The Brain at Work in this New Environment

Alistair Schofield speaking at the Emotional Intelligence Online Summit in 2020 for People Builders and the Emotional Intelligence Academy on the brain at work.

02:30​ - Jumping on the bandwagon of the topic of neuroscience

08:48 - Evidence-based insights that explain the ‘why’ of human behaviour

11:30​ - Going beyond the mere understanding of behaviours

18:02​ - Processing things that are outside of our conscious awareness

20:47​ - Weighing up alternative courses of action

26:00​ - The shift from routine and innovation

WATCH THE FULL VIDEO BELOW

If you want more information on how you can develop your own Emotional intelligence, visit our Emotional Intelligence Academy website to see where we can help you get on the right track for your situation.

http://emotionalintelligenceacademy.online/

If you are interested in becoming a social and emotional intelligence trainer and coach, go deeper into the principles of applied neuroscience and positive psychology, visit our People Builders Institute website to find the path that suits your individual needs.

https://www.peoplebuildersinstitute.com.au/

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Neuroscience has become something of a hot subject in the last few years. Everybody has been jumping on the bandwagon. There are neuro-pills, neuro-drinks, there are neuro-games that are supposed to make your brain younger. Yesterday my colleague, Gill McKay mentioned the snooker cue which is supposed to improve your game. 

But my favorite is some hair straighteners that I came across, that or so they claim will make your hair “neuro-smooth”. The problem is that the brain cells; stick the word in neuro in front of something and add a picture of a brain or an MRI scan image and all of a sudden you have a new and interesting and more valuable product.  

In our own field of coaching, training, and people development, plenty of people are playing this game. They are either rebranding existing psychological models with a neuro-spin or in the worst cases, making claims that are completely untrue. For an interesting and amusing talk on this subject, I'd highly recommend that you have a look at the Ted talk by the Neuroscientist, Molly Crockett, entitled ‘Beware Neuro-Bunk”. She talks about a particular article she saw saying that ‘chocolate was good for your brain’ or something similar; only to find, the claim was based on her research.  

The reason I get quite angry about all of this, is because it creates a negative impression that can overshadow the extremely positive things that neuroscience can offer. It's for this reason that we coined the term ‘Applied Neuroscience’ for people development.  Applied Neuroscience for people development in order that we can focus people's minds on the practical applications of neuroscience in their coaching or organizational development work. 

In particular, I'd like to mention today three areas where applied neuroscience is beginning to have a huge and beneficial impact. The first of the three areas are first and foremost, the impact neuroscience is potentially going to have in enhancing and advancing psychological research. I'll explain more about this in just a moment so I won't say more now. 

The second area is the way in which applied neuroscience could provide evidence-based approach for coaches and trainers in their work in individual and organizational development. 

And the third area is: The insights neuroscience can provide into the influence of the unconscious mind.  

So, during the talk, I'm going to go through these three areas. 

Okay. The first area I want to mention is the huge potential neuroscience has for providing a unifying platform to underpin current and historical psychological research. Let me explain, imagine that we are living in a time before it was known that the world was round and someone noticed that when they let water out of their sink, that it always seemed to spiral down the plug hole in a clockwise direction. They did loads of experiments and determined that this is almost always true. However, they then came across a traveler who had conducted exactly the same experiment in the same thorough and controlled way where they lived, but to come to the exact opposite conclusion that water spiraled down the plug hole in an anticlockwise direction.  

So, we have two pieces of thorough and detailed research that reach opposite and conflicting conclusions. Both can't be right, or can they? Once we know that the world is spherical and spinning, and that one person's observations came from the Northern hemisphere and the other in the Southern hemisphere, we have a unifying theory known as the Coriolis effect. That explains why the different pieces of contradictory evidence are actually entirely compatible. I believe that ultimately neuroscience will provide a similar unifying framework to underpin psychology. If I'm correct, this will be a profound breakthrough in understanding human behavior, as it will provide connections and associations between the vast and existing amount of psychological research. Examples of where other unifying theories have had a profound impact on, for example, in geology, the understanding of plate tectonics and explaining the existence of volcanoes and the movements of continents or the impact, the decoding of the human genome is having in the pharmaceutical industry where the unifying genome data is today leading to a radical shift in the way in which research is conducted and medicines are developed. In the past for example, medicines were developed by people researching in specific pockets, such as looking for a drug for cancer treatment and if it didn't work, they basically put the research on the shelf and ignored it because they couldn't apply it in other areas because they didn't have the underlying unifying data. Today, they do research on the impact that medicines are going to have, and then look at where they might be applied. It's a much more efficient and totally different and also leads to a faster time to market.  

