However this feeling of effectiveness is misplaced.  Each time you switch tasks the brain has to re-orientate itself to the rules of the new task.  In fact, switching backwards and forwards between tasks has been shown to increase the time taken to complete both tasks by 30%.  So, anyone habitually bouncing between activities, who allows themselves to be tempted by the ‘ping’, could be losing two hours of raw productivity each day

Big chunk your time

The impact of switching tasks on productivity is seen most strongly for more intellectually demanding activities such as problem solving, prioritizing or planning.  Your brain needs more time to get into gear, to grapple with the issues.  Think of it like a new job.  If you have been employed to perform a simple task, you will probably get up to speed pretty quickly.  However, take on a big role and you simply won’t be able to add value for months.  I worked with a Brasilian VP in a major multinational who was taking on his first role in the Asia Pacific Region.  He spent his first three months doing nothing except chatting and learning.  He recognized he needed time to understand before he could perform.  Big, complex tasks are the same: you need time to kick the issues around before you can deliver value.  If you switch tasks before you have got fully up to speed, you are losing significant efficiency.  Big tasks need big chunks of time

So, when you are working on that big task today…shut off your distractions to reduce the temptation to hop, skip and jump away from productive focus

Are thin slices ever good for big tasks?

In 1927, a Gestalt psychologist called Bluma Zeigarnik was sat in a Vienna coffee house with a bunch of friends.  They ordered a few rounds of drinks, yet the waiter never wrote down their order.  Intrigued by this, after the bill was paid and the group had left the coffee house, Zeigarnik returned.  On questioning the waiter, she found that he no longer could recall what her group had drunk.  One way of interpreting this is that the brain works with open and closed files.  Once the bill had been paid, the waiter closed the file and forgot.  This has become known as the Zeigarnik effect (and people tend to be twice as likely to remember things in open files than in closed ones)

I use the Zeigarnik Effect slightly differently.  If I have a big task to do, one that requires creativity or deep thought, I’ll deliberately ‘open the file’ a few days before I actually want to do the work.  In practice this simply involves starting to work on the problem for about 20 minutes, possibly in the form of a mindmap.  I then leave my subconscious to work its magic.  When I finally begin to work on the task in earnest, my thinking and ideas flow

What file should you leave open today?

As I psychologist, I understand why we prefer not to doubt but, for businesses at least, there has never been a time in history where doubting is more important.

Two significant reasons why people don’t doubt are:

1.  Believing, not doubting is our default state; we doubt by exception.

Take the statement: Lizards love playing Sudoku.

What happened as you read the statement above is that an image of a lizard sitting in front of a Sudoku puzzle, probably holding a pen, popped into your head.  In doing this, for a little while at least, you believed me.  Daniel Gilbert explains that to understand anything we first have to believe [1].  Or, more accurately, to understand something we must first know what the idea would mean if it were true.  So we picture it as if it’s true.  It is only then that we may or may not begin to question whether it is true.

We normally, however, don’t bother to try and disbelieve, because it’s hard work.  You see, our brains constitute about 2% of our body weight, but use up 20% of all the energy you consume.  It’s not that the brain is lazy, it’s just on a serious budget: conserving energy is one of its prime objectives.  It does this by splitting mental functioning into two types:  System 1 and System 2.  System 1 is fast, automatic, easy and unconscious.  System 2 is slow, hard and conscious.  The brain, to reduce its workload, processes as much as it can with System 1.  Believing is System 1.  Doubting is System 2.

Information that is odd, or that we’re alerted to, will prompt us to make the conscious effort of will to fire up our System 2 to verify our belief.  However, in the normal cut and thrust of daily life, the majority of data is received as unquestioned fact.  In addition, because System 1 is unconscious, we’re not even aware that we haven’t properly analysed the information…it is accepted as a ‘taken for granted’ piece of information.

2.  We believe more when the brain is busy.

System 2 is more effortful and has severe limitations as to how much it can handle at once.  So, if the brain is busy consciously processing other things, there is less capability left for doubt, so you believe even more.  Gilbert ran a nice experiment to show this [1].  He gave people a series of nonsensical statements for them to remember such as  ‘a dinca is a flame’.  Some of the participants he also asked to hold numbers in their head at the same time (thus using up some processing power).  Later, those who had to remember the numbers as well as the statements, believed more of the nonsense.

The importance of doubt

Yet doubt is crucial.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studies Nobel Prize Laureates to see what had led to their breakthroughs in their fields [2].  He found a consistent pattern: identifying solutions wasn’t the hard thing; it was finding the right question to ask.  Once they had identified the right question, the solutions flowed swiftly.

