A Brain for Business – A Brain for Life: How insights from behavioural and brain science can change business and business practice for the better

© The Author(s) 2018

Shane O'MaraA Brain for Business – A Brain for LifeThe Neuroscience of Businesshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49154-7_2

2. Scene-Setting, Background Information and Tools for Thinking

Shane O’Mara¹ 

(1)

Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

(Robert Frost 1874 –1963, Poet)

The guiding principles of this book are that ‘knowledge is power’ and that ‘to be forewarned is to be forearmed’. These clichés have a point: to be aware of and to take active strategies to thwart say, pervasive cognitive biases that affect how we all make decisions, are vital and possible. As a result, decision making in business (perhaps under pressure and with poor or insufficient information) may therefore be much more effective. Another important lesson of this book is that the common idea of the brain as hard-wired and therefore immutable is simply incorrect. The key lesson of modern brain science is of the astonishing plasticity of the brain—that it is in fact the most plastic organ in the body. This capacity is referred to as ‘neuroplasticity’. The components of the brain are remodelled, reworked and sculpted by experience—including the experience of reading this text! It is by capitalising on this capacity for change by individuals that business cultures can adapt, learn and evolve. Leveraging this capacity for plasticity also allows changes to become ingrained and instantiated within the culture of the business itself.

At Your Desk

You’re sitting at your desk as usual. The morning commute was not so bad, and you’re looking forward to a busy and hopefully exciting week at work. The computer hums away quietly in the background, with emails pinging every few minutes; the mobile phone and landline are diverted to voicemail (but still give you visual alerts of calls arriving); the major report you will present to the senior management meeting at mid-day sits on your desk. Lots happening: you look about the office and watch your team. Everyone is seated at their desks, their facial expressions and behaviour all different. Some are smiling, some frowning, some blank. Some are assaulting their keyboards; yet others stare vacantly into space. If only you knew what was going on inside their heads…you wonder, what if you could see inside their heads? What would you see? You push the thoughts aside, as there is work to be done. You stand up, walk to the door of your office, open the door and loudly clap your hands together. A relative silence quickly settles as the faces turn toward you. You begin to speak, and they seem to listen.

If you could see inside their heads, what would you see? Inside, you would see a frenzy of activity: of molecules collected into cells, cells gathered into assemblies; assemblies coalescing into systems and systems tangled into brain-wide networks. And all of these in continuous communication together and with the outside world—the world that begins at the edge of the brain. You clapped your hands, and in under a quarter of second, the assembled brains stopped some of what they were doing, processed the sound, interpreted it as a signal to orient the heads and necks and body trunks they control toward you, to listen. To listen to what? The words and sentences you utter are just pressure-waves modulating the air; they are meaningless until they strike eardrums and are conveyed to the brain where they are turned back into words and sentences again. You have two, four, six, however many, brains with mutually co-ordinated activity. One making sounds—speaking, gesticulating, the others interpreting those sounds as words, sentences, calls to attention, calls to action. More than this, though, all of these brains are engaged in active housekeeping: keeping their bodies breathing, monitoring hunger, thirst, posture, sights and sounds, remembering facts and figures, stories, solving problems, negotiating positions on the social hierarchy, interpreting gestures and facial expressions. All these unique brains, housing individuality, personal history, ancestral history; all alike but all unique. This is a fantastical achievement and is perhaps the current supreme expression of the blind watchmaker.

All of this variation, difference, individuality, is vital, but it is not the whole story. We humans all share common principles of brain structure and function, and the modern behavioural and brain sciences are at last revealing some of these common structural and functional principles. We are starting to understand how people organise themselves into hierarchies and groups, how knowledge transmission spreads in groups, how humans reason and how they make systematic errors in reasoning, how the stress response occurs and how it can be managed, how we learn, remember and forget. We now have a vast wealth of information on how the brain manages conflicting sources of information, searches for unique items in a sea of similarity (such as how you identify your favourite brand of toothpaste quickly from among the tens or more brands available in the supermarket!), how fear and anxiety arises and how they might be controlled, even on how to give well-designed visual presentations (and to control the stress of speaking in public), given the limitations on human attention. We can also start thinking in systematic ways to apply this knowledge to our everyday lives.

Neuroscience Applied to Business

Neuroscience—the science of brain and behaviour – has emerged as perhaps the key science of the twenty-first century. It is the science of you as an individual and of us, as humans. The secrets of the brain are being discovered, and being discovered at a rapid rate. Topics that were difficult to understand or seemed to be intractable a few short years ago (e.g., who gets depression? Why? What are the most effective treatments for depression?) are getting intensive and revealing investigation, and slowly the functions of the brain are being revealed. In this book, we are attempting something a little unusual and new: we will try to extract from the vast body of data that has been generated in the behavioural and brain sciences over the past number of decades findings of specific use and application to business practice, development and management.

