Brainhack

When The Marketing Society kindly sent me this book to review I must admit to being less than enthusiastic about reading it. It’s exactly the sort of book I normally avoid: a slim volume of tips and tricks that promises a massive benefit (“to unleash your brain’s full potential”) and piggybacking on a fashion (neuroscience). Plus – it uses the term ‘hack’ which is rapidly becoming the most hackneyed term in business today.

So I ignored it and it sat on my desk for many weeks until the guilt engendered by reminder emails from Michael at The Marketing Society finally overcame me and I opened it to find that it is a really enjoyable read, full of useful advice and actually is rooted in current neuroscience.

Brainhack is divided into five sections: Thinking Smarter, Getting Started, Problem Solving, Idea Generation and Breaking Through and Innovating, each containing nine ‘tips and tricks’. These tips range from ‘Change your Memories’ in the Thinking Smarter section to ‘Run a Brain Marathon’ (a more intelligent version of a ‘brainstorm’) in the Idea Generation Section.  Without exception, the tips are very well-explained in an engaging style and with the ‘minimal viable dose’ of neuroscience or behavioural economics needed to make sure you know the advice has some grounding in research. A good example is Pavitt’s story about Labelling and the importance of language. He shows the link between the names given to hurricanes and the names and initials of those who donate to disaster relief: relief funds for Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita received disproportionately high donations from people whose names begin with K and R respectively.

I’ve already put into practice a number of his tips and found them useful. I particularly like his suggestion to keep a “Surprise” Journal to counter our own decision-making biases. I now keep a section in my journal for surprises – positive or negative. The idea reminded me of Isaac Asimov’s observation that “the most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I've found it!), but 'that's funny’.” That’s what makes us really think.

It was also good to see some of my existing favourites affirmed: taking notes by hand, doing pre-mortems on important projects (I’ve just done three pre-mortems on advertising campaigns to anticipate potential ‘fatal’ problems) and analysing the specific success factors that we can change and improve rather than amorphous factors (for example, “that workshop went well because we prepared x, y and z” rather than “yay! Aren’t we brilliant?”)

So, thanks to The Marketing Society for guilt-tripping me into reading this slim volume and thanks to Neil Pavitt for disrupting my biases about “tips and tricks” books.

Go and buy it. It’s well worth a read!           

Sandra Pickering is Founding Partner of opento.com, specialising in applying data science and neuroscience to helping businesses grow.