Myths or Facts about your brain?

I just read a very informative blog article exposing some myths and facts about our brains – you can find it here  and I hope that the author does not mind that I copied it here…

 

Top Ten Myths about the Brain: The Answers

by Dr Trish Riddell

Recently, I posted a number of questions about the brain and challenged this community to see if they could say which were supported by evidence, and which were myths.  I promised to provide my answers and the evidence to support them.  So, here are the questions again for those that might have missed them.  See if you agree with me on which are myths:

1. We make no new neurones in our brain after we are born
2. Men have fewer connections between the right and left of their brain than women
3. There are left brain and right brain people
4. Listening to Mozart does not make you smarter
5. Your memory can hold 7 + 2 things at a time
6. It’s all downhill after 60!
7. We know what will make us happy
8. Our memories of past events in our lives are inaccurate
9. The reptilian brain controls our emotional responses
10. The adult brain is able to be changed

And, here are my answers with some evidence to support my position.

10.  The adult brain is able to be changed: TRUE

Our brains are designed as learning machines and two main mechanisms for learning have evolved.  The first is called experience-expectant learning.   The human infant brain creates 100% more connections (synapses) between neurones than are found in the adult brain.  The original wiring of the brain is based on thousands of years of evolution and is the product of the unchanging environment over this time – things that can be expected in that environment are coded into the original connections we make in our brains (e.g. the ability to process language). Over the first years of life, the experiences of each individual child determine which synapses should be kept and which lost due to lack of use.  So, connections that represent the sounds that we hear in our own language are kept, and those for other languages that we do not experience are lost. However, as we approach the appropriate number of adult connections, this mechanism for learning becomes less useful.

Therefore, not all learning can be based on the expectation that our environments will contain certain information.  We have to have a means of learning about new technologies, new environments etc.  So, in addition to using the loss of synapses as a means of learning, we also create new synapses to code novel experiences.  This is called experience-dependant learning, and this is available throughout the lifespan.  Learning results in strong connections within networks of neurones so that behaviours become habits.  But, just as habits are learned through overuse, a new set of behaviours can replace old habits if they are used frequently and therefore develop equally strong networks of neurones.  An old dog can learn new tricks!

9. The reptilian brain controls our emotional responses: FALSE

This seems to be a slight misinterpretation of the literature.  I would agree that there is a more primitive, reactive, emotional system that responds in a characteristic way to emotional events, and then a more developed, proactive, system that can over-ride this in most circumstances to give us more control over our emotional responses.  The problem is that what McLean defined as the reptilian brain contains no more than the brain stem and cerebellum which is responsible for highly stereotyped emotional responses (e.g. the aggression response that you see in an angry cat).  What I think of as the reactive emotional brain is based more in the amygdala and structures at this level (which MacLean defined as the Limbic brain).  The context specific, proactive emotional system is probably found in the orbitofrontal cortex which is one of the latest evolutionary areas to be developed in primates.  This is the part of the brain that allows us to change our response to events that perhaps would have triggered strong and unproductive emotional reactions for us in the past. 

8. Our memories of past events in our lives are inaccurate: TRUE

In a series of studies, Elizabeth Loftus has demonstrated that it is possible to plant false memories.  In one experiment, participants were given an individual booklet containing three true stories from childhood (verified by relatives) and one false story about being lost in a department store at about the age of 5 (an event which relatives confirmed had not happened).  After reading the booklets, participants were asked to write what they remembered about each event, and, if they did not remember anything, to say “I do not remember this”.  This writing exercise was repeated on three occasions.  Six of the 24 participants claimed to remember the false event on each occasion asked.  As a result of a series of research studies, Elizabeth and her colleagues have been able to outline the circumstances under which false memories are produced.  These include: social demands to remember (in this case by the experimenters), memory construction by imagining events when participants are having trouble remembering, and encouragement not to think about whether the imaginings are true or not.  This reveals something about the nature of our memories – while we might think they are a true reflection of events, they can be modified by suggestion and so, over time, might become a mixture of memory and imagination.

