Three Quick and Easy Ways to Quiet Your Mind

Neuroscience tells us that, to be more productive and creative, we need to give our brains a break. It's the quiet mind that produces the best insights. But it's a challenge to take that sort of time off in the midst of a busy day. Here are three specific, quick, and easy ways to build purposeful break time into your day.
Quick Meditation

New research from the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging suggests that people who meditate show more gray matter in certain regions of the brain, show stronger connections between brain regions and show less age-related brain atrophy. In other words, meditation might make your brain bigger, faster, and "younger". As lead researcher Eileen Luders explains, "it appears to be a powerful mental exercise with the potential to change the physical structure of the brain."

Tip: If you commute via public transportation (or even if you're a passenger in a car pool) use the time to close your eyes for 10 minutes. If you drive, leave a little early, park, and spend 10 minutes in the car before you walk into work. Choose a very specific image, such as a waterfall, beach, or tree, and try to focus on it alone. If other thoughts get in the way, gently push them aside. Do this once or twice per day. The goal is to let your mind achieve a sense of relaxed awareness.

Pulsing

Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, renown for his research and theories on expertise, points out that top performers in fields ranging from music to science to sports tend to work in approximately 90-minute cycles and then take a break. We are designed to pulse, to move between spending and renewing energy. Pulsing is the simplest, easiest, most immediate way to build breaks into your day.

Tip: Download a "break-reminder" utility, such as Scirocco or Healthy Hints, and set it to ping you every 90 minutes. Focus hard on a particular task until that cue. And then take a walk, talk to a colleague, doodle, or listen to music. Do anything that renews you and gives you a "second wind," even if you think you don't need it. You do. Five minutes later, get back to work.

Daydream Walks

Most people have heard the story about how 3M's Arthur Fry came up with the idea for the Post-it note: he was daydreaming in church. Jonathan Schooler, a researcher at UC Santa Barbara, has repeatedly shown that people like Fry who daydream and let their minds wander score higher on creativity tests. What separates this from meditation is that, instead of emptying your mind, you're letting it fill up with random thoughts. The trick is to remain aware enough to recognize a sudden insight when it comes.

Tip: Start by taking 20 minutes, two days a week during your lunch break to take a stroll and daydream. Think about anything you want besides work—a beach vacation, building your dream house, playing shortstop for the Yankees, whatever. Ramp it up to three or four days a week. The next time someone catches you daydreaming on the job and asks you why you're not working, tell them that in fact you're tapping into your creative brain.

Contributed by Matthew E. May

Finding Meaning at Work, Even When Your Job Is Dull

Do you experience meaning at work — or just emptiness?

In the United States people spend on average 35 – 40 hours working every week. That's some 80,000 hours during a career — more time than you will spend with your kids probably. Beyond the paycheck, what does work give you? Few questions could be more important. It is sad to walk through life and experience work as empty, dreadful, a chore — sapping energy out of your body and soul. Yet many employees do, as evidenced by one large-scale study showing that only 31% of employees were engaged.

Work can, however, provide an array of meaningful experiences, even though many employees do not enjoy those in their current job. So, what are the sources of meaningful experiences at work?

We have compiled a list based on our reading of literature in organization behavior and psychology. Many theories speak to meaning at work, including need-based, motivational, status, power, and community theories. The phrase "meaning at work" refers to a person's experience of something meaningful — something of value — that work provides. That is not the same as "meaningful work," which refers to the task itself. Work is a social arena that provides other kinds of meaningful experiences as well.

Before we run through the list, it is important to note;

Different people look for different types of meanings;
Different workplaces provide different meanings.

Purpose

1. Contributions beyond yourself. The people at Kiva, a non-profit, channel micro-loans to poor people who can use the money to get a small business going and improve their lives. Their work clearly has a greater purpose — that of helping people in need. This taps into a longing to have a meaningful life defined as making contributions beyond oneself.

The problem is, however, that most work doesn't have such a higher purpose, either because work is basically mundane or because — let's face it — the company doesn't really have a social mission. Critics like Umair Haque argue that work that involves selling yet more burgers, sugar water, fashion clothes and the like has no broader purpose whatsoever. In this view, Coke's "Open Happiness" is just a slogan devoid of meaning. However, as Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer argue, much work can be infused with some level of purpose. Companies that make real efforts in social responsibilities do this; for example, Danone, the $25-billion large and highly successful consumer goods company selling yogurt, has defined their business as providing healthy foods (which led them to sell off their biscuit business). The litmus test here is whether employees experience that their work makes positive contributions to others. Then they experience meaning at work.

Self-realization

2. Learning. Many MBA graduates flock to McKinsey, BCG and other consultancies so that they can rapidly acquire valuable skills. General Electric is renowned for developing general managers; and people who want to become marketers crave to learn that trade at Procter & Gamble. Work offers opportunities to learn, expand the horizon, and improve self-awareness. This kind of personal growth is meaningful.

3. Accomplishment. Work is a place to accomplish things and be recognized, which leads to greater satisfaction, confidence and self-worth. In the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi we see Japan's greatest sushi chef devote his life to making perfect sushi. Well, some critics like Lucy Kellaway at the Financial Times say there isn't a real social mission here. But, from watching the movie, his quest for perfection — to make better sushi, all the time — gives his life a deep sense of meaning. And for Jiro, the work itself — making the sushi — gives him a deep intrinsic satisfaction.

Prestige

4. Status. At cocktail parties, a frequent question is, "where do you work?" The ability to rattle of a name like "Oh, I am a doctor at Harvard Medical School" oozes status. For some, that moment is worth all the grueling nightshifts. A high-status organization confers respect, recognition, and a sense of worth on employees, and that provides meaning at work for some.

5. Power. As Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria wrote about in their book Driven, for those drawn to power, work provides an arena for acquiring and exercising power. You may not be one of those, but if you are, you experience work as meaningful because you have and can use power.


Social

6. Belonging to a community. Companies like Southwest Airlines go out of their way to create a company atmosphere where people feel they belong. In a society where people increasingly are bowling alone, people crave a place where they can forge friendships and experience a sense of community. The workplace can complement or even be a substitute for other communities (family, the neighborhood, clubs etc.). Workplaces that provide a sense of community give people meaning.

7. Agency. Employees experience meaning at work when what they do actually matters for the organization — when their ideas are listened to and when they see that their contributions has an impact on how the place performs. A sense of real involvement gives people meaning.

8. Autonomy. As Dan Pink shows in his book Drive, autonomy is a great intrinsic motivator. Some people are drawn to certain kinds of work that provides a great deal of autonomy — the absence of others who tell you what to do, and the freedom to do your own work and master your task. For example, entrepreneurs frequently go into business by themselves so that they can be their own boss. This kind of freedom gives work meaning.
There are no doubt other sources as well, but these eight seem to be especially important.

Which of these are important to you? And which does your current workplace give you?

The more of these is not necessarily better. Experiencing one deeply may just be enough. But it's an issue if you don't experience any of these.

Contribution by by MORTEN HANSEN AND DACHEl KELTNER

120 seconds to reduce stress

Prevention

When we were 5, we might have sucked our thumbs for stress relief. As adults, many of us self-soothe with junk food, a glass (or two) of wine, maybe some mindless TV. But those are fixes that don't actually fix anything. Luckily, recent studies reveal some easy ways to lift your spirits and lower your stress that actually create positive shifts in your brain and body. "Stress triggers the release of the hormone cortisol, which can damage our brains and weaken our cardiovascular and immune systems over time," says neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, PhD.

We asked experts for their best instant mood boosters, backed by the latest research in nutrition, psychology, and neuroscience. Follow these tips and you'll be saying "aah" in no time.

Put on a Happy Face
Smiling soothes you, even if you're just going through the motions. A University of Wisconsin study found that people who'd had Botox injections were less prone to anger because they couldn't express it. What's the lesson? Just fake it till you make it.

Think: Hot Hands
When fear and anxiety take hold, the nervous system directs blood flow to the largest muscles, an evolutionary response to protect against physical danger. This redirected flow often results in cold hands. So when you warm them, that automatically signals your nervous system that it's OK to calm down, says neuropsychologist Marsha Lucas, PhD. "Even simply visualizing warm hands can be enough to help turn off the fight-or-flight reaction," she says.

Donate Some Dollars
Giving money to a good cause makes you feel better than buying a pair of designer jeans--and studies prove it, say Elizabeth Dunn, PhD, of the University of British Columbia, and Michael Norton, PhD, of Harvard Business School. Plus, you don't have to be a millionaire to enjoy this karmic boost. The researchers learned that those who gave even $5 to someone else felt measurably better than those who bought themselves a treat instead.

7 Ways To Beat Stress Fat

Load Up on Whole Grains
"If you're feeling grumpy, the best idea is to eat an all-carb whole grain snack and you should feel happier within a half hour," says nutritionist Elizabeth Somer, RD, the author of Eat Your Way to Sexy. "The carbs raise blood sugar, which boosts serotonin, a neurotransmitter associated with calm, positive feelings that last." Aim for 30 g of carbs: 4 cups of air-popped popcorn or half of a whole wheat English muffin (but not a bag of Chips Ahoy) will do the trick, Somer says.

