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In this 2021 kick-off episode, Margie Meacham, Chief Freedom Officer at LearningtoGo, joins us on The Accidental Trainer podcast. We discuss how to get started in AI, the fears around AI and her new book AI in Talent Development.  Resources ,...

Customize Your Learning Programs Using AI With Margie Meacham

Margie Meacham, “The Brain Lady,” is a scholar-practitioner in the field of education and learning and president of LearningToGo. She specializes in practical applications for neuroscience to enhance learning and performance. Meacham’s clients include businesses, schools, and universities. She writes a popular blog for the Association of Talent Development and has published two books, Brain Matters: How to Help Anyone Learn Anything Using Neuroscience and The Genius Button: Using Neuroscience to Bring Out Your Inner Genius.She first became interested in the brain when she went with undiagnosed dyslexia as a child. Although she struggled in the early grades, she eventually taught herself how to overcome the challenge of a slight learning disability and became her high school valedictorian, graduated magna cum laude from Centenary University, and earned her master’s degree in education from Capella University with a 4.0.Meacham started her professional career in high-tech sales, and when she was promoted to director of training, she discovered her passion for teaching and helping people learn. She became one of the first corporate trainers to use video conferencing and e-learning and started her own consulting company from there. Today she consults for many organizations, helping them design learning experiences that will form new neural connections and marry neuroscience theory with practice.“I believe we are on the verge of so many wonderful discoveries about how we learn. Understanding what happens in the brain is making us better leaders, teachers, parents, and employees. We have no limits to what we can accomplish with our wonderful brains— the best survival machines ever built.”—Margie Meacham

Margie Meacham

Here are six technological areas that are trending because of their importance to the L&D profession.

Is Your Strategy Ready for These 6 Tech Trends Shaping L&D?

In this short video, Margie Meacham shares a bit of her personal journey and interest in brain and learning science.

What If You Could Understand What Was Happening in the Brains of Learners?

MJ Hall discusses how ATD Forum Labs are using old school spiral notebooks to capture ideas and insights.

The Spiral Notebook: An Old-School Tool for Capturing Ideas and Gaining Insight

Part 1 of a blog series by Vincent Miholic examines what the research says about learning styles.

Is Appealing to Learning Styles Malpractice?

Neurosciences offers exciting possibilities for the L&D industry, but also some concerns. Margie Meacham reviews some issues we need to consider.

Neuroscience: Intended and Unintended Consequences

 There really is a "Homer Simpson" effect in neuroscience. The phenomenon was given this name in honor of the Fox network character, Homer Simpson. Homer once told Marge, "Every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain." Who knew Homer was such a brilliant neuroscientist?The Homer Simpson Effect means that in order to "make room" for new learning, your brain weeds out prior learning. We specifically tend to forget information that is similar to the new information. While more work needs to be done to fully understand the mechanism, it seems that the frontal cortex is sending a signal that inhibits retrieval of prior learning in order to make it easier to encode and retrieve new information. The older information is still there, but it becomes temporarily harder to access, giving the new information a chance to take hold. Expect Performance Dips This “unlearning to learn” behavior probably helped our ancestors develop increasingly more effective survival strategies, rather than sticking with things we already knew. When you are in the middle of the process, however, it can be just as vexing as it is helpful. If you are teaching people a change to an existing process or a new procedure that is similar to, but also different from a previous one, you need to allow some extra time for learners to integrate prior and new learning. If learners need to go back on the job and use both bodies of knowledge, there may be a temporary drop in the performance of the earlier skill while their brains struggle to integrate and also separate the two. An Example from Essentials of Brain-Based Learning I observed the Homer Simpson Effect firsthand while teaching a recent session of Essentials of Brain-Based Learning for ATD. My audience was comprised of experienced learning professionals. I knew that many of the adult learning techniques these participants already knew would be seen in a new light by the end of our three sessions together, as seen through the lens of neuroscience. However, during the first two weeks of the online workshop, I noticed that most participants tended to question everything they already knew about learning. Their brains were clearing the way for new information to settle in. By our last session they were starting to integrate the new brain-based practices into their existing body of knowledge. Minimizing the Homer Simpson Effect If you are teaching a new skill that has similarities to a previously learned skill, here are a few things to keep in mind:Tell your participants to expect some unlearning to occur. If they are aware of the Homer Simpson Effect, they will be better prepared to select which parts of the old learning will still be useful. Link the new information to previous learning, so participants can more easily locate those suppressed neural pathways to the earlier skill. For example, if you are teaching a new software application that has similarities to an application that your learners already know, comparing and contrasting the two skills can help learners incorporate the new concepts without completely throwing out the old ones. In Essentials of Brain-Based Learning, I was aware that the Homer Simpson effect might apply, so I built in many references to instructional design before we knew how the brain learns. Some of those earlier techniques are still quite relevant, while others need to be replaced by more recent findings. It’s funny how our brains work. Just because I’m aware of certain revelations coming out of neuroscience doesn’t mean that my brain is any smarter. I recently learned how to use Adobe FrameMaker to fulfill a client's request for a technical manual. After working on that project for several weeks, I found myself staring blankly at a blank screen in Microsoft Word, unable to remember where to begin to write a new document. Doh!