As we struggle our way out of the financial crisis; as we deal with the unprecedented complexity and interconnectedness of global markets [3], companies will not succeed through increases in efficiency.  They will not succeed through finding new solutions.  Successful companies will fundamentally change the way they operate; they will make breakthroughs and disrupt the markets they are in.  Breakthroughs don’t need new solutions; they need great new questions.  Such organizations will find a way to have their people start questioning the ‘taken for granted’, they will question everything.  Questions don’t arise from certainty, they come from doubt.

Thirty years ago German companies used to employ philosophers to create doubt in their businesses and identify fundamental questions.  Who’s doing that in your business today?  In most of the organizations I work in, all I see is people too busy to question; too distracted to doubt.  We need to kill the mantra that says ‘Don’t bring me problems; bring me solutions’.   Managers and leaders should do all in their power to be catalysts of doubt.  It is only through doubt that the next great questions and breakthroughs will emerge.

[1] In ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ Daniel Kahneman (a brilliant book)

[2] In ‘Breakthrough thinking inside the box’ Kevin P. Coyne, Patricia Gorman Clifford, and Renée Dye. Harvard Business Review 2007

[3] Capitalizing on Complexity.  IBM CEO Study. 2010.  A survey of 1500 CEOs across the globe that identified the biggest single challenge facing their businesses as being the increasing complexity and interconnectedness of global markets.  Further, they acknowledged that their organizations were simply not equipped to deal with this and needed to find new ways of responding.

Hold the pen lightly in your lips.  Then read the following statement: Why don’t oysters ever donate to charity? Because they are shellfish!

Now, take the same pen and hold it in your teeth.  Now read: Where is the English Channel? I’m not sure. We don’t get it on our TV!

Which statement did you find funnier?  Typically, irrespective of whether it’s jokes, stories or comics people find things funnier when they hold the pen in their teeth than when they hold it in their lips.

This is because of something called embodied cognition.  In plain language, our thoughts and emotions are affected by the position or sensations in our body; and vice versa.  This stands to reason since the only real reason we think at all is so we take the necessary actions to survive or mate.  Cognition isn’t simply a brain thing.

Some weird examples:

Warmth

When people feel socially rejected, they start wanting a hot drink to warm up; and when people are holding a warm drink, they rate themselves closer to important people in their lives than when they hold a cold drink.

Cleanliness

Shakespeare was right when he had Lady Macbeth say “Out damn spot, out I say!”: people actually do have a greater desire to wash after their morals are threatened; and conversely, feel transgressions are less morally wrong when they wash their hands.

Posture

People who were criticized when lying down had less left precortical activity (the part of the brain that goes into overdrive when we experience extreme emotion) than those sitting down.

Darkness

People are more likely to cheat in the dark, or act selfishly when wearing sunglasses.

Smiling

Back to the pen and the jokes.  When you held the pen in your teeth it moved your face’s smiling or zygomatic muscles.  The brain assumes the fact you are smiling means the joke is funny.  Conversely, holding the pen between your lips prevented these muscles being activated, so you assume it isn’t funny.

So next time you’re trying to influence how someone feels, think first about how their body feels.  If you want people to warm to you, turn the thermostat up or serve hot drinks; to accept an idea or bad news, make them comfortable…literally;  or to take your arguments seriously, put them in a weighty folder!

Reference

For a great summary of all this research and more in this area see:

Barbara Isanski and Catherine West. The Body of Knowledge: Understanding Embodied Cognition http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2606

So what does it take to be ‘in the mood’ to be creative?  The advice around producing a creative atmosphere, for example for brainstorming, has always been to foster a trusting, positive mood.   Rubbish!  The results just don’t support this ‘best practice’ view.  Both positive and negative moods have been linked to improved creative performance.  For example, watching tapes of stand-up comics increases the frequency of creative insight.  Whereas being blasted with negative feedback improves the creativity and quality of paintings produced afterwards.

To help make sense of this, I want to refer to some lovely research at the University of Amsterdam.  It was shown that creative output is less about whether the mood is positive or negative, but how extreme the mood is.  They classed moods as being ‘activating’ (happiness, anger, fear) or ‘deactivating’ (calm, relaxed, sad, depressed).   Activating moods – both positive and negative -caused a surge in creativity, deactivating moods had little effect.

