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Report "42". Big synopsis

Hi, Habr, my name is Vadim Makishvili. In 2014, I made a report "36" . He talked about the midlife crisis, admitted his own weaknesses and shared ways that helped me to cope with my fears. Immediately after the performance, my friends began to make fun of me, they say, come on every ten years to continue. I laughed it off, they say I’ll definitely do it. But, actually, he was not going to, because every ten years to tell the whole world about his fears is boring.

However, a few months ago, at the YaTalks conference in Yekaterinburg, I made a new report. The heading number is 42, and the question arises: "Is Makishvili really the author of one topic?" No. There was no self-digging. What happened? And can “42” be considered a continuation of “36”?

My story is related to the previous lecture only indirectly. In "42" I ponder in detail a topic that I barely touched on then. But if it’s more convenient for someone to think that “42” is the second series, let it be. Then there is a third ahead, which will have nothing to do with either the first or the second, well, except that the author is me, and the name will also turn out to be some kind of number.

“42” is definitely not about a midlife crisis.


- Hello, friends. I want to tell you a lot. So much so that the first version of this report lasted two hours. But the organizers told me - Makishvili, do not be impudent. In short, you are here with me for an hour. I will try so that you are neither bored nor sad.

The answer to the question why the report is called “42” will not sound right now. Absolutely, this number has a symbolic meaning for me, and it is not related to age. Also, it is not related to the answer to the main question of the Universe and everything. I would like you to not try to match the title with the content at all - that makes no sense. My parents called me Vadim. My wife was called Natasha. Why did they call us that? Just Vadim, just Natasha, just “42”.

I have been doing web development since 1996. 23 years I earn this for my living. They repeatedly came to me with the question: “What needs to be taught in order to become a developer like you?” I quickly began to respond routinely, without thinking: “HTML-CSS-JavaScript”. But recently, I thought, what am I saying? We are all developers. We make money like that. Wake us up in the middle of the night - we are sure to make up and program something, even put it in the cloud, and it will start there. And it is quite obvious to us that in 2019, it is not enough to know these three basic technologies.




Now we must possess such knowledge that was not required of us before. We must become full-stack developers: do something on the client and on the server, raise the base, and deploy it to the cloud, and write tests. Soft skills are also required of us in order to pull younger developers to older ones. We have to learn all this constantly. The number of tasks that we do per unit of time has grown, but the strength remains the same. Therefore, we are looking for different ways to increase our effectiveness. We study the techniques of time management, put the system and reminders, so that they remind us of what needs to be done. Be sure to plan our tasks every day. In the teams we enter all sorts of Edge, Kanban, Scrum. This is not enough for someone - and they put different programs on the computer, time trackers: for so many hours I have been sitting in the IDE,so much on Facebook (but I would like to sit on Facebook less). But this is not enough - someone goes to psychologists, someone goes to personal growth trainings.

Despite all efforts, we periodically find ourselves on an emotional swing. It seems that I already know so much everything, I did such a cool thing, I’m an unrealistic fellow. And a week later, when I sit on a task and almost cry over it, there is a feeling that I am mediocrity. From these swings it gets bad.

I have a hypothesis: what if we do not need to increase efficiency? What if we have it reduced, and we need to restore it to normal? What if I can’t restore efficiency because I don’t know how to listen to my body’s signals?

We are programmers, we program in the IDE. But we are not programming with this tool. We write programs with the brain. It turns out that our main tool is the brain. And we do not understand how it functions. We use it blindly.

But in work, we do not do that. If I want to use some kind of library, I will first read the documentation, look at the source, and then I will use it. And where to get the documentation for the brain? There seems to be no documentation for the brain. Remember how the doctor said in Mark Zakharov’s film “Formula of Love”? "The head is a dark matter, not subject to investigation." However, documentation for the brain has long been written - in the textbooks of medical schools. I am a medical doctor, I read. The fundamentals of the functioning of our nervous system are described and they do not change, they are only specified by details and nuances.



