How are we just like Congressman Weiner?

Like you all, I am both oddly perturbed that Congressman Weiner’s sexting scandal is front page news and mildly intrigued.  No, not from some perverted visual curiosity of the inappropriate pictures, but from a neuroscience side—-this incident, for me, is rich with key commentaries about:

• Human Decision Making -  What is optimal/desired, and what is “normal”?
• Morality/Ethics – How does this kind of thing rank in the overview of “what matters” in human decency amongst other
• Job Description for Political Office – Characteristics/traits of the ideal candidate?

While many are responding on the level of citing reasons for resignation or how best to Tweet and do social networking with better judgment, I feel as the brain guy i am circling a different orbit all alone.  That is, I feel compelled to look a bit deeper at what the implicit assumption is that we are breezing over, so as to open up a new way of looking at an age old dilemma. To me, the implicit assumption underneath the outrage is:

“An elected official entrusted by the people to serve and lead is at risk of doing so effectively and with trust by virtue of making these type of decisions”

Though people may having different adjectives and phrases they would want to add or subtract here, it would seem that the point would remain—-any justification of removal from office hinges on the premise that in some substantive way this scandal represents a significant aberration from the ‘norm’

But what if our ‘normal” isn’t normal?

That is, what if what we are comparing Congressman Weiner to a fictitious ideal? Before people jump down my throat that I am condoning or even encouraging such behavior I am not. But I am saying once one studies neuroscience and takes a look under the hood a bit on what is true and what is not about human decision making processes, one yawns at such decisions.  And to me, there is a difference between endorsing behavior and saying that the decision to embark on that behavior is a result of processes IN US ALL. And it is in this light, that I would like to share a few facts about information processing and the brain that many CNN commentators know nothing about and yet if they did could radically change how we view politicians, ourselves, and our sense of what is “normal”.

1.  There is no unified “one self” that should be coherent in its identity.  If you think about it, at the core of the disdain for Congressman Weiner’s behavior is a belief that there could be no possible way a loving husband who has a pregnant wife could be also doing something like perpetuating multiple online relationships with women.  That such a pattern of behavior would be alarming and likely worthy of some addiction treatment or certainly psychological counseling.  Though I am not in a position to make any such claims, I can say there is another theory explaining this behavior—-as Prof Kurzban from the University of Pennsylvania explains in his work, the mind is modular in nature and has competing, contradictory processes going off all the time with no “one” master self running the show.  This has been proven in many neuroscience circles and yet we are persistent in the myth that there is this “I” separate from dissonant-reducing processes that actually drive our decisions.

2. That truth and transparency are not the same thing. Much of the hoopla around this ordeal with the Congressman centers around frequent uses of this word “transparency”, as if its the mother of all words.  Whether I am listening to a commentator chide the Congressman for not being “transparent” early on as he should have been or a tutorial about what you should or shouldnt be transparent about when Tweeting, they are superficial arguments, akin to arguing over what interior design of a car is more optimal while ignoring it has only 3 wheels.  You see, once you study the brain, you realize self-deception is inherently part of the whole game of what it means to be conscious.  That heuristics are developed to make sense of the world that deny much of the real world data of what is actually happening around you. To me, truth is a greater construct than transparency but we intermingle these words haphazardly like they are the same. They are not. If one cared to know about the truth of how the brain works, well, quickly it would put to rest fruitless dialogue about “the need to be transparent.” The fact is truth about truth sucks—and it is easier to talk about safer terms.

3. That not only it is possible to be a great Congressman and sext, but that all contradictory behavior needs to have better systems of thinking to accomodate the “why” behind it. Look, I am not advocating deviant behavior. But I am saying that the inner and the outer world that we have grown so comfortable to shame and judge is inherently in us all. If we dont sext, we carry pride and ego illusions that distort our actions. If we dont father a child outside our marriage like John Edwards,  we may love withdraw from the one we shouldnt.  Or, we just may be a psychologist talking mental health practices all day in therapy and have an anger issue with our spouse.  If there were reality shows that showed every devout and honored profession that we entrust out there in an “after hours capacity”, what would we see?

Something more ghastly than a weiner.  Our own self.

This past week a wonderful article entitled “NFL is Head-Serious About Safety” written by noted sports columnist Rick Telander came out in the Chicago Sun Times.  In this excellent call-to-action piece of press, he tells the story of the NFL becoming more attuned to the subtle yet substantial effects that a blow to the head can have on a football player’s health.  As someone who has conducted hundreds and hundreds of neuropsychological evaluations, I can personally attest to the dramatic ways cortical damage or bruising of the brain can have on a wide array of aspects touching on emotional and physical health. It is about time that public awareness increased regarding this growing problem, and I applaud the NFL for organizing committees and various dialogues looking to make a radical culture change around all aspects of the game: from health history data to equipment modifications.