There is a difference of course, before all you leaders out there start ranting and raving at your teams to spark their powers of innovation.   Anger and fear – even simply seeing someone being shouted at – have been shown to narrow people’s thought processes.  People observe and think less expansively, making fewer lateral insights.  However they are more persistent and urgent.  So if creativity is what’s required, people will work hard at creativity.  It’s unlikely to be truly breakthrough originality, but it will be good and solid creative output.

On the other hand, people who are happy and having fun (activating states) also produce more creative ideas, but this time from more cognitive flexibility.  One of the central mechanisms in the brain for generating insight is the ability of the brain to switch from one line of thought to another; to see a problem from a different perspective.  Happy people do this much more than those either in a deactivating or a negative mood.  They also think and see more widely, they are more likely to spot things (physically or intellectually) that can help lead to insight that others simply miss.  Genuinely new thinking is more likely to emerge from happiness.

There you have it, if you want your team (or yourself) to create, the last thing you should do is make everyone relaxed and comfortable (or sad).  Get them going!  Fire them up with anger or fear: they’ll produce a lot of creative stuff, though it may be more mechanical.  Or help them to have a lot of fun: and stand back as the ideas fly!

So are truly creative people mad?  The chances are they just experience more extreme moods, or put themselves in situations that generate stronger reactions (good or bad) than most of us.  When they are at their best, ‘creatives’ probably are mad (angry)…or maybe just really happy.

Key Reference:

Carsten K. W. De Dreu, Matthijs Baas, and Bernard A. Nijstad (2008) Hedonic Tone and Activation Level in the Mood–Creativity Link: Toward a Dual Pathway to Creativity Model.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2008, Vol. 94, No. 5, 739–756

In flood-ravaged countries in the developing world, when you build a levee you can significantly reduce the risk of flooding.  However, research shows that, despite the success of the levees, the actual number of flood victims remains about the same.

Why?

These results can be explained by something the Canadian Psychologist Gerald J.S. Wilde called Risk Homeostasis.  Homeostasis is the process in biology which keeps things about the same.  Think of your body temperature.  You have a normal temperature of 37.0 °C (98.6 °F).  When your core temperature rises, you start sweating and blood flows to the surface of your skin to cool you down.  When your temperature cools below 37.0, you start shivering to generate heat.  Risk homeostasis works like this.  We all have a level of preferred risk.  This varies between people but stays the same for any given person over time.  Fairly obviously, if we are in a situation of higher risk than our preference, we act to reduce the risk.  More surprisingly, if the risk is lower than our preference, we also act; this time to increase our risk.

This was most powerfully demonstrated in a taxi fleet in Munich.  Half the fleet were equipped with ABS (anti-lock braking system).  Half the fleet had conventional brakes.  ABS makes the car safer by reducing skidding under braking.  However, the number of accidents in those using ABS was the same as those using conventional brakes.  Drivers with ABS could recognize their cars were safer, so what did they do?  They responded by driving more dangerously to increase the risk back to their preferred level.

This effect was nicely used by Volvo, who are well known for building a brand around safety.  This was a very successful strategy in the 70s and 80s, but became a less potent proposition into the 90s as all cars got safer.  Volvo asked themselves the question: why do you want to be safe.  The answer they came to is that having a safer car allows you to do more dangerous things.  The resulting adverts showed Volvos driving through volcanoes and ice fields.  This was risk homeostasis in action.

So when a successful drink-driving campaign in British Colombia reduced alcohol-related accidents over a four month period by 18%, it should come as no surprise that accidents that were not alcohol-related increased by 19%.  Or that smokers who quit, simply increased their other non-healthy behaviors.  Or that people living in areas which are less prone to flooding due to levees increasingly build houses on the more fertile, more risky, flood plains.

On a personal note, my wife and I often commented that whenever our lives seemed to be ‘settling down’, we would do something which dramatically de-stabilized everything again.  What we didn’t realize at the time is that we were simply finding our way back to our preferred level of risk.

The lesson from this is to be mindful about your risk-related choices.  Like so many areas of human judgment, these decisions about adjusting risk are not explicit, conscious decisions.  The taxi drivers will not have thought ‘Oh, I’m a little safe in this car…better change that!’  If you want to increase the risk in your life or career, create the capability and motivation first by increasing your sense of safety.  If, on the other hand, your life has just got a lot safer, your attraction to risk-taking behaviors is likely to shoot up.  Be ready for this, and meet that need by choosing risk that is productive (or at least not harmful).

