Lawsagna

Yawn, smile, and simplify

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
~ Leonardo da Vinci

I was reading my Sunday paper last weekend and saw a cartoon depicting two birds sitting on a wire.  They were watching the third bird that was about to fall down and was struggling to hold on to the wire.  The caption read "You're overthinking this, Phil."  

Do you sometimes complicate things excessively?  I am guilty of it, I'll admit.  Here's a related belief that comes up in coaching:  we distrust simple solutions.  If something is too easy, it can't be the answer.  Are you familiar with that kind of thinking? Yet, simple practices can be very effective in producing remarkable results. 

Take an example of recent neuroscience discoveries in the area of brain health.   A few weeks ago, I was at a workshop conducted by Mark Robert Waldman, co-author of "How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist."   The topic was "Imagination, Reality, and Maintaining a Healthy Brain."  When it comes to maintaining a healthy brain, the strategies are simple and effective when done consistently.  The authors list eight ways to exercise your brain to enhance your physical, mental and spiritual health.  The easiest two may surprise you. 

Do you know, for example, that a simple act of yawning improves alertness and concentration, optimizes brain metabolism, lowers stress, and increases memory recall among other things?  Now, that's what I call brain efficiency.  So, yawn on purpose.  In fact, do it right now.  Take a deep breath and get yourself into the yawning mood.  If you have people around, that's even better because yawning is contagious. It can even improve group cohesiveness because it helps people synchronize their behavior with others. 

If you are tired of yawning, smile.  Smiling stimulates brain circuits that strengthen empathy and a positive outlook on life.  Even if you don't feel like smiling, try it anyway.  You'll give a signal to your subconscious that you are happy, and it can improve your mood.  

Yawn, smile, and simplify! That's today's lesson.

"Welcome to the Future: Time for Law School 4.0"

What would the law school of the future look like?  Paul Lippe shares his insights in the article "Welcome to the Future: Time for Law School 4.0" in The AmLaw Daily.   He discusses the challenges of the current system of legal education and suggests directions for improvement. (Hat tip to Idealawg).

Related Posts:
Is your learning significant?
Finding opportunities for cognitive apprenticeship

25 Tools: A Toolbox for Learning Professionals 2009 by Jane Hart

Jane Hart, the founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, created this excellent presentation of the most popular learning tools in 25 categories, as selected by learning professionals worldwide.

25 Tools: A Toolbox for Learning Professionals 2009

View more OpenOffice presentations from Jane Hart.

"THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY" By Don Tapscott

In his thought-provoking Edge piece "The Impending Demise of the University,"  Don Tapscott explores that future of learning and the function of universities in a networked society: 

Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning, as the web inexorably becomes the dominant infrastructure for knowledge serving both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people.

Meanwhile on campus, there is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn.

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It's a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril.

Knowing how to work with information becomes more important than mastering subject matter content:

In the old model, teachers taught and students were expected to absorb vast quantities of content. Education was about absorbing content and being able to recall it on exams. You graduated and you were set for life — just "keeping" up in your chosen field. Today when you graduate you're set for say, 15 minutes. If you took a technical course half of what you learned in the first year may be obsolete by the 4th year. What counts is your capacity to learn lifelong, to think, research, find information, analyze, synthesize, contextualize, critically evaluate it; to apply research to solving problems; to collaborate and communicate.

But now that students can obviously find the information they're looking for in an instant online in the crania of others online, this old model doesn't make any sense. It's not only what you know that really counts when you graduate; it's how you navigate in the digital world, and what you do with the information you discover. This new style of learning, I believe, will suit them.

Universities should be places to learn, not to teach.

Click here to read the full article.

People in a Good Mood See More

When we are in a positive mood, our visual cortex takes in more information, while negative moods result in tunnel vision, according to a recent University of Toronto study.

In my previous post on "Positivity," I wrote about Barbara Fredrickson's research indicating that positive emotions tend to broaden our focus, enabling us to discover more tools and solutions to life's challenges and ultimately making us more resourceful. 