I invite readers consider more closely the topic of brain development in professional athletes. What do I mean by this? For years, prior to today’s neuro “a-ha!” moment, we have seen peak performance questions limited to a realm mostly called “performance enhancement.”  If you asked any elite athlete what word associations come to mind when you say this phrase you would get responses like:

• mental health
• focus/concentration
• winning at the mental game
• psychological tools
• harnessing the power of the mind

Doing a performance enhancement search for resources on Amazon.com shows a radical preference of thought towards mentalism: if you put the word “mind’ in front of “performance enchancement,” as opposed to “brain,” you get nearly four times as many hits to choose from. In my job as a neuroscience-based consultant working with high-performers worldwide, I can tell you that there is a huge paradigm shift in the making, and it has to do with the brain – not the mind – holding most of the secrets to mastery, both on and off the field/court.  And here is the kicker: this is true with or without prior head injuries or concussions.  When I conducted a random sampling nationally of psychologists, including sports psychologists, over 50% of these professionals commented that the brain was mostly influential in high impact situations, but that working with the “mental aspects” was something different, and highly generalizable to most athletic situations where behavior change or performance improvements were needed. It is as if a Descartes-like dualism is rearing its ugly head, ignoring neuroscience research that has shown time and time again consciousness is a matter of the brain. Consider the irony: sports psychology choosing to ignore the body, as though the brain were not as much a part of the body as are the muscles and bones of an athlete.

But this is not surprising. Most PhD programs in psychology teach brain-based information only around psychiatric disorders, as if to imply the brain can not have impairments of thinking “under the 68% of the bell curve” where many “normals” find themselves. My work has confronted this myth head-on, and has focused on promoting innovative brain-based technologies for use in uncovering basic decisional illusions that most psychological performance enhancement work misses, and that when fixed could make “brain prevention and optimization” more of a standard phrase.  Though I am glad that concern about head injuries is bringing brain impairments to the forefront of awareness, it is time to acknowledge the role of neuroscience in the brain’s decision-making even before a head injury.  Without a brain-centric performance philosophy that addresses both sides of the continuum (optimization and impairment), we will be shuffling deck chairs on the neuro-Titanic: for the brain is wired to feel correct, not to be truly effective in its decision-making.  This is hardwired and not necessarily impact-related.  With a plot twist like that, you are destined to write many a harrowing athlete story, some of which we have seen in the headlines from Tiger to Zambrano to Roethlisberger.  Even more of such stories remain imperceptible to us, expressed only in the thought bubbles above the heads of athletes: things that do not get spoken, yet create situations of ambivalence or “stuckness.”  These athletes are shuffled around, ignored, or fall victim to rationalizations that their sheer willpower can fix their problems.

So, in the interests of blowing up the NFL brain even more, beyond the “good fire” that was started by Rick Telander’s recent article, here are 3 radical brain truths that professional sports cannot ignore any longer:

1.      What got you here won’t get you there.  This great statement I first heard from my executive coaching colleague, Marshall Goldsmith, in his brilliant book of the same name.  In this brain dialogue, it holds much truth. Most transformational moments in people’s lives have an invisible train track switch that is tricky to flip because it is usually hidden under a half-truth that we buy into and has helped us solve many similar problems at other points in time. Effort, hard work, focus, or concentration all seem at these instances to do the opposite of what is needed. And many times working on visualizations and imagery won’t get you out of it.  Most of us are walking around with imbalanced brains from emotional traumas and compulsive patterns that we have overcompensated for and called normal, in much the same way we pull our steering wheel to compensate for a car out of alignment. There are innovative brain-based procedures that help set that under-the-consciousness radar straight way before we use words and therapy to grow the change we desire.

2.      Most of human behavior is predictably irrational without head injury complications.  This is a critical point to understand, for it screams out the hidden assumption that brain issues are for those impaired; and that if you are not impaired then you must be normal; and if you are normal, then you are rational and logical.  Most of the training I received in psychotherapy really followed this logic, as I was supposed to flag disorders that needed intervention and treatment, and then those outside that arena, well, we could get together each week in sessions and talk about strategies to change.  Little did I know I was merely describing the water as they drowned and calling it “success,” as people would leave the office, do something different, make a rationalization the next time that reduced the dissonance, and we would start the circle all over again.  Neuroscience and behavioral economics have helped us finally understand that the “deciding brain” is quite different than the brain that engages in supposed rational dialogues.  New assessment tools have been designed in order to increase the meta-cognition that we use in my work to help close this gap.

3.      There is another side to high performance that rarely gets acknowledged and worked with. Be careful what you wish for it may come true. Most performance enhancement interventions solve a problem linearly and do not include systems thinking. That is not a fault, per se, but it is an accurate perception, for that is what these people are hired to do. But many times, as systems thinkers have taught us, changing one wheel without working with the other 10, say, in a life system can cause some inadvertent consequences. The brain’s mechanisms and communications are a system following many laws of homeostasis. If you push down on an air bubble, it is going to even out and pop up somewhere else.  High performance lifestyles/goals and decision-making grounded in sustainable, reality-based perceptions have grown oddly apart from each other, as we have seen in the headlines of derailed, at-risk athletes. Understanding the distinctions between pleasure and joy, and understanding the neurological curveballs thrown to the consciousness of an athlete, are issues rarely addressed in traditional treatment programs and talk therapy.  Such understanding cannot be achieved without working with the undertow of the limbic system that is helping call the emotional shots.

Perhaps all brains are being called to grow to a higher level here: the athletes and the administrating bodies around them that both have to use their brains in order to conceptualize what is best for making lasting change and improvements in the self that is in and around the world of the game.

When news hit recently about the unnerving release of nearly 250,000 sensitive and top secret cables via the whistle blower website, WikiLeaks, the White House acted fast to do damage control—and understandably so.  Representatives from 186 countries were contacted by the administration in attempts to manage the unintended consequences of this inevitably perceived trust issue—a natural consequence when our internal dialogue about how we really feel about someone gets spilled.  Responding to the slew of insults released in these documents about world leaders, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton responded positively and assertively, assuring America that by no means does this event affect how the U.S. conducts foreign policy.