Wilde, Gerald JS (1994) Target Risk: Dealing with the danger of death, disease and damage in everyday decisions. First Edition. Web edition: http://psyc.queensu.ca/target/index.html

The mere presence of people has been known to affect performance for many years.  Norman Triplett, back in 1898, noticed that cyclists consistently achieved faster race times when cycling with others.  He concluded that the “bodily presence of another contestant” alone was enough to improve performance.  Further research found that performance often improves when that ‘bodily presence isn’t even competing.  For example, simply having observers on tasks ranging from sports to mathematics and word puzzles, also raises performance.  This phenomenon became known as social facilitation.

So what about the disappearing letters on my keyboard?  It turns out that having people around you cuts both ways.  If the task is well learned or simple, performance improves when observed.  If, on the other hand, the task is complex or not-well learned, performance drops.  For example, when novice pool players are observed, they miss more shots than normal; the opposite effect is noticed in experts.  So when my sons attempt to demonstrate their new skills on a skateboard to grandparents, they end up saying ‘No, wait…I’ll get it right this time’ (a lot).

The effects of social facilitation are robust and everywhere.  Bizarrely, it even affects cockroaches!  Cockroaches complete straight runways faster when they are with other cockroaches than alone.  However, they are much slower on complex mazes when there are others around.

Why does this happen?  It’s to do with arousal (at least for humans…I can’t speak for cockroaches).  For simple or well-learned skills, the attention of others increases our arousal which leads to greater focus on what we’re doing.  This improves performance.  However, an increase in arousal when performing complex or new skills can divert cognitive resources from the task at hand, reducing effectiveness.   For example, when students were being monitored electronically, they learned less well on a web-based training program.

In addition, ‘arousal’ may mean something different for established versus new skills.  In the former case, arousal may mean stimulation.  In the latter it may mean fear of evaluation.  In fact, it has been shown that when people are observed doing complex tasks their cardiovascular system responds as it does for threatening situations.  This is further supported by some interesting
research in the world of sports.  For many years, crowds have believed ‘home field advantage’ comes from the strength of their support for their team.  It now appears that any amount of cheering for your team has no effect on the game.  However, jeering and booing the opposing team leads them to fluff more shots and commit more fouls.

As a final thought, social facilitation can increase ‘performance’ in unhelpful ways too.  Men eat 36% more when in the company of others; women eat 40% more!  So, if you’re on a diet, eat alone…unless of course you were to increase the complexity of the task and eat with chopsticks…

Epting, L. Kimberly, Riggs, Kristen N. Knowles, Joseph D. Hanky, John J. (2011) Cheers vs. jeers: effects of audience feedback on individual athletic performance. North American Journal of Psychology, June, 2011: 13: 2

Strauss, B. (2001). Social facilitation in motor tasks: a review of research and theory. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 3, 237-256.

Thompson, L.F.T., Sebastienelli, J.D.S., & Murray, N.P.M. (2009). Monitoring online training behaviors: awareness of electronic surveillance hinders e-learners. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 39, p. 2191–2212.

Zajonc, Robert B., Alexander Heingartner, and Edward M. Herman. “Social Enhancement and Impairment of Performance in the Cockroach.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 13.2 (1969): 83-92.

It turns out, people’s choices of company to invest in are significantly affected by the name (or more specifically by the three-letter ‘ticker’ symbol that stock exchanges use).  In a study of real-world investments, a basket of shares with easy-to-pronounce names such as KAR outperformed those with less easy names such as RDO by 12% on their first day of trading and 33% over the first year.  That’s astonishing in the most hard-bitten, objective of industries.

Why?

Whenever you look, remember or think, your brain has to work.  Some tasks are easier than others for the brain to process.  Easy tasks feel like they flow, whereas harder ones get a bit stuck.  Psychologists refer to this mental experience of processing ease as cognitive fluency.  The brain likes easy.  The brain is also a manic interpretation machine.  It interprets the positive feeling of fluency as meaning something positive.  So when you come to make a judgement about how much you like something; whether you believe it;  or how confident you are, this feeling of fluency influences you.  And you will be entirely unaware of this influence.

Which picture do you like more?

Most people prefer the picture on the left.  It is a more familiar image – looking like a zebra – than the more geometric one.  Familiar images are more fluent than unfamiliar ones.  Think of a cave man seeing an elephant for the first time.  The brain has to go into over-drive to observe and judge if the elephant is going to eat him or not.  Once the man is familiar with elephants, he (and his brain) can easily judge he’s safe.  So you can understand why he would come to prefer familiar things to the unfamiliar.   The ease of processing becomes a signal for the brain that suggests familiarity; which in turn says ‘Relax.  You are not lunch’.

