Cognitive Design

Imagine being able to design an experience that is so powerful it transforms  someone with a deep fear of spiders into someone that could touch a tarantula.  Now imagine this designed experience is only 3 hours long and creates lasting effects on the brain regions associated with fear that can be detected with a brain scan 6 months later!

That is exactly what researchers at Northwestern University achieved in a study of 12 adults with lifelong debilitating spider phobias.   Participants went through a single  3-hour session of exposure therapy as described below.

“During the therapy, participants were taught about tarantulas and learned their catastrophic thoughts about them were not true. “They thought the tarantula might be capable of jumping out of the cage and on to them,” Hauner said. “Some thought the tarantula was capable of planning something evil to purposefully hurt them. I would teach them the tarantula is fragile and more interested in trying to hide herself. “

They gradually learned to approach the tarantula in slow steps until they were able to touch the outside of the terrarium. Then they touched the tarantula with a paintbrush, a glove and eventually pet it with their bare hands or held it.

“They would see how soft it was and that its movements were very predictable and controllable,” Hauner said. “Most tarantulas aren’t aggressive, they just have a bad reputation.”

The cognitive and behavioral features of this experience design are clear. The question for innovators is will they work to produce rapid, deep and lasting behavior change in other contexts?

More generally, is exposure therapy a reusable design pattern for shifting mental models and producing lasting behavior change?

With a mountain of behavior-based health problems, ethical concerns and spending problems that answer is no!

There are lots of demands on our time but even more demands on our mental energy.  Watching, thinking, learning, deciding, stressing and controlling our own emotions, impulses and behavior all take a tremendous amount of mental energy.   As we start to run out of mental energy our cognitive performance and willpower begin to slip.  If our supply of mental energy runs too low our attempts to stick to our goals, resist impulses, manage biases when making decisions, learn deeply and other attempts at conscious self-regulation fail.

Mental energy is a limited resource.

Mental energy appears to be more than biological energy and brain sugar. There are subjective components including a sense of vigor and motivation.  This means our attempt to manage mental energy should include both psychological and biological interventions.  This point is illustrated well in a recent post of the science of willpower blog that look at temptations that actually boost our willpower. The temptations  include psychological tactics such as watching others pursue goals (e.g. reality TV) or a humorous or cute video as well as biological tactics including naps, snacks and caffeine.

From a cognitive design standpoint these are great tactics because they can be integrated easily into daily life, are science-based and avoid the paradox of using willpower to build willpower (we naturally want to do them).

Interestingly, the science behind some of these claims (those focused on glucose) have recently come into question.   For example, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania claim that the  Brain’s Willpower is not Fueled by Glucose.  This might signal a larger role for psychological tactics or even a powerful placebo effect.

Understanding the nature of mental energy and how to manage it through scripted interactions and experience is of central concern to cognitive design. How else can we create effective behavior change, learning and innovation programs? At the very least we want designs that avoid wasting mental energy and in fact seek designs that maximize mental energy on both a biological and psychological basis.

I am interested to hear from readers about what you do to keep your mental batteries charge on a daily basis. What advice do you have for creating, maintaining or otherwise managing mental energy?

Source of Image: Futurity

New psychological research shows that encouraging the use of hand gestures improves spatial visualization.  When trying to mentally manipulate an object,  using hands to “see” the shape and behavior of the object improves our ability to make judgments and learn.

 We have known about this in science education for a while. For example,  in my physics classes I always teach specific hand gestures and pencil gestures to use to think clearly about forces, fields and vectors.

This finding has clear implications for teaching in every field (e.g. design) and thinking in the workplace.  Hand gestures are natural and spontaneous but are sometimes discouraged in more formal workplaces.  We often teach people to minimize the use of their hands during presentations. This finding suggest it might be far more effective for both speaker and listener to learn to use topic-specific hand gestures, especially when mental or spatial visualization is required.

Interested to hear from readers that have specific hand gestures they use individually or in groups to stimulate thinking.

Analytics involves using data and math to make decisions and run the organization.  With current technologies, oceans of data and advanced simulation and statical techniques what analytics means for all aspects of business – strategy, marketing, product development, innovation, customer service and real time operations – can be profound. That is one of the key findings in a new report, Analytics: The New Path to Value,  from MIT’s Sloan School of Business and IBM. The study emphasizes that top performer see analytics as a differentiator and they achieve value, not so much by mastering data and technology but by doing good design.

“The adoption barriers organizations face most are related to management and culture rather than being related to data and technology. The leading obstacle to widespread analytics adoption is lack of understanding of how to use analytics to improve the business, according to almost four of 10 respondents. More than one in three cite lack of management bandwidth due to competing priorities. Organizations that use analytics to tackle their biggest challenges are able to overcome seemingly intractable cultural challenges and, at the same time, refine their data and governance approaches.”

Developing the shared mental models needed to crank value from analytics is a cognitive design challenge.  It requires a keen understanding of how managers really think including the cognitive biases involved in decision-making. It also means skill in using visualization, scenarios and other techniques to lower the cognitive load of data complexity.  If we don’t shape the practices of analytics on the basis of how minds really work there is little chance of creating value from it.

When it comes to memorizing new information, learners that take active control of the process do a better job. At least that is the finding from research at the University of Illinois recently reported in Nature Neuroscience.

Subjects were asked to memorize the location of specific objects found at different points in a window on a computer screen.

“The “active” study subjects used a computer mouse to guide the window to view the objects. They could inspect whatever they wanted, however they wanted, in whatever order for however much time they wanted, and they were just told to memorize everything on the screen,” Voss said. The “passive” learners viewed a replay of the window movements recorded in a previous trial by an active subject.”

