Fresh Takes on Innovation

In Long Beach, California (home to one of our Brains) the TED Conference is currently in progress.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it before, TED is a conference that brings together an enormous group of brilliant thinkers who are all challenged to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes or less.

We love their motto: “Ideas worth spreading.”  And we love watching the fascinating talks that are posted after every event.

We can’t wait until the 2010 talks arrive online, but while we’re waiting, we thought we’d share one of our favorite talks from last year:

In this short (under 7 minute) talk, Tom Wujec covers a topic near-and-dear to our heart: the brain!  He talks about how our minds processes information and develop meaning.  He also explains how to use the brain’s capabilities to create a common mental image among members of a group so that the entire group can move forward.

Fascinating stuff!  We can’t wait to see what they’re talking about at TED this year!

I always knew it! Sleep is essential in the process of finding good ideas. In Japan it’s already common to take a nap during working hours. So don’t be confused when you enter your colleague’s office tomorrow and find him resting his head on the table. He is probably just searching for a great idea!

Dr. Ellenbogen, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and director of the Sleep Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, says, most people think of the sleeping brain as similar to a computer that has “gone to sleep” — it does nothing productive.

Wrong. Sleep enhances performance, learning and memory. Most unappreciated of all, sleep improves creative ability to generate aha!-moments and to uncover novel connections among seemingly unrelated ideas.

In other words, people are more creative after sleep, but are usually unaware of it. We have noticed this at our 2-day workshops, where a huge amount of inspirations and ideas is generated on the first day. After a highly stimulating day and evening the participants get some well-deserved rest during their sleep. On the second day they are always highly motivated to connect and combine ideas and to come up with new ones.

Have you ever – like I did yesterday – wondered what this organ “brain” is all about? Probably you have… Well, none of the numerous answers is entirely sufficient, as so far neurological scientists haven’t even come close to defining it. However, there are many scientific facts and figures and, of course, one’s own experience with the approximately 3 pounds we carry around in a safe bone shell on top of our spine. (Yes, it weighs about 3 pounds, 85% of which are actually water – amazing, considering that it causes us about 95% of our problems…) These and other interesting facts, brain training programs etc. you find here. Enjoy…

Just read this list provided by the litemind blog if you are looking for ways to improve your brainpower. Some suggestions are obvious for the mind related worker, but others are really new and fun. Enjoy!

We all use the yellow sticky notes, known as the Post-it note. This useful and yet so simple invention is not a product of years of R&D but simply emerged from a daydream.

«On a Sunday morning in 1974, Arthur Fry sat in the front pews of a Presbyterian church in north St. Paul, Minn. An engineer at 3M, Fry was also a singer in the church choir. He had gotten into the habit of inserting little scraps of paper into his choir book, so that he could quickly find the right hymns during the service. The problem, however, was that the papers would often fall out, causing Fry to lose his place.

But then, while listening to the Sunday sermon, Fry started to daydream. Instead of focusing on the pastor’s words, he began to mull over his bookmark problem. “It was during the sermon,” Fry remembers, “that I first thought, ‘What I really need is a little bookmark that will stick to the paper but will not tear the paper when I remove it.’ ” That errant thought – the byproduct of a wandering mind – would later become the yellow Post-it note, one of the most successful office products of all time.»

Scientists have discovered that daydreaming is not a habit of lazy people or lack of discipline, daydreaming is a fundamental feature of the human mind and a crucial tool for creativity.

It was also discovered that kids who never experience moments of sensory stimulation (absence of TV, video games etc.) are not able to daydream.

The tricky thing the scientists found out: daydreaming is not as simple as it might seem! Just letting your mind wander is not enough; you also need to remain conscious enough to access your daydream. The good news: you can practice daydreaming!

Read the full Boston Globe article by Johan Lehner here.

Where our hands brought us to
In the course of history, human beings have changed the world as no other species. Apart from our intelligence, our creativity and our mind, human tools are mostly our two hands. They are the ones executing our intellectual superiority!
Dolphins form the cognitive spearhead in the animal kingdom. Where else would be those cute water mammals today if they had been able to use their resources and to craft tools with their hand-like fins?