This is called the mere exposure effect.  Present unfamiliar images to people. Show some of those images for a little longer than others (400ms compared to 100ms).  Afterwards people will reliably prefer the images they saw for longer.  Interestingly if you ask the person why they like them more, they will make up a reason – and it won’t be that they saw them for 400 rather than 100ms!  The fact is, people are entirely unconscious of the impact of cognitive fluency.

It’s not simply familiarity that influences judgements.  Let’s imagine you saw the statement ‘Osorno is in Chile’ and you were asked to judge the truth of this statement, would the clarity of the text affect your judgement?  When these statements are shown in clear text (e.g. black text on white) people are more likely to believe the statement than when the contrast is not strong (e.g. blue on black).  Or, moving beyond the visual, people judge the aphorism ‘Life is mostly strife’ as being truer than ‘Life is mostly struggle’ because rhymes are fluent.  Finally, the author of an essay is judged by experienced professors as being less intelligent if the font is difficult to read or the sentences longer!

Cognitive fluency doesn’t simply affect your judgements about the world, but also about yourself.  In a classic study, people were asked to judge how assertive they were.  Just before they were asked this question, they were given a task: to recall either 6 or 12 examples of times when they had been assertive.  Those who had been asked to remember 6 examples (the easier task) rated themselves as more assertive than those who had to remember 12.  This was irrespective of how assertive they actually were!  Those asked for 6 examples processed the task more easily and used that experience of cognitive fluency to make their judgement.  In this example, the experience of fluency plays a greater role in the judgement than the facts themselves.

This same effect has also been found with happiness.  If I asked you to identify 12 examples of happy times in your life (a hard task), you would subsequently rate your life as less happy than if I had asked you to only recall 6 times!  The brain unconsciously reasons ‘I’m struggling to think of 12; I can’t be happy.’

Cognitive fluency is pervasive, and unconscious.  Everything we do is more or less fluent. This knowledge can be hugely helpful if you want to influence people’s judgements, whether you want people to believe something or like (or buy) something:  Make it simple.  Make it easy.  Make it clear.

If, on the other hand, you want to protect yourself against unconscious influence, the trick is to be aware.  Studies show that once people are conscious of a possible bias caused by fluency, they begin to base their judgements on the facts rather than the processing ease.  So next time you’re thinking about investing, remind yourself to forget how nice the names are!

Now ask yourself, how are you seduced by the easy?

References

Alter, A.
L., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2006). Predicting short-term stock fluctuations by using processing fluency. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, 103, 9369-9372

Adam L. Alter and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (2009) Uniting the Tribes of Fluency to Form a Metacognitive Nation. Personality and Social Psychology Review; 13; 219 – 235

McGlone, M. S., & Tofighbakhsh, J. (2000). Birds of a feather flock conjointly (?): Rhyme as reason in aphorisms. Psychological Science , 11, 424-428

Now imagine you’re standing in front of a room full of people as forgetful as you.  The simple fact is that few people, when designing or delivering a presentation, give their audience the credit they deserve: they are world class forgetters.  This blog is about simple strategies you can employ to get your messages remembered.  Having interesting and relevant content is clearly important in making a memorable presentation; but it certainly isn’t everything.  You don’t have to become more confident, extrovert or funnier to make more of an impact either.  Simply play to the strengths of the brain – or more specifically the Working Memory – and you’ll create lasting memories.

Working memory has four elements: a central executive and three slave systems with horrible names (phonological loop, visuo-spatial sketchpad and the episodic buffer).  Each element has preferences; things that arouse it more.  Arouse them sufficiently and you’ll create enough of a neurotransmitter called glutamate to make a memory.  Bingo!  You’ve succeeded.

The Central Executive: Attention

The Central Executive is summarized in a single word: attention.  Unless you have the full attention of the brain, you will not be remembered.  The problem with attention is that there are so many competing demands for it at any time, but fail to grab it, and you’ll simply be blah-blah-blahing at a sea of politely nodding blank faces.  I have a 30 second rule.  I do something unexpected or make an unexpected request within the first half minute of any presentation.  Why?  The novel or unexpected causes the anterior cingulated cortex to fire.  This is the brain’s error-detection mechanism.  The message your audience picks up is that they cannot fully predict what will happen in the presentation, so they had better pay attention.  This doesn’t have to be crazy.  It might be as simple as starting talking from the back of the room; asking everyone to look under their chair (for something you placed there before the presentation); or standing up and doing something relevant (maybe just shaking hands).  It matters less what you do, than you consciously break the norm in some way.

