Brains On Purpose™

Top 10 trends for 2014: This blog keeps you up to date on two

We're trendy here at Brains on Purpose. Two of our Categories (in the column over to your right) are on this year's top-10 list created by JWTIntelligence. They are:

2. DO YOU SPEAK VISUAL?: We’re shifting to a visual vocabulary that relies on photos, emojis, video snippets and other imagery, largely supplanting the need for text. “Visual” is a new lingo that needs to be mastered. [Our category here is "Drawings and Images."]

And . . .

10. MINDFUL LIVING: Consumers are developing a quasi-Zen desire to experience everything in a more present, conscious way. Once the domain of the spiritual set, mindful living is filtering into the mainstream, with more people drawn to the idea of shutting out distractions and focusing on the moment. [Our category is "Mindfulness."]

Watch for more posts on each topic as the year unfolds, including, of course, more about the neuroscience of visual communication and of mindfulness. Keep coming back; doing so will keep you hip and cool.

H/T: Susan Kaiser Greenland.

Map that shows you parts of your brain: Example of visual communication of content

Have some fun clicking around at "Your Brain Map: Strategies for Accelerated Learning" created by Open Colleges in Australia. Although I can't vouch for the accuracy of all the education tips, I do think the presentation mode is delightful and that by using it you can learn about brain anatomy.

Click to read more about the brain map (Digital Journal).

Click to read a past post about the role of learning in conflict resolution. Many other earlier posts on learning here.

And click to see an excellent example of presenting lots of content visually (and effectively, I think).

Visual communication in the law: A chance to hear one of the gurus

Susanne Hoogwater

If you read my blogs, you know that for many reasons (including my knowledge of how the brain receives information), I am a true and enthusiastic advocate of using images to communicate. So I am delighted to tell you about an opportunity to hear one of my colleagues talk about the role of visual communication in the legal world.

On November 5, at 10 Mountain (noon Eastern), lawyer Susanne Hoogwater will give a telepresentation titled "Visual tools to make legal information and agreements more accessible and more user-friendly." Good news: You may get a guest pass to listen for free! This program is one of many terrific presentations offered by Purposeful Planning Institute for its members but you, even if a non-member, will be able to hear this one if you contact Julie Dorosz in advance.

A description of the program is below; although the talk is geared to estate planners and aligned professionals, it will beneficial for anyone wanting to incorporate visual communication in their work in order to be more memorable and clear.

Being a lawyer in the field of estate planning comes with the demanding task of motivating your clients to read and understand their legal documents before signing them, and consult them as their handbook for future reference.  Visual tools can support you to explain critical  information to your clients, and invites them to engage with the fine print that impacts their vision, relationships and finances.

I hope many of you will be on the phone on November 5, getting great information from one of the leaders in the field of visual communication.

Visual vocabulary: Some tips for your pictograph path

We've looked at the brain-friendliness of visual communication in past posts. Today I am creating a very short post just to give you a couple of resources you may find helpful on that pictograph path™—if you decide to follow the visual way.

First, a blog post on building your visual vocabulary: "Sketchnote building blocks + visual vocabulary" (Cheryl Lowry). This post links to another (from Sacha Chua) on building your visual vocabulary, too.

Second, an article that includes some benefits of drawing: "Don't stop doodling, it's good for you" (New Zealand Herald).

Have you been drawing? Doodling? Scribbling? If you get a moment, please let me know about your pictograph path™.

Want to improve visual communication? Here are 10 principles

We have looked at the pictograph path in past posts and considered the benefits of visual communication in conflict resolution (or in almost any situation when you want thoughts and feelings better understood). I recently discovered a terrific resource to help us communicate with pictures. It's a book with the title Picture This: How Pictures Work.

In this delightful book, you will read, and see illustrated, 10 principles of design and picture composition. 

The first four:

• Smooth, flat surfaces, horizontal shapes give us a sense of stability and calm.
• Vertical shapes are more exciting and more active. Vertical shapes rebel against the earth's gravity. They imply energy and a reaching toward heights or the heavens.
• Diagonal shapes are dynamic because they imply motion or tension.
• The upper half of a picture is a place of freedom, happiness, and triumph; objects placed in the top half often feel more spiritual.

In addition to appreciating the practical guidance in the principles, I find them inspiring as metaphors. Makes me want to live in the top half of my picture of life with some vertical shapes living with me.

For the other six principles, and to see illustrations from the book, click here. The principles are also here and many other places on the 'net.

Walking down the pictograph path again: Let pictures carry your message

I have a longstanding goal. I'd like to give a presentation using only visual messages: pictures, images, colors. Why? The brain-friendliness of visual communication is one reason, one about which I have already blogged. I also believe that doing so will cause me to finely hone my message, to seek a new degree of precision.

