Your Brain at Work

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about how you can understand and work on your performance by understanding how the brain works. The book goes through different scenarios and explains why the persons in the scenario do what they do and what they can do to achieve better results. The book contains helpful hints about how to "hack" your brain to achieve better results and improve your life.

🎨 Impressions

I quite liked it and felt it was a good overview of how the different ways the brain. It was a nice summary of the current status of the science of the brain and performance. It contained a lot of interesting insights about the brain and how it might lead you down some slippery paths.

How I Discovered It

I read about the book in a blog post, but cannot remember which one, unfortunately.

Who Should Read It?

I think everyone who is interested in neuroscience and performance in work, relationships, and focus would have great use of this.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

I think I will return to the book a lot more and try to incorporate science in order to perform better in all aspects of my life. Especially, how I can distance myself from petty impulses and emotions and become a better person.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• More people than ever are being paid to think, instead of just doing routine tasks. Yet making complex decisions and solving new problems is difficult for any stretch of time because of some real biological limits on your brain. Surprisingly, one of the best ways to improve mental performance is to understand these limits.

• While the brain is exquisitely powerful, even the brain of a Harvard graduate can be turned into that of an eight-year-old simply by being made to do two things at once.

• Yet making complex decisions and solving new problems is difficult for any stretch of time because of some real biological limits on your brain. Surprisingly, one of the best ways to improve mental performance is to understand these limits.

• These five functions, understanding, deciding, recalling, memorizing, and inhibiting, make up the majority of conscious thought and are recombined to plan, problem-solve, communicate, and other tasks. Each function uses the prefrontal cortex intensively and requires significant resources to operate,

• Conscious mental activities chew up metabolic resources, the fuel in your blood, significantly faster than automatic brain functions such as how your brain helps keep your heart beating or your lungs breathing. The stage requires a lot of energy to function.

• The first clinical evidence for this limitation came way back in 1898. The scientist J. C. Welsh measured people’s ability to do physical tasks while thinking. She had subjects start a mental task and then asked them to impose as much force as they could, at the same time, on a dynamometer, a machine for measuring force. Her measurements showed that almost all mental tasks reduced maximum force, often by as much as 50 percent.

• If Emily knew how energy-hungry her stage was, she would start her Monday morning differently. The big difference is she would prioritize prioritizing. She would prioritize first, before any other attention-rich activity such as emailing. That’s because prioritizing is one of the brain’s most energy-hungry processes.

• This partly explains why people spend more time thinking about problems (things they have seen) than solutions (things they have never seen). It explains why setting goals feels so hard (it’s hard to envision the future). Daniel Gilbert’s 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness, dives deeply into the implications of this finding, illustrating how human beings are terrible at estimating emotions in the future, a concept he calls affective forecasting.

• Gilbert shows how people define how they will feel in the future based more on the way they feel today, instead of correctly assessing the mental state they might be in at a future date. That’s because it’s difficult.

• Like the coding used on the ski slopes for the degree of difficulty, there are mental tasks that are green, blue, and black. Prioritizing, at least in a knowledge economy full of conceptual projects, is definitely a black run, perhaps even a double black diamond. Do it when you are fresh and energized, or you might crash and burn down the hill.

• This tendency means scheduling the most attention-rich tasks when you have a fresh and alert mind. This could be early in the morning, or perhaps after a break or exercise. The prefrontal cortex has much in common with other energy-hungry body parts such as muscles. It tires from use, and can do a lot more after a good rest. Making a tough decision might take thirty seconds when you are fresh and be impossible when you’re not.

• One final insight about prioritizing involves getting disciplined about what you don’t put on the stage. This means not thinking when you don’t have to, becoming disciplined about not paying attention to non-urgent tasks unless, or until, it’s truly essential that you do. Learning to say no to mental tasks that are not among your priorities is difficult but very helpful. Another technique for thinking less about unnecessary tasks is to delegate well.

• Another technique is not to think at all about a project until all the information is at hand. Don’t waste energy solving a problem you know you will have more information about later.