Dig in the Dirt
According to a 2011 Dutch study published in the Journal of Health Psychology, 30 minutes of gardening reduces stress levels more effectively than 30 minutes of reading quietly in a room. The researchers say it's the result of physical activity. But perhaps the secret lies in the dirt itself. A few studies have shown a link between a common bacterium (M. vaccae) found in garden soil and increased serotonin levels, meaning less anxiety and better concentration. Gardeners may inhale this bacterium while digging in the soil.

Give Yourself a Hug
When you think negatively about yourself, the brain's amygdala sends signals that increase blood pressure and raise adrenaline and cortisol levels. Researcher Kristin Neff, PhD, at the University of Texas, recommends the "surreptitious self-hug"--wrapping your arms around yourself and squeezing. Even your own touch releases oxytocin and other biochemicals that promote well-being.

Focus on the Exhale
We've all heard that deep breathing is crucial to feeling tranquil, but the most important part of it is breathing out, Dr. Hanson says: "When you elongate your exhalations, you spark your parasympathetic nervous system, which slows down your heart rate." Take three long exhalations, making them twice as long as your inhalation.

Just Move It--A Little
John Ratey, MD, a Harvard Medical School professor and the author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, says just 2 minutes of exercise is enough to change your mood, as long as you raise your heart rate. "Anything from squats to jumping jacks supplies a surge of neurotransmitters, such as norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin--the same targets as antidepressants," he says.

Be a Jaw Dropper
"Relaxing your tongue and jaw sends a message to your brain stem and limbic system to turn off the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol," says Dr. Lucas. Simply let your tongue go limp in your mouth, and then open your mouth slightly, which will instantly loosen up your jaw. "These exercises help bring our parasympathetic nervous system online, which tells our bodies to rest and restore," Dr. Lucas says.

Think Sensually
Next time you're feeling frazzled, try a tactile solution. During peak moments of stress, endorphins released into the brain relieve pain and begin a recovery period. Doing things that feel good physically--such as taking a warm shower or listening to a favorite piece of music--mimics this process and shuts down the stress deluge.

Fatten Up That Latte
When stress makes you unfocused, caffeine's stimulating qualities may promote a can-do attitude. "To supersize that good feeling, drink your coffee with a little bit of organic whole milk instead of fat free. The extra protein and fat make you feel more satiated and therefore calmer," says Drew Ramsey, MD, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia University.

Nibble on Chocolate
"A Johns Hopkins University study found that the taste of sweetness on your tongue causes a surge of feel-good endorphins," Somer says. Also, dark chocolate contains compounds called flavonoids that also affect mood: According to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, cocoa flavonoids improved both mental acuity and attitude.

Additionally, in a 2009 study by the American Chemical Society, eating a mere 1.4 ounces of dark chocolate daily lowered stress hormone levels. The key is to limit yourself to just a few bites, since the sugar in chocolate can cause a crash later. "Plus, when you binge on anything, your blood is diverted to your gut away from your brain and muscles, which leaves you feeling tired," Somer says.

Beef It Up
A burger isn't all bad, as long as it's made from grass-fed beef. That's because pastured beef is high in conjugated linoleic acid, a fat that fights cancer and belly fat and has also been shown to protect brain cells from worry, Dr. Ramsey says. Grass-fed beef also supplies a good dose of iron, which may boost your energy levels. "As many as 15% of women ages 20 to 40 are iron deficient, and most iron-deficient people are tired and stressed," Dr. Ramsey says.

Contribution by Jessica Baumgardner

A great mental exercise to sharpen your brain

Research has shown that exercising your mind contributes to your mental health and well being. While physical activity has been shown to aid in sharpening our minds and recall, simple mental exercises can help us to remain sharp and improve memory as we age.

Try doing this mental exercise over a 4 week period and you should notice an improvement in your short and long term memory.

When you are ready to go to sleep, go over what you did that day from the time you got up until you get into bed. Start with the time you awoke, got out of bed, follow your entire day step by step until the time you went back to bed. Try to recall as much detail as possible, visualizing in your mind each and every step from beginning to end. In the beginning, you probably wont remember much detail, and you’ll probably move rapidly from task to task or think of the day in large periods of time. However, try to slow down and remember as much as you can to take in as much detail as you can. With time and practice, you will notice significant improvement in your recall of events and details throughout the day.

This basic mental exercise has the following benefits:

1. It will improve your memory.

2. Your ability to visualize will improve.

3. You will improve your concentration.

4. You will be more in the moment throughout the day. Because you know you will be recalling your day later, you pay more attention to details throughout the day.

5. Your power of observation will improve. You will probably find yourself during the day performing a modified recall of your day to date because you know that later than night you will be trying to recall it again.

6. You will likely fall asleep faster because your mind will get tired much like counting sheep at night in order to fall asleep.

Contribution by Rober Glatter, MD at Forbes

A Note on Common Minds

Contribution by Alex Provan

In the 1980s and ’90s, as the standard model of physics gathered dust and the field moved from front-page philosophy into the murk of mathematics, neuroscience emerged as the discipline most likely to demystify the natural world—or at least one particularly interesting element of it, ourselves. Modern physics had seemingly gone from promising a holistic explanation for why things are the way they are to suggesting that the universe is fundamentally inscrutable, its mysteries multiplying with each discovery. Neuroscience, meanwhile, turned inward—mirroring the putative narcissism of the era—and strived to reveal the immaculate mechanics lodged within our skulls. This nascent discipline cannibalized psychology, linguistics, and sociology, planting flags in far-flung realms of academia, medicine, and law. Today neuroscience is a central prism through which nearly all aspects of life are regarded.

With the popularization of functional MRI (fMRI) technology, the workings of the brain began to be broadcast in color, with cartoonish images of neural activity accompanying newspaper and television reports on the efforts of researchers to explain our most intimate drives, locate our souls, read our minds. Though neuroscience has provided a preeminent narrative of the twenty-first-century self—look to the nonfiction best seller lists for evidence of its reach—the discipline is still in its infancy and its promises remain largely unfulfilled; the workings of the brain are, of course, far from wholly comprehended by researchers, much less the public. We now know more about diseases and disorders like epilepsy, aphasia, Alzheimer’s, and Tourette’s syndrome than ever before, but none have been cured. We have an inkling of the cognitive processes that beget consciousness, which is both a product and central feature of the brain; but philosophers and neuroscientists alike still have trouble defining, much less locating, the phenomenon and explaining the emergence of subjectivity—if not the more mundane matter of self-awareness. (Even if we could define consciousness, we might not be able to understand it except at the level of the neuron’s cytoskeleton, through quantum mechanics—the physics for which is incomplete. Or our brains might be unconsciously following a program so complex that we could never grasp the entire thing at once. If so, one could theoretically simulate cognition, or at least the underlying processes, though not without an excellent quantum mechanical computer.) We have not found the brain’s “God spot” or “buy button.”

“Common Minds,” a series of essays and conversations on the contemporary infatuation with the brain, will address the limits of neuroscience and how the knowledge produced by researchers and clinicians operates in other realms of culture and society. “Common Minds” was coedited by Dawn Chan and is being published in issues 17 and 18 of Triple Canopy. The series aims to facilitate discussion about ideas that are too rarely scrutinized outside of a specialized setting, despite their sweeping effect. Recent criticism in magazines and academic journals has justifiably deflated—and perhaps tempered public enthusiasm for—the tumid, reductive claims of pop-science scribes. But such venues tend be dominated by professional journalists and scientists debunking other professional journalists and scientists. Departing from the conventions of this discourse, Triple Canopy has invited artists, poets, novelists, philosophers, historians, and psychologists to contribute analytic essays, linguistic compendia, and prose poems; a video rumination on blindness and perception, a collage-survey of the persistent vocabulary of phrenology, and a two-thousand-year genealogy of images of the brain.

In preparing this series, we considered how psychoanalysis became a prevailing cultural narrative in the 1960s and ‘70s and how profoundly it altered the way we construct our own experiences and selves. The standard model may have imparted an all-encompassing theory of the natural world, but to most people that theory is incomprehensible. And those who do understand know that the failure to reconcile the general theory of relativity and quantum theory—the so-called macro and micro worlds—keeps the model incomplete. As such, the standard model speaks to ontology only indirectly. Psychoanalytic theory proffered a softer science, a framework for interpreting—if not resolutely explaining—our thoughts and behaviors, which could be elaborated as a worldview. Even if many who invoked Freud had little purchase on psychoanalysis beyond the rudiments, they could assimilate that worldview (which was confirmed in their own daily lives).

Neuroscience awkwardly straddles these two bodies of knowledge, in terms of the potential to link visceral experience to vanguard science in the construction of a more or less complete picture of the world—inasmuch as the world is a construct of our own cognitive faculties (and therefore a projection of biology). And yet generally, especially in nonclinical settings, what neuroscience has to offer is interpretation, not explanation. And too often the two are confused.

