Breaking down what makes top performers so great, and setting up practice and reflection to stimulate certain neural responses, can help you clone your best talent.

February 21, 2017

by William Seidman

The best talent is almost always deeply engaged and incredibly productive. Wouldnt it be great if learning leaders could clone those people? Well, they can.

There are two parts to being able to clone your people: the ability to reverse engineer the top performers to really understand what makes them extraordinary, and the ability to quickly and efficiently develop others to think and act like those top performers.

Self-discovery allows an organization to quickly and effectively reverse engineer top performers. Self-directed learning, based on advances in neuroscience, enables an organization to quickly develop everyone to be like the best.

We began with a question that can be quite difficult to answer: How do top performers actually become top performers? As with trying to reverse engineer top performers, there was neither good information nor robust methodologies on how to develop lesser performers into top performers.

The closest answer is that experts spend 10,000 hours working to become an expert, with no definition of what that work meant. Ten thousand hours of unfocused learning was hardly going to meet our requirements. Fortunately, starting about 2005, the emerging neuroscience of learning suggested a way to solve this problem.

Neuroscience showed the basic building block of all learning is the rewiring of neurons into new patterns. What causes neurons to rewire? The scientific saying is neurons that fire together wire together. Firing together means a sufficient number and depth of meaningful experiences around a defined set of attitudes and behaviors cause the brain to rewire or learn the new patterns. Once rewired, these patterns are the new unconscious competence.

But what experiences cause the brain to rewire and, most critically, how do you get non-top performers to want to become top performers enough to do the practice required to rewire their neurons? Lets answer the second question first. Here again the breakthrough came from neuroscience. The science shows that certain types of images and actions cause neural changes that drive our attitudes and behaviors. When someone feels they are making a contribution to a greater social good for family, teammates, the organization and/or society, their brain releases endorphins and dopamine called a dopamine squirt which make them feel great and more receptive to new ideas.

Similarly, if a person writes down their greater purpose, the act of writing suppresses portions of the brain associated with fear and resistance to change and stimulates portions of the brain associated with a sense of greater control, also making them more open to new ideas. Finally, if all of this is done with others in some sort of social group, other neurochemicals serotonin and oxytocin are released that cause people to want to promote collaboration and group success.

It is possible to create an effective methodology to rapidly develop non-top performers to become top performers. It would need to include:

Most of these ideas should sound familiar from the protocol for reverse engineering top performers. Top performers are driven by a compelling purpose to achieve a greater social good and work hard to achieve mastery by continuously practicing their skills. The key is to present images from the reverse engineering of the top performers to non-top performers in ways that stimulate the desired neural responses.

The process begins with the top performers description of their purpose. By presenting the top performers purpose to groups of non-top performers and asking them to identify, discuss and write ways they too can contribute to the great purpose, all of the above neural changes occur. The non-top performers want to become top performers because they too can be part of a greater purpose and it feels great. Further, because our brains are very efficient at processing images associated with a greater purpose, an initial powerful motivation can be stimulated in a few minutes and firmly entrenched in about an hour.

Moving to the need to practice, by asking the top performers how they learned to become top performers, learning leaders can identify their most valuable learning experiences. By modifying these high yield experiences so non-top performers can try them in their own environment, repeating this practical application multiple times in rapid succession and then sharing the learning with a social group, the time needed to become a top performer can be reduced to 40 hours or less.

These methodologies are so simple, fast and robust they can be provided using a protocol similar to that used for reverse engineering top performance. We call this protocol, neuroscience-based self-directed learning, and its prompts guide a non-top performer to:

As a result, anyone, anytime, residing anywhere in the world can quickly learn to think and act like the top performers. Essentially, you can clone your best people.

William Seidman is the CEO of Cerebyte Inc., a company focused on creating high-performing organizational cultures, and co-author of The Star Factor. Comment below or email editor@CLOmedia.com.

