Brain Training: |
© Dr. Karl Albrecht, all rights reserved. |
Brain training, that curious category of human resource development that waxes and wanes over the years, seems ready to wax again. Pieces of it, like creativity, innovation, and problem solving skills, come back into style periodically, and then fade out again whenever the next "bottom line" fad comes along. Now, new findings from brain research - and some established but less appreciated theories as well - give us some practical ways to think better. There's ample cause for a new wave of interest in training brains. Can Understanding Your Brain Make You Smarter? Knowing how your brain works can help you use it more deliberately for your own benefit and success in life. Although most of us don't need to know the detailed inner workings of the brain or its anatomy, there are certain practical facts you can put to direct use, and train others to use. Let's test this premise with a practical example: scientists have long known about "brain cycles," but very few people in the general public consciously understand them or make good use of that knowledge, except perhaps intuitively or inadvertently. In the vocabulary of brain training, brain cycles are variations in the brain's focus of attention, ranging through a period of roughly 90 minutes. In one part of the cycle, your brain pays close attention to the outside world, i.e. the incoming "data" from the senses. During this phase, you are consciously involved in interacting with your environment, such as when reading or listening attentively to what someone else is saying. At the other end of the brain cycle, your brain withdraws its attention from the sensory data stream and turns inward, processing its own stored images, sensations, reveries, thoughts, and musings. In everyday language, we say that your mind is "wandering." This brain state is usually easily detectable in another person by watching his or her eye movement, facial expression, and diminished motor activity. One can think of a number of immediate applications for just this one simple but important aspect of brain function. For example, you may observe that your boss seems to be distant and detached from the conversation, indicating that his or her brain is temporarily "off line" (to use an Internet analogy). You might decide to wait until another time to bring up a complex or critically important issue which requires his or her full concentration, i.e. a time when the brain is back "on line." As another example, consider that there are certain times when you seem to be in the mood for work that requires close attention and concentration, and at other times you find it more difficult to focus on details. To the extent that you can choose, you can tackle certain tasks when your brain cycle is in the right phase for the job. We can directly apply findings like these to human performance management. Ask how many data-entry errors, short-changed customers, industrial accidents, car crashes, surgical blunders, and maybe even plane crashes are associated with brain cycles. Can we provide job aids and skill training to reduce these effects? Another significant finding about brain function applies to motor skills such as sports. Accomplished athletes learn to trust their well-trained bodies, and to prevent their conscious minds from trying to take over at critical moments. Understanding how the brain learns to perform coordinated movements can help you to play any sport more instinctively and naturally. The principle involved is based on the cooperation between your cerebral cortex and a lower part of your brain called the cerebellum. The cerebellum manages all motor activity that is "over-learned," i.e. so well learned that it no longer needs conscious attention. Walking, talking, speaking, and reciting familiar information is handled by the cerebellum, leaving the cerebrum free to manage other, more complex activities. The cerebellum learns to handle coordinated motor activities by mimicking the electrical patterns that occur in the cerebral cortex as you learn to serve a tennis ball, play a guitar chord, or sing a song. Once you have learned the procedure thoroughly, the cerebral cortex "delegates" the task to the cerebellum, which usually handles it afterward. The problem arises when you become anxious about your performance, i.e. as with a critical point in a tennis match or presenting detailed data from memory. Under anxiety, the cerebral cortex tries to take over the activity, not trusting the cerebellum to carry it out expertly. Bad serves, bad baseball pitches, strikeouts, bad golf shots, forgotten words to songs, missed comedy lines, and many other "flubs" occur at this instant of conflict between the cerebrum and the cerebellum. Sports psychologist Timothy Gallwey explained this aspect of brain function well in his landmark book The Inner Game of Tennis, in which he prescribes mental techniques for preventing the higher brain processes from interfering with the well-learned and instinctive skills. Although we don't need to know as much as neuroscientists, maybe we should know at least as much about our brains as we know about our cars and our computers. And this simple knowledge can translate directly into greater personal effectiveness, career success, and greater contributions to our organizations. Let's start with a better understanding of the architecture of mental process. The Hierarchy of Thinking: Your Five Minds Recent brain research points ever more clearly toward the conclusion that we humans don't have just one "mind." We have multiple minds, which work together - or fail to - to enable us to cope with our surroundings. Harvard