I have a rather difficult task now - I want to tell you the basics of what is written in the textbooks of medical schools, in scientific articles and medical journals. And this is difficult because it is not enough for you, programmers, to say a fact or give a recommendation. You will not believe it, because you consciously or unconsciously apply an engineering approach to everything in life. You need to submit information as cleared of subjectivity as possible. Then you will hear it, realize it, take it into your life and you can do something with it.

I brought this information. And interestingly, I have proofs. Habr you read: and where are the proofs? There are no proofs - goodbye. There are proofs, there are many of them. If they are needed, I will give links to research, the names of articles, books and the books themselves. And if you start reading them - and I would like you to read them - I guarantee you about a year of thoughtful intellectual reading. Only one thing can stop you from understanding everything - your own opinion. By the age of 20-30-40, you have a certain idea of ​​how the human body, the brain, and specifically yours, function. If you read the social networks, you get the feeling that everyone on the planet is wonderfully versed in three things: in politics, football and medicine (and in medicine it is best in hormones, antibiotics and vaccinations).

I would like you and I to think: what is our opinion based on? What facts?

While you are thinking, I’ll tell a joke.

A child comes from school, mom hears, a child comes, cries sobbing:
- Son, what happened?
- Mom, they told me that I have no opinion.
- How is it, no opinion? Come here, mommy will tell you your opinion!

None of us are a neurosurgeon, not a neuropsychiatrist, not a neurophysiologist. None of us saw a living brain, that a person was alive, talking, and you look at his brain. How many of us can do functional magnetic resonance imaging and can decipher the results?

And if we did not see all this, did not touch, did not smell, then what is our opinion on the functioning of the organism based on? It seems to me that it is based on some information that we read somewhere, heard from someone. There is a lot of information on the Internet. There is a lot of absolutely accurate, but absolutely useless information. Nothing can be done with her.

For example, there is an article stating that our psycho-emotional state, whether it is joy or sorrow, is caused by five signaling molecules: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, adrenaline, vasopressin. And they say: “Imagine, if you have depression, your life is gray, you don’t want to live, then this serotonin has fallen. If you are happy - dopamine has risen. If you want someone - oxytocin rolls over. " Wonderful facts. But why should I know them?

Well, for example. I am sad, lonely, hard life. And, I think, well, it’s clear - it’s my serotonin has fallen! Now, I'll take blood from a vein, measure the level of serotonin. Well, yes, it is - low serotonin. I will get serotonin from the first-aid kit right there, stick a needle into a vein - life has played with bright colors. So what?

Well no. We don’t do that, and we don’t have such an opportunity. Then why should I know? I want to know other facts with which I can do something to change my life. And I brought you such facts. I will tell them without any speculation, assumptions, and without much simplification, as I did in "36".

There are three sections in my story. The first section is some facts from human physiology. I propose to listen, to be surprised at something, to remember and put it aside. The second section is facts from human neurophysiology. We will also listen, be surprised and will not try to look for a relationship between these groups. And in the third section we will see how facts from there and from here intertwine.

I will tell it as I would like it to be told to me, that is, it is clear.

First part. Physiology


Three simple facts.

The first fact. Every creature on the planet, especially multicellular, eats, drinks and breathes something.

The second fact. Each creature on the planet constantly analyzes sounds, smells and images from the environment. If a creature does not, especially in the wild, someone will eat it. Nobody will eat us, but if I go out on the roadway with my headphones, I won’t hear the bus - and goodbye.

The third fact. Any organism remains viable within narrow limits of the concentration of consumed substances. A little is bad, a lot is also bad. Why is little bad, obviously. I do not like when there is little money, not enough food, not enough opportunity. And in physiology this is exactly so. Deficiency of nutrients necessary for the body leads to disruption of life. I will give a simple example. Each cell of our body every unit of time must consume at least two substances - molecular oxygen, which we inhaled from the atmosphere, and glucose, which was recently eaten in a sandwich. Every second. There are approximately 30 trillion cells in each of you. And every cell right now, each of you is actively absorbing glucose and oxygen, wherever it is: in the skin of the cheek, in the retina of the eye or in the brain. And the most sensitive to this process is the nervous tissue,brain neurons.



