The neurobiology of Systems 1 & 2

I was coaching a group on a programme last week where one of the speakers was Paul Dolan - another of the behavoural scientists who uses the System 1 / System 2 language made famous by Daniel Kahnemann in his recent bestseller "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow". Paul was great, and Daniel's book is a must read. What I want to do in this post is connect that language with the work of the neuroscientists - the simplified model of the brain used by eg Dr Daniel Siegel ("Mindsight"), David Rock ("Your Brain at Work"), and Dr Stephen Peters ("The Chimp Paradox") amongst many others.

The reason I want to do this is that what the neuroscience tells us is that having a mental picture (literally a picture) of the brain is what helps you use your knowledge to change things. But the system 1 & 2 insights are all explained in words! So it struck me it would be really helpful to try to map the words onto the picture. The good news is it turns out to be pretty easy - my own version of the brain model is shown below, and super-imposed on the picture are Kahnemann's thinking systems. Once you see the linkage you can also see how managing the limbic and PFC helps you manage systems 1 & 2.



System 1 is your autopilot - your limbic recognises the situation and automatically selects the appropriate programmes or data to address that situation. The various biases of System 1 (Paul's mnemonic was MINDSPACE) can all be explained by the limbic's emotional perception. Eg M stands for Messenger - we tend to believe someone who is "like us". It seems clear to me that the reason we distrust someone "unlike us" is that the limbic perceives difference as a threat, and the appropriate response to threat is to avoid / reject. You can similarly work through the rest of the mnemonic for yourself. So managing system 1 is really about managing the limbic.

 

System 2 is your intentional thinking - it needs to use the PFC to deliberately choose the programmes and data to use, or even to create new programmes and data. We know from neuroscience that the PFC is easily over-worked and also shut down by negative emotions - which explains why system 1 is often used just when we might need system 2 most, eg in critical decision-making situations. So once again, the key to using system 2 when you need it would appear to be managing the limbic. 

 

There are two other things this linkage tells us. One is that we can use system 2 to re-train system 1. The limbic learned by experience and can be re-trained by using the PFC to deliberately create alternative experiences - real or imagined in your head. That is essentially what we are doing in coaching, self-reveiew journaling or other developmental practices. We can also develop system 2's ability to monitor the activity of system 1. Practicing mindfulness mindfulness improves the PFC's function in both emotional regulation and monitoring. You may still be on autopilot using system 1 - but you can at least your system 2 can be aware that you are! 

 

Daniel Kahnemann can sometimes be a bit negative about the chances of changing our biases or improving our inherently bad decision-making. But with this link to the brain model, I think we can all be a lot more positive. 



Generating acronyms to apply neuroscience

Yesterday I was at a local interest group meeting of the NeuroLeadership Institute, listening to a presentation by NLI founder David Rock.

He was talking about learning and memory, and the simple yet powerful image of memory as a big neural net of connections, so that the bigger we make the net, eg by activating neurons in many different parts of the brain at the same time, the easier it is to access it. As part of his talk he explained his acronym for effectiveness in establishing the net - particularly when imparting learning re knowledge, ideas, concepts etc. The acronym is AGES, which stands for Attention, Generation, Emotion, and Separation.

I found the most interesting one to reflect on was Generation, which is about doing something immediately to create personal meaning out of what you have just heard or read. All good teachers know this from experience, but the research shows it is even more important than we think. For example, if immediately after explaining an idea, you ask people to tell you (or their neighbour) when and how they could apply it to a real-life situation, it makes it much more likely that the idea will stick. If they don't, it probably won't. It's worth taking a minute now to think about when you do and don't do this, and how you might do it more effectively, ie in a way which creates the biggest net.

Using acronyms can itself be a mini-application of AGES - but only if they are your own. Making up an acronym is pure Generation. It requires quite a lot of effort (high Attention), there is a sense of triumph on finding a good one - especially if this is preceded by a period of frustration when you can't see it (negative switching to positive Emotion). And I often return to think about it / play with it several times over a period of a week (Separation). It's rare, therefore, that I forget my own acronyms!

But what do you do when someone gives you an acronym? What I always do is try to modify it to make it my own. Instead of AGES, I remember SAGE, which for me links to knowledge and wisdom. And instead of Rock's SCARF for his social threat model, I remember SCARE, which obviously links to threat - simply replacing his F for Fairness with E for Equity. And for his four conditions for allowing insight I remember QUIET PINT, standing for Quiet, slightly Positive, Internally focused, and Not Trying - again the link is obvious!

So I offer you SAGE, SCARE and QUIET PINT... but with some sadness recommend you don't use them. Try to make up your own!

