We are excited to welcome Practus LLP Partner, Robert Fried, as Helix Opportunity’s new Corporate Counsel. As an international leader in workforce development and inclusive design, Helix Opportunity carefully selected Practus LLP to steward our diverse interests and relationships with some of the world’s most recognized companies. Robert is a U.S. Supreme Court precedent-setting attorney and a proud member of the disability community. He has vast experience with inclusion issues. Robert and Practus LLP bring a formidable strength to the future-facing, forward-moving focus that defines Helix Opportunity.

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It’s critically important for designers to understand mental fatigue, and how many of their best practices, accessibility included, actively contribute to cognitively impairing users. Mental fatigue is a pervasive problem in the 21st century. It causes cognitive impairment and this has been one of the most significant causes of accidents in modern society.

Research demonstrates that mental fatigue induces decline in executive functions such as executive attention, sustained attention, goal-directed attention, alternating attention, divided attention, response inhibition, planning, and novelty processing. In particular, conflict-controlling selective attention (response inhibition) is highly vulnerable to mental fatigue. It also blocks the brains ability to produce cells necessary for learning and remembering.

The impact of interaction between technology and your digital design on users can severely debilitate their well-being. It can be especially devastating on users with disabilities.

Consider this, for instance, a 2003 study of YAHOO’s home page determined that while it was keyboard accessible, navigating the home page could require 270 tabs to access a particular link and it would take 6 min to reach a link at the bottom of the page.

The interaction of assistive devices for users with disabilities has a high propensity of creating mental fatigue through complex maneuvers and cognitive processing load. For instance, accessible design might include rollover menus that reduce visual clutter and are conducive to mouse manipulation. However, but they often require additional manual dexterity and may create excessive loads on the cognitive resources available to users with disabilities.

Mental fatigue can be very damaging. It causes people to feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and make their responsibilities and problems seem impossible to overcome.

Mental exhaustion causes physical as well as emotional symptoms. It can also impact your behavior, which others may notice even before you do. Mental exhaustion can cause you to feel as though you’re in a dark hole and can’t see your way out.

Some emotional effects include:

• Depression
• Anxiety
• Cynicism or Pessimism
• Apathy (feeling of not caring)
• Detachment
• Anger
• Feelings of hopelessness
• Feelings of dread
• Lack of motivation
• Decline in productivity
• Difficulty concentrating
• Physical signs

Physical signs of mental exhaustion may include:

• Headaches
• Upset stomach
• Body aches
• Chronic fatigue
• Changes in appetite
• Insomnia
• Weight gain or weight loss
• Increased illness, such as colds and flu
• Behavioral signs

Mental exhaustion can cause you to behave in ways that are out of character for you.

Behavioral signs may include:

• Poor performance at work
• Social withdrawal or isolation
• Inability to keep personal or work commitments
• Calling in sick to work or school more often

Given the extraordinary amount of time human beings spend interacting with the web, and ICT, in this day and age, your design is having major, potentially catastrophic, consequences on the well-being of society. How is your user experience research, testing, and development, addressing this? This is why we, at Helix Opportunity, focus on neuro-design.

Keywords: Neuroplasticity neuro-design user experience ux design thinking user experience userexperiencedesign

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In short, your design can either enhance the neural connections in the brain, or decrease them. In effect, you may be technically causing brain damage. The human brain continuously reorganizes its neural connections all throughout our adult life, even giving birth to new neurons (stem cells) that can take on any form that our daily environment indicates as necessary. This is neuroplasticity, in the basic sense.

Stress has negative effects on the hippocampus region of the brain that influence its primary functions such as memory and learning. The hippocampus is critical to important types of memory of time and space, and conscious working memory. The hippocampus is the center for memory that is consciously recalled such as facts and specific verbal learning. This is called either declarative or explicit memory. Declarative refers to memory that can be “declared” in words. Explicit is the type of memory that is recalled with effort, what we think of as “a memory”.

Stress causes a decrease in volume in the hippocampus. It causes atrophy of neurons, while also blocking the generation of newly minted neurons for memory. Research reveals that stress even kills healthy brain cells. The hippocampus is one of the regions where stem cells make new neurons every day of our lives (around 700 per day) that incorporate themselves in the circuits related to new memories and remodeling of memory. This process is reduced with stress.

The more often a user has a stressful experience using your digital property, the more atrophy they will experience in this region of the brain. Consider the frequency of use for social media sites/apps facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. and we’re talking major long term damage here.

In the short term, for those less frequently used digital properties, you end up becoming nothing more than just a fleeting memory to your users because the stress you induce every time they encounter you…

Keep this in mind the next time you conduct a usability study. This is why our work, at Helix Opportunity, is driven by neuroscience and social psychology.

