The 4 Brain Superpowers You Need to Be a Successful Leader, According to Neuroscience 10-16

Leaders who understand how brains work can make themselves and their teams more nimble, innovative, and resilient.

Kevin Chin wants his executives to limber up their brains.

Chin's investment company, Arowana, based in Sydney, Australia, is expanding into London, Los Angeles, and Asia, and "it is imperative to have a senior leadership team that is mentally agile and resilient," says Chin. Last year, the entrepreneur began working with Tara Swart, a neuroscientist, executive coach, and lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Now, he is extending that coaching to his top decision-makers so they, too, can get in touch with their amygdala.

Interest in applying neuroscience to business has been mounting for decades. One reason, according to Swart, is that leaders prefer the idea of optimizing an organ--which is tangible--to the idea of optimizing behavior--which is not. "If I say, 'You need to be more emotionally intelligent,' I have had people respond, 'I don't understand what I'm supposed to do,'" she says. "If I tell them, 'You can build a pathway in your brain that will make it easier for you,' then many are more willing to embark on that process."

Optimized thinking requires a healthy brain, and so part of Swart's advice falls into the familiar sleep-eat-hydrate-and-exercise domain. Disturbed sleep is particularly damaging. Your IQ can take a hit of 5 percent or more after a bad night. (Swart began working with Chin to combat the debilitating effects of jet lag on his sleep and, consequently, his thinking.)

A well-fed, rested, and oxygenated brain is necessary for mental resilience and peak performance amid stress and uncertainty. "When all other things are equal, mental resilience is the factor that really distinguishes the CEO," says Swart. To improve resilience and performance, Swart recommends leaders work on the following:

1. Neuroplasticity

"Everything you have experienced in your life has molded and shaped your brain to favor certain behaviors and habits," says Swart. But those behaviors and habits may not be optimal. By focusing attention on and repeatedly practicing new, desirable behaviors, leaders can redirect their brains' chemical, hormonal, and physical resources to create new pathways. The old ones, meanwhile, wither from lack of use.

Learning--particularly attention-heavy subjects like a language or a musical instrument--is the best way to enhance plasticity. "The fact that you are forced to attend to things that your brain hasn't experienced before has its own benefit apart from what you learn," says Swart. "The brain becomes more flexible, which [supports] things like being able to regulate your emotions, solve complex problems, and think more creatively."

2. Brain agility

To be nimble, you must think nimbly. Brain agility is the ability to switch seamlessly among different ways of thinking: from the logical to the intuitive to the creative. Agility may be particularly important for entrepreneurs. "The fact that the brain is likely to think in diverse ways or absorb diverse ideas means that you are more likely to spot trends, pivot, be ahead of the curve," says Swart.
Multitaskers who try to use several modes of thinking at once generally do less well at all of them. Swart recommends working on problems consecutively and looking at them from different angles. Leaders can also leverage different thinking styles within their teams.

3. Mindset mastery

People with fixed mindsets believe traits like intelligence and talent are settled. People with growth mindsets see themselves as works in progress who develop their intelligence and talent through hard work. A fixed mindset leads to stagnation: a growth mindset to innovation and progress.
Leaders with fixed mindsets should use neuroplasticity to try to move themselves toward growth, according to Swart. For entrepreneurs, that may not be a stretch. "It is about your appetite for risk and attitude toward failure, so it makes sense that entrepreneurs are more comfortable with this," she says.

4. Simplicity

A hyperactive world places impossible demands on limited brains. Stress rises. Decision-making suffers. Swart advises that leaders practice mindfulness--focusing on their bodies, breathing, and thoughts in the moment--as a way to reduce stress hormones and multiply folds in the part of the brain associated with executive function. She is also an advocate of reducing noncritical decisions. "Figure out what you are going to wear the night before or wear the same thing every day," she says.
Leaders who know how to improve their own brain function can then apply those lessons to their companies. For example, by creating cross-functional work programs they help employees forge new neuro-pathways and develop brain flexibility as they master unfamiliar knowledge and skills.
Leaders can also use their understanding of the brain to drive fear and stress out of the workplace and to develop trust. Stress spikes cortisol in the brain, which negatively affects thinking and the ability to control emotions. At sustained levels, people go into survival mode.

By contrast, "if you are in a really exciting environment where you have got lots of the hormone oxytocin flowing around your organization, you are more likely to make decisions that are not based on scarcity and survival but on abundance," says Swart. Innovation and risk-taking flourish.

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Why a Grateful Brain Is a Giving One 12-31

The neural connection between gratitude and altruism is very deep, suggests new research.

When you think about gratitude and its place in our culture, you might not immediately think about morality—that is, matters of right and wrong.

Often, we make gratitude sound like it’s all about you. In the domain of self-help, we hear that gratitude is the single most important ingredient to living a successful and fulfilled life—or that when we are grateful, fear disappears and abundance appears.

