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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast. I'm Scott Barranado. Today we're going to talk about

brain science. But don't worry, I'm not going to bore you with retro spleenal cortex or multivoxal pattern analysis.

Our guests know all about those things, but they're here to talk about something much more exciting to us.

How recent breakthroughs in neuroscience are advancing our knowledge of how we do and how we should do knowledge work.

The new science will fundamentally change how we approach tasks such as creative thinking and how we structure rewards and how we multitask, among others.

I'm joined today by neuroscientists Adam Waits of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern

University and Malia Mason of Columbia Business School.

They're two young rising stars in the neuroscience community and the authors of the July-August-HBR feature, Your

Brain at Work.

Adam and Malia, thanks for joining us.

Thanks very much for having us.

Thank you.

So I want to start Malleo with just asking about this sort of new approach to brain science we talk

about in the article in the July August issue of

HPR this network's approach? Well I think one of the things that has changed

is we've gone from thinking about what specific brain areas do to

thinking about what networks of brain areas do and one of the reasons why that's important is because it turns out that a specific

brain area has a multitude of functions and you know what its significance is, why we're seeing it active for any given task.

...