July has been a refreshing DProf month for researching and reading. I have now completed two sets of pilot interviews. The first set were people known to my supervisor. They weren’t totally in my area but they were really valuable for learning about the interview process. Apart from valuable research information, they also gave feedback on the process and logistical aspects. The second set of pilots were with two neuroscience Professors who responded to my invitation email – 2 from 35 invitations isn’t bad.

My learning so far: The embedded link to Skype-for-Business isn’t as user friendly as I thought but I need to use it as the recording facility is reliable. With 3 out of 4 interviewees struggling with it initially I’ll need to put in some simple guidelines on connecting to it. Actually, I could do a side piece of research on the profile of who can and can’t easily use the link in the invitation! I reckon you can all guess which stereotype finds it easiest as it’s the one I think we’d all guess it to be when it comes to being tech-savvy.

I also refined opening the interview by reiterating the invitation email and situating my research in the coaching of change-hesitant coachees. The latter helped me focus the conversation much better so I am glad I was forced to get my head around it. In fact, both the Professors referred to it which helped to guide and anchor the discussion.

Everyone was very generous with their time. Having asked for just 20 minutes, all gave around 40-45. I was very grateful for that as 20 minutes on this topic only just gets people warmed up. I am going to regret it when I type up the transcripts though. I have found that initially the conversation is quite conceptual and I have had to push it down in to ‘So how does that actually happen in the brain?’. I then noticed a little pause – almost of surprise – and then they give me what I am really looking for and talk about a variety of mechanisms and caveats. I am really pleased that I read that Neuroscience textbook last year as it made the conversations much easier.

There are two things I have really loved about having these conversations so far: Firstly, it is just a conversation where ideas are given, explored and questions are proffered and answered. As someone commented, it must be nice not to have to talk in words of just one syllable – so right (lol). Secondly, they are very down to earth people and are clear about the constraints of their research and how animal research is difficult to use for hypothesizing about human aspects. A refreshing change from all the neuro-hype.

On the down-to-earth and refreshing reading side, my supervisor recommended ‘Neuro’ by Rose and Abi-Rached. A very different book as it is about the history of neuroscience blended with a critical review of some of its emerging themes, directions and assertions. It picks up on some of my favourite themes – medical hypes that have little foundation, neuroscience as court evidence, lab settings affecting experiments that deal with the brain and the blurring of the use of the words ‘the self’. Although I need to be careful here otherwise I might undermine the very research that I am conducting but it does bring home that neuroscience is a very interpretivistic science at the moment. (A useful reference for my Chapter 3 claims on epistemology and methodology.) One of the sadder facts is where it says that most research aimed at helping with mental illness has in fact not generated many new medical practices. Thus we are still using drugs from many years ago as they are the best we have.

Another book, which will provoke outcries, is called ‘How emotions are made’ (Lisa Feldman-Barrett) although I enjoyed it. Basically, she is differentiating between us labelling something as ‘fear’ verses it being a collection of responses due to a stimulus. It is the same as LeDoux where he splits apart the feeling of fear from the threat response. Part of their thinking is that a mouse, for example, has a threat response but we don’t know if it feels fear as we can’t ask it. We tend to ascribe fear to the mouse through our interpretation of what we see it doing but that is us ‘humanising’ things. What was fascinating is that she talks about more recent research verses older research on archetypal emotional faces. Effectively it appears that the older research which concluded that there were universal emotional faces which everyone recognised isn’t entirely true, well not true at all if you concur with Lisa. Here it links back to the ‘Neuro’ book and Lisa talks about how the research wasn’t actually as ‘clean’ as it espoused.

She believes that we learn during childhood that a certain collection of responses are labelled as ‘fear’ or ‘joy’ or ‘sadness’ and that the actual reactions for a feeling are quite diverse: Think of different joy responses such as a big smile or wide-eyed and open-mouthed. She feels that the standard faces are unusable just as the average family having 2.4 children is fairly meaningless. She also covers how feelings affect the decisions we make (don’t get a court appearance just before lunch/ make sure the interviewer holds a warm drink) and our behaviours which is worth a read. She also discusses how much the brain uses concepts to group things together such as colours in a rainbow. Most of us see it as 6 distinct bands when really it is a gradient. Russians view it as 7 distinct bands as culturally they view light blue as a different colour to dark blue, as green and blue are viewed differently. This she suggests makes colour a cultural thing not a reality.

This links nicely to an article discussing how children beat computers on some tasks and how far computers have yet to go.

