One Thing to Know About Your Brain That Will Change Your Life | Ann Herrmann-Nehdi | TEDxTryon

most of us assume that we're actually in control of our brains but I've learned that most of the time were not we're actually on autopilot not really taking advantage of all of the great capability that our brains provide us but the good news is we actually can take control by knowing your brains patterns and preferences you can not only take control but you can significantly expand your potential I know because it changed my life but this is really personal it started when I was very young I used to come home after school and my father would strap electrodes to my head and this equipment an EEG an electroencephalogram in order to measure the level of electrical activity in the different parts of my brain why well he was a scientist by training but he was head of management education at General Electric at the time and was trying to figure out a scientific explanation for creative thinking in order to see whether or not they could really teach it to GE employees and so he started wiring everybody up neighbors friends whoever he actually knew and as a matter of fact sometime later in spite of the fact that I begged him to not do this he actually even wired up my then boyfriend now husband to see what was happening in his brain well what he learned was important for GE that you could in fact teach creative thinking but since then so much more the impact has been tremendous on thousands of people around the world who actually taking control of their thinking for better results so why are we on autopilot what's interesting the brain is actually by design unbelievably lazy and you know it's it's really organized around learning patterns and then trying to recognize those patterns so it can be more energy efficient and it becomes like a pattern-seeking machine constantly scanning the environment and this allows us to go on autopilot which actually can be pretty practical we can get into some preferred ways of doing things and not have to think too hard so for example once you've learned how to write most of us don't have to think about which hand we're going to use when we're going to actually write something down or once you've learned how to drive I would suspect that you go on autopilot right and maybe you even you don't even pay attention to the last five miles or maybe even go whizzing past there your normal turn for home so the downside of patterns is that when things change which they inevitably do we can get caught off-guard if by chance you have to start learning how to use your non-preferred hand like my son did when he had a weight training accident he had to take a big test it was unbelievably draining for him to actually learn how to use that he could do it but it was draining or even like me when I have to change keyboards maybe you experience this and I think I'm hitting the Delete key and I realize oh in fact no it's not the delete key and I don't even know where the delete key is you can get frustrated so one of the best ways to understand patterning is through language so even when we maybe don't know something perfectly well once we've studied it enough we can actually decipher things that may not be perfectly clear so see if you can see what this says quit stealing our letters absolutely or even if you cover 50% of what you need to read I bet you could still read it let's see if you can read this what does that say good times are here yeah I guess both most of you got that correct or did you no tricks here right ah okay well this is what Daniel Kahneman author and researcher calls the traps of fast thinking and that is that we leap to conclusions our brains kind of leap ahead based on all the patterns and the biases and the preferences and experiences that we've had over the course of our lives now the antidote which I'm going to recommend you try is slow thinking which is paying attention to your thinking what that does is it allows you to really wake up that lazy brain of yours the first step for you is awareness awareness of context why context is what brain looks for first in any situation it sort of scans the environments for a pattern goes oh my god I see it I got it and then knows what to do can make some assumptions about what to do I don't know about you but sometimes assumptions have kind of led me astray I was in Vietnam with my husband visiting a major city we were walking down the street and got hit with a torrential rainstorm so I go running into a store to get something to protect myself and buy a poncho right we've all of us have bought Poncho's before so I didn't think this is a very complicated decision and as soon as I came out my husband took one look at me and said what's with the window and I was like I didn't even recognize that there was a window there in the first place and of course I assumed that it was about my body which of course it wasn't right and and so we didn't really know what this window could be for until we decided to look up and look out and get out of our context and what we saw on the streets around us was hundreds of motorbikes with many people wearing ponchos I mean you took a closer look at the poncho you saw that the window was actually designed for the motorbike not for me the motorbike for the light to shine through so what do you do to break out of these patterns well one of my favorite tools is something I call a mind hack you're basically hacking your brains autopilot and it's really useful to kind of get mentally unstuck or shift your perspective and so a great mind hack for this is something called assumption reversal so my assumption was it had something to do with my body if you reverse that and you say it had this window had nothing to do with my body suddenly it opens up your brain to think of new perspectives so you can always use a mind hack to shift your thinking now the second step is to recognize what your preferred patterns might be now a lot of people assume since I grew up with a researcher studying this stuff that I sort of instantly got it but it wasn't until I was a young adult working with other people that I started to really understand the implications of his research I had volunteered for a community project the fundraising project and had assembled a team and so we had an accountant I had a retired drill sergeant a school counselor and myself at the time an entrepreneur and we got together into one of those team meetings and most of us have experienced that by the end of the meeting I thought oh my god what have I signed up for I know have you ever been on a team that feels like this it's sort of you feel kind of like