Design Work to Energize the Brain
Watch someone deeply engrossed in a good novel, video game, Sudoku math puzzle or a Rubik’s cube. They are happily, even joyfully exerting massive mental effort. They do so without apparent stress because each of the items mentioned delivers more mental energy in the form of novelty, meaning, emotions and associations than it consumes in the form of decision making, cognitive load and self control. These effects work for group activities too as the all-to-addictive smart phone and online virtual worlds have demonstrated. The mental energy we get from technology-mediated but instant and robust social interaction is tremendous. Millions of people are spending more time with their phones and in virtual worlds than any place else!
Organizations are still struggling to figure out how to harness mental energy and design work that release the potential of the Human brain.
The best results recently are crowdsourcing and open innovation. In this case tasks and jobs are thrown open to anyone with an Internet connection and those that get net mental energy from doing them will self select. Efforts to gamify work, or redesign processes to include game-like features that drive up mental energy, are also on the rise. Gamification is a powerful generator of mental energy and will surely impact the nature of work.
If you have any doubts on the importance of understanding the details of mental energy for improving knowledge work check out the post: Vastly Improve Mental Focus with Switching. It reports recent research that suggests maintaining cognitive performance on a task over time is more about spending a few seconds switching to a task that gives us a burst of mental energy or novelty than it is taking a rest break. Deactivating and then reactivating goals rather than decreasing focus actually generates mental energy to help maintain focus.
We are hardwired from our brain chemistry up to our social nature to relentlessly seek mental energy. In the life sciences mental energy is defined as the capacity and motivation to do cognitive work coupled with a subjective feeling of fatigue or vigor. Researchers in cognitive science and human factors have identified a handful of key variables that drive mental energy. Tapping this emerging science to improve organizational performance is what the cognitive design blog is all about.