The brain consumes 25% of the oxygen that we inhaled. It turns out that this is almost the most important consumer of oxygen in our body. And in a child under four years of age, the brain devours 50% of oxygen.

This should make it clear that when it’s stuffy in the office, it’s not just a matter of discomfort, but a matter of the effectiveness of our intellectual activity.

About the deficit is understandable. And “a lot” is why bad? When I have a lot of money, a lot of food, a lot of opportunities - this is obviously better than when there is not enough. No, in physiology this is not so. An excess of nutrients, even the very necessary ones, leads to disruption of life.
Take a simple example. Every cell in our body has an iron ion. Mandatory. Not in the cell membrane, but in the mitochondrial membrane, but it is necessary! And if they were not there, the molecular oxygen that we breathe would not be able to integrate into chemical reactions. That is, iron is vital for our body.

Why am I talking about this? We need iron in minimal concentrations. We have to absorb it about 1 mg per day - about the same we lose with natural substances. Take the tip of a knife, there lies metal shavings. We divide this shavings into a thousand parts, take one such part (I don’t even see it on my finger) - I have to learn so much during the day. Imagine that during the day I learned not 1 mg, but 1 gram, all the chips. It seems, what will happen from such a dose? Nothing. However, I will be in a state of severe iron poisoning. And if within a day I learn 20 grams - a teaspoon of iron - I will die. And this is not a matter of probability - will I die or not. I will die. From 20 grams of absorbed iron. This fact excites me, does not give rest.



Take another example, more tasty. Honey. Tasty useful thing, many have a table on their home. However, if Sasha eats a liter of honey during the report, then by the end of our meeting we will see how Sasha develops cramps, breaks her breathing, stops her heart, and he quickly finds herself in a coma. A liter of honey. Stands at home in free access. If some child loves him very much, then we can lose the child. This is an excess.

Why it happens? Most of the excess substances entering us invariably integrate into the metabolic, chemical reactions in our body. Why it happens? Man, as a species, exists for 2.5 million years. Evolutionary psychologists say that in living organisms during evolution only those mechanisms are fixed that contribute to the survival of this species in constantly changing environmental conditions. 2.5 million years we lived in an era of food shortages. We practically did not have an era when we would live in abundance of food, so evolution did not need to create mechanisms to ignore the excess. We don’t have them. There has always been hunger — integrate whatever comes into your body.

I started with the fact that we constantly eat, drink and breathe. And we also analyze sounds, smells, images of the environment. That is, we consume information. It’s interesting, but the same rule applies to information: a little is bad and a lot is bad?

Obviously, when there is little information, it is bad. In the wild, a living creature dies rather quickly if there is little information.



I am a diver, I like to dive. If you dive with me into the Black Sea, you will see that there "everyone eats everyone." Ruthlessly. Fish eat jellyfish, jellyfish - other jellyfish, crabs - fish, mollusks - mollusks, and humans are everything. One has only to gape, miss information, and it will be in the hands of the diver.

And why is it so bad? It seems that there is not much information. I’m not a jellyfish, I’m a man, I have a higher nervous system. I will take as much information as I need, I will ignore the rest. Like a glass - you can pour there as much as you can, and then everything will pour over. So? No.

Neurophysiologists say that an abundance of information reduces intellectual functions because it distracts attention, makes thinking superficial and leads to an increase in the number of errors.

When I heard this, I did not believe it. He began to understand. Quite quickly found the opinion of the same evolutionary psychologists. They say that everything is quite logical: now is the era of information abundance, and we have not had in our entire evolution such an era when information would be more accessible than food. And since there was no such era, there was not even a chance to develop evolutionary mechanisms of ignoring information.

I did not believe and went for evidence.

