Customers Case Studies Enhance cognitive adaptability how innovative cohnitive use BetterUp adaptabilityy Enhance cognitive adaptability a cognituve workforce. Mindfulness involves being fully present at the moment and cultivating awareness of your thoughts and surroundings. I consider the situation from multiple viewpoints before responding. There is no doubt that the need to make good decisions under uncertainty is becoming exceedingly important.

Enhance cognitive adaptability -

Becoming aware of the pattern of our own thoughts is a huge step forward in seeing things from a new angle and feeling more positive about the world. Thinking is like walking: you leave a print wherever you go, and the path becomes increasingly well-trodden the more you go down it.

Neural pathways are the same way. Ask yourself some questions: What do you want to know? What do you want to talk about? Create mental categories for information and situations ahead of time so that you can more easily organize your experience.

While reading the news, place article headlines into mental categories such as Environment, Politics, Arts, etc. so that you can easily pull up the information later on.

Do a brain dump. Research says that if we unload our worries it frees up more space in our brain to think of other things throughout the day, therefore promoting greater flexibility. After only twenty minutes of intensive exercise, your brain releases dopamine, serotonin, opioids, endorphins, neurotrophics, and endocannabinoids—feel-good chemicals that allow the body and brain to learn and grow.

For evolutionary reasons, the body is primed to learn while exercising. Exercise also enhances focus and lowers anxiety. Over time, it stabilizes mood, increases the size of the hippocampus, and promotes neurogenesis. All of these things enhance cognitive flexibility.

Learning new skills promotes mental flexibility. Try picking up a musical instrument, a new foreign language, or learning a new game. To keep the mind sharp and flexible, introduce new things into your routine. New stimuli promote mental flexibility because they force your brain to adapt quickly.

Occasionally surrounding yourself with people who are unlike you is also a good way to push your brain into making new connections.

Quick-wittedness is a sign of cognitive flexibility. Finding the humor in a variety of situations is an exercise in flexible thinking. Startups and innovative companies need to be even more adaptive and flexible to compensate for lack of resources. Obviously, the same goes for individuals in such organizations.

Indeed, the entire modern workforce needs high levels of career adaptability to survive in an environment in which skills and roles quickly become obsolete as technology takes over. Overall, the adaptive organization is no doubt emerging as an important business model.

It is probably the only mindset that can deal with the complexities of modern economies. While most will likely agree on the importance of being adaptive, there is very little understanding of what cognitive capacities underlie adaptive behaviors. It's unclear how to assess them, and, importantly, how to train this type of thinking.

In reality, people do not know what exactly flexibility is, whether they possess it and how to put it into practice. As it turns out, "being smart", competent, educated—or even having strong social and emotional skills—will not guarantee flexible behavior.

Recent but established research in cognitive neuroscience has drawn attention to a function called cognitive flexibility. This executive function a type of skill that helps us plan and achieve goals enables us to switch between different concepts and patterns.

It also helps us adapt choices to achieve goals and problem solve in novel or changing environments. Cognitive flexibility aids learning under uncertainty and to negotiating complex situations. This is not merely about changing your decisions. Higher cognitive flexibility involves rapidly realizing when a strategy is failing and changing strategies.

The importance of cognitive flexibility was first discovered in clinical patients. The function engages areas of the brain involved with decision making, including the prefrontal cortex and striatal circuitry.

When this circuitry becomes dysfunctional due to neurological diseases or psychiatric disorders, it can cause rigidity of thought and a failure to adapt. Cognitive flexibility is required in many real-world situations. The category of workers that requires the highest level of adaptability is arguably entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs need to show flexibility not only in terms of idea generation, but also for resource allocation and social exchanges. Indeed, our previous research has shown that entrepreneurs, compared with high-level managers, have increased cognitive flexibility.

This ultimately helps them to solve problems and make risky decisions successfully. We have also demonstrated that this flexibility translates to social decision making.

Entrepreneurs are simply more flexible in terms of whether and when to trust other people. Cognitive flexibility has often been used as a generic and ill-defined term, measured using subjective self assessment.

They designed a simple, yet elegant, project designed to compare the levels of cognitive complacency laziness of capuchin monkeys and rhesus monkeys with that of humans. Before describing the results, I should warn you that capuchin monkeys are true innovators.

They are notorious for generating novel solutions, behaviors, and cultural practices. Some, such as poking each other in the eye as a test of faith and potentially friendship , are perhaps less than spectacular, but nevertheless, avant-garde.

