Glossary

Hormone released in response to stress,  It's primary function is to increase blood sugar, so you can get that extra energy boost to either fight or flee.  Low levels of cortisol are fine, but prolonged high levels have long term negative effects on the body.

Dopamine is a very important neurotransmitter, or brain chemical. When you feel rewarded, scientists believe you are activating the dopamine network in your brain.  After you check off one of those items on your list, you fire your dopamine system.

The limbic system is the emotional center of the brain.  Not only does it contain structures like the amygdala, which add critical emotional weight to our conscious thought, it also contains the hippocampus, which link powerful emotional associations to memories as they are formed.

Low hanging fruit refers to the easier parts of the task (or easier list items).  It's nice to get these out of the way because you can get a lot of stuff done in a short amount of time, allowing you to feel accomplished and rewarded early in the process.

Take a look at the word revision.  When we're working through a second or third draft we actually want to see our paper in a new way.  Move paragraphs around to see how your draft changes (reorganize), delete and reword sentences that don't work, as well as add sentences or paragraphs that do work (rewrite and revise).

Stress is a natural response to environmental threats and it can actually mortivate us to avoid or manage these threats.  Humans can imagine future threats and if we focus too much on them, then we overactivate our important stress system.

Our brains are actually doing lots of thinking that we are not aware of.  Sometimes when we focus on the solution too hard, we neglect these very critical parts of our brain.  Take a break and let the unconscious mind think about your assignment for a little while.

Scientists believe that working memory always as to temporarily manipulate information as we try to work through a problem.  We only have so much working memory capacity, and if we overload this system then all the information we are trying to hold in working memory gets lost.  Fortunately, we can use scaffolds to help store some information externally (i.e. lists, friends, outlines) so we don't overload or working memory system.