The second part of. Neurophysiology


The structure and functions of the nervous system and brain began to be studied 500 more years before the birth of Christ. Pretty quickly they understood how the nervous system is arranged macroscopically. Then they found out that there are cells, neurons, that they are united into groups, called these groups - nerve centers, nuclei. We realized that a certain core is responsible for a certain function in the human body. For example, 250 years ago, the Frenchman Charles Lorry destroyed the cerebellum of an animal and found that the animal cannot walk, its coordination is impaired - this means that the cerebellum is responsible for coordinating movement. That is, we have known the anatomy of the nervous system for a long time, and how it functions was not clear. Even 300 years ago, scientists believed that it functions "somehow."

It reminds me of an intern look at the application. When I came to Yandex.Maps, they gave me small tasks there - to edit some view, touch it from the edge - I understood something in such problems. And how the application functions “in general”, I did not really understand. “Somehow,” I thought. So people did not imagine how the nervous system functions for a long time. “Somehow.” Any energies there, higher matter or non-matter at all.

But 158 ​​years ago, Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov, a Russian physiologist, published the work “Reflexes of the brain,” where he said that behind all our activities lies a material substrate. He first applied the Cartesian concept of "reflex" (from lat. Refleksus - reflected) to the higher nervous activity of man. That is, any of our actions is a reaction to some kind of stimulus that arose outside or inside. This statement has split the scientific world into two parts.

Some said it was heresy! How dare this Russian Ivan lower a man to the level of an animal, reflexes, some kind of reflex arcs there?

And second scientists, for example, Nikolai Evgenievich Vvedensky, Alexei Alekseevich Ukhtomsky, British scientist Charles Sherrington, saw an opportunity to study the work of the nervous system further. Pretty quickly some 7 principles of coordination of reflex nervous activity were formulated. We will talk in detail about two of them - the principle of reciprocity and the principle of dominance.


I.P. Pavlov. Photo source: libmir.com/book/288344-ivan-petrovich-pavlov-1849-1936-gg-ezras-asratovich-asratyan/image

In 1924, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov received the Nobel Prize for work in the field of digestion and also switched to studies of higher nervous activity. And he formulates the doctrine of unconditioned and conditioned reflexes. We will also talk about one unconditioned reflex.

80 years ago, the Soviet scientist Petr Kuzmich Anokhin writes the work "Theory of functional systems." This is a fundamental job. Only at the end of the last century, people came up with such cunning scanners that made it possible to see the systems that Peter Kuzmich spoke about.

We studied the brain as before? There was magnetic resonance imaging or computed tomography, and we did some sections of the static state of the brain and got a 3D picture of the state of the brain right now. And I wanted to see how the brain functions in a living person over time. And only at the end of the last century two tricky scanners appeared: functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography. They are based on the study of glucose and oxygen consumption by nerve tissue. They study in which parts of the brain these substances are actively being consumed. And where they consume more actively, this means that there is a high physiological activity of neurons. When we shake some muscle in the gym, it actively devours something. The principles are the same.

What is a functional network according to Peter Kuzmich Anokhin? This is when groups of neurons come together in a functional community to perform a specific task. Suppose I was pricked with a needle - I experienced pain because my nerve center of pain was activated. At the same moment, I experienced emotional upheaval: surprise, fear. My neurons, which are responsible for my emotional state, have activated and my center has been activated, which analyzes the images. I also remembered all this, that is, my neurons in the hippocampus were activated. For such a simple situation, different groups of neurons became active in me, and they completed one of their tasks.



Until 1990, scientists believed that there were five functional networks for performing intellectual work. But in 2000, it became clear that there were only three of them.

All three functional networks provide all our intellectual activity. You listen to me, you are all very different, but if we placed you in these scanners, we would see that all of you now had the same groups of neurons - the same functional system, the same large-scale neural network.

And if we put the scanner on me and on Andrei Plakhov, who is also telling something interesting in the next room, it turns out that I have exactly the same functional networks with him now. And if we take the guys who are now somewhere on the sea, sitting on the beach, looking into the distance and seemingly not thinking about anything, they have an active third functional network.

These functional networks in foreign popular science literature as soon as they are called. Daniel Kahneman calls them "fast and slow brain." The psychiatrist Theo Compernolle calls them the “thinking, reflecting, and archiving brain.” But we are programmers - we can understand the real names of these networks.