Tags: neuroscience, self-directed learning, top performers

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EssayThe Neuroscience of Self-directed Learning - Chief Learning Officer

The Ji Lab at Baylor College of Medicine investigates how the neural circuits in the brain encode, consolidate, and retrieve memories using lab rats.

Source: Ji Lab/Baylor College of Medicine

Specific neurons in the hippocampus (called hippocampal place cells) remember when and where your brain experiences a broad range of sensory stimulation and emotions, including fear. Hippocampal place cells also drive subsequent fear-based avoidance behaviors, according to a new rodent study from the Ji Laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine.

The February 2017 study, Hippocampal Awake Replay in Fear Memory Retrieval, was published online ahead of print today inNature Neuroscience. This is the first time neuroscientists have identified specific patterns of electrical activity in the hippocampal place cells of lab rats associated with specific memories. In this case, the memory of afearful experience.

Hippocampal place cellsare activated anytime a human or animal moves within and between locations. These place cells keep track of everywhere your body goes and tag each location with a specific neural code that includes sensory perceptions based on stimuli that evokepleasure,pain, reward, etc.

All animals (including humans) seek pleasure and avoid pain. Therefore, it makes sense that when hippocampal place cells tag a specific location as being associated withphysicalor psychologicalpain, parts of the brain becomehardwired to avoid this location. From an evolutionary standpoint, learning to avoid life-threatening environments is key to any species' survival.

At the beginning of this new experiment, the researchers inserted tiny probes to monitor the electrical activity generated by neurons in the hippocampus. Then, they conditioned a fearful memory by exposing lab rats to mild foot shocks in a specific shock zone as the rats explored a troughlike track. Lastly, the researchers observed neural activity in hippocampal place cells as each lab rat was placed back on the track and began to explore.

The researchers found that specific place cells linked to the 'shock zone' were reactivated anytime a rat got close to the place where foot shocks had been administered. The anticipatory thought of getting a shock appeared to triggeravoidance behaviors that caused the rodents to bypass the shock zoneand avoid crossing the fearful path.

According to the abstract of this study, the fear reactivation of place cells occurred in ripple-associated awake replay of the exact location linked to a cell sequence that had been encoded along the path inthe shock zone.

These findingsreveal a specific hippocampal place-cell pattern underlying inhibitory avoidance behavior. Thisstudy also provides strong evidence for the involvement of awake replay in fear memory retrieval.

In recent years, a few different neuroscientific studies have reported that hippocampal place cells play a central role in storing location data and forming episodic memories. However, exactly how 'place cells' retrieve memories associated with a particular placeand subsequently drive avoidance behaviorshas remained a mystery until now.

In a statement, Daoyun Ji, associate professor of molecular and cellular biology at Baylor College of Medicine,described the recent findingsfrom his lab:

"Our laboratory rats cannot tell us what memory they are recalling at any particular time. To overcome that, we designed an experiment that would allow us to know what was going on in the animal's brain right before a certain event.

Interestingly, from the brain activity we can tell that the animal was 'mentally traveling' from its current location to the shock place. These patterns corresponding to the shock place re-emerged right at the moment when a specific memory is remembered.

We are also interested in determining how the spiking patterns of place neurons in the hippocampus can be used by other parts of the brain, such as those involved in making decisions."

This study from Daoyun Ji's Lab breaks new ground by discovering that milliseconds before a lab rat decides to avoid going back to a place where it previously had a fearful experience, the brain is recalling specific memories associated with the exact physical location where the fearful experience occurred.

Like most people, I have an innate fear of rats. Staring at the enlarged image of the rat below evokes a slight fear-based responseand is probably encoding my hippocampal place cells to the place I'm sitting now as I stare at this image while typing this blog post. Your hippocampal place cells are probably being activated, too. If this image makes you uneasy or sticks in your mind, itwill most likely be linked to when and where you are reading this by yourhippocampal place cells.