7. We know what will make us happy: FALSE

You probably have experience of this in your own, or your family’s, life.  Think of something that you really thought you wanted, and quite quickly received.  Then think whether your expected happiness corresponded with your actual happiness. Or think of something that a child said they really wanted for Christmas or a birthday, and remember how long it was played with before it was superseded by a new toy or pastime.  Research by Daniel Gilbert and his team suggests that we are very poor at imagining the consequences of both happy and sad events.  We over-estimate both how unhappy we would be if something bad happened (in reality we bounce back very much quicker than we expect) and also how happy we will be if something good happens (the happiness lasts for a much shorter time than we expect).  In fact, we can maximise our happiness through anticipation!  We are happiest just before we receive something that we have wanted for some time.  Think how that might save on the shopping bills!

6. Its all downhill for the brain after 40 (or 50 or 60): FALSE

While it is true that working memory for facts decreases with age, and that we do slow down a little, the picture for the ageing brain is not all bleak.  Laura Carstensen, a professor at Stanford University has theorised that some differences in memory between younger and older adults arise from a difference in temporal focus.  Young adults who feel that their lives will stretch on indefinitely focus on saving as much factual information as possible since this is likely to benefit them in the future.  In comparison, older adults have a more restricted sense of their future and so concentrate on emotional well-being.  Laura’s group have shown that manipulating this sense of time by either telling older people to imagine that a new drug has been invented that will expand their healthy life by 20 years, or by testing young people immediately after a disaster that increases their sense of mortality, reduces the memory differences between young and old people.  In addition, older people attend to and remember more positive than negative events, and have better emotional well being than younger people.  Again, this difference can be decreased by manipulating expectations of longevity.  Thus, while there are some deficits in the ageing brain, the picture is definitely not all negative – in fact, it becomes increasingly positive with age!

5. Your memory can hold 7 ± 2 things at a time: FALSE

This “fact” is based on one of the most highly cited papers in psychology The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing informationpublished in Psychological Review in 1955. In this paper, he described studies that estimate the number of categories of a single dimension of sound (e.g. tones) or space (e.g. locations) that can be identified accurately as about 7 (though this ranged from 5 to 10 depending on the nature of the category).  He also described experiments that suggested that the number of chunks of information that we could remember immediately after hearing them was about 7 (again with a range from about 5 to 10).  Since 7 appeared in both estimations, he tested to see whether these were limited by the some aspect of human brains (i.e. that the number 7 was a “magical” representation of some human neural capacity).  He showed quite clearly that these were not dependent on the same mechanism and so that 7 was not magical.  Indeed, subsequent research suggests that memory span varies depending on what is being remembered (7 for digits, 6 for letters and 5 for words) so even the number of things we can remember is not described by the magical number 7.

4. Listening to Mozart does not make you smarter: TRUE

I have to admit to being a fan of Mozart, and even sometimes listening to this when I am working.  However, I do not do this on the chance of being made smarter!  The original research into the Mozart effect was conducted by Gordon Shaw and Frances Rauscher at University of California, Irvine.  They tested the spatial reasoning of a group of college students before and after listening to 10 minutes of Mozart Sonata for two pianos in D Major.  They found that the students showed short term improvement in spatial reasoning.  Attempts to replicate even this very modest finding have failed (a good summary of studies can be found here).

3. There are left brain and right brain people: FALSE

Most myths are based on some truth, and this is no exception.  Clearly, the two halves of the brain have evolved to perform different functions.  On balance, the two sides of our brain are much more similar than they are different.  However, in order to increase our brain’s potential,  we have evolved so that some tasks are performed preferentially with brain tissue located in one half of our cerebral cortex. Thus, for instance, our language production centre, Broca’s area, is in the left frontal lobe. However, not all language abilities are confined to the left hemisphere, and our right and left hemispheres communicate with each other, so we have only relatively better language function in the left hemisphere. Similarly, the right hemisphere processes complex spatial patterns relatively better than the left. So performance in a particular task in most people can be slightly better or faster in one hemisphere than the other – but it is not exclusively processed in only one hemisphere.  The corpus callosum allows information to pass quickly between the hemispheres so that information is shared.

What does this say about training that purports to increase right or left hemisphere function?  A study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded that, while training could enhance different styles of learning (logical vs intuitive), this was not as a result of improvement in function of the left or right hemispheres respectively.  Improved functioning in both hemispheres contributed to any changes seen.

