Finished reading the book, Your Brain at Work by David Rock. Its one of the most exciting books i've come across. Some excerpts from the book are given below.
Loved it. You can always share your views about it with me :)
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Conscious mental activities chew up metabolic resources, the fuel in your blood, significantly faster than automatic brain functions such as keeping your heart beating or your lungs breathing.
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Thoughts Are fuelled
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prioritizing is one of the brain’s most energy-hungry processes.
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Prioritizing involves imagining and then moving around concepts of which you have no direct experience.
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Prioritizing, at least in a knowledge economy full of conceptual projects, is definitely a black run. Do it when you are fresh and energized, or you might crash and burn down the hill.
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Picturing a concept activates the visual cortex in the occipital lobe, at the back of the brain.
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Minimize energy usage to maximize performance.
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scheduling the most attention-rich tasks when you have a fresh and alert mind.
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Deep thinking tends to require more effort, so plan to do your deep thinking in one block, perhaps early in the morning or late at night.
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Don’t waste energy solving a problem you know you will have more information about later.
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your ability to make great decisions is a limited resource. Conserve this resource at every opportunity.
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Conscious thinking involves deeply complex biological interactions in the brain among billions of neurons.
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Prioritize prioritizing, as it’s an energy-intensive activity.
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Use the brain to interact with information rather than trying to store information, by creating visuals for complex ideas and by listing projects.
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“There is clear and compelling evidence of one unit being maintained in focal attention and no direct evidence for more than one item of information extended over time.”
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When you think, you picture how a concept connects in space with other concepts.
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Simple is good; simplest is best. When you reduce complex ideas to just a few concepts, it’s far easier to manipulate the concepts in your mind, and in other people’s minds.
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The organization’s overall goals; The desired outcome from the meeting, such as to decide yes or no; The main argument for the investment; and The main argument against the investment.
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Build a detailed project plan. Research existing software versus building from scratch. Write the software. Install.
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Sometimes seemingly small changes in the brain can have a big impact in the world.
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The less you hold in mind at once the better.
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Memory starts to degrade when you try to hold more than one idea in mind.
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the main mental processes relevant to getting work done are understanding, deciding, recalling, memorizing, and inhibiting.
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Understanding a new idea involves creating maps in the prefrontal cortex that represent new, incoming information, and connecting these maps to existing maps in the rest of the brain. It’s like holding actors onstage to see if they connect with the audience. Making a decision involves activating a series of maps in the prefrontal cortex and making a choice between these maps. It’s like holding audience members onstage and deciding between them, as with an audition for a chorus line. Recalling involves searching through the billions of maps involved in memory and bringing just the right ones into the prefrontal cortex. Memorizing involves holding maps in attention in the prefrontal cortex long enough to embed them in long-term memory. Inhibiting involves trying not to activate certain maps. It’s like keeping some actors off the stage.
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when people do two cognitive tasks at once, their cognitive capacity can drop from that of a Harvard MBA to that of an eight-year-old. It’s a phenomenon called dual-task interference.
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Linda Stone, a former VP at Microsoft, coined the term continuous partial attention in 1998. It’s what happens when people’s focus is split, continuously. The effect is constant and intense mental exhaustion. As Stone explains it, “To pay continuous partial attention is to keep a top-level item in focus, and constantly scan the periphery in case something more important emerges.”
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long-term potentiation, or what I call here
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the serial nature of the prefrontal cortex and conscious mental processing, and it’s called a bottleneck. A bottleneck is a series of unfinished connections that take up mental energy, forming a queue. Other decisions wait in a queue behind the first decision. It’s a bit like when a computer printer jams and other documents bank up waiting to print.
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You can focus on only one conscious task at a time. Switching between tasks uses energy; if you do this a lot you can make more mistakes. If you do multiple conscious tasks at once you will experience a big drop-off in accuracy or performance. The only way to do two mental tasks quickly, if accuracy is important, is doing one of them at a time. Multitasking can be done easily if you are executing embedded routines.
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Catch yourself trying to do two things at once and slow down instead. Embed repetitive tasks where you can. Get decisions and thinking processes into the right order to reduce “queues” of decisions. If you have to multitask, combine active thinking tasks only with automatic, embedded routines.
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There’s some evidence that schizophrenia involves this kind of interruption—an inability to inhibit these task-irrelevant signals that most of us are able to dampen down and effectively ignore.
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The medial prefrontal cortex is located within the prefrontal cortex itself, around the middle of your forehead. It activates when you think about yourself and other people. This region of the brain is also part of what is called the default network. This network becomes active when you are not doing much at all, such as in between any focused mental activities.
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“Elephant and the rider,” where the conscious will, the rider, tries to control the larger and uncontrollable unconscious mind, the elephant.
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With the prefrontal cortex taking up just 4 percent of total brain volume, modern brain science seems to affirm the truth of this metaphor. The prefrontal cortex, central to conscious decision-making, has a degree of influence, but the rest of the brain is bigger and stronger.
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The brain region important for detecting novelty is called the anterior cingulated cortex (see diagram, Chapter 4). It’s thought of as your error-detection circuit, because it lights up when you notice something contrary to what is expected, such as when you make a mistake or feel pain.
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One study found that office distractions eat up an average 2.1 hours a day. Another study, published in October 2005, found that employees spend an average of 11 minutes on a project before being distracted. After an interruption, it takes them 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they do at all. People switch activities every 3 minutes, either making a call, speaking with someone in their cubicle, or working on a document.
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“Self-control is a limited resource,” says Baumeister. “After exhibiting self-control, people have a reduced ability to exhibit further self-control.”
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Each time you stop yourself from doing something, the next impulse is harder to stop.
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half a second before a “voluntary” movement, the brain sends a signal called an action potential, which relates to a movement about to occur.