Ever found that you remember routes much better when you were driving than when you were in the passenger seat?  This comes to the second principle of attention: our attention naturally focuses when we are doing something.  No matter how wonderful an oration you are giving, if your audience is in a passive role, like the passenger in a car, their attention is less strongly focused.  Every presentation should be sprinkled with activity, where people have to engage.  Ask reflective questions (and then pause); give people time to discuss with their neighbour; ask people to write something down.  For example, the NHS (the UK Health Service) found that patients are nearly 30% less likely to forget appointments when asked to write down the date and time rather than simply being given a pre-written appointments card.

Phonological Loop: Words

The phonological loop is the brains short-term store for words and sounds it hears.  I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how difficult listening is (and I’m not saying that just because I’m male).  Words arrive quicker than you can process them.  To convert these sounds into memories, the listener has to interpret what is being said and summarise it for themselves – and in doing this they have to switch off their attention to the incoming new words, missing stuff.  You need to make life easier for your audience.

I used to work with Dell.  They had a principle for presentations called ‘Answer First’.  The idea is that rather than building suspense through your presentation until you finally reveal (to trumpet blasts) your killer idea at the end, tell the audience your idea – your central message – right at the start.  Psychologically this works really well.  Firstly, it’s this idea you want people to remember and you probably have their attention most at the start.  More fundamentally though, by telling people ‘the answer’ you are removing some of the hard work needed to process, interpret and summarise what you are saying.  They effectively know the punch-line, so what you say after is just filling in the blanks.  This means they can listen to more words.

Once you have your one big idea which you present at the start, repeat it a lot (and key elements of your argument).  We know the phonological loop thrives on repetition.  Don’t feel the need to constantly entertain by keeping every word fresh.  Repeat, reinforce and re-state.   And don’t say a lot.  If you think of a scale of how much content you should include.  At one end are all the things you want to say because you they are interesting and they make you look clever.  At the other end are all the things people are able to or want to take in.  There is a huge gap between the two points.  Think what you want to say and halve it, and repeat it.

Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad: Images

The visuo-spatial sketchpad (the VSS for short) is where images are held for processing or forgetting. Like most of the Working Memory, the VSS likes novelty and simplicity.  Keep any visuals varied: use different colors and styles.  Clearly you don’t want your presentation to look a mess, but when you hit your key slides, you might do them with a different background i.e. change white to black.

The biggest mistake people make in presentations comes from a misunderstanding of the use of visuals like powerpoint.  People often mistakenly think the presentation is the slide deck.  The presentation is what you say, the visuals are there to support you.  Let’s take the example of a presentation where there is a lot of text on the slide, or a complicated data table, and the speaker is also talking.  The Working Memory cannot deal with both the Phonological Loop and the VSS being hammered at once, it feels over-whelming, so the listener switches off or at best scrambles to make sense of all they take in.  The rule should be simple: either you’re talking or the slide deck is.  Not at the same time.  If you have a quote or text you want people to read; shut up!

Use your slides to help the listener summarise what they are hearing, making it easier to remember.  A slide with a single word on can powerfully reinforce what you are saying.  A strong and relevant image can do the same thing.  Done correctly, your words stimulating the Phonological Loop and the image firing up the VSS will synchronise and you’ll create a memory.

Episodic Buffer: Connections

The process of learning is a process of making associations between existing memories and new information; of weaving what you experience into a meaningful whole; a story.  The episodic buffer is a key focal point for this, looking explicitly for the connections.  Your job is to help people make those connections.  Refer to experiences they may have had (‘Like last year when…’), ask questions to have them relate your content to what they know already (‘This is similar to what we already call…’).  Most of all, the episodic buffer loves stories.  Stories work at visual, verbal and emotional levels; they convey lots of information and they are interesting.    Give anecdotes, share examples, paint scenarios; tell stories.

In a far-away land aboy was helping his father sell carpets in the market.  In truth he was far more interested in what he saw and heard than in selling.  He wandered through the stalls, watching, smelling, touching and tasting, but most of all, listening.  He loved to hear the stories people had to tell: stories of life and of love, stories of their day, funny stories and imaginary stories.  He listened, he pondered, he learned.  Over time he took each of these stories and wove it into a beautiful carpet.

One day, he sat down on his carpet in the market.  The threads he had woven started rising around him, entwining with other threads making beautiful new patterns, wondrous new stories.  As patterns emerged, he told what he saw.  Crowds arrived, enthralled at his stories; their stories.  He had created memories.

