It was 1979. I was off to a conference in Pittsburgh.

This was before the days of non- stop flights to the US. I had to go from Sydney to Auckland, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland and finally to Pittsburgh. I arrived at my hotel at 2am after 32 hours of travelling. Not feeling much like sleep I went to the bar. I exchanged greetings with the few that were there, downed a ‘bud’ and headed off to bed for the few hours that were left.

Getting up at 8am, not really awake, I stumbled into the conference room, determined to find a seat to fall into until morning tea. No sooner had I settled that I heard my name being called.

The key note speaker (Ned, but I did not know it at the time) was asking for certain people to come up the front. I was one of them. We were split into 2 groups and each given the same task - to go into a breakout room for 15 minutes and answer 2 questions: What type of work turned us on and what were the common elements of that work?

I found myself in a room with 4 strangers. I was wrong. It turned out that 4 out of the 5 of us had been in the bar the night before! Needless to say we got on well. 45 minutes went by before we were dragged back into the conference room. It took another 5 minutes for Ned to get us back up the front. We were far from organised!

The other group was organised. They had come back after 15 minutes, had been waiting patiently for us to return and had a flip chart with bullets points and a nominated speaker. We had to be sent for, had not nominated anyone and had a hand drawn picture of a seagull on a crumpled bit of flip paper.

When asked for our answers to the 2 questions, ‘What type of work turned us on and what were the common elements of that work’, we replied that we had a problem with the concept of work. The nearest we could get to describing it was that we liked to ‘fly’ and we liked to help others ‘fly. Hence the seagull after the then famous ‘Jonathon Livingston Seagull’.

The other group had responded in a much more grown up and professional way about work and what it meant to have a clearly defined job.

By now my head was clearing as I realised something special was happening. I realised that Ned had cheated! As pre-work he had got 300 people to complete the HBDI. He had then picked the 5 people with the strongest scores in the B (green) quadrant and the 5 people with the highest score in the D (Yellow) quadrant. With a score of 155 in the yellow quadrant, I was in the D quadrant group.

No wonder we had a problem with the concept of work! No wonder 4 of us had been in the bar the night before.

What did sober me up and completely attract my attention, was what Ned had done during the 15 minutes that the (Green quadrant) group was out of the room. Ned told 300 people exactly what was going to happen. He told them one group would come back on time, the other would not. He told them the words we would use, the way we would behave and the things we would laugh at (or not!) It was the predictability of it all that blew me away.

My D quadrant score is 155. Needless to say, I have a short attention span. Thirty years ago this Whole Brain stuff caught my attention - and it will have in another 30 years!

What are some of your favorite stories and memories of Whole Brain® Thinking over the years? Please contribute by posting a comment on this blog post.

Read how Yale College, Wrexham, North Wales, used the HBDI® as part of its “Learning to Learn” project to identify learning preferences and find appropriate strategies to address learning challenges. As the data from this Spotlight on Learning Overview reveals, the HBDI provided the key to unlocking the learning potential of students across the college.

Orange Credit Union
How Whole Brain® Thinking improved communication and assisted with cultural change
Orange Credit Union has an opportunity to surpass all other banking institutions in the Orange region, by providing quality member services in an open, trusting and supportive environment.
Central to achieving this objective is building and maintaining a culture of trust within the management team, between staff members and from members to staff.
As Kate Gorell, HR Manager at Orange Credit Union explains, “While the management team were already working effectively as a team, we saw an opportunity to further develop and become role models for our staff. By becoming role models, we are able to demonstrate how we understand the strengths and skills of each member. By utilising our skills more effectively, we are able to target the skills between the teams to maximise team performance.”

We now have a unique URL for our Facebook Fan Page.

http://www.facebook.com/herrmannasia

Add us to your Facebook pages and come back and visit anytime.

Neuroplasticity is a long word – and it sounds like a complicated process.

It might well be a complicated process but it is easy to experience. We do so each every time we learn something new.

When we learn something new, we create new connections in the brain. This is neuroplasticity. And if you revise something you have just learnt, or even remember something from the past, you strengthen the existing connections. This is neuroplasticity. Also, as each neuron can connect to many other neurons, you not only remember something, but you also make associates with other things that are linked. This is how you memory grows and expands.

Keep learning and your brain will keep changing.

There are a number of powerful memory techniques that work the same way that neuroplasticity works. Pegs, Loci Story Links and Links all feed off the way neurons naturally connect with each other.

If you want to maintain a good memory and enhance your ability to learn, you also need to do a few things to help your brain and keep it fit:

Give it a balanced diet of complex carbohydrates, fruit, vegetables and protein.
Give it enough sleep
Exercise it
Stimulate it
Increase your attention span
Be organised

Today we added 2 new products to our webstore.

The ‘Four F’s’ Model balloons in a set of 4 Herrmann colours
Create a powerful and highly interactive presentation using the ‘Four F’s’ Model balloons, Fact, Form, Feel and Free. Each set includes 4 balloons in the four Herrmann colours. Blue and green are printed with a white image and red and yellow with a black image.