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But you do have “veto power,” the ability to choose whether to act on an impulse.
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Inhibiting distractions is a core skill for staying focused. To inhibit distractions, you need to be aware of your internal mental process and catch the wrong impulses before they take hold.
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Three tenths of a second is very close to the gap between noticing you want to take an action and taking an action,
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learning to inhibit impulses as they arise. To inhibit impulses, you must veto them before they turn from impulse into action.
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Attention is easily distracted. When we get distracted it’s often a result of thinking about ourselves, which activates the default network in the brain. A constant storm of electrical activity takes place in the brain. Distractions exhaust the prefrontal cortex’s limited resources. Being “always on” (connected to others via technology) can drop your IQ significantly, as much as losing a night’s sleep. Focus occurs partly through the inhibition of distractions. The brain has a common braking system for all types of braking. Inhibition uses a lot of energy because the braking system is part of the prefrontal cortex.
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Attention is easily distracted. When we get distracted it’s often a result of thinking about ourselves, which activates the default network in the brain. A constant storm of electrical activity takes place in the brain. Distractions exhaust the prefrontal cortex’s limited resources. Being “always on” (connected to others via technology) can drop your IQ significantly, as much as losing a night’s sleep. Focus occurs partly through the inhibition of distractions. The brain has a common braking system for all types of braking. Inhibition uses a lot of energy because the braking system is part of the prefrontal cortex. Each time you inhibit something, your ability to inhibit again is reduced. Inhibition requires catching an impulse when it first emerges, before the momentum of an action takes over. Having explicit language for mental patterns gives you a greater ability to stop patterns emerging early on, before they take over. Some
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When you need to focus, remove all external distractions completely. Reduce the likelihood of internal distractions by clearing your mind before embarking on difficult tasks. Improve your mental braking system by practicing any type of braking, including physical acts. Inhibit distractions early before they take on
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Arousal in any region of the brain means its level of activity.
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Arousal in any region of the brain means its level of activity.
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electroencephalogram (EEG),
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It takes a certain amount of stress just to get out of bed in the morning. This type of stress is known as eustress, or positive stress. Positive stress helps focus your attention. When
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Neurons, the nerve cells of the brain, are not directly connected to other neurons. Instead, there is a small gap between them called a synapse.
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An electrical signal travels down a neuron cell body and is converted into a chemical signal at the synapse. There are receptors on both sides of the synapse that receive messages from these chemical signals. Synapses send and receive one of two signals: either what is called an excitatory signal, which tells the neuron to do more of something, or an inhibitory signal, which tells it to do less of something. This electrical-to-chemical-to-electrical communication system across the synapse is sometimes called a synaptic “firing.”
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You want to arouse the brain just enough to get motivated, but not so much that you end up obsessing about your fear and increasing your allostatic load.
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Rewards to the brain include food, sex, money, and positive social interactions.
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One study showed that new lovers’ brains have a lot in common with people on cocaine. Dopamine is sometimes called the “drug of desire.” Too much dopamine, from being “high with excitement,” can also be exhausting.
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Peak mental performance requires just the right level of stress, not minimal stress. Peak mental performance occurs when you have intermediate levels of two important neurotransmitters, norepinephrine and dopamine, which relate to alertness and interest. You can consciously manipulate your levels of norepinephrine and dopamine in many ways, to improve your alertness or interest.
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Bring your adrenaline level up when needed with a small dose of visualizing a mild fear. Bring your dopamine level up when needed, using novelty in any form, including changing perspective, humor, or expecting something positive.
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It’s well established that you remember, without knowing why, words or concepts you have seen recently and that these automatically influence your actions, subconsciously. It’s a quirk of the brain called priming.
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An impasse is a roadblock to a desired mental path. It’s a connection you want to make but can’t. An impasse can be anything from trying to remember an old friend’s name, to working out what you will name your child, to suffering full-blown writer’s
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block.
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Creative people are all about putting together information in a novel way.
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attention tends to generate revenue.
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Whether you’re a creative person tinkering with the shape of a product, or a captain of a ship, knowing how to get from an impasse to an insight can make a big difference to your success.
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‘Everyone knows what attention is until you try to define it,’”
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This knowledge about insights provides a possible strategy for increasing creativity: let your subconscious brain solve the problem.
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With so many impasses each day at work, perhaps what’s needed are more thinking partnerships, where one person has a lot of detail and the other very little. Together they can come up with solutions faster than either can on his own.
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Increasing happiness increases the likelihood of insight, while increasing anxiety decreases the likelihood of insight. This relates to your ability to perceive subtle signals.
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When you are anxious, there is greater baseline activation and more overall electrical activity, which makes it harder for you to perceive subtle signals. There’s too much noise for you to hear well. This is why companies such as Google create work environments that allow for fun and play. They have seen that this increases the quality of ideas.
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People who have more insights don’t have better vision, they are not more determined to find a solution, they don’t focus harder on the problem, and they are not necessarily geniuses.
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At the moment of insight, there is a burst of gamma band brain waves. These are the fastest brain waves, representing a group of neurons firing in unison, forty times a second.
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It’s astonishingly easy to get stuck on the same small set of solutions to a problem, called the impasse phenomenon. Resolving an impasse requires letting the brain idle, reducing activation of the wrong answers. Having insights involves hearing subtle signals and allowing loose connections to be made. This requires a quiet mind, with minimal electrical activity. Insights occur more frequently the more relaxed and happy you are. The right hemisphere, which involves the connections between information more than specific data, contributes strongly to insight.
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Take the pressure off yourself, get an extension on your deadline, do something fun, reduce your anxiety any way you can. Take a break and do something light and interesting, to see if an answer emerges. Try quieting your mind and see what is there in the more subtle connections. Focus on the connections between information rather than drilling down into a problem; look at patterns and links from a high level rather than getting detailed. Simplify problems to their salient features; allow yourself to reflect from a high level, watch for the tickle of subtle connections preceding insight, and stop and focus on insights when they occur.
