Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

Scientists recently came up with new connections between how your brain operates and what your body does in a day. Turns out … the human brain works far more magic for those who act on what they learn. Not everybody will benefit though.  Why so?

Traditionally we’ve viewed cognition as an input and output process – where your brain inputs information, processes it, and then outputs a response. That is partially true, but not the whole story, and scientists have a new robot to prove it.

Recently, a neuroscientist and Indiana University roboticist discovered how to support the fact that it takes all types of sensory information to help us benefit more from any environment.

Philosophers and learning reformers such as John Dewey argued all along, that to learn means to do, and  now this new study affirms that anything short of doing is cheating your brainpower.  That’s so because human brains continually interact with and are shaped by our work environments.  Think about it.

This newly discovered interaction can lead to better learning and more successful innovations in any firm, when people draw on unused resources already found and conditioned  in your brain.

So what’s the problem? Why have organizations not acted on brain based ideas that trigger more business benefits, and raise individual and collective IQs for what they do.  

Here’s the problem…. Quantifying this neural-behavioral relationship, has been difficult, until recently. This study takes quantum leaps through mathematical advances that helped researchers create critical measurement tools. You’ve got it – that’s where robots and the raw boned proofs come in -  to stop nay-sayers. Well, at least, to slow skeptics down a bit.

Robots, like the one pictured here, were  used in the study to measure the information flow from the environment to themselves, and then from their robotic brains back to the environment. They also recorded data about what they saw and did.

You can read the details in the Journal Public Library of Science Computational Biology on October 27.  You’ll enjoy how measurements help researchers to view the brain interacts, as a vital part of the body, and of your daily environment.

I suspect this research could help drive a few more nails into the coffin of lectures that bore brains to death - literally. Who knows?  Maybe they’ll help us to envision a few brilliant new approaches to communicate insights from the arts or from some of the best thinkers out there. I’m thinking of firms that connect what people learn and do,  to benefit the bottom line. Now that would make this post worth its words in intelligence - yours. What do you think?