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Archive for the ‘neuroscience’ Category

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Motivation: Do What You Know is Right, Not Because You’re Afraid of Consequences

Monday, March 8th, 2010

By William Seidman

I am enthusiastic about Daniel Pink’s newest book Drive, and have been discussing it a lot lately, but I had some questions for Pink:

Q. Why don’t more companies adopt and support intrinsic motivation? (Pink calls it “Motivation 3.0″)

Q. Most executives know that it is more powerful than the old carrot-and-stick approaches — “Motivation 2.0.”  So why not rely on it?

I emailed Pink and got a quick response. His thinking is that “folklore” was a critical factor. People have been brought up on Motivation 2.0 - the carrot and the stick — and told it is the way to drive work. Leaders rely on that.

I think it goes even further. I think Motivation 3.0 - intrinsic motivation, which comes from within — requires executives to trust people to do the right thing just because it is the right thing to do, and executives are not really comfortable trusting others.

A move to 3.0 requires of a leap of faith.

Fortunately, recent advances in neuroscience make the leap smaller because this research shows how our brains respond differently to 2.0 than 3.0.

As Pink notes, intrinsic motivation literally stimulates different portions of the brain that are more closely associated with independent work.

This is the same body of research Cerebyte uses to create and sustain people’s motivation to change.

Posted in Uncategorized, business, management consulting, neuroscience, organizational change, organizational culture | No Comments »

Daydreaming and Problem Solving: The Deep Connection

Monday, December 28th, 2009

By Michael McCauley

Clive Thompson, writing for Wired Magazine, recently explored the idea that the act of daydreaming is a crucial part of problem solving. This is an interesting notion, since most work environments are designed to minimize or eliminate daydreaming. Instead, Thompson suggests that tools and applications should be developed to encourage mental drift.

 A recent study by Dr. Michael Kane of the University of North Carolina found that our minds drift away from our tasks fully one-third of the time. His study further suggests that when your mind drifts off, it is actually doing important data-storage work.  Brain scans indicate that, when you are daydreaming,  the mind is actually using the prefrontal cortex –  the part of the brain used for problem solving. Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara, believes that an idling mind is likely doing deeply creative work.

So how is all this related to persuasive technology? Modern productivity software is designed to minimize mental drift. Often we are so focused on completing tasks, checking off to-do lists and scheduling meetings that we don’t have time to just sit and think.

How about designing software that changes our attitude and behavior about drifting — software that actually optimizes daydreaming? I find this to be a truly inspired idea. Using persuasive technology, we could design software that actually encourages people to make notes about their daydreams. What about software that actually encourages daydreaming? In its crudest form, maybe the application pings you from time to time to see if your mind is wandering. If it is, then the application gives you an opportunity to capture what you’re thinking about in a few simple notes. You could then go back and review your notes at a later time. This might spur additional ideas that can be used to enhance your problem- solving ability and actually improve your productivity.

Maybe this represents the next generation of persuasive technology. What do you think?

Posted in neuroscience, persuasive technology | No Comments »

Experiential Learning and Conventional Learning: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us

Friday, December 11th, 2009

By William Seidman

I’m working with a company that is asking traditional instructional designers to develop experiential learning activities - which are different in conception, design, and actual practice from what these designers are used to doing. There’s an inherent struggle: it’s difficult to be learner-focused if you are sticking to traditional design.

In experiential learning, everything begins with the learner experience.

New ideas and new stimulation are useful only if they connect with the learners’ current abilities and ways of doing things - with who they are, right now.  A student isn’t a vessel into which the instructor pours knowledge.  In addition, the learning must have enough of the right types of repetition to be internalized.

Traditional instructional design is much more about telling people what they should know — and telling them very specifically what they will do — to learn something.

In my view, there’s an unspoken inherent mistrust of the learner in the process, and in any “teaching” in which the course designer and instructor are in charge.

The neuroscience of learning proves over and over again that experiential learning, in contrast, is all about providing learners with activities,  and trusting that they will learn the “right” lessons, and also trusting that they will continue to learn the right lessons often enough to produce long-term change.

The difference in perspective between a trusting and a not-trusting teaching method is where I’ve found great opportunities for learning, creativity, and growth.

Posted in best practices, getting change to "stick", neuroscience, organizational change, personal change, training | 1 Comment »

Grit, Determination, Persistence: The Value of Long-Term Effort in Developing Talent

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

By Rick Grbavac

An article by science and tech writer Jonah Lehrer in the online Boston Globe describes studies that point to the fact that grit and perseverance are better predictors of success than intelligence.  I found it interesting that, because IQ is relatively quick and easy to identify, researchers focused their attention on raising IQ and disregarded focusing on values of long-term development of talent.

