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environment more relaxed and thinking more clearly. And so on and so on.
    Third, and this might not be something readily apparent from hearing the conversation with Jill, the simple remedy that I suggested is rooted in an understanding of the workings of the most complex organ known: the human brain.
    THE ORGANIZED BRAIN: TAKE A LOOK
    You may have heard about how neuroimaging—our ability to look at the structures and functions of the working brain through advanced imaging technologies—is giving us incredible insights into our understanding of how the mind works. That’s true, and nowhere more so than in our ability to see how the brain is structured to help it function optimally—in other words, its organization.
    So just how is the brain organized? Well, at first glance, its complexity seems almost beyond comprehension. The human brain is composed of neural cells—an estimated 100 billion neurons!—that are connected into groups or circuits, communicating with chemicals called neurotransmitters. These groups form larger macrocircuits. The scale of it all is mind-boggling. But here’s a good way to visualize it: Think about looking at your house on Google Earth. You can zoom in and see where you live and your neighbors’ houses—each of them like a single neuron. Toggle back on your computer, and you can see a whole block. Go back further, and the blocks form a neighborhood, a community. Even further, and you’re at jet-plane level, looking at clusters of communities forming a metropolitan area. The brain is structured in a similar way. Put all those individual “houses” (neurons) together, and you go from something relatively simple into something enormously large and complex.
    Now imagine it’s a hot summer day in your neighborhood, and you and everybody on the block cranks up the air conditioning. Folkson the adjoining blocks are doing the same. If the whole community and the adjacent communities are doing it, too—responding to the hot weather—what do we have? An overload, maybe at the local level, but more likely—if enough blocks or neighborhoods are involved—a grid failure, a blackout, an entire community powerless.
    What happened is that the system got overloaded. But it probably could have been avoided. Chances are, there were warnings signs: The lights dimmed at one point. Or the local power authority issued alerts throughout that day, warning customers to cut back on their power usage during peak hours.
    A brain bombarded with too much stimulus, as many of us are these days, is similar to the community on the brink of a power outage on a hot summer’s day. Too much drain, too much strain. Losing those keys, forgetting a scheduled meeting, “blanking out” something you needed to do: each of these episodes are like a momentary dimming of your cognitive lights, a warning message from the brain. Indeed, you may have already experienced some of these signs, which is why you picked up this book.
    That’s a great first step. But here’s where the electrical blackout analogy falters. There is only so much power available from the grid and when it goes down, it goes down. Fortunately, the brain is more adaptable, so we reach for a different metaphor:
    You may get irked and frustrated by what goes on in Washington, D.C., but one thing that continually works and works well is the balance of power in our American system of government. The Executive Branch, Congress, the Supreme Court—sure, they may bicker and they may even work against each other at times, but the truth is that in the complex array of checks and balances that is the genius of the Constitution, none can ever get the “upper hand” over the long haul. The human brain, too, is in and of itself a remarkable system of checksand balances of “on” and “off” switches. What’s really remarkable is how, despite this delicately engineered