Combating “The Homer Simpson Effect”

Approach-Avoidance Conflict and the BrainApproach-avoidance conflict is a term used to describe a major decision that has both appealing and unappealing elements to it. Since most people inherently mistrust salespeople, nearly every major purchase decision falls into this category. How can we feel good about a deal we’ve just made with a perceived devil? Neuroscience suggests that the less we trust the salesperson, the more risky we believe the purchase decision and the less likely we are to act, regardless of the product’s benefits.The Brain on TrustEverything we think or feel is generated in the brain as an electrochemical response to outside stimuli interacting with previous memories. While this statement is an oversimplification, it will work for the purposes of this post. Neuroscientist Paul Zak was one of the first to identify the neurotransmitter oxytocin as an indicator that we are feeling a high degree of trust toward a stranger, as exhibited by heightened levels of oxytocin. Oxytocin and other “messenger molecules” are released in response to internal and external stimuli, flooding specific parts of the brain and triggering specific emotional reactions. Daniel Goleman, expanding on his initial work in emotional intelligence, has discovered that the brains of two people who trust each other have a remarkable symmetry—their brains are so in sync that they exhibit high levels of brain activity in the same parts of the brain at the same time. The same synchronicity has been found in couples dancing and musicians playing duets. Experienced sales professionals may have sensed this syncing of brain waves when things are going extremely well in the sales process.Zak found that the more oxytocin coursing through your brain, the more likely you are to trust people. It stands to reason that if we can stimulate oxytocin in the buyer’s brain, we can overcome the deeply ingrained tendency to distrust a sales representative. Here are a few behaviors that stimulate oxytocin and make us believe that an individual is trustworthy.The Power of TouchBeing touched by another human being stimulates oxytocin and other transmitters and increases the feelings of trust toward that individual. Zak found that hugging, in particular, generates high degrees of trust in both participating brains. Handshaking can also improve the degree of trust between two individuals and make the prospect of striking a deal more likely.Each Purchase Increases the Likeliness of the Next PurchaseWhen we make a purchase, we feel good about it because our brains reward us with oxytocin. This feeling becomes associated with the person, company, and product that has been purchased, making future sales more likely. Each time the customer goes back over the same pathway, the reward response increases in a virtuous cycle, ramping up the trust level and making each sale more likely than the previous one. For this reason, many online marketers promote low-cost entry-level products, knowing that the buyer will continue to move up to higher-cost items as long as the customer experience remains positive.All Decisions Are EmotionalWhile many sales professionals believe that certain types of purchases, such as those made to support a business, are completely logical processes, the truth is that every purchase decision is emotional at first. The “reasons” for the purchase are often concocted by our neocortex—the seat of rational thought—to help us accept a decision that may have originated in the amygdala, the seat of emotional response.Storytelling Builds Trust and ConnectionStories have a profound effect on the brain. Brain imaging studies have shown that when we are immersed in a story, our brains respond as though we are the protagonist of the narrative. Therefore, stories about others buying and using the product can help buyers see themselves making the purchase decision and generate positive emotions about the product and the salesperson.You Can’t Fake TrustworthinessThe results above suggest that we should train sales professionals to touch their prospects more often, start with smaller sales and lead the buyer to increasingly larger purchases over time, and use stories to appeal to the emotions of the buyer. If only it were that simple. Remember, our brains are highly tuned survival machines, and at some point in our evolution it became necessary to detect lies in order to stay alive. Today, our brains are capable of detecting false statements or actions within milliseconds. We may not be able to express the reaction in words, but we know at “a gut level” (really a brain level) that some people are not genuine. Trustworthiness cannot be faked; your brain will give you away every time.ConclusionIf you review the top 20 sales training organizations, you may see a familiar pattern. To me, their content seems to focus on external behaviors that will make salespeople appear more credible. Neuroscience seems to indicate that we should focus instead on teaching sales professionals to be genuine, sincere, and trustworthy—a much bigger challenge with a much greater payoff.

Overcoming the Sales Credibility Gap

August 2015 - TD Magazine

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