I’ve been on the motivational speaking circuit for over 10 years now. And throughout that period I’ve noticed that the demand for talks that explain how our brains work and how we can get more out of them only increases!

During the first 5 years the demand came mainly from the British mainland. I travelled the length and breadth of the country to speak at schools, science festivals and businesses. But since then I’ve been invited to speak all over central Europe, western Europe and the USA.

Talks in educational institutions used to be primarily aimed at students, helping them to understand how best to get their brains into gear as they prepared for examinations. Yet in more recent times this work has extended into promoting a brain-focused approach to improving well-being at all levels of education. In particular I’ve found it particularly rewarding to help teachers, lecturers and other support staff to understand what they can do, in practical terms, to help students develop greater resilience (i.e. to cope with stress without it spilling over into mental health issues).

Over the first few years, the keynote talks I gave across various industries tended to be focused on increasing productivity at all levels of the business by sharing practical tips (backed by scientific evidence) regarding everything the human brain needs to function at an optimal level. Increasingly these brain optimisation tips (or BOPs) are just used at the beginning and end of each talk, with the main, middle segment focused on a more specialist subject matter developed for the particular audience in question.

While the neuroscience of decision making and science of creativity have been two firm favourites for a decade, clients have increasingly been requesting talks on bespoke subject matters. For example, last year the National Trust asked me to do a talk about unconscious bias and empathy, THRIVE asked me to cover the neuroscience of meditation and run some mindfulness workshops, while Siemens and a couple of other major engineering firms working on huge infrastructure projects asked me to deliver the neuroscience of decision making talk with a specific focus on matters relevant to health and safety.

One utilities company in the north-west of England whose Health and Safety record is very nearly perfect even commissioned me to do some research on strategies that might help them promote better mental health throughout their organisation.

There is a huge amount of insight that neuroscience can provide on a wide variety of topics. It’s always satisfying to find that, in tailoring my talks to the specific needs of a client, I’m constantly stumbling upon new areas of neuroscience and psychology with which I wasn’t previously familiar. No matter what the organisation’s priorities have been in terms of what they want their staff to take away from my talk, a few days of digging around in the neuroscience literature ALWAYS yields some inspiration; shedding an interesting new perspective on virtually any topic.

Another interesting development has been that content from The Science of Sin – a book I wrote in 2018 that looked at modern neuroscience and psychological studies relevant to the concept of the seven deadly sins – has proven to be very useful in talks focused on improving well-being. Warner Brothers asked me to do a talk as a part of their well-being week and my whistle-stop tour of why our brains make us do the things we know we shouldn’t, stimulated a fantastic debate that extended well beyond the 10 mins of Q&A. It seems that everyone struggles to control one temptation or other (humans always have) and grasping the role of psychological pain in bringing out our worst behaviours was deemed as illuminating as understanding the techniques that can help to successfully reduce it in order to improve our self-discipline was deemed useful!

Here’s a list of some of the most popular, “classic” talks that I’m asked to return to again and again.

Talks For Business: Neuroscience of Decision Making

In the last few of years I’ve been working more and more with senior management teams across Europe to help them understand insights from neuroscience that are relevant to their specific business needs. For example, I helped one of Europe’s “Big Four” auditors win a highly lucrative new business contract by sharing with them my Neuroscience of Decision Making talk in the context of reverse engineering the pitch process in light of the flaws in how the human brain evaluates information when making important choices. By exploiting a large corpus of knowledge generated over the past decade or so from neuroeconomic investigations the realities of how risk, uncertainty and benefit are evaluated in the human brain can be explored in order to concoct strategies that improve the likelihood of developing a successful pitch.

Talks for Business: Neuroscience of Creativity

Since the first outing of my Neuroscience of Creativity talk in 2013 it has evolved into a half-day workshop experience. I’ve been rolling this Innovation Workshop out over the course of 2015 with various members of the Senior Leadership Team at one of the world’s biggest broadcasters by sharing with them everything that science has to offer in terms of techniques that work and those that sound good but ultimately don’t. By assisting them to create an environment that genuinely promotes innovative thinking right at the very top of the organisation and convincing them of the worth of approaches in an evidence-based fashion, the idea is to reduce resistance to some of the seemingly unorthodox strategies in order that they might be allowed to permeate freely throughout the rest of the company.

