Brain Lessons

Do Project Leaders need to understand the way brains work?  When I read Brain Lessons I was surprised how many of these neuroscience authors  focussed on, or displayed compassion – often self-compassion.  Is compassion a leadership quality?  Ask the Dalai Lama!

Since I’m fond of saying that “you can’t learn Project Leadership from a book”, I’ve copied another comment that focussed on learning below:

Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.
I spend a lot of time in my job learning new things, and I spend a lot of my leisure time learning how to play new pieces on the piano or guitar. What I know about the brain has changed my life by teaching me that with learning, "slow and steady wins the race." A few minutes of practice each day is better than several hours all at once, once a week, because of the neurochemical and neurodynamic processes involved in memory consolidation. I also know that practicing—whether it's a new Bill Evans solo or cracking a multivariate differential equation—is best done every day at the same time.

I was also very interested in this comment, regarding our ability to problems solve:

David Linden, author of The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God.
The brain is not a generic problem-solving machine—rather, evolution has shaped it into a strange edifice that is very proficient in dealing with a particular subset of problems.

—Philip Greenwood

Tags:  Neuroscience, Cognition, Leadership, Dalai+Lama, Compassion, Mind, Brain