What’s the best way to welcome compliance officers with more on their plates than ever to a three-day conference? By telling them multitasking is a myth, of course.

Such was among the messages delivered by cognitive neuroscientists Dr. Sahar Yousef and Lucas Miller during their opening keynote presentation at Day 1 of Compliance Week’s National Conference in Washington, D.C. on Monday. Yousef and Miller are MBA faculty at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where they teach a class on the science of productivity and performance.

The two were largely bubble-bursters for a room full of hundreds of professionals with more work to be done than hours in the day. Their session, titled “Becoming Superhuman,” was a reminder to everyone in the room that we are all human and there are certain habit we think set us up for success that actually work against us.

Consider the following insights and anecdotes Yousef and Miller shared:

‘Start with the end in mind’

The human brain constantly scans its environment because it is conditioned for survival—short-term survival at that.