2. Men have fewer connections between the right and left of their brain than women:  FALSE

A classic example of this which I heard recently is that men have a quarter of the connections between the two halves of their brain (corpus callosum) when compared to women, and therefore are less able to bring together logical with more holistic perceptions.  Leaving aside the differences in processing style of the two halves of the brain, is there any evidence for the difference in size of the corpus callosum between men and women?  The most recent imagining techniques have been used to update older studies, and these show that there are no differences in size in this structure between men and women.  A study by Yokota and colleagues found subtle differences in shape exist between sexes.  However, as in most studies of sex differences, some women had a corpus callosum which was more male in shape and some men had a corpus callosum that was more female.  If shape was used to try to identify the sex of a participant, 25% of brains were assigned the wrong sex.  Subtle differences of this kind are unlikely to produce the types of behavioural differences that are often asserted to exist between the sexes.  Most of the behaviours that we need to survive are not sex specific, so men do not perceive the world, direct attention, learn new skills, encode memories, communicate, empathise, or judge emotions differently from women.  We are moslty more alike than we are different.

1. We make no new neurones in our brains after we are born: FALSE

Our neural networks control our behaviours, our emotions, our memories.  As adults, much of our behaviour is fixed (though not unchangeable) and so creating lots of new neurones throughout the brain is unnecessary.  Most of the change we require can be accomplished by creating new synapses (connections) between neurones that already exist.  However, each new memory that we keep requires electrical activity in a set of neurones.  It might be possible, therefore, that we could run out of neurones to store new information and therefore would not remember new experiences as we grew older. This problem is overcome by creation of new neurones in the one part of the brain where we need them most – the hippocampus.  This part of the brain is responsible for keeping an address book of where each of our memories is stored.  We know that creation of these new neurones have important functions – you might remember a time when you were very stressed and found it difficult to retain new information.  We make fewer neurones in the hippocampus when stressed or depressed.  However, the good news is that there is a simple condition in which we make more new neurones – when we exercise.  And, this creates more new neurones than we lose when we are stressed.  So, if you want to keep a healthy body and hippocampus, go and have some exercise.

A quick thought on the importance of language

Question mark - WHY?
When someone else does something that puzzles me, I am often tempted to ask ‘Why?’ – and I always get an answer that justifies the original act.

Whenever you ask someone ‘why’ they did something, you are inviting them to justify their actions and, in their mind, this actually reinforces the behaviour. The question somehow invokes defensive routines in the respondent’s mind.

Rather than ask why someone did something there are more helpful questions you can pose. Ask them what they were trying to achieve, or how what they did helped them. These are quite different questions and far more useful because they activate a different part of the brain to ‘Why?’. You might get an answer that helps you understand how the original action was a good idea, or you might get a better understanding of the rationale for the action and so be able to formulate a different action that would get the result you both want.

On the other hand, it is good to ask why someone did something that turned out well, as this will reinforce the desired behaviour.

“Why do you read these blog articles?” 🙂

Metaprograms – Sameness or Difference

brain, metaprograms

The last in this short series of blogs about metaprograms explores ways of thinking that notice the sameness or difference in the world.

Until a few years ago I had lived in the same house for 26 years and most of those years my next-door neighbour had gone to the same Mediterranean island for the holidays. Not only had they gone to the same island, they had gone to the same hotel during the same two weeks of the year and it also turns out that many of the same people were in that hotel when they got there. I just couldn’t understand this, I had rarely been to the same country on holiday twice and when I did go to the same country it was to very different parts to that I had visited previously. I have no objection to going on holiday with people I know, and what I find really interesting is meeting new people and doing new things is trying new phone.

That same neighbour had the same job from almost all of those 26 years, whereas I had a new job every two or three years, including one major career change.

When you think about your team, what types of thinking do you need? Is the team charged with developing and implementing a radical new future with no reference to the past or are they opening the 475th Starbucks, with exactly the same layout and stock as the previous 474?
When you are selling change, some of your audience will want to know the ways in which the future is going to be the same as the past and others will want to know how the future is going to be different to the past. Effective communication is addressing both of these audiences.

