BUSINESS
It is about Signal versus Noise What goes on in the brain when we ignore or pay attention to a message?
alongside the background music. Just by shifting your attention - as effortless as redirecting your gaze - you can focus either on the conversation or the music. Your brain does the heavy lifting and automatically zeros in on the signal you want to focus. (Detail for the curious: In this context the “you” is the Prefrontal cortex, and the “brain” is well, the rest of the brain, mainly the areas that do audio processing: thalamus and the temporal lobes.) Basically, you give the brain a description of what you want it to focus on, and it does the rest: Pay attention to signals that fit the description; ignore those that don’t.
Ozan Dagdeviren
The Brain
The Inbox
Startup Consultant | Author of Startups Grow With People | Domain expertise on Growth, People, Culture and Learning.
This weekend, I watched the Netflix Vox Special “Explained” on music (this one). It turns out, humans are like no other animal when it comes to understanding music. This makes sense as we have the biggest brains relative to our body size - and hearing is more about the brain (same with vision) than the ears. Understanding music is not one single thing. It is a combination of understanding rhythm, pitch, timbre, texture, volume and form simultaneously. Some birds are great at understanding rhythm, some bonobos are great at understanding pitch but humans are the ones who got it all. So “getting music” is an active and cognitively intense process for the brain. Distilled to its very essence, what brain does is; differentiate the signal from the noise. Imagine you are sitting at a cafe sipping your almond milk latte or that you are at your favourite co-working space, hearing the noise of the people discussing the best e-mail marketing growth hack
When it comes to your inbox (your mailbox, linkedin messages, whatsapp, messenger etc.), the situation is almost exactly the same. There are more messages than you could ever read through paying 100% attention, let alone answer. So what do you do? You compromise. You skim through and ignore… We naturally choose to pay more attention to messages that are important to us, for the cost of ignoring the rest that don’t seem as promising. But how does this exactly happen? It is just like deciding to hear or ignore the music: We give our brain a vague and fuzzy description of the types of messages we would potentially be interested in and let it do what it does best. Focus on the signals. Recognise the patterns. Ignore the noise. Should I answer?
4 Message from the CEO of a large company? Most likely, yes.
4Message from a good friend? Yes. 4Message from a lucrative client? Yes. 4Message from a someone offering SEO service? Most likely, no.
4Message from someone looking for a job? Most likely, no and so on… Here is the critical bit. In most cases, the brain works in autopilot to find the matching patterns, ignoring the rest. It wakes you only when you need to make a decision. The brain seeks a signal - a pattern. So that signal is really important and worth consciously thinking about. It is very much like a brief you give to a marketing or recruitment agency. Give the wrong one, and you got to a very bad start. What is your brief to your brain? 42 Turkish British Magazine I January - February 2020
