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the Potential and Limitations of the Executive Brain

      If you hold a position of power and authority within your organisation, you have responsibility for making key decisions upon which the future success of your organisation depends. With this comes responsibility for your employee’s prosperity, not to mention your supplier’s prosperity and the people who supply goods and services to your suppliers.

      Recent neuroscience research is shining a spotlight on how the brains of the most effective leaders differ from the norm. It’s still early days for this research, but studies indicate that many of the things you may think enhance performance are probably the opposite. We talk more about this in the final section of this chapter.

      Setting aside these neurological differences, in the main, the executive brain is very much the same as anyone else’s brain. This means that as a leader, you’re blessed with the same incredibly powerful brain as the rest of your workforce – a brain more powerful than the most powerful super computer ever built, that’s ever changing and evolving from the day you’re born until the day you die, that’s capable of re-authoring its own internal operating system and figuring out how to put man on the moon and how to split the atom.

      Despite the unlimited potential of your brain, it does have a number of limitations. First, it doesn’t come with an instruction manual. And unless your leadership education was very recent or you have a particular interest in neuroscience, you may have very little knowledge of what your brain is doing or why. So here’s a little introduction to the human brain, its complexities, adaptability, and limitations.

The human brain 101

      Humans have big brains. In the last 7 million years, the human brain has tripled in size. The fossil skulls of ancestors around 1.9 million years ago had an average brain size of 600 millilitres. More recent 500,000-year-old fossil skulls show a huge increase to around 1,000 millilitres. Modern brain size is around 1,200 millilitres, weighing around 1,300 grams or more. In comparison, a gorilla’s brain is around 500 grams, and a chimp’s brain, around 420 grams. The modern human brain evolved to have much larger regions devoted to planning, communication, problem solving and other more advanced cognitive functions.

To manage your mind better and understand its hidden rules, it’s important to gain a basic understanding of how the brain is structured. See Figure 3-1.

      © John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

       FIGURE 3-1: The human brain.

      At the base of the brain is a cluster of structures referred to as the reptilian brain. This part of the brain controls your most vital functions, such as sleep, heart rate, breathing and the like. Its innate and reflex control programs help you to survive.

      Above this is a cluster of structures referred to as the limbic system, which are associated with social and nurturing behaviours. While reptilian brain structures rely heavily on instinctive behaviours, the limbic system adds an emotional dimension. Emotions are the brain’s way of remembering how different situations affect you.

      The limbic system and reptilian brain combined are often described as the primitive brain.

      At the top of the brain, the neocortex (the wrinkly bit you see in pictures) is a cluster of brain structures involved in advanced cognition – the mental process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience and the senses. These structures are responsible for special human traits, such as planning, decision-making, reasoning language, thought and impulse control. They enable you to move from reaction to reaction so you not only respond to external stimuli but also are able to take action to get something to happen.

      The neocortex gives you the ability not to take action in specific situations and equips you with the opportunity to reflect on your feelings and thus suppress or inhibit more impulsive reactions that are activated lower down in the brain. The neocortex brain structures give you awareness of yourself.

Boosting your neuroplasticity

      The term neuroplasticity is derived from the root words neuron and plastic. It’s a term that refers to the brain’s ability to change and adapt as a result of experience. Up until the 1960s, researchers believed that changes in the brain could only take place during infancy and childhood. It was thought that by early adulthood, the brain’s physical structure was permanent. Modern research has proven that the brain continues to create new neural pathways and alter existing ones to adapt to new experiences and learn new information until the day you die.

      Neuroplasticity has two forms:

      ❯❯ Your brain’s ability to move functions from a damaged area of the brain to other undamaged areas is referred to as functional plasticity. After a stroke, for instance, your brain can reorganise itself to move functions to undamaged areas.

      ❯❯ Your brain’s ability to actually change its physical structure as a result of learning is called structural plasticity. An example of this might be an increase or decrease in grey matter in specific brain areas as a consequence of experience and learning

      The human brain is composed of approximately 100 billion nerve cells called neurons. Neural pathways transmit data from one neuron to another quickly by passing an electrical or chemical signal from one neuron to another neuron via the synapse (see Figure 3-2). Neurons that fire together wire together, forming strong connections over time. Each time you repeat a particular thought or action, you strengthen this connection, making it easier to repeat in the future.

      A good example of neuroplasticity has been found in London taxi drivers. A cab driver’s hippocampus (part of the limbic system that holds spatial representation capacity) is measurably larger than that of a bus driver. By driving the same route every day, the bus drivers don’t need to exercise this part of the brain as much. The cabbies, on the other hand, rely on it constantly for navigation.