Updated May 11, 2008: Archana Raghuram joined the conversation with a nice book review of Phantoms in the Brain.

Prolog:

Last week we covered what the ultimate belief system would look like using Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit. Thank you all for the stimulating discussion. As i said in my previous post, i want to keep God and belief in a religion outside the scope of this discussion. Ganesh’s comment captures the essential difference between Faith and Belief extremely well. We all liked the quote from Buddha that Arun gave us. NK Sreedhar captures the approach of a sceptic (i am one as well) beautifully in his comment. Scpeticism is a great quality to cultivate for a better belief system. I will talk about another idea in that regard that may be helpful to all. The main purpose of this post is to look at the neuroscientific view to understand what challenges our brain poses.

Left Brain Vs. Right Brain

Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, one of the world’s foremost neuroscience experts discovers, through a series of experiments on patients suffering from a brain disorder called Anosognosia , that the left brain essentially forces us into keeping our current beliefs intact, whereas the right brain plays the role of the devil’s advocate. If you are passionate about Neuroscience, and want to understand how he reached the conclusions that he reached, you may want to read Chapter 7 in Dr. Ramachandran’s brilliant book – Phantoms in the Brain.

To illustrate this, Dr. Ramachandran gives a beautiful example:

Imagine, for example, a military general about to wage war on the enemy. It is late at night and he is in the war room planning strategies for the next day. Scouts keep coming into the room to give him information about the lay of the land, terrain, light level and so forth. They also tell him that the enemy has five hundred tanks and that he has six hundred tanks, a fact that prompts the general to decide to wage war. He positions all his troops in strategic locations and decides to launch battle exactly at sunrise at 600AM.

Imagine further at 5.55AM, one little scout comes running into the war room and says, “General, I have bad news.” With minutes to go until battle, the general asks, “What is that?” and the scout replies, “I just looked through binoculars and saw that the enemy has seven hundred tanks, not five hundred”.

At this point a typical General would like to ignore/rationalize/deny this new bit of information and proceed with his battle plans. Dr. Ramachandran says this is typically what the left brain does – protects us from lots of divergent information creating chaos in our mind by allowing us to delude ourselves. Now, Dr. Ramachandran, asks – what if a scout comes in and says that the enemy has nuclear weapons. That would call for a complete reevaluation of the battle plan obviously. At this point the right brain kicks in and calls for a paradigm shift to handle this new information. Dr. Ramachandran says (it is only a hypothesis now but it makes a lot of sense), the right brain keeps looking at anomalies that come our way and when a threshold level is breached, it kicks in to call for a complete revision of the belief.

Taking time for forming beliefs

Let us say, we formed a belief in our mind, without first considering many points of view (the first step in Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit), we risk forming an incorrect belief. But then even more troublingly for us, the left brain will keep making us believe in the incorrect belief by ignoring/denying counter examples. This is called Confirmation Bias - we only look at data that confirms our beliefs because of the left brain’s need to preserve our beliefs.

For example, instead of trying to find data with a starting position – All XYZ = ABC, you should collect all points of view about XYZ and then form a belief. Even after you do that, when you come across completely contradictory information, you need to revisit the belief again to reevaluate. This is a better strategy and one that sceptics practice. The reason your starting point is important because, given the amount of information we have on the Internet, it will be fairly easy to find supporting data for any belief you may have. Therefore it is important to start with collecting data and then form the belief instead of the other way around.

Strong Opinions Weakly Held

Having strong opinions is a leadership trait and is essential to make decisions about moving foreward. But these strong opinions should be weakly held – that is whenever contradictory information is presented, we order a revamp. I came across this from Bob Sutton’s blog – I am a big fan of his writings. This powerful idea of strong opinions weakly held and a strategy to avoid confirmation bias are 2 big cornerstones of a sound belief system. As we have seen, thanks to the brain, this type of belief system is hard to practice.

Epilog:

It must be pretty clear from the above, that our brain forces us to have confirmation bias, what do you all do to avoid it?

I just covered how words have power over our behavior. Came across a f***ing brilliant article on why we swear [Caution: article Not Safe for Work - NSFW], written recently by Steven Pinker, the man who has made a name for himself by writing insightful tomes about the power of language.

It is a long article that explores the usage of swear words and the hows and whys of it. Per Pinker, the crux of why swear words seem to have such emotional power seems to boil down to how speech cognition occurs in the brain. He says that swear words have both denotations and connotations and these are interpreted by different parts of the brain:

The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but it seems likely that words’ denotations are concentrated in the neocortex, especially in the left hemisphere, whereas their connotations are spread across connections between the neocortex and the limbic system, especially in the right hemisphere.