In March 2008, the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience published an article called “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations,” which grappled with the question of why people are much more likely to believe a statement when it includes a neuroscience gloss and fail to recognize when that information is illogical or irrelevant. The researchers asked subjects to evaluate various descriptions of psychological phenomena, both inaccurate and accurate, with and without perfunctory references to neural circuitry. For instance, they were told that “the curse of knowledge”—the tendency to assume other people know what you do and are ignorant of what you don’t know—arises from our innate inability to judge others and that brain scans reveal the curse “happens because of the frontal lobe brain circuitry known to be involved in self-knowledge.” Subjects found that such bilge made circular arguments “significantly more satisfying.”

To most people, neuroscience supplies a skein of novelty and credibility to propositions that might otherwise appear unoriginal or even outlandish. Among the beneficiaries of the public’s susceptibility to science-inflected language and imagery are neuromarketing companies wielding brain scans to help clients sell everything from politicians to Super Bowl ads to social media campaigns. For example, MindSign Neuromarketing’s “neurocinema” service will “take your trailer or spot and show you what parts or scenes cause activation (good) and what parts cause deactivation (bad).” Many in the humanities have responded by insinuating neuroscience into their work—the so-called cognitive turn, which has given rise to disciplines such as neuroeconomics, neurotheology, neuroaesthetics, and neuroethics.

For the most part, neuroscience has given us an empirical basis for assertions made decades or centuries ago by linguists, psychologists, philosophers, and ophthalmologists. And yet one effect of the rapid rise of neuroscience is the comparative diminution (and, coincidentally, defunding) of the very branches of science and the humanities upon which the discipline draws. The result is a creeping assumption that the brain makes the mind. “Although we do not know how, it is widely accepted that a complete neural explanation is, in principle, possible,” writes psychologist William Uttal in Mind and Brain: A Critical Appraisal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2011). “Those who labor in the laboratory rarely make this monistic assumption explicit, and yet few cognitive neuroscientists would challenge this fundamental idea.” The guiding principle of much contemporary neuroscience is “without any compelling empirical foundation.”

The work in “Common Minds” aims to disclose and debunk, but more orthogonally than polemically, by charting the origins of the brain-as-computer metaphor, considering fMRI scans as part of the history of photography, evaluating the claims of neuroscience alongside the observations of seventeenth-century Japanese anatomical illustrators, and so on. To us, this work is itself a strike against biological reductionism. There have been many enthralling, if provisional, discoveries regarding the unconscious processes underlying our behavior, the adaptive and plastic nature of the brain, and the relationship between vision and cognition. But what, besides consciousness, prompts such efforts, impels us to engineer experiments, parse data, invent theories? The core of who we are and why we do what we do—that union of memory, consciousness, and the body that marks us as human, grounding our various representations of the world in what Kant called a “single common subject”—remains obscure.

“Common Minds” questions the expectation of revelation, especially as advanced by popular neuroscience books that mostly work to inspire awe by assigning biological explanations to every aspect of our behavior. The brain “is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us,” writes David Eagleman in Incognito: The Brains Behind the Mind (2012). Eagleman’s book is wrenchingly typical for making unconscious mechanics responsible for the preponderance of what we do and say and for obscuring certain material facts that suggest otherwise. For instance, Eagleman uses Ulysses to analyze the housing bubble: By bounding himself in anticipation of his ship passing the Sirens, Ulysses shorted the same “instant-gratification circuits” that produced the subprime-mortgage crisis. But this account neglects predatory lending practices and the failure of government regulation—anything besides the cognitive processes of homeowners.

Rather than trouble what neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran calls our “cognitive state of grace” in relation to other species, such books tend to strip away the construction of subjective experience from objective reality in order to reveal the gears at work and marvel at the mechanics. The conscious mind becomes an evolutionary product of these unconscious operations; it is dismissed as an incidental aspect of the brain, a tool for achieving certain rarefied tasks. (Aside from being the basis of higher-level thinking, consciousness is the crux of the liberal democratic project. The terminal point of which might be the erosion of the free, autonomous political subject, in favor of a biologically constituted self, which has dramatic implications for the exercise of power and the production of social life.) Authors are expected to edify initiates while catering to their relative ignorance, acquaint them with the basics of brain functioning but not muddle the material with too much neuroanatomy. Often this means pitching a ream of case studies and summaries of academic papers as a “journey,” “search,” or “quest.” At the end of the road there tends to be either a solution to everyday problems—leadership, love, sales, addiction, productivity—or a sense of pure wonder. Dwelling on the magic of cognition, while insisting on its biological basis, returns the brain to a fantastical realm just as it is being demystified.

The quest for a purely biological account of consciousness seems, paradoxically, to point to something about our cognitive configuration that eludes such an understanding. Neuroscience has illuminated the brain’s constant efforts to make sense of the world, to form an astonishingly coherent narrative out of a welter of information. Our eyes capture fragments of objects in mere moments—fleeting records of passing cars, gathering clouds, familiar faces—which are strung together by the brain, giving the impression of a continuous visual flow. Cognition is enabled by regular communication between different regions of the brain, a kind of discourse between neuronal factions that, over a lifetime, actually restructures the brain, in what neuroscientist J. P. Changeux has labeled “the Darwinism of the synapses.” Furthermore, the brain develops a model of the outside world that enables it to anticipate rather than merely respond to sensory data. We are, in effect, always constructing the setting of our own story just before it happens. Somehow this seemingly effortless assembly of memories and impressions inspires the vague but tenacious belief in the presence within us of something that exceeds our circuitry, a more or less authentic self. And this self seems to be as real, if not more real, than anything else in the world.

Neuroscience: Under Attack

THIS fall, science writers have made sport of yet another instance of bad neuroscience. The culprit this time is Naomi Wolf; her new book, “Vagina,” has been roundly drubbed for misrepresenting the brain and neurochemicals like dopamine and oxytocin.

Earlier in the year, Chris Mooney raised similar ire with the book “The Republican Brain,” which claims that Republicans are genetically different from — and, many readers deduced, lesser to — Democrats. “If Mooney’s argument sounds familiar to you, it should,” scoffed two science writers. “It’s called ‘eugenics,’ and it was based on the belief that some humans are genetically inferior.”

Sharp words from disapproving science writers are but the tip of the hippocampus: today’s pop neuroscience, coarsened for mass audiences, is under a much larger attack.

Meet the “neuro doubters.” The neuro doubter may like neuroscience but does not like what he or she considers its bastardization by glib, sometimes ill-informed, popularizers.

A gaggle of energetic and amusing, mostly anonymous, neuroscience bloggers — including Neurocritic, Neuroskeptic, Neurobonkers and Mind Hacks — now regularly point out the lapses and folly contained in mainstream neuroscientific discourse. This group, for example, slammed a recent Newsweek article in which a neurosurgeon claimed to have discovered that “heaven is real” after his cortex “shut down.” Such journalism, these critics contend, is “shoddy,” nothing more than “simplified pop.” Additionally, publications from The Guardian to the New Statesman have published pieces blasting popular neuroscience-dependent writers like Jonah Lehrer and Malcolm Gladwell. The Oxford neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop’s scolding lecture on the science of bad neuroscience was an online sensation last summer.

As a journalist and cultural critic, I applaud the backlash against what is sometimes called brain porn, which raises important questions about this reductionist, sloppy thinking and our willingness to accept seemingly neuroscientific explanations for, well, nearly everything.

Voting Republican? Oh, that’s brain chemistry. Success on the job? Fortuitous neurochemistry! Neuroscience has joined company with other totalizing worldviews — Marxism, Freudianism, critical theory — that have been victim to overuse and misapplication.

A team of British scientists recently analyzed nearly 3,000 neuroscientific articles published in the British press between 2000 and 2010 and found that the media regularly distorts and embellishes the findings of scientific studies. Writing in the journal Neuron, the researchers concluded that “logically irrelevant neuroscience information imbues an argument with authoritative, scientific credibility.” Another way of saying this is that bogus science gives vague, undisciplined thinking the look of seriousness and truth.

The problem isn’t solely that self-appointed scientists often jump to faulty conclusions about neuroscience. It’s also that they are part of a larger cultural tendency, in which neuroscientific explanations eclipse historical, political, economic, literary and journalistic interpretations of experience. A number of the neuro doubters are also humanities scholars who question the way that neuroscience has seeped into their disciplines, creating phenomena like neuro law, which, in part, uses the evidence of damaged brains as the basis for legal defense of people accused of heinous crimes, or neuroaesthetics, a trendy blend of art history and neuroscience.

It’s not hard to understand why neuroscience is so appealing. We all seek shortcuts to enlightenment. It’s reassuring to believe that brain images and machine analysis will reveal the fundamental truth about our minds and their contents. But as the neuro doubters make plain, we may be asking too much of neuroscience, expecting that its explanations will be definitive. Yet it’s hard to imagine that any functional magnetic resonance imaging or chemical map will ever explain “The Golden Bowl” or heaven. Or that brain imaging, no matter how sophisticated and precise, will ever tell us what women really want.

The Art of Positive Skepticism

In the late 1500’s, everyone believed Aristotle’s claim that heavy objects fell faster than light ones. That is, everyone except Galileo. To test Aristotle’s claim, Galileo dropped two balls of differing weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. And guess what? They both hit the ground at the same time! For challenging Aristotle’s authority, Galileo was fired from his job. But for his place in history, he showed us that testing human claims should be the mediator of all truth.