The range of topics being actively researched within neuroscience—the brain and behavioural sciences—is quite remarkable, and neologisms are appearing for to label the research effort responsible for the fusion of these topics. Here are a few: neuroeconomics is emerging as an important discipline, as the sciences concerned with brain function, decision-making and evolutionary psychology (particularly those aspects of evolution concerned with altruism and altruistic behaviour) all begin to merge within a common theoretical framework. Social neuroscience attempts to understand how social behaviour is generated by the brain and how the brain manages and is changed by social interaction. The wonderful catchphrase ‘from neurons to neighbourhoods’ has been used to summarise this new science—the investigation of the social brain. There are many others: neuroleadership, neuromarketing, neurolaw and neuroethics are just some of the more popular portmanteaus of recent years. We will here explore a large variety of topics drawn from neuroscience of more or less specific application to business.

The regularities of human behaviour result from the shared similarities of brain structure and function between individuals. Explaining these regularities comes from these starting points: that these behavioural invariants derive from the fundamental fact of our existence—our behaviour arises from the structure and function of our brains. In turn, understanding these invariants should help make predicting and understanding what people do perhaps a little easier. It should also help avoid some of the commonest mistakes that are made in this very interesting and somewhat peculiar form of group and social life—the modern organisation.

Studying Brain and Behaviour in Modern Humans

The past few decades has seen a revolution in terms of the understanding of how the brain works, primarily because of the arrival of a whole new set of technologies that allow us to probe the structure and function of the brain. These technologies can be applied during both health and disease, and neuroscience is generating an ever-clearer understanding of both normal and abnormal brain function. Humans, unlike most other species, present special difficulties for the study of their brain and behaviour. Their brains are inaccessible in a way that the brains of other species are not; they may not be subjected to invasive investigation, with brain tissue harvested for further experimentation. Experiments on humans can only be conducted under carefully defined, controlled and regulated circumstances, and experiments involving controlled manipulations such as social or nutritional deprivation on the structure and function of the brain are generally not possible to conduct. Furthermore, the human genome has only recently been deciphered, but its meaning is still not clear: the day when each of us has our own personal genome deciphered and available to interrogate in a database is still some time away. Our knowledge of gene-gene interaction (the effect of one gene on another) or gene co-expression, or indeed gene-environment interaction, is still severely limited. At this point in time it is safe to say that there is little to no useful, actionable knowledge available on the level of the individual on these matters, but it is also safe to say that the next few decades will falsify this statement. What is clear is that any full account of human behaviour must fully account for the contribution of genetic factors and cultural factors to what is to be human; furthermore, the contribution of the unique psycho-socio-biological point through which these factors are developed, embodied and expressed—the human brain—must also be invoked, investigated and explained.

Human Cultures and Valuable Intangibles

Humans occupy the widest range of environments of any animal species on the planet: we are the only species living in the Arctic and the Antarctic, and we live in just about every environment between the poles. Even deserts have been and continue to be lived in by humans. Thus, the geographical environment of humans is remarkably variable: we have mentioned just a few different physical environments (think of the many, many other environments that humans occupy: the tropics, the rainforests, the dry plains of Asia, the rain- and storm-swept western coasts of Europe).

The cultural environments of humans are astonishingly variable, too. Comparing and contrasting the variation in population density, lifestyle, education, per capita income, immigration, occupational opportunities, and political, religious and social attitudes within the suburban USA is a fascinating exercise: comparing suburban California (say, the San Fernando Valley or Palo Alto) and suburban Alabama (say, Birmingham or Montgomery) brings this home. Now compare the similarities between Americans in terms of shared culture and the overlap between their culture and the culture of a nomad from the Kalahari desert, a refugee from a failed state (take your pick) or a citizen of a barely functioning and corrupt one (take your pick from the Transparency International listing) to a citizen from a state divided by social, religious and tribal behaviour (again, take your pick). We should properly expect that humans from these differing places will differ dramatically in terms of their expectations of the future, beliefs about the role of the state, and expectations regarding the corruption of state officials to the stability and independence of the legal system and of the judiciary. Finally, regarding the wealth and poverty of nations, what the World Bank (2006) refers to as intangibles (‘human capital and the value of institutions (as measured by rule of law) constitute the largest share of wealth in virtually all countries’)—perhaps up to 80% by their estimate. These intangibles vary dramatically between nations: in the developed countries of the world, they constitute perhaps more than twice the amount of wealth of developing nations. But where do the intangibles themselves reside? Intangibles, by definition, can’t be touched or felt, but they exist. These intangibles reside in the behaviour, attitudes, culture, expectations, capacity for learning and change (adaptability) of the individuals within a nation. These capacities, in turn, develop from exposure through the lifespan to the educational, legal, ethical, political, religious and social institutions within these countries. In turn, these factors are instantiated within brains, and brains themselves have evolved over millennia to perform very differing functions. These include being survival- and present-centred in orientation, performing swift (but relatively fixed) learning from experiences of fear, stress and predation, and surviving in severely resource-limited