Carol S. Dweck, psychologist at Stanford University, has said, ” One of the most important elements is teaching kids that talent takes time to develop, and requires continuous effort.” She refers to this as a “growth mindset.” Dweck compares this view with the “fixed mindset,” the belief that achievement results from abilities we are born with. “A child with the fixed mindset is much more likely to give up when they encounter a challenging obstacle, like algebra, since they assume that they’re just not up to the task,” says Dweck.

“..talent takes time to develop, and requires continuous effort.” If you want to develop the high-performing organization, it is not done with the fire hose approach.  It takes some time to develop the skills, grit and determination to be successful.

Lehrer goes on to say that praise for determination, trying, effort and grit are much better in the long run rather than praising for intelligence.  This research has great relevance for our education system and for our business talent development.  It also supports Cerebyte’s drip approach to becoming great at just about anything.

Posted in US education, neuroscience, personal change | No Comments »

Does Language Affect our Thoughts?

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

By Michael McCauley

Lera Boroditsky is a Stanford University assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems. Recent research she’s done suggests that the words we use actually affect our thoughts. She has found that even something as seemingly small as the gender of nouns  can have a deep impact on the way we think. For example, in German the noun for “bridge” is feminine while in French it is masculine. When describing the same bridge, German speakers saw it as having feminine characteristics, using terms like “floating above the clouds,” “breathtakingly beautiful,” and “elegant and light.” When describing the same bridge, French speakers described it using masculine terms such as “immense,” “powerful,” and “a concrete giant.”

Boroditsky also found that people tend to have a better memory for colors if each shade has a distinct name. For example, in English two different shades of blue would be commonly called light blue and dark blue. In Russian however, these same colors would be called “goluboy” and “sinly.” When given three color swatches and asked which of the bottom two was like the top one, native Russian speakers were much faster than English speakers when the colors had distinct names.

In still another experiment, Boroditsky found that English tends to focus more on who is to blame for a particular incident - for example, “she broke the bowl” even when it was broken accidentally - while Spanish and Japanese describe the same event more like “the bowl broke itself.” When groups of English, Spanish and Japanese adults are shown video of the same event, sure enough, English speakers tend to remember who was to blame for the incident while Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to remember what was done. In Boroditsky’s words, “this raises questions about whether language affects even something as basic as how we construct our ideas of causallty.”

What does this all mean? Simply, that the words we use in daily speech may actually “color” our thinking in subtle ways. It may even impact the neural pathways that are most easily formed in our brains.

Definitely something to think about, but choose your words carefully!

Posted in neuroscience | No Comments »

Training Brains for Improvement in Reading - and Work Performance, too

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

By Michael McCauley

Researchers recently set out to answer a question that dogs educators and parents:

Why are some kids better readers than others?

They used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging  (fMRI) to study the brain activity of both high and low performing readers.  Brain activity turned out to be significantly different in the two groups.  

This raised another question: Could the brains of the low performing readers be somehow “trained” to mimic the same brain activity as the high performers? The researchers set about developing a software program, called “Fast ForWord,” to specifically address this question.  It turns out that language acquisition has to do with how the brain “hears” and interprets sounds. The software was designed to deliver acoustically modified speech that helped students learn. Over time, new synapses were formed in the brains of the learners, allowing improved language processing. The results were staggering. Initial students that used the software in one-hour daily labs showed significant improvement; there was an  average reading level gain of eight months in 29 days.

This research has implications for early learning, but it also has implications for businesses. It demonstrates in a very tangible and measurable way that the brain is trainable. The tired adage that “old dogs can’t learn new tricks” doesn’t apply any more. Given the right stimulus, we can now “train” the brains of lower performers to mimic the activity of top performers, even at an early age. A similar approach can be used to help lower performers in business think and act like the highest performers.

Posted in US education, neuroscience, training | No Comments »

Wear Your Rose-Colored Glasses: A Good Mood is a Biological Reality and is also Good for Productivity, Creativity, and Vision

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

By William Seidman

We have observed that there is a noticeable change in the speed and quality of learning when people are feeling good about themselves. Kim Cameron  in his book Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance  supports this.

Now there is more specific research that shows that a good mood makes learning more effective .   A University of  Toronto  study by Drs. Taylor W. Schmitz, . Eve de Rosa, and Adam K. Anderson, “Opposing Influences of Affective State Valence on Visual Cortical Encoding,”  strongly suggests that “seeing the world through rose-colored glasses is more biological reality than metaphor.” 

