W. BRUCE CAMERON - This is Your Brain on Level 3

I was fascinated to listen to a report on how to make one’s brain more effective, although my brain wasn’t all that interested.

Apparently, there are three levels of brain activity. Level 1 is the lowest level — the amount of concentration required to, say, delete e-mails or serve in Congress. As human beings, we spend a lot of time in Level 1, including all of our teenage years.

Level 2 is mild engagement, like listening to an in-law. Our brains are burning glucose and becoming fatigued (or, depending on the in-law, enraged). You want to limit Level-2 activity so as not to become so tired you slip back into Level 1, so if your mother-in-law calls, hang up.

Level-3 activity requires all of your brain and creative power — the type required when you make up an excuse to your spouse for why you hung up on her mom. The brain can process only about two hours of Level 3 at a time, which means that just as an airplane is on final approach, the pilot is thinking like a teenage driver.

For most people, the most productive brain time is in the morning, when people are rested, fresh and preoccupied with deleting e-mails. Throw in a little conversation in the break room to burn off any Level 2 you’ve got left, and voila — an entire office of Level-1 thinkers.

This has enormous implications for the workplace. Let’s say Worker A and Worker B are employed by a large corporation. Worker A starts every day in his cubicle, tackling his most intense tasks while his brain is at Level 3. Worker B, however, spends the morning chatting with co-workers about fantasy football and sticking his head in the boss’s office to discuss “American Idol.”

When it comes time to lay off employees, the axe will fall, of course, on Worker A — people don’t like him, the guy never comes out of his cube. Worker B will go on to receive promotions until he’s running the place and makes the company so inefficient and bloated that it requires billions of dollars of government bailout money to stay in business, resulting in huge executive bonuses. See how it all comes together?

Studies show that individuals who check e-mail and text messages frequently suffer the same loss of IQ as do people who smoke a great deal of pot. This, more than the recession, explains why so many young people are moving back to their parents’ basements. It’s a disturbing trend because all the people in their 20s who are still smoking pot and living in their parents’ basements are now having to share space with people who spend all day on Twitter.

So parents are hearing arguments like this:

Son: Mom! Susie is texting and won’t put her phone on mute, and I’m trying to watch “America’s Top Model”!

Susie: Well, he smells like burned jungle fungus!

Parents: Why don’t you two focus your Level-3 brainpower on productive activities?

Susie: What’d she say?

Son: Huh?

Susie: Ummmm ... Wha?

Son: Uh ...

So now you need more space downstairs, but as any contractor will tell you, the hardest room in the house to expand is the basement. This forces parents to do the next best thing, which is to sell their home and move someplace where they don’t have basements. This floods the market with houses, causing the bottom to drop out and banks to take on enormous losses, requiring gigantic government bailouts and huge executive bonuses. The executives e-mail each other with congratulations for getting such a big bonus, and they read those e-mails in the morning, which starts the cycle all over again. Thus is born the digital economy.

I’ve decided that the best way for me to counter this effect is to focus on my most intense work at 4:00 in the morning — in other words, when I’m still asleep. That way I’ll have gotten all my Level-3 activity out of the way by the time I start smoking my e-mails. Within a few years, I’ll be so efficient no one will want to hire me, and I’ll have to move in with my parents.

They have a big basement for just that purpose.

To write Bruce Cameron, visit his Website at http://www.wbrucecameron.com.

COPYRIGHT 2010

CREATORS.COM