How Do I Love Thee: Embodied Thinking

Embodied thinking is when your brain no longer has to make conscious decisions to do an action or feel an emotion.

I chose this embodiment because I was recently inspired by a Youtube video “Controlling vs "Being" Your Video Game Avatar”. It talked about the increased complexity of Avatars in gaming and how based on decision making situations and the level of personalization that the gamer actually feels empathy for their Avatar. This is great for the gaming industry obviously because it really draws in the player and they become attached or addicted and fully invested into the game. When I was purposed this assignment it made me think about how I could apply Avatars to e-learning or training. Often times training deals with choices or decision making that the trainee must deal with later, and it is highly likely that as humans emotion would/could and does influence these choices and decisions. It is fairly common to come across situation based or scenario based e-learning and training. We learn and retain things better when we can relate them to real life situations. As an Avatar we can become more attached to the situation and engage emotion in the training that may help us in applying what we learn in an emotional situation.

It wasn't until I was faced with the task to visually represent this transitional process that I thought about comparing the traditional learning with this new Avatar based learning and how it may be affecting or stimulating the brain differently. I started researching the brain and which lobes are stimulated when learning. The following information is slightly skewed for the training content I provide as well as the common method of delivery, as my learners are not often engaging in math or learning language. One of the big areas in learning is the frontal lobe controlling; problem solving,  memory, judgment and impulse. The temporal lobe; organizing information, has controls in memory retrieval, visual memory and factual memories. With Avatar based learning my theory is that we are stimulating all the same parts of the brain as traditional learning as well as engaging the emotional parts of the brain including the: Amygdala, Lateral Orbitofrontal lobe, and possibly more of the Hippocampus with creates concepts and organizes experiences into them. In the image above you will see Blue areas which indicate the emotional parts of the brain we could be stimulating with Avatar based training. There is a Red area that indicates areas of the brain stimulated by traditional learning. You may notice that there is no Red area and that the majority of the highlighted brain is Purple. This is due to the overlap with the Blue emotional area of Avatar based training.

This affects the way I think about, create and produce training. It seems like if I can engage more of my learners brain that there would be a higher chance of increased retention of the information I am providing them but also the chance of them actually enjoying training.