Building a Better Business Using the Lego Serious Play Method

Chapter 7Neuroscience—Understanding the Builder's Mind

Neuroscience is somewhat of a newcomer to the understanding of the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® method. In the early research phase, findings from neuroscience were used mostly on an intuitive level to support the method's development. However, as this branch of science has evolved, with the increasing use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and most recently functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), many medical and research professionals are publishing papers that can help us understand and further strengthen the impact of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY.

Most neuroscientists would go to great lengths to stress that we're still in the early days of applying findings directly in workshops. This should of course be heeded—and it is with that in mind that we dive into the insights that do seem to be emerging from this exciting field. These are findings that support the reflections about constructionism, constructivism, and hand knowledge that we covered in Chapter 6, and we have clustered the insights into sections on attention, memory, and developing insights in this chapter.

Attention

Emotions drive attention, which drives learning, which drives memory. We will return to emotions in the next chapter where we look at the flow theory and go into detail with the emotional aspect in relation to the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY method. However, first we turn our attention to attention.

We can define attention as the ability to focus on particular ...