hummingbirds, and they end up flopping ineffectively from one thing to the next. Doing this day in and day out accommodates us to what is actually an unnatural, anxiety-producing mode in which the mind struggles to find nourishment.
Which owl is going to feel busier, the one focusing on the sound of a mouse in the snow, or the one trying to draw tiny bits of nectar from a thousand flowers? And which owl is going to be, in the end, better nourished?