Cognitive Design

An outstanding new book, Brain Landscape, argues that the time is ripe to develop paradigms that deeply integrate neuroscientific insights into architectural design practice and create classrooms that impact the cognitive processes of children, hospital rooms that impact the recovery rate of patients and work environments that improve white collar productivity as well as other spaces that favorably impact the brain.

The book is a treasure trove for the cognitive designer. The author, John Eberhard, provides grand vision:

“It seems likely that just as 19th-century physics underlay the development of 20th-century engineering applications, so neuroscience (combined with genetics) will become the basis for new applied science tools in the 21st century. In the next few decades it is likely that the fundamental aspects of neuroscience will become the domain of a new generation of applied social and behavioral scientists, engineers and architects.” 

 As well as a number of well-grounded hypotheses that are specific enough to guide design work:

“A child provided with a space that is appropriately scaled to his or her size will have an adjusted sense of time and space that leads to reduced stress, greater feelings of security, and increased competence.”

The book is a bit pricey but is available at a modest discount as a Kindle edition.

The disciplines of management and leadership have the most to gain from advances in the cognitive and neuro sciences that reveal how people perceive, learn, think, feel and inter-relate.  Especially in the era of knowledge work where emotional quotients are more important than intelligence quotients and  overall cognitive performance is a matter of competitive advantage, leaders must do what they can to understand and support the “workflow between the ears”.

And we have learned a lot about how the mind works but it does not seem to be rewiring our approach to management and leadership.

Why is that?

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The FDA just approved (under the humanitarian device exception) a deep brain stimulation implant to help control treatment-resistive obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). The device is aptly called Reclaim and was developed by Medtronic. According to an FDA press release: 

“The Reclaim system uses a small electrical generator known as a pulse generator to create electrical stimulation that blocks abnormal nerve signals in the brain. This small battery-powered device is implanted near the abdomen or the collar bone and connected to four electrodes implanted in the brain through an insulated electric wire known as the lead. Two device systems may be implanted to stimulate both sides of the brain or one device may be implanted with two lead outputs. ”

Not offered as a cure or even as a substitute for medication it is still a good example of how we are using insights from cognitive science to design new artifacts – in this case a therapy.   Additional applications (e.g. depression) are now in clinical trials.

Leading Organizations are Investing in Developing Sophisticated Models of Employee and Customer Cognition. 

When talking to process improvement experts, organizational designers or IT professionals about cognitive design I emphasize that the starting point is always the “workflow between your ears”.  The idea is to understand how people perceive, remember, think, feel, learn and interact with each other in order to do work. This is not the workflow that happens between departments but it is the invisible workflow that happens between the ears and amongst our heads and employees and customers.

Making an effort to model cognition or the workflow between the ears gives us the insight into how people really think and feel. This in turn supports the redesign of business models, work processes, information systems, management policies, incentives and other aspects of the work system in a way that supports, enhances or even creates employee and customer cognition. This means serivce innovation, higher productivity, fewer errors, less turnover, faster uptake, less burnout and all the other signs of happy and engaged knowledge workers.  

Remaking our processes and organizations (not to mention products and services) for how minds naturally work is a mega innovation opportunity for the 21st century.

So how do we see the workflow between the ears, how can we model cognition? 

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Almost two weeks ago I did a post on harnessing brainpower, a report by 60 Minutes on brain-machine interfaces. Now brain-machine interfaces are on the cover of Scientific American magazine. 

The lead story, Jacking into the Brain, covers the expected ground but does have some interesting speculation about the future including  the possibility of converting text into neural signals for downloading into our brains.

The Discovery Channel’s Prototype This! team used biofeedback and mind control systems to prototype a car that safely slows and even stops  as the driver becomes angry.

If you have 40 minutes watch the full episode of the Mind Controlled Car. It is worth it! Or if you just have a few minutes check out this 3 min video on final testing.

Simple devices that use head phones and goggles to blast your brain with pulsed light and sound in the hopes of shifting your brainwave patterns for positive effects are called by many different names – mind machines, psychowalkmans, audio visual therapy and brain wave entertainment (BWE).

Various devices and protocols have been created to accelerate learning, lower stress, help with depression and headaches and so on.  Clearly fringe activity but do they actually work?

In a just published article, Comprehensive Review of the Psychological Effects of Brainwave Entertainment, Drs. Huang and Charyton offer a guarded yes as an answer.

To quote the authors:

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A new brain imaging technique called diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI) tracks how water molecules move through the nerve fibers of your brain to expose for the first time large-scale pictures of axons (nerve wires).

Check out this video of the neural wiring of the human brain.

Two miltary contracts worth $11M have been awarded to develop binoculars that work directly with the brainwaves of soliders. The idea is that the brain often “sees” things before the mind can recognize them and objects “far a field” might not be recognized as threats in time.  

The goal, as reported by MSNBC is:

“Electrodes on the scalp inside a helmet will record the user’s brain activity as it processes information about high-resolution images produced by wide-angle military binoculars. Those responses will train the binoculars over time to recognize threats.”

A new imaging study of the brain, Mapping the Structural Core of Human Cerebral Cortex, reveals an architecture that connects the distributed nodes and subsystems of the cortex into a centralized activity hub that guides thinking and behavior.

NY Times coverage on the article  provides a nice visualization as a hub “in a region about the size of a palm, centered atop the cortex like a small skullcap.”

This finding, if it holds up, repaints our picture of the brain activity in the Cerebral Cortex to resemble a “hub map of the airport system in the United States.”