Hmm. Really?

Though certainly I understand the protocol responses officials must make, I am curious what the brains of foreign leaders think about that potentially naïve statement. Though we can’t interview solely the brain without getting the conscious person involved (lol), we do have techniques in neuroscience to extrapolate a bit on that notion, and to see just what happens to the brain when trust is violated. For instance, what would a qEEG or fMRI scan show about the brain of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi  in a pre and post fashion after being now coined as “feckless, vain, and ineffective as a modern European leader”?   Or when asked to comment through a voice stress analyzer about what it felt like to be called “risk aversive and rarely creative” would the German leader Angela Merkel minimize and rationalize its effect? Chances are, when we read these imaginative scenarios, they do bring us closer to the realization that there may be a disconnect between how we assess “trust truth” linguistically and whether there is a need for a whole ‘nother level of thinking and assessment methodologies for inherently complex, geopolitical issues.

That is, I do believe there is an irrational wish we all carry in our hearts and brains that what people say about us matches what is the truth and many of the world’s personal and corporate development strategies all rest on this assumption in many ways. Sure, we have paper and pencil tests to get at personality, team, and culture factors, but these tests rarely go to a level underneath our conscious rationalizing-addictive brain.  Most people are primed to be innovative at work yet the means by which they are asked to do so get quietly undone by the way cultures seek it and the system it has to be integrated in to.  And even if we tolerate the fact that there is a known disconnect between words and what is the bubble above our head, I am convinced in coaching and consulting work that many cognitive biases affect who and when we give the “get out of jail free” card to (i.e., leading to accountability issues) and who we verbally call out in a righteous way (i.e., leading to emotionally misguided efforts to be “right”).  While the WikiLeak crisis brings issues of increased security to most of the internet and chat room dialogue around what is needed to solve this, I seem to be taking the mental road less traveled here—that that response is furthering the same cognitive illusions that got us in this debacle in the first place as it denies again the rational/irrational battles of the brain.
While there may be readers at this point of this article that are about to say preemptively that I am about to advocate this panacea of having politicians speak transparently the bubbles above their head while skipping in gardens together, I actually am saying something different.  That is, there will always be this split but acknowledging the split upfront and not something that gets equated to a certain type of high risk person or procedure is likely the more effective route to go. Why? For then your policies and procedures will be adjusted to test and assess on this meta-level of understanding upfront without irrational judgment, versus describing the water to people while they drown on the backside and calling that success.  I argue this leak is merely an extreme version of a fundamental disconnect in us all that needs ontological tightening on the front end of our culture building, leadership thinking, dialogue, and content development for training world leaders.  One of my friends and colleagues, John Mroz,  is President and CEO of the EastWest Institute which, in their words, is “an international, non-partisan, not-for-profit policy organization focused on confronting critical challenges that endanger peace.”  Their critical work in what we would understand as the facilitation of solutions around geopolitical impasses and conflicts is world class. What makes them extraordinary is that they have seen the value of incorporating the thinking of a neuroscience trained professional in how the brain understands notions of trust, a huge assumption in the work they do every day.  Asking questions about whether our current strategies in dialogue actually match the reality of the brain is primary. Such as, investigating more what the brain does in its own internal negotiations while externally negotiating—-that is, to neurologically “save face” while selling to others an illusory concession brings notions of both dissonance-reduction as a primary driver for the ego-based brain, as well as the receiver’s bias to see partial truths as whole truths.  Most facilitation processes don’t dive this deep for the absence of a negative is quickly and mistakenly taken as a presence of a positive. Christophe Morin and Patrick Renvoise, colleagues of mine in the neuroscience side of the sales effectiveness industry, have articulated a wonderfully clean and clear model of this when they speak of how to incorporate this forgotten aspect of marketing—selling to the pain of the primal brain, not to the wishes and needs articulated on the surface of the rational brain. We will never “get there” if we settle on what people say.
So what could the U.S. do if there was a Chief Neuroscientist Office in the White House, in the wake of this WikiLeak crisis and they wanted to assist the President in building up the psychological immunity system around strategy?

• Do a brain autopsy on your volumes of protocols.  That is, let a neuroscience-based practitioner trained in the say/do gap differentials of humanity write a meta-level appendix, so to speak, to the instructions noted. What are irrational wishes that suppress natural drivers designed to always be the “paper that covers rock” over your protocols? How much of those protocols are truly designed in the egocentric brain to truly reduce our own anxiety? Seeking the dissonance in flipping assumptions over can be radically uncomfortable yet necessary in getting the ending out of the way in the beginning.

• Have a neuroscience-oriented process facilitator with appropriate security clearance that is trained in linguistics and language biases observe meetings, record the dialogue, and analyze the scripts. Though most behind-the-scenes analysts in Washington are indeed psychologically and quantitatively trained to do the appropriate research to solve complex problems, I have yet to run across the bold addition of a brain guy here.  We usually are trained to find what we know how to find when seeking analytical solutions, but what about using someone who critiques the act of finding itself? Wouldn’t this be appropriately honoring Einstein’s call to innovation when he stated no problem will be solved on the same level of thinking it was created on? Perhaps we have implicitly accepted a layer of knowledge finding that in and of itself is inherently faulty, way before we get to the answer that is usually driven by a confirmation bias anyways.