• Surprises About the Brain

  • Conscious thinking involves deeply complex biological interactions in the brain among billions of neurons.
  • Every time the brain works on an idea consciously, it uses up a measurable and limited resource.
  • Some mental processes take up a lot more energy than others.
  • The most important mental processes, such as prioritizing, often take the most effort.*

• Some Things to Try
  • Think of conscious thinking as a precious resource to conserve. Prioritize prioritizing, as it’s an energy-intensive activity.
  • Save mental energy for prioritizing by avoiding other high-energy consuming conscious activities such as dealing with emails.
  • Schedule the most attention-rich tasks when you have a fresh and alert mind.
  • Use the brain to interact with information rather than trying to store information, by creating visuals for complex ideas and by listing projects.
  • Schedule blocks of time for different modes of thinking.

• Paul has hit a second limit of the prefrontal cortex here: there’s a limit to how much information can be held in mind and manipulated at any one time. That’s because the stage is small, smaller than generally acknowledged. To make a series of important decisions this morning, Paul has to quickly make sense of a huge amount of information.

• Surprises About the Brain

  • The stage is small, much smaller than commonly realized.
  • The less you hold in mind at once the better.
  • New concepts take up more space on the stage than ideas you know well.
  • Memory starts to degrade when you try to hold more than one idea in mind.
  • When trying to make a decision between items, the optimal number of items to compare is two. The optimal number of different ideas to hold in mind at one time is no more than three or four, ideally three.

• Some Things to Try

  • Simplify information by approximating and focusing on an idea’s salient elements.
  • Group information into chunks whenever you have too much information.
  • Practice getting your most important actors onstage first, not just the ones that are easiest.*

• This idea that conscious processes need to be done one at a time has been studied in hundreds of experiments since the 1980s. For example, the scientist Harold Pashler showed that when people do two cognitive tasks at once, their cognitive capacity can drop from that of a Harvard MBA to that of an eight-year-old. It’s a phenomenon called dual-task interference.

• The lesson is clear: if accuracy is important, don’t divide your attention.

• The problem isn’t doing two things at once so much as doing two conscious mental tasks at once, unless you are okay with a significant drop in performance.

• “To pay continuous partial attention is to keep a top-level item in focus, and constantly scan the periphery in case something more important emerges.”

• What people tend to do is what Emily tried to do in the meeting. They try to hold several focuses at once and switch rapidly between them. You might think this is a fine idea. But consider what happens when you hold tasks in the background. Given your small working memory, you decrease the amount of data that can be held for what you want to focus on at any moment. Instead of four items on the stage at once, you may be down to three, or even just two. Space is being taken up in working memory for the items held just off the stage.

• Once you repeat a pattern often enough, the basal ganglia can drive the process, freeing up the stage for new functions. Develop routines that can be repeated over and over again: How you call people. How you open up a new document, how you delete emails, how you schedule your time.

• Surprises About the Brain

  • You can focus on only one conscious task at a time.
  • Switching between tasks uses energy; if you do this a lot you can make more mistakes.
  • If you do multiple conscious tasks at once you will experience a big drop-off in accuracy or performance.
  • The only way to do two mental tasks quickly, if accuracy is important, is doing one of them at a time. Multitasking can be done easily if you are executing embedded routines.

• Some Things to Try

  • Catch yourself trying to do two things at once and slow down instead.
  • Embed repetitive tasks where you can.
  • Get decisions and thinking processes into the right order to reduce “queues” of decisions.
  • If you have to multitask, combine active thinking tasks only with automatic, embedded routines.

• One study found that office distractions eat up an average 2. hours a day. Another study found that employees spend an average of 11 minutes on a project before being distracted. After an interruption, it takes them 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they do at all. People switch activities every 3 minutes, either making a call, speaking with someone in their cubicle, or working on a document.

• According to Microsoft, if you’re looking for a technological solution to being more efficient, getting a bigger computer screen is one of the few clear winners.

• Less energy equals less capacity to understand, decide, recall, memorize, and inhibit. The result could be mistakes on important tasks. Or distractions can cause you to forget good ideas and lose valuable insights. Having a great idea and not being able to remember it can be frustrating, like an itch you can’t scratch, yet another distraction to manage.

• Once you understand how much energy is involved in high-level thinking such as planning and creating, you might be more vigilant about allowing distractions to steal your attention.