The study team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to look at how the visual cortex processes information when the subject is in a good,  bad, or neutral mood. Good moods enhance the size of the window through which we see the world. A bad mood shrinks creativity and productivity. This information is critical in terms of creating an organizational culture worth having. 

For the good of your organization, learn to think positively!

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Posted in affirmations, business, management consulting, neuroleadership, neuroscience, organizational change, personal change, positive leadership | No Comments »

Remembering Ourselves/Revising the Past: Are Rose-Colored Glasses Hard-Wired?

Monday, June 8th, 2009

By Michael McCauley

As we work with companies to maximize their performance we often encounter a rather odd phenomenon: once the people in an organization have changed their behavior and internalized the new way of doing things, they deny ever having done things the old way. Even when we show them data that clearly illustrates the way they used to do things, they still deny that they ever engaged in the old, now outdated, behaviors. They claim that they have always done things the “right” way - i.e., the way they do them now.  How can that be?

I’ve been reading an interesting book, Why We Make Mistakes   by Joseph Hallinan . Hallinan finds that this tendency to see and remember our actions in self-serving ways is so ingrained, and so subtle, that we often have no idea we’re doing it. He cites a study of recent high school graduates now attending a local college. They were asked to recall their high school grades; researchers compared their remembered grades against the actual transcripts.

They found that no less than 29% of the recalled grades were wrong and far more grades were shifted up than down. This combined with other studies shows a significant predisposition for people to reconstruct their memories in positive, self-flattering ways.

These findings are confirmed by Princeton Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman . He has found that that most people, after they change their mind or behavior, reconstruct their own past opinions in such a way as to truly believe that they always thought or acted in a certain way. 

So, it seems that the responses we encounter are perfectly natural - people really don’t remember ever doing things the “old” way. It seems that we all wear “rose colored glasses” -they’re probably hard-wired, and we don’t even know it.

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Posted in neuroscience, organizational change, personal change | No Comments »

Your Brain on Failure

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

By Michael McCauley

Is failure actually good for you? Recent studies by Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck  indicate that it is.  For forty years she has studied how people handle failure, and her research has led her to identify two distinct mindsets that dramatically influence how we react to failure. She’s recently published a new book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, which explains her findings.

 A “fixed mindset” is grounded in the belief that talent is genetic - you’re a born artist, baseball pitcher, or math wiz. People with a fixed mindset believe that they are entitled to success without much effort and regard failure as a personal affront. Conversely, a “growth mindset” assumes that no talent is entirely innate and that effort and learning make everything possible. Since the ego isn’t on the line as much, the growth mindset sees failure as opportunity rather than insult.

In her studies,  Dr. Dweck  tracked and compared brain waves of subjects with both growth and fixed mindsets. She  found that when those with a growth mindset fail at something, they actually enter a more focused mental state as they try to figure out their mistake and how to learn from it. On the other hand, those with a fixed mindset never enter this focused state of learning and show little, if any, advancement from failure. In essence, fixed mindset people don’t learn from their mistakes.

 Antoine Bechara, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at University of Southern California, has gone further and actually isolated the spots in the brain that are responsible for our fear of failure and our fear of success. These are the points in the brain where we debate risk and reward. By studying brainwaves emanating from these two locations, Dr. Bechara has found that in a normally functioning brain, failure is welcomed as an opportunity for learning, and for strengthening us.

What we learn from these studies is that failure is normal, healthy and necessary to learning. Great coaches and teachers know this, and they give us the opportunities we need to fail in a controlled environment so that we can learn and grow.

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Posted in neuroscience, personal change | No Comments »

Positive Thinking and The Neuroscience of Attention and Attentiveness

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

By William Seidman

Last week, the New York Times ran an interesting article on attention, specifically on Winfred Gallagher’s book Rapt: Attention on the Focused Life.  Some conversations I subsequently had got me thinking about attention. One discussion I had was about a teaching technique that spends a lot of time focusing on what people are doing wrong. A reasonable challenge to that theory of learning is, “If you’re focussing on what you’re doing wrong, how will you learn to do it right?” A more complex and complete response has to do with the neuroscience of attention - which magicians/performance artists Penn and Teller know quite a bit about.

Are any of you golfers? Have you ever gone to the tee and said to yourself, “Don’t slice, don’t slice!” What do you immediately do? You slice. It is the same idea for a well-known expression: “Playing the game not to lose.” In sports, and, it turns out, in inherited wealth (check out Lee Brower’s  work), when you play a game defensively, you usually lose.

Why is this? When you spend most of your mental resources on what’s wrong, you are getting better at the wrong thing. Instead, we need to focus on the positive - or, how to do the job right.

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Posted in best practices, business, neuroscience, personal change, positive leadership | No Comments »

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