What’s going on? What are the facts? How do we know?
There was a time not so long ago that it seemed easier to organize and make sense of information – a time when exercising independent judgment was less stressful.
Why is it more difficult, and what can we do about it?
What are the disruptors?
The demands on our personal super-computers (brains) are bigger than ever. It’s not just our PC’s that need faster processors and more RAM. We do also.
We are confronted with more information more quickly that impact not only the prefrontal cortex or reasoning parts of the brain, but also every aspect of the emotional and sensory brain.
We’ve had screens for years, but now information streams from many devices, and from a number of platforms on each. The input stimulates dopamine production, generates energy and a sense of pleasure, so we are addicted. Yet, constant exposure to electronic media fatigues and changes the brain. Just as your smartphone battery is depleted when the color display screen is left on, so does your brain become fatigued by exposure to multi-media displays.
Attention and working memory are finite. Neuroscientists assert that we can hold between four and seven chunks of information in working memory. As we do more, we become slower and prone to errors. Think about how often we respond to social media. The interruptions disrupt o focus and cause mind wandering, and to make matters worse, a distracted brain is an unhappy brain.
Social media not only grabs attention. It binges on emotion. It’s hard to resist. Provocative tweets hit raw nerves, observes Barbara Bickart in the Harvard Business Review. There is no bigger disruptor than heightened emotion.
Image also has enormous influence. “We are consumers of spectacular images,” says Zaretsky in the NYTimes. We consume images that are repeatedly delivered to us, and in their intensity and repetition, we become addicted to them, and disoriented by them. We are consumed, and unbalanced by their impact.
Finally, we forget to reflect and restore. Thought quality is degraded further, because we are then over-utilizing what Daniel Kahneman of Thinking Fast and Slow calls System 1 (thinking fast) or intuition, without backing it up with the analysis of System 2 (thinking slow).
What can we do?
Robert Eichinger, PhD, COO at Teamtelligent and Senior Director at MatrixInsights, has answers. At the 2017 address to APA consulting psychologists, he suggested that the reason that people, teams and enterprises do not do “what they know is the right and best thing to get the outcome they all agree they want” is because we don’t manage our most spectacular super-computer, the brain. To do this, he says, but we must strengthen our Chief Brain Officer (CBO). The Chief Brain Officer appears to be what Dr. Dan Siegel, expert in interpersonal neurobiology, calls the mind. Siegel defines the mind as an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information. The mind, Siegel says, uses the brain to create itself.
So, what does the Chief Brain Officer need to attend to? Eichinger names five jobs.
- The CBO needs to be expert in self-awareness. Deliberate methods to cultivate accurate self-knowledge are essential.
- The management of automaticity is critical. Approximately 40-80% of what we do is reflexive. Some of this is undesirable. Newer behaviors that might be better need to be cultivated with repetition. Estimates are that it takes over two months of reps (66 days) for a new behavior to become automatic.
- We need a clear working memory. Attention needs to be disciplined, so that we don’t degrade the quality of thinking by flooding the system.
- We need to manage Dopamine flow. It’s the neurotransmitter that creates a sense of energy and pleasure, and accompanies our best functioning.
- We need to attend to the needs of the CBO, making certain that this “YOU” is fit and healthy. This means practicing disciplines of renewal and reflection like mindfulness or a structured spiritual practice of some type, and a variety of health practices, and making direct contact with other humans a priority.
Neuroscientists assert that we have the capacity to grow up to 10,000 new brain cells per day. We can strengthen and train the CBO, and approach our changing culture with confidence.