Fast forward to modern times. Challenging commonly held assumptions about computers and human behavior, Steve Jobs lost his job with Apple in 1985. Returning 12 years later, he changed the way people use technology by testing the truth of other people’s claims. As a result, history considers Jobs one of the most innovative minds of the 21st century.

Galileo and Jobs were skeptics. They had developed habits of thinking that challenged what appeared to be reliable facts. They understood that testing assumptions over human authority led to greater understanding, innovation, and creativity.

It’s easy to confuse being a skeptic with being a cynic. So let’s define the terms.

A cynic distrusts most information they see or hear, particularly when it challenges their own belief system. Most often, cynics hold views that cannot be changed by contrary evidence. Thus, they often become intolerant of other people’s ideas. It’s not difficult to find cynics everywhere in our society, from the halls of Congress to our own family dinner tables. People who are driven by inflexible beliefs rarely think like Galileo or Jobs.

Skepticism, on the other hand, is a key part of critical thinking – a goal of education. The term skeptic is derived from the Greek skeptikos, meaning “to inquire” or “look around.” Skeptics requires additional evidence before accepting someone’s claims as true. They are willing to challenge the status quo with open-minded, deep questioning of authority.

In today’s complex world, skeptics and cynics are often hard to differentiate. While the ability to challenge human authority has led to important innovation and reform, it has also made it possible, for a price, to prove our “rightness.” Oftentimes, what appear to be legitimate studies are manipulated to support a particular idea or outcome that a company, individual, or government believes is the truth.

And herein lays the dilemma of our modern day quest for certainty. When we can no longer be objective “inquirers” because we have already decided the truth, then we create a culture of cynicism instead of skepticism. Is this the kind of world we want for ourselves and our children?

If we model skepticism instead of cynicism, our children would inherit a world that would be less dependent on power and authority and more dependent on critical thinking and good judgment. Adolescents and young adults would be capable of questioning the reliability of what they think or hear. They would learn to believe in their natural abilities to facilitate positive change through intellectual inquiry. They would become discerning consumers of ideas rather than passive accepters of other people’s visions of certainty.

How we adults model the art of positive skepticism not only helps us make better informed decisions but also shows our children how to think for themselves. And, if kids learn to think for themselves, they learn to believe in themselves!

Five Ways to Model Positive Skepticism



Be a Deception-Detector

People constantly make claims that affect our daily lives. From those selling products and services to candidates running for political offices, we are barraged with decisions that require us to act. Thomas Kida, in his book Don’t Believe Everything You Think, shows how easily we can be fooled and why we should learn to think like a scientist.

Challenge claims by asking for evidence. Ask questions like, “What makes you think this way?” “What assumptions have you based your claim upon?” “What facts or research support your ideas?” “Are there facts or studies that dispute your claim?”

Doubt

Constant streams of commercial messages, TV news, and campaign ads try to tell us how to think. When we allow others to think for us, we become vulnerable to indoctrination, propaganda, and powerful emotional appeals. In her book, Descartes’s Method of Doubt, Janet Broughton examined the important role that doubt plays in our quest for truth.

Recognize the limits to anyone’s claims of truth! Look below the surface rather than accepting ideas at face value. Ask yourself questions like, “What is the logic of this argument?” Listen to yourself when something doesn’t feel right!

Play Devil’s Advocate

Part of being a good skeptic is learning to play a devil’s advocate role. Take a position you don’t necessarily agree with, just for the sake of argument. This doesn’t have to be combative. You can simply say “In order to understand this idea better; let me play the devil’s advocate.” Putting your mind to work poking holes in what you think might be a good idea can lead to greater understanding of a problem. Playing devil’s advocate is a great way to teach children how to see another person’s perspective.

Use Logic and Intuition

We are persuaded to doubt or believe other people’s claims through logic and intuition, and most of us tend to rely heavily on one type of thinking or the other. Whether you are a logical or intuitive thinker, it’s helpful to alternate between these two qualities of mind. In his book, Embracing Contraries, Peter Elbow says, “Doubting and believing are among the most powerful root acts we can perform with our minds.” We become better thinkers when we deploy doubting and believing more consciously through the use of logic and intuition rather than by chance.

Be a Bias-Detector

One of the most important tasks of a true skeptic is to determine whether sources of information and analysis are impartial. This is a trait that serves us well when we turn on the television. If we only listen to one channel, or our favorite news commentator, we’ll likely be persuaded by biased or emotional appeals. Ask yourself, “What’s the other side of this story?” “Is this one person’s story or does it apply to thousands of people?" “Is there an underlying belief or assumption being made that reflects this reporter’s ideology?”

R.M. Dawes’ points out in his book, Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally, that emotional appeals and story-based thinking often lead to faulty reasoning. The point in detecting bias is to be able to identify messages that are intended to persuade rather than inform us.

Positive skepticism leads to better problem-solving, innovation, and creativity! It also helps develop our abilities to think critically about the world around us! Do you agree? Feel free to poke some holes in my thinking!

By Marilyn Price-Mitchell

The downside of missing breakfast.

People who skip breakfast may end up eating more and making less healthy food choices throughout the day, according to a new study. Eating breakfast, on the other hand, helps people avoid overeating and cravings for high-calorie foods.

The findings are scheduled for presentation Wednesday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in New Orleans.

Researchers compared MRI brain scans of 21 people. Scans were conducted both when the participants had not eaten anything that morning and after they had a 750-calorie breakfast. After all of the scans, the participants were served lunch.

“Through both the participants’ MRI results and observations of how much they ate at lunch, we found ample evidence that fasting made people hungrier, and increased the appeal of high-calorie foods and the amount people ate,” Dr. Tony Goldstone, at the MRC Clinical Science Centre at London’s Imperial College, said in a society news release.

The study revealed that the people who skipped breakfast had a variation in the pattern of activity in their orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the brain linked to the reward value and pleasantness of food.

Specifically, pictures of high-calorie foods triggered activity in this area of their brain. The study authors noted, however, that if the participant ate breakfast, this response was not as strong.

The researchers concluded that fasting is not a good dieting strategy because it may cause the brain to seek out high-calorie foods.

Because this study was presented at a medical meeting, the data and conclusions should be viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about nutrition.

SOURCE: Society for Neuroscience, news release, Oct. 16, 2012

They Work Long Hours, but What About Results?

Do long hours lead to better results?

This week I've decided to take an article from the New York Times.  The author, Robert C. Pozen, articulates very well the challenges that come with working long hours.  The question that is asked that does the number of hours work correlate with the quality of results?  Read on.  Enjoy.

IT’S 5 p.m. at the office. Working fast, you’ve finished your tasks for the day and want to go home. But none of your colleagues have left yet, so you stay another hour or two, surfing the Web and reading your e-mails again, so you don’t come off as a slacker.

It’s an unfortunate reality that efficiency often goes unrewarded in the workplace. I had that feeling a lot when I was a partner in a Washington law firm. Because of my expertise, I could often answer a client’s questions quickly, saving both of us time. But because my firm billed by the hour, as most law firms do, my efficiency worked against me.

From the law firm’s perspective, billing by the hour has a certain appeal: it shifts risk from the firm to the client in case the work takes longer than expected. But from a client’s perspective, it doesn’t work so well. It gives lawyers an incentive to overstaff and to overresearch cases. And for me, hourly billing was a raw deal. I ran the risk of being underpaid because I answered questions too quickly and billed a smaller number of hours.

Firms that bill by the hour are not alone in emphasizing hours over results. For a study published most recently in 2010, three researchers, led by Kimberly D. Elsbach, a professor at the University of California, Davis, interviewed 39 corporate managers about their perceptions of their employees. The managers viewed employees who were seen at the office during business hours as highly “dependable” and “reliable.” Employees who came in over the weekend or stayed late in the evening were seen as “committed” and “dedicated” to their work.

One manager said: “So this one guy, he’s in the room at every meeting. Lots of times he doesn’t say anything, but he’s there on time and people notice that. He definitely is seen as a hard-working and dependable guy.” Another said: “Working on the weekends makes a very good impression. It sends a signal that you’re contributing to your team and that you’re putting in that extra commitment to get the work done.”

The reactions of these managers are understandable remnants of the industrial age, harking back to the standardized nature of work on an assembly line. But a measurement system based on hours makes no sense for knowledge workers. Their contribution should be measured by the value they create through applying their ideas and skills.

By applying an industrial-age mind-set to 21st-century professionals, many organizations are undermining incentives for workers to be efficient. If employees need to stay late in order to curry favor with the boss, what motivation do they have to get work done during normal business hours? After all, they can put in the requisite “face time” whether they are surfing the Internet or analyzing customer data. It’s no surprise, then, that so many professionals find it easy to procrastinate and hard to stay on a task.

There is an obvious solution here: Instead of counting the hours you work, judge your success by the results you produce. Did you clear a backlog of customer orders? Did you come up with a new idea to solve a tricky problem? Did you write a first draft of an article that is due next week? Clearly, these accomplishments — not the hours that you log — are what ultimately drive your organization’s success.