So, I have great hopes for neuroscience in this area. However, this development is something for the future. It may not even happen in my lifetime. So hopefully it's something that will be beyond them.  

The second area I want to mention is in providing evidence-based insights into the question, why psychology is very good at providing analysis of human behavior, but it has not been very good at explaining why people behave the way they do. This is because psychology is largely the study of behaviors or more precisely the statistical analysis of group behaviors.  

For example, at this very moment, there are people all over the world who signed into this YouTube stream to listen to me speak. So, from a behavioral perspective, their actions are all the same, but the motivation that led each of you to sign in will be different. For example, some of you may think it will be a value to you in your work. Others may simply have a personal interest. My colleague Gill may have tuned in as entertainment while she's eating her breakfast (only joking Gill) and Grant is here because he has to be.  

If you want to see another fun Ted talk on this, have a look at the one entitled: '‘The Mathematics of Love’ in which Dr. Hannah Fry, who is a professor of mathematics at the University College of London looks at the mathematical formula associated with dating, marriage and divorce.  

The point is that while psychological modeling can explain and even predict human behavior on average, it cannot explain or predict the behavior of each individual. We know that if a certain event happens, 60% of people, well, for example, reacted one way and 40% reacted another. What psychology cannot predict is which group you will be in, or even whether you conform to the model at all. The problem is that in statistical modeling, an individual is a simple, a sample size of one, which is why it's psychometric instruments that purport to tell you things about yourself or attempt to compare you against other people are in fact nonsense. As Carl Jung himself said, in his book, ‘Psychological Types’ and I quote: ‘Conformity is one side of a person. Uniqueness is the other. Classification does not explain the individual psyche.’  

He goes on to say: ‘Every individual is an exception to the rule’. Which is quite comforting really, that we are all individuals. However, this is where the disciplines of genetics and neuroscience are coming in, and that they are enabling us to go beyond the mere understanding of behaviors and additionally, helping us to understand the energy and motivation that leads to those behaviors. Let me explain: although all brains are unique, they are physiologically very similar. So, it follows that as we move from the similarity of our physical brains, to the lowest level of our psychology, there must also be a great deal of similarity. The analogy I use is that of a color laser printer, all of the printers have the same make and model are identical. And each of the four-toner cartridges in those printers are also the same. But from those same four-toner cartridges, each of us can create a unique set of colors and images.  

The brain is similar in that the physiology of each of our brains is the same. What makes us all unique is therefore not so much the brain itself as the neural network which dictates the unique way in which each of us utilizes the different processing styles of the brain regions, or to quote the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux: “You are your synapses; they are who you are.” 

Our work at My Brain International has therefore been focused on understanding the boundary between physiology and psychology in developing a causal explanation of how the physiological aspects of the brain turn into the psychological profile of the individual. In this way, we've been able to go beyond the mere understanding of how a person is, by providing an explanation as to why they are the way they are. This is an incredibly powerful thing in areas such as coaching, team performance, motivation and so. Because instead of attempting to measure what a person might be good or bad at -which has been a theme of many psychometric tests in the past- we can instead help people identify what motivates and energizes them as an individual. 

 So, the process we take people through is first to explain the way all brains work and in particular, the way in which the physical attributes of the brain manifest themselves in the psychology of the person before then taking each person's assessment of themselves and mapping it back onto the neurological model. In this way, they go beyond merely understanding how they are, as they now have an insight into the physiological aspects of the brain that make them who they are. Now, this does not result in conclusions as to what a person will be good or bad at, but rather it identifies the combination of what we term: ‘the energies and motivations.’ As it is those that make them a unique individual. They are, if you like the building blocks of their personality and their character.  

Yesterday, Gill mentioned the Concept of Flow from the psychologist Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi and the work on Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation by Richard Ryan and Edward Dacey from the University of Rochester. Now these are brilliant psychological concepts and great pieces of research. What applied neuroscience is able to provide, is an evidence-based approach to enable you to apply those theories in practical terms with your clients. I think that's one of the biggest things that applied neuroscience is beginning to give us. 

The third area I wanted to highlight, the one I wanted to spend more time on, is the insights neuroscience is providing us into the influence of the unconscious mind. Let me give you an example:  

A research study in around, I think it was about 2005, gave some experienced judges the details of a crime. 

They were then asked to throw a pair of dice before being asked to say what period of imprisonment they would sentence the person to. Unbeknownst to them, the dice were rigged. For some judges they always resulted in a three, while for the other judges they always came up nine. 

