Teens who have behavioral problems and difficulty making friends, or who are depressed, may be more inclined to use social media in negative and sometimes aggressive ways, or not to use such sites at all.
The teenage brain is an unfinished product," explains David Walsh, psychologist and author of Why Do They Act that Way? A Survival Guide to the Adolescent Brain for You and Your Teen In the teenage years, says Walsh, one of the major circuits that's developing is the prefrontal cortex. 'The circuits that are under construction during the teen years have to do with impulse control, management of aggression, emotional regulation, self regulation a lot of executive functions of the brain," he says.
It's also the reason teenagers are famous for having to pull all-nighters, not thinking through the consequences of downloading porn onto mom's computer, or piercing their tongues. That's because the prefrontal cortex also handles planning, reasoning and social skills, says Jordan Grafman, who heads the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. "It's what makes us human," he says and because it's still developing, "it's very susceptible to trends and changes that happen during the adolescent years."
The amazing infographic below mirrors these findings visually as it reveals Facebook's good and bad impact on high school and college age youth.
All creativity imagines an alternative universe ~ August Turak
Thinking Outside a Less Intact Box
Why is it that creative people tend to break rules? Innovators imagine something that will work better. They don't like being boxed in, but somehow have a glint in their eyes for the adventure of a challenge. Is that where you see yourself?
Intriguingly, creativity may have come into the world by a lie... An early inhabitant on our planet imagined a fake water hole and made it seem realistic to a competing tribe so that competitors picked up stakes and moved to settle in that locale. "All creativity imagines an alternative universe," Turak finds. "A universe that does not yet exist, and in this sense every creative act is 'untruthful.'"
Consider the mad artist...is there a link between highly creative people and mental illness? After all, Vincent Van Gogh and Sylvia Plath, represent a popular perception that creativity and madness go hand in hand. Some scientists recently found that "divergent thinking, or the ability to think outside the box, involves the brain's dopamine communication system." A Swedish research team, who investigated the dopamine connection further, discovered that "people who had lower levels of dopamine receptor activity in the thalamus also had higher scores on tests of divergent thinking--for instance, finding many solutions to a problem." They think outside a less intact box, since previous works shows that people with schizophrenia also have lower dopamine receptor activity in the thalamus.
So what exactly does this have to do with work? Everything. Here're examples of divergent thinking that break norms...
1. Great guerrilla marketing "means developing a sixth sense for knowing when and how to creatively cut corners," August Turak notes. "It requires a sort of impish instinct for breaking rules. But it also means successfully walking that invisible line between creativity and unethical chicanery."
"Every great guerrilla marketer is a bit of a scamp; a person who is constantly evaluating the rules that make up conventional thinking looking for the ones just screaming to be broken. If the bowling ball is the implacable enemy of the egg, guerrilla marketing is the implacable enemy of all the assumptions that pass for business as usual."
2. From Mentor to Mindguide "Both experts and upstarts claim to see unlimited potential in shared wisdom, Dr. Ellen Weber points out. "Yet seasoned mentors advise clever cronies to operate much like themselves, in spite of rapidly changing horizons."
"Few would disagree – it’s time to shift tutoring approaches to reflect more balanced and reciprocal coaching. Guidance based on mutual brainpower potential, and experience from differences, rather than on entitlement, age or seniority."
3. Conversation as a "non-zero sum" game The world is fast changing from the 500-year tradition of individualism since it is not working in today's world. Individualism leads to a zero-sum game which polarizes positions. Collaborative conversations take people in a more productive direction that benefits humankind. "One player's gain does not translate into the other's loss, Melinda Blau concludes. Such conversation helps us to think differently and see new creative possibilities.
4. Experimentation - a part of every employee's work In order to develop a culture of experimentation, H. James Wilson and Kevin Desouza suggest that "organizations should provide employees with a multitude of opportunities to question, observe, and engage in new experiences." Some key strategies are:
a. Increase managerial attention. Managers can encourage employees to experiment with their ideas, but even go so far as requiring experimentation when ideas are being developed and proposed.
b. Develop employees' skills on basics of conducting experiments.
c. Use experimentation in spite of the fact it'ss a messy and untidy process. Experiments usually don't lead to fruitful results.
d. Start presentation series for researchers and practitioners. Sharing extends insights. Both researchers and practitioners seek quality outcomes to present to wider community.
5. Fail HarderThough failure goes against the grain, Jorge Barba reminds us that massive failure advances the creative process. "Success is a lousy teacher compared with failure," Mohawn Sawnney of the Kellogg School of Business finds. "We learn a lot from failure, because failure makes us more receptive to new ideas and failure is easier to diagnose than success." Sawhney suggests that companies should document, celebrate and reward failure by focusing on Famous Mistakes.