The neuroscience of self-fulfilling prophecies

More and more I find my coaching is as simple (or hard) as helping people take a different perspective and/or change their focus of attention. Last week I was discussing this with a colleague (a proper neuroscientist with a PhD etc) and she gave me a neat neuro-biologically informed explanation of how to discover what change is required by thinking about your strengths.

The basic neuro-biology is that we literally see what we focus attention on, and are correspondingly "blind" to what we are not focusing on. So changing perspective and shifting our focus of attention are actually both about altering our perception. Once we see / perceive the situation or the person differently we can act / react differently. So far, fairly obvious.

The interesting bit is that by thinking about your strengths you can quickly identify what you habitually pay attention to, hence what you will typically be blind to and how you will tend to mis-interpret what you do see. Knowing where you habitually focus attention makes it much easier to shift it elsewhere. And knowing you have a (literal) blind spot is an essential first step towards seeing what is in it!

The easiest way to explain this is with an example.

Suppose your strength is that you are decisive and action oriented. This suggests you pay a lot of attention to looking for decisions to be made and actions to be taken. As a result, you see lots of decisions to be made and lots of actions to be taken. You are literally blind to other possibilities. So you carry on making decisions and taking actions - because that's all there is to do! From another person's perspective, of course, you may appear to be over-using your strength - they may see you as too dominant and/or too hasty.

Take this further, if you mostly pay attention to decisions and actions you will only see those aspects of other activities (or other people) that affect the decisions and actions you are paying attention to. Nearly everything else - even a suggestion that you pause for thought- will be seen as either a challenge to be overcome or a delay to be avoided or ignored. And, of course, if all you are seeing is your decision or your action, it's actually true - that is the self-fulfilling prophecy, ie "What You Get Is What You See".

So how do you get to see a more complete picture? The answer is to shift your focus of attention. Practice asking yourself: "What if a decision or action wasn't the only thing needed right now, what else might be needed?" or "What if this other activity / person was not just a delay or a challenge, what else might it / they be offering that is helpful?". It's that simple.

However, if your brain is telling you that even pausing to think is a delay, it won't necessarily be easy. That's why you have to practice!

Integrating Siegel and Rock

If you want to know about the brain in relation to leadership, or development of leaders, then the best two books to start with are David Rock's "Your Brain at Work" and Dr Dan Siegel's book "Mindsight". They are both fantastic at filtering, applying and making sense of the vast amounts of neuroscientific research being generated every day.

However, they have always seemed to me to be approaching that research from completely different viewpoints. David Rock's writing has been mostly about how we can use knowledge of the brain to improve our thinking. Dan Siegel's work has been about how we can use knowledge of the brain to change unhelpful patterns of behaviour. Now I find they are mutual fans! Let me give two examples from a David Rock presentation I attended yesterday.

The first is Rock's explanation of why awareness of neuroscientific research helps leaders. The hard data in research creates a willingness to look at how our brains work, it also creates a language for talking about it. This allows better self-regulation, which supports better adaptation of our behaviour to the situation (flexibility). Importantly, Rock explicitly saw the link between better self-regulation and better adaptation as being better integration of brain function. This is Dan Siegel's entire focus - his work is all about various forms of mindfulness and physical practices which integrate the brain.

The second is Rock and Siegel's collaboraion to produce a list of 7 things you should do every day to maintain mental health - the "heatlhy mind platter". Google it for more details, but in outline you need: Sleep time, Physical [Activity] time, Focus time, Down time (relaxing, preferably not with TV), Play time, Connecting time, and Time In (his word for internal reflection or mindfulness type meditation - the opposite of Time Out). And both of them are clear that the last is one of the most essential.

New (neural) paths through the wood

Talking to a colleague I used an analogy to describe the process and impact of our coaching which they really liked and suggested I share more widely. I don't think it is original, but I do think it is quite useful / helpful.

We were talking about patterns of behaviour being determined by the neural pathways in the brain, and I suggested that these neural pathways could be represented by paths through a wood. Our repeated pattens of behaviour are like the heavy traffic of repeated journeys which create a broad clear path that is easily followed. In fact the path would appear to us to be the only route through the wood. The coaching process is like helping somebody strike out directly through the undergrowth to find a new route through the forest. Lots flows from this analogy, both about the process of coaching and it's long term impact.

The coach may not know any more than the coachee the exact path we will take, or even where it will end up, but their job is to stay close and give confidence that it is ok to keep going. As an experienced guide they may play a big role in clearing some of the tangling undergrowth, and they may suggest changing direction or retracing our steps if it looks like we're in danger of getting lost.

And once the new path has been taken, for a while at least, it is clearly there to see as an option. The more times you take that option, the clearer and more permanent that new path becomes. But if you don't ever choose that path it soon grows over and disappears again. And this is exactly what happens literally with the neural pathways created by new ways of thinking.

