How lifting the lid on the brain can help you rethink the way you train and motivate staff
They use around a fifth of the calories we consume and a quarter of the oxygen we breathe. But we understand less about the inner workings of our brains than we do our calf muscles. Bridging that gap could transform our understanding of the way people work, with a resulting revolution in training, change management and OD as science-savvy HR and L&D professionals make better decisions based on insight and, in some cases, “pre-sight”. It’s all being made possible because the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) – an advanced form of brain scanning – shows which part of our brains are active at any given time. It shows us what genuinely changes our thinking (rather than just what we think changes it). As occupational psychologist Gary Luffman of think.change consulting says: “Our methods of investigation have come on in leaps and bounds, and we’re getting a much better understanding of what different parts of the brain can do. But we’re still only at the beginning of our knowledge.” So which neuroscientific breakthroughs could really make a difference in the workplace?1 Neuroplasticity (why your brain never stops growing) Until recently, our brains were viewed as fully formed by the time we reached our early twenties. Childhood neurogenesis (frenzied formation of new brain cells) ushered in a period of synaptic pruning in adolescence, as little-used neural pathways became redundant, followed by a slow descent thereafter. It took determined neuroscientists and a group of London cabbies to prove the theory wrong. Liz Gould spent eight years studying the brains of marmosets to show they were developing extra neurons (cells responsible for transmitting data across the brain) during their lifespans. Then researchers at UCL found that cabbies who rigorously learnt London’s streets over the course of decades had a larger hippocampus than bus drivers following a linear route, also pointing to neural development over time. Similar tests on violinists (larger right sensorimotor cortex than non-musicians) and lawyers confirm the effect, and show that a taxing job enhances our brain chemistry. Extreme stress, says Gould, has the opposite effect. “Our neurons are constantly updating to help us cope with our environment,” says Luffman. “Knowing neuroplasticity is possible has huge implications for coaching. It means there’s no such thing as not being able to teach old dogs new tricks. You just need to find the right mechanism to do it.” Older employees’ rate of synaptogenesis – formation of new links between neurons – may be slower than millennials’, but it never switches off. Neuroplasticity also makes “brain training” a reality, says Luffman: “If you want to be more positive, or interpret something differently, you can think long and hard about it.” The brain doesn’t distinguish between thinking and doing (in tests, subjects who merely thought about lifting weights still added muscle mass). It makes positive visualisation more than just New Age hyperbole. Gould, however, has a more intriguing technique – learning to juggle, she has found, stretches our minds to new limits. 2 Egocentricity bias (other people know stuff too, you know) A big problem we face in everyday interactions is thinking we know better than other people. That’s why 94 per cent of us believe we have an above-average IQ, or 80 per cent are convinced we are better drivers than others. When we’re teaching, coaching or managing, such egocentricity bias creates a real headache: we pay attention only to people who agree with us, or who are so similar to us we think they’ll affirm our views. We also overstate the degree to which people are the same in order to find common ground and feed the bias, says Geoff Bird, a cognitive neuroscientist at King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry. “We are using less of our conscious mind when we make assumptions about people,” he points out – which is why it’s easy to ignore dissenters or people who are hard to reach. Bird says bias often befalls reward managers: because they assume others share their motivations, the benefits packages they design are invariably geared towards their own needs (which often, he adds, tend to involve pensions). Egocentricity bias is the enemy of genuine empathy (stepping into someone else’s mindset), which develops through “social biofeedback” in our formative years. Our parents mirror the emotions we are feeling (looking sad when we cry, or showing pleasure when we laugh). At times like this, the right supramarginal gyrus may be stimulated as we take on a new perspective. But Bird’s work with alexithymia sufferers (who cannot recognise their own emotions) suggests adults without sufficient empathy can still avoid egocentricity bias: actively doing the opposite of someone else (crossing your right leg when they cross their left, for example) over a period of time seems to put us in the right frame of mind to recognise difference. He suggests trying it as an exercise before a training session or meeting when you need to make a connection. 