Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (20 page)

No hospitals or schools currently offer these interventions to the future students of America, and there is no formal curriculum for harnessing the cognitive horsepower of the under-solid-food crowd. But it could be developed and tested, beginning right this minute. The best shot would come from experiments between brain scientists and education scientists. All one needs is a cooperative educational will, and maybe a sense of adventure.

Free family counseling, child care

Historically, people have done their best work— sometimes world-changing work—in their first few years after joining the work force. In the field of economics, most Nobel Prize-winning research is done in the first 10 years of the recipient’s career. Albert Einstein published most of his creative ideas at the ripe old age of 26. It’s no wonder that companies want to recruit young intellectual talent.

The problem in today’s economy is that people are typically starting a family at the very time they are also supposed to be doing their best work. They are trying to be productive at some of the most stressful times of their lives. What if companies took this unhappy collision of life events seriously? They could offer Gottman’s intervention as a benefit for every newly married, or newly pregnant, employee. Would that reverse the negative flow of family stress that normally enters the workplace at this time in a person’s life? Such an intervention might enhance productivity and perhaps even generate grateful, loyal employees.

Businesses also risk losing their best and brightest at this time, as talented people are forced to make a terrible decision between career and family. The decision is especially hard on women. In the 21st century, we have invented two economic classifications: the child-free class (people with no kids or without primary responsibility for them) and the child-bound class (people who act as a main caregiver). From a gender perspective, these categories have very little symmetry. According to Claudia Goldin, Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard, women are overrepresented in the child-bound category by nearly 9 to 1.

What if talented people didn’t have to choose between career and family? What if businesses offered onsite child care just so they could retain employees at the very time they are most likely to be valuable? This obviously would affect women the most, which means businesses immediately achieve more gender balance. Would such an offering so affect productivity that the costs of providing child care become offset by the gains? That’s a great research question. Not only might businesses create more stable employees in the current generation, they might be raising far healthier children for work in the next.

Power to the workers

Plenty of books discuss how to manage stress; some are confusing, others extraordinarily insightful. The good ones all say one thing in common: The biggest part of successful stress management involves getting control back into your life. This means that a manager or human-resources professional has a powerful predictive insight at his or her disposal. To detect stress-related problems, one might simply examine the situations where an employee feels the most helpless. Questionnaires based on Jeansok Kim’s and David Diamond’s three-pronged definition of stress could be developed that routinely assess not the broad perception of aversion, but the narrower issue of powerlessness. The next step would be to change the situation.

These are only a few of the possibilities that could be realized if brain scientists and business professionals ever collaborated on the biology of stress in the work force. It is possible their findings would change the absentee rate of their employees, cut down on the number of trips to the doctor, and reduce their insurance overhead. As well as money saved, a great deal of creativity may be engendered simply by routinely giving employees a way out—not from their jobs but from the stress they experience in them. It’s no coincidence that stress researchers, education scientists, and business professionals come to similar conclusions about stress and people. What’s astonishing is that we have known most of the salient points since Marty Seligman stopped shocking his dogs in the mid-1970s. It is time we made productive use of that horrible line of research.

Summary

Rule #8
Stressed brains don’t learn the same way.

• Your body’s defense system—the release of adrenaline and cortisol—is built for an immediate response to a serious but passing danger, such as a saber-toothed tiger. Chronic stress, such as hostility at home, dangerously deregulates a system built only to deal with short-term responses.

• Under chronic stress, adrenaline creates scars in your blood vessels that can cause a heart attack or stroke, and cortisol damages the cells of the hippocampus, crippling your ability to learn and remember.

• Individually, the worst kind of stress is the feeling that you have no control over the problem—you are helpless.

• Emotional stress has huge impacts across society, on children’s ability to learn in school and on employees’ productivity at work.

Get more at www.brainrules.net/stress

no
one—at least not in his immediate circle—he began to suspect he was crazy. Neither impression was correct, of course. Tim is suffering—if that’s the right word—from a brain condition called synesthesia. Though experienced by as many as 1 in 2,000 people (some think 1 in 200), it is a behavior about which scientists know next to nothing. At first blush, there appears to be a short-circuiting between the processing of various sensory inputs. If scientists can nail down what happens when sensory processing goes wrong, they may gain more understanding about what happens when it goes right. So, synesthesia intrigues scientists interested in how the brain processes the world’s many senses. The effect that this has on learning forms the heart of our Brain Rule: Stimulate more of the senses at the same time.

saturday night fever

That you can detect anything has always seemed like a minor miracle to me. On one hand, the inside of your head is a darkened, silent place, lonely as a cave. On the other hand, your head crackles with the perceptions of the whole world, sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, energetic as a frat party. How could this be? For a long time, nobody could figure it out. The Greeks didn’t think the brain did much of anything. It just sat there like an inert pile of clay (indeed, it does not generate enough electricity to prick your finger). Aristotle thought the heart held all the action, pumping out rich, red blood 24 hours a day. The heart, he reasoned, harbored the “vital flame of life,” a fire producing enough heat to give the brain a job description: to act as a cooling device (he thought the lungs helped out, too). Perhaps taking a cue from our Macedonian mentor, we still use the word “heart” to describe many aspects of mental life.