• One reason for your wandering attention is that the nervous system is constantly processing, reconfiguring, and reconnecting the trillions of connections in your brain each moment. The term for this is ambient neural activity. If you were to look at the electrical activity even in a resting brain, it would look like planet Earth from space with electrical storms lighting up different regions several times a second. The result is a stream of thoughts and images emerging into conscious awareness.

• Or, as scientist and philosopher Jonathan Haidt at New York University says, we are the descendants of people who paid a lot of attention when there was a rustle in the bushes

• This partly explains humanity’s universal resistance to wide-scale change: big changes have too much novelty.

• “Self-control is a limited resource,” says Baumeister. “After exhibiting self-control, people have a reduced ability to exhibit further self-control.”

• It seems that you may not have much free will, but you do have “free won’t” (a term coined by Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz), which is the ability to avoid urges. However, you have only a small window in which to inhibit a response. And, of course, if your stage is too full, you may not have the space to hold the concept of inhibition there. It’s starting to become clear why, when you’re tired, hungry, or anxious, it’s easier to make mistakes and harder to inhibit the wrong impulses.

• When you develop language that describes an activity, at least in this experiment, it’s more likely that you can catch yourself about to do something before taking the action. Having explicit language gives you more veto power. When you have words for a pattern, which means the prefrontal cortex is involved, a lot more is possible in relation to that pattern.

• If you have language for the way your mental stage gets tired, you will catch this exhaustion as it happens. If you have language to describe the feeling of having too much on your stage at once, you will be more likely to notice it.

• The harder part is learning to inhibit impulses as they arise. To inhibit impulses, you must veto them before they turn from impulse into action. And you are more likely to be able to veto an action if you have explicit language for the mental processes involved. It pays to know a lot about how your brain works, so you can catch your brain while you try to work.

• Surprises About the Brain

  • Attention is easily distracted.
  • When we get distracted it’s often a result of thinking about ourselves, which activates the default network in the brain.
  • A constant storm of electrical activity takes place in the brain.
  • Distractions exhaust the prefrontal cortex’s limited resources. Being “always on” (connected to others via technology) can drop your IQ significantly, as much as losing a night’s sleep.
  • Focus occurs partly through the inhibition of distractions.
  • The brain has a common braking system for all types of braking.
  • Inhibition uses a lot of energy because the braking system is part of the prefrontal cortex.
  • Each time you inhibit something, your ability to inhibit again is reduced.
  • Inhibition requires catching an impulse when it first emerges, before the momentum of an action takes over.
  • Having explicit language for mental patterns gives you a greater ability to stop patterns emerging early on, before they take over.

• Some Things to Try

  • When you need to focus, remove all external distractions completely.
  • Reduce the likelihood of internal distractions by clearing your mind before embarking on difficult tasks.
  • Improve your mental braking system by practicing any type of braking, including physical acts.
  • Inhibit distractions early before they take on momentum.

• In 1908, scientists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson discovered a fact about human performance that they called the inverted U. They found that performance was poor at low levels of stress, hit a sweet spot at reasonable levels of stress, and tapered off under high stress. The verb stress means “to emphasize,” and it’s not necessarily a negative thing. It’s wrong to think your performance would improve if stress disappeared from your life. It takes a certain amount of stress just to get out of bed in the morning. This type of stress is known as eustress, or positive stress. Positive stress helps focus your attention.

• Putting aside stimulants such as caffeine (which is, like a bigger computer screen, a proven technique for increasing mental performance), there are two main strategies for increasing arousal.

• One strategy, perhaps the easiest and quickest, is to increase adrenaline levels by bringing “urgency” to a task. Norepinephrine, also known as noradrenaline, is the brain equivalent of the adrenaline most people feel before public speaking. It’s the chemistry of fear. When you are scared, you pay intense attention; you are highly alert. Fear brings a deep and immediate alertness. Norepinephrine also turns out to be important for binding circuits together in the prefrontal cortex. You can play various “tricks” on yourself to generate the release of this chemical. Visualizing an activity generates a similar metabolic response to actually doing it. One study found that picturing yourself doing a finger exercise increased muscle mass by 22 percent, which was close to the 30 percent achieved by doing the exercise for real.