The first network is the salience network. This network is activated when we consume some information. You are listening to me, she is actively trying to identify the significance of the information for you.

The second network is the central executive network. It is active in any person who is now trying to execute a decision. Roughly speaking, when we create information or implement the decision we made. I'm trying to convey my thoughts to you now.

The third network is the default mode network. The guys are sitting, looking at the sea, doing nothing, it seems they don’t even think about anything, but at that moment they have an active functional network, although this is not visible by human behavior. I won’t say a word about this network, although it is incredibly interesting, and you should read about it separately. In Russian popular science literature, the psychotherapist Andrei Vladimirovich Kurpatov talks about it in full, read it. We will be interested in the first two networks.
When is the significance network active? When we watch Facebook, scroll through Instagram, read someone else’s pool request, and read the letter. That is, when we actively consume some information.

When is the central executive network active? When we write something in the IDE, create information, implement the solution, write a note in the pool request, write a letter. That is, when we execute some invented decision.

And the question immediately arises: “And when I read the pool request and immediately write a comment on it, do I have two systems active at the same time? Or when I conduct a meeting and talk with a person, I listened to him, then answered - I also have two systems working simultaneously? ” No. It turns out that these systems work on the principle of reciprocity - one of the seven principles of coordination of higher nervous activity, which we talked about a little earlier.

The principle of reciprocity is characteristic of many tissues in our body. It means that the fabric can do one thing, or something else - but never both at once. For example, the liver is a multifunctional organ that can do a lot of useful things, a kind of factory in our body. When we ate deliciously, glucose entered our liver. Then the liver with the help of its receptor apparatus understands that there is a lot of glucose, and it includes it in some chemical reactions, for example, to create a supply of this glucose in the body, turning it into glycogen.



And if we drank alcohol, then alcohol enters the liver - it is toxic for the whole body, sadly, toxic. The poison, though tasty. Then the liver traps alcohol with its receptors and incorporates it into other chemical reactions to neutralize ethanol. The liver can do either one or the other - either add glucose to glycogen or hydrolyze ethyl alcohol - and never do both at the same time. A very unpleasant surprise. When we drink and have a tasty snack, we switch the liver to the mode of neutralizing alcohol, and it can do nothing else. This is the principle of reciprocity.

In nervous tissue, this means that functional large-scale neural networks can function either one or the other - and never together. This is due to the fact that when one network of neurons is activated, another network is sharply inhibited. It is even known exactly how this happens. When excitation comes to the neurons of one group, from these neurons through special insertion cells - neurons - there is a inhibitory impulse to the group of another network. Like a children's swing: if you fly up, the other flies down. So with these networks. And in order for this inhibitory impulse to pass, it is necessary that an electric impulse passes in the neurons, so that some signal molecules are ejected between the processes of these cells, they must be created, for this, genes that are responsible for protein synthesis are expressed. In general, a lot of resources are spent, although we do not notice it.

For example, if we can somehow label a water molecule in a glass and measure the number of collisions of this molecule with other molecules in a glass, then it turns out that in a second this molecule makes 10 trillion collisions with other water molecules. For us, the second is nothing, but there a whole life has passed. It’s the same in our head - we switch one network, nothing seems to have happened for us, however, a whole life of protein molecules has happened there. When we switch one activity to another, it takes some time and a certain amount of resources.

We pass to the principle of dominance. It was formed by Alexei Alekseevich Ukhtomsky. I knowingly call all these names. In the process of understanding the functioning of the brain, it was the Russian scientists who played a big role, I would like us to be proud of it.


A.A. Ukhtomsky. Photo source: yarwiki.ru/article/2061/uhtomskij-aleksej-alekseeevich

The principle of dominance means that when a certain functional network of neurons is activated, it seeks to dominate other networks. This is very easy to understand. Suppose it is evening, snow will fall at night. Can this be in the Urals? Easy. Woke up in the morning - knee-deep snow. The man went out, trodden the path. The second person will go where the first person went. 20 people will pass, and then you will go. And you, of course, will choose this particular path, and not loose snow, no matter how it winds. There are even videos on the Internet, how people mock other people - they trample down such tracks that do not lead anywhere. And people are thoughtlessly following them.