In my imagination, the discussion among the attendees would have a different quality, too—a depth not provoked by my spoken or written words.

And, as I often have said before, the pictograph path can be a helpful one to walk during conflict, leading us towards solutions.

To move me closer to my goal of visual messages, I have been gathering and absorbing oodles of resources. For example, many of you probably already know of the work of the uniquely wonderful Lynda Barry. Click to follow a class she is offering. On the 'net just today I bumped into Molly Bang, and learned of her book Picture This: How Pictures Work (at Amazon). Click here to see many of her principles of graphic storytelling.

As I have time, I plan to add here at this post links to the resources I am discovering. Any suggestions?

More about the pictograph path: Mediators using images to communicate with clients

In a recent post, I looked at the use of images and pictures in mediation. Today a lawyer who uses images in legal settings pointed out a related article to me in a law review that I had linked to in the past. The article is on the use of images to communicate to clients in family mediations. When I linked to a recent edition of Phoenix Law Review, I had not noticed this article. Thanks to lawyer and artist Susanne Hoogwater for bringing it to my attention!

The article, written by Dr. Colette R. Brunschwig, is titled "Multisensory Law and Therapeutic Jurisprudence: How Family Mediators Can Better Communicate with Their Clients." To read it, go to page 705 in the law review.

Ideographically and pictographically speaking: Using images to solve problems is brain-friendly

Doctors do it. Trial lawyers do it. Kids do it. Why aren't more lawyers doing it? Why don't we see it more often in mediations?

"It" is drawing. Given what we know about the brain, one would expect to see much more drawing in meetings of decisions coaches with their clients. By decision coaches, I mean service professionals of all stripes, including physicians, ministers, dentists, mental health professionals, funeral directors, lawyers, and mediators.

In at least two ways, drawing can improve communication between decision coaches and their clients. First, it can help the coach explain factors that may be important to the client's making a good decision about matters for which he has sought the professional's counsel. Second, it can facilitate the client's explaining to the coach matters critical to the decision being made. Drawing can take understanding between decision coach and client to a new level of clarity.

Drawing also brings another bonus to decision making. Words are not always the most direct, efficient, and productive vehicle for accessing good ideas and sharp insights in the mind and brain.The fastest path to creativity often may be through drawing. (I've blogged about this before and explained why I frequently have attendees at my seminars draw the concepts we are discussing.) If the decision coach

Become a Quick Draw: Let images guide you to new understanding

In every program I present, I advocate the use of images in addition to words to facilitate communication. Last weekend at the 19th Annual Nothwest Dispute Resolution Conference, that advocacy was taken to whole new level because I was fortunate to have Nancy White graphically record my presentation. Take a look at her masterpiece above (click to enlarge). It is obvious why she is one of the world's top gurus of the processes of graphic recording and graphic facilitation!

Coincidentally, today Globe and Mail published a fine article on using images and the visual components of thinking. From "For polished presentations, think visually":

Visual thinking is an approach that uses art to develop critical thinking, communication and visual literacy skills. Incorporating sketching and visual note-taking skills for meeting facilitation in real time instead of using PowerPoint presentations is an effective way to solve problems, articulate ideas and communicate with clients and team members.

Here are ten things about visual thinking that will help you to facilitate a highly interactive, productive and enjoyable meeting.

Click to read the rest.

To read why the brain likes images, take a look at

• Opening the Mind's Eye: How Images and Language Teach Us How To See
• The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

And here are a couple of past blog posts about the value of images in communication and conflict resolution:

• Images can help you paint a bright resolution to conflict
• Are you involved in half-brained mediations? Let's promote full-brained conflict resolution

Now get out your utensils—chalks, pencils, crayolas, pens, whatever—and draw. Doing so will take you to new places in your brain, new solutions and resolutions, new ways of seeing.

Note (added May 9, 2012): Recent post at idealawg: Another way to incorporate images, pictures, drawings in conflict resolution.

Note (added May 10, 2012): New post here: How do you listen attentively? Well, first you grab a paint brush, a pencil, or a piece of chalk.

Are you involved in half-brained mediations? Let's promote full-brained conflict resolution

Western societies have largely lost the ability to think in images rather than words.-Ian Robertson

Is your conflict resolution process full of words, words, and more words? Then it is probable that large amounts of wisdom, creativity and innovation are absent. Full-brained mediators, and parties, know to use something more than words: Vivid thinking.

