Conflict: Bad For Your Brain

Love Paul Graham's latest essay. A great reminder of the importance of keeping conflict out of your life if you want to accomplish anything.

Eben Pagan has talked about the same idea (which I suspect he picked up from somewhere else, but I don't recall the source). His marketing-friendly term is "open loop," which he defines as any type of conflict or unfinished business that pops into your mind unbidden.

It's interesting that conflict in particular always tends to jump right to the top of our minds. It can't be a coincidence. It must be a mechanism that evolved to enforce fairness in communities by ensuring that no one forgot to punish someone who wronged them.

In any case, it's clearly not nearly as useful today in our non-zero-sum world as it would have been in the past.

I'm probably more introverted than most people because even simple social interaction tends to stick in my thoughts for too long. I'll be trying to get something done and I start thinking about the conversation I just had instead of what I am working on. For the same reason I don't really like Twitter or Facebook and try to spend as little time as possible in IRC chatrooms and mailing lists for projects I'm tracking (even though they can be insanely useful!) because they screw up my ability to focus for some time afterwards.

It stinks, but I guess it's just a tradeoff that has to be made for deep concentration. At least with my wetware.