Hidden Resources have deep expertise in metaprograms, why not ring Suzanne and see how we can help?

Metaprograms – Compete or Collaborate

Brain, metaprogramThis week we’re looking at people’s thinking preferences-those inborn (or perhaps learned – that’s a different blog!) filters that influence how we think about and subsequently act in the world. We know that everyone is different, and an understanding of metaprograms is one way in which we can start to understand what might lie behind those differences. Today we will explore the extremes of collaborative or competitive thinking.

The construction industry is well known for its competitiveness, contractors shaving pennies of prices in order to win business. How difficult was it for them when many of the big clients decided that the most effective route to high quality and low costs was for clients, consultants and contractors to work together, not only within an individual project but across projects that may have different consultants and contractors? The move towards collaborative working in major construction projects over the last 10 to 15 years has been and continues to be seriously constrained by the fundamental competitive mindset of those involved.

Let me be clear, I have no problem with competition or collaboration in the right situation-I cannot see Olympic sprinters collaborating to produce the lowest overall time of all competitors added together although we can and do members of cycling teams collaborating for the benefit of their star rider.

What might your predisposition be? Do you seek opportunities to work with other people inside and outside your organisation? Are you an active networker always on the lookout for opportunities to help each other? Would you rather work with others in a team than on your own? Are you constantly on the lookout for how you can not only achieve your goals but help others achieve theirs as well? If so, then you exhibit collaborative thinking.

Another position in the spectrum might be that you find yourself constantly competing with yourself to do better than before, regardless of what other people are doing. Or maybe you are driven to beat others, perhaps regardless of the cost because after all’ it’s about winning not making friends’. You are likely to look towards getting your own needs met regardless of anyone else.

If you have people with these different ways of thinking working for you, you might easily see how you would need to do different things to motivate them. The collaborator will value opportunities to work in a team for the greater good, the competitor would want challenging personal goals

So, now might be the time to consider your own thinking and how that might be similar to our different from those of your colleagues and the implications of that how you are working together.

Suzanne Wade at Hidden Resources can help you to learn more about metaprograms, she can also offer you an great pyschometric exploring how you ‘rate’ on the ‘Top 15’.

Metaprograms – Conforming or Challenging

Brain, metaprograms

More exploration of metaprograms today to help you understand yourself and others more thoroughly and so be able to manage better. Today we are looking at whether your basic thinking stye is one that Conforms or Challenges.

Conforming thinkers can be flexible and adaptable, they will flex and adapt to match the culture of the organisation or team where they are working; they avoid confrontation and might agree superficially but then fail to implement the agreement.

On the other hand the challenging thinker is likely to be overtly confrontational, constantly pushing the boundaries; they dislike being told what to do and can adopt high risk approaches to achieving their objectives. They can exhibit an intriguing habit of saying ‘no’ in the first instance to any suggestion (because of their initial inclination to challenge) before changing their mind and saying ‘yes’ on reflection. They can be perceived as argumentative and can be difficult to manage, however this is the sort of thinking that is fundamental to achieving change. The, former is happy with the status quo, the challenger is forever looking for something different.

If you want to learn more about metaprograms, perhpas by completing a pyschometric exploring how you ‘rate’ on the ‘Top 15’ then contact Suzanne Wade at Hidden Resources.

Metaprograms – Detail or Strategy

Brain,metaprograms

Here’s another great metaprogram pair that, when you appreciate and understand it, will help you become more effective as an individual and part of a team.

A close friend of mine was telling a story about how she learned to manage the new boss who came her way some years ago. She clearly had a great relationship with her old boss, to whom she took her ideas and was generally given the nod to get ahead and implement them. What a surprise to find that her new boss was not as amenable and constantly came back asking nitpicking questions about her proposals. There was a risk that all these nitpicking questions could be interpreted as a lack of trust, however my friend knew different and she was familiar with the different ways that people thought, in particular how detail conscious thinkers differed from strategic or big chunk thinkers.

Her old boss was happy to hear the general idea and recognise how it fitted into the long-term plans; when thinking about an idea they wanted to be presented with a few bullet points that included how the proposal fitted into the broader context of the business. The old boss’ preference was for strategic or big chunk thinking.

