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- MEETINGS: WIRED TO CONNECT
- By Andrea Sigler, PhD
- President and CEO, Connected
International Meeting Professionals Association
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- "Get Connected. Join the Connected
international Meeting Professionals Association”, the CIMPA postcard with
the multi-colored linked hands, suggests.
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- "Why?" My 8 - year old granddaughter asks
her perennial question.
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- "Why what, Honey?", I answer her question
with a question.
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- "Why do you want people to get
connected?"
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- "We're wired to connect", says
bestselling science writer Daniel Goleman. Our brains are designed to be
social - and they catch emotions the same way we catch colds.
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- Mark Matousek writes in a recent issue of
AARP Margazine, "Thanks to recent breakthroughs in neuroscience, experts are
able to observe brain activity while we’re in the act of feeling — and their
findings have been astonishing. Once believed to be lumps of lonely gray
matter cogitating between our ears, our brains turn out to be more like
interlooped, Wi-Fi octopi with invisible tentacles slithering in all
directions, at every moment, constantly picking up messages we’re not aware
of and prompting reactions...in ways never before understood".
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- Terrence Sejnowski, a Salk Institute
expert in computational neuroscience is currently collaborating with Scott
Makeig at the Swarz Center for Computational Neuroscience at the University
of California in San Diego to analyze patterns seen in social neurobiology -
studying, for example, what happens in the brains of people as they engage
in conversation.
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- “The brain itself is social—that’s the
most exciting finding,” Goleman explains “One person’s inner state affects
and drives the other person. We’re forming brain-to-brain bridges—a two-way
traffic system—all the time.”
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- That is one good reason why people should
travel and attend meetings and events.
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- Social Intelligence. I am obviously less
interested in the logistics of meetings (there are experts in every facet of
meeting/event planning) than in the interaction of people and the
development of social intelligence. I will venture to say that social
intelligence is better learned in social environments like meetings and
travel than in formal classrooms. We define social intelligence as the human
capacity to understand what’s happening in the world and responding to that
understanding in a personally and socially effective manner.
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- "Social exchange -- also known in biology
as reciprocal altruism or more commonly, tit-for-tat - is an ancient part of
human social life. This mutual provisioning of benefits, each conditional on
the others’ compliance, is rare in the animal kingdom. Some species -
humans, vampire bats, chimpanzees, baboons -- engage in this very useful
form of mutual help, whereas others do not. This is itself telling: Social
exchange cannot be generated by a simple general learning mechanism, such as
classical or operant conditioning. All organisms can be classically and
operantly conditioned, yet few engage in exchange. That strongly suggests
that engaging in social exchange requires specific cognitive machinery,
which some species have and others lack".
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- Social exchange is universal in our
society. It is richly expressed in all human cultures - we exchange gifts,
share food, price our goods, engage in trade and so on. Paleoanthropological
evidence (e.g., hunter-gatherer archaeology) suggests that this form of
cooperation existed in hominids at least 2 million years ago – long before
we heard about Diversity and Multi-Culturalism.
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- We continue to do it - as we travel the
world, forming friendships and learning about other people and ourselves.
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- The other point I want to make are people
who travel are generally happy people. "We actually catch each other’s
emotions like a cold”, Goleman says. Neuroscience is behind him on this one,
as I will explain below. Spreading happiness and causing a joy epidemic is,
in my view, a wonderful thing to do.
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- Mirror neurons have been referred to by
scientists as one of the most important neuroscientific breakthroughs of
recent history. What these neurons do is amazing--they activate in the same
way when you're watching someone else do something as they do when you're
doing it yourself. This mirroring process is thought to be behind our
ability to empathize, but you can imagine the role these neurons have played
in keeping us alive as a species. We learn from watching others.
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- Although the neuroscientific findings are
new, our parents didn't need to know the cause to recognize the effects:
"Don't hang out with the wrong crowd"; "Choose your friends carefully."
"Watch how the experts do it."
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- Spend time with a nervous, anxious person
and physiological monitoring would most likely show you mimicking the
anxiety and nervousness, in ways that affect your brain and body in a
concrete, measurable way. The reverse is true when you associate with happy
people. This is not mumbo-jumbo--it's simply the way the brain works.
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- Travel and meetings is a happy industry
generally populated by excited, happy people. We need more of them to create
a happy world.
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- There is great value in creating
organizations where social connections are fostered. We need to recognize
the power of conversations - in telling our stories and listening to other
people's stories . This is how friendships are formed. This is how tolerance
and understanding are developed. Ultimately, it may be the way world peace
can be attained, one friendship at a time. Indeed, the raison d'etre of the
meetings industry.
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Andrea Sigler, PhD
is President of Connected International Meeting Professionals Association, an
online association of meeting planners and incentive organizers. She is also
Chairman of the Board of Asian Leaders Association, author of the book "How To
Plan Meetings On The Internet" and co-developer of the certification program for
planners organizing meetings using high-tech tools. She has organized meetings
in 57 countries around the world. In her former job as President of the
International University for Independent Studies, she developed learning
materials for delivery to remote villages in developing countries using a
multi-media approach. The project became an award-winning model for developing
countries and earned millions of dollars in replication funding from UNESCO,
US_AID, UNICEF and other international organizations. Dr. Sigler is recognized
in the educational community as an expert on educational measurement and
curriculum development. She has written several books on this subject. Dr.
Sigler is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the International
Association of Hispanic Meeting Professionals and the International Network of
Tourism Educators, Vice President of the Pacific Asia Travel Writers
Association, Chairman of the Board, Pacific Asia Network of Association
Executives and Friendship Corps. She can be reached at sigler@cimpa.org
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