Many of your results-oriented strategies will be specific to your job and your company, but here are a few general ways that professionals across all industries can improve their efficiency.

LIMIT MEETINGS Internal meetings can be a huge waste of time. A short meeting can be useful for discussing a controversial issue, but long meetings — beyond 60 to 90 minutes — are usually unproductive. Leaders often spend too much time reciting introductory material, and participants eventually stop paying attention.

Try very hard to avoid meetings that you suspect will be long and unproductive. When possible, politely decline meeting invitations from your peers by pointing to your impending deadlines. If that’s not an option, make clear that you can stay for only the first 60 minutes, and will then have to deal with more pressing obligations. And be hesitant to call meetings yourself; you can deal with most issues through e-mail or a quick phone call.

If you’re involved in calling or planning a necessary meeting, make sure it’s productive. Create an agenda that organizes the meeting and keeps it moving briskly. Distribute that agenda, along with any advance materials, at least a day in advance. Appoint a “devil’s advocate” for every meeting, whose job is to make sure that the potential negatives are discussed. At the end of the meeting, make sure that everyone agrees on the next steps, with each step assigned to one participant and with a specific deadline.

REDUCE READING You don’t need to read the full text of everything you come across in the course of your work, even if it comes directly from the boss. Though reading a long article from cover to cover might make you feel productive, it might not be the best use of your time. Most likely, only a very small part of that article is vital to your work. Maybe you need to remember the big ideas, not the intricate details. Or maybe you need only to find one or two examples that illustrate a particular larger point. Once you start reading a text, make it a point to search for what’s important, while skipping sections that are less relevant.

Of course, some materials call for you to become totally immersed in the details. If you are reading an article directly related to the company’s newest blockbuster product, for instance, it probably makes sense to go over every word. But for less important tasks, this level of detail is often unnecessary. If you’re not careful, these tasks can take over your entire schedule.

And avoid rereading your e-mails. I am a great believer in the OHIO principle: Only handle it once. When you read an e-mail, decide whether or not to reply to it, and, if you need to reply, do so right then and there. I have found that about 80 percent of all e-mails, whether internal or external, do not require a response. Don’t let these extraneous communications clog your in-box and waste your time.

WRITE FASTER Even if you need to create A-plus work for a project, it needn’t be perfect right off the bat. When some people sit down to write a long memo, they insist on perfecting each sentence before moving to the next one. They want to complete all the stages of the writing process at the same time — a most difficult task. In my experience, this leads to very slow writing.

A better approach separates the main steps in the writing process. First, compose an outline for what you are going to say, and in what order. Then write a rough draft, knowing it will be highly imperfect. Then go back over your work and revise as needed. This is the time to perfect the phrasing of those sentences.

In general, don’t waste your time creating A-plus work when B-plus is good enough. Use the extra time to create A-plus work where it matters most.

AS you try these and other results-oriented strategies, you may well find yourself spending less time at the office — and that can make some bosses nervous. The traditional emphasis on face time, after all, is easy for managers: it takes much less effort to count hours than it does to measure results. That’s why you may need to forge a new relationship with your boss.

You must earn your boss’s trust that you can accomplish your work in less time. In part, you can do this by thinking about your organization and watching your boss. Ask yourself: What are the most important goals of your unit? What sort of pressure is your boss under — to expand globally, to introduce new products, to cut costs, or something else? How might the boss’s personality and management style shape these considerations?

But it’s not enough to think and observe. You need to communicate — often. Every week, write down a list of your assigned tasks — short-term assignments and long-term goals — and rank them by importance, from your perspective. Then ask your boss to weigh in on the list.

You and your boss should come to a consensus about the metrics for every project. If your boss doesn’t establish any, suggest them yourself. Metrics can include both qualitative and quantitative results. They provide objective measures for judging final results — and move your boss away from the crutch of face time. And the process of establishing these metrics can help you and your boss clarify how best to accomplish a project.

Once the boss is confident that you know what to do and how to do it, show that you can consistently create high-quality results on high-priority projects. There’s no particular secret here: you need to do your best to achieve the established goals. And remember that most projects run into potholes or even roadblocks on the way. Be quick to report problems to the boss and to suggest possible solutions, including a revision the project metrics themselves.

I KNOW that a change in focus from hours to results may be a challenge in some organizations. But your boss is likely to be receptive if you politely raise the question of productivity and show you’re willing to be held accountable for results, rather than hours worked. You may also be able to do more work from home, if that’s what you prefer.

Even in a culture oriented toward results, however, you sometimes will need to be physically present in the office to do your work. And some jobs absolutely depend on it. In almost all workplaces, colleagues need to get together to brainstorm ideas, solve tough problems or build communal bonds. But there’s no reason for these interactions to take up large amounts of time.

By emphasizing results rather than hours, I’m able to get home at 7 p.m. for dinner with my family nearly every night — except when there are true emergencies. This has greatly enhanced my family life, and has given me a secondary benefit: a fruitful mental break. I’ve solved some of the thorniest problems in my home office at 10 p.m. — after a refreshing few hours chatting with my wife and children.

Focusing on results rather than hours will help you accomplish more at work and leave more time for the rest of your life. And don’t be afraid to talk to your boss about these issues. To paraphrase the management guru Peter Drucker, although you don’t have to like your boss, you have to manage him or her so you can have a successful career.

Like what you've read?  Please visit us at www.MINDtalk.no

How can I run more effective meetings?

Meetings: Into the fray once again.

I am in and out of a number of companies every week helping working professionals move forward through the quagmire of doing and running businesses.  One of the rather larger bumps in the road are the number of internal meetings that take up too much time. 

Here is an interesting excerpt from Robert Pozen's latest book Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours.  Read on and enjoy.

Internal meetings are the bane of corporate life. There are too many meetings, they take too long, and they get too little accomplished.

Why? Because most meetings are really not necessary. Before you call a meeting, think about whether you can accomplish your goals through email or a quick phone call. You rarely need to call a meeting if you’re just planning on sharing information or issuing action instructions. By contrast, meetings may be needed to debate issues or to develop new approaches.

You also shouldn’t feel the need to attend every meeting to which you’re invited. Quite often, you can politely refuse an invitation by pointing out your imminent deadlines. Even if you can’t avoid the meeting completely, it can give you a good excuse for bowing out after a set time limit (30 or 60 minutes, for instance).

Even if a meeting is necessary, you can still reduce the employee-hours spent in meetings by limiting invitations to only those employees who are vitally necessary—letting as many people as possible avoid the meeting entirely. Empirical research suggests that a smaller group (five to seven) is more effective at decision-making, so making your meetings smaller should make for a more productive meeting as well.

Most importantly, you should keep your meetings as short as possible. Meetings rarely need to last for more than one hour, and virtually never past 90 minutes. After that, employees will lose concentration and little more will get done. One way to enforce time limits is to take the chairs out of the meeting room; when standing up, participants get down to business very quickly.

When there are meetings, good preparation is the key to their productivity. When some participants don’t prepare for a meeting, the first part must be devoted to getting everyone up to speed. This is a disincentive for anyone to prepare for future meetings.

To encourage good preparation, the leader should send out background materials and an agenda, at least a day in advance. If you find that a particular leader often forgets this step, you can make your attendance conditional on receiving these materials with enough lead-time. But be sure to fulfill your end of the bargain: if the leader sends out advance materials, read them carefully before the meeting.

If everyone prepares, you can have a more productive meeting. After brief introductory remark by the leader (15 minutes or so), participants can debate the issue in question or develop new approaches. But often the introduction goes on and on, leaving little time for discussion. That totally undercuts the primary purpose for having a meeting.

Long introductions are particularly irritating when they take the form of PowerPoint presentations. We have all been bored to death when someone marches through 20 or 30 PowerPoint slides, reading every word on each slide. If that starts to happen, nicely say, “Your points are really interesting, so I hope we can have as much time as possible to discuss your presentation.”


At the end of any meeting, all participants should agree on the next steps, along with a deadline for each step. The leader should resist the urge to make this decision himself or herself: if participants can set their own goals, they’ll be more likely to buy into them.

In short, you cannot eliminate meetings totally. But you can get rid of most of them, limit their size, and keep them short. And you can structure the necessary meetings to maximize their productivity.

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What language does your stressed brain speak?

A distinct language of the stressed brain.

 
In earlier blog entries I have written about the thinking mindset and the reactive mindset.  As a quick recap the thinking mindset is characterized by higher cognitive functions such as critical thinking, judgement, attention span, impulse control, solution orientation, cognitive flexibility and so on.  We find ourselves in this mindset when we feel a good degree of confidence, certainty, and oversight.  Unfortunately, this can quickly change.

Similar to how quickly the weather can shift in the northern Europe, so can the key-elements in a situation.  We can move from certainty to uncertainty and from having oversight to being overwhelmed.  With this shift come a change in our mindsets from thinking to reactive.  In the reactive mindset all of the higher functions that characterize the thinking mindset pretty much go offline.  What we are left with are the survival, instinctual behaviors of fight, flight and freeze.

Have you considered that mindsets have their own distinct language?