everybody together annoys me well what was happening is that the accountant was completely focused on the numbers not a big surprise you want to know what the payoff was going to be meanwhile they're retired drill sergeant kept saying well no point talking about the numbers and we don't have a plan what's our process and our school counselor said look I know all these people we could be calling why don't we just call them and I was there with all sorts of possibilities and new ideas and kind of like a fire hydrant of lots of possibilities and so it was really tough and I thought to myself gosh what am I going to do and went home that night and said oh my god of course this is a perfect application of that research that my father was doing years ago he discovered that in fact we actually have access to our whole brain not the simplified left brain right brain and we have access to all different kinds of patterns but we develop definitely preferences for some patterns over others so what I was seeing with this group is that we had the accountant completely focused on the payoff we had the drill sergeant all about process we had our counselor wanting to talk about people and of course I was there talking about the possibilities and my challenge was to get us all out of autopilot because we were just looking at the world through our own personal lens and so I had to stretch my thinking and bring the group together and it's interesting because the payoff was really worth it in fact we were able to double the amount of money that we expected to make and in the process we actually bonded as a group which kind of surprised me now since then our research has shown that you can get up to great up to 66% more effectiveness when you bring together different thinking but what do you do if you don't have a team available to you so here's a mind hack that you can use that's really very simple that thousands of people around the globe use every day and it's simply for questions you ask yourself when you're faced up the big challenge or a problem or even something that is a big decision ask yourself what is really important to get into the payoff mode ask yourself how am I going to do it to get into the process mode ask yourself who needs to be involved to get into the people mode and then ask yourself what if this or that happen to get into the possibilities mode but you know you don't really have to you know do this by yourself because we have a lot of different people around us why maybe even at home how many of you have a family member spouse or somebody like that who is really a different thinker than you are let's see all right so are our research shows that opposites attract and then we have to deal with the differences everyday right and sometimes that shows up in in interesting ways so if you were to look at this little example a person saying I love you and the other person says do you have evidence to support that statement so this can be irritating but we have a choice every morning at breakfast you have an opportunity to invite that different perspective into your world and to embrace it so I encourage you to look for those opportunities with family now families also really good at pointing out what we're not so good at you ever noticed that our blind spots now we all have our blind spots I certainly have my own being I'm not really a process and detailed person so yeah I've missed a few deadlines in my time but what I've had to learn to do is to build in that blind spot to whatever it is I'm doing and working with a large global company IHG they decided to do this with their project management training they had project managers who really struggled to kind of keep their eye on the big picture and think about all the possibilities and they knew from our research that draw something actually helps open up that part of your brain so they started their training by having them each draw something and at first they felt really uncomfortable and kind of silly drawing and then they got used to it and they saw how easily that shifted their thinking or maybe a group of engineers I worked with who were so into the technical aspects of their work that we completely forget the customer that they were building the product for and so what they did was they decided that every meeting they had they would have to share a story about one of their customers and just preparing for that before the meeting would shift their thinking one of my favorites is a college student I know who was really having a hard time getting their papers in on time so he actually went out and found an app that was really fun and he would use it to actually get organized and started getting his stuff in on time and his grades improved or a local business that really wanted to be for-profit but was not making any money and they realized that they didn't have a voice at the table to actually talk about the bottom line and so they brought in a part-time person in their meetings to make sure that they were focusing on the finances of the business and they actually saw their business improve it's really up to you on average Americans spend 444 minutes a day at 7 point 4 hours looking at screens that's TVs devices laptops etc that's three point seven months of your year in screen suck time it's interesting because as you look at that chances are I would suspect that some of that is on autopilot have any of you ever experienced that going online and then you look at your watch and - three hours of gone by and you experience that and you're not taking advantage of this incredible system you might miss something really important like this little silly cartoon shows it's up to you it's really up to you you can take control of your brain be aware especially of the context that you're in recognize your patterns and your preferences invite different perspectives to the table manage your blind spots by building them in be intentional about where your thinking time goes choose to wake up that lazy brain of yours you know in life we can either kind of sit in the backseat of the car and kind of ride along on autopilot or we can move to the front seat take the steering wheel and take control of this incredibly precious resource that we have so the one thing you need to know about your brain is for best results use daily you've got a whole brain leverage it thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 441,559

Rating: 4.7673111 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Life, Behavior, Brain, Cognitive science, Control, Intelligence, Personal growth, Self improvement, Self-help

Id: oKjigQPOAi4

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2015