On Mental Relaxation | "Hit the Reset Button in Your Brain"

Matthieu Bourel / New York Times

NEW YORK CITY:  It's summer in New York City.  It's the first week of August. Taking summer breaks isn't just restorative. It's become a ritual.

So it makes sense to look back at Daniel J. Levitin's opinion essay in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times.  It was published on August 9, 2014. Exactly a year ago.

Daniel J. Levitin is the director of the Laboratory for Music, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University and the author of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.

To read the entire essay, please click here: Daniel Leviton's NYT Essay.

What follows is only a excerpt from an intelligent essay. Read it. Then go over to the New York Times. What Levitin wrote is worth sharing.

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES
THIS month, many Americans will take time off from work to go on vacation, catch up on household projects and simply be with family and friends. And many of us will feel guilty for doing so. We will worry about all of the emails piling up at work, and in many cases continue to compulsively check email during our precious time off.

But beware the false break. Make sure you have a real one. The summer vacation is more than a quaint tradition. Along with family time, mealtime and weekends, it is an important way that we can make the most of our beautiful brains.

Every day we’re assaulted with facts, pseudofacts, news feeds and jibber-jabber, coming from all directions. According to a 2011 study, on a typical day, we take in the equivalent of about 174 newspapers’ worth of information, five times as much as we did in 1986. As the world’s 21,274 television stations produce some 85,000 hours of original programming every day (by 2003 figures), we watch an average of five hours of television per day. For every hour of YouTube video you watch, there are 5,999 hours of new video just posted!

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, there’s a reason: The processing capacity of the conscious mind is limited. This is a result of how the brain’s attentional system evolved. Our brains have two dominant modes of attention: the task-positive network and the task-negative network (they’re called networks because they comprise distributed networks of neurons, like electrical circuits within the brain). The task-positive network is active when you’re actively engaged in a task, focused on it, and undistracted; neuroscientists have taken to calling it the central executive. The task-negative network is active when your mind is wandering; this is the daydreaming mode. These two attentional networks operate like a seesaw in the brain: when one is active the other is not.

To read the entire essay, please click here:  Daniel Leviton's NYT Essay.