Your Brain at Work

The Prefrontal Cortex

The market demands that you become a knowledge worker, and rewards you most for staying focused and creative. Yet emails, social media messages and endless entertainment options make today the most distracting time in history. You can’t change the world, but you can learn how your brain works and how to make it perform better.

Your brain is subject to “surprising performance limitations.” You can think at your highest levels for only limited periods of time. To make decisions or solve problems, you depend mainly on your powerful prefrontal cortex. However, the prefrontal cortex is a little like Goldilocks: For it to work well, everything has to be just right. Imagine the prefrontal cortex as “a stage in a small theater where actors play a part.”

The stage represents where you direct your focus. The actors represent information passing through your attention. Your stage “needs a lot of lighting,” or energy. The audience is “information from your inner world” – your memories and thoughts. Members of this internal audience sometimes take over the stage, which can hold information from the external world, from your internal consciousness or ...