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
Advances made in neuroimaging techniques in recent decades have allowed us to ‘take a look inside’ to begin to understand how our brains actually work in practice, rather than just infer from observed behaviour, inherited cultural assumptions or popular psychology.
What is revealed is an extraordinarily complex and beautiful ‘prediction machine’ – developed over hundreds of millions of years of evolution – which is constantly testing and updating its generative model of the world through sensory data. Understanding how and why our brains function the way they do, enables us to ‘hack into’ and leverage their natural processes, which normally run unnoticed, unchallenged and under-utilzed below the surface of our everyday awareness.
The underlying framework of our approach is (broadly) Predictive Processing, which is revolutionising the cognitive sciences and our understanding of brain and mind.
Predictive Processing turns our common-sense understanding of perception on its head. It suggests that perception is primarily a ‘top-down/inside-out’ process where we impose our internal mental models on our understanding of the world, rather than a ‘bottom-up/ outside-in’ experience where we passively receive objective information from 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 as they seek to identify regularity and patterns in the world.
Perhaps even more surprisingly, we have come to understand that perception and action are actually two sides of the same coin, rather than being distinct categories. This provides critical entry points for new ways of thinking about how we interact with the world.
It is absolutely not necessary to have any previous understanding of these issues before working with the Brain Innovation Project.
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 perspective. This is critical since it provides us with a heightened sense of agency and choice, rather than deferring to something immaterial ‘out there’.
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 hear in feedback is ‘surprising’, as things start to make sense in a way which is a mix of being both intuitive and obvious at a certain level, yet entirely different at another.
But here are some other comments:
