From "Ha-ha" to "Aha!"

New study on puzzles, problem-solving and laughter, demonstrating that people find it easier to solve puzzles through a flash of insight after they've watched something funny.  I love this from two points of view:

As a puzzle maniac, I agree that even thinking about a good one (cryptic crosswords are my drug of choice) induces a pleasant mind-state - something they found in the study.  And that moment of insight when the answer suddenly appears is one of the great joys of life, to me.

And as a creator of leadership-skills practice sessions which always combine laughter with serious practice, I constantly see how insight follows the loosening-up process of watching a funny live scene.

Glad to have the neurology to prove it!

The clock is ticking

Found this interesting item on John Jamison's ImagiLearning blog:                                    

There is something about the human brain that causes it to begin to refocus every 10 minutes. So after doing your best for 9 minutes, spend the next 60 seconds doing something to re-capture the brain's attention, to 'hook' it into sticking around for the next 10 minutes. If you lecture for 60 minutes...or create online courses...chunk them into 10 minute 'modules' divided by a 60 second "hook"...something that will cause the learners' brains to say, "Say what?" This buys you another 10 minutes.

 Don't know what research this comes from, but it's interesting enough to try out.  I'll watch in my next training program to see if folks get restless in 10-minute intervals.  Anybody notice this in their own classroom work?

Vulcanizing

This brief article in NewScientist, "We Humans Can Mind-Meld, Too," says people listening to a story produced the same brain patterns as the narrator -- just a few seconds later.  In a few cases, the listeners' patterns even preceded the storyteller's.  (I've experienced that myself: watching certain television shows or movies, I can often say the next line before the character does.  Poor writing, not my genius!)

These findings seem like neurological support for the well-documented phenomenon of entrainment, when people in conversational sync spontaneously mirror each other's movements and rhythms.  Guess we do it on the brain level, too.    Does this explain why my sister and I so frequently say the same thing at the same time?  We even do it while instant messaging.

So, fellow trainers, how can we encourage this shared neurological dance with our classes?  And does this give you new ideas about the effectiveness of story in adult learning?

Wait, I know what you're going to say...

Mind games

Terrific interview with cognitive developmental neuroscientist Adele Diamond from Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Diamond has found that full-body involvement and dramatic play facilitate learning (something we're committed to at Workplace Productions). Surprisingly, some now-rejected traditional strategies such as memorization also help. Diamond's research focuses on children, but I think some of these ideas relate to adult learning as well. What's your take?

Good words

Insight requires a clean slate - Mark Jung-Beeman, quoted in Jonah Lehrer's book How We Decide

Failure to thrive

I've been reading Jonah Lehrer's excellent new book How We Decide, and this morning I turned up something that startled me but makes utter sense.

People who are praised for innate intelligence end up learning less and performing more poorly than those who are praised for their effort.

Lehrer describes the experiments of Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist who gave hundreds of school children an easy test, told them their scores, and then gave each one sentence of praise. Half were told, "You must be really smart," and the other half were told, "You must have worked really hard."

Then all the children were given a choice to take a hard test or an easy one. Overwhelmingly, the children praised for their effort chose the harder test, while those who had been commended for their intelligence chose the easier one. And on a final test of the same difficulty as the intial one, the "hard workers" improved their scores by an average of 30 percent, while the "smart" kids' results actually dropped by nearly 20 percent.

Dweck wrote that praising children for their intelligence teaches them not to risk making mistakes; Lehrer points out that "it encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is learning from mistakes." The most effective masters of any skill actively look for their mistakes, to train their brains to avoid them next time.

I encourage you to read the book; Lehrer explains the neurological reasons why lots of failure is essential to learning.

How many of our learners (and how many of us) don't reach the levels we could because we have been taught to avoid making errors? How can we set up learning situations to help failure-averse people, whose sense of self-worth may be tied up in making no mistakes, and therefore learning nothing?

Distraction, creativity, and -- oh, wait a minute, someone's texting me

Every classroom trainer has faced the scourge of the BlackBerry: the participant whose attention is focused more on her handheld than on the task at hand. With our clients' support, we generally bar the devices from our learning sessions, which are all about engagement and interaction -- what's happening here and now.

The current Newsweek has a terrific article about the cognitive effects of frequent interruptions. Although many BlackBerry fans maintain that their habit doesn't harm their thinking, lots of scientific studies beg to differ. Distraction interferes with memory, problem-solving, and creativity. So-called multitasking actually means not doing several things at once, but switching rapidly among them, to the detriment of all.

So the CrackBerry fan, while telling himself he's being efficient, is actually functioning with one frontal lobe tied behind his back. Which may be why he doesn't even realize he's missing things, like that really useful learning that's going on right in front of him. Hello?

Step by step

I'm reading a marvelous little book called My Stroke of Insight. The author, Jill Bolte Taylor, is a Ph.D. neuroanatomist who suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke at the age of 37. She writes about the experience of stroke from the inside, aided by her knowledge of brain structures and science. And she tells the story of her long, slow recovery after losing much of her left-brain functioning, including speaking, understanding language, reading, and virtually all conceptual thinking.

The book is fascinating in many ways, but one of Jill's insights into learning struck me particularly. It's something we probably know, but probably forget all the time: the most productive way to learn is to focus on the step we're working on now. For example, immediately post-stroke, Jill was trying to learn to sit up - a process that began with rocking. She writes,

While in this stage of rocking, I had to recognize that rocking was the only activity that mattered. Focusing my success on the final goal of sitting up was not wise because it was far beyond my current ability. If I had decided that sitting up was the goal, and then tried and failed repeatedly on every trial, I would have been disappointed with my inability and stopped trying....Essentially, I had to completely inhabit the level of ability that I could achieve before it was time to take the next step.

How often do we rush our learners - or ourselves - through necessary stages, trying for a final goal? And how often do we create a sense of failure and discouragement, instead of celebration for small successes?

Raisin' brain

Fascinating article at The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer's blog, on the mental effects of intimidation. Seems that when the brain feels overwhelmed by too much choice or competition, it tends to shut down instead of working harder. (And I thought it was just me!)

I'm looking forward to Lehrer's new book, How We Decide, due out next month. Oh, and if you haven't read Paco Underhill's Why We Buy: the Science of Shopping, give it a look. Whether you love shopping or hate to cross a store's threshhold, I predict you'll find lots of insights that may be useful for training design as well.