This is a question that I have my asked myself many times when I am in a coaching session with a client.  Typically, when I begin a session my client is some state of distress.  It could be an issue of looming deadlines and not enough time or a key direct-report who is giving him/her grief.  He or she may start our meeting in a reactive mindset where their focus is on only the problem and where they are hijacked by their emotions.  As they describe the situation their language instantly reflects their negative mindset.

As I ask more questions for clarification or elaboration, my clients are forced to start the arduous climb to the thinking mindset.  It requires cognitive energy to answer the questions and to articulate their thoughts.  With this heavy investment comes rewarding dividends.  That is, my clients are no longer plagued by the reactive mindset but are caught in the upward spiral of the thinking mindset.  There is a shift in their language that is characterized by forward-thinking, solution-orientation, and a broad spectrum of possibilities.

Even though I have been doing this for close to 13 years, my observations are still only anecdotal. Nonetheless, I have found the language used is a significant indicator of a constructive shift in mindset.

      If we are in the thinking mindset our outlook tends to be constructive and optimistic, and we use
      words such as solution, challenge, approach, possibilities.  When we question to figure out what
      has gone wrong we tend to ask questions like what is the reason?  In this mindset we are
      searching for an explanation.

      If we find ourselves in the reactive mindset our outlook is bleak and pessimistic, and we use
     words such as negative, problem, impossible, never.  When something does go wrong we ask
     questions like why now?, why does this have to happen?, where instead of searching for an
     explanation we are instead seeking a justification.

How does this relate to stress and self-management?
 
Individuals can sometimes be very harsh on themselves, where if it had been someone else they would have been much more lenient. This over-critical view really shines when someone chides himself for not getting something done.  I'll hear him say something along the lines of  'I should have done something' or 'I have to do something'. Simply thinking or saying this to yourself immediately begins the slide into the reactive mindset.

The answer is not being able to stop the reactive mindset from occurring, because that would only be an effort of futility.  If our brains interpret a situation to be a threat, whether mild or severe, it will automatically go into a reactive state.  The answer is to stop the reactive slide and begin the climb toward the thinking state of mind.

Part of self-managing your stress has to do with monitoring your thoughts and being award of what you say.  This is not very easy to do when your mind is occupied already with concern and worries. The key is to be able to shift your reactive language to a more thinking language (i.e. forward-thinking, solution-orientation, and a broad spectrum of possibilities).

An example of this is to shift from saying 'I need or have to do this...' to 'I want or would like to do this...'. Instead of asking yourself to justify your action by questioning, 'Why did you do that?', you instead search for an explanation by asking 'What is the reason...?'

Mind Your Language

An integral part of self-management in relation to stress is monitoring what we think and what we say.  There is a distinct language set depending on our mindset.  If we can become just a little more disciplined in how we use words in stressful situations, this can go a long way in modifying how we deal with stress.  

Curious? Wish to know more? Visit us at www.MINDtalk.no

How to build self-confidence in order to be more assertive?

A common challenge many of us face in the daily grind is the ability to be assertive. There is a trepidation about moving forward and speaking up.  In the moment when we feel we want to speak up we instead tend to choke-up.  Many of us have become very adept at convincing ourselves to back-down and close-down.

This may play out when we need to have a difficult conversation with a colleague; when we feel it's time to give corrective feedback to a direct-report; when we want to speak up during a meeting to share our opinion; and a whole host of other situations. When it is time to step-up, we politely bow our heads and step-down.  It is only afterwards when the window of opportunity is closed that we kick and berate ourselves and quietly promise ourselves next time...

More than likely, although the situation will be different, the same elements will come into play and we will find ourselves hunkering down and clamming up.  This is a pattern that does not need to continue and can be broken.  Our lack of assertiveness can be due to a fear of conflict, upsetting people, looking stupid, feeling silly and so on.  Often you will find the common denominator to be a confidence issue.

Espen Bredesen's Playbook

Espen Bredesen is a world champion Norwegian ski jumper who competed actively from 1990 to 2000. Along with his list of accomplishments was winning gold and silver medals at the 1994 Winter Olympics at Lillehammer.  Ski jumping requires an individual to rocket themselves down a very steep incline, launching into the bright-blue air, while all the time believing that you will land intact and with some measure of grace at the base of the hill.  As you can imagine, confidence in one's abilities is paramount.

One of the techniques Espen Bredesen used when training was visualization.  The ability to use the full extent of his brain to not only visualize a competitive event, but to make it as visceral as possible - to completely immerse himself mentally in the situation.  The brain can not tell the difference between what is reality and what is imagined.  It is only the tiny aspect of our conscious mind that allows us to make this differentiation.

By visualizing himself at the top of the ski jump Espen Bredesen's brain actually thought it was happening.  The more detail he adds (i.e. the feel of the wind on his face, the tensing of his legs as he prepares, the colors and texture of his surroundings, the grip on his ski-poles etc.) the more real it seems to the brain. His confidence is high when the day of competition finally arrives and he finds himself at the top of the ski jump.  A large part of this is due to the fact that he had rehearsed so often in his brain that it laid down a well-worn neural pathway -  a strong sense of certainty of what was to be expected and what he needed to do.

Brain Skill One

We can take a lesson from Espen's play book.  One very effective tool is to visualize the meeting you are going to attend and the participants.  Run the meeting through the theater of your mind.  Who are the supporters and who are the antagonists? When might you have to share your opinion? How will you present yourself? As serious or informal? Add details and richness to the image.  When the actual time for the meeting arrives your confidence will be higher than if you had not gone though the visualization exercise.  With confidence comes a certain degree of assertiveness.

Brain Skill Two

A second technique is to reassess the pleasure and pain that you associate with being assertive.  Most times we will assign massive amounts of pain to speaking up and equal amounts of pleasure to staying timid and quiet.  The idea is to do a 180 on this.  That is, we need to reconfigure what we associate with pleasure and and what we associate with pain.

You can do this by articulating your thoughts on paper.  List the pleasure you will have by being assertive (e.g. I will feel confident; I will have contributed; I will feel I took the chance; people will know I have a voice and can speak up etc.)  Also you will want to list the pain you will have if you are not assertive (i.e. I will feel I've lost another opportunity; I will feel regret; I will have let another chance slip by to prove I can make a valuable contribution; people will start to question by value since I never seem to contribute etc.)

Brain Skill Three

A third technique is to simply search your memories for times when you were assertive and spoke up.  Keep your thinking on the lessons learned and the times when it paid off.  The simple act of recalling past events of past successes primes our brains for confidence and motivates us to be assertive.

Through visualizing how a meeting may play out; reconfiguring our pain and pleasure association; and reflecting on past wins has a significant affect on putting us into a confident and assertive mindset.

Curious?  Have questions?  Please visit me at MINDtalk

How does priming affect performance?

Take a moment and study the following five words:

      Florida           Forgetful            Bald            Gray             Wrinkle

Psychologist John Bargh and his team at New York University gave this particular set of words to a group of students and asked them to assemble a 4 word sentence from the set of 5 words. After completing the task the students were asked to walk down a hall to do another experiment.  Unbeknownst to the students the actual experiment was to measure how long it took them to walk the short distance down the hall.

The results showed time and again those students that had to form a sentence with words that had an elderly theme walked down the hall significantly slower than other students given different 5 word combinations.

Even the the word old was never mentioned the students minds were primed with the word old.  This had a direct influence on their thoughts and behavior (i.e. the act of walking down the hall slowly).  The kicker is this - it all happened below the radar of awareness.  The students had no idea that this priming had affected them so significantly.

Afterwards, all the students were asked if they believed the first experiment had any influence on their performance on the second experiment.  The answer was a resounding, 'NO'.  When the students were asked if they recognized a common theme in the words, the answer again was no.

What is priming?

This brings us to the topic of this blog - priming. What is priming?  Priming refers to a increased sensitivity to certain stimuli due to prior experience. Priming it believed to occur outside of conscious awareness, it is different from memory that relies on the direct retrieval of information.  The way it does this is through what is termed - associative memory.

One idea triggers other ideas in a domino-like effect.  Each mental domino is connected and supports the other.  An idea awakens emotions that in turn awakens physical behavior and reactions.  A great majority of this associative workings goes on without much conscious realization.

What is reciprocal priming?
 
There is also something called reciprocal priming.  That is, by physically smiling it evokes optimistic emotions and thoughts.  By physically frowning it will evoke more pessimistic emotions and thoughts. Based on the above mentioned experiment by acting and behaving old it will make you feel and think old.  Remember cognition (i.e. thinking) is not limited to simply the brain, you also think with your body.  Cognition is embodied.

How can I use priming to my benefit?

Priming shows us that stimuli in our environment can trigger thoughts, emotions and behavior through associations that our brains make.  If we know we are going to move into a meeting or situation where we need to perform at our best we may want to consciously act on priming our brains - to utilize our brain's associative machinery to our advantage.

Some ways of doing this is to play a much-loved song that motivates you and fills you with the rush of endorphins.  Standing in front of the mirror preparing yourself for the day ahead, you may want to have a Post-It note stuck on the mirror with five words that trigger constructive associations.  You may want to avoid reading the newspaper or watching the news in the morning (we all know how the newspaper is choker-blocked with all the good things that have transpired in the world in the last 24 hours).

