NeuroGovernment

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on neuroscience.  Turns out understanding sarcasm requires both sides of your brain:

“Reality, in other words, is so richly complex that the brain has to process it in two different ways at the same time. We need to see the trees, but we also have to remember the forest. . . Sarcasm, of course, is a perfect example of speech that requires a contextual understanding. The only way to know if someone is being sarcastic is to look around. The incongruity isn’t in the words – it’s in the world.”

Great article explaining why our risk perceptions sometimes follows game theory and why it differs from rational calculations.  By studying sports like tennis, baseball, and football, the research found that players are likely to switch strategies after the previous strategy failed.  For example, according to statistical analysis football coaches should call more passing plays than they actually do.  An explanation for this is that there is more perceived uncertainty with a ball “in the air” even though the evidence demonstrates that rushing is actually more risky.

How this relates to government is that many policies that attempt to handle risk events are highly influenced by the perceived emotional reactions of the public and the employees who have to implement the policies.  Think about how emotions have greatly affected the health care debate with the angry town hall meetings and the specter of “death panels.”

A month ago I posted a link to the essay on how unstructured movements quickly become more tyrannical than the organizations they are protesting.  This might be well worth remembering as one reads this rather interesting essay that proclaims the Tea Party Movement the first open-source political movement.  I dispute the foundational belief that the Tea Party is leaderless as it has been well-documented that a large part of the movement is bankrolled by conservative advocacy groups.

Let’s go with the premise that this is an open source movement.  Open source may work well for software projects where there is a clear goal and the benefits are fully realized.  That doesn’t translate into politics as it may take time and compromise to realize some benefits.  Anger may be good for short bursts of activity but what is the focus of the Tea Party movement?  What will sustain the movement after the anger fades?

If we continue the open source analogy, the ultimate fate of the Tea Party movement could be that it will be abandoned in favor of the newer open source political movement.  Or the Tea Party movement could have some success that will attract political professionals who will come in with their high-paid advice to make the movement even more successful by offering a premium version of the movement (while keeping a free but functionally-limited version).

Casting this in neuroscientific terms:  movements based on the amygdala may start faster and build faster but they don’t have the staying power of a movement built on the prefrontal cortex.

Hello everyone and I hope you had a good time during the holidays.  I certainly had and that’s why it has been a while between postings.

The latest issue of the Harvard Business Review and before I talk about an interesting article, I want to express how much I like the redesign.  The look needed to be updated and I found the magazine more readable.  Great job!

One of the new features is the “Idea Watch” which is a great roundup of interesting roundup of new ideas for management.  One section, “Neuroscience,” reported on how success causes the brain to change in response to successful stimuli.  What was surprising is that failure has no effect on the brain.  This makes sense in one way because you want the brain to change to repeat successful actions.  But, this also prevents learning from failure.  And in many cases, that can be more beneficial.

For example, when I build a program, I will spend some time debugging the program.  I may try several different approaches before I find the right coding to fix the issue.  I will remember the successful fix but I will quickly forget my unsuccessful attempts.  These attempts may be useful in other instances or may help me in generalizing the problem so that I can create an ever better fix.  There are numerous examples of failures that  turn out to be successes in other ways (think about Post-It Notes).

Thus, you should be just as attentive to your failures as your successes.  Keep a failure log and go through it on a periodic basis.  Instead of beating yourself up over past failures try to find ways to turn them into successes in a different way.  After all, failure or success is in the mind of the beholder.