Neuroplasticity

For Everyday Use

You Bring the Subject Expertise. We Bring the Tools and Techniques.

Flexible and Modular

Most of the basic tools, techniques and approaches can be adapted and recombined to whatever the topic, because we use the same brain whatever we are doing.

This flexibility means that skills and knowledge are entirely transferable across domains and subjects, whether you are developing a human rights campaign, undertaking scientific research or seeking to improve the well-being of staff.

By changing your thinking, our tools and techniques enable your evolutionary brain to make new connections and reorganise the way it perceives, processes and integrates information. This neuroplasticity – otherwise known as learning – is at the heart of our ability to change our way of thinking.

We all make changes in the wiring of our brain every day and night throughout our lives, but by being deliberate about this, you open up new options and possibilities.

Our Predictive Brains

Our cutting-edge modern understanding of our brains is as extraordinarily complex and beautiful ‘prediction machines’, developed over hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Our brains develop powerful and all-encompassing models of the world, which they are constantly testing against the sensory data they receive. 

Here, perception is primarily a ‘top-down/inside-out’ process where we impose our internal models onto the outside world, rather than seeing the world ‘as is’, as if through a video camera.

Left to their own devices, our brains’ powerful prior models run unnoticed, unchallenged and under-utilzed below the surface of our everyday awareness. This is fine when our models are effective in a static world, but hopeless when the world is changing rapidly or we wish to change the world. 

Thus, individually and collectively, our prior expectations shape and drive our experiences and expectations in much more fundamental ways than we are aware. This goes far beyond traditional cognitive ‘assumptions and biases’, but is central to how our brains work at all levels and across all time-scales, as they seek to identify regularity and patterns in the world and minimise uncertainty. Our models and expectations can and do literally determine what we perceive and pay attention to.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, we have also come to understand that action and perception are actually two sides of the same coin, with both concerned with testing and updating our model against the world. Or, more accurately, testing the world against our model.

If this sounds overly theoretical or abstract, it really shouldn’t. This has very practical, immediate and concrete applications as to how we understand the world around us and provides critical new entry points for understanding and changing how we and others think and act at all levels and in all circumstances. 

It is absolutely not necessary to have any previous understanding of these issues before working with us.

For a generally accessible overview of the Predictive Brain see, for example, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict And Shape Reality, Andy Clark. For comprehensive treatment see a more in-depth, formal and technical overview, see Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain and Behavior by Thomas Parr and Giovanni Pezzulo. For challenges and open questions see The Philosophy and Science Of Predictive Processing.

Our Approach

Our approach is unique in combining practical tools and techniques and the underlying models and explanations behind them. 

Without the theory, the tools and techniques seem like a series of unrelated ‘magic tricks’, whereas in reality they are located in physical brain-functioning. Indeed, a core message of the approach is that our perceptions, actions, choices and beliefs can be understood from a natural, biological perspective. 

Without the practice, the subject is fascinating and thought-provoking, but challenging to make actionable and practical.

As workshops are tailor-made, the extent of focus on the theory and the practice can vary according to participant needs, interests and time.

WHAT OTHERS SAY

The word we most often here is ‘surprising’. Here are just a few pieces of other feedback.