L&D 2020: Shaping change in learning
Brain & Mind
Unconscious learning
NLP practitioners have joined forces with martial arts experts to produce new models for unconscious learning. For example, most people are familiar with ‘unconsciously’ learning to ride a bike. New techniques help experts guide novices to overcome the normal frustrations of the expert who cannot pass on their learning and the learner who cannot move beyond unconscious incompetence. Unconscious installation1 comes about by accessing patterns of rules and guidelines in a trance-like state.
Unconscious learning is also supported by photoreading2, a technique where the individual passively uses their peripheral vision to access their unconscious mind – as opposed to actively reading from the page. Photoreading is a modern form of speed reading that allows learners to absorb information from various media such as print, web pages and emails on subjects from business to leisure. The technique uses phenomenal speeds to blast information at the learner’s brain as a mental photograph. Learners from technical backgrounds, in particular, say they would be unable to keep up with developments without quickly absorbing the masses of information regularly available.
By 2012, Professor Pierre Balthazard of Arizona State University had mapped the brains of 500 leaders by wiring electrodes to their scalps and recording electrical brain activity3. He had previously discovered that visionary leaders use their brains differently. Now leaders’ brains are routinely mapped to demonstrate their visionary capabilities. Electrodes link them to a computer to stimulate specific areas of the brain responsible for unconscious thought and in this way, a leader is able to unconsciously enhance their visionary capabilities.
Learning design expressly combines well-known conscious learning techniques with newer practices that embody unconscious learning – previously an ill-defined concept, but now grounded in scientific method. Implicit learning4 is better understood and proven learning techniques manage the process to make use of what was previously a random and chance learning outcome.
Even long, careful and conscious deliberation is ineffective because the conscious mind has a surprisingly limited processing capacity. Most people cannot, for example, compare three makes of car differing on 14 dimensions without brain overload. Experiments5 have shown that the more mental effort people put into decisions, the poorer the predictive outcome. Conscious deliberation leads to sound decisions only when a very limited amount of information is involved.
Decision makers have learned not to think so hard about their decisions – to rely instead on the power of their unconscious mind, which has a far greater processing capacity than its conscious counterpart. They prefer to make a complex decision by ‘sleeping on it’ – occupying the conscious mind with an unrelated task mind while their unconscious mind processes the relevant information.
In the past gut feeling, or intuition, was regarded as an undesirable attribute in a leader. Today, executive search companies commonly list ‘instinctive decision making’ as a desirable candidate quality.
1. http://www.transformations.net.nz/trancescript/how-to-be-consciously-unconsciously-skilled.html
2. http://www.photoreading.com/
3. Wall Street Journal Online, September 20, 2007
4. http://www.psychol.ucl.ac.uk/david.shanks/Implicit%20learning%20review%20chapter.pdf
5. HBR breakthrough ideas for 2007
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