How Our Minds Really Work (We Think)

“Most of what you read about neuroscience in the popular media – particularly about parts of the brain ‘lighting up’ and what that indicates – vastly oversimplifies how the brain works and is not instructive at all,” say Adam Waytz (Kellogg School of Management) and Malia Mason (Columbia Business School) in this provocative Harvard Business Review article. To understand how the mind works, they say, “we must separate fact from fiction, resist facile narratives, and establish a more sophisticated view of brain science.” 

Recent research has enabled us to see that as many as 15 brain networks are at work. “The network-based view isn’t nearly as sexy as the current popular view of neuroscience,” say Waytz and Mason. “Good neuroscience based on the network view is more complex. Messier. But good science is messy.” Here is their report (admittedly interim) on how four primary networks operate – and the implications for leaders:

• The default network – It controls introspective thought and the ability to envision the past, the future, and alternative realities. The default network activates when people are awake but aren’t focused on input from the five senses or any specific goals. This network helps us understand creative thinking and breakthrough innovation, and should make managers value unstructured time as a key factor in innovation. A number of companies, including Google, give employees time to work on what intrigues them, but Waytz and Mason don’t think this goes far enough. To take full advantage of the default network, people need to get away from their e-mail, calendars, phones, offices, and colleagues. 

• The reward network – It controls perceptions of pleasure and displeasure, activated by food, money, praise, and unpleasant experiences. This network helps us understand motivation and incentives. Recent research has shown that money is not always the best incentive; status, social approval, collaboration, transparency, fairness, opportunities to learn, and being able to work on challenging and interesting problems are often more important. “In fact,” say Waytz and Mason, “the reward network’s strong response to immaterial rewards suggests that money is often a more expensive and less efficient incentive.” 

• The affect network – It controls autonomic and endocrine responses to emotions (blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature). “The brain’s affect network seems to know what’s going on before we consciously recognize it,” say Waytz and Mason. “Feelings inform thoughts, not the other way around.” This network helps us understand hunches and gut instincts and the role emotions play in decision-making. “A hunch is not some mystical sixth sense. It’s a real neurological response that manifests itself physically… Leaders tend to push away feelings because they think it’s best to be dispassionate. But a mounting body of neurological evidence suggests that emotional impulses should not be ignored. The affect network fast-tracks decision making and helps us process information that may include too many variables.” Of course we shouldn’t always trust hunches, which are sometimes off base. But they should be heeded. “We now know,” say the authors, “that we should try to incorporate these transient feelings into our decision-making process, not push them away.”

• The control network – It aligns behavior with goals and kicks in when we weigh long-term consequences, control our impulses, and selectively focus our attention. This network helps us understand the benefits and risks of multitasking and how to set and manage priorities. “Whereas other animals react to only immediate needs,” say Waytz and Mason, “we can pursue loftier goals… even when they conflict with our immediate needs or contradict our past behavior patterns. The control network is responsible for this flexibility.” It shifts the focus from other networks to longer-term goals and aspirations.

When the control network is in charge, the trade-off is that the default, reward, and affect networks are deemphasized. “The soccer player so intent on getting off a winning shot may not notice a wide-open teammate who could score more easily if he were passed the ball,” say the authors. “The player may also fail to realize that time is running out – ignoring an entirely separate and more critical priority because he’s so focused on shooting.” 

This speaks to the importance of limiting the number of strategic objectives so our brains aren’t overloaded and confused. Multitasking is over-rated, say Waytz and Mason. “E-mails, meetings, texts, tweets, phone calls, news – the unstructured, continuous, fractured nature of modern work is a tremendous burden on the control network and consumes a huge amount of the brain’s energy. The resulting mental fatigue takes its toll in the form of mistakes, shallow thinking, and impaired self-regulation. When overwhelmed, the control network loses the proverbial reins, and our behavior is driven by immediate, situational cues instead of shaped with our priorities in mind.”

A leader’s success, conclude Waytz and Mason, “requires, first and foremost, creating just a few clear priorities and gathering the courage to eliminate or outsource less important tasks and goals. Executives must also reset their expectations for what constitutes a viable workload, basing them on a realistic understanding of what their brains can handle.” It’s also short-sighted to think it’s smart to run a “lean” organization that overloads workers. “The more leaders ask their workers to focus on, the worse those employees will perform.”

“Your Brain at Work: What a New Approach to Neuroscience Can Teach Us About Management” by Adam Waytz and Malia Mason in Harvard Business Review, July/August 2013 (Vol. 91, #7/8, p. 102-111), no e-link available

From the Marshall Memo #492