21st century advances in neuroscience reveal each brain is a collection of processing systems that more or less communicate with each other.

In short, our brain is a community. Sometimes, it’s a committee. Sometimes, it’s a jury. Other times, it’s a Quaker meeting. On any given day, it’s a contentious town hall forum. Once in a while, it’s a barroom brawl. Each of us engages these systems in a distinctive way.

What more, if we’re successful enough to have to push our limits, we all achieve situational learning disabilities. If you haven’t, you’re almost certainly underchallenged. Top performing individuals learn to embrace, manage, and tune these distinctions. As a result, they put their unique signatures on their accomplishments.

A lot of business people are stuck in mid-20th century constructs. This results in tools designed to type people rather than to identify distinctiveness, and mindsets that say people who spell conventionally, don’t fidget, or don’t um er are somehow smarter and more in control.

Knowing the science behind all this can help you, not only to understand and manage your own distinctiveness better, it makes is possible to recognize and leverage the distinctions of others, as you navigate through the waters of life, education, and work. OpenBook takes complex research on thinking and learning and makes it personable and easy to understand, with practical applications to embrace and tune your cognitive distinctiveness. Why? A complex and interesting world, needs you at your complex and interesting best.

OpenBook developed from a confluence of influences brought together when Patricia Albjerg Graham took over leadership of the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1982. Graham brought in classroom teachers working in the neighborhoods near Harvard and put them in conversation with some of Harvard’s foremost thinkers and researchers. Albjerg coined the term “thoughtful practitioner” to describe people working in the world under the light of research-identified best practices. In this environment OpenBook President Francis Sopper, as a young teacher, got guidance from Howard Gardner, developmental psychologist, MacArthur Fellow, and author of Frames of Mind; Magdalene Lampert, then studying how boys and girls with their teachers engaged in mathematical thinking; from leading computer scientists at the newly formed Educational Technology Center working to develop personal computers as tools to enhance thinking and learning. In 1985, Dr. Charles Drake, Ed.D, Harvard, self described as severely dyslexic, founded Landmark College as a laboratory school for the development of successful learning-performance solutions for high-potential adult learners.

In 1998, then Dean of Admissions, Francis Sopper, consulting with Robert Lefton, Ph.D., CEO of Psychological Associates and other member of Psychological Associates, headed up the preparation of learning-performance materials for the commercial market. The resulting cognitive preference survey underwent further revision in 2000, following evaluation by Carnegie Mellon researcher Suguru Ishizaki, Ph.D.MIT MediaLab.. The work is always under review as new data emerges from published research in neuroscience together with OpenBook’s engagement with high-performing individuals.