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Or, for that matter, knowing which brain circuits are involve in ‘love’, will it make us better lovers?

I have made clear that I have a problem with the Neuro-explanations of everything.  What we are seeing are multi-colour correlations and descriptions of human activity, but we should not confuse them with ‘explanations’. The fact that some parts of the so called paleo-encephalic brain (the old, in evolutionary terms, part of the brain that deals with emotional reactions, defence, attack, aggression etc. – well known for a long, long time) fire and change colours on a fMRI when a leader is thinking of responding to a crisis, or mentally exposed to memories of frustration, maltreatment by his boss, an injustice, or, on a more personal level, the anger following the loss of a child, does not surprise me a bit. What would greatly surprise me is that this would not happen.

But these Neuro-explanations and general Neurobabble are taking over fast. It seems that explaining how the reward and recognition circuits in the brain work, will make leaders better at rewarding and recognising people. No, it won’t!  That showing how certain parts of the brain fire when people are collaborating (or recollecting memories of collaboration) in group situations, will makes us more collaborative people. No, it won’t! That showing the anxiety circuits change colours when watching videos of extreme poverty will make people jump and start doing charitable work. No, it won’t! That to ‘demonstrate’ the brain activity in a creative process will make us more creative. No, it won’t!

So, where do we go from here? What do we do with the Neuro-Offerings knocking at our doors? This is next, tomorrow, the final part.

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  1. Paul Brasington

    I’ve held back from commenting because I wanted to see where this was going but now I just want to say I’m glad you’re doing this. Metaphors are powerful things. It seems ironic that just as we’re finally taking on the idea that organisations are more organic than machine-like we should be turning ourselves into machines – the idea that the brain (let alone mind) is best understood as a kind of computer. Iain McGilchrist and Bryan Appleyard have both written powerfully about the consequences of this blinkered vision. McGilchrist I think would see it as characteristic of the left brain hemisphere – a rage to simplify and control, to get past the messy indeterminacy of human communication and offer a simpler model of cause and effect (rather like NLP, and no accident that the P should stand for “programming”). But if we neglect that indeterminacy or try to eliminate it we literally won’t understand what we’re looking at or dealing with… Sadly in my own field of corporate communication neuro-things are being leapt on as a kind of holy grail, an undreamed-of possibility of certainty. It’s an illusion rooted in conceptual and philosophical naivity, but sadly may prove a distraction for some time yet

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