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Best Practices for Leveraging Neuroscience

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Have you ever hosted a meeting or training session and wanted to get better at engaging your coworkers or team? It all begins with leveraging neuroscience. What is neuroscience exactly? According to Merriam-Webster, neuroscience is a branch (such as neurophysiology) of the life sciences that deals with the anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, or molecular biology of nerves and nervous tissue their relation to behavior and learning. In this article, we’ll look at ways to leverage neuroscience.

According to the North American Mission Board, there are ten ways to leverage neuroscience:

  1. Emotion – The brain more deeply encodes and more easily retrieves learning that has an emotional component.
  2. Lightbulb Learning – Learning Is more deeply embedded when the learning environment and experience fosters “aha” moments.
  3. Environment – The brain more easily recalls information when in the same environment, it learned the information.
  4. Pre-encoding – Memory is enhanced when a general roadmap or metaphor is given before the presented information.
  5. Humor – Humor activates the brain’s dopamine reward system and stimulates memory and motivation.
  6. Application – When we see how the information applies to us, it’s sticks in our memories better.
  7. Novelty – Unconventional communication techniques or presenting familiar information in surprising ways helps the brain retain information better.
  8. Testing – Frequent testing makes the brain work harder and thus enhances later retention; our brains will retain what they work hard to obtain.
  9. Spacing – Providing breaks and leveraging breaks between review sessions increases retention.
  10. Stories – Telling good stories enhances learning.

Which best practice for leveraging neuroscience sticks out to you? Try to integrate at least two or three of these best practices in your next training session. The result may surprise you!