• Know thyself, but not too well. While most political leaders will claim they have undergone leadership training, show emotionally intelligent and engaging styles, and have the adequate self-awareness to take on a fruitful cause for humanity, after assessing and coaching many high performers, I do not believe this to be true. But the kicker? It has nothing to do with the media slamming case, typically, of pointing out THEIR unique hypocrisy; it has to do with the fundamental denial that we are all hypocrites from an intention-to-action perspective and that is just “what is.”  Why is this threatening to admit when science has already proven that our consciousness to why we do what we do is in many ways a post-hoc explanation of something that was already initiated by neuro impulses? Perhaps media would never have someone like me on a CNN-like talk show because I would unplug the merry-go-round and the carnival lights that in many ways we seem to need in our high stimulation-based world.  Who knows.  But I would recommend nonetheless in settings like this a radical reformulation of leadership training for politicians, one that teaches them to not be so confident in their knowledge of self and be confident externally with that essential truth.  This leadership dialectic would save the world.

True, this my wish list.  But, heck, I can dream… it is Christmas time, right?

When news of nutrition professor Mark Haub’s amazing junk food only 27 pound weight loss over two months hit the airwaves, I know I scratched my head. And making that spot a bit red, I scratched some more when I heard that not only he lost the weight but that his bad cholesterol went down by 20%, his good cholesterol went up 30%, and his triglycerides were reduced by 39%. True, there was a protein shake and some nibbled-on veggies thrown in there during the day, but for the most 2/3 of this guy’s calories and food choices were coming from what we all would deem “bad” stuff.

When I made it to the office that day, for some reason I was compelled to pull Steven Johnson’s pop culture rebel of a book, Everything Bad Is Good For You, a book that makes a rather compelling argument from a brain side of things why TV these days may be a neural-network-complexity-enhancer when we think of the simultaneous levels of processing reality TV has forced our brains to evolve to when being “entertained”. Perhaps we are now subliminally doing cross training on our prefrontal cortexes while we shudder and shriek with things like “can you believe they just did that?” Similarly, this new study that challenges potentially some aspects of what healthy eating means begs an application article this to link some of the hidden neurophilosophical nuggets we all burn through too quickly to notice, in ways that echo the empty junk food calorie that may get a bad rap. So let’s unpack a few takeaways from this study and see what can be said about wisdom, behavior change, and other life lessons.

1) Be careful what you wish for it may come true…including weight loss. This timeless statement has always reminded us to keep in mind what we go after and if how we go after things matters as much as what we attain from it. Mark Haub’s study conveys rather clearly weight loss is a pure calories game in the short term, but we know not what the long term ramifications of something like this may be. But what I think is most amazing, given what I have studied about the prevalence of strategic half-truths that confound much of strategic thinking at home and at work is how the perpetuation of something potentially bad for us always gets paired with one primary, desired positive side effect (the weight loss) but a secondary positive effect that is usually unexpected and arguably beyond our grasp of reason (the internal health parameters of cholesterol getting affected). This latter effect gets relegated by our brains as being for some reason more powerful and gets overinflated as the correlation to why we may continue that behavior longer than we ought to. I have spoken to many people randomly about this study and the secondary effect seems more related to why someone would do this and continue to do this type of diet over a long haul. Such over inflation prevents the brain from seeing new data, new context, and new invitations for change. For we know not here a “third level of consequences.”

2) I don’t know. Man, do I love this phrase. When I was curious if Mark Haub would get bit by the sensationalism bug after this study, he pulled back. In a very genuine way, you could read and hear the conflict within     him as he shared the results of this study. This “both/and-ness” of a guru who shares his new finding and yet affectively lives in the tension of what we tend to do when we get addicted to knowing—-this was the presence I felt in getting inside this guy’s research announcement. To me, this was as amazing as the result itself. You see, most limitations of research get put rather automatically to the conclusions section of a research paper, and if you read one of these peer reviewed articles they read very “cognitively”and you get a sense one is just listing them just because they are compelled to do so. I think Mark goes one step beyond in inviting in the ambivalence as not a limitation but as something to be learned from as well as perhaps a wisdom nugget in and of itself.

3) Eating healthy and being healthy may not be the same thing. When Mark Haub alluded that he had tried diets that were healthier in food choices (grains, veggies, fruits, etc) he tended to not lose weight and he actually ate more. This to me begs two philosophical questions: Is eating more necessarily undesirable? And is too much of something good potentially undesirable? The answer is likely sometimes yes, sometimes no for both. Eating more when done right may not have us lose weight but may decrease long term risk of cancer. And taking “one right, good thing” and overdoing it is always foolish in a world rich with complexities and systems that need balancing, eccentricities, and ultimately authenticity. Take it from me. I was a shrink for years and if “unconditional positive regard” and empathy was a legume, well, let’s say I swallowed much of this strategic teaching of how to connect with people almost to a belly-distending fault. For I was not taught about the humility of being an expert, and instead turned EQ into a strategic conversational process that lost heart slowly over the years. And to keep one in a self-indulgent fog, do not worry—there was always someone calling you brilliant regardless, thereby keeping you in the comfort of your “one food diet.”

Perhaps this study holds more wisdom than we think.  Nothing junky about it.  Crème-filled wisdom in a Twinkie….