• Scientists have also found that expecting a positive event, anything the brain perceives as a reward, generates dopamine. Rewards to the brain include food, sex, money, and positive social interactions. So Paul could have put his prefrontal cortex into the right neurochemical sweet spot by focusing on the possible rewards of his doing a great job on this proposal, the money he could win, and the future rewards that would come his way.

• One study showed that new lovers’ brains have a lot in common with people on cocaine. Dopamine is sometimes called the “drug of desire.” Too much dopamine, from being “high with excitement,” can also be exhausting.

• Surprises About the Brain

  • Peak mental performance requires just the right level of stress, not minimal stress.
  • Peak mental performance occurs when you have intermediate levels of two important neurotransmitters, norepinephrine and dopamine, which relate to alertness and interest.
  • You can consciously manipulate your levels of norepinephrine and dopamine in many ways, to improve your alertness or interest.

• Some Things to Try

  • Practice being aware of your levels of alertness and interest throughout the day.
  • Bring your adrenaline level up when needed with a small dose of visualizing a mild fear.
  • Bring your dopamine level up when needed, using novelty in any form, including changing perspective, humor, or expecting something positive.
  • Bring your dopamine or adrenaline level down by activating other regions of the brain other than the prefrontal cortex.

• Emily has hit what is known in neuroscience circles as an impasse. An impasse is a roadblock to a desired mental path. It’s a connection you want to make but can’t. An impasse can be anything from trying to remember an old friend’s name, to working out what you will name your child, to suffering full-blown writer’s block.

• “There is a famous old quote from William James on attention: ‘Everyone knows what attention is until you try to define it,’”

• Ohlsson’s research shows that people have to stop themselves from thinking along one path before they can find a new idea. “The projection of prior experience has to be actively suppressed and inhibited,” Ohlsson explains. “This is surprising, as we tend to think that inhibition is a bad thing, that it will lower your creativity.

• This is why companies such as Google create work environments that allow for fun and play. They have seen that this increases the quality of ideas.

• Surprises About the Brain

  • It’s astonishingly easy to get stuck on the same small set of solutions to a problem, called the impasse phenomenon.
  • Resolving an impasse requires letting the brain idle, reducing activation of the wrong answers.
  • Having insights involves hearing subtle signals and allowing loose connections to be made. This requires a quiet mind, with minimal electrical activity.
  • Insights occur more frequently the more relaxed and happy you are.
  • The right hemisphere, which involves the connections between information more than specific data, contributes strongly to insight.

• Some Things to Try

  • When You Hit a Mental Wall Take the pressure off yourself, get an extension on your deadline, do something fun, reduce your anxiety any way you can.
  • Take a break and do something light and interesting, to see if an answer emerges.
  • Try quieting your mind and see what is there in the more subtle connections.
  • Focus on the connections between information rather than drilling down into a problem; look at patterns and links from a high level rather than getting detailed.
  • Simplify problems to their salient features; allow yourself to reflect from a high level, watch for the tickle of subtle connections preceding insight, and stop and focus on insights when they occur.

• “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

• When you listen to a hunch that you need to stop emailing and think about how to plan your day better, you’re being mindful. When you notice that you need to focus so you don’t get lost driving to a meeting, you’re being mindful. In each case you are noticing inner signals. The ability to notice these kinds of signals is a central platform for being more effective at work. Knowledge of your brain is one thing, but you also need to be aware of what your brain is doing at any moment for any knowledge to be useful.

• Mindfulness is clearly useful for getting and staying healthy, but is that just because it makes you less stressed, or is there something more powerful going on here?

• “Mindfulness is a habit, it’s something the more one does, the more likely one is to be in that mode with less and less effort . . . it’s a skill that can be learned. It’s accessing something we already have. Mindfulness isn’t difficult. What’s difficult is to remember to be mindful.” I love this last statement. Mindfulness isn’t difficult: the hard part is remembering to do it.

• Your ability to regulate your emotions instead of being at the mercy of them is central to being effective in a chaotic world.

• “Everything you do in life is based on your brain’s determination to minimize danger or maximize reward,” Gordon explains. ‘“Minimize danger, maximize reward’ is the organizing principle of the brain.”