Now, the University of Toronto study shows that good moods also create such broad focus for our perceptual experience.  In the article "People Who Wear Rose-colored Glasses See More, Study Shows," ScienceDaily reports:

The researchers first showed subjects a series images designed to generate a good, bad or neutral mood.  Subjects were then shown a composite image, featuring a face in the centre, surrounded by "place" images, such as a house. To focus their attention on the central image, subjects were asked to identify the gender of the person’s face.  When in a bad mood, the subjects did not process the images of places in the surrounding background.

However, when viewing the same images in a good mood, they actually took in more information — they saw the central image of the face as well as the surrounding pictures of houses.  The discovery came from looking at specific parts of the brain — the parahippocampal  "place area" —  that are known to process places and how this area relates to primary visual cortical responses, the first part of the cortex related to vision.

The researchers suggest that good moods help us see more in our environment, but the downside is that the broad focus can distract us from critical tasks that require narrow focus, such as operating dangerous machinery.  In contrast, bad moods limit our ability to integrate information that is outside our immediate attention. 

Want to be a better problem-solver in your dreams?

"Ideas twinkle in dreams like bicycle lights in a mist." 
- Michael Michalko, "Thinkertoys"

Have you ever been caught daydreaming or doodling in class, during a lecture or at a business meeting?  While others could interpret it as a sign that your mind was meandering aimlessly instead of paying attention, neuroscientists now provide us with the evidence to the contrary.  It turns out that the daydreaming mind continues to solve problems, and doodling actually helps remember things better.  The advice to 'sleep on it' isn't a bad idea either. 

According to a recent University of British Columbia study, activity in numerous brain regions increases when our minds wander.  Daydreaming activates both the brain's "default network," which is linked to easy, routine mental activity and the "executive network" - the brain areas associated with high-level, complex problem-solving. The findings support the notion that daydreaming, which can occupy as much as one third of our waking lives, allows us to shift our attention from routine tasks to work through more important problems in our lives.  You may not be able to accomplish an immediate goal if you daydream, but you can come up with a creative solution to a life challenge. 

If you feel the urge to daydream during a boring presentation and want to improve your concentration, try doodling.  It may seem contradictory to the common perceptions, but doodling while listening can keep you on track with a boring task and help you remember details better.  In a recently published study, subjects given a doodling task while listening to a dull phone message had a 29% improved recall compared to their non-doodling counterparts. 

In addition, nighttime dreams can also help you solve problems.  A study conducted by the University of Alberta and the University of Montreal of 470 psychology students revealed that dreams that occurred six to seven days after the remembered event often reflected "interpersonal interactions, problem resolution and positive emotions."  These findings suggest that people continue to work through personal difficulties in dreams. 

Sleep psychologists claim we have about six dreams each night during rapid eye movement sleep (REM sleep).  We often forget our dreams, but there are things we can do to recall dreams better and capture any creative ideas that emerged in the dream state:

1. If you've been working on a problem for a while, bring it back into focus right before you fall asleep.  Think about a question related to your problem that you'd like to get an answer to in your sleep.
2. When you awake, don't get up immediately.  Instead, lie quietly as you reflect on your dream.  If you have trouble remembering your dreams, try waking up thirty minutes earlier. 
3. Have a dream journal next to you bed so that you could promptly record any thoughts that came to you after you woke up.  Don't censor, just write down anything that comes to mind.  Your ideas are often triggered by your dream even if you can't remember the dream exactly.  After all, the contemporary scientific method was first reveled to René Descartes in his dream, which he promptly recorded in his dream journal.
4. You can later go over your dream journal again to see if any patterns, ideas, or insights emerge from your dream entries.

Finally, if you want your dreams to be more positive, try smelling something pleasant while you sleep.  German researchers used specific volatile odorants with a negative or a positive smell ("rotten eggs" versus "roses") to stimulate subjects during sleep.  When the unpleasant odor was used, the subjects reported that the emotional coloration of the dream was predominantly negative.   When they smelled the pleasant odor, their dreams had a positive coloration.