Sort Your Brain Out

Sadly many people proclaim that their busy lives simply leave no time to read books. Adrian Webster and I have turned our best-selling book Sort Your Brain Out into a live event. Since our first booking late last year we have been enjoying a steady increase in demand for our motivational speaking duet over the past few months and very much hope that this trend continues in the years to come. We are both represented by Gordon Poole Agency and our speaking agent James Poole is always on hand to discuss booking enquiries.

Talks for Schools

Over the years I’ve been invited to speak at many schools across the UK. The aim is usually to engage young learners, usually in the build up to their big exams, with an upbeat neuroscience narrative that brings to life what exactly is going on inside their brains as they learn. Once students grasp that all their efforts are leading directly to huge changes in the wiring of their brains, how memory works and adaptations that brains undertake to support new skills acquisition, motivation levels invariably rise.

I give them insights into straight-forward techniques to get brains working better: whether memorising information more thoroughly, managing exam stress more effectively and simply encouraging them to see school as the only viable way (currently) of sculpting young brains in preparation for dealing with whatever adult life might throw at them.

If you’d like me to do a talk for you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

High neuroplasticity means kids seem to absorb new information like a sponge

Neuroplasticity – the ability of the brain to adapt to the specific demands of the environments in which a person spends their waking hours. It occurs via reinforcement of connections between some brain cells (neurons) and weakening those between others. Neuroplasticity is at an all time high during childhood. This is primarily why kids seem to be able to absorb information like a sponge and pick up new skills so effortlessly.

Children’s brains are in a special, highly-adaptive state, enabling them to pick up new abilities very easily and develop a large repertoire of them very rapidly in preparation for adult life. That’s not to say that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks – it’s just that older brains have to put in more time and effort to pick up new skills. As with all things, the more you do something the easier it becomes. It may sound odd but, in a manner of speaking, you need to learn to learn, and then it comes easy. Older people tend to not bother trying to learn as intensively as during childhood, so when they do try, as they are out of the habit of learning, it all seems much harder. The trick is to never stop learning. Get back in the habit of learning, as you were naturally inclined to be during childhood, and learning becomes much easier, because your brain goes back into the “learning mode” i.e. your brain’s neuroplasticity increases.

The more a specific mental function is practiced, whether performing coordinated body movements, reading, engaging in conversation, experimenting with imagination, music, gadgets, whatever, the quicker, more accurately and more easily it can be performed the next time round. From day-to-day these improvements are usually not very noticable. But across a timeframe of weeks or months these tiny, incremental progressions add up into great leaps forward.

Practice means more brain connections and better mental function

Any particular mental function involves a different set of brain areas that must communicate with each other via rapid fire electrical messages. Connections between brain areas that regularly work together to perform a specific mental function are strengthened, whilst others that are rarely used are eventually chopped away. That is one of the most surprising findings about brain development. You would think that the more you learn the more brain cells are created and the brain gets larger. In actual fact the complete opposite is true. Over the course of adolescence, as the ability to write, calculate, communicate, use tools, acquire knowledge and many other skills improve, a whopping great 33% of the brain’s neurons are trimmed away. And that’s a fact. Adolescence is all about pruning away brain cells that aren’t providing a useful function in order to free up precious resources and make way for extra connections to be made between brain cells that ARE often used.

The grey matter (crinkly outer layer) contains synapses that connect neurons together

The upshot is that the more complex, rich and varied a person’s experiences over the course of their childhood, the more complex, rich and varied the connections between its brain cells; ultimately translating into a broader repertoire of capabilities. The importance of a parent’s influence on the development of a child’s brain cannot be over-emphasised. Parents either do or do not provide a stimulating environment in which to stretch and challenge their child’s brain. They may or may not efficiently guide, nurture and encourage the development of skills, new experiences and abilities. This does not have to incur expense. Encouraging a young brain to explore and engage with their environment, to communicate openly and to feel free to ask as many questions as they want is key to enabling a brain to develop.

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The first signs of the grasping reflex are evident in the womb at 10 weeks after conception (towards the end of the 1st trimester)

In the womb, brain development occurs at a startling pace. Seven weeks after conception the nervous system is sufficiently developed for the foetus to translate detection of gentle brushing of the nose and lips into a reflexive movement of its head away from the stimulus. Just ten weeks into gestation, i.e. towards the end of the first trimester, the first coordinated finger movements that constitute the grasp reflex are already kicking into action in response to stroking of the palm.

At birth, all our different senses are somewhat intermingled, only differentiating out into distinct, separate senses through experience. Infants learn to distinguish sights from sounds, smells, tastes and touch by interacting with the environment. Synaesthesia – where stimulation of one sense results in perceptions in another (e.g. coloured sound) – is thought to result from incomplete separation of the senses.