• Emotions such as curiosity, happiness, and contentment are toward responses. Anxiety, sadness, and fear, on the other hand, are away responses.

• Clearly, being able to regulate your emotions well is not a “nice skill to have.” It’s essential for success, not just in work, but in life overall.

• situation selection, situation modification, and attention deployment.

• If Paul knew he was terrible at pitching to customers, he might have chosen not to pitch anymore and to hire someone else to do that task. That’s situation selection at work. Once you’re in a situation, you can modify it to some degree.

• Even when you’re already in a situation, you can still decide where to put your attention. That’s attention deployment.

• The first option is to express your emotions. If you’re upset, cry, as kids do. Obviously, in many social and work settings, this doesn’t work too well.

• The second option is expressive suppression, which requires holding the feeling down and stopping the emotion from being perceived by others. Paul tried to suppress his emotions early in the meeting. He was angry at himself for messing up with a previous client, and he tried not to let this show.

• “Even after you’ve got yourself into a bad situation, you can still, even at this relatively late stage, think about it differently,” Gross explains. There are two examples of this phenomenon. One is called labeling. It’s when you take a situation and put a label on your emotions. The other is called reappraisal, which involves changing your interpretation of an event. We will explore reappraisal in the next scene and focus here on labeling.

• To reduce arousal, you need to use just a few words to describe an emotion, and ideally use symbolic language, which means using indirect metaphors, metrics, and simplifications of your experience. This requires you to activate your prefrontal cortex, which reduces the arousal in the limbic system

• Surprises About the Brain

  • The brain has an overarching organizing principle to minimize danger (an away response) and maximize reward (a toward response).
  • The limbic system can be aroused easily.
  • The away response is stronger, faster, and longer lasting than the toward response.
  • The away response can reduce cognitive resources, make it harder to think about your thinking, make you more defensive, and mistakenly class certain situations as threats.
  • Once an emotion kicks in, trying to suppress it either doesn’t work or makes it worse.
  • Suppressing an emotion reduces your memory of events significantly.
  • Suppressing an emotion makes other people feel uncomfortable.
  • People incorrectly predict that labeling an emotion will make them feel worse.
  • Labeling an emotion can reduce limbic system arousal. Labeling needs to be symbolic, not a long dialogue about an emotion, for it to reduce arousal.

• Some Things to Try

  • Use your director to observe your emotional state.
  • Be conscious of things that may increase limbic system arousal and work out ways to reduce these, before the arousal kicks in.
  • Practice noticing emotions as they arise, to get better at sensing their presence earlier.
  • When you sense a strong emotion coming on, refocus your attention quickly on another stimulus, before the emotion takes over.
  • Practice assigning words to emotional states to reduce arousal once it kicks in.

• “Your brain receives patterns from the outside world, stores them as memories, and makes predictions by combining what it has seen before and what is happening now. . . . Prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the primary function of the neo-cortex, and the foundation of intelligence.”

• This predictive capacity, however, involves far more than just your five senses. Dr. Bruce Lipton, author of The Biology of Belief, says that there are around forty environmental cues you can consciously pay attention to at any one time. Subconsciously this number is more than two million.

• A study of teenagers in Western cultures found that these teenagers have fewer choices than a felon in prison. Food for thought.

• This idea of the importance of a perception of choice is easy to test on children, who often rail against a lack of choice. When a child won’t go to bed, you might reduce her resistance by giving her back a choice. For example, she can choose whether she is read a book or told a story. This choice can have a big impact. It’s the “perception” of choice that matters to the brain.

• “Our emotional responses ultimately flow out of our appraisals of the world, and if we can shift those appraisals, we shift our emotional responses.”

• This is one of the reasons why change is so hard: doing things differently can bring about a negative spiral that can feel overwhelming.

• “All the brain can know it knows from inside itself.”

• If you recognize that all interpretations of the world are only that—interpretations your brain has made, and ultimately just yours—then having a choice about which interpretation you might use at any moment makes more sense.

• Surprises About the Brain

  • Certainty is a primary reward or threat for the brain.
  • Autonomy, the feeling of control, is another primary reward or threat for the brain.
  • Strong emotions generated by certainty and autonomy may need more than labeling to be managed.
  • Reappraisal is a powerful strategy for managing increased arousal.
  • People who reappraise more appear to live better lives.