Roughly the same thing happens in nerve tissue. If there is already a chain of neurons that actively interact with each other, then any excitation from other groups flows to this network - called “converts” - and feeds the work of this particular functional network.
Why is it important to understand? You have been listening to me for 45 minutes, you have a very active functional network. You are trying to understand what I am telling you. You are now strengthening the connection between neurons. And if we are in a state of activity of some network for a long time, for example, I’m sitting on vacation, reading books, watching TV shows, and not loading the brain with creative intellectual activity, then the connections between neurons are physically strengthened in my brain.

When I heard this, I thought that this could not be: 25 years ago we were taught at the institute that the brain is such a tissue that once appeared, developed over 25 years and no longer changes, only something dies there . Now it is known that there are areas where neurons constantly grow, multiply. And it is known that throughout life, each of us constantly reorganizes the connections between the cells of the brain. This ability underlies the plasticity of the brain. I want us to understand that plasticity is not when a piece of the brain has been removed, and something will grow there. Nothing will grow. Plasticity is mainly about strengthening the connections between neurons.

I want you to understand how this happens. A nerve cell, a neuron, has several incoming channels and one outgoing. Unidirectional data flow, as in React, the pulse goes all the time in one direction. If you imagine that my hand is the axon of some cell, and this is the incoming dendrite, there is a gap between them - we call it a synaptic gap - signaling molecules are thrown there. And when this axon irritates this dendrite for a long time, additional processes, dendritics physically grow in the dendrite. There was such a connection, and it became such to increase the area of ​​contact of this dendrite with this axon, so that information flows more easily. These dendritics are called dendritic spines. The word "spikes", in my opinion, is dumb, but it is a completely scientific term accepted throughout the world.And it is precisely the ability to strengthen ties that underlies plasticity.

I was on vacation not so long ago, a whole month at sea. This month I read, watched TV shows and did not program at all. When he returned, on the first day he could not do anything at all. I continued to read mail, physically could not force myself to do something useful. But you do not need to be on vacation to plunge into such a state. When you watched five episodes of the Game of Thrones in a row, the only thing you can do after that is to watch the sixth episode. Right?

All. The most difficult parts about physiology and neurophysiology have ended. I want us to knock out some facts. In order for us to consume information, we are activating a large-scale neural network called the “significance identification network”. In order for us to do something, the central executive network is activated. These networks operate reciprocally, that is, either one or the other. When we are in a dialogue or editing someone’s pool request, we write valuable comments, then we have a very fast change of these networks. We do not notice, but at this moment there is an active expenditure of resources in the nervous tissue. When we are in a state of activity of one network for a long time, our connections in the brain are physically reorganized - which leads to the dominance of this network.

Why am I talking about this? We recall that information is now more accessible than food - we consume a lot of it. This means that if we consume it uncontrollably, then, most likely, we are in a state of active one network for a long time, a network for identifying significance. And this is the network with the help of which we can only identify whether the information is significant to us or not, but we can’t do anything with it.

The third part. Summary


We come to the topic of inefficiency, where did I start. Why does it seem to me that we need to restore efficiency and not increase it?

In 1978 (I was then three years old), Nobel laureate Herbert Simon received an award for his work in the field of studying people's behavior at work and making decisions. He said such a phrase, I will read it: “In a world where the main limited resource is attention, information can be an expensive luxury item, as it can switch our attention from important to non-essential.” Once again: information can switch my attention from important to non-essential.

It seems that one does not have to be a Nobel laureate to understand this. All sorts of bad people - crooks, thieves in public transport or loud women in colorful skirts at the station - have long understood this. One of them grabs your hand and pokes something in the palm of your hand, the second shouts in an ear in an unfamiliar language, their children scurry around and pull you on the shirt. And you don’t notice how iPhone leaves your back pocket. Because the attention was scattered from something important to non-essential.