The Herrmann Enviro Tote Bag

The Herrmann Tote Bag is made from 80gsm Polypropolene sourced from recycled soft drink bottles. The bag measures 35cm square and has a pocket on either end as well as a front pocket with a sleeve for 2 pens.

The May edition of the New Scientist has a wonderful article called 6909 ways of thinking.
The Whole Brain Model is based around 4 major types or ways of thinking. Another 6905 is mind boggling!

The article is about language and how it effects the way we think. Up until recently, the prevailing though was that all languages followed a number of basic rules and that the brain was born ‘language ready’ to learn what ever language it was surrounded by.

This is now being challenged by linguist Nicholas Evans at the Australian National University in Canberra.

He believes that languages do not share a set of common rules. Rather, the brain learns the unique language it is surrounded by, and in turn is shaped by it. Different languages have different structures and create different connections in the brain.

This is yet another example of the brain’s plasticity.

He goes on to say that the first job of the brain is to build a better brain. This it does using any input it can get, including language. It probably means that speakers of very different languages have very different brains.

6909 different ways of thinking. Wow.

Source: The New Scientist, May 2010, pages 33-35

We have always known that fine wine improves with age.

Now there is hard evidence to show that we do as well. The older we get, the better our thinking becomes.

This is due to ‘bilateralisation’. This means we increasingly use the two sides of our brain to think.

PET scans have shown that compared to younger brains, the middle aged brain not only uses more of itself to solve a problem, but also does better at solving the problem.

The middle aged brain accesses the powerful Frontal Cortex more that the younger brain does. As we go through life, our brains become more and more connected, making it easier for us to access it all. The younger brain appears to rely more on one side of the brain or the other. The middle aged brain uses the lot.

There is a potential downside to this ‘better thinking’. The middle aged brain is not so good at multi-tasking as the younger brain. There is also a lot of evidence to say the younger brain is not much good at it also. Picture the teenager trying to send a text message whilst driving!’

Roberto Cabeza, from Duke University, in his 2002 study “Aging Gracefully’, came up with the term ‘HAROLD’, or Hemisphere Asymmetry Reduction in Older Adults. HAROLD shows that the older we get the more able we are to recruit as much brain power as we need.

The brain seems to spend a lot of its time building a better brain which you can access during middle age.

This could also explain why, for many people, middle age is the most creative time of their lives. As we age, the brain becomes more intertwined, letting us see bigger patterns and have bigger thoughts. Our thinking might get slower but it gets richer and more creative.

As our brains become more densely wired, they become less rigidly bifurcated. We end up being able to access the natural powers of both hemispheres resulting in the neural integration of our thoughts and feelings. We move towards being more Whole Brained.

As one neuroscientist said, “Wisdom is learning how to use the brain in different ways”.

Reference: Secrets of the Grown-Up Brain by Barbara Strauch

“I’m having a mid-life crisis. I am loosing my youth and have nothing to look forward to but the downhill slide to old age. I need to do something to cheer me up. I need a new car (or boat, partner, house etc).”

Sound familiar? I am sure you have heard someone say this sort of thing. There are also many books that explain when and how your crisis will happen and what to do when it does.

Well, this is a bad news / good news story.

The bad news is that you will have to find another excuse for buying that car. There is no such thing as the ‘mid life crisis’.

The good news is that, from a brain perspective, you just keep getting better.

Harvard’s Ronald Kessler, a director of the middle-age survey says, “The data show that middle age is the very best time of life.”

Another study at Perdue University showed that life satisfaction actually peaked at age sixty-five.

One explanation of this is the brain’s plasticity; this is its ability to learn new things and to re-wire itself. This happens all the way through our lives. There is ample evidence showing how the brain reorganises itself and continues to develop.

There are the now famous studies of London taxi drivers and expert violin players and how the areas of the brain associated with spatial reasoning (taxi Drivers) and fingering strings (violin players) grew larger the more they drove and played.

The mid-life crisis is a trick played on you by culture and society with no real reason behind it. By choosing you use your whole brain, to expand your world and create new and exciting mental pathways you can continue to grow and enjoy life – crisis free.

The only downside of all of this is that you will have to find another reason for buying that car. But there again, your brain will be working so well, that will be easy!

Taken from Barbara Strauch’s book, Secrets of a Grown-Up Brain.

I am not sure who said that first but Confucius said it slightly differently. He said, “If you love what you do, you will never work another day in your life.”

The HBDI measures your thinking preference. I think of a preference as some thing I like, something that ‘turns me on’.

The two best places to see preferences at work are at school and at work. At school our preferences have an enormous effect on the subjects we choose. At work they have the same effect on the jobs we like.

The link between thinking preference and subject and job choice is strong.

Remember, the HBDI does not say you can or can’t do a job. It does, however, give big clues as to how you will do a job and how much you might enjoy it.

“To be successful, the first thing to do is fall in love with your work.” Sister Mary Lauretta.