Ad house Wieden+Kennedy created a mural to display such a divergent approach.
6. Best leaders are great followers Nearly everyone sees him or herself as a leader. But where are the followers? Michael Hyatt asks. On the flip side, history’s worst leaders never learned to follow. As a result, they became tyrants, making the lives of their own followers miserable, Hyatt contends. He sees unassuming qualities in great followers: clarity of role; obedience with the ability to follow orders; servants willing to do the job joyfully; humility that shines light on other leaders; and, loyalty in public with private influence.
Ignore people who have solved the exact problem you face,
Hire "slow learners" (of organizational code),
Seek out ways to avoid, distract, and bore customers.
"Rules which fight against the normal corporate norms," Lifehacker's Dave Drager concludes, "have been proven to foster creativity within organizations."
8. Power of Play In a quest to "escape the tyranny of technique," Kate Arms-Roberts discovered InterPlay, an integrated system encompassing all the parts of your life--"a sanctuary for those who seek to be spontaneous, affectionate, open to truth, playful and real," according to leader and guest blogger, Kate Arms-Roberts. InterPlay's foundations build on "improvisational practices using song, story, silence, dance and community and a set of principles that can be applied to any moment in life.to help break the rules." Consider Ann's experience...
Storytelling forms of InterPlay loosen me up. When I struggle to make the words tell my story, Babbling in a Made-up Language releases me from the pressure of precision. When I am running over with ideas, I Could Talk About is a form that gets the ideas out without requiring me to do anything with them; I just have to list them. If my body is stiff or my words are stilted, I can shake things up by telling Big Body Stories that involve movement or dance as well as words.
How might improvisational play launch new creativity in your work?
9. Gaming changes disliked routines If you take the Tube to work in London, travel can be fun rather than bearable with Chromaroma. Here's how it works:
Chromaroma will import the user's Tube, bus and bike journey history, awarding points for each trip. For each user, Chromaroma tracks statistics on the number of swipes, achievements, “missions,” “collections,” places, identities, modes of transport, seasonal highlights and passengers encountered as the user travels around the city, along with the number of stations “captured,” records set and overall rank. By watching their own travel details, users can investigate new ways to travel and new destinations; "multipliers" and bonus points are available by working with a team, building up connections with fellow passengers, and discovering “mysteries” attached to a particular location. Beyond competition and conquest, Chromaroma's gameplay “opens up the beauty in the city's transport flows and reveals to its most persistent players some of the mysteries of travel, and even the strange characters travelling through the tunnels in the centre of the system, who may hold the secrets to your city.”
Gaming is used successfully for call center motivation as employees create teams and vie to win trips by most successful calls. Who would guess gaming can be motivating rather than distracting!
10. Solutions do not necessarily address problems Luke Williams tells the story of how Jonah Straw and friends discussion turned to "disruptive business ideas." One of Jonah's friends asked, "how crazy would it be if some company started selling socks that didn't match? Jonah's friends thought it was a terrible idea. It was soon forgotten by everyone, but Jonah, who couldn't let go of it. It led Jonah to launch Little Miss Matched.
"Most people in business are trained to focus only on problems: things that don’t work and need fixing," Williams finds. He says, "It’s more effective to start by identifying something in your business or industry that’s not necessarily a problem, and then go about methodically breaking it down." To do so try the following steps:
~ What do you want to disrupt? Define the situation you want to challenge. Define it in a sentence.
~ What are the business cliches? Identify assumptions that influence the way insiders or outsiders thing about your situation such as "hackneyed beliefs that govern the way people think about and do business in a particular space...We don’t consciously think about these things because 'that’s the way they’ve always been.'"
~ What are your disruptive hypotheses? Poke the status quo by generating several disruptive hypotheses to fill in the answer to, "I wonder what would happen if we ________." Think about opposites as you do this.
~ What can you invert? Red Bull was developed by Coca-Cola as an expensive soda, whereas their others were inexpensive. It may cost double the price of other colas, but it sure will give you a shot of energy when you need it.
~ What can you deny? In the case of Zipcar the company did not need to see the customer or complete paperwork. And, it started renting by the hour. consumers liked the process since they no longer needed to wait in line, fill out papers, listen to pressure to upgrade or add all kinds of insurance. Customers simply apply for membership and they can reserve vehicles online.
Try focusing on something that you take for granted at your business and use Luke Williams' steps to see what hatches.
Let's face it, people who live disruptive thinking, may not be not so crazy after all, considering all the innovations that emerge.
Imagine the brain,
that shiny mound of being,
that mouse-gray parliament of cells,
that dream factory,
that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone,
that huddle of neurons calling all the plays,
that little everywhere,
that fickle pleasuredome,
that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag.