How does the brain, brooding in its isolated bony chambers, perceive the world? Consider this example: It is Friday night at a New York club. The dance beat dominates, both annoying and hypnotic, felt more than heard. Laser lights shoot across the room. Bodies move. The smells of alcohol, fried food, and illegal smoking mix in the atmosphere like a second sound track. In the corner, a jilted lover is crying. There is so much information in the room, you are beginning to get a headache, so you step out for a breath of fresh air. The jilted lover follows you.

Snapshots like these illustrate the incredible amount of sensory information your brain must process simultaneously. External physical inputs and internal emotional inputs all are presented to your brain in a never-ending fire hose of sensations. Dance clubs may seem the extreme. Yet there may be no more information there than what you’d normally experience the next morning on the streets of Manhattan. Faithfully, your brain perceives the screech of the taxis, the pretzels for sale, the crosswalk signal, and the people brushing past, just as it could hear the pounding beat and smell the cigarettes last night. You are a wonder. And we in brain-science land are only beginning to figure out how you do it.

Scientists often point to an experience called the McGurk effect to illustrate sensory integration. Suppose researchers showed you a video of a person saying the surprisingly ugly syllable “ga.” Unbeknownst to you, the scientists had turned off the sound of the original video and had dubbed the sound “ba” onto it. When the scientist asks you to listen to the video with your eyes closed, you hear “ba” just fine. But if you open your eyes, your brain suddenly encounters the shape of the lips saying “ga” while your ears are still hearing “ba.” The brain has no idea what to do with this contradiction. So it makes something up. If you are like most people, what you actually will hear when your eyes open is the syllable “da.” This is the brain’s compromise between what you hear and what you see—its need to attempt integration.

But you don’t have to be in a laboratory to show this. You can just go to a movie. The actors you see speaking to each other on screen are not really speaking to each other at all. Their voices emanate from speakers cleverly placed around the room: some behind you, some beside you; none centered on the actors’ mouths. Even so, you believe the voices are coming from those mouths. Your eye observes lips moving in tandem with the words your ears are hearing, and the brain combines the experience to trick you into believing the dialogue comes from the screen. Together, these senses create the perception of someone speaking in front of you, when actually nobody is speaking in front of you.

how the senses integrate

Analyses like these have led scientists to propose a series of theories about how the senses integrate. On one end of this large continuum are ideas that remind me of the British armies during the Revolutionary War. On the other end are ideas that remind me of how the Americans fought them. The British, steeped in the traditions of large European land wars, had lots of central planning. The field office gathered information from leaders on the battleground and then issued its commands. The Americans, steeped in the traditions of nothing, used guerrilla tactics: on-the-ground analysis and decision making prior to consultation with a central command.

Take the sound of a single gunshot over a green field during that war. In the British model of this experience, our senses function separately, sending their information into the brain’s central command, its sophisticated perception centers. Only in these centers does the brain combine the sensory inputs into a cohesive perception of the environment. The ears hear the rifle and generate a complete auditory report of what just occurred. The eyes see the smoke from the gun arising from the turf and process the information separately, generating a visual report of the event. The nose, smelling gunpowder, does the same thing. They each send their data to central command. There, the inputs are bound together, a cohesive perception is created, and the brain lets the soldier in on what he just experienced. The processes can be divided into three steps:

step 1: sensation

This is where we capture the energies from our environment pushing themselves into our orifices and rubbing against our skin. The effort involves converting this external information into a brain-friendly electrical language.

step 2: routing

Once the information is successfully translated into head-speak, it is sent off to appropriate regions of the brain for further processing. The signals for vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell all have separate, specialized places where this processing occurs. A region called the thalamus, that well-connected, egg-shaped structure in the middle of your “second brain,” helps supervise most of this shuttling.

step 3: perception

The various senses start merging their information. These integrated signals are sent to increasingly complex areas of the brain (actually called higher regions), and we begin to perceive what our senses have given us. As we shall see shortly, this final step has both bottom-up and top-down features.

The American model puts things very differently. Here the senses work together from the very beginning, consulting and influencing one another quite early in the process. As the ear and eye simultaneously pick up gunshot and smoke, the two impressions immediately confer with each other. They perceive that the events are occurring in tandem, without conferencing with any higher authority. The picture of a rifle firing over an open field emerges in the observer’s brain. The steps are still sensation, routing, and perception. But at each step, add “the signals begin immediately communicating, influencing subsequent rounds of signal processing.” The last stage, perception, is not where the integration begins. The last step is where the integration culminates.