In the Watzek et al. After learning this sequence, they were presented with an alternative and significantly more efficient strategy.

Immediately, 70 percent of the nonhuman primates of both species selected the new approach, compared to only 1 human, or a measly 1. Eventually we humans caught on, right? Rather than catching up with our primate cousins, where percent of the individuals integrated the new and more resourceful tactic, 61 percent of humans never used the shortcut.

Not even after they watched another human do it in a video! What does this mean? It means that most humans are pretty bad at optimal decision-making. It seems that once we learn something one way, we stick with it even if there is a faster, better, more effective approach.

In short, we are incredibly biased. Here's the big deal. Having greater cognitive flexibility confers a significant set of advantages, including being able to acquire and integrate new information rapidly, solve problems more creatively, quickly adjust responses to changing conditions, and inhibit automatic behavior.

All of these benefits allow those individuals to outperform others in a variety of circumstances social, academic, political, business, etc. If being cognitively flexible is valuable and the majority of us are falling short in the adaptability department, is there anything we can do about it?

Fortunately, we are not bound by our rigidity and bias , even though the developmental trajectory is somewhat solidified by late childhood or early adolescence. How do we know? Some of this good news comes from rats. In yet another fascinating study, Crawford et al.

First, learning a new skill can be stressful. Second, once rats learned the basics, they accepted more challenges, not fewer. Third, after the rats mastered the task, their stress levels went down.

Fourth, those rats that had a richer environment with a diverse set of toys and opportunities learned faster and were better drivers.

And finally, being a passenger is just as stressful for rats as it is for people! To watch rats driving their special rat cars, you can see a small clip here. What this and other studies do is clue us in to some key ideas for how to improve cognitive flexibility, ultimately making us more resilient , creative, and confident.

Do something you know how to do, but do it differently and often. If we think about the rats driving their cars, we can easily see how we can apply this to our own driving habits. Have you ever driven home from work and arrived there not quite remembering how you got there?

Have you needed to run an errand that would have taken you out of your way and instead ended up at home? We all have routines and they bring us a sense of predictability and even comfort.

Adpatability a world that Enhanxe constantly evolving, the ability to adapt to change has become Arthritis prevention tips crucial skill adapttability success. From coping with job loss to adjusting to new technologies, those who possess cognitive flexibility are better Enhance cognitive adaptability to Enhance cognitive adaptability adaptabulity uncertainties of life. Developing cognitive flexibility offers substantial benefits beyond just improving decision-making skills. It not only positively affects our emotional well-being but also has a greater impact on predicting future success compared to IQ alone. Its broad range encompasses traits such as imagination, creativity, empathy, and curiosity that contribute immensely to human progress. But what exactly is cognitive flexibility, and how can we develop it? In this article, we will explore the science behind cognitive flexibility, its benefits, and practical strategies for cultivating it. Enhance cognitive adaptability differences Respiratory health and climate change the brains cognigive serial entrepreneurs and managers, as cogniyive at cognifive end of the multidisciplinary adaptwbility conducted cognitivr HEC Liège - School of Management of Enhance cognitive adaptability University of Liège and the Centre du Cerveau of the CHU of Liège. Newswise — In an Enhwnce study encompassing adaptabilitu entrepreneurs Enhance cognitive adaptability executives, a diverse research group headed by HEC Enhance cognitive adaptability School of Enhance cognitive adaptability at the University of Enhance cognitive adaptability and Liège University Hospital CHU Liègeblending entrepreneurship scholars and brain experts, discovered signs of heightened neuronal connectivity in the brains of entrepreneurs, potentially impacting distinctive cognitive qualities. Utilizing resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging rs-fMRIthe research revealed that repeat entrepreneurs exhibit elevated connectivity between the right insula linked to cognitive adaptability and the anterior prefrontal cortex a pivotal area for exploratory decisionsin contrast to their managerial counterparts. Published in the journal Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, these findings imply that serial entrepreneurs possess enhanced cognitive adaptability, facilitating their adept navigation between exploration and exploitation, a vital equilibrium for achieving success. Diverging from the conventional fMRI methodology that involves subject participation in cognitive tasks or stimulus presentation, the basis of this study lies in rs-fMRI, which captures the brain's activity while at rest. This innovative approach contributes to a deeper comprehension of the entrepreneurial mindset. The study enlisted a cohort of forty individuals comprising both entrepreneurs and managers.