The active learner significantly outperformed the passive learner. Brain scans revealed that the hippocampus plays a more significant role during active learning and is likely responsible for improved memory performance.

From a cognitive design perspective, having control means increased mental work or effort. The subject makes more decisions and exercises more self direction. There is likely more emotional uncertainty to manage.   Fortunately, this increased mental effort is translated into a better learning outcome.  Less task structure more deeply engages the brain in learning.

This should be no surprise to many educators that already promote active learning. What is interesting though is the specific definition of what constitutes the cognition behind “being active”. In this case control over the  stimulus environment engages the hippocampus.    This likely makes (and I am speculating) memorizing something secondary or incidental to a more natural whole-brain activity.

Deep and lasting learning happens automatically as we engage our brains in problem solving, planning and other activities of daily life. The learning process becomes problematic when we make it our primary focus or de-contextualize it and engage in formal learning in a classroom. Active learning changes our cognitive priorities and gets other brain regions involved and produces better outcomes. As we move to the base of learning pyramid (shown above) we are engaging student’s in “designed experiences” rather than formal learning exercises and retention increases dramatically.

Reading, lectures and other devices of formal learning are still important, especially as they set up the designed experiences of learning or to help debrief them.   If we want to optimize educational processes for how student’s minds actually work we must design and deliver experiences not lessons.

The Psychiatric News recently published an interesting article, Brain Training Maybe the Next Fitness Craze. It has an important message for cognitive designers –  there is a significant and growing market for evidence-based designs that improve the cognitive performance of health people.

“The market for brain-fitness products and interventions amounted to about $265 million in 2008; by 2015, the sales figure is projected at $1 billion to $4 billion, according to William Reichman, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and president and CEO of Baycrest, an academic health center at the university that focuses on aging issues.” 

Although avoiding or minimizing age-related cognitive decline is a keen focus now there is definite demand for brain boosting at all ages.

Consumers of all ages want to boost their cognitive abilities and prevent age-related decline. Schools want to know whether cognitive training can enhance children’s learning ability while controlling attention and behavioral problems. Corporations, sports teams, and the military are interested in the potential of increasing the cognitive performance of their employees.

But what options do designers have?  There is an enormous array of claims and approaches in brain training and the empirical evidence is just starting to emerge.

I’ve started systematic research into this issue in January. I am sharing sources and insights on a new blog, YourNextBrain! I invite you to visit, browse and contribute resources and observations of your own.

YourNextBrain! provides daily tips and tools for enhancing cognitive performance and building a more resilient and longer-lasting brain.

Why a new blog? My current blog, Cognitive Design, is a little over two years old. It has accumulated 435 posts, 165 comments and several thousand regular readers (as far as I can tell).  I get a steady stream of emails with insights, questions and requests which I appreciate very much. The number one request by far is for tips on designing ways to improve cognitive performance and boost brain functions. It seems readers want to know how to design programs to make themselves and others smarter in a broad sense. I cover that a bit under the categories of cognitive training, behavior change and augmented cognition but just scratched the surface.

What can we do to consciously improve our cognitive abilities and brain function? How can we train our minds for peak performance and lifelong fitness just as we train our bodies?

In researching these questions I was surprised by the number of options and the growing body of scientific research around what works.   One very interesting finding was that our concept of cognitive aging — or how the brains of middle agers and older adults work — is undergoing a paradigm shift.  There are distinct areas where cognitive performance improves with age and there may be several stages of neural/cognitive development that have gone unnoticed.

All of this has enormous cognitive design implications so I decided to launch a new blog. It is dedicated to ideas and tools for designing and building YourNextBrain! The  blog’s theme is a bit forward looking but each post will provide information you can use today and will  have a design focus. It will cover the gambit of options from those with hard scientific evidence to the more speculative applications. The Next Brain blog is new, only 38 posts so far but give it a try. I look forward to your comments and invite your participation.

The Cognitive Design Blog will continue as is so please visit regularly and share your ideas and experiences.

How does our ability to remember, think, plan, decide, learn and manage emotions change with age? What methods (exercise, diet, cognitive training, social interaction, stress management) can be used to help minimize cognitive decline?  How do we distinguish normal cognitive aging from a cognitive disease? Pressing questions as Baby Boomers begin to hit 65 in mass.

These questions are being taken up by a new public-private Research Partnership on Cognitive Aging.  Some $28M is already flowing into 17 research projects.

“These grants will make it possible for researchers to further pursue basic research in this area and to devise interventions that could be experimentally tested for their ability to improve cognitive function in older people,” 

The research is basic and still in the formative stages but it should be a great source of insights for cognitive designer. I will watch the progress of the 17 projects and share designable insights as they surface.

In the meantime, if you have insights into how to design for the aging mind please leave a comment and share your experiences with other readers.

SharpBrains is running a virtual summit covering many aspects of cognitive health and performance:

“The SharpBrains Summit features a dream team of over 30 speakers who are leaders in industry and research to discuss emerging research, tools and best practices for cognitive health and performance. This innovative event will expose health and insurance providers, developers, innovators at Fortune 500 companies, investors and researchers, to the opportunities, partnerships, trends, and standards of the rapidly evolving cognitive fitness field.”

Hopefully some readers will participate and share their insights by posting here.  I will collect responses and other notes and blog on the event next week.

It is sometimes claimed that the herb Ginko Biloba can delay the decline of cognitive functioning in adults. PsychCentral reports on recent research that challenges this claim:  “In the largest randomized controlled research trial ever conducted on the herb ginko, new research suggests that older adults who used the herbal supplement Ginkgo biloba for several years did not have a slower rate of cognitive decline compared to adults who received placebo.”

An important finding for those taking an evidence-based approach to the design of cognitive programs for the elderly.