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“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
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“Self-awareness is the capacity to step outside your own skin and look at yourself with as close to an objective eye as you possibly can. In many cases it means having a third-person perspective on yourself: imagine seeing yourself through the eyes of another individual. In this interaction it would be me becoming the camera, looking at myself, observing what my answer was. Becoming self-aware, having a meta-perspective on ourselves, is really like interacting with another person. This is a fundamental thing that social neuroscience is trying to understand.”
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Without a director you are a mere automaton, driven by greed, fear, or habit.
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The ability to notice these kinds of signals is a central platform for being more effective at work. Knowledge of your brain is one thing, but you also need to be aware of what your brain is doing at any moment for any knowledge to be useful.
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This awareness of signals coming from inside of you has a technical term: interoception. It’s like perception of your internal world.
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the brain has an overarching organizing principle, which is to classify the world around you into things that will either hurt you or help you stay alive. “Everything you do in life is based on your brain’s determination to minimize danger or maximize reward,”
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‘“Minimize danger, maximize reward’ is the organizing principle of the brain.”
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Emotions such as curiosity, happiness, and contentment are toward responses. Anxiety, sadness, and fear, on the other hand, are away responses.
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When the brain detects a threat that could endanger your life it is called a primary threat. Primary threats include real threats such as seeing a bear in the woods or getting hungry, hot, or thirsty, or even just seeing angry faces in a photograph. When your brain detects something that could help you survive, you experience a sense of reward, from noticing what are called primary rewards. Primary rewards include food, money, and sex, or even just a familiar face.
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The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathon Haidt
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Even the strongest toward emotion, lust, is unlikely to make you run, whereas fear can do so in an instant.
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Human beings walk toward, but run away.
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Hot spots are patterns of experience stored in your limbic system and tagged as dangerous.
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When the limbic system gets overly aroused, it reduces the resources available for prefrontal cortex functions. If
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Another challenge with increased limbic system arousal is that your director seems to go missing. Activating your director allows you to perceive more information and make better decisions. Good decisions are even more important when you are under
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pressure.
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It takes a lot of resources to think about thinking. It’s like having four actors onstage, with four other actors noticing what the first actors are doing, and commenting on them. With room for only a few actors in total, or even fewer when the limbic system has reduced the stage’s resources, this is tricky.
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It’s bad enough that an over-aroused limbic system gives you less space on the stage, and makes you more negative. But it gets worse. An aroused limbic system increases the chance of making links where there may not be any.
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When you are anxious, you miss stimuli and make mistakes about what is said to you because your attention is going inward.
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He explains that before an emotion arises, there are several choices to be made: situation selection, situation modification, and attention deployment.
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One is called labeling. It’s when you take a situation and put a label on your emotions. The other is called reappraisal, which involves changing your interpretation of an event.
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Trying not to feel something doesn’t work, and in some cases even backfires.
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The two work like a seesaw. You can make this switch happen by trying to find the right word to identify an emotional sensation, a technique that is called symbolic labeling. Neuroscientist
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The two work like a seesaw. You can make this switch happen by trying to find the right word to identify an emotional sensation, a technique that is called symbolic labeling.
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Most successful executives have developed an ability to be in a state of high limbic system arousal and still remain calm. Partly this is their ability to label emotional states. They are like an advanced driver who has a word for the experience of fear when he senses his car going into a skid. During a skid he can recall the word instantly, therefore reducing his panic. Stress is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s how you deal with it that’s key. Successful people learn to harness deep stress and turn it into eustress, thus enhancing prefrontal cortex functioning. They do this partly by naming, and using the other techniques
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The brain has an overarching organizing principle to minimize danger (an away response) and maximize reward (a toward response). The limbic system can be aroused easily. The away response is stronger, faster, and longer lasting than the toward response. The away response can reduce cognitive resources, make it harder to think about your thinking, make you more defensive, and mistakenly class certain situations as threats. Once an emotion kicks in, trying to suppress it either doesn’t work or makes it worse. Suppressing an emotion reduces your memory of events significantly. Suppressing an emotion makes other people feel uncomfortable. People incorrectly predict that labeling an emotion will make them feel worse. Labeling an emotion can reduce limbic system arousal. Labeling needs to be symbolic, not a long dialogue about an emotion, for it to reduce arousal.
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Some Things to Try Use your director to observe your emotional state. Be conscious of things that may increase limbic system arousal and work out ways to reduce these, before the arousal kicks in. Practice noticing emotions as they arise, to get better at sensing their presence earlier. When you sense a strong emotion coming on, refocus your attention quickly on another stimulus, before the emotion takes over. Practice assigning words to emotional states to reduce arousal once it kicks in.
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“Your brain receives patterns from the outside world, stores them as memories, and makes predictions by combining what it has seen before and what is happening now…. Prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the primary function of the neo-cortex, and the foundation of intelligence.”
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You don’t just hear; you hear and predict what should come next. You don’t just see; you predict what you should be seeing moment to moment.
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Women tend to be better at labeling their emotions. Emily knows
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Women tend to be better at labeling their emotions.
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The brain likes to know what is going on by recognizing patterns in the world. It likes to feel certain.
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Uncertainty is like an inability to create a complete map of a situation, and with parts missing, you’re not as comfortable as when the map is complete.
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you can have a lot of certainty from a secure job, but a micromanaging boss may not let you make decisions.
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uncontrollable stressors cause deleterious effects. Inescapable or uncontrollable stress can be destructive, whereas the same stress that feels escapable is less destructive, significantly so.
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I decide to be responsible for my mental state instead of a victim of circumstances. In the instant that I make this decision, I start seeing more information around me, and I can perceive opportunities for feeling happier, such as remembering to call a friend. This experience is one of finding a choice and making that choice, and it shifts what and how I perceive in that moment.