3 The mentalising system (or ‘How to win friends and influence people’) Why are some people at ease around others – gliding effortlessly through social situations and making friends at the drop of a hat – while others are awkward, Radiohead-listening loners? The answer lies in the mentalising system – a way of processing the signals we receive from other people, and our status in relation to them, which is entirely separate from more formal learning systems for taking on board facts and figures. Mentalising takes place in parts of the brain – notably the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex – that only humans have and is in essence a form of “mindreading”. “The mentalising system is coherently active from the moment we are born, and reliably comes on whenever we have downtime – even when we dream,” says neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman in his new book, Social. “Our brain sets itself to see the world socially, presumably because of the great benefits of doing so.” Mentalising isn’t linked to conventional intelligence (and it may be a more useful idea than “emotional intelligence”). People who are good at it tend to be persuasive, inspiring and motivating. Those without it rely on being aggressively dominant to succeed, and are poorer learners because theydon’t process information they pick up from others: “They don’t think it’s worthless but they are much worse at calculating its value, so they tend to reject it,” says Bird. L&D professionals would do well to identify people who are good at mentalising, says Bird. They’re likely to learn well on the job, and benefit from peer support and mentoring (forms of “social learning”) because they are open to others. Those without such skills may need more formal learning techniques. Cognitive tests where respondents sort data from different sources can give an indication of how strong you are at social learning. And, says Lieberman, they might just keep you sane: he believes friendships are key to being “healthier and happier”. 4 Generalisation decrement (or why you forget everything you learn) If you want someone to learn something new, role-modelling is far and away the best method. The neuroscientific principles behind it were first determined by Giocomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma 20 or so years ago. He saw that when one monkey watched another monkey reach for a grape, the part of the brain that performs the same action was activated in its own simian shell. The “mirror neurons” in play help embed practical lessons in our mind, and are important in decoding body language – which is why presenters can reinforce their message through the way they deliver it. “Mirror neurons give us a biological basis for saying role modelling is one of the best methods for learning,” says Eugene Sadler-Smith, professor of organisational behaviour at the University of Surrey. But that isn’t the end of the story. “While it’s important to observe, it’s equally important to consolidate the neural connections by doing it for yourself.” If we don’t, we risk suffering the generalisation decrement – the difference between the condition of training and the condition of testing. In other words, our brains struggle to apply things we understand in one context (a training course) in another (our working life). The decrement is the reason addicts often lapse into their old ways as soon as they complete rehab, or why we can’t place people when we see them outside their usual context (known in scientific circles as the “butcher on the bus” conundrum). It means the recent trend for gamification (learning through game-like technologies) may need tempering with further research. When we bridge the decrement, the parahippocampal gyrus seems to be heavily involved. Giving visual demonstrations of concepts and how they’ll be employed in the workplace can help provide context to learning, but Bird says it’s just as effective to mix up the locations and times of day for training or coaching, so people’s learning becomes less context-dependent. 5 Unconscious thought theory (or the power of thinking without thinking) Forget – if you haven’t already – any business lessons you thought you could learn from Lord Sugar. Because when it comes to stimulating good ideas, The Apprentice has got it all wrong. Sugar and his cohorts force people to innovate while they’re being watched and judged, with the clock ticking, all of which is guaranteed to yield truly abysmal breakthroughs (advertising cereal in your Y-fronts, anyone?) Unconscious thought theory tells us we solve our thorniest problems when we’re not trying – the so-called Eureka moment. It comes about, says Sadler-Smith, because we’re putting things on the back burner: “Our rational mind is excellent at analytical and convergent thinking, but less good at creative stuff. But its silent partner, our intuitive mind, is processing data even when we’re not aware of it, behind the screen of our conscious awareness. When neural activation levels reach a threshold, solutions often emerge as a ‘light bulb’ moment.” During this “thinking without thinking”, the anterior superior temporal gyrus is working double time, processing data and reaching its own conclusions by connecting previously disparate concepts. Certain things help: unrelated mental stimulation (doing a puzzle), a positive mood (“it promotes divergent thinking,” says Sadler-Smith), plenty of sleep (the temporal gyrus crunches more data at night) and even chocolate.Most of all, says Sadler-Smith, you need to be informed on your subject matter: “Creativity is about joining the dots, but you need to have the dots to join in the first place.” It’s a clarion call that is equally relevant to HR: by equipping ourselves with the latest knowledge and the best emerging breakthroughs, it’s possible to stay one step ahead – without needing your own fMRI scanner.
✶ Jacqui Grey from the NeuroLeadership Group is speaking at this year’s CIPD Annual Conference, taking place on 6-7 November in Manchester cipd.co.uk/cande/annual ✶ Neuroscience for leaders and managers – a one-day CIPD course bit.ly/brainPM