Engage Your Brain

OurClub.tech is for professional coaches and those who coach no matter what their title–teacher, manager, parent. This blog discusses how PerfectCoaches helps a person harness the brain’s immense power for habit formation, or what psychologists call operant learning.

You’ve heard it since childhood. Parents, teachers, sport coaches, supervisors, maybe even your friends admonish you: Concentrate! Pay attention! Keep your eye on the ball! But we like to say: ENGAGE YOUR BRAIN!

Perfect coaches helps you master any habit and suggests more than 40 specific habits to choose from. One of the 40 habits–ENGAGE YOUR BRAIN—stands out as the key to success. You practice the habit this way. When you get ready to do something, a quick tap on your skull can remind you it’s time to focus. Engage the full capability of your very own information processing wonder.

Just think about that capability. Your brain weighs just 3 pounds and only uses the power of a 20 watt light bulb. Yet every second of every day your brain sifts through millions of bits of information coming in through your senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. Perception via neural networks then filters and condenses it into meaningful patterns that you can use to get things done. 

I’ve studied the brain beginning with my first job in a neuroscience lab. People ask me if our brain is as powerful as a super computer. My answer? A computer scientist will tell you that the brain’s estimated performance of one exaFLOP (a trillion Floating Point Operations per second) is in the ballpark with high performance computers like the ones used in the labs of the US Department of Energy.  Although this processing speed is impressive,  the brain’s efficiency is awe -inspiring. Supercomputers with comparable processing speeds can weigh nearly 300 tons, take up the floorspace of two tennis courts, and consume as much energy as a small city. 

Plus, as a behavioral scientist, for me there is really no comparison. That is  because the human brain is more than just an information processor. It’s a processor that interacts in real time with a network of sensors and effectors. For the most part, it controls what you sense and what you do all day every day. And that power of the human brain—to help a person operate in a complex physical environment—brings us back to operant learning, habit formation, and the value of PerfectCoaches.

I have the patent for the process built into PerfectCoaches. Like most patents, US patent 10,249,212 is a long document full of diagrams and technical terms. Yet the invention is quite simple. The method begins by analyzing and comparing current behavioral attributes to a predefined goal state, then proceeds to reach the desired goal state by an iterative process of successive approximation. The process is similar to shaping in operant learning where closer and closer approximations of a desired behavior are reinforced, guiding the learner to a target behavior by rewarding small steps along the way. 

What users get is a very patient coach—the Adaptive Motivational Interaction (AMI) software module—that helps the user get closer and closer to their goal via a dialog of questions and answers. The process can work every time so long as the user is self-aware and mindful of the cues and reinforcers at work. Which is to say, the user must engage their brain.

The Artificial intelligence inside PerfectCoaches helps the true human intelligence inside your brain to build good habits, break bad habits, and build a repertoire of productive daily habits for managing money, managing time, leadership, achieving personal excellence, and healthy living. This isn’t about habit tracking or habit tacking or anything of the sort. Habit building starts with one simple admonition: Engage your brain!  

–Dr. Douglas Hines, PhD