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Tag: Brain

Thinking Skills

26/05/2016 /

Eric Garner, in his book Thinking Skills, argues that our brain is the most powerful organ we possess. It is the tool that, if used skillfully, can help us perform better in our job, better in our team and better in our organization.

Thinking Skills are some of the most valuable skills to learn today. Indeed, we live in an Information Age, no longer an Industrial Age. That’s why brain has replaced brawn, and strength in thinking has replaced strength in muscles. No matter what kind of business you work for, nor what kind of job you do, today you are expected to apply a range of thinking skills to the work you carry out. This includes using your judgment; collecting, using, and analyzing information; working with others to solve problems; making decisions on behalf of others; contributing to ideas to innovate and change; and being creative about how your job can function better.

By developing your thinking skills to meet the needs of the modern world, you are guaranteed to succeed.

 

Brain food

Image: Flickr – Sean MacEntee (CC BY 2.0)

 

A Master Procrastinator’s mind

10/05/2016 /

Tim Urban knows that procrastination doesn’t make sense, but he has never been able to shake his habit of waiting until the last minute to get things done.

In this hilarious and insightful TED talk, Urban takes us on a journey through YouTube binges, Wikipedia rabbit holes and bouts of staring out the window — and encourages us to think harder about what we’re really procrastinating on, before we run out of time.

Procrastination Meter.jpg

Image: Flickr – Emilie Ogez (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Changing Mindsets

06/02/2014 /

Which ‘mindset’ do you possess? ‘Mindset’ is a simple idea discovered by Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck in decades of research on achievement and success, a simple idea that makes all the difference.mindset_2

According to Carol Dweck everyone has either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is one in which you view your talents and abilities as ‘fixed’. In other words, you are who you are, your intelligence and talents are fixed, and your fate is to go through life avoiding challenge and failure. A growth mindset, on the other hand, is one in which you view life as a series of challenges and opportunities for improving and you see yourself as fluid, as a work in progress.

The good news is that mindsets are not ‘set’ and we can cultivate a growth mindset to achieve success and happiness. At any time, we can learn to open our mind to develop our ability to learn new things across a broad range of skills. The more we learn, the more our brain grows and can learn more easily.

In this TEDx talk Eduardo Briceno, co-Founder and CEO of Mindset Works, explains the principles.

How to learn 1,000 foreign words in 22 hours

14/01/2014 /

How much time do we need to learn a foreign language?

According to Joshua Foer, an American journalist who learnt Lingala – a Bantu language spoken in the North West of the Democratic Republic of the Congo-, you just need 22 hours spread over a period of 10 weeks.

He used Memrise, a web app that teaches foreign languages through a game based on the repetition of words and their audio pronunciation. The trick is to assign to each word a “memo”, that can be an image, a sound, a rhyme, a video or just a note on the etymology of the word.

The idea behind Memrise is making the study of a foreign language a fun practice by using the internet as a social gaming and by exploiting the potential of our memory.

Read full article http://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/09/learn-language-in-three-months

10 Ways to Make Yourself Smarter

22/01/2013 /

Whether you are trying to survive an intensive schedule or just want to seem smarter in front of your friends, you can do a lot of things to both look and be smarter.

In his article “Top 10 Ways to Make Yourself Look (and Be) Smarter” published on lifehacker.com, Whitson Gordon, senior editor of lifehacker blog, provides ten simple tricks for boosting your real (and perceived) brain power:

  1. Read faster and better
  2. Speak up
  3. Don’t fall prey to BS
  4. Focus on what you know
  5. Get some exercise
  6. Talk to yourself
  7. Learn a second language
  8. Do things the hard way
  9. Know what won’t make you smarter
  10. Just believe you can be smarter

You can read more at: http://goo.gl/6TFL0

Image source: bit.ly/SCph1U

What happens in your brain while you multitask?

10/07/2012 /

A study by Zhen Wang and Clifford Nass from Stanford University, analyzes what happens in a brain while a person is multitasking. Multitasking, at first sight, looks very productive and seems the best way to solve several problems at the same time, without ignoring even just one of them.

The study, instead, shows that multitasking decreases brain efficiency and doesn’t help memory and filtering of information. Listening to music, instead isn’t a way of multitasking and can also help the person to be more efficient and concentrated.

Read the full article to “solve your multitasking madness” at:

http://lifehacker.com/5922453/what-multitasking-does-to-our-brains

Brain Rules – 12 principles for Surviving and Thriving

03/05/2012 /

John Medina, molecular biologist, is the author of a “MUST HAVE” book titled “Brain Rules. 12 principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School“.

Here are the 12 Principles:

1. Exercise: it boosts brain power
2. Survival: the human brain evolved too
3. Wiring: every brain is wired differently
4. Attention: we don’t pay attention to boring things
5. Short-term memory: Repeat to remember
6. Long-term memory: Remember to repeat
7. Sleep: sleep well, think well
8. Stress: stressed brains don’t learn the same way
9. Sensory integration: stimulate more of the senses
10. Vision: vision trumps all other senses
11. Gender: male and female brains are different
12. Exploration: we are powerful and natural explorers

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