Hook new ideas to your brain's stored facts ... and you’ll find more facts at your fingertips 
when you need them most. Why so?
It’s how the brain makes sense of new knowledge… I like to think of it as a hat rack with mental hooks ready to catch any new facts or ideas.
The problem is, we throw hats around at each other and too often miss the brain's hardwired hooks. It's often the difference between ruts and results.
Here's how it works…. Say I know many facts about the human brain but very little about how the brain operates under 
extremely hot climate conditions.
Now imagine that you are expected to present a development session about climate changes. A bit of research will tell you that the audience will want to know that effects business in global settings. Where you begin determines how far you'll get to present your new topic.
Start with jargon from your expertise in weather changes… for instance ... and you can lose an audience in seconds. Unfamiliar words ... such as barometric pressure thrown together with other unfamiliar terms in your field… will lose most on a chilly day.
People simply don’t all know all the current terms and so the brain projects no concrete pictures of your ideas on screens inside our heads. What could you begin with to draw people from what they know about weather -- to where you'd like to bring them with your new topic?
If the brain is offered no hook to hang your ideas on… while they might be great suggestions…they are lost to others …and people leave frustrated.
Hook what you teach onto what others already know about heat, business in China, weather, or best practices in global settings, and you have captured curiosity and capitalized on your own time and talent for the session….
What do you know lots about, and how do you build personal hooks to what you’d like to learn? When I read technology books I seem to have fewer hooks in my brain than most... Luckily, I often find meaningful hooks through interactions with the technology gurus here at Know More Media, because they fire new ideas onto what I already know…little as that may be at times…. Thanks guys!
Two-footed questions also help us to create new hooks for new information.
For example, you’d capture interest and help folks to build hooks for your ideas if you asked:, “What would you do to adjust to the extreme climates along the Yangtze in July, for winning results?” Ok….I was on the Yangtze last year in July and at temperatures well over 100 degrees F. I’d love to hook any wisdom you have onto my hat rack… What do you think about adding hooks to a development session, or better still -- to your own brain-- to prepare for another new topic? Any questions out there, of the two-footed sort….?
Ellen, after reading how we can get new info to hook easily to our brain, I have a question. I am new to blogging and I'm wondering how you are doing with all the new terminology. Is it hooking to your brain well? When I see new terms such as co-comments, technorati and maybe even bloggerati, it all seems like spaghetti to me and I get lost. How are you doing with all of this?
Posted by: Robyn McMaster | April 30, 2006 9:03 PM | Permalink to Comment