• Some Things to Try

  • Watch for uncertainty creating a feeling of threat; practice noticing this.
  • Watch for a feeling of reduced autonomy creating a sense of threat; practice noticing this.
  • Find ways to create choice and a perception of autonomy wherever you can.
  • Practice reappraisal early when you feel a strong emotion coming on.
  • You can reappraise by reinterpreting an event, or reordering your values, or normalizing an experience, or repositioning your perspective.
  • Reappraising your own experience is a powerful way of managing internal stressors; use this technique when you are anxious about your mental performance by saying, “That’s just my brain.”

• Surprises About the Brain

  • Expectations are the experience of the brain paying attention to a possible reward (or threat).
  • Expectations alter the data your brain perceives.
  • It’s common to fit incoming data into expectations and to ignore data that don’t fit.
  • Expectations can change brain functioning; the right dose of expectations can be similar to a clinical dose of morphine.
  • Expectations activate the dopamine circuitry, central for thinking and learning.
  • Met expectations generate a slight increase in dopamine, and a slight reward response.
  • Exceeded expectations generate a strong increase in dopamine, and a strong reward response.
  • Unmet expectations generate a large drop in dopamine level, and a strong threat response.
  • The dynamic between expectations altering experience and impacting dopamine levels, helps generate an upward or downward spiral in the brain.
  • A general feeling of expecting good things generates a healthy level of dopamine, and may be the neurochemical marker of feeling happy.

• Some Things to Try

  • Practice noticing what your expectations are in any given situation.
  • Practice setting expectations a little lower. To stay in a positive state of mind, find ways to keep coming out ahead of your expectations over and again, even in small ways.
  • When a positive expectation is not being met, practice reappraising the situation by remembering it’s your brain doing something odd with dopamine.

• Success in most jobs today requires a strong ability to collaborate with others. For some people who build their mental maps around logical systems such as computers or engineering, the chaos and uncertainty of dealing with people can be overwhelming.

• “The more we can see each other, the better we can match emotional states,”

• “If you want to collaborate well with others you have to understand what kind of state others are in.”

• Oxytocin is released when two people dance together, play music together, or engage in a collaborative conversation. It’s the neurochemistry of safe connectivity.

• This phenomenon makes sense: it explains why facilitators and trainers insist on “icebreakers” at the start of workshops, and why “establish rapport” is the first step in any counseling, customer service, or sales training manual. New research does complicate the story of oxytocin as the “trust drug” though.

• Research within the positive psychology field shows there is only one experience in life that increases happiness over a long time. It’s not money, above a base survival amount. It’s not health, nor is it marriage or having children. The one thing that makes people happy is the quality and quantity of their social connections.

• “Loneliness generates a threat response,” Cacioppo explains, “the same as pain, thirst, hunger, or fear.”

• While shared experiences make a difference, shared goals are really the driving force of relatedness. When you’re trying to collaborate with anyone, start with a shared goal, and everything after will be easier.

• Surprises About the Brain

  • Social connections are a primary need, as important as food and water at times. We know one another directly through experiencing other people’s states ourselves.
  • Safe connections with others are vital for health, and for healthy collaboration.
  • People are classed as friend or foe quickly, with foe as the default in the absence of positive cues.
  • You need to work hard at creating connections to create good collaboration.

• Some Things to Try

  • Anytime you meet someone new, make an effort to connect on a human level as early as possible to reduce the threat response.
  • Create an in-group with the people you work with by sharing personal experiences, or create an opportunity for any kind of shared experience.
  • Create shared goals with people you feel you might be in conflict with. Ideally, these goals should be tactical short- to medium-term focuses.
  • Actively encourage people around you to connect on a human level to create better collaboration.

• Paul doesn’t know that fairness is a primary need for the brain. A sense of fairness in and of itself can create a strong reward response, and a sense of unfairness can generate a threat response that lasts for days.