Along comes a new boss who was more tempted by details; who needed bite-size chunks and to be told exactly how the proposal would be implemented and exactly how it contributed to the broader picture. This new boss became frustrated when such detail was not available and, perhaps not surprisingly, would generally not agree to my friend’s proposals going ahead.

So this pair of metaprograms has detail conscious thinking at one extreme and strategic thinking at the other. The detail thinker being frustrated by the strategist and a strategist being bored by the detail. Where do you sit? And what about your boss, your team members?

Until I understood about this stuff I used to treat everybody the same, and most likely to assume that what they needed, how they thought, was the same as me. I now find myself actively thinking, does this person require 10 bullet points or a 10 page report. My flexibility in meeting other people’s needs improves my chances of achieving my goals. The person with the most flexibility is most likely to get what they want.

We can help you learn more about metaprograms. Have a look at Thinking Styles.

Metaprograms – Internal and External Reference

Brain - metaprograms
Yesterday I talked about Self- and Others-referenced thinking, today I would like to explore another Metaprogram in that same arena. Today I will talk about Internally referenced thinking and Externally referenced thinking.

In a prior existence I was responsible for a team of people who went round collecting samples of tapwater for analysis on behalf of our water company. The job was pretty straightforward, you took a van with a load of bottles and a list of addresses out in the morning, filled the bottles at the designated addresses and delivered them to the laboratory in the evening. (Actually it was slightly more complex than that, you needed to fill the right bottle the right premise but basically it was a fairly mechanistic straightforward job – and rewarded appropriately). Every night one of the samplers, let’s call him Bill, would bring his samples back and look for myself or his immediate supervisor to check that he had done the right thing today – even though he had been doing it for years and knew exactly which bottles to fill and how to do the job. At one time it used to frustrate me that I had to give Bill a pat on the back every single day, especially when compared to Julie who just got on with the job and sometimes, perhaps often, did not tell us about the changes that she had made to the schedule. We knew Julie would just get on with the job, but occasionally we had to pull her up because those changes were important – the records had to be right and we had to be sure that appropriate samples have been taken.

As soon as I discovered internal thinking and external thinking metaprograms all became clear. Bill had a very strong external thinking metaprogram; he needed feedback, he needed help in deciding what to do when he wasn’t able to take a sample from a designated points; his way of deciding whether or not he had done a good job was to ask others.

Julie, on the other hand, had a strong internal thinking metaprograms. She set her own standards, she was not very interested in feedback from other people, she was quite happy making decisions on her own and she was always right (even when she was wrong).

Do either of these extremes ring a bell for you, or perhaps people you work with for? Again, there is a spectrum and we can all exhibits tendencies to either end of the spectrum although we may well have an overall predisposition to operate closer to one end of the other.

Once I knew that Bill just needed that daily reassurance, it was a couple of minutes a day to keep him happy. Similarly, once I knew that Julie was happily changing the sampling regime without contacting anyone, we needed to explain to her how important it was to make sure that the records were accurate and samples taken appropriately. An understanding of metaprograms probably saved both of them their jobs – and me a lot of heartache.

If you want to learn more about metaprograms, perhpas by completing a pyschometric exploring how you ‘rate’ on the ‘Top 15’ then contact Suzanne Wade at Hidden Resources.

How our brains work – Metaprograms

Brain, metaprogrammesI visited our local farmers market this morning (Leeds – it’s a very good market on the first Sunday of every month and a passable one on the third Sunday, so why not try it if you are local?). Going back to my car I noticed the usual muddle of newly arrived patrons looking for a parking space and then found myself looking on their behalf, indeed I actually managed to direct one car to a vacant space close to mine. This left me wondering about what it was that led me to volunteer to look for spaces on other people’s behalf, yet other people returning to their car would do so head down with no regard whatsoever to others trying to find a space.

I was reminded of the concept of meta programs – relatively hard wired perceptual and thinking filters that influence our thinking and action. Those of you who have studied psychology, or even NLP, will know that we all have a set of unique perceptual filters that help our brains deal with the zillions of bits of information that are continually impacting our senses and zapping around in our brains. Our brains are just not built to deal with this amount of information and so create a set of filters that help us narrow down the information streams to ones that seem most relevant or appropriate to us. One set of such filters has been labelled Metaprograms.

