Risk & Your Brain: Taking Smart Risks & Making Better Decisions

Be careful when making connections. Because the human brain is always seeking out patterns, people have a propensity for apophenia - seeing connections where there aren't any. Capture the Right Memories In contrast to short-term memory, which lasts for a maximum of one minute, long-term memories are limitless. Memories that include emotional sensations (i.e., we remember how we felt when the event took place) are easier to recover than memories without emotional content. Because emotions, sensations, and thoughts create additional links (a bit like the metadata on a web page used to optimize search-engine results), adding importance to a memory. Start with the Tough Stuff: When asked how to change board meetings for the better, experts advise discussing the toughest issues at the beginning rather than during the "new business" part of the agenda.