Supply Chain Hack – Get to Know Your Brain
Could the human brain be augmented in the future to the benefit of supply chain? Find out on Day 2 of Career Boot Camp 2019!
Professor Moran Cerf is our guest on Day Two of Career Boot Camp 2019. Sign up here to listen to his podcast now.
Do you sometimes wish you could upgrade your professional performance to the next level by simply inserting a micro-chip into your brain with the supply chain skills you need?
Professor Cerf started out in the depths of the cyber world as a hacker, spending 15 years cracking the secrets of computing’s black box. His career took a different course when Francis Crick, of DNA discovery fame, gave him some career advice. Moran recalls that his mentor encouraged him to move away from focussing on computers and “apply his expertise to the most complex black box in the world,” the human brain.
We’ve all heard of the concept of ‘biohacking’, where people make small, incremental changes to their diets and/or lifestyles, resulting in changes to health and wellbeing. At one end, this can be as simple as reducing your sugar or caffeine consumption. At the other, perhaps more extreme, end it can involve the use of technology, gadgets or implants designed to ‘hack’ your biology to improve yourself.
Moran is fascinated about the way the brain solves problems, imagines the future and even composes music. He thinks we may never fully understand the processes inside our heads but he’s excited about the ways that machine learning can mimic the brain and potentially augment it.
Consider how this could be used to improve the day-to-day lives of billions of people. Could the future hold a time when we have a microchip inserted to augment our brain to become a Human 2.0? Could this be applied to help our brains do the analytical things we need to do in supply chain?
Playing to your Cerebral Strengths
One piece of Moran’s research, in partnership with Red Bull, sought to identify why some people perform better than others. How do some people manage to carry on while others give up? The research team “wanted to see whether we could tap into the part of the brain that regulates performance.”
And it turned out that it was possible to identify the conditions when performance started to dip. By monitoring the reaction in the brain in the seconds before a person gave up, the research team could send trigger to give a performance boost. The brain would then react to increase performance and improve motivation to carry on with a task. Moran’s team’s findings were clear – “There is always the potential to do more and do it better.”
Moran advises Boot Camp participants to think of the brain as a muscle whose performance you can improve. “The key,” he tells us, “is to play to your brain’s strengths and carry out tasks at times and condition.”
Five Steps to Improve Your Self-Control Muscle
How can we get into the neuro-science gym and practice the professor’s spin class for our brain? He has five steps we can take to improve our brain performance:
- Identify the key activities you do in your role and keep a diary to capture data about the times of the day when you carry out these activities
- Review your performance each day – did you do these activities well, were there any factors that influenced your performance?
- Identify the times of the day and conditions when your performance in each activity has been the best.
- Align your schedule so that you do these activities at the time of day that works best for your brain
Why not kick-start your training today by running through these steps, starting your very own diary and seeing if you get even more than you thought possible from your brain?
And what better way to start than by listening to the Professor himself on our Career Boot Camp 2019 podcast series!
