Friday, January 22, 2010

You Ever Have "Brain Stop"?

Working at home today (and yesterday) thanks to the torrential downpour, and the fact that Southern California, in general, reacts to vast quantities of rain the way the rest of the country reacts to vast quantities of snow.

(Perhaps it's just that we don't get all that rain all that much.)


Anyway, I've been sleeping in and working late and all that good stuff (also, apparently, "time shifting" some of this week's work into this weekend).  And for the past two days, I've found that I'll work really well and be very productive for a certain amount of time ... and then my brain just says, "Done now!"  


It's not that I don't want to do the work.  (This particular task, which involves reviewing ... let's see, 14 volumes at 250 pages each ... about 3500 pages of transcript, is equally interesting (or not) whether I'm feeling ready to attack it or feeling totally wiped.)  It's just that, on a very fundamental level, my brain is finished for the night.  It's almost like physical exhaustion, when you just can't go another minute on the elliptical, except it's, y'know, mental.

2 comments:

Peg said...

I just heard a radio program on precisely this - how our brains are basically good at "upper level" processing for just a couple of hours a day. Let me try to find it for you.

Peg said...

Your Brain at Work

http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2010/01/21/this-is-your-brain-at-work/#comments

I didn't get to listen to the whole thing (was in the car at the time of the program) but it sounded interesting.