BrainChains: Your Thinking Brain Explained in Simple Terms

"Well, you should understand just a very simple idea that Theo talks about: there are three parts of your brain. The most evolutionary, oldest part is the limbic part—that’s the survival one. That’s the one that lives in the present. That’s the one that recognizes tigers and bears and thunderstorms and berries and things to eat and so forth. It’s the execution part of your brain that works extremely well to keep you alive on the savannah and in the jungle. Then, later on evolutionary-wise, you developed the forebrain. The forebrain is the thinking part, the future part, the part that can make plans, set goals, have visions and so forth. As Theo pointed out, that’s the part that can actually get tired. Two other friends of mine, John Tierney and Roy Baumeister, when they wrote Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength— which is another book that could have made it to the list—talked about decision fatigue: the forebrain only has a certain amount of horsepower that it can use before it gets tired, frankly. But Theo points out that there’s a third part of the brain, a very important part that I don’t think most people are aware of, called the archiving brain. The archiving brain is the part of you that takes all the multitudinous inputs that we get 24/7, and starts to knit it together. It works beyond your conscious mind. Therefore, sleep is the best place for your archive brain to reinforce and reinvigorate all the other parts of your brain, and it’s absolutely necessary. “You need to daydream, you need to let your mind rest, or take a nap” It’s also why it’s necessary, every 90 minutes, to get up and walk around for five minutes. You need to daydream, you need to let your mind rest, or take a nap. And Theo curated in BrainChains over 600 of the latest cognitive science research studies to pull together his basic rant on this point. I just love to sleep. Every night I look at my calendar to see how late I can sleep in the morning, because I just love it. I thought I was lazy. Now after reading all the new cognitive science, I’m just sophisticated. I’m just optimizing my cognitive function by sleeping whenever I can and taking a nap whenever I can afford to! Great stuff. As a matter of fact, I’d be quite concerned if you’re not getting seven to nine hours of sleep a night. There are a few people, I think he mentions that, there are a few people that can get by with less. But most people need at least that much sleep in order to really optimize your cognitive functions. Yeah, well, they’ve got it wrong."