Novelty Training

Articles, research and tools for the L&D professional. Insights for managing the business of learning.Talent development — especially in these stressful and emotional times — needs to adapt to meet the humanness of leadership. The decades-old go-to of routine, process and familiarity lacks one of the most compelling and relatable aspects of the human experience: weirdness. The reason our talent development industry tries to keep training as non-weird as possible is because strangeness can initially feel uncomfortable, disorganized and just plain awkward. We often see thrusting participants into their discomfort zone too quickly as risky. In psychological and neuroscience research, weirdness is also referred to as “novelty,” or something new and different. Interestingly, the current understanding of memory is that when we experience something novel in a familiar context, we can more easily store that event in our memory. A novel stimulus activates our memory center (the hippocampus) more than a familiar stimulus does. Even better, the emotional processing in our amygdala also impacts this memory formation, particularly if there is a strong emotion about that novelty. In fact, our brains process a lot of sensory information every day. The hippocampus compares incoming sensory information with stored knowledge. If the two differ, it sends a pulse of dopamine to the substantia nigra (SN) and ventral tegmental area (VTA) in the midbrain. From there, nerve fibers extend back to the hippocampus and trigger the release of more dopamine. This process is called the hippocampal-SN/VTA loop. The dopamine release in a “weird” experience also makes us more motivated to discover, process and store these sensory impressions for a longer period of time.