THE Enlightenment Lecture - Regent's School, Pattaya

Terry Wilcox, the founder of the Theory of Human Excellence (THE), presented during the Enlightenment series of lectures to selected students at The Regent's School, Pattaya Campus. This lecture provided a basic introduction to the human brain. The main focus of the lectures is 'enhancing learning skills' that could boost an individuals performance and improve their ability to complete every day tasks.
 

The lecture covered topics such as brain plasticity and how this allows the brain to constantly change. How, through regular exercise, good food, adequate sleep and systematic thought, the brain can be developed. The students used plasticine to model the brain, reinforcing their memory of a constantly changing and growing mind. Also covered during the lecture were demonstrations of how the body's sensory inputs are combined with memories to form a picture of the real world and how this can be altered or tricked by illusions. To help understand the way the brain rewards itself, volunteer students performed practical experiments to help demonstrate both the individual and social human reward mechanism. This topic helped students to understand how motivation works and how to help each other succeed when in teams.

The lecture also covered how mirror neurons make humans follow other people's behaviour patterns like laughing or yawning, plus several accelerated learning techniques to help the students remember content. The final elements of the lecture covered how to raise performance levels when completing any task by using positive self-talk and visualisation techniques. Many practical experiments or alternative learning methods were incorporated to ensure the lecture was unlike their normal learning environment. An example of this is that all the PowerPoint slides had virtually no words and contained only relevant pictures or images. this helped the students to remember that humans actually don't think in words - but pictures. This also greatly aided their comprehension of the subject matter.

Feedback from the students was extremely positive. They found the content both interesting and useful. The general opinion was that the knowledge provided should allow them to improve how they learn, improve how they remember and help them achieve a higher level of performance. In fact, the lecture was so well received that Terry has been requested to conduct the same lecture at the earliest opportunity for the reminder of the student body.

For more information on the Theory of Excellence go to www.theoryofexcellence.org or if you are interested in having a lecture on the theory then please contact terrywilcox@theoryofexcellence.org.

Terry Wilcox 
Theory of Human Excellence

Neuroscience brings Direct Mail back to life!

Neuroscience continues to prove the 'marketing experts' wrong and also confirm for many of us that we never really understood how the brain works.

Recent neuro-research has proven that direct mail is not dead and actually has a stronger influence on consumers than digital media. Furthermore, actual real life experiments revealed that direct mail creates a much stronger impression that lasts longer, and delivers a better return on investment and improves a brand's adoption. Whilst postmen in the UK are extremely happy with this revelation, many multi-million dollar brand consultancy companies are a little red faced. They have been 'selling' new marketing strategies based upon - you need to go fully digital; Social 2.0 is the only way; it needs to go viral; digital is much more cost effective, ubiquitous and has the best impact. How wrong they are and it just goes to show that we should continue to validate even our basic concepts against new developments in neuroscience.

 These findings were the result of research done on for the Royal Mail by the Bangor University. People were given physical direct mail along with digital advertisements. What they found through fMRI scans is that direct mail is significantly more multi-sensory than online marketing, as a result of the increased number of senses used by holding something in your hand, rather than just looking at it one a monitor. So, the lets go digital bandwagon just hit a bump and all the advertising consultants will have to take out their old 'direct marketing' slides from the trash bin and build a new presentation based around a mix of digital and tangible items that we can touch, hold and feel. Time for a new set of buzz words and re-vamped strategic pitches, I think!

The Theory of Human Excellence (THE) is based on the very latest neuro-scientific research such as the experiments used above, plus some completely original thought based upon years of investigation and analysis. THE provides a new way to view the way humans think or make decisions, plus it delivers a revolutionary strategy that is used to define and control how organisations operate and improve their business in areas such as marketing, sales or man management. The combination of new research plus original thought are used to deliver human excellence at work, which increases productivity and profit.

Terry Wilcox
Theory of Human Excellence