The internet now is buzzing with inspiring lessons derived from the 33 Chilean miners trapped 69 days some 2000 feet below the surface who were saved last week in Chile. And this is understandably so, as so much of this ordeal is way beyond our imagination. Yet while much of their decision making is likely outside of our grasp of our understanding, the belief-making conscious brain that love to “know at all costs” has been rearing its ugly head with half-truths in posts that claim statements such as:

• Their experience was an exercise in consummate teamwork

 • People who succeed, much like these miners, have a tenacious capacity to focus on goals

 • Since every miner had a distinct role/job, discipline played a big part in why they were able to make it as long as they did

 • It takes adversity to bring out our best

 • Leadership is something that transcends just organizational goals

While one can not say that these lessons were not literally in some way, shape or form correlated to the decision making processes that kept them all in a sustainable disposition, it is equally possible that something outside of the motivational spirit we have come to love in this country as ‘god” could be more at play here. As Barbara Ehrenreich notes in her brilliant book Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America we all have a propensity to orient to an optimum that exemplifies itself as primarily a stellar positive attitude;but ironically this could be a myopic piece of cognitive foolery, growing stronger inadvertently in and through the human element forgotten in management and up through the current recessional effects:

“Between 1981 and 2003 , about 30 million about full time American workers lost their jobs in corporate downsizings….Downsizing did not, of course, increase the number of salespeople, but it did increase the number of people who were encouraged to THINK of themselves as salespeople. In the hazardous new corporate workplace, everyone was encouraged to engage in a continual sales effort, selling him or herself. As anthropologist Charles N. Darrah put it, the white collar worker had become a ‘bundle of skills…who can move freely between [workplace] settings, carrying his or her skills like so much luggage.’ But he or she could hope to move ‘freely’ only by constantly working on and burnishing what Tom Peters termed ‘the brand called you.’ No longer were you to think of yourself as an ‘employee;’ you were ‘a brand that shouts distinction, commitment, passion!’…Everyone, from software writer to accountant, was now subject to the same insecurities as the ‘lonely salesman’ once targeted by Norman Vincent Peale…The motivation industry could not repair this new reality. All it could do was offer to change how one THOUGHT about it….”

Was this position stated by Barbara Ehrenreich off base or could this cognitive phenomenon indicate a shift in thinking that permeated pop culture, including what fuels our responses to inspirational stories like the miners’ rescue? I believe the latter to be true and it appears neuroscience does as well. It may be appropriate to have some skepticism to the feel-good understandings of some events of this world, only in the sense of the attributions we make around the powerful thoughts changing reality; or better said, jumping over the said impossible through the immense powers of the brain’s mysterious frontiers. Such an implied notion is actually housed inside the quantum physics world which has been wonderfully exploited by the self help industry, making millions and millions of dollars off of this half-truth now called “the law of attraction.” I am sorry, Mr. Newton, your laws are now on the level of The Secret. 

But don’t cry just yet Isaac. It appears that there has been a clever misuse of science in getting this Law of Attraction validated. You see, for this quantum level of the world to merge with the world of thoughts, the neurotransmitter levels of reality would need to be at the level of what constitutes of quantum level of impact. This quantum distinction however is WAY smaller the neuro-world in our heads. You see, for something to be classified as quantum oriented it has to be on the level of Planck’s constant which is way beyond super small. The world of the neuron is two orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to be impactful.

 Since this is true, and this quantum level of changing the world through your thoughts is a bit over rated, what could account for the extraordinary mental efforts of the miners below the surface of the earth? In my opinion, we have to look beyond the surface, beyond the emotions and half-truths, and beyond what merely makes sense. As much brain research has shown, the unconscious is running the show a lot more than what our post-hoc rationalizations say about that fact. These affirmations are usually couched in worldviews that make us feel right. As some of the following brain research shows, the time has come to flip around what our rational brains thought was going on but may not be:

 • We used label young kids as having attentional disorders, but perhaps babies and toddlers are conveying more of a broad-based “taking it all in” type of attention span that is serving a purpose that honors more periphery balance and pattern changing

• We used to state common critiques of standard “multiple choice tests” as being proof of the pudding for why we lack correlations of those scores to actual life success, stating the need for more critical thinking skills to be included in curriculums. But we are realizing that it may not be rational ‘critical thinking skills” that are essential but something psychologists are called “grit,” a more persistent disposition to dealing with stimuli that we know in one way may not serve us well but are “part of the game” to get through. Such comfort with irrationality is quite different than mere critical thinking skills.

These examples show that something more critical to the truth may be “underneath our first gut sense of why things are.” We as humans hold lazy brains in our heads and it takes a lot of meta-cognitive power to bust through things that seem right. What if the miners success has nothing to do with teamwork, goal-setting, and exceptional leadership, but something we do not know or something we know but deem silly and inconsequential? As a former shrink listening to thousands of stories I can say my models of human behavior were readily trumped by quirkiness, randomness, and eccentric oddities I just didn’t understand. And let’s not forget Grace, the ugly stepsister in a house of positivism and rationality.

Can we resist the urge to label something that we ache so badly to generalize for our own sporadically inspiration-less lives? Perhaps it would be more inspirational for us and the miners to observe their story without generalizing. Here, inspiration could just be….not be something reduced to feel-good factors.

