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Brain Matters Newsletter - Vol. 2, No. 22 - August 5, 2016 
What Color is Your Learning?
What Color is Your Learning_
Close your eyes and think about your favorite shirt or dress. What colors do you see? Close your eyes again and picture your training room or elearning template. What colors are you using? How are you using them? Do you intentionally choose some colors over others because of their effect on the brain, or is the decision made by default to match the other rooms in the office, or the colors in the corporate logo?

In this post you will learn about recent discoveries relating how the brain processes color and how a deliberate and informed use of color can support the learning process.
Read more...
A Permanent State of Mourning
A Permanent State of Mourning

In years past the sight of a flag flying low in honor of the fallen was fairly rare, and prompted questions like "Who died? What happened?" In this terrible and terrifying year, the flag is almost in a permanent state of mourning. And so are we.
Featured Infographic - Actually Three This Time

I'm fascinated by Infographics and how they affect the human brain. By selecting your graphics carefully and telling your story in pictures, you make it much easier for the brain to understand, encode, store and retrieve information. I generally feature one infographic in each issue, but this time I have several great examples for you. All of these examples come from the eLearning Infographics site, which compiles the best examples from all over the world and shares them on a weekly basis:

 

Sleep and Learning: While it targets college students, the information shared in this attractive document with a college dorm room theme applies to all of us. The brain needs sleep to heal itself, process new information and solidify new connections.

  Sleep and Learning 


Music and the Brain summarizes how playing a musical instrument (and learning to read music) support a wide range of brain functions and make your whole brain work better.

 

    

 

Content Curation for Education gives you a few tips on how to select content to use in your classes. Curation is a key skill for the modern learning professional and this document will give you a great start or refresher.

 

 

If you'd like to share your own infographic for training or educational purposes, you can submit here.

Buy it now!
What's on Margie's Bookshelf
 The Mentor's Guide
by Lois J. Zachary

Why I like it
Mentoring is a critical component for developing new leaders and unleashing the genius inside your team. This book is considered the number one resource for new and experienced mentors. Don't think this topic applies to you? Think again. If you're not acting in the role of mentor for at least one other person you probably should be. Lois talked about the neuroscience of mentoring in her podcast last year.

See all the books on Margie's Bookshelf! 
Updated Teaching Leaders How to Think eBook
 

Has this ever happened to you? You accidentally publish or distribute a draft version of something and don't discover your mistake until much later. Last week one of my students from my The Neuroscience of Instructional Design workshop told me that the ebook I've been offering on my site had a watermark from an image provider - meaning I hadn't paid for the image! Of course, in the lovely final version sitting in my cloud files, I had the purchased version of the image. How embarrassing! If you've downloaded the ebook Teaching Leaders How to Think prior to August 1, you may have a draft version of the book.

 

If you would like the "official" version, just let us know and we'll send it right out to you. Please accept my apologies for the mistake. I hope you found the content valuable, even if the images looked a little shady.
Upcoming Events
Don't Miss Essentials of Brain-Based Learning, Starting August 11

There are already 25 folks registered for my next Essentials of Brain-Based Learning online workshop.

I'm honored to be partnering with ATD to bring these evidence-based best practices to a wider audience. When you understand how the brain works, you will find it easier to develop highly effective training that yields business results. Get a solid overview of the practical applications of neuroscience to the talent development profession, identify how you can apply brain-based design and delivery best practices to your learning programs, and receive a comprehensive toolkit to use on-the-job.

Visit the ATD site for full details.

 

Register here!

In order to build a smarter organization you need to start with smarter brains. The pace of change today demands that your team become nimble, ready to respond to new threats and capitalize on new opportunities with utmost speed and mental agility. However, the human brain evolved over centuries to keep us alive, so it is still responding to our current work environment as though we are hunting for food - and trying to avoid being hunted - on a daily basis. Within this framework we can train the brain to learn new skills, process information in new ways and develop a mindset that is open to new possibilities. We have only recently begun to understand the inner workings of the brain, thanks to neuroscience. Sadly, most of what is written on the subject is either too theoretical to be practical or so over-hyped as to be meaningless.

In this workshop, you will learn how to leverage the survival imperative to boost employee engagement, enhance performance and accelerate learning by speaking to the brain in its own language. You will come away with specific actions you can take right away to make your organization "smarter" - in ways that will get you ready for the challenges ahead. The tools and templates provided in the workshop will give you a head start to mapping out the transformation of your team into a smarter, continuously learning organization, one brain at a time.
 

Please join me at the Arizona Women's History Alliance Conference on October 7 in Tempe, Arizona. The theme of this year's conference is Working Women, honoring Arizona women in history who worked inside and outside of the home. My keynote address, Neuroscience and History - What your brain does to your memories, explores how our increasing understanding of the brain is changing the way we look at historical records and accounts. Read more...