professor Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences supports this conclusion. The concepts of neurolinguistic programming, pioneered by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, contribute an important neurological perspective. And the "modular mind" concept developed by Michael Gazzaniga and Robert Ornstein, out of the original "split-brain" research at Cal Tech, helps to explain the impact of subconscious impulses on our behavior. And, of course, Freud's fundamental concept of the subconscious mind and Jung's view of introversion vs. extraversion also deserve a part in our understanding of the brain-mind system. All of these bits and pieces of brain research are now coming together in the concept of the modular brain. According to Ornstein, in his landmark book Multi-Mind, the human brain is constructed with a large number of individual processing units, or modules. Some of these modules, or collections of brain circuits, work at the automatic, biological level - sort of the brain's operating system. Others come into and out of consciousness, handling various useful tasks from moment to moment. And others make up the conscious level of thinking: paying attention, reacting, interpreting, deciding, and launching various behavioral programs. A useful model of mental process needs to integrate and unify these various levels, and explain how they can work together to enable a person to deal effectively with his or her world. The most practical model for integrating these various modular processes seems to be a series of levels, i.e. a kind of hierarchy. Borrowing from Abraham Maslow's concept of a pyramid, or hierarchy of needs, we can understand human mental process as a "hierarchy of thinking," as pictured in Figure 1.
The Automatic Mind The biochemical and neurological processes of the body play just as important a part in our mental competence as the so-called "conscious" mental processes we think of as "the mind." All activity at higher levels depends intimately on physiological influences such as emotional arousal, mood, fatigue, stress, and the effects of foods, stimulants, and intoxicants. We all know that states like fear, extreme anger, and even elation make it more difficult to think clearly and creatively. Conversely, we know that our conscious thought processes can trigger various states of arousal. Many researchers claim that activities such as meditation and visualization can accelerate healing and even eliminate disorders as serious as cancer. Clearly, the traditional distinction between "body" and "mind" makes very little sense. All mental activity finds its expression, in some form or other, all the way down to the cellular level. Indeed, we may accurately say that we think with the whole body. The Automatic Mind serves as a kind of operating system for the entire mental process. The Subconscious Mind According to psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, we have another level of mind, the so-called Subconscious Mind, which seems to influence our conscious thoughts and our emotional responses, from just beyond the boundaries of our awareness. We probably understand this Subconscious Mind better than we realize. Although we cannot dissect it and study it, we can infer its operation by its effect on our behavior. By observing our own emotional responses, impulses, and reactions to experience, we can identify the "recipes" for our emotional processes. The Subconscious Mind houses the "demons" of our psychological make-up. Our fears, our primitive impulses, our addictions, our greed, our envy and jealousy, our guilt and self-condemnation, and many other powerful emotions arise from these primal recipes. And, certainly, our altruistic impulses - generosity, compassion, and the impulse to help others - arise from the Subconscious Mind as well. Our self-concept and sense of self-esteem arise largely from the Subconscious Mind. The Practical Mind When most of us refer to "the mind," or "the conscious mind," we usually mean the regular thinking process which gets us through the day. This normal habitual process depends heavily on learned routines of thought, or "brain scripts." We walk, talk, eat, read, write, sing songs, recite information, make decisions, drive cars, buy things in shops, and do countless other well-learned things in a fairly "mindless" way. We have learned these brain scripts so well that we don't really "think" much about them. The Practical Mind, for better and worse, serves as our mental "autopilot." It enables us to survive the experiences of life while paying little direct attention to them. But it can also cause problems when it activates obsolete, ineffective, or inappropriate brain scripts. The Practical Mind calls in various "subroutines," or service modules from lower levels, to deal with the moment-to-moment requirements of living. The Creative Mind At various times, we may break out of the "autopilot" mode of the Practical Mind and find ourselves thinking about things in new ways and thinking about new things. We all have moments of unusual mental clarity. We may experience a state of heightened awareness, accompanied by a sense of the significance of ideas. A flash of insight, a clever way of doing something, a realization of some primal truth about our lives, all signal the activation of our Creative Mind. When we free ourselves from many of our automatic reactions, re-educate ourselves to speak in original ideas and not in slogans, suspend judgment and avoid arguments and ego-battles, listen more attentively, and think in terms of options instead of the "one right way," we deploy this enormous potential for creating new solutions in our lives. Unfortunately, our