Recently CNN reporting some fascinating statistics on the problem of obesity in America.  In essence, 2/3 of all Americans are either overweight or obese. This is staggering given that back in 1985 no state (as reported to the CDC) had an obesity rate greater than 1 in 10 people.  Now, only 25 years later, we have reached a staggering level of obesity in America, with only Colorado and Washington D.C. reporting obesity rates under 20%. 

But what is most fascinating is a psychological phenomenon around this data; namely that 3 in 10 “overweight” people feel they are normal, and 7 in 10 obese people (body mass index > 20) feel they are simply overweight.  If rational means of influencing behavior was king, then we would have a backside psychological response to this data that would be more in sync with the actual situation at hand. But it appears that human beings seem to be a step behind in their rationalizations of information. If overweight people externally are normal weight internally, and obese people merely overweight, does this mean we have a crisis of perception around other important human factors around performance and relational mastery? It makes you think…

• Are low emotionally intelligent people processing themselves as “not bad”

• Are leaders reviewing their 360 data in perpetually “yes, but” terms

• Is conflict in marriages and teams usually pseudo-acknowledged?

• Is not saying anything when a recommendation is made taken as full-hearted agreement?

All these real life perceptual crises seem to breed from a hybrid of brain-based biases and a George Carlin-esque unfolding of a life that is like his skit around euphemisms and politically correct terms, with the focus this time not on other people’s feelings but on our own eternal quest for dissonance reduction.

Cognitive dissonance, a theory made prominent by the work of Leon Festinger, holds that when people hold two competing or conflictual ideas simultaneously in their head it can create an uncomfortable feeling of tension and that a primary driver internally is to reduce this feeling. Seeking such homeostasis may work for body temperature and other regulatory systems of the body, but when it intersects with matters of the brain we can literally re-write the rules in ways that are unnoticed by us. The best way, therefore, to reduce the discomfort is to change around the initial belief system so reality and the “data” provided around us works better for us.  The obese epidemic and our collective response as Americans are likely influenced by this fundamental neurological drive. Instead of assisting in the breakdown of these processes, the consumer products industry has implicitly reinforced these tendencies by introducing “vanity sizing” of their clothing lines.  What is this exactly? It is basically a switch of the rules again so we are not disrupted by reality. For instance, on some clothes a Size 36 waist is marketing as anywhere between a size 37 to 41.  This allows us to feel we are not gaining weight.

Another brain-based process that may be at play in how we calm the crisis of health that is brewing around us all has to do with something that researchers have called the identifiable victim bias which states we are more likely to help in a perceived need or crisis when we can identify with that person—-that is, we will help “the” person more than “a” person. This bias explains what statistical trends and data do little to move our moral emotions, even if the numbers are alarming on many levels.  Analytical processing seems to suppress the rise of the emotional response needed to move beyond this innate tendency.

The plot thickens when we apply these two neurologically influenced tendencies to the issue of obesity and the necessary behavior changes. For, as you can see, they work hand in glove in a masterful way to truly protect you from ever really seeing things as are. You see, one may propose that the way to engage human beings to make health behavior change is to make it more one-to-one emotionally meaningful so as to “trip the wire” of the identifiable victim bias to work for our favor; to see yourself as this identifiable real person and not a statistic that doctors throw at you in your check ups. But where does this lead? This inevitably leads to the cognitive dissonance mechanism to kick in when what is needed brings more discomfort or pain.  The tendency then here is to reduce it by any means possible.

Perhaps the answer lies in not just eating and exercise recommendations, but in building meta-cognition (thinking about one’s thinking more intelligently) so that better neural pathways can be created to not just comply to recommendations, but more importantly better assess what is going on in your brain when the recommendations and you don’t “fit.”. Teaching heart-healthy menus and exercise regimens are great, but are we teaching a menu of insidious brain biases and transformational paradoxes like the one above? Starting with the ending in the beginning, so to speak, from a neuro-level, can create change without ever tripping the “motivationally resistant or not ready” wire which is the standard explanation for the disconnect in the research that started this blog. This ironically self-protects an individual from taking the leap in the first place.

The brain, in other words, can not be forgotten in this process of behavior change. Without knowing these fundamental brain laws, you risk your brain being as sluggish as your feet on that treadmill.

If you are like me, you can surf the net and find many a perspective on how to “build a creative team” in your business; those that think outside the box. Dont you just love this phrase? I mean, we seem so hellbent on getting outside the box all the time that no one knows the “properties of the box” itself.  All we know is we want out Such naivete can lead to something I call “pseudo-creativity”, a state of being where the purposeful seeking of contrarian knowledge at all costs can lead to only the feeling of being creative.   Many times this is really the bottom line, functionally speaking, in business while language of bottom line (financial) is verbally noted. Why? We havent linked knowledge of the verbal world with the neuro-level of processing laws that are actually running the show.

So how do we transcend the feeling of being creative in meetings and discussions?

For one, it is critical to understand the role of language/culture and how it influences the free association-type process of ideas.  The brain is highly influenced unconsciously by patterns, things that are known reliably by what it commonly sees in its environment. So even if you consciously set up a brainstorming meeting to get outside this box we have grown so passionately to hate (poor box, eh?) we rarely get what we think we get.

