The Benefits of Flexible Thinking
The Challenge
What do we mean by flexible thinking – and how can we help people to harness their own cognitive elasticity?
Find some experts. Send them in a DeLorean back to 1982 – to the BBC Television Centre. Make a school science programme.
The BBC Ideas brand has a great deal of scope for fun and quirkiness. With this in mind, we imagined the film as a tongue-in-cheek homage to the educational programmes of the early 80s. Think mustachioed scientists with bad hair, flimsy home-made props, wonky camera zooms and ‘futuristic’ analogue transitions – and full to the brim with elastic, stretchy references to emphasise cognitive adaptability (including a wibbly-wobbly jelly brain).
We interviewed two academic experts, to form the backbone of the piece. These were Dr Lisa Feldmann Barrett – a neuroscientist and psychologist at Northeastern University – and Dr Volker Patent – a chartered psychologist at The Open University.
The Results
The film has received over 130,000 unique views and was chosen to feature on the BBC homepage.
