Mindframe

As you can see from the above graph, global warming is pirate-based.  It's something I think we all suspected, but were hesitant to advance until the facts could be summarized in a handy graphic. There is something about information delivered via graph that instantly lends an air of unassailable authority. The person trapped in the cube next to you, or even the guy down at the gas station couldn’t possibly carry the credibility of a simple graph. It is an axiom of business that any presenter worth his or her salt is going to fill their PowerPoint with charts and graphs. The more the better, and the more oblique and difficult to read the best. Data delivered with a graph says "Here is the evidence, plain and simple. Let the ascending and descending lines tell you the story." The problem with the story, as with the graph above, is that we aren't just suckered into believing correlation implies causality. We start thinking correlation is causality. Governments...

Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom. This simple truth is often ignored. Maybe it's not surprising. After all, it doesn't take much work for information to masquerade as knowledge. With a million statistics and soundbites at your fingertips, the internet can be an incredible tool for information-mining. But a fistful of data points doesn't necessary translate to truth. It's a concept perfectly embodied by Wikipedia, that convenient-but-at-times-questionable fount of facts, inconsistencies, and outright falsehoods. The idea behind Wikipedia is that once enough people read and edit a post, the best version will ultimately win out. In the abstract, this sounds good, a sort of Darwinian movement towards truth. But the world is full of examples where people individually and/or collectively fail to do the right thing. Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect theory would go one step further and say that people don’t even always act in their own self-inter...

Last week, I talked about whole brain strategy . This week, a look at what happens inside a workplace when a company or organization tries to implement a new policy without understanding how the human brain works. If you've ever witnessed a giant disconnect between the systems a company claims to use, and the way their employees actually operate (call it Ghost Ship Syndrome, if you will), unbalanced brain strategy may very well be to blame. So without further ado, I give you: The Top Six Errors in Unbalanced Brain Strategy 1.    Ignoring the importance of habit 53% of our day is composed of habits, or bits of neural code that dictate specific behaviors. For example, we tend to sit in the same chair every night for dinner, even when all the chairs are identical to each other. Habits are built through repetitive action, which gradually reinforces certain neural pathways by adding layers of an insulator called myelin. Habits take roughly 21 days to create and...

It's hard to overestimate the power of whole-brain thinking. Sometimes defined as "systems thinking", it occurs when your creative right brain is in balance with your analytical left-brain. Leonardo Da Vinci is a classic whole-brain thinker. He was able to dream up fantastical flying machines but also to follow it through with detailed schematics. He studied math and engineering along with sculpting and painting, and his careful research of anatomy gave him a huge advantage in bringing his grand visions to life. Da Vinci was an artist and a scientist. It's one of the things that made him, well, Da Vinci. Imagine if all of us could achieve this balance. Of course, it’s not that simple. First, your left and right brain are not strictly compartmentalized—there is a certain amount of overlap and redundancy. And to the extent that the two differ, most of us veer strongly towards one side, either focusing on emotions and big ideas (right brain), or logic and detail...

Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it, and so do humans. I’m talking, of course, about sleep.  We spend roughly 33% of our time on earth in semi- hibernation, with our bodies partially paralyzed and although we can’t live without it, we are still somewhat in the dark (too obvious to be intentional) about how the whole process works. If you ask most people, they will equate sleep with rest, a recharging of the ol’ battery. If you ask neuroscientists about sleep, they will tell you that it’s some of the brain's most important working hours, when memory is consolidated and strengthened. In our waking state, we take in a vast amount of information through our five senses. Hebb's rule says, “ synapses that fire together, wire together.” This is known as synapse potentiation , the idea that synapses, the chemical/electrical wiring connectors in our brains, lock in memory through the frequent friending of other synapses. This in a nutshell is what happens when...