On his book On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done
Cover Interview of December 16, 2020
The wide angle
Cognitive control and its mechanisms in the brain affect
just about everything we do. They affect our ability to be productive, to
multitask, to resist our impulses, to navigate our digital world, and even to
remember. Cognitive control shapes both how we grow up into independent adults
and how we maintain that independence as we age. And, cognitive control function
is commonly affected in a wide array of psychiatric and neurological health
problems. This book provides a framework for understanding cognitive control across
its diverse facets in terms of the science behind it.
I have long been curious about the mind and brain. I want to
understand how it is that humans can be so ingenious and adaptable across such a
wide range of circumstances. What other species could enact a sudden,
coordinated change in its behavior almost worldwide in response to a pandemic,
like we’ve witnessed in response to COVID-19 in the past several months?
Consider that many of us learned how to do our work
remotely, routinely using new applications like Zoom or Slack that we hadn’t
used before. We found new ways to find food, to meet with friends, and to
organize our lives. We added new everyday routines few of us would have
imagined adding before, like remembering to bring a mask whenever you leave the
house. The very course of our daily lives changed radically, and yet we made
these changes in a matter of days and weeks. It didn’t require thousands of
trial-and-error learning events or thousands of years of evolution to develop
these behaviors. We did them nearly overnight because of our capacity for
cognitive control.
Of course, while our ability to make these changes is
astonishing, it also important to ask why all this is so hard. Why does it feel
so exhausting this year? Why is it so hard for parents when their children are
home while they try to work? And, more ominously, why do we see widespread “pandemic
fatigue”, meaning that people worldwide are complying less and less with
behaviors that can help mitigate the virus spread?
The book does not address COVID directly, but the topics we
cover provide insight into questions like these. I’ve devoted my scientific
career to investigating these questions with a focus on the neuroscience of
cognitive control. On Task is a chance to offer a first introduction to
this topic to a non-specialist audience.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
The wide angle
Cognitive control and its mechanisms in the brain affect just about everything we do. They affect our ability to be productive, to multitask, to resist our impulses, to navigate our digital world, and even to remember. Cognitive control shapes both how we grow up into independent adults and how we maintain that independence as we age. And, cognitive control function is commonly affected in a wide array of psychiatric and neurological health problems. This book provides a framework for understanding cognitive control across its diverse facets in terms of the science behind it.
I have long been curious about the mind and brain. I want to understand how it is that humans can be so ingenious and adaptable across such a wide range of circumstances. What other species could enact a sudden, coordinated change in its behavior almost worldwide in response to a pandemic, like we’ve witnessed in response to COVID-19 in the past several months?
Consider that many of us learned how to do our work remotely, routinely using new applications like Zoom or Slack that we hadn’t used before. We found new ways to find food, to meet with friends, and to organize our lives. We added new everyday routines few of us would have imagined adding before, like remembering to bring a mask whenever you leave the house. The very course of our daily lives changed radically, and yet we made these changes in a matter of days and weeks. It didn’t require thousands of trial-and-error learning events or thousands of years of evolution to develop these behaviors. We did them nearly overnight because of our capacity for cognitive control.
Of course, while our ability to make these changes is astonishing, it also important to ask why all this is so hard. Why does it feel so exhausting this year? Why is it so hard for parents when their children are home while they try to work? And, more ominously, why do we see widespread “pandemic fatigue”, meaning that people worldwide are complying less and less with behaviors that can help mitigate the virus spread?
The book does not address COVID directly, but the topics we cover provide insight into questions like these. I’ve devoted my scientific career to investigating these questions with a focus on the neuroscience of cognitive control. On Task is a chance to offer a first introduction to this topic to a non-specialist audience.