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Responsibility means an ability to respond.
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This idea of consciously choosing to see a situation differently is called “reappraisal,” and it’s the missing link for Emily at her lunch meeting.
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It turns out that conscious control over the limbic system is possible, not by suppressing a feeling, but rather by changing the interpretation that creates the feeling in the first place.
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New means uncertain, which means arousing, which reduces space on your stage.
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Certainty is a primary reward or threat for the brain. Autonomy, the feeling of control, is another primary reward or threat for the brain. Strong emotions generated by certainty and autonomy may need more than labeling to be managed. Reappraisal is a powerful strategy for managing increased arousal. People who reappraise more appear to live better lives.
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Reordering how you value the world changes the hierarchical structure of how your brain stores information, which changes how your brain interacts with the world. The last type
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Reordering how you value the world changes the hierarchical structure of how your brain stores information, which changes how your brain interacts with the world.
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With too much arousal, the director is hard to find. Without the director, the mind easily wanders, and it’s easier for irrelevant audience members to jump onstage and take over. A small amount of over-arousal can result in your taking longer to do simple work or missing important insights.
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Perhaps Ochsner is right: sometimes it’s irresponsible not to practice reappraisal.
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Gross also found that men suppress more than women. Perhaps men generally think it’s not “manly” to tell oneself “stories” about the world, and prefer to “grin and bear it.” “There
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Gross also found that men suppress more than women. Perhaps men generally think it’s not “manly” to tell oneself “stories” about the world, and prefer to “grin and bear it.”
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Frustration at your limitations, mistakes, missed opportunities, forgetfulness, or bad habits can generate a lot of limbic activity. A common automatic response when people get annoyed with themselves is to try to suppress this feeling, to push aside the internal frustration.
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Watch for uncertainty creating a feeling of threat; practice noticing this. Watch for a feeling of reduced autonomy creating a sense of threat; practice noticing this. Find ways to create choice and a perception of autonomy wherever you can. Practice reappraisal early when you feel a strong emotion coming on. You can reappraise by reinterpreting an event, or reordering your values, or normalizing an event, or repositioning your perspective. Reappraising your own experience is a powerful way of managing internal stressors; use this technique when you are anxious about your mental performance by saying, “That’s just my brain.”
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Maintaining the right expectations in life may be central for maintaining a general feeling of happiness and well-being.
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Unmet expectations often create a threat response, which
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when a cue from the environment indicates you’re going to get a reward, dopamine is released in response. Unexpected rewards release more dopamine than expected ones. Thus, the surprise bonus at work, even a small one, can positively impact your brain chemistry more than an expected pay raise. However, if you’re expecting a reward and you don’t get it, dopamine levels fall steeply. This feeling is not a pleasant one; it feels a lot like pain.
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Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of desire. Dopamine levels rise when you want something, even something as simple as to cross the road. (Dopamine is a driver of the reward response in most of the animal kingdom, too. At last we know the real reason the chicken wanted to cross the road; it was craving a burst of dopamine!)
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Parkinson’s patients, having lost most of their dopamine neurons, have trouble initiating movement.
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The movie Awakenings, with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, illustrates the story of a patient who goes from comatose to manic after being given a dopamine-producing agent, L-dopa. When the L-dopa is stopped, the patient plummets back into a comatose state.
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Interest, desire, and positive expectations are slight variations on a similar experience, the experience of having an increased level of dopamine in the brain.
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Expectations are the experience of the brain paying attention to a possible reward (or threat). Expectations alter the data your brain perceives. It’s common to fit incoming data into expectations and to ignore data that don’t fit. Expectations can change brain functioning; the right dose of expectations can be similar to a clinical dose of morphine. Expectations activate the dopamine circuitry, central for thinking and learning. Met expectations generate a slight increase in dopamine, and a slight reward response. Exceeded expectations generate a strong increase in dopamine, and a strong reward response. Unmet expectations generate a large drop in dopamine level, and a strong threat response. The dynamic between expectations altering experience and impacting dopamine levels, helps generate an upward or downward spiral in the brain. A general feeling of expecting good things generates a healthy level of dopamine, and may be the neurochemical marker of feeling happy.
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Practice noticing what your expectations are in any given situation. Practice setting expectations a little lower. To stay in a positive state of mind, find ways to keep coming out ahead of your expectations over and again, even in small ways. When a positive expectation is not being met, practice reappraising the situation by remembering it’s your brain doing something odd with dopamine.
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Few people work in isolation anymore.
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“Four out of five processes operating in the background when your brain is at rest involve thinking about other people and yourself.”
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In the absence of positive social cues, it’s easy for people to fall back into the more common mode of human interactions: distrusting others. In this brain state, with the limbic system overly activated, a joke becomes a slight, a slight becomes an attack, and an attack becomes a battle. And that can be the end of productive, goal-focused thinking for as long as humans can hold a grudge, which is a long time indeed.
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In the absence of positive social cues, it’s easy for people to fall back into the more common mode of human interactions: distrusting others. In this brain state, with the limbic system overly activated, a joke becomes a slight, a slight becomes an attack, and an attack becomes a battle. And that can be the end of productive, goal-focused thinking for as long as humans can hold a grudge, which is a long time indeed.
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- Note on Page 157 | Loc. 2575 | Added on Monday, September 05, 2011, 12:06 PM
true
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In the 1960s, Abraham Maslow developed a now famous “hierarchy of needs,” which shows that humans have an order in which their needs have to be met, starting with physical survival and moving up the ladder all the way to self-actualization.
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Being hungry and being ostracized activate similar threat and pain responses, using the same networks.