The other "Three R's"

I watched a TED/U-tube video the other day of Dan Siegel talking about his idea of Mindsight. Whilst it wasn't up to the best of TED talks (so didn't get added to the other neuroscience links on my main website) I did like his basic idea that schools should change their focus.

Dan's argument is that they spend too much on the three R's of Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic - a purely rational focus. And not enough time on the other three R's - Reflection, Relationship and Resilience. If schools were really training people for life - or indeed future leadership roles - these latter three would be central to the curriculum.

"Until one is committed"

I promised to write about the coincidence that when you open yourself to positive possibilities they "magically" appear, and it seems appropriate to make this the first post of the New Year. My title comes from an often quoted passage about this by William H Murray, who goes on to explain rather poetically that: "The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too" and who also quotes Goethe that: "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it".

And by coincidence (!) at Xmas I received a lovely update from a client I worked with a while ago which illustrates perfectly this effect. I'll try to tell their story without giving away too much that is personal. When we worked together, the explicit goal was around achieving a senior level promotion. However, what became clear very quickly was that they were frustrated in many aspects of their life (reaching the point of depression). They dd not enjoy work and did not actually want the promotion. But it was "the devil they knew" and there were "no other options out there". They could only see the negative possibilities in uncertainty, not really believing that there could be positive possibilities in taking risk (ironically also the reason they were unlikely to get their promotion). So they sat waiting for the right opportunity to change their life to appear - and of course it never did appear, because they literally could not see it.

Then, after some fairly serious personal development (not with me - we agreed it wasn't right for our coaching contract) they made a move to another company. It wasn't the perfect job, and it wasn't that different a company. So, rationally, it wasn't opening up anything. Their old mindset would have dismissed it as pointless - in fact they had rejected this offer several times in previous years. But their new mindset was: "Who knows? At least I'm doing something positive and there's a chance something will come out of it". And then, the kicker. A few months into the new job, an opportunity did come their way through one of their new colleagues. This was a different type of job, in a different sector of the industry. They tell me it is perfect for them and it is going great. Yet when I first met them it would have been an option dismissed as an unrealistic dream, and they wouldn't have registered it even if they'd heard about it!

So that's how it works - attitudes and beliefs held deep in your limbic brain constrain your thinking and put filters on your perception which change and shape actual future possibilities. It's easy to accept as common sense that: "If you don't believe it can happen, it won't". What's harder to accept is that: "If you act on the belief that it can happen, it just might". But it is the same process.

Some things defy rational explanation

I'm not just talking about strange coincidences. I may write in the New Year about the coincidence that as you commit to opening yourself to new possibilities, so they suddenly appear. but to me this is a coincidence that is easily explained rationally. It's another case of perception creating reality (or the "what you see is what you get" effect I have written about before).

No, in this last post of 2010, I am thinking about how there are many things whose essence is not fully captured by rational explanations. Rational explanations by their nature are created in the Left Brain and so are all about using "either/or" logic to categorise, put into sequence, limit the set of possible outcomes etc. And while these are usually helpful, sometimes they just don't capture it all.

The specific event which triggered this reflection was trying to write a paragraph to describe my coaching approach. I realised that however I worded my rational explanation, my description diminished the work - not just because I lack the writing skills but because the left brain process of analysis inherently cannot capture some key elements. It is like describing a dance purely as a series of steps. It would be accurate, but it wouldn't capture everything. That's why the judges on a programme like "Strictly Come Dancng" comment on things like musicality, the mood of the dance and the connection between the couples, rather than just on the footwork and choreography.

So just as my coaching often uses right brain approaches such as images, metaphor and story within the work, I realise I need to be comfortable to describe my approach to coaching using these tools. Not just in order to explain what I do to clients, but to embrace better the non-rational aspects.

The metaphorical image I am playing with is of a labrador dog with glasses (and a PhD in psychology) - friendly, trustful and attentive, if a bit excitable, yet with real depth of emotional intelligence and insight. What do you think? Is it just too soft?!

It's magical... but it's not magic!

I seem to spend more and more of my time exploring the links between experiential / creative methods I increasingly use in my coaching and the neuroscience which explains why they work. Rather than conflicting, I find the science and the creativity make a perfect match.

My own experience has been that the science has helped me to accept and embrace these so-called "right brain" techniques, so that I use them more often and with greater confidence. My character style needs to have a rational basis for doing irrational work (!), whether that is physical mapping of systems, body work, using imagery and story, or even the dream analysis I was learning about last weekend.

Although the science can explain what's going on, it often doesn't help you change things... exactly what the experiential methods do help with. The outcomes from these methods can be truly "magical"... but it helps me that I don't have to believe they are actually "magic"!