The interesting result was that the judges whose dice came up with a three gave sentences that averaged five months. While the judges whose dice came up as a nine, gave sentences that averaged eight months. This happened because of what is known as the anchoring bias. And it is interesting in this case, in particular, as judges are supposed to make sentencing decisions based purely on the empirical evidence. Whereas this case illustrates those judges, despite their extensive training, are just a susceptible to cognitive biases as the rest of us. 

However, I don't like the term cognitive bias. I think it's misleading as if you look up its meaning, you find the definitions tend to refer to things such as error in thinking or deviations from the norm, or irrationality in judgment. In fact, if you'd go to Wikipedia, they have a statement that says: “Thus cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment in logical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality. And the reason I think this is misleading is because I believe that most of these biases are not irrational at all. They are as a result of the influence of our unconscious mind. If we look at a life-size model of the brain - now I have one here made of plastic that I got from eBay- the parts of the brain that deal with the processing of things, that are outside of our conscious awareness is here. It's called the cerebellum. The part colored blue. It is sometimes referred to as the hind brain or the baby brain because it's almost like a little, another separate brain at the back of the brain. The interesting thing is that this area is home to 80% of your brain cells. The conscious part of your brain is the Cerebral Cortex: the gray matter that only has 19% of your brain cells. The other 1%, if you're wondering around the brainstem. The other interesting thing is before all information from your census has passed through, it's the point that grant was making earlier, that all of the information that you are consciously aware of in this part of the brain has to, first of all, pass through these older lower brain structures before it gets to your conscious awareness. And while this might seem strange, it is not, it's totally natural. 

 Let me explain. Our brains, like the rest of our bodies, are the product of evolution. And as we know, evolution works by optimizing us for our environment through a process known as natural selection. So, the evolutionary heritage of our brains can provide interesting insights into why they work the way they do. Now, anthropologists regard our oldest ancestor as a brilliant creature called Australopithecus that lived on the Plains of Africa about 4 million years ago. I do not know about you, but I find the concept of 4 million years difficult to get my head around. So, what I've done in this slide is to convert it into a 12-hour day.  

 So, imagine that it is noon today, and Australopithecus has just emerged at midnight last night. Two hours later, the stone-age began, but it was not until 54 minutes ago that our species, the homo sapiens, emerged. And it was within the last two minutes that we built the first house and invented writing. And it was only two seconds ago, that the industrial revolution began. 

Human brains have therefore been optimized for a natural environment in which the pace of change was relatively slow and where our only priorities would have been food, shelter and safety. Now, while 80% of our brain cells are in the cerebellum, outside of our conscious awareness, the part of our brain that enables us to think, to question things, to challenge convention, or to weigh up alternative courses of action is here at the frontal part of the brain, it is known as the frontal lobes or more precisely the prefrontal cortex. This part of the brain is home to just 2% of your brain cells. Thinking is therefore a limited and expensive resource, which is why your brain is designed to automate as many functions as possible. 

In the mid-nineties, a group of neuroscientists at the National Institute of Mental Health in the US, wired some people to a PET scanning machine so that they could see what happened when they perform different tasks. What they found is that when a person is performing a task for the first time, the areas of the brain that are involved, are the right hemisphere and the prefrontal cortex. Now the right hemisphere is involved because this is the part of the brain that processes new information. When you learn something new, it comes into the right hemisphere. It then looks for patterns to see if it can match it to things that the person already knows - if there are similarities with existing information. Because the task is new, the prefrontal cortex is involved because the person has to think about what they're doing. An analogy I often use is, if you are choosing to fold fancy napkins for dinner party or for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner or whatever. So, you get some instructions up on the internet and the first time, you really have to concentrate on how you're doing it. The second time is getting easier. By the third or fourth time, you're doing it without even thinking about it, because now you're bored and you're looking around for other things. And actually, the folding is probably getting better and better all the time, but you're not having to think about it.   

So, what happened is in this research, when the person performed the same task, multiple times, what they found is that only an area of the left hemisphere was involved and the left hemisphere more towards the sort of the left rear area of the brain, the parts of the brain that deals with our routine functions, the prefrontal cortex is no longer needed because the person has learned how to perform the task and no longer needs to think about it. In fact, it's become a routinized. It has become habitual; it has become automatic.  

A good example of this process is when you learn to drive, if you, again, you think back to when you were learning to drive you probably ended up stolen the car at junctures because you forgot to press the clutch in, or you're setting off at the handbrake and now people drive to work and they don't even remember the journey. But why would, brains work in this way? Well, the reason is because nature has created you with a brain that frees up that expensive resource of thinking. It keeps thinking available as part of your defense mechanism.  

