To Know is to apply – Roundtable 5 – Brain Leaders And Learners

When was the last time you learned a thing in a way you could apply it to improve your situation?

**The evidence of learning is in its application!**

When we give talks, lecture ideas, tell information or deliver facts, we risk removing adventure from the art and science of learning. Facts are to growth what blueberries are to pie. Both need to be applied, tweaked and tasted in ways that show evidence of their impact. Neither suffice without application.

Let’s say we want to build community where learners remain active and engaged? We want to avoid plucking joy from our learning process or erasing value from visible outcomes.

To achieve these Mita brain-friendly goals, we build our community with brains more in mind. How so?

Fortunately, our brain’s come with working memory tools to apply new facts and insights in ways that extend and add meaning to what we learn.

Working memory is a brain’s thimble-sized capacity to hold new facts as we apply these to solve problems or create products. WM is short for working memory and is a fictitious character with real brain parts.

WM is one of six namungos that illustrate our brain’s capacity to hold a few new facts that can be applied to create improvements and solve complex problems we face. Working memory’s our equipment to learn new skills or try new approaches. It replaces its new few bits when our focus changes.

**Basal ganglia warehouse for ruts or working memory?**

We use working memory each time we boldly step up to learn anything – and we enlarge our working memory’s capacity with more use each time we learn new skills.