How, then, to overcome these factors? Merzenich says the key is keeping up the brain's machinery for learning. "When you're young, almost everything you do is behavior-based learning -- it's an incredibly powerful, plastic period," he says. "What happens that becomes stultifying is you stop learning and you stop the machinery, so it starts dying." Unless you work on it, brain fitness often begins declining at around age 30 for men, a bit later for women. "People mistake being active for continuous learning," Merzenich says. "The machinery is only activated by learning. People think they're leading an interesting life when they haven't learned anything in 20 or 30 years. My suggestion is learn Spanish or the oboe."
Meanwhile, the leaders of a company need "a business strategy for continuous mental rejuvenation and new learning," he says. Posit Science has a "fifth-day strategy," meaning that everyone spends one day a week working in a different discipline. Software engineers try their hand at marketing. Designers get involved in business functions. "Everyone needs a new project instead of always being in a bin," Merzenich says. "A fifth-day strategy doesn't sacrifice your core ability but keeps you rejuvenated. In a company, you have to worry about rejuvenation at every level. So ideally you deliberately construct new challenges. For every individual, you need complex new learning. Innovation comes about when people are enabled to use their full brains and intelligence instead of being put in boxes and controlled."
What happens if you don't work at mental rejuvenation? Merzenich says that people who live to 85 have a 50-50 chance of being senile. While the issue for heart patients is "change or die," the issue for everyone is "change or lose your mind." Mastering the ability to change isn't just a crucial strategy for business. It's a necessity for health. And it's possibly the one thing that's most worth learning.
Alan Deutschman is a Fast Company senior writer based in San Francisco.
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Recent Comments | 28 Total
September 18, 2008 at 4:07pm by Michael Ballard
First rate article. It fits everything I know to be true about change an behaviour.
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Change is a must to survive due to the very fast change that economy is doing now!
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October 27, 2009 at 2:43pm by Christopher Jeschke
This was an impressive article. I think that "Change of Die" applies to many issues, in particular that of drug addiction. If someone is a drug addict, they need to change or they could die.
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Changing the peoples behavior isn't just the biggest challenge in health care. Most important challenge for businesses is trying to compete in a turbulent world.
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November 10, 2009 at 9:52am by Karl Karlos
I'd have illustrated this article's main idea by a very common example without looking for experts' statistics and points of view: as long as the alcoholic hasn't caught a serious disease, he'd continue to drink even though all the doctors of the world would have told him that his health would be in great danger. However, once he is ill, perhaps would he change his way of living.
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December 11, 2009 at 6:28am by David Marsh
"Changing the behavior of people isn't just the biggest challenge in health care. It's the most important challenge for businesses trying to compete in a turbulent world." I love this line, it makes so much sense in the real world. People need to understand this statement.
I believe that one should be ready for change as time & circumstances require us to change, so change is going t happen anyways. It's just that the change is either for a good cause or bad cause. That is upto us.
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