A likely suspect within the limbic system is the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ buried at the front of the temporal lobe of the brain (one on each side) that helps invest memories with emotion. A monkey whose amygdalas have been removed can learn to recognize a new shape, like a striped triangle, but has trouble learning that the shape foreshadows an unpleasant event like an electric shock. In humans, the amygdala “lights up”–it shows greater metabolic activity in brain scans–when the person sees an angry face or an unpleasant word, especially a taboo word.

The response is not only emotional but involuntary. It’s not just that we don’t have earlids to shut out unwanted sounds. Once a word is seen or heard, we are incapable of treating it as a squiggle or noise; we reflexively look it up in memory and respond to its meaning, including its connotation.

There in lies the power of the swear word, its ability to provoke an limbic reaction. I was discussing this article with my wife Priya Raju and she made a brilliant point -

She said, it appears that swear words – f***, c**t, s**t etc seems to sound very animal like. Swear words never sound sweet but instead sound very harsh. She pointed to Vilayanur Ramachandran’s Buba/Kiki effect that he describes in his brilliant book – The Emerging Mind.

I was doing some more research on Priya’s point and I landed on this Wired magazine article about Steven Pinker’s latest book – The Stuff of Thought and the article says things confirming Priya’s point:

The experimental psychologist also takes a fresh look at the “poo-poo theory,” which proposes that swearing was actually the first form of language. He points to the fact that brain-damaged patients who lose the power of articulate speech often retain the ability to curse like a sailor. “Since swearing involves clearly more ancient parts of the brain,” Pinker says, “it could be a missing link between animal vocalization and human language.”

Isn’t it amazing how deep a significance some routine thing like swearing has?

Going back to my article, it must be pretty clear, that the term “Contractor”, due to the elaborate rituals surrounding the term, had a lot of negative connotations, there by producing a limbic reaction with a deleterious effect on performance. On the contrary, the term “Partner” had a lot of positive connotations producing a positive limbic reaction with the attendant benefits.

References:

1. Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran’s The Emerging Mind available as a series of lectures both transcript and audio form available at the BBC Site. He uses the Buba/Kike example in this lecture to postulate how language might have originated in contrast to Steven Pinker’s theories.

2. I have added Pinker’s latest book The Stuff of Thought to my to-do list. If any of you have read it, would appreciate a comment.

3. Stroop Effect – a popular psychology phenomenon that demonstrates how color impedes reading cognition.

Some unsavory developments have happened at the client site where I took up Account Management for the first time in my career in 1996. I have kept in touch with my clients all these years and I got to hear about these developments directly from my clients. I am totally saddened by what happened. Unfortunately due to confidentiality issues, I can’t write more on this.

These conversations put me in nostalgia mode and brought back one of the key learnings that I had from one of my favorite clients – she calls her style “Subtle Leadership”. This post is a tribute to her.

The time I started at this client site, we were all called “contractors”. Now, this isn’t an unusual practice by itself. Even today external consultants are called contractors or vendors or something like that. The practice had evolved to such an extent that the identity cards were color coded and heck even the email address was tagged with a “c” to denote contractor. All contractors were excluded from team outings, many important meetings etc. Contractors were not given name plates to hang outside the cubicle. It wouldn’t be surprising if as a contractor you felt like an outcast.

It is in this milieu, that my favorite client practiced an entirely different approach. She invited all the contractors to all meetings, team meetings, addressed us as partners and treated us almost like any other employee. Guess what, our employees in this group worked harder, were more productive, came up with more creative ideas, jelled with each other as a team better. She invited our suggestions, implemented many of them.

In short, she got the best work out of us “contractors”. She did all this quietly without tooting her own horn – the hallmark of “subtle leadership”. Creating this sense of belonging, camaraderie and using that to drive better performance is one of the biggest lessons I have learnt in my life and I owe this to my client.

Now to the original subject of this post. Think about how one word Contractor vs. Partner makes such a big difference in performance. It is funny why more companies and leaders don’t understand this simple thing. As it is my fancy these days, I looked at the neuroscience of this. In my research I came across the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which postulated that there is a strong connection between language and your ability to think complex thoughts.

It remained a hypothesis and a hotly debated subject amongst scientists untill the discovery of a tribe in South America that speaks the Piraha Language. It turns out that this tribe has no words in their language for numbers greater than two – they simply use one, two and many. When they were adminstered quantitative ability tests as a part of the research they couldn’t handle numbers greater than two effectively.

It has also been shown now that people who can’t speak and hear are able to do better thinking if they have learnt the sign language. Such is the power of a single word – use them wisely. Have you all had any such experiences that demonstrate the power of langauge?

References:
1. Wikpedia entry for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis:

2. Wikipedia entry for the Piraha Language