Your Brain at Work: Attention Is a Battery

The guest introduces himself: a grandmaster of more than nineteen years in the world's top hundred, a European champion, founder of a chess academy whose online platform already works in three countries, and a partner in a company developing managers' skills, where he leads the thinking track and where Alexander once took a dozen personal sessions over a month or two. He picked the book for its practicality: next to the science sit examples to try at once. It is built like a theatre — four acts split into scenes. Emily, building a corporate career, and Paul, working from home on contract projects, first act without thinking about the brain; then the author pauses to unpack the theory; then the heroes rewind and live the same scene consciously. Every chapter closes with two blocks: what about the brain came as a surprise, and what to try.

Part one is the view of yourself, and its protagonist is the prefrontal cortex: it handles conscious, deliberate decisions and burns far more energy than the more optimised areas. Rock describes it as a theatre stage where mental objects are actors and the light comes from a battery-powered generator: the charge is finite, must be spared and topped up, and important work belongs to the hours when you still have it. Emily's mistake is classic — she opens the day with her inbox, and nothing is left for the serious project. Alexander recalls the chocolate bar his parents gave him for children's tournaments; Ernesto gave up pure sugar for its spike and equally sharp crash, and in games of six to eight hours keeps bananas and dates at hand: a solid lunch lasts three or four hours. One of the most energy-hungry activities in the book is planning: objects must be brought on stage, compared and taken off.

Ernesto notes that the stage matches a key chess skill — visualisation, holding objects clearly in mind — though he did not come across the term in the book. Chapter two is about the limits of that stage: Paul's project on payment terminals for shops is on fire, he put it off to the last moment, the proposal is due, and thinking about it hurts. Ernesto recognises the feeling of inevitable defeat before an opponent three heads stronger, when the weaker player rushes into an unfamiliar opening and fails to play even at his own level. The book's conclusion: we juggle roughly four objects at once, so a choice is best narrowed to two and tasks broken into steps. Chunking is the rescue — tying the new to what already sits in long-term memory: ten digits are easier to remember in groups, which is perhaps why phone numbers are written that way.

Chapter three goes to the basal ganglia, the centre automating routine: after a couple of years your hands drive the car by themselves. Ernesto adds a caveat — new connections grow when you do the familiar differently, if only by taking another route to a known place — and shows the flip side of automatism with a top chess player who spent a whole rest day preparing a new first move, then played his habitual one automatically and could not understand what happened. The next chapter is about actors bursting onto the stage uninvited: the signal from other brain areas beats awareness by about 0.3 seconds, leaving almost no free will but the right of veto. Hence Ernesto locking his phone in a safe from ten until eight at tournaments, and Alexander once living without a fridge next to a large food court: inhibiting an impulse spends energy of its own, and every next no comes harder.

Chapter five adds the inverted U: too little arousal and too much stress both push you out of the effective zone, and the point differs for everyone — Ernesto reached his peaks at tournaments, never in the hardest training. Then comes the chapter on getting past a block: when a task will not yield consciously, the author advises loading more information and switching activity; the guest adds the later research on the brain's default mode. That is how Ernesto worked: he studied the opponent's games, stopped deliberately and went walking, and after thirty or forty minutes the opening was chosen; Alexander prepares conference talks the same way, hanging up a few branches months ahead. Part two opens with the guest's first insight: the limbic system is another energy monster, and it cannot run at the same time as the prefrontal cortex. Once emotions take over, the head stops calculating, and coming back to a conscious state is harder than falling out of it. Hence the order of priorities Ernesto worked out in sport: first calm and a reserve of energy, then decisions. His practical device comes from shooting — shoot and forget: a marksman who checks the previous target misses the next, and among chess players a second mistake follows the first at once.

Alexander used to suppress emotions; he learned labelling from his wife, who taught their sons to name what they feel, and found it explained in the book. Steering your own processes, the author repeats, takes a language for naming them. Chapter eight is reappraisal: in a study of a hundred-odd people, those who reframed a situation instead of suppressing the emotion scored better on optimism, relationships and life satisfaction. Ernesto retells a Covey example: a man lets his children run wild on public transport — until it turns out their mother died in hospital that day, and irritation gives way to a wish to help. The part's last chapter covers expectations: anticipation is lived through almost as if the event had happened. Parts three and four go at a run: mirror neurons make us live another's pain or smile as our own; a stranger is filed under foes by default, so the manager in the book who opens his first meeting with tasks triggers an instant conflict; status turns out to be a primary instinct alongside hunger. The last part is about change: a person must see the need himself, and the help that works is consolidating new habits. Both verdicts agree — a practical textbook with exercises, worth keeping at hand.