In fact, research does support the idea that gratitude helps people who practice it. They report fewer physical symptoms of illness, more optimism, greater goal attainment, and decreased anxiety and depression, among other health benefits.

If you stop with feeling good, gratitude certainly seems more like a platitude than a moral emotion that motivates reciprocity and altruism. But here is where I think many of us get gratitude wrong.
There is a much older, pre-self-help conception of gratitude as an emotion with moral motivations.

To first-century philosopher Cicero, gratitude was a matter of religious obligation “to the immortal gods.” Modern psychologists such as Michael McCullough and colleagues have systemized it this way: Gratitude is a “moral barometer”—an acknowledgement “that one has been the beneficiary of another person’s moral actions.” They go on to argue that gratitude is also a moral reinforcer, meaning that you’ll see a “thanks” from others as a reward that will lead you to give more in the future.

My own work has tried to map the relationship between gratitude and altruism in the brain. I am discovering that the neural connection between the two is very deep, and that cultivating gratitude may encourage us to feel more generous. We don’t say “thanks” for selfish reasons. Far from it: Gratitude, like giving, might be its own reward.

Neural rewards for giving

When we think about research on the relationship between gratitude and altruism, there are generally two main approaches.

First, we can ask whether people who seem to be more grateful are also more altruistic. Researchers use questionnaires to determine the degree to which someone is characteristically grateful. They ask other questions to determine the degree to which someone is generally giving. Finally, they use statistics to determine the extent to which someone’s altruism could be predicted from their gratitude.

Such studies are helpful for understanding the way gratitude could relate to altruism—in fact, the two do appear to go hand in hand—but of course, they depend on a person’s ability to judge their own gratitude and altruism. We can imagine someone touting himself as tremendously grateful, or the most generous person since Mother Theresa, but this could certainly be untrue. That’s why studies using these methods cannot explain why grateful people might behave prosocially. Perhaps they just feel guilty. Or perhaps altruistic people feel good when other people do well. How can we know?

At this point, we need to take an experimental approach. In one recent study, some colleagues of mine tried to understand the relationship between general prosocial tendencies and the way the brain responds to charitable donations. To start, the researchers assessed the prosocial tendencies of the participants using questionnaires. Then, they supplied participants with real money and put them in an MRI scanner that measures blood-oxygen levels in the brain.

In the scanner, the money could go to either the participants themselves or to a charity, such as a local food bank. Sometimes, these gifts were voluntary; sometimes not, so that it was more like a tax than a donation. This distinction was important, because in the tax-like condition, the participant doesn’t get to feel good about a charitable choice—only about the charity getting money. As the money transferred, my colleagues focused on reward centers of the brain—the regions that give us a dose of feel-good neurotransmitters—in order to compare the brain’s response to these various conditions.

The result? My colleagues found that the more prosocial participants felt far more inner reward when the money went to charity than to themselves. They found something else interesting: The older the participant, the larger this benevolent disposition—suggesting that, with age, your brain may reward you more when you see good in the world, rather than when you yourself get some benefit.

Stepping back from results like these, we are left to wonder about what makes someone grateful or altruistic in the first place. Is it a matter of the right dose of prosocial genes? Or is it a lifetime of experiences or family socialization that encourage both gratitude and giving?

My colleagues’ study answered some big questions, but also left some unanswered. One of these big questions involved the link between gratitude and altruism. Do they go hand in hand? Does gratitude actually encourage altruism?

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Classical and Jazz musicians show different brain responses to unexpected events, study finds 10-31

Scientists at Wesleyan University have used electroencephalography to uncover differences in how the brains of Classical and Jazz musicians react to an unexpected chord progression.

Their new study, published in the journal Brain and Cognition, sheds new light on the nature of the creative process.

“I have been a classical musician for many years, and have always been inspired by the great jazz masters who can improvise beautiful performances on the spot,” explained study author Psyche Loui. “Whenever I tried to improvise I always felt inhibited and self-conscious, and this spurred my questions about jazz improvisation as a model for creativity more generally: What makes people creative improvisers, and what can this tell us about how we can all learn to be more creative?”

The researchers used EEG to compare the electrical brain activity of 12 Jazz musicians (with improvisation training), 12 Classical musicians (without improvisation training), and 12 non-musicians while they listened to a series of chord progressions. Some of the chords followed a progression that was typical of Western music, while others had an unexpected progression.

Louie and her colleagues found that Jazz musicians had a significantly different electrophysiological response to the unexpected progression, which indicated they had an increased perceptual sensitivity to unexpected stimuli along with an increased engagement with unexpected events.

“Creativity is about how our brains treat the unexpected,” Loui told PsyPost. “Everyone (regardless of how creative) knows when they encounter something unexpected. But people who are more creative are more perceptually sensitive and more cognitively engaged with unexpectedness. They also more readily accept this unexpectedness as being part of the vocabulary.