Source: Ji Lab/Baylor College of Medicine

Zooming in on this potentially menacing image of a rat from Ji'sLab barreling down a track towards the viewer triggers flashbacks in my mind's eye to the torture chamber "Room 101" from George Orwell's1984.

While being brainwashed by the Thought Police inRoom 101, WinstonSmith (the protagonist in1984),must confront his biggest fear: A wire cage that fits snuggly on a person's head with a trap door that houses two very large (and ravenous) rats eager todevour the cage wearer's face.

Hypothetically, if Winston Smith's hippocampal place cells could be measured in Ji's neuroscience laboratory, Room 101would evoke fearful memories and avoidance behaviors much like the lab rats who steered clear of the 'shock zone' in their habitrail.

The next goal of Ji and his colleagues is to investigate whether the hippocampal spiking patterns they identified are absolutely required to guide (or misguide) humanand animal behavior.

The researchersalso plan to explore what role spiking patterns in the hippocampus might play in diseases that involve memory loss, such as Alzheimer's disease. Stay tuned for more cutting-edge research on hippocampal place cells in the months and years ahead.

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The Neuroscience of Fearful Memories and Avoidance Behaviors ... - Psychology Today (blog)

Publishers own websites couldbe mightier than the almighty news feed when it comes to impact for advertisers, according to newneuroscience research comparing social platforms and premium sites.

Neuro-Insight, a neuro-marketing company, examinedcontent from four major publishersCond Nast, Forbes, Time Inc., and The Atlanticand found that test subjects were 16 percentmore likely to find web postsrelevant or engaging than similar content in social feeds.Tounderstand how readersrelated to different types of content, Neuro-Insight connected 100 people with neuro-mapping technology and showed themvideos inaFacebook newsfeed or a publishers website.

Along with being more personally relevant, publishers websites might be more memorablethey had a 19 percent greater impact on the rational left side of the brain, and an 8 percent greater impact on the emotional right side of the brain, the study found. Memories of video ads were also more detailed on the websites, with 8 in 10performing better than in a social feed.

The results shouldbe welcome news for publishers, which continue to struggleto monetize contenton mobile and social platforms. Some estimates saymajor tech players like Google and Facebook get as much as 85 cents for every new digital dollar spent on advertising.

What weve always understood is that there is strong engagement, said Caryn Klein, Time Inc.s vp of research and insights. But how is that halo to an advertisers message? Thats always been a question. We know there is high engagement, but what were seeing here is that when you go into what the brain is doing, were proving here that there is a lot more resonance of the message from a memory standpoint.

Teads chief marketing officer Rebecca Mahony said the goal was to give publishers a better view of how effective their ads really are.

Time Inc. is increasingly betting on the future of video. The company saw a 150 percent growth in video starts from 2015 to 2016for a total of 4.6 billionaccording to its fourth-quarterearnings.

The study, commissioned by Teads, anonline video advertising firm, featured 15-second ads abouteverythingfrom tech and CPG to fashionand food. Teads chief marketing officer Rebecca Mahony said the goal was to givepublishers a better view of how effective their ads really are. She said in-depth, long-form storiesalso make a reader more invested, which in turn helpsthem recalladsbetter than when theyre passively scrolling.

Certain brands also perform better than others across platforms. For example, health food, coffee and hospitality brands advertising on publishers sites had a big impact onthe detail-oriented left-side of the brain. However, ecommerce and consumer electronics brands resonated withthe right side of the brain. An interesting caveat:hospitality brands and ads for TV programsfaredbest on Facebook.

Advertising can drive a skew, said Matt Engstrom, Teads director of content and insights. It either impacts the detailed left side of the brain more stronglyor the right side of the brain more strongly. And when that sort of imbalance aligns with the reaction of the content on the brain, that makes the advertising more likely to be impactful.

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This Neuroscience Study Says Ads Are More Effective on Publishers' Websites Than Social News Feeds - FishbowlDC (blog)