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mirror neurons throughout the brain light up when we see other people do what is called an “intentional action.” If
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“Real interaction activates more than video, which activates more than telephone, as we are reacting to visual input of body language, and especially facial expressions.”
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If people don’t have social cues to pay attention to, they can’t connect with other people’s emotional state.
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Mirror neurons explain why leaders need to be extra conscious of managing their stress levels, as their emotions really do impact others.
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collaborating with people you don’t know well is a threat for the brain. Perhaps, after millions of years living in small groups, the automatic response to strangers is “don’t trust them.”
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You use one set of brain circuits for thinking about people who you believe are like you, who you feel are friends, and a different set for those whom you view as different from you, as foes. When your brain decides someone is a friend, you process your interactions using a similar part of the brain you use for thinking about your own experience. Deciding someone is a friend also generates a toward emotional response, which provides more space on your stage for new ideas.
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When you interconnect your thoughts, emotions, and goals with other people, you release oxytocin, a pleasurable chemical.
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Oxytocin is released when two people dance together, play music together, or engage in a collaborative conversation. It’s the neurochemistry of safe connectivity.
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Research within the positive psychology field shows there is only one experience in life that increases happiness over a long time. It’s not money, above a base survival amount. It’s not health, nor is it marriage or having children. The one thing that makes people happy is the quality and quantity of their social connections.
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Happiness is not just a good dose of dopamine, but a nice oxytocin buzz, too.
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Having many positive social connections doesn’t just increase your happiness; it can also help you perform on the job, and even live longer.
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“Loneliness generates a threat response,”
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Having friends around you reduces a deeply ingrained biological threat response.
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Having friends helps you change your brain, because you get to speak out loud more often.
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When you speak to someone about an idea, many more parts of your brain are activated than just thinking about the idea, including memory regions, language regions, and motor centers. This is a process called spreading activation. Spreading activation makes it easier to recall ideas later on, as you have left a wider trail of connections to follow.
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Deciding someone is a foe means you make accidental connections, misread intent, get easily upset, and discard their good ideas.
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companies that encourage water-cooler conversations exhibit greater productivity. Increasing the quality and quantity of social connections (up to a point, of course) is likely to improve productivity,
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Social connections are a primary need, as important as food and water at times. We know one another directly through experiencing other people’s states ourselves. Safe connections with others are vital for health, and for healthy collaboration. People are classed as friend or foe quickly, with foe as the default in the absence of positive cues. You need to work hard at creating connections to create good collaboration. Some Things to Try Anytime you meet someone new, make an effort to connect on a human level as early as possible to reduce the threat response. Become friends with people you work with by sharing personal experiences. Actively encourage people around you to connect on a human level to create better collaboration.
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“There is a brain region called the striatum that responds when we get what’s called a primary reward. The striatum receives rich dopaminergic input from the midbrain and is involved in positive reinforcement and reward-based learning. When people experience fair treatment, this circuit is activated. But when they experience unfairness, their anterior insula is activated.
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Perceiving unfairness generates intense arousal of the limbic system, with all the attendant challenges this brings.
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Oxford Dictionary of English
- Bookmark Loc. 23167 | Added on Tuesday, September 06, 2011, 12:04 PM
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Prefrontal functioning recovers in late teens and reaches an adult state only in the early twenties.
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A sense of fairness can be a primary reward. A sense of unfairness can be a primary threat. Linking fairness and expectations helps explain the delight of the kindness of strangers, as well as the intense emotions of betrayal from people close to you. When you accept an unfair situation, you do so by labeling or reappraising. Men don’t experience empathy with someone who is in pain who has been unfair, whereas women do. Punishing unfair people can be rewarding, and not punishing unfairness can generate a sense of unfairness in itself.
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Be open and transparent about your dealings with people, remembering that unfairness is easy to trigger. Find ways to sense increasing fairness around you, perhaps by volunteering or donating money or resources regularly. Don’t let unfairness go unpunished.
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Watch out for fairness being linked to other issues such as certainty, autonomy, or relatedness, where you can get intense emotional
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People will go to great lengths to protect or increase their status. A sense of increasing status can be more rewarding than money, and a sense of decreasing status can feel like your life is in danger. Status is another primary reward or threat. Your brain manages status using roughly the same circuits used to manage other basic survival needs.
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schadenfreude.
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Status explains why people love to win arguments, even pointless ones. Status explains why people spend money on underwear from a designer fashion store, when similar clothes are available for a fraction of the price. It explains, at least in part, why thirty million people today play online games with no obvious benefits except playing for points to raise their status compared to that of others. Status probably even explains how Google, one of the world’s richest companies, gets thousands of people to work for free, doing work that computers can’t do: they get people to compete with one another on tasks such as labeling a photograph.
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A perceived threat to status feels as if it could come with terrible consequences. The response can be visceral, including a flood of cortisol to the blood and a rush of resources to the limbic system that inhibits clear thinking.
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A feeling of being less than other people activates the same brain regions as physical pain.
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Many of the arguments and conflicts at work, and in life, have status issues at their core. The more you can label status threats as they occur, in real time, the easier it will be to reappraise on the spot and respond more appropriately. The
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Status is rewarding not just when you have achieved high status, but also anytime you feel as if your status has increased, even in a small way. One study showed that saying to kids “good job” in a monotonous recorded voice activated the reward circuitry in them as much as a financial windfall. Even little status increases, say, from beating someone at a card game, feel great. We’re wired to feel rewarded by just about any incremental increase in status.
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Testosterone helps people focus, makes them feel strong and confident, and even improves sex drive.
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The ongoing fight for status has other downsides. While competition can make people focus, there will always be losers in a status war. It’s a zero sum game.
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So where can you get a nice burst of confidence-inducing, intelligence-boosting, performance-raising status around here, without harming children, animals, work colleagues, or yourself? There’s only one good (non-pharmaceutical) answer that I’ve found so far. It involves the idea of “playing against yourself.”