“This three-stage process: sensitivity, engagement, and acceptance, occurs very rapidly, within a second of our brains encountering the unexpected event. With our design we can resolve these differences and relate them to creative behavior, and I think that’s very cool.”

Previous research has found that Jazz improvisers and other creative individuals show higher levels of openness to experience and divergent thinking — meaning the ability to “think outside the box.”

But without additional research it is unclear if the new findings apply to other creative individuals who are not musicians.

“We looked at three groups of subjects: jazz musicians, classical musicians, and people with no musical training other than normal schooling, so the results are most closely tied to musical training. It remains to be seen whether other types of creative groups, e.g. slam poets, cartoonists, interpretive dancers, etc. might show the same results,” Loui explained.

“It would also be important to find out whether these differences emerge as a result of training, or whether they reflect pre-existing differences between people who choose to pursue training in different styles. We are currently conducting a longitudinal study to get at that question.”

“This is the first paper of a string of research coming from our lab that use different methodologies to understand jazz improvisation,” Loui added. “We are also doing structural and functional MRI, as well as more behavioral testing, including psychophysical listening tests and also production tests, where we have people play music in our lab.”

The study, “Jazz musicians reveal role of expectancy in human creativity“, was also co-authored by Emily Przysinda, Tima Zeng, Kellyn Maves, and Cameron Arkin. 


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How Apps, Wearables, And NanoTechnology Are Revolutionizing Healthcare 04-03

How Apps, Wearables, And NanoTechnology Are Revolutionizing Healthcare

Today, massive technological shifts – driven by Big Data, mobility, security and cloud computing – are rapidly transforming business and society. Entire industries are being completely transformed, and healthcare is one of them. These trends are unlocking new possibilities for hospitals, researchers, doctors and patients. Perhaps easily predicted, because innovations in healthcare are critical, technology advancements are setting exciting new benchmarks for further innovation, but also these innovations are saving countless lives all over the world. While massive amounts of data (Big Data) are enabling better diagnosis and predictions, applications, wearables, and nanotech are revolutionizing healthcare by empowering the consumer to take care of themselves and to perform better in their personal and professional lives. After all, if we don’t have our health, what are we left with? With so many advancements already achieved and the growing desire to take our own health by the horns, healthcare IT is fast turning into the favorite child of tech innovation.

Applications are changing the patient/doctor relationship

In today’s health-conscious world, tools like Fitbit and other personal monitoring tools are becoming ubiquitous, allowing us to track our fitness activities, sleep patterns, blood pressure and caloric intake. The trend to track these lifestyle variables has changed the dynamics of the traditional patient-doctor relationship, and has opened the doors to more advanced forms of treatment and care through remote monitoring, telemedicine, etc. In-clinic diagnostic treatment is giving way to virtual consultation, and homecare might replace hospital care very soon as we move to turn patient/doctor relationships into virtual ones.

2014 witnessed widespread adoption of telemedicine across healthcare facilities in the U.S, while the field has become even more accessible with healthcare retail giants like Walmart, Walgreens, and CVS stepping into the telemedicine game. New telemedicine kiosks have made their way into retail spaces and mobile apps have been developed with the aim of putting healthcare into the hands of the patients. Not just for diagnosing common illnesses, apps are also being developed to manage critical diseases. For instance, a new Ebola Care App is helping caregivers and Ebola workers handle key areas of disease management such as data collection, analysis, and response.

Wearables and nanotech: The future of healthcare is here

While applications and tools are enabling self-monitoring of health, more sophisticated devices and technologies are also capable of delivering the data generated to healthcare professionals, who can process it to predict and prevent bigger health concerns in the future. Wearable devices are playing a major role in transferring actionable data from patients to doctors and caregivers, even employers. As a recent example, Google X Lab has partnered with Novartis to design contact lenses that track glucose levels in the wearer’s tears and transfers that information to a mobile device that the doctor uses for monitoring.

Another Google X project is the use of nanotechnology for detecting cancer. This project aimed at developing the nanoparticles Pill, which when ingested will run through the bloodstream, detects any abnormalities that suggest the presence of cancer. The data generated will be transmitted to doctors through a wearable device. It may be a revolutionary innovation for detecting and eradicating life-threatening diseases in their early stages.

The way disruptive technologies are creating seismic shifts in the healthcare landscape, it’s not hard to predict that we are in the midst of a healthcare revolution that empowers us more than ever to manage our lives to perform better on the field, at work, or in our home. Our ability to track our diet, exercise, daily activity, and sleep are giving us the opportunity to better understand how we can be at our best. As we gain insight, we’ll be provided with data (Big Data) that will not only allow us to make better decisions about how we live, but will give our doctor’s insight on how to save lives, and will even allow companies to better plan technology and healthcare for their employees and determine the best ways to provide Life-Work balance that brings out the very best in us.

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