Here is an excerpt from an article written by David Rock for Chief Learning Officer magazine. He observes that, by figuring out how the brain works, learning leaders can change how they approach learning to promote behavioral change and increase business results. To read the complete article, check out all the resources, and sign up for a free subscription to the Talent Management and/or CLO magazines published by MedfiaTec, please click here.

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Neuroscience has been with us for hundreds of years in some form or other. Scientists first observed people with brain injuries to try and understand the relationship between the brain and behavior.

In the past few decades, however, scientists have made dramatic breakthroughs in our ability to study the brain directly. We can now observe electrical activity or blood flow inside the head, or switch off functioning for a specific region of the brain on demand. The result is an enormous burst of brain research, with thousands of papers published each year.

As of 2015, there are more than 60 peer-reviewed research papers exploring various developments in neuroscience and how they relate specifically to leadership. This is an effort that began in 2007 with the launch of the first NeuroLeadership Summit, which has since become an annual gathering of neuroscientists meeting with leadership experts to find ways to improve leadership development by understanding the brain.

Organizations have begun to use this research on two levels. First, brain research is explaining in specific detail how we learn. In turn, this informs new ways to design learning solutions. Second, organizations are finding that teaching managers and leaders about the brain is a helpful frame to develop self and social awareness and other soft skills, especially for more cynical leaders who want more science than art when they learn.

[Here is the first of three areas of opportunity that Rock explores.]

Rethink Learning

In the past decade, neuroscientists discovered that whether an idea can be easily recalled is linked to the strength of activating the hippocampus, located in the lower section of the brain, during a learning task. The stronger the hippocampus fires up while learning something, which means the more oxygen and glucose it uses, the better people can recall that information later.

With this finding, neuroscientists such as Lila Davachi at New York University and others have been able to test out many variables in learning experiences, such as what happens to the hippocampus if someone is distracted while absorbing information. There are many different findings emerging, but they can be summarized into four categories called the AGES model. AGES stands for attention, generation, emotion and spacing, and describes four conditions that each need to be high for learning to occur.

Attention is about how much people focus in the moment on a particular learning task. This is no small matter in an era with ever shrinking attention spans. People experience a dramatic drop-off in memory simply by diverting their attention with a secondary media, like another screen, while focusing on a memory task. For the hippocampus to fire at the level needed to embed memories, people need to pay close attention during a learning task.

Essentially, to speed up learning we need to focus more on, well, focus. Yet, we seem to be going in the other direction, giving people many things to focus on at once in learning environments to try to make learning as rich an experience as being online. Deep focus is a critical factor for learning. Anything that gets in the way of this focus needs to be removed if leaders want people to recall ideas later.

Generation means that people need to make their own meaning, literally generating their own links while learning, not just passively listening to ideas. We need our brains to create rich webs of links to any new concept, linking ideas to many parts of the brain. Using different types of neural circuitry to link to an idea is the key. Meaning, we should be listening, speaking, thinking, writing, speaking and other tasks about any important idea.

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The research behind these three ideas created a strong pull for the company’s managers to participate in the program, and these fundamental concepts gave them new ideas on how to improve their effectiveness.

Neuroscience is here to stay, and it’s now possible to leverage related findings to improve organizational learning and performance, both at the process level and via content development. This affects what we teach leaders and how we teach them, and it’s opening up new frontiers for breakthroughs in leadership effectiveness.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

David Rock is the co-founder and director of the NeuroLeadership Institute, a global research and behavior-change consulting firm, and author of Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long. He can be reached at the Institute.