The new book Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don't Work by Dan Roam is one of several books in which smart authors tell us that we need more than words to really, truly, deeply understand a problem—and its solutions. From an interview of Roam (Blogging about Business):

"Vivid Thinking" is a mnemonic. Vi-V-id stands for Visual-Verbal-Interdependent thinking. It is a simple idea that says we haven’t really thought through an idea until we have both talked about it and looked at it, and that we can’t really explain an idea until we can both write about it and draw it. Vivid thinking does not accept that an either/or verbal-vs-visual approach ever fully illuminates an idea; on the contrary Vivid Thinking demands that we must exercise both our verbal and visual minds in concert if we really wish to understand an idea. Talk + look; write +draw = Vivid.

Another wonderful book on welcoming both the verbal and the visual is neuroscientist Ian Robertson's Opening the Mind's Eye: How Images and Language Teach Us How To See. (Click to watch a talk by Robertson talking about brain function, and peruse a worth-the-read interview with him about the role of experience in sculpting our brains.)

Verbal and visual are related to our brain hemispheres. Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, says the division of the brain into left and right hemispheres is "something neuroscientists don't like to talk about anymore" because the popularization of it in the latter part of the last century led to theories and statements that were "entirely false." Click to watch a very clever animation in which he talks about what we do and do not know about the divided brain. Here is another video in which he also talks about the divided brain.

It is not that there is no difference between the right and left hemispheres of the brain; it is just that we are arriving at a new level of understanding and sophistication about the differences. Most self-help books of the 20th century are not good sources. I recommend you learn from Robertson and McGilchrist.

Verbal, visual, left brain, right brain. Do you want all of your clients' minds and brains involved, as well as all of yours, when conflict is being addressed? If so, I invite you to explore some of the above resources.

There are many ways to engage the full brain. Two methods are graphic recording (example on iPad) and graphic facilitation. I have been experimenting with the former and will be learning the latter soon. Why? Because we need to use new methods in this new century to take advantage of our new knowledge about the brain.

I owe it to my clients to engage in full-brained mediation. I will be blogging about other methods in the coming months. (Here's one previous post about using images as well as words in mediation, and another.)

It is important to be diligent in evaluating what you hear and read. Remember when we all thought that communication was 55% body language, 38% tonality, and 7% words? Then we wised up to the Meharabian Myth and realized we needed to be more discerning about what he hear from speakers and trainers, and read from self-professed experts.

I suspect that non-verbal communication is about to undergo new rigor of examination; see my post "In Reading Facial Emotion, Context Is Everything" (Clue to why non-verbal-communication dogma is often wrong).

Be careful out there. Myths, urban legends, and falsehoods abound. The truth as we know it thus far is available but we need to be mindful and to engage critical thought in our search. May your mediations be based on the brain, the full brain and nothing but the truth.

Note: I will continue to add resources related to using the whole brain here on this post. Please check back. And let me know if you have any suggested resources. Thank you.

Note (added May 16, 2012): Click to watch "Dr. Iain McGilchrist on The Divided Brain" (Gardiner Museum in Toronto on March 5, 2012).

Why it's brain-friendly to clarify ideas through images

I have before urged you to make images a part of the conflict resolution process. Here's a TED video on why images assist in good communication. From the Web page of this video of Tom Wujec:

Information designer Tom Wujec talks through three areas of the brain that help us understand words, images, feelings, connections. In this short talk from TEDU, he asks: How can we best engage our brains to help us better understand big ideas?

The video is only 6 and 1/2 minutes long. And the presenter is a good speaker. Watching will be a good—and short—break for you.

On another note: Click to see the interview I posted today at idealawg of Sue Smalley, founder of UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center.

Professional Artistry of Mediation: Accessing more of your brain and the knowledge of your body

The people offering this workshop are on the same wavelength as I am, but they may not know how aligned they are with neuroscience. In the past, I have posted about using images to access different parts of the brain and of finding ways to access the body's knowledge, both of which can add much, including creativity, to dispute resolution.

That's why I was delighted to learn of the workshop Professional Artistry of Mediation [pdf] [note from 9/22/12: link no longer works]. It will access the image nuggets in the brain and discover what the body knows, all in service of redefining how mediators see conflict and their roles as resolvers. From the workshop description:

This workshop is designed to challenge and inspire you! The workshop provides an experiential and reflective space for participants to engage in creative processes and conversations to reflect on the artistry of their practice.

Participants will explore in a playful and hands-on way the art of what we do, our identities as mediators, how we think about conflict and its resolution, and where we might like to take our practice in the future.

The workshop will include a range of arts-based activities including improvisation, drawing, storytelling and working with artifacts.

A workshop like that would certainly facilitate the kind of shift I recommended to mediators in my last post, don't you think?

Note (added September 22, 2012): Here are a couple of links related to artistry in mediation:

• "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Artistry, Expertise and Professionalism in Mediation and the Role of Higher Education" (Working Paper)
• The Making of a Mediator: Developing Artistry in Practice

Image credit: ppdigital.