Related post:  Take a nap

Body Movements Can Influence Problem Solving

Directed movements of the body can, outside of conscious awareness, guide higher-order cognitive processing, according to a new study, conduced by University of Illinois psychology professor Alejandro Lleras with Vanderbilt University postdoctoral researcher Laura Thomas.  PhysOrg reports:

In the study, the researchers asked study subjects to tie the ends of two strings together. The strings dangled from ceiling rafters and were so far apart that a person grasping one could not reach the other. A few tools were also available: a paperback book, a wrench, two small dumbbells and a plate. Subjects were given a total of eight, two-minute sessions to solve the problem, with 100 seconds devoted to finding a solution, interrupted by 20 seconds of exercise.
...
Some subjects were told to swing their arms forward and backward during the exercise sessions, while others were directed to alternately stretch one arm, and then the other, to the side. To prevent them from consciously connecting these activities to the problem of the strings, the researchers had them count backwards by threes while exercising...

The subjects in the arm-swinging group were more likely than those in the stretch group to solve the problem, which required attaching an object to one of the strings and swinging it so that it could be grasped while also holding the other string. By the end of the 16-minute deadline, participants in the arm-swinging group were 40 percent more likely than those in the stretch group to solve the problem.

"By making you swing your arms in a particular way, we're activating a part of your brain that deals with swinging motions," Lleras said. "That sort of activity in your brain then unconsciously leads you to think about that type of motion when you're trying to solve the problem."

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio said, "The mind is embodied, not just embrained."  This study demonstrates once again the important link between our mind and body, or "embodied cognition."

You can think on your feet quite literally.  So, next time you feel stuck trying to solve a problem, start moving.  Your body may guide your brain to an unexpected solution.  

This study is described in the article "Swinging Into Thought: Directed Movement Guides Insight in Problem Solving" by  Alejandro Lleras and Laura Thomas, appearing in an upcoming issue of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.  To read the full report and watch the videos of the problem-solving and exercise sessions, click here.

Life Metaphors: An Exercise in Creative Thinking

Life can feel like a roller coaster - the highs and the lows, the fear and the exhilaration - all coming in rapid succession.  Life can also be like an airplane - always self-correcting to stay on course.  To Albert Einstein, "Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving."

What would be a good metaphor for you to describe the way you experience life right now?

When we think in metaphors, we directly compare unrelated or dissimilar objects and situations.  Metaphorical thinking has benefits beyond the poetic and aesthetic value of metaphors.  Metaphors can improve our understanding and help us solve problems.

Metaphors expand meaning by transcending the literal and structural interpretation.  The whole meaning is greater than, and often different from, the sum of its parts.  According to research led by V. S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, a region of the brain known as the angular gyrus is at least partly responsible for the human ability to understand metaphors.  The angular gyrus is strategically located at the crossroads of areas specialized for processing touch, hearing and vision. 

Metaphors reveal subtle patterns that can otherwise fall beyond our perceptive powers.  But beware:  because of their ambiguous, emotive and nonlinear nature, metaphors can confuse as well as illuminate.  Be patient with yourself and the process.  The idea is to probe and peel the layers and be open to what you may find.

To experience the creative power of metaphors, do the following exercise, adapted from the book "Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques" by Michael Michalko:

1.    Think of a challenge or a choice you are facing.

2.    Instead of describing it in words, browse some old magazines, newspapers or catalogs and cut out images that symbolize your challenge or choice.

3.    Move your pictures around, exploring different patterns and associations.  Continue until they form a collage.  

4.    Look at your collage and search for clues, insights and new ideas related to your challenge or choice.  Ask yourself the following questions:

    a.    What is my challenge/choice like?  
    b.    What does it remind me of?
    c.    What aspects of my challenge/choice are revealed through the collage?
    d.    What can I learn from this?

Hear Frank Felberbaum On Memory Development And Brain-Power Performance

[UPDATE] Yesterday, I had the pleasure of  interviewing Frank Felberbaum, the memory expert and author of "The Business of Memory: How to Maximize Your Brain Power and Fast Track Your Career," with Rachel Kranz. 

Frank Felberbaum is president of Memory Training Systems, a division of The Felberbaum Consulting Group, Inc., a global company specializing in memory development and brain-power performance strategies.  Formerly founder and director of The Memory Training Institute in Geneva, Switzerland, he has implemented his unique memory systems at more than 175 major corporations.

In 1995, Frank Felberbaum represented the United States at the World Memory Olympics in London and was awarded a special medal.  From 1997 to the present, he has trained and coached many of the mental athletes who compete at the U.S. Memory Championship held in New York City.

Now, you can listen to his interview and learn how to tap your full memory potential and put your career on the fast track to success.

Most of us forget 85 percent of what we learn within 72 hours.  Frank Felberbaum has taught thousands of business people throughout the world, including employees and executives at dozens of Fortune 500® companies how to become more efficient, effective, and powerful on the job by mastering the three basic mental functions behind memory:

•    Paying attention:  How to be a better observer and stay focused in the era of multitasking.

•    Visualizing:  How to create mental movies that help retain information by telling stories.

•    Associating:  How to link newly acquired information to familiar experiences, which are easily recalled. 

You can listen to the interview via web at:

http://www.selfhelpbookmuse.com/memory-expert.html

To download the audio recording of the interview:

Download the audio recording of the interview [mp3, 8.12MB]

Mind illusions and portion control

"Habits are basic and foundational aspects of our mental lives.  Without habit, there is no calculation, no speech, no thought, no recognition, no game playing.  Only a creature with habits like ours could have anything like a mind like ours.  But habits, at least many of them, are situational or environmental.  A habit is like a trail laid down by our own repetitive action.  A habit is not merely a disposition to act or an automatic or unthinking tendency; it is a responsiveness to the environment in which we find ourselves.  If the trail is paved over or if familiar landmarks are removed, our habits can frequently be extinguished."

~ Alva Noë, "Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness"

How much of what you do is in response to things that are happening around you, your immediate environment?  A couple of days ago, I was putting together a collage of colorful images of fruits, vegetables, and herbs for my Ultimate Mind-Body Makeover coaching class.  One of the images was a picture of mint plants forming a bright green carpet.  Later, when I went to get some tea for myself, guess what kind of tea I chose…  That's right, I chose mint tea.   So, how does our environment influence our daily actions and decisions? 

Studies on habit formation reveal that as much as 45 percent of what we do every day is habitual, that is, we act almost without thinking usually because of subtle cues in our environment, such as "a specific location or time of day, a certain series of actions, particular moods, or the company of specific people."  For example, you may experience the urge to check your e-mail if you feel stuck in your current task.  Similarly, you may want to grab a cookie if you feel upset or bored.

On occasion, those cues in our environment can trick our minds into behaving in a way that is inconsistent with our goals and we may not even realize it.  Here are a few examples of mind illusions related to the issue of portion control.

You may have heard that it is helpful to use smaller plates if you want to eat less.  The following experiment illustrates this point.  If you cut a sandwich into two same-size portions and you put one half of the sandwich on a small plate and the other half on a large plate, you will create an optical illusion.  People will perceive the half-sandwich on the small plate as bigger than the half-sandwich on the large plate.  Moreover, if they eat the half-sandwich on the small plate, they will feel fuller compared to eating the sandwich on the large plate.  Thus, physical objects around you can affect your appetite. 

The second example explains why all-you-can-eat buffets cause people to eat more.  Researchers investigated how variety influenced consumers' quantity perceptions. "Does a bowl with both red and blue candies seem to have more or less than a bowl with only one color candy?" they asked.  It turns out that we tend to underestimate portions if there is greater variety.  People poured larger portions when there was variety of food without realizing it.

You don't even need to go to a magic show to experience the power of mind illusions in your daily life.  

What triggers hide in your immediate environment?  How can you eliminate or minimize those that sabotage your goals?