Dr. Charlan Nemeth, a psychologist at UC-Berkeley did some fascinating research on how we can bust through this neurological tendency.  When subjects were shown colors on a slide the people simply had to name them. Easy enough, right? These folks then had to do some free association tasks with the colors. Another group had the same task, but in this condition the lab assistant yelled out wrong names of colors sporadically before the subjects responded. So if a yellow slide was shown, they would hear “Red!”  These folks then had to free associate on the colors shown them.  What was most interesting was in the first group, the free associations were “standard”—-blue would bring up “sky” and green would bring up “grass.”  But in the second group, where flat out wrong answers were given, they actually free associated a standard deviation or two, shall we say, beyond what we call the normal or safe realm of creative responses. Here, we started hearing responses like “Miles Davis” in response to “blue”.

The implications of this experiment on the thought leadership assumptions and strategy of Corporate America is beyond far-reaching.  Neuroscience-oriented beliefs and failure, arguably, merge for a wisdom perspective that is quite rare in Board rooms. Imagine dissenting to the level of wrongness akin to “red” being “yellow” in your meetings with your team?  This makes me think that it is essential not to reinforce the regular use of brainstorming practices, but to be blatantly wrong on a regular basis and as a result rewarded in your culture–or at least share the same reward as the one who says the solution. For as we see in the experiment, the lab assistant was the ”wing man” to brilliance.  Both would share the same bonus in my world of corporate regulations.  Wild, eh?  Think about this for a second.  As things are now in the business world—and the world we all live in—-when numbers are thrown up on a screen and a “gross revenue” amount is shown to be the logical result of numbers added together, imagine someone saying the 2 + 2 is not 4?  This implications of this position is staggering, for it calls on radical acceptance of radical denial in a weird merging of something that can only create something more beatiful and brilliant then we could ever imagine—-because it doesnt make sense.  Now, keep in mind I did not just promote emotional invalidation, but rather an acceptance of the reality of invalidation. Perhaps we are now seeing the inadvertent positive consequenes of this understandably undesireable state.

Do we have the courage in this world to be this lab assistant to dissent so radically, to respond with the same love and enthusiasm (not mere intellectual tolerance) as we do to “the right answer,” and to go a step further to create systems, with checks and balances, in commerce that exploit this irrational yet courageous tendency?

I will let you know when I get there.

James Hillman once said in his provocative book of the same title, “We’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy and the world’s getting worse.”  Though many would take case with this satirical, yet telling title, one does begin to wonder how well we are doing in the grand scheme of things related to reducing pain and suffering in this world.  And when this pain has to do with drug and alcohol addiction, how well do psychotherapeutic providers do in the final analysis of impact on changing behavior for the good? And does our cutting edge research from neuroscience have anything to say about it?

When the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) recently came out with their report “NIDA InfoFacts: Treatment Approaches for Drug Addiction,” they did a helpful synopsis in a meta-analysis sort of way on the key principles of effective treatment. Being the neuroscience-oriented change agent that I am who has seen the practice of psychotherapy enhanced by understanding the secret world of the brain, I thought it would be helpful to view these classic research findings from the lens of your brain— to see if “it” sees things the same way we as outsiders believe behavior change works. Lets take a look at a sample of these points.

1. Addiction is a complex but treatable disease that affects brain function and behavior.

Brain’s Response: Neuroscience has shown a less than perfect linear “cause and effect” relationship here, and that the brain is affecting the addictive response and manifestation as well. It’s a fine line between a true addictive disorder and the fundamental “wishing that reality was something else than it is” response that colors most of everyday decision making of us all.

2. No single treatment approach is appropriate for everyone

Brain’s Response:  Because the brain is wired to “feel right” and not to necessarily be effective, we all have unique ways of reducing the anxiety and dissonance we feel of the “one approach” coming at us.  Whether it is another approach being more effective or are defenses less effective in rationalizing the benefits away, remains unclear.

3. Treatment needs to be readily available

Brain’s Response: Research on neuroplasticity and deliberate practice has shown us that it takes a lot more concerted effort and repetition to change behavior than we think.  Being “readily available” allows the brain to practice at an exponentially higher level counter behaviors so as to rewire neural networks

4. Effective treatment attends to multiple needs of the individual, not just his or her drug abuse

Brain’s Response: Research on why the best cognitive rehabilitation strategies work on the brain after a certain traumatic event seem to convey the importance of a ‘cross training” effect on boosting rewiring potentials. That is, working all the lobes and not just where the supposed injury occurred.  Such is the case potentially with why a multidisciplinary approach works with addiction—-from a neuroplasticity angle, you increase the chances of enlisting the support on non-injured, healthy, and addictive-busting neural networks.

5. Remaining in treatment for an adequate period of time is critical.

Brain’s Response:  Though time is indeed correlated to treatment success, I am curious what the exact correlation coefficient would be.  Could it be a cognitive bias of ours that makes us think this is literally true but in reality the data could be something else, in much the same way that ? Do we not have examples of people who show insight potential around behavior change across the whole spectrum from one intervention to 10 times in rehab? The brain is an inadequate distinguisher between things that make sense and things that are literally true. My hunch on this one is that in actuality the correlation is mediocre at best;  that time in treatment is a powerful variable when supported by many moderating variables (family support, level of pain experienced per intervention, accountability factors, etc).

