Making decisions is a great effort

Executive function is exhausted after the difficult decisions.

The so-called executive function is actually a set of subfunctions cognitive skills including concentration when performing a task, decision-making, short-term memory and inhibitory control. It is therefore a core function of many regulatory and other various mental activities and plays an important role in reasoning ability, hata the extent that is necessary to take into account in any attempt at evaluation or measurement of intelligence, as evidenced research published in 2007 in the journal Child Development.

The effort involved in these processes, the job of keeping the mind alert in case of concentration, not to distract us from the object we have to focus, or the need to not give in to the temptations of the worst option in the case of decision-making, and this effort is to turn a tired and a depletion of executive function, just as weight lifting muscles tired and exhausted arms.





Important decisions

He describes a collaboration of Amir On in Scientific American: Tough choices: making decisions tired your brain. To better understand executive function as a construct that underlies the decision-making on matters that may not have anything to do with each other, the author proposes the illustrative example of someone who discusses the options somewhat irrelevant or not eating a cookie .

Later, that same person has to take a decision more important, relative to a completely different area and will affect very relevant to your life, as is the choice between two possible jobs that have been offered. Well, that decision may be affected by the earlier efforts on the issue of the cookie, since the effects of such efforts are persistent and may have exhausted the instrument-executive function, which now is required to make a decision transcendent.

The fact that the decision merely tired and even exhausted executive function, and it has an effect on subsequent cognitive tasks, seems confirmed by the research and field studies conducted by psychologist at the University of Minnesota Kathleen Vohs and colleagues .

In one of them, for example, some students took to the mall, where they were making purchasing choices. Subsequently were given the simple algebraic problem solving, and students who had made a greater number of choices at the mall had a considerably more difficult to solve.

Mental exhaustion

The decision-making process includes, among other things, the consideration of different options, the sacrifice of the advantages of one of them in exchange for what it offers the other, the transition from one state to another mental evaluative decision-making, and are these mental activities that require effort that ends up straining to executive function.

Especially stressful, as the findings of a parallel study conducted by Nathan Novemsky professor at Yale University and colleagues, is facing the need to sacrifice something to make other, and here it should be noted that the greater similarity maintain between If the different options that you need to choose, it is more strenuous efforts.

Another study, published by the psychologist at the University of Maryland Anastasiya Pocheptsova and colleagues in 2007, also confirms the effects of tiredness and fatigue on executive function, in this case by experiments on concentration and attention regulation, which also require the use of it. Subjects with the tired brain for this activity took the worst decisions in the matters put to them later.

Cognitive tools

On the other hand, many of the tests and tests used in this type of research, also serve to assess the extent to which the performance of certain cognitive activities tired, fatigued or exhausted at the "muscle" brain, can also be used as training for same, as noted by Clancy Blair, associate professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Pennsylvania State University, and author of the first of the studies cited in this article.

All these results and conclusions are extremely relevant, because executive function is something that we continuously throughout the day. They can challenge the idea that the multi-functionality in the workplace increases productivity, because only the transition time between them and other tasks by an employee would rather low, especially when it comes to complex tasks. This aspect has been investigated.

They are also clear implications of the same in many other areas (including economic) of our lives and take account of these studies and their findings may help at least identify when it is not a good time to take an important decision. For example, after having been assessing the advisability of eating or not a cookie.