At birth a baby’s brain is developed enough to respond to different tastes, but their visual brains have to learn how to see from scratch

Babies are not born with the ability to perceive the outside world as adults do. Right from birth a baby will pull different faces in response to salt, sour, bitter and salty tastes, yet most of the other senses are enormously underdeveloped. The senses must be honed interactively with the environment during early life. The more varied the experiences the more sophisticated their sensory perceptions will become, as will their ability to make sense of events encountered in the outside world, and ultimately the manner in which they engage with their environment.

When a baby opens its eyes for the first time a critical period begins in which the neuronal wiring of the visual brain is gradually moulded to make sense of all that light. A newborn baby’s visual acuity is 1/30 that of an adult – it sees outlines but no detail. At 7 days old, babies show a preference for curved over straight lines, but cannot make out a face until the fourth week.

Babies can hear what’s going on in the outside world from within the womb during the 3rd trimester

Hearing, however, is a different matter. Sounds from the outside world can reach a baby’s ear whilst still in the womb allowing the auditory sense to be honed whilst still inside the womb. The theme tune to the Australian soap opera “Neighbours” was actually instrumental in revealing that babies can begin to hear and recognise specific sounds during the third trimester of pregnancy! An observant mother noticed that her foetus’s behaviour consistently changed as soon as the vocals kicked in every weekday.

At 3 weeks of age, babies smile in response to the sound of their mother’s voice, whilst not until 6 weeks do they smile in response to the sight of a friendly human face.

The skin is the human body’s largest organ. It contains many types of touch receptors, each cleverly designed to create various different sensations. Merkel cells, for instance, are sensitive to soft, delicate caresses. These are particularly abundant in the lips, tongue and fingertips, enabling extraction of texture, size and shape information.

Infants have a tendancy to explore objects with their mouths first and fingertips later

Two months after birth, infant brains see objects as targets to be looked at or reached for (they usually don’t successfully hit the target until 4 months), whilst they respond to humans socially – with smiles, vocalisation and, of critical importance, efforts to imitate their actions.

In early infancy the visual brain is developed enough to define the edges of an object, providing the motor system with a target for the hand to reach for. At 2 months an infant typically uses one hand to investigate the object, usually bringing it to the mouth. By 4 months the infant can use two hands, one to hold it and the other to extract shape and texture information.

By the age of 6 months if the parent shakes an object, the infant will tend to shake it too. If the parent bangs an object on the table, the infant will tend to copy this. Thus even at this young age the example set by the parent or caregiver is vital for the successful acquisition of skills.

The more effectively an infant can coordinate their limbs to move around and manipulate objects the better they can explore the world to figure out how things work

Development of an infant’s senses accelerates when it has acquired the ability to crawl around and explore the world by touch. Various institutions provide parents with a place to go where their infants and children can engage with and explore a rich variety of stimuli in a safe environment. Most of us will have been taken to play school, crèche or just the playground as kids, overtly to keep us occupied and tire us out, but implicitly so that we could explore a range of exciting sensory stimulations and ultimately learn to use and develop our senses and ability to make sense of “how the world works”. Such offerings have become gradually more sophisticated up until the point where institutions like The Little Gym provide not only the setting, but also trained guidance to parents and children alike that bears in mind the developmental milestones that kids should pass through at different life stages.

The Little Gym uses knowledge of how infants and children learn to hone brain areas involved in sensory perception and movement coordination using activities tailored to the needs of each age group that help them to hit their developmental milestones

Activities at The Little Gym are constructed for each age group in light of current knowldege gleaned from advances in developmental neuroscience and conducted in a non-competitive manner to ensure that children’s confidence in using their bodies is incrementally boosted after every session. I’ve visited The Little Gym in Chiswick, London and was very impressed to see how much thought had gone into tailoring activities to match the specific developmental level of each age group. Apparently they have no trouble convincing parents of the benefits of The Little Gym approach once they have got them to attend a session. When new parents compare their own children’s movements and sensory awareness to kids who’ve been attending The Little Gym for even just a few months, the advantages of having trainers directing the “play” activities according to a sound knowledge of child developmental trajectories are often abundantly obvious. One reason it is really good for kids to hit their developmental milestones as soon as they are able is that it creates a “can do” attitude that fosters positive engagement with the environment that gives them self-belief. And if you can instil a real sense of self-belief in a child then this will really help to shepherd themselves through the intellectual, social and emotional turmoil that they will almost inevitably encounter during adolescence.

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