6. Treatment does not need to be voluntary to be effective

Brain’s response:  Sure, on one level this is true. Behavioral compliance can come from both an involuntary or voluntary event.  However, because the brain makes “one size fits all” emotional responses, it gets tricky to discern from words used–and even behavioral evidence– the committed from the compliant individual.  The brain is masterful on reading the environmental needs around it and assessing the patterns to learn what it needs to do to fit. So, arguably from a brain training side, this statement is correct. The brain can learn from the environment thrown on it or co-created. The problem comes when “what gets you here doesn’t get you there” and the tipping point of life kicks in….and more is needed than just “compliance”

As you can see, when one looks at these common assertions of treatment efficacy with a more discerning light of neuroscience, once can’t help but question one’s thinking about one’s thinking.  And is this troublesome? I think not. Ironically, perhaps it is this meta-cognitive stance that is most beneficial in building humility-based practitioners who use neuroscience as a knowledge helper and not a rule generator.

Once upon a time, in the wake of the impending nomination of Elana Kagan and the slew of email communications being released, townspeople began to wonder: What is the process or criteria of evaluation for assessing the email content? Is there an “ideal email” that would make one undoubtedly say this is one for the representation of pure reason to guide America’s legal quagmires? If not, what constitutes the type of human “error” we deem uncorrelated to judgment under high stake situations? Or, perhaps we don’t pay much attention to this email stuff outside the obvious psychological projections that are easy to do in these kinds of situations.

But in the rare case in Washington that there’s a consistent “mental model” guiding its decision making, I invite my readers to partake in what one would say is a fantasy narrative—a proposed, standardized way of looking at what is becoming an inevitable event in the tech age of a public figure; the release of virtual communication. Perhaps a Chief Neuroscientist Officer in the White House may not be a bad idea, for we could have an objective (or less arbitrarily subjective and more neurologically based subjective) way of assessing these kinds of things in the hopes of not being more intelligent, but in applying the right kind of intelligence to the situation at hand.

So, with these 160,000 pages of documents released around Elana Kagan’s communication, what would some of the proposed psychological factors that would be reasonably applied to this scenario to get a sense of whether there was some mental trouble stewing. Some might say looking for evidence

• Evidence of prejudicial statements
• Non-rational/emotion-based thinking
• Integrative reasoning

And assuming you are of the camp that “all data is good data,” than it might interest you to know that these factors are rarer than you think in the “normal” brain population, so much so that using these kinds of lens around an analysis of a potential Supreme Court Justice’s emails would be futile. That it is a fact that:

• The brain stereotypes endlessly as an efficiency-based organ, trying to pick out which information to attend to and what not to attend to (sorry…no such thing as multitasking, folks)
• That emotions drive decisions
• That overcoming the left hemisphere’s “love of reasoning at all costs” is something that loved ones of anosognosiacs know well but is pushed out of our own consciousness in our post-hoc rationalizing ways.

This leaves us wondering then what would a possible model of assessment be of all these emails, one that satisfies more the reality of the brain’s laws and not the whimsical feel-good notions of traditional psychologisms?

Well, I would say that the late strategic therapist Paul Watzlawick gives us a good look at the other side—-what we really should be focusing our attention on if we were to comb these emails for any substantive insight that is correlateable to real life decision making on the Bench:

“…He was standing in the town’s Beethoven Park, in front of a larger flower bed, and there discovered a sign with the inscription “No trespassing.” This brought back a problem that had been bothering Franzi more and more during recent years. Once again he found himself in a situation that seemed to present only two possibilities, and both were unacceptable. Either he exerted his freedom in the face of this oppressive prohibition and began trampling on the flowers, at the same time risking arrest; or he stayed off the flower bed. But the mere thought of being such a coward, of obeying such a stupid sign, made his blood boil. For a long time he stood there, undecided at his wit’s end, until suddenly, maybe because he never looked at flowers long enough, something totally and completely different came to his mind: THESE FLOWERS ARE BEAUTIFUL” (Watzlawick, 1988).

You see, in this brilliant example one sees a transcendence of thinking power that is not bound by mere claims of sarcasm and foul language, some of the common accusations around the content released in Kagan’s emails. One could easily rewrite this story with these “less sophisticated qualities” and still not rob it from the main point at hand—that there was a significant paradigm shift capacity here. At the end of the day, we need to look for the mother of all traits that is responsible for wisdom potential and not get mired down by the screaming symptoms that tempt us to derail into more comfortable analyses of contempt. But how do we foster this thinking more?

If Alexander Smith’s quote is correct—“Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition”—perhaps evidence of this is essential for decisions that affect humanity. Is it too flowery to look at love as the gasoline for this insight potential, and could it be what fuels meta-cognition (thinking about one’s thinking) in the way the Watzlawick story alludes? I argue not at all. The field of neurocardiology has discovered that the two way communication system between the heart and the brain is essential in creating peak performance thinking, and that feelings of love, care and appreciation do indeed foster more powerful transformational thinking. True, some of the email content is tough sounding and perhaps Kagan could have used a course in neurocardiology and political correctness, but I invite everyone to look behind the symptom—language—and look for evidence of paradigm-shifting thinking.

Without this we risk writing on June 28^th through the annals of her hearings a transcript that is rote with biases, and decisional illusions, and assumptions made without neuroscience in mind. When that happens not sure which is more fantasy-based—the committee’s conclusion or the overly hopeful, fantasy narrative of legitimizing a true neuropsychological profile of wisdom for our Supreme Court

Just a quick link to yesterday’s full CoachExchange interview with Blog Talk Radio.

“8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific Dr. Kevin J. Fleming joins Premier Coach Stacey Chadwell for a special hour interview”

Listen in or download:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/thecoachexchange/2010/07/15/tce-coach-radio-with

Enjoy!

Kevin