People are built to forget, so anyone who can deliver messages that are remembered has a huge advantage.

How will you create memories?

Time is weird.  We sense it, yet we have no sense organ to detect it.  It’s fixed and regular, yet we know it’s relative.  It doesn’t exist in any concrete sense, yet our lives are built around it.  Time affects everything.  Specifically, our awareness of time also affects our productivity, creativity and happiness.

Time Flies when you’re Having Fun

Unless you enjoy passing away the time looking at obscure, out-of-date car or home improvement magazines, time probably seems to slow when you’re in a doctor’s waiting room.  Boredom slows those second hands like little else (apart from anxiety and depression).  If those magazines happened to be erotic, on the other hand, research suggests that the time would fly by – or indeed any other type of magazine that genuinely interested you.

You can think of your internal sense of time as being like a ticking clock.  We make judgements on time by how many ticks we notice.  When we are bored, we really notice the ticks, so time seems to drag.  When we’re amused, we don’t notice many of the ticks, so time disappears.  Put another way, awareness of time slows it down; awareness in time speeds it up.  A watched kettle never boils.

In fact, we get so used to the time flies when you’re having fun effect, that we begin using speed of time to judge our enjoyment!  People doing something boring were told the task had only lasted half as long as it had actually taken.  They rated the activity significantly more enjoyable than those who weren’t tricked in this way.

On the other hand…

I was on a great stag do cycling on the Isle of Aran many years ago.  At the end of the 2 days I found it hard to believe that only 48 hours had passed.  Listening to the internal clock is not our only approach to perceiving time, memory plays a part too.  We judge time’s passage by how much we can recall of a period of time.  The brain makes a simple assumption that sheer quantity of memory is a good yardstick of how long something took.  Remember a lot, it must have lasted a long time.  Deep attention on something, good or bad, creates more memories.   So if you’re actively engaged in something, or doing something amazing (or really scary) at that moment time may seem to fly, but the overall passage of time seems long.

This is why the first week of your holiday always seems to last longer than the second week: the experiences are more novel and therefore more memorable.  It is also why, when trying to explain the duration of a holiday, you may find yourself saying how quickly it went, but at the same time, it seems ages since you arrived.

Using Time

Given how full our lives are, an increased awareness of time can give us a little buzz, a shot of urgency.  It draws attention to how little time we actually have, and in so doing, increases our pace and our focus.  Can this be helpful?  Research has fairly consistently shown that heightened awareness of time increases productivity.  So if you want to increase the amount of stuff you can do in a day or a meeting, increase your awareness of time by putting a big clock on your desk for example.

On the other hand, increased time awareness has a downside: research in the field shows that people think less deeply when focused on time.  This is particularly the case with creativity.  The cognitive processes in creativity involve exploration, kicking things around, going back to the start.  They are messy.  They are also time consuming and seemingly inefficient.  Increased time awareness drives us to increase our efficiency, so we play around less, take a more direct route, and produce more mundane results.

I also have a hunch that it’s harder to simply be in the moment if you are highly aware of time.  An awareness of time pulls the focus of our attention to the future (or the past) but out of now.  As we mark time we observe our seconds, minutes, hours and days pass, but maybe we miss the moments.  We become less good at hanging out, relishing, or connecting.  Put another way, an awareness of time is great for doing, and bad for being.

My Watch

As for me, will I get a new watch?  Of course I will (I’m no hippie!).  What this period has made me mindful of is how to use time better: how to use my watch as Red Bull, stimulating me to clear my to-do list; and how to untime key chunks of my days, to allow me to dive deep into thought or the moment.

Don’t wear your watch tomorrow.

(Thanks Jeremy Dean for the inspiration – @psyblog)

Now imagine a TV without controls.  A TV that gets stuck on channels – often the wrong channel – and that doesn’t allow you to adjust the volume, or even turn it off.  Welcome to your brain.

I want to look at one particular scenario.  I want to look at how pointing a remote control at yourself might improve your creativity.

The Channel Button

Suppose that every time you encountered a problem you had to start from scratch and figure it out.  Even tying your shoelaces would be a nightmare if each morning you faced the challenge of working out afresh how to tangle those strings in order to keep your shoes on.  Clearly, this would be impossible.

Each time you successfully solve a problem, your pattern of thinking is stored.  Like a channel on a TV.  All you need to do, when you encounter a problem, is select the right ‘channel’.  Fantastic;  much more efficient.   What’s even better news is that our range of channels increases with experience, with each new problem type we successfully resolve.