Please contact Helix Opportunity if you’re interested in learning more about this exciting field of neuroplasticity, and how you can improve your design of any digital property to increase user cognition, motivation, and focus, reduce stress, and treat a multitude of disorders like depression, OCD PTSD, even addiction.

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The brain has the ability to change at any age, for better or for worse. As you can imagine, this flexibility plays an incredibly important role in our brain development, or decline, and in shaping our distinct personalities, and behaviors.

There are a number of behavioral, environmental, and biochemical factors that affect this process, many of which we have considerable power to influence.

When it comes to neuroplasticity, the brain is a lot like film. When you photograph a picture, of say, a mountain, you’re exposing the film to new information. It reacts to the light, and its makeup changes in order to record the image of that mountain. In the same way, your brain’s makeup changes when it’s exposed to new information, so that it may retain that information.

For example, each time we learn a new dance step, it reflects a change in our physical brains: new “wiring,” or neural pathways, form, that give instructions to our bodies on how to perform the step. Each time we forget someone’s name, it also reflects brain change, “wires” that once connected to the memory degenerate, or even sever. As these examples show, changes in the brain can result in improved skills, like a a new dance step, or a weakening of skills, like a forgotten name.

Neuroplasticity makes it possible for the design of your products, environments, and services to harness the brains constant remodeling.
Direct it in ways that can enhance overall functionality, improve quality of life, and train your customers brain, for any number of reasons that you choose.

Neuroplasticity is the next frontier of design. It truly is mind manipulation. Dr. Michael Merzenich, of UCSF Medical Center, pioneered this revolutionary field by first legitimizing the science, then launching, Posit Science, and Brain HQ. Through Brain HQ Posit Science can actually enhance your brain’s information processing speed, vision, hearing, ability to pay attention, everyday cognition, mood, and sense of self control, and restore lost functioning, from traumatic brain injury.

Those of you that follow my work have probably heard/read, that Helix Opportunity’s Harmony at Work, through Common Sense Design, is derived from this science. What you may not know, is that it evolved out of my participation in Dr. Merzenich’s research and development of Brain HQ.

Understanding neuroplasticity allows you to design products that can treat drug, and alcohol addiction/abuse, depression, PTSD, and a myriad of other medical conditions, or just embed the desire for customers to want to use your products, environments, and services, deep in their brains. To better understand this, I will break it down into a couple examples:

Drug, and alcohol addiction/abuse

Drug, and alcohol abuse/addiction, is a case of maladaptive neuroplasticity. The brains reward system establishes memories of [drug] experiences, which we psychologically interpret as beneficial, because of the pleasure associated with them. Those memories are what influence relapse. Our reward circuits are shaped by these drug experiences, coordinating the brain’s interest in pleasureful rewards that associate with the body’s physiological state. It integrates brain function with our physiological needs.

Chronic exposure to addictive drugs like Cocaine produces a progressive pattern of brain plasticity in reward circuits that can continue to develop well into periods of drug abstinence. This is adaptive plasticity, rewiring of the brain by forming, or strengthening, neural connections, even though they have negative consequences.

For instance, Let’s say that you used cocaine, while you lived at your parents house. You moved away, and sobered up. It’s been 12 months since you last used cocaine. Your parents invite you over for dinner, and suddenly you have the urge to use cocaine, again, and relapse. This is a highly likely scenario to occur because of your brain’s adaptive neuroplasticity. Your brain’s reward system manipulated by your cocaine use caused you to pay particular attention to this environment, and associate it with the pleasureful rewards of your cocaine use.

Returning to that environment stimulates the neuropathways in your brain to seek out that pleasureful reward of cocaine again. In order for neuropathways to form beneficial connections, they must be stimulated by pleasure.

Adaptive neuroplasticity

The brain’s ability to efficiently reorganize allocation of its resources to meet demands and compensate for deficits is uniquely illustrated in research utilizing individuals with different kinds of sensory disabilities. Both blind and deaf individuals often demonstrate superior skills in their remaining senses, as compared with individuals with all senses intact. That is because areas of their brain normally dedicated to the missing sense are recruited for use by their other sensory abilities. The intact, Sensory-specific, areas receive direct inputs from other sensory brain regions. This interconnectivity provides the brain with multiple pre-existing pathways with the potential to redirect neural activity so that lost, or new functions, can be “unmasked” when needed.

Harnessing the power of neuroplasticity is the next frontier of design, with infinite human potential. Only one company on this planet has actually devised a design methodology, and training, to do just that. That company is Helix Opportunity. Feel free to contact Helix to learn more.

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