When it comes to problem-solving and decision-making we want to prime our thinking so it is solution-oriented and forward-focused. One of the easiest and most effective ways of doing this is asking yourself questions. What is the next step? What are the knowns? What do I control? What can I influence? Who can I go to? What has worked in the past? What's another way to look at this? Where could I find the answer or part of the answer?

It is a hard pill to swallow to know that we are not allows in control of ourselves.  That a great majority of who we are and what we do is vastly influenced by our environmental triggers, and a great majority of this goes on below our awareness.

Priming is some ways similar to breathing.  It functions automatically, but when we become aware of our breathing we can control it.  This to some regards is what we can do with the phenomenon of priming.

Curious? Wish to know more?  Please visit us at MINDtalk

Are you staying hungry?

Not long ago, I facilitated a round table discussion for a designer furniture store helping them to take a hard look at themselves.  The focus was on understanding who they were, where they wanted to go and what needed keeping and what needed fixing.

The store began as a few scribblings on a napkin at a cafe.  In a span of five years, they have grown into a thriving business with a modest turnover.  At present, they are the exclusive agents to some of Sweden and Denmark's well-known, designer brands.  Their presence amongst architects, interior designers and other such professionals is growing at a pace that would make many envious.

But as you may have already guessed their growth and success were no easy feat.  Every meter gained had to be earned with an investment of effort and energy.  Most businesses fail within the first twelve months.  If they survive that then there is the 24 month hurdle to overcome.  If a business has managed to stick around 5 years there is a greater sense of stability and that it is doing something right. 

From my experience a sense of success can sometimes breed a sense of complacency or even worse a sense of superiority.  That is,  sometimes people think they have stumbled on to the secret formula of success and all they have to do is keep on doing what they are doing.  Of course as many businesses know this is more like the formula of crash and burn.  It has been written about in hundreds of articles and books.  Nonetheless, what were once global empires of enterprise are now empty ruins only spoken in terms of what once was or has been.

One of the latest examples of an empire crumbling is Research In Motion (RIM) makers of the famous or infamous Blackberry.  At the top of their might they spoke arrogantly about the demise of the iPhone.  RIM truly believed no significant development had to be made to their phones.  They thought they knew what the business world wanted. It seems they thought wrong and are presently trying to cling on to a market that is nearly beyond their reach.  Since 2007, their market value has tanked by 65%. RIM's desperation is tantamount to building a sandbag wall after the flood has already hit.

As for the designer furniture store their near future looks extremely bright, but they are under no illusion that it will always be so.  Their success has not gone to their heads and left them feeling satiated.  It has rather rekindled their hunger to stretch the business beyond where they are today.

I believe hunger in business is a necessity and should never been undervalued.  Hunger stokes the drive to strive.  Every now and then I think it is important for an individual or a business to create their own wake-up call and to take a hard look at themselves.  Simply asking the question, 'Are we staying hungry?' is a strong first step.

Curious? Wish to know more?  Please visit us at MINDtalk

Thinking about NLP? You had better think again.

Contribution by The Skeptics Dictionary

neuro-linguistic programming (NLP)

I think the more you want to become more and more creative you have to not only elicit other peoples' (plural) strategies and replicate them yourself, but also modify others' strategies and have a strategy that creates new creativity strategies based on as many wonderful states as you can design for yourself. Therefore, in a way, the entire field of NLP™ is a creative tool, because I wanted to create something new.   --Richard Bandler

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is one of many New Age Large Group Awareness Training programs. NLP is a competitor with Landmark Forum, Tony Robbins, and legions of other enterprises which, like the Sophists of ancient Greece, travel from town to town to teach their wisdom for a fee. Robbins is probably the most successful "graduate" of NLP. He started his own empire after transforming from a self-described "fat slob" to a firewalker to (in his own words) "the nation's foremost authority on the psychology of peak performance and personal, professional and organizational turnaround." The founders of NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, might disagree.

NLP has something for everybody, the sick and the healthy, individual or corporation. In addition to being an agent for change for healthy individuals taught en masse, NLP is also used for individual psychotherapy for problems as diverse as phobias and schizophrenia. NLP also aims at transforming corporations, showing them how to achieve their maximum potential and achieve great success.

What is NLP?

NLP was begun in the mid-seventies by a linguist (Grinder) and a mathematician (Bandler) who had strong interests in (a) successful people, (b) psychology, (c) language and (d) computer programming. It is a difficult to define NLP because those who started it and those involved in it use such vague and ambiguous language that NLP means different things to different people. While it is difficult to find a consistent description of NLP among those who claim to be experts at it, one metaphor keeps recurring. NLP claims to help people change by teaching them to program their brains. We were given brains, we are told, but no instruction manual. NLP offers you a user-manual for the brain. The brain-manual seems to be a metaphor for NLP training, which is sometimes referred to as "software for the brain." Furthermore, NLP, consciously or unconsciously, relies heavily upon (1) the notion of the unconscious mind as constantly influencing conscious thought and action; (2) metaphorical behavior and speech, especially building upon the methods used in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams; and (3) hypnotherapy as developed by Milton Erickson. NLP is also heavily influenced by the work of Gregory Bateson and Noam Chomsky.

One common thread in NLP is the emphasis on teaching a variety of communication and persuasion skills, and using self-hypnosis to motivate and change oneself. Most NLP practitioners advertising on the WWW make grand claims about being able to help just about anybody become just about anything. The following is typical:

NLP can enhance all aspects of your life by improving your relationships with loved ones, learning to teach effectively, gaining a stronger sense of self-esteem, greater motivation, better understanding of communication, enhancing your business or career... and an enormous amount of other things which involve your brain. (from the now defunct http://www.nlpinfo.com/intro/txintro.shtml archived here)

Some advocates claim that they can teach an infallible method of telling when a person is lying, but others recognize that this is not possible. Some claim that people fail only because their teachers have not communicated with them in the right "language". One NLP guru, Dale Kirby, informs us that one of the presuppositions of NLP is "No one is wrong or broken." So why seek remedial change? On the other hand, what Mr. Kirby does have to say about NLP which is intelligible does not make it very attractive. For example, he says that according to NLP "There is no such thing as failure. There is only feedback." Was NLP invented by the U.S. Military to explain their "incomplete successes"? When the space shuttle blew up within minutes of launch, killing everyone on board, was that "only feedback"? If I stab my neighbor and call it "performing non-elective surgery" am I practicing NLP? If I am arrested in a drunken state with a knife in my pocket for threatening an ex-girlfriend, am I just "trying to rekindle an old flame"?

Another NLP presupposition which is false is "If someone can do something, anyone can learn it." This comes from people who claim they understand the brain and can help you reprogram yours. They want you to think that the only thing that separates the average person from Einstein or Pavarotti or the World Champion Log Lifter is NLP.

NLP is said to be the study of the structure of subjective experience, but a great deal of attention seems to be paid to observing behavior and teaching people how to read "body language." But there is no common structure to non-verbal communication, any more than there is a common structure to dream symbolism. There certainly are some well-defined culturally determined non-verbal ways of communicating, e.g., pointing the back of the hand at another, lowering all fingers but the one in the middle, has a definite meaning in American culture. But when someone tells me that the way I squeeze my nose during a conversation means I am signaling him that I think his idea stinks, how do we verify whether his interpretation is correct or not? I deny it. He knows the structure, he says. He knows the meaning. I am not aware of my signal or of my feelings, he says, because the message is coming from my subconscious mind. How do we test these kinds of claims? We can't. What's his evidence? It must be his brilliant intuitive insight because there is no empirical evidence to back up this claim. Sitting cross-armed at a meeting might not mean that someone is "blocking you out" or "getting defensive". She may just be cold or have a back ache or simply feel comfortable sitting that way. It is dangerous to read too much into non-verbal behavior. Those splayed legs may simply indicate a relaxed person, not someone inviting you to have sex. At the same time, much of what NLP is teaching is how to do cold reading. This is valuable, but an art not a science, and should be used with caution.