There is a problem though.  The brain is crazy about automation.  Since our conscious processing power is so limited, the brain stores as much as it can into pre-conscious areas.  Then, when we encounter a problem type, ‘click’ the brain chooses the appropriate channel; most of the time.

When we get stuck on a problem, when we’re struggling to come up with ideas, it’s because we’re on the wrong channel.  We’re stuck on the channel the brain auto-selected.  This is called fixation.

Example: You find a pipe, a carrot and a couple of sticks in a field.  Why?  Your brain may have auto-selected ‘rubbish’, or the world ‘field’ may have triggered you to think in terms of agricultural channels.  You only solve this puzzle when you select more wintery channels: snowman.

In one of the more famous creativity tests first used by Karl Dunker in 1945, people are given a candle, book of matches and a box of thumb tacks.  They are told to attach the candle to a wall so that the candle doesn’t drip when lit.  People typically try and use the thumb tacks to stick the candle directly to the wall, or melt the side of the candle so they can attach it.  The solution is to tip the tacks out of the box, put the candle in it and attach the box to the wall using the tacks.  People get stuck on a channel which continues to see the box as something that simply holds the tacks.  Interestingly, if the problem is presented with the tacks lying alongside an empty box, most people get the answer pretty quickly.

Creativity happens when we are able see a problem from a different perspective, using a different pattern of thinking.  In fact, when people are being creative, one of the most active parts of the brain is the medial prefrontal cortex: the brain’s channel button.  Consistently creative people are not simply good at thinking about problems, they’re good at spotting how they are thinking.  Specifically, they recognise when their channel isn’t working and go surfing.

The Volume Button

When you’re working on a problem, ever had that feeling that you’re close to a breakthrough?  You can feel the brain grasping for something…you don’t know what, but you sense you’re close.  It turns out people can be pretty accurate at assessing how close they are to having a creative breakthrough.  How can this be, since the creative process is far from linear?

Creativity is all about making new connections, combining information and ideas together in ways that haven’t been done before.  The brain picks up weak signals from outside its current pattern of thinking, and recognises it may be close to an aha moment.  Mark Beeman – a leading creativity neuroscientist – found that about 1.5 seconds before a breakthrough, people almost go blind.  The fact is, our visual sense is so dominant it can drown out quiet internal signals, crying out to be heard.  So alpha waves flood into
the visual cortex, blocking visual signals.  The brain is saying ‘Shhhh.  What was that?’

Meetings can be frenetic.  Pressure can be intense.  Environments can be stimulating.  However, creative people have learnt to turn the volume down at key moments, either by choosing to change environments or by shutting out the noise.  They turn the focus of their attention from the shrieking external world to the still quiet place of lost memories and distant thoughts.  They pick up those weak signals and make strong connections.

The Power (or Standby) Button
Join all nine dots, without ever taking your pencil off the paper, in as few lines as possible.

What is the solution?  How many lines do you need?

Any blog on creativity wouldn’t be complete without the famous, nine dot challenge that spurned the term ‘thinking outside the box.  The solution involves going outside the box to enable you to complete the challenge in only four straight lines.  Did you get it?

I rather hope not.  I included this example to demonstrate one of the biggest barriers to creativity: solutions.  The correct answer to the nine dot challenge above is 1.  The instruction never mentioned the lines had to be straight!  However, we’re often so sure we ‘know’ the solution that any further search for ideas stops.

The brain is such a busy fellow that once it finds a solution it thinks ‘job done’ and shuts up shop.  So while it might seem odd, one of the most important functions of the brain during creativity is inhibition: stopping previous solutions from prematurely terminating the creative search, or at least interfering with it.  These previous solutions may not have been from a long time ago, they may be the first new idea that came to mind in the very meeting you’re in.  The ability to keep your full attention on your
creative quest, to go beyond the obvious and the previous, is central to creativity.

Creativity is a process, not a solution.  Creative people are great at parking good solutions once identified: ‘that’s Plan A, now what about Plan B?’  They hit the power button and put solutions on standby to allow them to keep searching.

Remote Control your Creativity

The most consistently creative people aren’t necessarily the most experienced, or the cleverest.  They are also not born with some unique creativity gene.  They have learned to pay attention to what’s going on inside their head.  They have learned to switch channels, turn down the volume and hit the standby button for previous solutions.  Your TV remote allows you conscious control over the images, information and ideas that flow into your house.  Next time you want to be creative, point it at yourself.