The Optimal Level of Stress

Research found that divergent thinking is linked to playfulness and creativity.

Children who play more tend to display curiosity, persistence, nonconformity, and a willingness to take risks. These are important characteristics for innovative solutions.

• Mind mapping helps your brain work by association. Start in the centre and add notes, connecting branches together.
• Brainstorming. Generate as many ideas as possible.
• Free writing. Focus on the question and write without stopping for a specified time.
• Journaling. It helps to clarify your thinking while producing new ideas.
• Art. Doodling, painting, creating graphs and illustrations will help you think outside the box.
• Role playing. Putting yourself in the shoes of a different character is a good way to practice divergent thinking.

Emotions are not a disposable or unnecessary response, but are signals, giving us vital clues about the state of our mind and body, akin to pain. It is a neglected part of our survival mechanism.

Our natural reaction is to suppress our emotions, but it is increasingly apparent that repression of our emotions, especially the stronger kind, is psychologically and physically harmful to us.

Showing emotion using empathetic and active listening is part of emotional intelligence and is greatly valued as a managerial skill set.

Studies show that empathic leaders enjoy more success and goodwill. Interpersonal communication is greatly enhanced when one is able to read someone's emotions and control one’s emotional reactions.

• Metacognitive knowledge: What you know about yourself and others in terms of thinking and learning processes.
• Metacognitive regulation: The methods you use to control your learning.
• Metacognitive experiences: The thoughts and feelings you have during your learning process.

• Declarative knowledge: the knowledge you have about your learning style and about what the factors that influence you.
• Procedural knowledge: what you know about learning in general - strategies you found or that you have already applied.
• Conditional knowledge: it refers to knowing when and why you should use declarative and procedural knowledge.

• Attention. To learn, we need to be able to focus on some aspects while ignoring or excluding others. For example, reading this paragraph while ignoring the noise around you.
• Memory. Knowing how memory works and how you can make learning more efficient can increase your performance. Science-based techniques include interleaving and chunking.
• Executive control. Being able to plan, to create a sequence of steps, and to retain important information for short periods. While most happens in the prefrontal cortex, lots of research is needed to understand how executive control works.
• Social behaviour. Social Neuroscience is aiming to understand how our biology affects our social behaviours.
• Neurodiversity. Conditions such as ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), dyscalculia (difficulty with arithmetical calculations), and dyslexia impact learning. Neuroeducation aims to understand how these conditions best adapt to the learning environment.

Learning starts in childhood and continues into adulthood. Some learning happens in our spare time, and a lot in the workplace.

Many of the current applications of neuroeducation in the classroom are usable in the workplace. Since $80 billion is spent every year on corporate training in the United States, we need to ensure training interventions are effective. Neuroeducation could provide an answer, ensuring employees understand how the brain thinks, learn, and make decisions.

Boreout results from the sameness, and the monotonous routine of the job, making the worker feel empty, mentally exhausted, sad and demotivated.

Though it is okay to be bored once in a while, the continuous feeling or irritation, cynicism and worthlessness can lead to depression.

Burnout happens when you are overstimulated, and boreout when you are understimulated.

In both cases, the way we are stimulated is wrong and doesn’t result in a sense of purpose.

• Optimism Bias is when we are sure about the success of a certain project or venture and do not take into account the scenarios of failure.
• Temporal Discounting is a cognitive error where we make decisions taking into account the present condition, and not bothering about any future consequences.

Just one ‘Pre-Mortem’ meeting at the beginning of the project can uncover many blind spots, recalibrating the mindset of all the team members.

Anticipating the future also fosters honest and open communication, and quells any fear.

"Progress always involves risks. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first."

NASA identifies any potential risk using the following variables:

1. Condition: A fact-based situation that is causing concern or doubt.
2. Departure: The variation or potential change that the condition will cause.
3. Asset: The project which gets delayed or affected.
4. Consequence: The potential damage or negative impact that the ‘condition’ can have on the ‘Asset’.

The Risk Assessment has to only include facts, and not speculations or assumptions, while ensuring that the risk identification does not introduce new risks.

• In any research, the validity of any concept is the first thing to check.
• One has to stress-test the rationality and see if the right thing is measured, for the right outcome to be divulged.
• Validity helps us evaluate the accuracy and appropriateness of the mental model in a particular situation.

The most important part is to check the consistency of any mental model when the same circumstances are applied repeatedly. Ideally one has to get the same result. This is usually done by:

1. Test-Retest Method: A set of diverse and repeated tests can check the reliability of a mental model.
2. The Inter-Observer Method: This method takes into account data from different observers or administrators to cross-check the validity and reliability of a mental model.

The negative effects of the curse of knowledge can be avoided by:

1. Questioning your assumptions and biases, and seeking alternatives to your beliefs for a broader perspective.
2. Knowing your audience or prospect, accessing their level of knowledge.
3. Asking honest feedback for your creations.
4. Including infographics and visuals and minimizing jargon.

The Feynman Technique is a way to understand or reinforce your level of knowledge by pretending to explain the same to a child.

Explaining without the use of complicated words is a way to learn and retain knowledge that lasts.

In Greek mythology, there were the muses, who provided inspiration for creative ideas.

Now, even if we stopped believing in muses, we still think about the process of producing ideas as something magical, that we can cannot explain or control.

"Idea generation could be thought of as a search for novelty, while its process partner, idea evaluation, might be thought of as an effort to make novel thinking practical, useful or relevant."