Which model is correct? The data are edging in the direction of the second model, but the truth is that nobody knows how it works. There are tantalizing suggestions that the senses actually help one another, and in a precisely coordinated fashion. This chapter is mostly interested in what happens after sensation and routing—after we achieve perception.

bottoms up, tops down

We can see how important this last step is by looking at what happens when it breaks down. Oliver Sacks reports on a patient he calls Dr. Richard who had lost various perceptual processing abilities. There wasn’t anything wrong with Dr. Richard’s vision. He just couldn’t always make sense of what he saw. When a friend walked into the room and sat down on a chair, he did not always perceive the person’s various body parts as belonging to the same body. Only when the person got up out of the chair would he suddenly recognize them as possessed by one person. If Dr. Richard looked at a photograph of people at a football stadium, he would identify the same colors of different people’s wardrobes as belonging “together” in some fashion. He could not see such commonalities as belonging to separate people. Most interesting, he could not always perceive multisensory stimuli as belonging to the same experience. This could be observed when Dr. Richard tried to watch someone speaking. He sometimes could not make a connection between the motion of the speaker’s lips and the speech. They would be out of sync; he sometimes reported the experience as if watching a “badly dubbed foreign movie.”

Given the survival advantage to seeing the world as a whole, scientists have been deeply concerned with the binding problem. They ask: Once the thalamus has done its distribution duties, what happens next? The information, dissected into sensory-size pieces and flung widely across the brain’s landscape, needs to be reassembled (something Dr. Richard was not very good at). Where and how does information from different senses begin to merge in the brain?

The where is easier than the how. We know that most of the sophisticated stuff occurs in regions known as association cortices. Association cortices are specialized areas that exist throughout the brain, including the parietal, temporal, and frontal lobes. They are not exactly sensory regions, and they are not exactly motor regions, but they are exactly bridges between them (hence the name
association
). Scientists think these regions use both bottom-up and top-down processes to achieve perception. As the sensory signals ascend through higher and higher orders of neural processing, these processes kick in. Here’s an example.

Author W. Somerset Maugham once said: “There are only three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.” After your eyes read that sentence and the thalamus has spattered various aspects of the sentence all over the inside of your skull, bottom-up processors go to work. The visual system (which we will say more about in the Vision chapter) is a classic bottom-up processor. What happens? Feature detectors— which work like auditors in an accounting firm— greet the sentence’s visual stimuli. The auditors inspect every structural element in each letter of every word in Maugham’s quote. They write a report, a visual conception of letters and words. An upside-down arch becomes the letter “U.” Two straight lines at right angles become the letter “T.” Combinations of straight lines and curves become the word “three.” Written information has a lot of visual features in it, and this report takes a great deal of effort and time to organize. It is one of the reasons that reading is a relatively slow way to put information into the brain.

Next comes top-down processing. This can be likened to a board of directors reading the auditor’s report and then reacting to it. Many comments are made. Sections are analyzed in light of pre-existing knowledge. The board in your brain has heard of the word “three” before, for example, and it has been familiar with the concept of rules since you were familiar with anything. Some board members even have heard of W. Somerset Maugham before, and they recall to your consciousness a movie called
Of Human Bondage
, which you saw in a film history course
.
Information is added to the data stream or subtracted from the data stream. The brain can even alter the data stream if it so chooses. And it so chooses a lot.

Such interpretive activity is the domain of top-down processing. At this point, the brain generously lets you in on the fact that you are perceiving something. Given that people have unique previous experiences, they bring different interpretations to their top-down analyses. Thus, two people can see the same input and come away with vastly different perceptions. It is a sobering thought. There is no guarantee that your brain will perceive the world accurately, even if other parts of your body can.

So, life is filled with the complex qualities of sounds, visual images, shapes, textures, tastes, and odors, and the brain seeks to simplify this world by adding more confusion. This requires large groups of receptors, each one in charge of a particular sensory attribute, to act simultaneously. For us to savor the richness and diversity of perception, the central nervous system must integrate the activity of entire sensory populations. It does this by pushing electrical signals through an almost bewildering thicket of ever more complex, higher neural assemblies. Finally, you perceive something.

survival by teamwork

There are many types of synesthesia—more than 50, according to one paper. One of the strangest illustrates that even when the brain’s wiring gets confused, the senses still work together. There are some people who see a word and immediately experience a taste on their tongue. This isn’t the typical mouth-watering response, such as imagining the taste of a candy bar after hearing the word “chocolate.” This is like seeing the word “sky” in a novel and suddenly tasting a sour lemon in your mouth.

A clever experiment showed that even when the synesthete could not recall the exact word, he or she could still get the taste, as long as there was some generalized description of the missing word. Data like these illustrate that sensory processes are wired to work together. Thus, the heart of the Brain Rule: Stimulate more of the senses.