• It’s the principle that counts. Think of people who spend enormous sums of money to “right wrongs” in court, with no obvious economic win other than “justice” or “revenge.” We crave fairness, and some people spend their life savings and even their lives to get

• It’s the principle that counts. Think of people who spend enormous sums of money to “right wrongs” in court, with no obvious economic win other than “justice” or “revenge.” We crave fairness, and some people spend their life savings and even their lives to get it.

• With the teenage brain, small emotional hits can bring strong reactions. Prefrontal cortex functioning tends to shrink briefly as teens hit puberty, which explains why a ten-year-old may have better emotional control than a fifteen-year-old.

• In the big downsizings of 2009, one firm’s executives agreed to a pay cut of 15 percent, making a big deal that this was three times more than the 5 percent cut all staff were being asked to undergo, to help reduce layoffs. While a 15 percent cut meant thousands of dollars a year less pay for an executive, this didn’t affect their bonuses, many in the tens of millions of dollars. You can imagine how employees felt about that.

• Surprises About the Brain

  • A sense of fairness can be a primary reward.
  • A sense of unfairness can be a primary threat.
  • Linking fairness and expectations helps explain the delight of the kindness of strangers, as well as the intense emotions of betrayal from people close to you.
  • When you accept an unfair situation, you do so by labeling or reappraising.
  • Men don’t experience empathy with someone who is in pain who has been unfair, whereas women do.
  • Punishing unfair people can be rewarding, and not punishing unfairness can generate a sense of unfairness in itself.

• Some Things to Try

  • Be open and transparent about your dealings with people, remembering that unfairness is easy to trigger.
  • Find ways to sense increasing fairness around you, perhaps by volunteering or donating money or resources regularly.
  • Don’t let unfairness go unpunished.
  • Watch out for fairness being linked to other issues such as certainty, autonomy, or relatedness, where you can get intense emotional responses.

• Status explains why people love to win arguments, even pointless ones.

• Marketing departments use two main levers to engage human emotions through advertising: fear, and the promise of increased status.

• Being left out, being classed as “less than” others, is a universally painful experience.

• Many of the arguments and conflicts at work, and in life, have status issues at their core. The more you can label status threats as they occur, in real time, the easier it will be to reappraise on the spot and respond more appropriately.

• Studies of primate communities show that higher-status monkeys have reduced day-to-day cortisol levels, are healthier, and live longer. This isn’t just monkey business (sorry for the pun).

• There is an entire book, called The Status Syndrome, by Michael Marmot, which illustrates that status is a significant determinant of human longevity, even controlling for education and income. High status doesn’t just feel good. It brings along bigger rewards, too.

• Status is rewarding not just when you have achieved high status, but also anytime you feel as if your status has increased, even in a small way.

• Even an increase in hope that your status might go up one day seems to pack a reward.

• Surprises About the Brain

  • Status is a significant driver of behavior at work and across life experiences.
  • A sense of status going up, even in a small way, activates your reward circuits.
  • A sense of status going down activates your threat circuitry.
  • Just speaking to your boss or a person of higher status generally activates a status threat.
  • People pay a lot of attention to protecting and building their status, probably more to this than any other element of the SCARF model, at least in organizations.
  • There is no one fixed status scale; there are virtually infinite ways of feeling better than others.
  • When everyone is trying to be higher status than others there is a decrease in relatedness.
  • Because we perceive ourselves using the same circuits we use when perceiving others, you can trick your brain into a status reward by playing against yourself.
  • Playing against yourself increases your status without threatening others.
  • Status is one of five major social domains that are all either primary rewards or threats, which form the SCARF model for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness.

• Some Things to Try

  • Watch out for people’s status being threatened.
  • Reduce status threats in others by lowering your status through sharing your own humanity or mistakes.
  • Reduce status threats in others by giving people positive feedback.
  • Find ways to play against yourself, and pay a lot of attention to any incremental improvements.
  • The slightest feeling of improvement can generate a pleasant and helpful reward.
  • Playing against yourself to improve your understanding of your own brain can be a powerful way of increasing your performance.

• Giving others feedback is often the first strategy people use to facilitate change. Yet, surprisingly, giving feedback is rarely the right way to create real change. While there are many “techniques” to improve the performance of feedback, people miss the basic reality of this approach: feedback creates a strong threat for people in most situations.

