"Let’s begin with a little exercise. Go down the column of words
below, and as quickly as possible read each word silently and then say
out loud either “upper” or “lower,” depending on whether the word itself
is written in upper-or lowercase letters.
UPPER
lower
lower
upper
LOWER
Unless
you are an alien cyborg from Alpha Centauri, you were probably cruising
along until you reached the last two, where you stumbled a bit and took
longer to say “lower” while reading upper, and then “upper” while reading LOWER. That slight catch as you began to talk—that feeling of needing to stop yourself, to not read the word but instead focus on its case—has been referred to as the oomph
that is the hallmark of conscious will or effort. A task that presents
someone with this kind of mismatch between the meaning of a word and its
physical appearance is commonly referred to as a “Stroop task,” after
the American psychologist who published a paper on the effect in the
1930s, originally using words printed in incompatible colors (for
example, the word green printed in red ink). The Stroop task is a classic example of what’s called a cognitive control or executive control
task—that is, a situation where the cold, conscious mind (System 2) has
to step in and override automatic, effortless processes (System 1)."lower
lower
upper
LOWER
"Armed with this information, we can now see how a brain on wu-wei might function. We can even get a reasonably precise picture of it, thanks to some recent neuroscientific work on wu-wei–like states. A clever study by Charles Limb and Allen Braun peered into what’s happening in the minds of professional jazz pianists in action. They designed a special, nonferromagnetic keyboard that could be taken inside the fMRI scanner, which is basically a huge magnet. The researchers then had them play in two different conditions. In the first, “Scales,” they were required to play, over and over, a one-octave C scale. In the “Jazz Improv” condition, they were asked to remain in the same key but improvise a melody based upon a composition they’d previously been asked to memorize."
Aqui