It has been suggested that there are over 100 such Metaprograms, however in this and subsequent articles I will comment on just a handful that I find particularly helpful (and of course, that selection is itself a manifestation of my own Metaprograms).

Some people in the world appear to others to act and think completely selfishly, always putting themselves and their needs first and rarely considering the needs of others. Conversely, I know people who put others’ needs in front of their own, sometimes to such an extent that they can make themselves ill dealing with other people’s issues – they sacrifice themselves for the sake of others.

You recognise the extremes of this scale in some of your friends, colleagues or associates? Self referenced thinking involves a belief that your needs are as important as others’ needs and that there are times when it is important to put yourself first; you might find you like to work alone and find being interrupted distracting or even irritating; you maybe sometimes find yourself too busy to help others do their work.

If you are others referenced (altruistic) you will be especially sensitive to the needs of other people; you are likely to go out of your way to help colleagues and friends even when this means putting your own immediate needs second; you might even find yourself anticipating the needs of others and providing for them before they have asked.

I have described the extremes of the spectrum and recognise that most others can display either of these two extremes or sit somewhere in the middle depending upon the circumstances.

We know that self-awareness is a key attribute of effective leaders and some sense of where you are on this spectrum is likely to help you lead other people more effectively, especially if they exhibit a different thinking style to you.

Stretch your brain

Energised brainIf you are anything like me your brain will have been on ‘idle’ for the last week or so – occupied with eating, drinking, socialising…and if you are anything like me, it now needs waking up – the metaphorical stretches that we do before exercise to make sure our muscles are warmed up properly. Anyone who has ever done yoga or other forms of exercise knows that unless we use and stretch our muscles regularly they tighten and weaken. Well, the same applies to our brain. Just imagine what your brain might be like if it was NEVER challenged and stretched from childhood – it’s the challenge and stretch that helps us learn and keeps our thinking gear fit and able.

One of the exercises we often challenge our coaching clients to complete is to do something different(ly) every day. It might simply be to read a different newspaper, or travel to work via a different route or mode of tansport, it might be to brush your teeth with the ‘wrong’ hand or to spend 10 minutes just watching the birds instead of the television…there are thousands of ‘differents’ that you could think of and do and any one of them offers the prospect of some learning and certainly keeps the brain agile.
So our Level 1 exercise is simply to do something different every day.
Level 2 is to record it and consoider what you learned about yourself or the world as a consequence of the action – and there is always some learning.

Go on, have a go – do something different every day for a week and record your feedback as comments on this article.

What is cluttering up your brain?

Just how much mess is cluttering up your brain?

Perhaps what I really want to explore is the effect of all those little unfinished jobs that are running around in your brain and occasionally pop out at unexpected, and maybe even unwelcome, moments. You know – that little voice inside your head that says “You never sent Auntie Ethel a birthday card” or “Whatever happened to that memorial bench you were going to buy for your dad?”. Those little things to which you committed yourself at some time, yet somehow never seem to have got done – let’s call them Incompletes.

Here’s an exercise – make a list of them. Get out a sheet of paper and a writewith – start writing, one per line, all those little promises, committment, ideas… that you have still to deliver. NB I do not mean the big stuff – “Redecorate the house” or “Build a garage” – but the smaller, realtively easily done stuff as in my earlier examples. Keep writing, most people (me included!) make a rather long list – when you think you have finished, go for a cup of tea and come back and add whatever it is you have remembered whilst making the tea; maybe you can put the list on the fridge or somewhere else handy so that you can add to it as you remember things.

My guess, indeed my experience, is that you will start completing them now you have written them down – and more so if you put them where they are easily visible.

Every one of these tasks has been cluttering up your brain, and stopping it from being as effective as it/you might be. It is as if each little Incomplete was occupying a bit of grey matter, the more incompletes you have, the more grey matter is tied up in unproductive effort. Once you actually do the action, the grey cell is free to concentrate on more pressing (and important?) matters.

So, whatever it was cluttering up your brain, this is a simple little exercise to start to clear the decks for action. Let me know how it goes for you….