During a state conference, when I began working with Ellen Weber, someone asked a question that I perceived totally "put down" brain research. Ever experience that?
My defense quickly emerged. I explained findings that defended why Mita brainpowered strategies work. Since this was my first time to receive critique during a presentation, I did not realize the more I defended, the more my critic chimed up to prove the opposite.
Though one woman in an audience of fifty people, she was able to divert the attention of all, as we were ten minutes into the program. But once launching this defense, Ellen soon diverted everyone's attention by asking a question that roused curiosity. We were back on track. As a result I began to reflect and change my approaches to critique.
This was an early and necessary lesson as I began the Mita work to facilitate change of long established methodologies by innovating effective solutions with the brain in mind. If you are an innovator, you soon learn how to deal with making mistakes related to critique.
"We don't want people to tell us something negative," Karen Wright declares, "unless we ask for it and are ready to hear it. And defensiveness is a natural first response. If you're on the receiving end, take a deep breath." Our strong reactions to negative feedback connect tightly to the way our brains work.
Interestingly, the human brain processes positive and negative data in different circuits. And, negative tracks are hypersensitive compared to positive ones, according to John Cacioppo, neuroscientist at University of Chicago. And, bullying happens, but in today's world where it may threaten your standing, "it is far easier to use feedback," Scott Young at Lifehacker advises, "instead of automatically assuming it is a personal attack." No wonder my initial reaction was to defend, since I sacrificed to help Ellen get Mita Leadership launched well. In my mind, the woman's words were a "put-down" to all I stood for.
Learning to orchestrate well!
The trick is to learn strategies to effectively deal with initial critique:
Separate yourself from emotions"Whether you are with someone you love, hate, know little or just met," Bala says, "in the first moments when you realize that you are being criticized you will react the same. Your heart beats faster, skin temperature goes down and you even lose peripheral vision. Because you feel under attack, your first instincts are to focus on that feeling, making it more intense. You will then feel like withdrawing or retaliating. Just remember that both instinctual responses are akin to saying, I don't like your comments therefore I will give you more power. Attempt to do neither as both fight or flight responses leave you with fewer options, not more."
Imagine a triangle of three contenders, the critiquer, yourself and the topic of criticism. In your mind's eye see both yourself and the critiquer staring at the criticism to solve together, rather than using sharp points to take each other out.
Thank the person for the comment This can be disarming. It takes away the need for one person "to be right." It gives you the presence of mind to move ahead.
Ask a two-footed question that leads to exploration of other possibilities. You might start in this way... "What ideas have you used in past to overcome...?" "What has worked for colleagues who faced the issue of...?"
Take it as advice and learn from it. Though it may have seemed negative initially, what can you learn that might assist in improvements?
Ignore it. Take space to consider it later.
Offer to answer later Often, a criticizer will have more important things to do later and will not take the time. If genuine and she wants to help, then ask questions that bring more understanding. If meant to diminish, the critiquer lost an audience and will merely leave.
Let go of it If you linger on negatives, you give your brain a message that you don't have what it takes to accomplish your goals. The more you let that notion fester, the worse it becomes in your mind. Instead, let it go as soon as possible and concentrate on new strategies to overcome future darts that may come your way.
These strategies work. One of the brilliant things about Ellen Weber is that she welcomed me as a collaborator not long after I started working with her, though I saw myself as unready. That meant she was willing to let me make mistakes and grow into that "crown" she saw for me. There's no easy way around it - mistakes teach us more than our successes.
Truth is that I dwelt on my failure at that early conference for several days following. Though Ellen recaptured everyone's focus and made the most of time remaining, I felt horrible. I grew new skills to learn from mistakes and change as a result of the incident.
Ted Coine remarked that he felt cranky the other day, so he grabbed a bite to eat. Somehow that remark about crankiness aroused my curiosity about the topic. What makes us cranky anyway, and what can we do about it? If you ever awaken feeling so cranky that you're ready to take off somebody's head, why not share what you do to overcome it.
Causes of Crankiness:
Self Control:People on diets are known to be irritable and quick to anger, researchers David Gal and Wendy Liu find. They just don't welcome messages that nag them to control their behavior. "People who attempt to practice more self-control are attracted to aggressive art and public policy appeals, according to a recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Sleepless Night: If we pull an all-nighter or experience a sleepless night we might be very cranky and moody next day. The sleep-deprived brain will swing to extremes of euphoria or crankiness, neither of which is good for decision-making. Sleep deprivation shuts down the brain's key planning and decision-making regions, Matthew Walker and his UC, Berkeley research team found.