I was wondering what kind of information is capable of scattering my attention at work from important to non-essential. And we have a lot of such information at work: mail, letters, mailing, notifications about the assembly system, that there were pool requests, messages in chat rooms, private or work, SMS.



I divided them into two groups - unexpected and desired information. I will selectively take examples, see how facts from physiology and neurophysiology interweave here and what this gives us.

Here is the first example. When I start talking with people about noise, they shrug their shoulders and answer: “Well, I don’t know, it doesn’t bother me.”

- Doctor, my leg hurts.
- I don’t know, I have the same leg, but it doesn’t hurt.

Most of you think that noise doesn't bother you.

In 2000, two scientists at Cornell University in the United States, Gary Evans and Dana Jones, published an article on Stress and Noise in an Open Office. They conducted an experiment: they took 40 office employees, divided into two groups. 20 women were put in one room, 20 in another. They were given exactly the same tasks to both. In one room it was quiet, and in the other they turned on the noise of an ordinary open space: keyboard clicks, flashes of laughter, the buzzing of a coffee machine and copy machines. And so they did these tasks for three hours. Then they collected work and threw them to hell, because that was not the point.

They took blood from women and examined hormones such as adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol. And it turned out that the group that worked in a noisy office had significantly higher levels of these hormones than the group that worked in a quiet office. And most of all, two hormones went off scale: adrenaline and norepinephrine. Adrenaline is also called the hormone of fear, and norepinephrine is called the hormone of hatred.

It seems that the article “Stress and noise in open office” can be renamed “Fear and Loathing in open office”. The article came out two years after Terry Gilliam's film “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” It seems to me that scientists have laid a joke in the title of their article.

Women who worked in noise were asked if it interfered with them. They replied that they did not even notice. It turns out that women did not notice the noise, but their body noticed and threw these signaling molecules into the blood. Namely, adrenaline and norepinephrine prepare our body for two actions: to fight or to run. Fight or run. This means that these hormones completely change the functioning of each system of our body. There is no such organ or system of organs that would not be subjected to their influence.

In these women, and in all of us, in a noisy office, the pressure rises a little, the heartbeat and breathing quicken, and sweating intensifies. These processes prepare us for a fight or flight. Guys, we have a ritual - we say hello to each other. You probably met a man who has a moist hand, it’s not very comfortable to touch it. Know that this person is likely to have a fairly high level of stress, so he has a wet hand.

And why are these hormones released? And here we recall Ivan Petrovich Pavlov with his teachings on conditioned and unconditioned reflexes. There is a wonderful unconditioned reflex - indicative. Pavlov aptly called "what is it?" Every person, every animal, even a fish in an aquarium has this reflex. This is the oldest reflex, it is like a program wired in the BIOS, you do not have access to it - you can neither edit nor cancel.

This reflex necessarily goes through two phases. The first phase is a stop reaction. No matter what you do, but at a loud noise, a flash of laughter or conversation, you stop doing what you did. You are sure to slow down the functional system in which you were now. And the second phase begins - the analysis phase. You turn on that sound. You have eyes turning, ears (who knows how, for example, dogs turn), even the head or the whole body. And if I had persuaded an assistant to knock loudly off to the side, you would all turn your head there first, be sure. And only then would you think - why did I look there?

That is why, when we go out on the road and hear the screech of brakes, we turn to this screech necessarily, while we stop dead in our tracks, look at the approaching bus. And the maximum that we can do is nothing.

Or when you walk in the dark and someone behind you shouts: “Stand”, you stop, although it seems logical to run headlong. And then you will think, what the hell am I standing for? Because an indicative reflex.



Now back to the noise in the office. This is not just a matter of discomfort or concentration. Loud outbursts of laughter, conversation, some sounds necessarily slow down the activity in which you were - they slow down the functional system in which you were. And if you concentratedly wrote some code with the help of the central performing network, it will slow down, and you will certainly throw up your head or listen: “What do they say? They tell me? No, not me. Damn, what did I do now? ” And the more noise distracting you, the more often this switching occurs.

