War With My Mind

[Jackie Bullinger]

Shawnawas an editor at The Scientist from 2017 through 2022. She holds a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from Colorado College and a graduate certificate and science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

To see what accounts for this superior performance, the authors analyzed the neural patterns corresponding to letters and to the straight reaching movements used in the point-and-click BCI. They found that the patterns for the letters are more distinct from one another, making them easier for a neural network to decipher. They also devised their own 26-letter alphabet, replete with curvy lines, that their simulations indicate would enable an even more accurate BCI by eschewing letters that are written similarly to one another.

There are several improvements that would be needed to make the BCI ready for clinical use. Those include tweaks to the brain implant itself, such as making it smaller and capable of wireless signal transmission, says study coauthor Jaimie Henderson, a neurosurgeon in the NPTL who consults for the BCI company Neuralink and is on the medical advisory board for Enspire, a company exploring deep-brain stimulation for stroke recovery. In addition, in the study the researchers needed to regularly calibrate the BCI to account for minute shifts in the positions of the sensors that alter what neural activity they pick up; ideally, Henderson and Willett say, this process, as well as the initial training of the neural network, would be automated.

In 1955, on 225 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, the CIA was devoting substantial attention to decorating a bedroom. George White oversaw the interior renovations. Not much of a decorator, White had a storied career in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. When the CIA moved into drug experiments, bringing White on board became a top priority.

White hung up pictures of French can-can dancers and flowers. He draped lush red bedroom curtains over the windows. He framed a series of Toulouse-Lautrec posters with black silk mats. For a middle-aged drug bureaucrat, each item evoked sex and glamour.

As humans, we are constantly assessing how social encounters either enhance or diminish our status. Research published by Hidehiko Takahashi et al. in 2009 shows that when people realize that they might compare unfavorably to someone else, the threat response kicks in, releasing cortisol and other stress-related hormones. (Cortisol is an accurate biological marker of the threat response; within the brain, feelings of low status provoke the kind of cortisol elevation associated with sleep deprivation and chronic anxiety.)

Separately, researcher Michael Marmot, in his book The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity (Times Books, 2004), has shown that high status correlates with human longevity and health, even when factors like income and education are controlled for. In short, we are biologically programmed to care about status because it favors our survival.

As anyone who has lived in a modest house in a high-priced neighborhood knows, the feeling of status is always comparative. And an executive with a salary of US$500,000 may feel elevated...until he or she is assigned to work with an executive making $2.5 million. A study by Joan Chiao in 2003 found that the neural circuitry that assesses status is similar to that which processes numbers; the circuitry operates even when the stakes are meaningless, which is why winning a board game or being the first off the mark at a green light feels so satisfying. Competing against ourselves in games like solitaire triggers the same circuitry, which may help explain the phenomenal popularity of video games.

Uncertainty registers (in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex) as an error, gap, or tension: something that must be corrected before one can feel comfortable again. That is why people crave certainty. Not knowing what will happen next can be profoundly debilitating because it requires extra neural energy. This diminishes memory, undermines performance, and disengages people from the present.

Studies by Steven Maier at the University of Boulder show that the degree of control available to an animal confronted by stressful situations determines whether or not that stressor undermines the ability to function. Similarly, in an organization, as long as people feel they can execute their own decisions without much oversight, stress remains under control. Because human brains evolved in response to stressors over thousands of years, they are constantly attuned, usually at a subconscious level, to the ways in which social encounters threaten or support the capacity for choice.

Each time a person meets someone new, the brain automatically makes quick friend-or-foe distinctions and then experiences the friends and foes in ways that are colored by those distinctions. When the new person is perceived as different, the information travels along neural pathways that are associated with uncomfortable feelings (different from the neural pathways triggered by people who are perceived as similar to oneself).

Conversely, the human threat response is aroused when people feel cut off from social interaction. Loneliness and isolation are profoundly stressful. John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick showed in 2008 that loneliness is itself a threat response to lack of social contact, activating the same neurochemicals that flood the system when one is subjected to physical pain. Leaders who strive for inclusion and minimize situations in which people feel rejected create an environment that supports maximum performance. This of course raises a challenge for organizations: How can they foster relatedness among people who are competing with one another or who may be laid off?

The perception that an event has been unfair generates a strong response in the limbic system, stirring hostility and undermining trust. As with status, people perceive fairness in relative terms, feeling more satisfied with a fair exchange that offers a minimal reward than an unfair exchange in which the reward is substantial. Studies conducted by Matthew Lieberman and Golnaz Tabibnia found that people respond more positively to being given 50 cents from a dollar split between them and another person than to receiving $8 out of a total of $25. Another study found that the experience of fairness produces reward responses in the brain similar to those that occur from eating chocolate.

If you are a leader, every action you take and every decision you make either supports or undermines the perceived levels of status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness in your enterprise. In fact, this is why leading is so difficult. Your every word and glance is freighted with social meaning. Your sentences and gestures are noticed and interpreted, magnified and combed for meanings you may never have intended.

Top-down strategic planning is often inimical to SCARF-related reactions. Having a few key leaders come up with a plan and then expecting people to buy into it is a recipe for failure, because it does not take the threat response into account. People rarely support initiatives they had no part in designing; doing so would undermine both autonomy and status. Proactively addressing these concerns by adopting an inclusive planning process can prevent the kind of unconscious sabotage that results when people feel they have played no part in a change that affects them every day.

For years, economists have argued that people will change their behavior if they have sufficient incentives. But these economists have defined incentives almost exclusively in economic terms. We now have reason to believe that economic incentives are effective only when people perceive them as supporting their social needs. Status can also be enhanced by giving an employee greater scope to plan his or her schedule or the chance to develop meaningful relationships with those at different levels in the organization. The SCARF model thus provides leaders with more nuanced and cost-effective ways to expand the definition of reward. In doing so, SCARF principles also provide a more granular understanding of the state of engagement, in which employees give their best performance. Engagement can be induced when people working toward objectives feel rewarded by their efforts, with a manageable level of threat: in short, when the brain is generating rewards in several SCARF-related dimensions.

When a leader is self-aware, it gives others a feeling of safety even in uncertain environments. It makes it easier for employees to focus on their work, which leads to improved performance. The same principle is evident in other groups of mammals, where a skilled pack leader keeps members at peace so they can perform their functions. A self-aware leader modulates his or her behavior to alleviate organizational stress and creates an environment in which motivation and creativity flourish. One great advantage of neuroscience is that it provides hard data to vouch for the efficacy and value of so-called soft skills. It also shows the danger of being a hard-charging leader whose best efforts to move people along also set up a threat response that puts others on guard.

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing leaders of business or government is to create the kind of atmosphere that promotes status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. When historians look back, their judgment of this period in time may rise or fall on how organizations, and society as a whole, operated. Did they treat people fairly, draw people together to solve problems, promote entrepreneurship and autonomy, foster certainty wherever possible, and find ways to raise the perceived status of everyone? If so, the brains of the future will salute them.

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