• Paul’s first attempt to help Eric involved a “polite” approach to giving feedback: he said something nice, then attacked Eric’s status, and then said something nice again. To me this is like an “arsenic sandwich”: the bread might make the meal appear more palatable, but it’s still going to kill you.

• “Performance review.” Mike Morrison, at the time the dean of Toyota University in Los Angeles, commented that annual performance reviews, “Essentially just reduce performance for six days each year: three days while people prepare for it, and three days recovering from it.”

• Ohlsson finds that when someone hits an impasse, telling her what not to think tends to help only 5 percent of the time. Giving people clues about what they should think about tends to help only 8 percent of the time.

• As people are often already anxious when stuck at an impasse, and anxiety generally makes people’s views narrow and their brains noisier, it’s important to reduce people’s anxiety and increase their positive emotions—in other words, to shift them from an away state to a toward state. A great way to do this is using elements of the SCARF model. You could help the person increase her sense of status, perhaps by encouraging her. Or increase someone’s sense of certainty by making implicit issues more explicit, say, by clarifying your objectives. Or increase a person’s sense of autonomy by ensuring that he is making the decisions and coming up with the ideas, not just listening to your suggestions.

• What you are doing is facilitating in others the ARIA model (Awareness, Reflection, Insight, and Action), which I introduced back in scene 6, as a fast way of getting past impasses.

• When you review your own work, there’s an incentive to convince yourself that the work is good. You don’t want to look bad to another person. Eric, for example, is convinced he’s done nothing wrong with the school project, especially when Paul thinks he might have.

• Asking someone else for permission to stretch their thinking can create a nice positive flush from a sense of increased status and autonomy.

• Surprises About the Brain

  • Giving feedback often creates an intense threat response that doesn’t help people improve performance.
  • The problem-solving approach may not be the most effective pathway to solutions.
  • Providing suggestions often results in a lot of wasted time. Bringing people to their own insights is a fast way of getting people back on track.

• Some Things to Try

  • Catch yourself when you go to give feedback, problem solve, or provide solutions.
  • Help people think about their own thinking by focusing them on their own subtle internal thoughts, without getting into too much detail.
  • Find ways to make it valuable for people to give themselves feedback; reward them for activating their director.

• Hebb’s Law, which says that “Cells that fire together, wire together.”

• As Sir Winston Churchill once said, “I love to learn, but I hate to be taught.”

• “There are toward goals and away goals,” Barrell explains, “and which one you use has quite an impact on performance.

• Toward goals have you visualize and create connections around where you are going. You are creating new connections. What’s interesting is you start to feel good at lower levels with toward goals. There are benefits earlier. Away goals have you visualize what can go wrong, which reactivates the emotions involved.” The trouble is, because problems come to mind so much easier than solutions, people are always setting away goals instead of toward goals. Also, problems are more certain than unknown solutions, and the brain naturally steers toward certainty. For these reasons and more, toward goals are rare, and setting them might require getting some help from someone else, such as a mentor or coach.

• When you set an away goal, you can end up paying attention to the negative emotions instead of making new connections. Lose weight, stop smoking, don’t drink: most of the New Year’s resolutions of the world are away goals.

• The term “attention density,” coined by Jeffrey M. Schwartz, provides a scientific framework for future research about repeated attention. This density can be measured with such variables as frequency, duration, and intensity of attention. This looks like measuring how often you recall an idea, how long each time, and with how much focus.

• Surprises About the Brain

  • While human change appears hard, change in the brain is constant.
  • Focused attention changes the brain.
  • Attention goes all too easily to the threat. Once you focus attention away from threat, you can create new connections with the right questions.
  • Creating long-term change requires paying regular attention to deepen new circuits, especially when they are new.

• Some Things to Try

  • Practice watching for people’s emotional state when you want to facilitate change.
  • Don’t try to influence people when they are in a strong away state.
  • Use elements of the SCARF model to shift people into a toward state.
  • Practice using solution-focused questions that focus people’s attention directly on the specific circuits you want to bring to life.
  • Invent ways to have people pay repeated attention to new circuits.

• Reappraisal. The process of changing your interpretation of an event, which also dampens activity of the limbic system.