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self. “Your sense of self comes online around the same time in life when you have a sense of others. They are two sides of same coin,”
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Thinking about yourself and about others uses the same circuits. You can harness the power of the thrill of “beating the other guy” by making that other guy (or girl) you, without hurting anyone in the process.
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If Emily played the status card at all, trying to be better than her team, it would come off badly. But if she worked hard to improve herself, focusing on her own skill sets, without trying to better her peers, she might be less of a threat. To play against yourself gives you the chance to feel ever-increasing status, without threatening others. And if you share your progress (and challenges) with others, it can increase a sense of relatedness, too. I have a hunch that many successful people have worked all this out and play against themselves a lot.
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there are five domains of social experience that your brain treats the same as survival issues. These domains form a model, which I call the SCARF model, which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness.
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Status is a significant driver of behavior at work and across life experiences. A sense of status going up, even in a small way, activates your reward circuits. A sense of status going down activates your threat circuitry. Just speaking to your boss or a person of higher status generally activates a status threat. People pay a lot of attention to protecting and building their status, probably more to this than any other element of the SCARF model, at least in organizations. There is no one fixed status scale; there are virtually infinite ways of feeling better than others. When everyone is trying to be higher status than others there is a decrease in relatedness. Because we perceive ourselves using the same circuits we use when perceiving others, you can trick your brain into a status reward by playing against yourself. Playing against yourself increases your status without threatening others. Status is one of five major social domains that are all either primary rewards or threats, which form the SCARF model for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness. Some Things to Try Watch out for people’s status being threatened. Reduce status threats in others by lowering your status through sharing your own humanity or mistakes. Reduce status threats in others by giving people positive feedback. Find ways to play against yourself, and pay a lot of attention to any incremental improvements. The slightest feeling of improvement can generate a pleasant and helpful reward. Playing against yourself to improve your understanding of your own brain can be a powerful way of increasing your performance.
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The brain constantly changes based on external factors, but it can also be changed by shifting people’s attention. Shifting other people’s attention from a threat state to focusing on what you want them to focus on is the central challenge to creating real change.
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Giving others feedback is often the first strategy people use to facilitate change. Yet, surprisingly, giving feedback is rarely the right way to create real change.
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Performance review training manuals tell managers to give “constructive performance feedback.” The problem with “constructive performance feedback” is that, like a wolf sniffing a meal across a field, even a subtle status threat is picked up unconsciously by our deeply social brain, no matter how nicely it’s couched. As “constructive” as you try to make it, feedback packs a punch. The result is that most feedback conversations revolve around people defending themselves. There has to be a better way to facilitate change in others.
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Cars and software are linear systems. Problems at work, like corporations and people generally, are often complex and dynamic.
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The past has lots of certainty; the future, little.
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Once the rain starts, an alternative path would have been to solve a different problem, perhaps this one: “It’s raining. There are no taxis. Where will I find one?” This question would focus you on the external world instead of the internal one. Focused on the external, you would notice lots of occupied taxis and realize that you are close to a subway stop, where taxis might drop people off.
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to focus on the desired outcome (getting a taxi) rather than on the past. Attention went to your goal, rather than to your problem.
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The decision to focus on an outcome instead of a problem impacts brain functioning in several ways. First, when you focus on an outcome, you prime the brain to perceive information relevant to that outcome (find a taxi), rather than to notice information about the problem (not getting to the airport). You can’t be looking for solutions and problems at the same time. That would be like trying to hold two large numbers in mind at once, and trying both to add them up and to multiply them at the same moment. Your actors can play only one scene at a time. And if it’s a solution that’s needed, it’s more useful to prime your brain to notice information relevant to the solution
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When you focus on problems you are more likely to activate the emotions connected with those problems, which will create greater noise in the brain. This inhibits insight. Whereas focusing on solutions generates a toward state, because you desire something. You are seeking, not avoiding. This increases dopamine levels, which is useful for insight. And if you are expecting you might find a solution, these positive expectations help release even more dopamine.
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focusing on solutions is not the natural tendency of the brain. Solutions are generally untested, and thus uncertain.
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people without a strong director (or those whose threat response has pushed their director aside) will naturally tend to focus more on problems.
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The “aha” experience is so much more energizing than the “a-duh” experience. The positive buzz from an insight might have helped Eric push past the uncertainty implicit in doing something differently.
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As people are often already anxious when stuck at an impasse, and anxiety generally makes people’s views narrow and their brains noisier, it’s important to reduce people’s anxiety and increase their positive emotions—in other words, to shift them from an away state to a toward state. A great way to do this is using elements of the SCARF model.
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If you stop and think more deeply here, do you think you know what you need to do to resolve this? What quiet hunches do you have about a solution, deeper inside? How close to a solution are you? Which pathway to a solution would be best to follow here?
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The poor quality of feedback is one of the biggest complaints by employees everywhere. This is an unfortunate cycle that new managers often go through: To begin with, they give lots of feedback, thinking people will appreciate this. Then they discover how people are easily threatened by feedback. They notice the long arguments and wasting time, and soon learn to not give feedback, but to avoid it. Then, at some point, they are forced to give feedback—by a performance review, or a mandate from their own boss. So their next technique is to waffle—to not say much at all—to avoid threatening the other person.
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If you don’t practice vetoing your desire to solve other people’s problems, your default approach, it’s easy to waste time in unnecessary discussions driven by people protecting their status. When your objective is helping other people be effective, sometimes to move fastest you have to put on your own brakes.