Finally, NLP claims that each of us has a Primary Representational System (PRS), a tendency to think in specific modes: visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory or gustatory. A person's PRS can be determined by words the person tends to use or by the direction of one's eye movements. Supposedly, a therapist will have a better rapport with a client if they have a matching PRS. None of this has been supported by the scientific literature.*

Bandler's Institute

Bandler's First Institute of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™ and Design Human Engineering™ has this to say about NLP:

"Neuro-Linguistic Programming™ (NLP™) is defined as the study of the structure of subjective experience and what can be calculated from that and is predicated upon the belief that all behavior has structure....Neuro-Linguistic Programming™ was specifically created in order to allow us to do magic by creating new ways of understanding how verbal and non-verbal communication affect the human brain. As such it presents us all with the opportunity to not only communicate better with others, but also learn how to gain more control over what we considered to be automatic functions of our own neurology."^*

We are told that Bandler took as his first models Virginia Satir ("The Mother of Family System Therapy"), Milton Erickson ("The Father of Modern Hypnotherapy") and Fritz Perls (early advocate of Gestalt Therapy) because they "had amazing results with their clients." The linguistic and behavioral patterns of such people were studied and used as models. These were therapists who liked such expressions as 'self-esteem', 'validate', 'transformation', 'harmony', 'growth', 'ecology', 'self-realization', 'unconscious mind', 'non-verbal communication', 'achieving one's highest potential'--expressions which serve as beacons to New Age transformational psychology. No neuroscientist or anyone who has studied the brain is mentioned as having had any influence on NLP. Also, someone who is not mentioned, but who certainly seems like the ideal model for NLP, is Werner Erhard. He started est a few miles north (in San Francisco) of Bandler and Grinder (in Santa Cruz) just a couple of years before the latter started their training business. Erhard seems to have set out to do just what Bandler and Grinder set out to do: help people transform themselves and make a good living doing it. NLP and est also have in common the fact that they are built up from a hodgepodge of sources in psychology, philosophy, and other disciplines. Both have been brilliantly marketed as offering the key to success, happiness, and fulfillment to anyone willing to pay the price of admission. Best of all: no one who pays his fees fails out of these schools!

the ever-evolving Bandler

When one reads what Bandler says, it may lead one to think that some people sign on just to get the translation from the Master Teacher of Communication Skills himself:

One of the models that I built was called strategy elicitation which is something that people confuse with modeling to no end. They go out and elicit a strategy and they think they are modeling but they don't ask the question, "Where did the strategy elicitation model come from?" There are constraints inside this model since it was built by reducing things down. The strategy elicitation model is always looking for the most finite way of accomplishing a result. This model is based on sequential elicitation and simultaneous installation.

Many would surely agree that with communication like this Bandler must have a very special code for programming his brain.

Bandler claims he keeps evolving. To some, however, he may seem mainly concerned with protecting his economic interests by trademarking his every burp. He seems extremely concerned that some rogue therapist or trainer might steal his work and make money without him getting a cut. One might be charitable and see Bandler's obsession with trademarking as a way to protect the integrity of his brilliant new discoveries about human potential (such as charisma enhancement) and how to sell it. Anyway, to clarify or to obscure matters--who knows which?-- what Bandler calls the real thing can be identified by a license and the trademark™ from The Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™. However, do not contact this organization if you want detailed, clear information about the nature of NLP, or DHE (Design Human Engineering™ (which will teach you to hallucinate designs like Tesla did), or PE (Persuasion Engineering™) or MetaMaster Track™, or Charisma Enhancement™, or Trancing™, or whatever else Mr. Bandler and associates are selling these days. Mostly what you will find on Bandler's page is information on how to sign up for one of his training sessions. For example, you can get 6 days of training for $1,800 at the door ($1,500 prepaid). What will you be trained in or for? Bandler has been learning about "the advancement of human evolution" and he will pass this on to you. For $1,500 you could have taken his 3-day seminar on Creativity Enhancement (where you could learn why it's not creative to rely on other people's ideas, except for Bandler's).

Grinder and corporate NLP

John Grinder, on the other hand, has gone on to try to do for the corporate world what Bandler is doing for the rest of us. He has joined Carmen Bostic St Clair in an organization called Quantum Leap, "an international organisation dealing with the design and implementation of cross cultural communication systems." Like Bandler, Grinder claims he has evolved new and even more brilliant "codes".

...the New Code contains a series of gates which presuppose a certain and to my way of thinking appropriate relationship between the conscious and unconscious parts of a person purporting to train or represent in some manner NLP. This goes a long way toward insisting on the presence of personal congruity in such a person. In other words, a person who fails to carry personal congruity will in general find themselves unable to use and/or teach the New Code patterns with any sort of consistent success. This is a design I like very much - it has the characteristic of a self-correcting system.

It may strike some people that terms like "personal congruity" are not very precise or scientific. This is probably because Grinder has created a "new paradigm". Or so he says. He denies that his and Bandler's work is an eclectic hodgepodge of philosophy and psychology, or that it even builds from the works of others. He believes that what he and Bandler did was "create a paradigm shift."

The following claim by Grinder provides some sense of what he thinks NLP is:

My memories about what we thought at the time of discovery (with respect to the classic code we developed - that is, the years 1973 through 1978) are that we were quite explicit that we were out to overthrow a paradigm and that, for example, I, for one, found it very useful to plan this campaign using in part as a guide the excellent work of Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) in which he detailed some of the conditions which historically have obtained in the midst of paradigm shifts. For example, I believe it was very useful that neither one of us were qualified in the field we first went after - psychology and in particular, its therapeutic application; this being one of the conditions which Kuhn identified in his historical study of paradigm shifts. Who knows what Bandler was thinking?

One can only hope that Bandler wasn't thinking the same things that Grinder was thinking, at least with respect to Kuhn's classic text. Kuhn did not promote the notion that not being particularly qualified in a scientific field is a significant condition for contributing to the development of a new paradigm in science. Furthermore, Kuhn did not provide a model or blueprint for creating paradigm shifts! His is an historical work, describing what he believed to have occurred in the history of science. Nowhere does he indicate that a single person at any time did, or even could, create a paradigm shift in science. Individuals such as Newton or Einstein might provide theories which require paradigm shifts for their theories to be adequately understood, but they don't create the paradigm shifts themselves. Kuhn's work implies that such a notion is preposterous.

Grinder and Bandler should have read Kant before they set off on their quixotic pursuit. Kant's "Copernican revolution" might be considered a paradigm shift by Bandler and Grinder, but it is not what Kuhn was talking about when he was describing the historical development of scientific theories. Kuhn restricted his concern to science. He made no claim that anything similar happens in philosophy and he certainly did not imply that anything NLP did, or is doing, constitutes a paradigm shift. Kuhn claimed that paradigm shifts occur over time when one theory breaks down and is replaced by another. Scientific theories break down, he claimed, when new data can't be explained by the old theories or when they no longer explain things as well as some newer theory. What Bandler and Grinder did was not in response to any crisis in theory in any scientific field and so cannot even be considered as contributing to a paradigm shift much less being one itself.

What Grinder seems to think Kuhn meant by "paradigm shift" is something like a gestalt shift, a change in the way we look at things, a change in perspective. Kant might fit the bill for this notion. Kant rejected the old way of doing epistemology, which was to ask 'how can we bring ourselves to understand the world?' What we ought to ask, said Kant, is 'how is it possible that the world comes to be understood by us?' This was truly a revolutionary move in the history of philosophy, for it asserted that the world must conform to the conditions imposed on it by the one experiencing the world. The notion that one has the truth when one's mind conforms with the world is rejected in favor of the notion that all knowledge is subjective because it is impossible without experience which is essentially subjective. Copernicus had said, in essence, let's see how things look with the Sun at the center of the universe, instead of the Earth. Kant said, in essence, let's examine how we know the world by assuming that the world must conform to the mind, rather than the mind conform to the world. Copernicus, however, could be considered as contributing to a paradigm shift in science. If he were right about the earth and other planets going around the sun rather than the sun and the other planets going around the earth--and he was--then astronomers could no longer do astronomy without profound changes in their fundamental concepts about the nature of the heavens. On the other hand, there is no way to know if Kant is right. We can accept or reject his theory. We can continue to do philosophy without being Kantians, but we cannot continue to do astronomy without accepting the heliocentric hypothesis and rejecting the geocentric one. What did Grinder and Bandler do that makes it impossible to continue doing psychology or therapy or semiotics or philosophy without accepting their ideas? Nothing.

Do people benefit from NLP?

While I do not doubt that many people benefit from NLP training sessions, there seem to be several false or questionable assumptions upon which NLP is based. Their beliefs about the unconscious mind, hypnosis and the ability to influence people by appealing directly to the subconscious mind are unsubstantiated. All the scientific evidence which exists on such things indicates that what NLP claims is not true. You cannot learn to "speak directly to the unconscious mind " as Erickson and NLP claim, except in the most obvious way of using the power of suggestion.

NLP claims that its experts have studied the thinking of great minds and the behavior patterns of successful people and have extracted models of how they work. "From these models, techniques for quickly and effectively changing thoughts, behaviors and beliefs that get in your way have been developed."^* But studying Einstein's or Tolstoy's work might produce a dozen "models" of how those minds worked. There is no way to know which, if any, of the models is correct. It is a mystery why anyone would suppose that any given model would imply techniques for quick and effective change in thoughts, actions and beliefs. I think most of us intuitively grasp that even if we were subjected to the same experiences which Einstein or Tolstoy had, we would not have become either. Surely, we would be significantly different from whom we've become, but without their brains to begin with, we would have developed quite differently from either of them.

In Conclusion

It seems that NLP develops models which can't be verified, from which it develops techniques which may have nothing to do with either the models or the sources of the models. NLP makes claims about thinking and perception which do not seem to be supported by neuroscience. This is not to say that the techniques won't work. They may work and work quite well, but there is no way to know whether the claims behind their origin are valid. Perhaps it doesn't matter. NLP itself proclaims that it is pragmatic in its approach: what matters is whether it works. However, how do you measure the claim "NLP works"? I don't know and I don't think NLPers know, either. Anecdotes and testimonials seem to be the main measuring devices. Unfortunately, such a measurement may reveal only how well the trainers teach their clients to persuade others to enroll in more training sessions.