Shift Work: Though shift workers may get 4-5 hours of sleep a night, they build up an increasing sleep debt. As time progresses, fatigue increases. Trouble is they become more irritable, and then it's easy for anger to flare as they take out frustrations on family, and fellow workers. Check tips from the Healthy Shift Worker and the Mayo Clinic for better sleep
Throughout Good Boss, Bad Boss, Sutton emphasizes the enormous power of social influence. We emulate the people around us, often unconsciously. And as he writes, "emotions are remarkably contagious." Anxiety, cynicism, selfishness, and negativity rub off. So if you are surrounded by cranky jerks, you just might begin to behave that way yourself without realizing it.
ChoresAn overload of mundane or housekeeping chores can be overwhelming and frustrating, leading to irritability and crankiness. This can be especially true if the whole load lands on one person after a work day or on the weekend. Every time we send a message to our brain about how much we hate doing chores, the stronger the aversion to chores becomes.
Genes The reality is that genes can make women cranky, though I am wondering if a comparable study was done with men. "Genetic variations that deal with the body's mood management chemistry are linked with anger, aggression and hostility in women," according to a University of Pittsburgh study. "The results counter some common beliefs that women are to blame for their hostility. And genetic tests for anger could help predict a woman's likelihood of other anger-related diseases." Women who had greater tendency toward aggressive and angry behaviors had lower levels of serotonin in their system.
The only way to get past something that leads to crankiness, is to begin to work against it. And, believe it or not, your actions can even change genetic make-up. It will take some focus and work on your part. So here goes...
Antidotes for Crankiness
Find rewarding activities Most people enjoy relaxing, playing a game or listening to music. If you intentionally include activities we enjoy during the day, you are less likely to revert back to moodiness or aggressive responses, even if you are on a diet. Preferred rewards might include something other than food, for that "feel good" sensation. By diverting attention from diet or things you "can't have" focus your thoughts instead on actions you can enjoy.
Pay Back Sleep Debts "Tacking on an extra hour or two of sleep a night is the way to catch up," says Lawrence J. Epstein, medical director of Harvard-affiliated Sleep Health Centers. "For the chronically sleep deprived, take it easy for a few months to get back into a natural sleep pattern."
When banking extra hours, lengthening the hours and intensity of your sleep are critical. Your most refreshing sleep occurs during deep sleep. And when you sleep more hours, you allow your brain to spend more time in this rejuvenating period.
Create a Pleasant Workplace To avoid toxins in a work place find workers who model characteristics you desire to see more of: good listeners, collaborative team player, welcoming to diversity, and caring of others. "Imagine a workplace that builds more on people’s strengths, Dr. Ellen Weber says, "and you’ll be staring down problems that prevent growth." Tap organizational brainpower to energize productivity on the job.
Delegate tasks effectively You can choose to keep on this path or go by a new road map. At work you can avoid "doing it yourself to have it done right," by learning to effectually delegate tasks, according to Gregory P. Smith. Start by determining what you will delegate, clarify the results you want to see, define responsibilities, communicate authority over the delegated task and set a timeline. To prevent problems, plan a series of follow-up meetings. And, to avoid having the whole delegated task dumped back on you, stick to the delegation program.
At home, enlist family help by explaining how you feel. Create a list of chores that need to be done and have the family sign up for the jobs and offer plenty of praise and thanks for jobs well done, followed up by a reward system.
Do the opposite The more you work in an opposite direction to problems and stress, the more you will rewire your brain for the opposite and build new habits that work in your favor. Here are some starters:
If you wing your days, what if you used daily targets to organize time effectively?
Rather than vehemently expressing your thoughts, what if you stepped back and replied with honesty, yet very respecting of the other person? Serotonin, the chemical hormone for well being is emitted through respectful tone. Dangerous levels of cortisol come with poor tone.
Instead of putting challenges aside, what if you were to team with others to solve them?
Before letting metamessages roll out of your mouth, what if you plan to be welcoming, grateful, and encouraging of others?
To find an alternative to busyness, what if you schedule some activities you enjoy, while you cut down on others?
Rather than sitting too much, what if you begin to exercise in ways you enjoy? Exercise keeps you mentally alert and physically fit.
Choices are yours. Create a "what if" solution to overcome your problem with stressors.
Rewire beliefs and actions We can actually rewire our brain by choosing new beliefs and actions, according to Dr. Bruce H. Lipton, even if we were born with genes that tend toward anger, hostility and aggression. "The new biology reveals that we ‘control’ our genome rather than being controlled by it," Lipton finds. Because of the brain's great capacity for plasticity, we can rewire by practicing activities that bring more serotonin to our lives to experience the calm, and contentment we desire.
Where to from here? The last phase of the MITA's five phases is to reflect so you can adjust what's not working well and change it. Find out what works best as you "play" with several of these to overcome a cranky habit. The brain leaps to novelty, so why not be free to change-up what you do as you work to overcome crankiness?