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When you review your own work, there’s an incentive to convince yourself that the work is good. You
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Giving feedback often creates an intense threat response that doesn’t help people improve performance. The problem-solving approach may not be the most effective pathway to solutions. Providing suggestions often results in a lot of wasted time. Bringing people to their own insights is a fast way of getting people back on track. Some Things to Try Catch yourself when you go to give feedback, problem solve, or provide solutions. Help people think about their own thinking by focusing them on their own subtle internal thoughts, without getting into too much detail. Find ways to make it valuable for people to give themselves feedback; reward them for activating their
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Changing one’s own behavior is hard. A study found that only one in nine people who underwent heart surgery were able to change their lifestyle, and these people had the ultimate “motivation”—possible
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The carrot-and-stick approach draws from a field called behaviorism, which emerged in the 1930s. The field built on Igor Pavlov’s famous concept of the “conditioned response.” Associate the ringing of a bell with food, and a dog will soon learn to salivate at the sound of a bell alone. Many of the behaviorist techniques work well with animals and are still widely used, such as for training police dogs.
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Many neuroscientists now think of attention as being a type of synchrony, of the brain getting in tune and working as a unit. Synchrony is a technical word, which means that different neurons fire in similar ways at the same times.
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“Cells that fire together, wire together.”
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This idea that attention is the active ingredient that changes the brain is supported by a large body of research called neuroplasticity, the study of how the brain changes.
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“The power is in the focus,”
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“The act of observing, in and of itself, makes a difference, in the material world,”
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It seems that attention can quickly change the brain, if enough attention is paid to stimuli. It’s just that attention doesn’t tend to go easily to one place and stay there.
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Learning a new language, for example, is relatively easy; it’s just that you have to stop paying attention to your current language to create the new circuits. That’s why moving to France is the fastest way of learning to speak French—your attention is forced there all day long.
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The brain is mutable. It changes all the time, a disconcerting amount, in fact. It changes based on the lighting around you, the weather, what you eat, whom you talk to, the way you sit, even what you wear. The consistency of the brain is like custard, and its makeup is more like a forest than a computer, always alive, rustling, changing. One study showed that you probably don’t even use the same neurons to lift your finger now as you did two weeks ago. The brain is happy to change; it’s a happy-go-lucky free agent. It’s attention that’s the grumpy curmudgeon.
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It’s not hard to change your brain. You just need to put in enough effort to focus your attention in new ways. Your brain changes in a wide-scale way when you make life choices, such as the choice to learn the piano when you are young. Here you have systems that keep your attention focused, such as music exams to pass to impress your friends. However, as Doidge and others point out, your brain can also change in much more subtle ways, in far less time, even moment to moment. When you change your attention you are, according to Schwartz, facilitating “self-directed neuroplasticity.” You are rewiring your own brain. The director isn’t just good for your health and important for being effective at work, it’s a key ingredient in how you sculpt your brain in the long term. Putting all this together, all you need to do to change a culture, whether at home or at work, is focus other people’s attention in new ways long enough. That’s exactly right. But it’s also really, really difficult.
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Sir Winston Churchill once said, “I love to learn, but I hate to be taught.” If
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Self-directed neuroplasticity, the director monitoring and altering the show, may be the true heart of change.
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How do you “facilitate self-directed neuroplasticity” on a large scale? There appears to be three key components to this kind of change. First, you need to create a safe environment so that any threat response is minimized. Second, you need to help others focus their attention in just the right ways to create just the right new connections. Finally, to keep any new circuits alive, you have to get people coming back to pay attention to their new circuits over and again.
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The positive reward from positive public recognition can resonate with people for years.
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If you have a specific task you want someone to do, you might say, “Would you be willing to do this?” rather than “I want you to do this.” This simple change takes into account a sense of autonomy.
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Taking care of status, you might say, “You’re all doing great. I’m not here to attack you but to find ways of our becoming even better than we already are.” Taking care of certainty, you might say, “I only want to talk for fifteen minutes, and I am not looking for specific outcomes.” Taking care of autonomy, you might say, “Is that okay with you, if we focus on this right now?” Taking care of relatedness, you might share something about yourself on a human level. Taking care of fairness, you might be careful to point out that you have had the same conversation with everyone else on your team. As you lay all this out, the alarm bells in people’s heads start to quiet down, which increases your chances of focusing people’s attention in the direction you want.
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Many great leaders understand intuitively that they need to work hard to create a sense of safety in others. In this way, great leaders are often humble leaders, thereby reducing the status threat. Great leaders provide clear expectations and talk a lot about the future, helping to increase certainty. Great leaders let others take charge and make decisions, increasing autonomy. Great leaders often have a strong presence, which comes from working hard to be authentic and real with other people, to create a sense of relatedness. And great leaders keep their promises, taking care to be perceived as fair.
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On the other hand, ineffective leaders tend to make people feel even less safe, by being too directive, which attacks status. They are not clear with their goals and expectations, which impacts certainty. They micromanage, impacting autonomy, and don’t connect on a human level, so there’s little relatedness. And they often don’t understand the importance of fairness.
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Creating a sense of safety is the first step to transforming a culture, whether the culture involves two people at home or twenty thousand at work. Given that any change tends to bring a sense of threat on its own, changing a culture requires creating toward states everywhere you can. People will be paying attention either to you or to their fears. The stage isn’t big enough for both at once.
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Once you have people’s attention, next you need to help them focus it in just the right ways.
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A common strategy people use is to tell a story. A good story creates complex maps in the brain as people hold different characters and events on the stage. Stories have some “point,” some specific idea at their core, which the storyteller wants others to understand. The point often involves a surprise connection within the story, a character who learns something unexpected. In this way a story might be thought of as an “insight delivery device,” a mechanism for having people change their maps.
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An effective and more direct way to focus attention is simply to ask people the right question, to give them a gap to close. The brain is quite happy closing any gap, as long as it doesn’t take too much effort.
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Your goal is to ask your team questions that require them to make just the right new connections. The insights from the last scene about facilitating change in individuals apply here, too: the questions should be about solutions, not problems. In a group setting, it’s even easier to end up putting too much attention on problems and not enough on solutions.
