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I have a keen interest in how the brain works, how if affects our memory, and our ability to achieve peak performance at work.  I recently read an article by David Rock of the NeuroLeadership Institute  that sheds some light on learning.

Studying how people recall information is easy to study in a lab, and recall is the first step to behavioral change. Now there is good research that shows how  recall of ideas correlates to activation of a decoding task  of a brain region called the hippocampus.  Whether we remember something later is linked to how active the hippocampus is while we are learning.

The NeuroLeadership Institute  worked from 2008-2010  with leading memory neuroscientists globally to discover what makes the hippocampus active during learning.  They discovered four critical elements, before we get to the challenge of how to build habits.

1.  Attention has to be high.  Individuals need to be very  focused.  Multi-tasking  dramatically reduces recall.  I have recommended in previous posts the benefits of mindfulness, focusing on one  task at a time.

2.  People need to generate their own maps around new ideas, so effort is key.

3.  Emotions need to be high. We only remember things that we care about.

4.  We grow our memories so spacing out learning is critical. I wonder how much learning is retained in a two day seminar?