cultural stereotypes of creativity have given most of us a warped conception of the creative person. Creativity means more than eccentric behavior and dressing in off-beat styles. It means more than doing things differently for the sake of the difference. Creativity involves creating, i.e. producing new, novel, and - occasionally - useful ideas. All normal humans have this creative level of mind, although many don't realize it and many simply haven't formed the habit of using it. The Spiritual Mind All human beings crave meaning in their lives, and no society has ever existed (so far as we know) without some concept of the cosmos and the human being's part in it. The Spiritual Mind is the part of us that seeks to connect to the "something else," to the source of inspiration, meaning, and higher purpose which transcends our daily experience. Dr. Viktor Frankl, author of the book Man's Search For Meaning, believed that the need for a sense of meaning and significance formed the very foundation for an individual's mental health and ultimately even his or her capacity to survive. We might consider the Spiritual Mind, in contemporary language, as our wideband connection to the "cosmic Internet." Some practitioners place a person's spiritual experiences on a par with all other cognitive activities, even to the extent that they involve "skills" of various kinds. Presumably, a person can become spiritually intelligent as well as intelligent in the other dimensions of mind. The Power of the Hierarchical Model The real power of the hierarchy of thinking is in the potential it offers to integrate our understanding of the various levels of mental process, and to promote a sense of mental fluency in moving freely amongst these various levels in our ordinary thinking. If we conceive of intuition, for example, not as some mysterious mental process outside the bounds of "normal" thought, but as a built-in component of the total mental process, we can value it in new ways and develop it just like any other mental skill. The same applies to creativity. We can also understand the familiar distinction between left-brained and right-brained mental process in terms of the operation of the Practical Mind. Our conscious processing involves both verbal-linear and nonverbal-nonlinear dimensions of knowing - beautifully integrated, by the way. Both dimensions are enriched by the processes of the Subconscious Mind and the Automatic Mind, and indeed by all the other minds as well. The concept of thinking styles comes directly into play here, as exemplified by models such as Mindex, the Hermann model, and to a lesser extent the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. If we understand that the Subconscious Mind feeds information to the Practical Mind in constructive and useful ways, and that valuing both ways of knowing can lead to better thinking and superior mental health, we no longer have to regard the Subconscious Mind as the mysterious "dark side" of ourselves. It is a legitimate and respectable part of our mental process, no more and no less. If we understand that the Automatic Mind conditions - and is conditioned by - all other mental processes, we can more deal more readily with the phenomena of stress, emotional experience, and constructive states of awareness like meditation, hypnosis, positive affirmation, and psychosomatic wellness. Of course, whatever appeal this multi-level explanation of human competence may have, we should also recognize clearly that it can never explain all of the human being's mental process. We don't know where these various "minds" may reside in the brain, or indeed even if they exist. And any attempt to talk about them as separate entities runs the risk of obscuring their interdependence. It makes more sense to think of them as dimensions of a total brain-mind system rather than as separable functions. In particular, we need to broaden our definitions of certain words and terms we typically use to describe various aspects of thinking. Since we have agreed to describe thinking as a bodily function, i.e. one involving all levels from the cortical synapses all the way to the cells throughout the body, it makes sense to broaden the terms "think," "thought," and "thinking" to mean the total creature experience of processing information. And we need to broaden the use of the word "brain" to refer to the total brain-mind system. We also need to abandon, so far as possible, the arbitrary dualities such as "body and mind" and "thinking and feeling." One thinks with his or her whole body, not just something called the "mind." One cannot think without also feeling, and cannot feel without also thinking. They are not separate things, but aspects of the whole. The State of the Art in Brain Training The main reason that brain training has not advanced very far is that we haven't tried very hard to advance it. Very few organizational training programs have approached the teaching of mental process as a comprehensive set of skills. And the public schools? Fuhgeddaboutit. Consequently, our unspoken model of mental process is basically a collection of random skills a typical person picks up as he or she navigates the experiences of life from adolescence to adulthood. Some people accidentally pick up more "smarts" than others. Many training programs do little more than flirt with the idea of cognitive skill training. Fluffy topics like "creativity" and "innovation" come across more as entertainment, or change-of-pace topics that offer a break from more serious fare. Few programs teach methods like idea-mapping, card-writing, and system diagramming, which are powerful tools for individual and team problem solving. Quality programs sometimes provide skill training in the use of information tools, but seldom as cognitive skills in their own right. Go to a typical conference and you might sign up for a workshop on "Developing Your Intuition," usually taught by some self-important narcissist who implies that you're just too up-tight to "let it flow," and that he or she is emotionally and spiritually more emancipated than you are. "Creativity" is often represented as some higher form of character, not to be defined or evaluated, but to be "experienced." This kind of fuzzy thinking about thinking has given the teaching of thinking a bad rap. If we're going to approach brain training with the same discipline we bring to other forms of competence building, then we should start with some reasonably clear competence model. What are the actual skills we need to teach? What Are the Competencies? Actually, the question doesn't have to be as daunting as it sounds. While there are lots of different aspects of the thinking process which we can treat as skills, and they seem to deal with many different dimensions of cognition, we can make sense of them by starting at the macro-level. What are the macro-skills we can consider as comprising a reasonably comprehensive approach to mental process, and how do they make sense within the framework of the hierarchy of thinking? I nominate the following ten macro-skills, which I've used as a working model of practical intelligence for the past 20 years:
As an exercise in training design, take any of these ten macro-skills and think about the many ways you could operationalize it in a training activity. First, you need to define it somewhat more clearly for the trainees, then you can help them grasp examples of it in action, and then you can provide them with experiences and opportunities to put it to use. Each of these macro-skills lends itself to self-assessment and introspection: How well-developed is my sense of humor? How well do I maintain a positive frame of mind, and encourage others to do the same? How open am I to new information and new experiences? How well do I manage the building blocks of abstract or conceptual thought? Approaching the brain training mission armed with an integrated model of mental process, such as the hierarchy of thinking, enables us to bring together lots of diverse practices under the single umbrella of practical intelligence. For example, we can train people to integrate both divergent and convergent thinking processes for effective problem solving, using tools such as idea mapping, slip writing, affinity diagramming, and brainstorming. We have training methods that can stimulate the use of intuition as a built-in component of practical problem solving. Such methods include meditative listening, word associations, and free-form drawing to get beyond the mental blocks that arise in dealing with complex problems. We can also train people to use logical, procedural thinking techniques, such as flow charts, system diagrams, and logical templates such as grid-charts, "truth trees," and schematics. Emotional intelligence falls naturally within the concept of the hierarchy of thinking. If we learn to overcome the arbitrary language of duality that portrays "feeling" as something separate from "thinking," we see that mental health and mental competence incorporate all five minds working in harmony. And speaking of language, brain training offers a natural place for teaching people to use language more effectively. The principles and methods of General Semantics, for example, can enable people to express ideas more clearly, communicate more humanely, avoid misunderstandings and conflicts, and become less susceptible to manipulation and coercion by others. And we can certainly train people to apply the principles of clear thinking in team situations, to capitalize on the total brain power available. The use of thinking styles in particular, i.e. left-brain vs. right-brain and concrete vs. abstract thinking, can play a powerful role in creating mental synergy in team situations. And what of the entire organization? Can brain training contribute to making the whole enterprise more intelligent? Organizational intelligence is really brain power writ large : the capacity of an organization to mobilize all of its available brain power, and to focus that brain power on achieving the mission. Before more organizations are going to invest in brain training, they're going to need to see a more well-formed state of the art in training methods. The American Management Association has recently made a commitment to this cause, particularly with its "Brain Power Course," a three-day public seminar program devoted solely to the development of thinking skills useful to business and professional people in their careers. According to AMA Senior Vice President Diane Laurenzo,
Now the training profession needs to move beyond the "gee-whiz" stage - fluffy little sessions and games that treat "creativity" and "intuition" as forms of recreation. We're long overdue to apply the same discipline and design skills to mental competence that we apply elsewhere. With the unrelenting pace of the transition of modern organizations from thing-cultures to think-cultures, the need for people who can think clearly will only increase. With the utter failure of most of our public schools to equip our young citizens with effective thinking skills, our business organizations are becoming the educators of last resort. And I believe they'll discover more and more clearly that training in the very process of thinking can bring the highest returns on the resources invested in it. Can the training community rise to this challenge - and opportunity? |
