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The Thinking Trap of Expedience

By | David Klaasen | Helping You Create Clarity, Inspire Your People & Drive Performance | Retain your best people | Changing Management Mindsets and Behaviour | Practical Behaviour Analytics

Even President Trump has had to admit that things are more complicated than he initially thought! While this is no surprise to most of us, many people don’t even notice that their brain is massively simplifying the complexities of the world they live in just to make some sense of it. What are you over-simplifying? 

The Brexit arguments for the UK’s Leave campaigners were reduced to very simplistic emotional statements that were easy to understand. The Remain campaign floundered with the complexity of trying to articulate the impact of disentangling the UK economy and legal system from 40 years of intense and very complicated negotiations. They didn’t manage to simplify the benefits of remaining part of the EU enough for people to comprehend. This made it very tempting to go with the argument that was easy to understand. For many, the alternative was just too difficult to think about (and all the fearmongering didn’t help – surely it couldn’t be that bad!).

Your Lazy Brain

Your brain is very energy-hungry and fundamentally quite lazy. It needs just the right amount of glucose and oxygen to function well. Our Prefrontal Cortex, the very thin outer layer at the front of our brain, where we do all our conscious thinking and decision making is particularly sensitive to any drop in energy. In fact it will cease all movement in the rest of the body in order to conserve energy for complex thinking. You can check this out when next walking with a friend. Just spontaneously ask them to do a difficult calculation like multiplying 927 by 13. They will probably slow down or even stop walking and look at you with a weird expression as their brain tries to make sense of what was just asked of it. 

Your brain is always looking for the most energy-efficient way to manage its thinking processes. This means simplifying things because expending precious energy on complex thinking takes a lot of effort and is mentally exhausting which has a direct impact on our physical energy.    

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