Don't drain the main brain

LAUGHING & DEVELOPMENT

ChatGPT is Making You Dumber

A recent MIT study found that people who used ChatGPT to write essays showed the lowest brain activity of any group.

The good news? Nobody misused “their” and “there”.

The bad news? The participants’ writing was labeled soulless.

There brains literally stopped brainstorming.

AI = Convergent Thinking; Humans = Divergent Thinking

Large language models like ChatGPT are built for convergent thinking - finding the “right” answer based on patterns, training data, and rules. Structure. Grammar. Em dashes. The works.

But humans? We’re wired for divergent thinking – generating new ideas, messy ideas, weird ideas. We draw from experience, failure, left turns, and unexpected sparks. That’s where originality lives.

Improv Boosts Idea Output by 37%

One of the best ways to build divergent thinking muscles is through improv. Improv has no “right” answer. Just listening, reacting, and playing to the top of your intelligence.

A different MIT study found the ability to generate many ideas is strongly correlated with being able to come up with the best idea. 

The way they got to these ideas? Improv.

4 Ways To Train Your Brain with Improv

While OpenAI trains its models, you should be training yours. Try these:

1. Book a Laughing & Development Laugh Event for your team at your next offsite

2. Flip the Script at your next project meeting, ask “What’s going right?” instead of “What’s going wrong?” It’s a fire hose of ideas AND a mindset shift

3. Try “Sh*tstorming”: Brainstorm terrible, unhinged ideas you’d never actually use (credit: Peter McGraw)

4. Watch a Bad Movie and then find 15 reasons why it sucked (My wife and I did this after watching The Life List on Netflix. A truly horrible watch, but a delightful loathe.)

Is it hard to come up with ideas? Yes, but that friction is the cognitive tension necessary for the brain to fire and create new neural pathways. Avoid that friction too often and the machines start thinking for us - literally making us dumber. 

WORKPLACE MEME OF THE WEEK

Disclaimer: These are memes submitted by real attendees from Workday Update describing their year. If you relate to them, please take a lunch break (or a Laugh Break).

This meme goes out to those who are working on July 3rd:

TAKE A LAUGH BREAK

Disclaimer: No offense is ever meant—just a laugh I couldn’t keep to myself.

Washington’s Dream came true. Happy 4th of July!