When I work in a noisy office, I often have the feeling that I did something all day, at the end of the day nothing was done, but I got tired like cattle. It is important to note that if you are a young person, then you have a wonderful property - to concentrate on the task, despite the noise. But believe me, for most young people, when they become not very young, this tolerance for noise will greatly decrease. And any noise will distract you. Everything about the noise.

So, I no longer have time. Further briefly.

About unwanted unexpected information a few words. All sorts of messages in the mail, in instant messengers - we all need them. But are they really needed at the moment they appeared? How many of these messages are really important that I should read them this second, when they arrived? If I look at my previous week or month, I will honestly tell you, I did not have such important messages.

I have only three types of important messages. The first is messages from my wife and daughter (they rarely write to me, so I want to immediately know what they wrote to me). The second type of message - if I am responsible for some kind of service in production, I want to know that it fell in the prod so that I immediately respond to it. And the third type - if I’m downloading something in production, I want to know whether it has come or not. If you haven’t come to react to this. But to take even this message - I can still drink tea, think carefully why it might not have come.

And what are incoming messages, triggers that distract me from work? Now we know that this is an indicative reflex, the obligatory switching of networks - one network is slowed down, the second is activated. This leads to the fact that my attention is scattered from important to non-essential. For me it absolutely definitely increases the number of errors in the code - a completely objective criterion for my work.

Further desired information. When do I go after her myself? I hate being bored. I made a push or commit, and while the pre-commit linters are working, will I wait 15 seconds? No, I'll go to Telegram and ... hang there for 10 minutes. He returned after 10 minutes - the linter fell, damn it, let's do everything again.



Or when I deploy the project and I know that it will be deployed for 10 minutes, I leave to read the pool requests ... for two hours. He returned two hours later - and the deployment fell.

So it turns out that I jump from task to task, switch from one network to another, my context is completely unloaded.

I started with training, I will finish with training. It seems that we need to learn constantly, daily. And when to study? There is not enough time and energy at home, so we will study while working. Therefore, in parallel with work, we set up training seminars, podcasts, and listen to something. So what do we do?

And now we know that when we listen to a lecture or podcast, we’ll activate a network for identifying significance, and when we try to write code, we’ll activate a central executive network. They cannot work at the same time. It turns out that when I listen to some useful text in parallel with work, I constantly switch. And I hear and program. At the same time, my attention is scattered. In other words, if I concentrate on something, I don’t hear anything in the podcast. Or am I listening to something there, but I think very badly here.

For this reason, I ask the guys I work with not to go to meetings with laptops. We gathered at a meeting to discuss the problem. And if we are discussing, and that person is sitting in the laptop, then he is not there, and not here - he is missing pieces of information.

Take my lecture "36". There were a lot of comments in the social networks for the video, and immediately you could see people who listened to my story in the background or at a speed of 2x. “Why didn’t Makishvili say that?” Yes, damn it, I said, you just didn’t listen, you did something in parallel.

There are other factors that affect our inefficiency. We talked about the abundance of information, about networks, talked about the fact that life is possible only within the narrow limits of the concentration of substances that we consume: few - bad, many - bad. Now we consume a lot of information, and when we consume it, we invariably switch our nervous system to one of the networks that cannot create information and make decisions. We have a poor idea of ​​how the brain works, we have some kind of speculation, and I want us to part with them and finally use our instrument in sight.

In search of efficiency, we try in every way to increase efficiency. But, it seems to me, it should not be raised, but restored. If we learn to use our brain, then we will restore it to a normal level.

What can be done with this knowledge? I would tell you, but it seems that this makes no sense. You, programmers, are simple people - you don’t need advice, if I advise something, it will only cause rejection in you.

I suggest you not to believe. I suggest that you read everything that I read and draw conclusions on how your brain functions and how to improve your performance. For literature and "proofs" come to telegram - write to me, and I will share it with you. I wish you health, happiness and effectiveness. Thank.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/undefined/

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