Brains are applesauce

The Science of Thinking Smarter
an interview with John J. Medina
Harvard Business Review 2008

This mercifully short interview in HBR reinforced a few neural pathways in my noggin.

Bona fide recorded memory is a very rare thing on this planet. The reason is that the brain isn’t interested in reality; it’s interested in survival. So it will change the perception of reality to stay in the survival mode. Unfortunately, many people still believe that the brain is a lot like a recording device—that learning something is like pushing the “record” button and remembering is simply pushing “playback.” In the real world of the brain, however, that metaphor is an anachronism. The fact is that the actual moment of learning—the moment of fixing a memory—is so complex that we have little understanding of what happens in our brains in those first fleeting seconds. Long-term memory is even worse. That’s because, much like cement, memory takes a long time to settle into its permanent form. While it’s busy hardening, human memory can very easily be modified, as traces of earlier memories leave their imprint upon it. All of which is to say that our understanding of reality is approximate at best.

Witch doctors who claim to understand the brain and prove it with parlor tricks need to read this article.

Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize for showing that when people learn something it’s because the wiring of their brains changes. You can test sea slugs or human beings, and you will come up with the same results—any creature that ends up learning something does so because of physical changes in its neural architecture. This is astonishing. We used to think that we were born with all the neurons we were ever going to get and that it would be hard, if not impossible, to change them beyond a certain age. But it’s been quite clear for a while now that the physical changes neurons undergo when learning something happen to anybody’s brain at any age. The brain remains quite plastic until we die. We are lifelong learners. That’s excellent news indeed.

Illustration from: http://www.medical-illustrations.ca

In short, neurons that fire together, wire together.

I wish the laymen who talk about the amygdala, the corpus collosum, or the frontal lobes would just stop. As if they think labeling a dozen pieces of the most complex organ is the universe is meaningful. Science is still in the dark about brain basics.

I’ve heard people claim that tests such as Myers-Briggs are based on “sound neurological principles”—that brain science proves their validity, or even that these tests were designed with brain science in mind. The fact is that most of these tests—including IQ tests—were developed long before we knew very much about how the brain processes anything.

My fellow facilitator put me on the spot in yesterday’s session. Didn’t I find the Myers-Briggs instrument useful? Hmmm… Anything that gets you reflect on the nature of others is probably useful. But saying you can never change your type is wrong-headed. The the terminology is a direct takeaway from Jung. And how about learning styles, certainly they can help us improve learning? Well, no again. This brain stuff is tricky.

Saul Wurman recounts the story that “I used to think my brain was the most important organ in the body. Then I paused to ask ‘Wait a minute. Who’s telling me that?’”