Managing Myself: Born to Learn - Recommended - Harvard Business Review

Managing Myself: Born to Learn - Recommended - Harvard Business Review



Harvard Business Review *
Recommended *

Managing Myself: Born to Learn *

11:22 AM Monday March 8, 2010 *by Rasika Welankiwar Comments (3) *

My earliest memories from childhood are of brushing my teeth and of looking up at a cracked ceiling. In the first my dad explains how I can tell if my teeth are clean: I'll hear squeaking, like birds chirping, when I run my finger across the tops of them. In the second I ask my parents why we're moving, and they point to the fractures in the plaster overhead. *

Out of the all the moments in my infancy when I learned something new, these are the only two I recall with any sort of detail, and it's quite possible — perhaps more likely — that they're false memories constructed from photographs and hearsay. *

As babies we gracefully ride wave after wave of new information, unfazed by the sensory surplus and smarter with each glide onto shore. Yet as adults we remember close to nothing of this intense period of learning. What is it about this time in our lives that makes us so good at managing information overload? *

Advances in neuroscience, particularly improvements in brain imaging, have begun to answer this question. *

A recent edition of "In Our Time" on BBC Radio 4 provides a comprehensive look at the latest research in early childhood development. The most telling discovery is that the prefrontal lobe in a baby's brain is underdeveloped, which limits the capacity for internally driven attention and goal-directed behavior. The inability of a baby to ask "How am I going to use this information later?" appears to be why they're able to absorb so much so quickly. *

As Alison Gopnik, the author of The Philosophical Baby, says in an interivew in The Psychologist, "the evolutionary argument is that childhood — our uniquely protracted human period of immaturity and helplessness — is designed to give us a protected space in which we can learn and imagine." *

As we get older, our brains mature to handle the increased demand for execution in addition to exploration. We're able to filter out extraneous facts and piece together only the necessary information for getting a job done. *

Of course, critical thinking skills are essential for navigating the adult world, but I can't help but think our struggle with information overload is directly related to our not being to turn off the fronts of our brains. For me, at least, it's impossible to encounter a new piece of information without wondering how I will use it later. Maybe the key is to not wonder at all. *

The experiments of Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer present an interesting possibility for regressing back to the sponges we all used to be. *

In 1979, she recruited a group of men in their late 70s and 80s and asked them to spend a week living as if they were in 1959, talking about events and surrounding themselves with media and objects appropriate to that time. After seven days, Langer conducted several physiological tests and found that the men improved across the board, from lower blood pressure to better hearing and eyesight. *

Considering these results, I'm curous what leaps we could make in managing information overload if we were able to cure "infantile amnesia" and re-create a time when our minds weren't yet built for execution and we developed the crucial skills for living simply by taking it all in. *

Access Article ***: http://blogs.hbr.org/recommended/2010/03/managing-myself-born-to-learn.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE
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http://dreamlearndobecome.blogspot.com This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.