Handcraft in the computer age
A modern design studio uses a mixture of precise handcraft and modern computer technique. Black-and-white and color sketches still are done by hand with pen and paper. Once scanned, they can be refined and changed on the computer with an electronic stylus before the drawings of front back and side are processed by the modelers. A team of „sculptors“ then starts to create a clay model.

IdeaFinding by hand
If hands are involved in intuitive idea finding methods, they supply our brain with very many inputs. They boost brain associations in search of new ideas. They are construed to the activation of the unconscious, of knowledge you would not think of. This method is supposed to leave dreary routines. Idea finding by hand activates the potential of entire groups and forms the basis of the following compression phase of the handmade ideas.

Did you know which bizarre conditions could affect your brain?

“The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat” (1985) is an absolute must read for everyone interested in the human brain.
In his clinical tales Dr. Oliver Sacks, respected neurologist and author, describes patients afflicted with different neurological conditions. For example you’ll find a young lady suffering from loss of propioception, e.g. this woman will not be able to perceive the spatial position of her limbs. Or there’s the title tale, where a husband wants to put his wife on his head. Or you’ll smirk over the essay where Sacks describes an aphasic person watching the president speak on TV; and although she doesn’t understand a single word, she can’t believe what he’s saying, simply by observing his non-verbal communication. Hilarious and so true to life!
If you have a minute, buy the book, read it and enjoy it. By the way, the title essay “The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat” was adapted as a one-act chamber opera by Michael Nyman, an English composer of minimalist music.
I’m really looking forward to reading Dr. Sacks revised “Musicophilia – Tales of Music and the Brain” which will be available as of September 23, 2008.

If you want to succeed in life you have to be emotionally literate. The new formula to success is the Emotional Intelligence Quotient, rather than the traditional Intelligence Quotient, according to Daniel Goleman, clinical psychologist and founder of the business consulting agency Emotional Intelligence Services (EIS).

Rationality – or keeping your cool – is not the only guarantee to professional and private success. It’s your emotional competences. The EQ measures the intelligence manifested in our understanding and our handling of human emotions – dividing it into a complex scale ranging from fear to anger, love to aggression, doubt and joy. Goleman bases his theses on various clinical cognitive research and the latest findings in brain science.

In his latest work, he supports the following claim: without an intact emotional life, even the best intellect remains useless. There is a profound and complex interaction between the emotional and rational side, opening up completely new perspectives and possibilities in life to each human being.

BrainStore has long recognized the importance of the Emotional Intelligence Quotient, having experienced in many workshops that creating emotional experiences will be a trigger for surprising ideas – and can favorably complement traditional cognitive methods.

One of the long enduring ideas in human psychology: the moment of decision-making is not pre-determined by a single default of the brain, e.g. by a person’s character being calibrated to more of a rational or emotional nature.

Human behavior rather reflects a dynamic interaction between two distinct subsystems of the brain, as a new study by psychologist Adam Alter of Oppenheimer Lab at Princeton University fortifies. While a first affective system follows heuristic cues, a second conscious and rule-based system monitors the quality of these emotional signals. Although perceived as one single act, decision-making appears to be a two-step process.

This dualism is very well reflected within as well as over all the three major phases of the BrainStore method. For inspiration boosting we pull emotional triggers, in compression we integrate emotional yes or no sessions and systematic criteria scans. At the end of the day, decisions on ideas are taken rationally – given that our emotions play along.

In a recent Time article two Harvard professors of psychology talk about how seldom our mind is actually focussing on the here and now. If our environment doesn’t draw our attention, we keep wandering off: Traveling back (and forth) in time, browsing through experiences and thoughts – “moving across the landscape of our history to see what we can learn — for free”. We learn by trial and error. By reviewing our experiences and previewing the consequences of our actions, we save a lot of real life trial and error that could lead to mistakes.