Neuroscience

WHY?

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EY’s ambition is to be the best in audit quality and to win 25% audit market share To achieve both of these objectives you need to meet the ever increasing regulatory expectations and delight clients and targets with your innovative audit offerings. You need to be on top of your game in everything you do.

Now Try this again...

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Professional Skepticism

Fourth Industrial Revolution

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Critical thinking

Creative thinking

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Curiosity

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Attention

Cognitive overload...

• Irritability
• Fuzzy head
• Making mistakes
• Exhaustion

Attention neurons

Abundance

• 9,000
• 40.000
• 80-85% = 150

Our decision making network doesn't prioritize

Information processing...

120 BPS

8 pieces of technology
800 pieces of technology

Attentional filters

Intentional Attention

Attention Switching

Myth of Multi-tasking

Cortisol
Adrenaline
Dopamine
Endogenous opiods

Decisions

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Take action

• Do tough thinking work after a "brain break"
• Be sparing with social media
• Check emails at pre-determined times
• Find isolated spaces to work rather than open plan
• Get others to help you create protected "brain time"
• Practice mindfulness
• Take a break, stretch and move!

Creative People

Xero

Creativity used to...

• Solve a problem
• Sell a proposal effectively
• Come up with better ways of approaching an audit
• Develop new data analytics
• Change the way a client looks at something
• Figure out how to do a new and challenging audit
• Persuade your boss

Creativity is...

• A special gift
• Based on a set of specific cognitive and neurological processes
• The product of ordinary thinking that leads to extraordinary innovations

It's not how smart you are, it's how well connected you are

Schools kill creativity

Creativity killers

Stroop test

Functional fixedness

Creative Process - Graham Wallas

• Preparation
• Incubation
• Illumination
• Verification

Insight favours the prepared brain

Connections

• Elephant, lapse, vivid
• Athletes, web, rabbit
• Sea, home, stomach
• Soap, shoe, tissue
• Desert, ice, spell

Anterior superior temporal gyrus

Does incubation help creativity?

The merits of unconscious thought in creativity

• Importance of the absence of attention during unconscious thought
• Temporarily distracting away attention from the task of idea generation (product names), lead to broader searches less constrained by conventional associations
• Creative thought is a 2-step process: (1) unconscious broad associations (2) emergence of these associations into consciousness.

How to...

• Think far away
• Be positive
• Learn broadly
• Set the scene
• Movement / kinetic energy

Critical Thinking

problem solving, decision making, metacognition, rational thinking, reasoning, knowledge, intelligence, reflective thinking. conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, evaluating, communication, experience, observation

PFC

Problem-Solution

• Clearly identify the problem or task (critical, top down evaluative thinking)
• Prime yourself (read relevant auditing standard / methodology)
• Generate ideas (creative, bottom up generative thinking)
• Evaluate ideas (critical, top down evaluative thinking)
• Present solution (critically or creatively)

Connect to others

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Electromagnetism

H. pylori

Right posterior middle temporal gyrus

Circle of Capability

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Lens: Skills: Behaviours