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Setting the right goal can also increase status, by giving people small achievements to notice. The right goal can increase a sense of certainty by providing more clarity on objectives, and it can increase a sense of autonomy if people have a say in how they achieve the goal. Setting the right goal is like a gift that keeps on giving: you continue getting positive benefits all the while you head toward it.
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“There are toward goals and away goals,” Barrell explains, “and which one you use has quite an impact on performance. Toward goals have you visualize and create connections around where you are going. You are creating new connections. What’s interesting is you start to feel good at lower levels with toward goals. There are benefits earlier. Away goals have you visualize what can go wrong, which reactivates the emotions involved.” The trouble is, because problems come to mind so much easier than solutions, people are always setting away goals instead of toward goals. Also, problems are more certain than unknown solutions, and the brain naturally steers toward certainty. For these reasons and more, toward goals are rare, and setting them might require getting some help from someone else, such as a mentor or coach. The goal Emily tried to set with her family was an away goal: “not to fight.” When you set an away goal, you can end up paying attention to the negative emotions instead of making new connections. Lose weight, stop smoking, don’t drink: most of the New Year’s resolutions of the world are away goals.
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Attention changes the brain, but the brain pays attention to a lot of things. Real change requires repetition.
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I have a metaphor for thinking about attention density. Think of the brain as a garden, where it’s sunny all the time and rains naturally once in a while. If you want to grow some nice tomatoes, you first plant seedlings, which need careful daily watering. Once the plants are a bit hardy, to keep them growing, you should water them regularly. How often is the right amount? If you water once a year, it will probably wash everything away. Once a quarter won’t do much. Once a month will help, maybe. Once a week does make a difference to some plants, but watering twice a week seems to make a sustainable and noticeable difference. It seems the best technique for growing plants is what they do in hydroponic farms, which is to water them several times each day. I propose that creating healthy new circuits in the brain is not dissimilar. You need to pay regular attention.
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How do you get other people to pay regular attention to something that’s important to you? One of the best ways involves getting them to collaborate. Remember that the brain is eminently social, so if you can get a change you desire linked to the social world, you’re on the right track. Creating systems and processes that require people to talk about a project regularly can be as simple as bringing an idea up once a week and having people share their thoughts. Ideas, and brain circuits, come alive in conversation.
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If you spend a lot of time in cognitive tasks, your ability to have empathy with people reduces simply because that circuitry doesn’t get used much.
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Leaders who want to drive change more effectively may want to practice becoming more intelligent about their inner world as a first step. A great way to do this is to discover more about your own brain.
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While human change appears hard, change in the brain is constant. Focused attention changes the brain. Attention goes all too easily to the threat. Once you focus attention away from threat, you can create new connections with the right questions. Creating long-term change requires paying regular attention to deepen new circuits, especially when they are new. Some Things to Try Practice watching for people’s emotional state when you want to facilitate change. Don’t try to influence people when they are in a strong away state. Use elements of the SCARF model to shift people into a toward state. Practice using solution-focused questions that focus people’s attention directly on the specific circuits you want to bring to life. Invent ways to have people pay repeated attention to new
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1, you discovered that being able to plan, organize, prioritize, create, or do just about anything except repetitive mental tasks requires using a small, fragile, and energy-hungry brain region, the prefrontal cortex. You discovered the underpinning biology that explains why it’s so hard to be in a zone of peak performance and how easily distracted the brain is. You also learned that sometimes the prefrontal cortex is the problem, and you need the ability to shut it down if you want to be more creative. Act 1 was all about learning to work around the limits of your conscious mental processes.
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In act 2, you explored how the brain is built to minimize danger and maximize reward. This occurs as a toward and away system of emotions, driven by the limbic region of the brain. You saw how toward states tend to be more productive for doing good work, but also discovered how easily, quickly, and intensely the away state can be. You saw how your thinking capacity can be reduced by remembering past threatening situations, by uncertainty, and by a feeling of lack of autonomy. You discovered two techniques that can help wrestle back control from an overly aroused limbic system: labeling and reappraisal. You also learned about the dramatic impact of expectations on experience. In other words, in act 2 you discovered that your brain’s drive to keep you alive sometimes comes with unintended consequences. These consequences can include reducing your mental performance, and can even decreasing your lifespan. In act 3, you got to see the social world from the brain’s perspective, discovering that social domains such as relatedness, fairness, and status can generate either a toward or away response with the same intensity and using the same circuitry as a reward or danger for one’s life. You got to see that a huge amount of human behavior is driven, largely unconsciously, by the desire to minimize social dangers and maximize social rewards. In act 4, you found out why it’s so hard to change other people, because of our natural tendency to focus on problems and make suggestions. You explored a new way of interacting, based on facilitating insights about solutions in others. You looked at what is involved in changing a culture, and explored how the real driver of change is people changing their own brain. You discovered how to help create cultural change by creating a greater sense of safety in ways that deeply impact the brain, then by enabling new connections to occur, and then by helping new circuits to be embedded.
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As your director becomes stronger, it gets easier to decide what to put on your stage and what to keep off; when to pay close attention to something, and when to step back and allow loose connections to occur instead; how to get decisions onto your stage in the right order, and get them off the stage quickly; how to quiet your mind, to listen to the more subtle signals coming from the two million environmental cues that your brain might be tapping into at any moment, instead of just the forty you can perceive consciously.
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If the ideas in this book exist not just in your head but also in the brains of the people around you, the ideas will be easier to find when you need them.
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A final word, a brain-based farewell greeting: May your cortisol levels stay low, your dopamine levels high, your oxytocin run thick and rich, your serotonin build to a lovely plateau, and your ability to watch your brain at work keep you fascinated until your last breath. I wish you well on your journey.
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