Imagine you're one of our older ancestors, thousands and thousands of years ago, you're running through the forest, chasing a Thompson gazelle for dinner. So, your instinctive brain, your automatic functions are enabling you to run, to balance, to jump, and to throw a spear. Ultimately, your memory is working hard to remember the, the forest environment you're running through and where would be a good place to trap the Thompson gazelle.  

But the thinking is kept free for emergencies, because as you're running, you notice a long, straight thing on the path in front of you. And in that instant, you have to make a decision. Is it harmless stick or a poisonous snake? That's why nature has given you a brain that tries to stop you thinking as much as possible to keep it free and available.  

So, let's consider again, the case of the judges. They were being influenced by what is called the Anchoring Bias. This occurs when people are influenced by an initial piece of information, while I was going to have a negative effect in our modern man-made world, you can see how this would have been an advantage to our ancestors, living in a wholly natural world, where they weren't being bombarded with random pieces of information all the time that are manmade and concocted.  

 They're living in a much more stable environment. Indeed, the same applies to most of the so-called cognitive biases far from being unusual, psychological phenomenon that trip us up. They are wholly natural neurological trays that are designed to provide our brains with the sort of shortcuts that limit the amount of time and energy we need to spend on thinking.  

As we could see from the 4 million years in 12-hour slide, this is only become a problem for us very recently. In fact, even for the vast majority of the last 200 years, since the start of the industrial revolution, things have been okay, because most of the work we've wanted people to perform has been re-routine and repetitive. In fact, it's only really been the last few years that the pace of change automation and computerization has caused the balance to shift. Today, we are not wanting employees in our organization to do the same old, same old all the time. We're instead wanting them to innovate, to challenge the status quo, to question existing processes and to keep up with the relentless pace of change.  

In other words, we want our organizations to be more prefrontal cortex friendly. Now, this is challenging because as we've seen, our brains are designed to form habits and to take shortcuts.  

Ironically, the CEOs of numerous companies are frequently heard, complaining that they need their organizations to be more innovative, more agile, faster to respond, to change. So, while at the same time, insisting that people stick to the same routines of working nine to five, five days a week while driving the same route to work each day, parking in the same place, sitting next to the same people and so on. Ironically, the current pandemic has probably thrown a spanner in the work of that. And they've probably found that actually people have been more creative while they've been working from home because it has mixed things up. It's created a different routine that has broken the pattern.  

So, to be prefrontal cortex friendly, organizations need to do that. They need to mix things up. They need to constantly change the employee environment and the worst case, ditch most of the rules. The rules on the whole, are there to ensure stability and continuity and predictability, which is the opposite of change. So, letting people work at times that suit them, for example, may help in some organizations, but not in all. This, by the way, links neatly to the research that Gill McKay shared with you yesterday on Intrinsic Motivation, you may think that this is all going too far and being too radical, but some companies are starting to do this. And in many ways, it's actually not that new. In fact, the first company that I came across that was doing this in recent times was 3m. And this is going back 40 or 50 years ago.  

Their philosophy was you don't recruit good people to tell them what to do. You recruit good people so that they can tell us what to do. It's a philosophy that then got adopted by Google in particular, where they have this practice of giving people 20% of their time free to do whatever they liked so long as it was for the good of the organization. And more and more organizations are doing it. I heard of one a while ago in Australia. And it's interesting that some key benefits are coming from this. The problem is that in many ways, there are also key benefits from coming from organizations that also oppressed people and treat them badly and they seem to deliver big profits as well. But I do think in the future, if we're going to keep that sort of flexibility in organizations, and we're going to keep up with the pace of change, then adopting these practices will be important.  

 And certainly, if you look at the lifespan curve of organizations, if you look at, for example, they drawn, how long companies last in the standard & poor 500 or the FTSE 100 in the UK or whatever, you find that the lifespan of companies at the top of the market are declining. If we go back, a hundred years or probably be something like 60 to 70 years, they would last. Today, the lifespan of companies in that sort of area is down around about 15 to 20 years. So, the lesson is that if you want change, creativity and innovation, you need to create an environment that encourages it.  

 So, to summarize, I said that I believe neuroscience could play a significant role in organizational life in three areas: (1) In providing a unifying theory to underpin psychology; (2) By providing an evidence-based approach to move us beyond the observational psychology of behaviors, to an understanding of the energy and motivation that leads to those behaviors. And finally, (3) by providing insights and influences parts of our brain, that outside of our conscious awareness, play in our everyday lives.