I’m beginning to see a change in non-academic neuroscience-based books - thankfully. When I first became interested in neuroscience the non-academic books seemed to be peppered with ones jumping on the band-wagon rather than for true practical use: The hyped ‘applicable’ ones often fell short of their promises and erred towards what felt like NLP (just my personal opinion). Most neuroscientists hate the hyped out-of-context claims that we routinely see in the press, as they understand all too well how young, fragmented and rapidly-evolving their field is. I have managed to find some very readable books by neuroscientists which are more scientifically based. These helped to explain the brain’s workings and magic but are less practical.

However, in the last year there seems to be a new breed of book appearing and partly this is because those previous books have brought brain terminology into everyday life. This new breed doesn’t have chapters explaining brain areas, etc, they just use the terms and expect you to know or Google them. They are also starting to credibly attempt and, in many ways, succeed in making neuroscience-based aspects more useful for applying to ourselves.

If you want to get beyond the hype and understand how awesome and yet fallible the brain is, read four books: The tell-tale brain (Ramachandran); How the mind works (Pinker); The myth of mirror neurons (Hickok) and the Future of the brain (Marcus and Freeman).  If you’re interested in the next level down which starts to give you a real insight into the workings of the brain and how that affects behaviour in specific aspects, then LaDoux’s ‘Synaptic self’ and ‘Anxious’ are good as is Deheane’s ‘Consciousness’. If you are very serious about understanding this topic then I would definitely recommend reading a neuroscience textbook such as the ’Principles of neurobiology’ (Lou) as you get a real insight into the busy world inside a seemingly static white-grey mass. And YouTube has a lot of good videos as well such as this ‘home-made’ one on a day in the life of a neurotransmitter.

The new breed of books are, for me, ‘Why we sleep’ (Walker); Cozolino’s ‘The neuroscience of psychotherapy’ and ‘The Business brain’ by Prof Shane O’Mara – which looks good although I’ve only just started it. The authors treat their audience as having a general knowledge about the brain as we do with other systems in the body. I think this change is coupled to the significant improvement in what neuroscience has been able to do in the last 5 years due to its new-found popularity and advances in technology. I think this change in style will go a long way to taking neuroscience literature out of hype and into application. Maybe that’s a bit of food for thought on change programmes in organisations – stop ‘selling it’ and start ‘using it’ as your daily work-life.

I was also sent this link to an article about the (still) common myths of the brain which I wish I could have shown at a meeting I went to last week. A number of these myths were espoused and nodded to wisely by others. Although to be fair to the sports coaches in the article, I think a number of these were pretty firmly held neuroscience concepts 20 years ago. Like Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’, when new evidence puts doubt into a well held concept then it can be hard to change public opinion, especially when it appears rationally true – even if the scientific evidence undermines that.

Conversely, I also liked this article written by Dr Mark Stokes, putting the case against the ‘attention-grabbing headlines slating neuroscience and throwing proverbial babies out with the bathwater’: Good on him.  Many neuroscientists must wish that the neuroscience-fad band wagon would move on to something else. When I went to a neuroscience and ethics seminar last year, they focussed on how lawyers were coming to neuroscientists to understand what is and isn’t credible when the defence or prosecution starts using neuroscience to aid their case. Many lawyers do workshops with neuroscientists to help them sort hype from more valid facts and to understand how ‘robust’ those facts may be currently.

On the DProf front things are hotting up. From notes, articles and working through people in university labs, I have around 247 potential neuroscientists whittled down to a top 71 and an initial 21 all from different universities predominately in Europe and the US. The invitation email has been sharpened up now I am actually about to use it and we’ve honed the questions for my interviews to help keep the conversation flowing on a topic most people probably haven’t given much consideration to. This has sparked a multitude of other work to do with logging people and tracking and confidentially and recording and piloting. There’s nothing like having to actually do something to make you understand what you really need to do (back to Change Projects again). Or maybe it’s just good old distraction techniques as I am a bit nervous about response rates given how difficult a colleague of mine found it was to get interviews with surgeons. It can also become a moveable feast as my supervisor has suggested I might, as an aside, in my thesis discuss whether neuroscientists whose native language doesn’t include an option for the Self, biases their thinking. I thought I’d distanced myself from that conversation but clearly not. It’s like Alice Through The Looking Glass, where in walking away from it, I move closer to it.

Also due to how I created my list, I have to write that up. Sometimes I wish I’d just randomly chosen the first 20 names I found as that would take less effort. Conversely, I reckon some DProffers give detailed explanations for their participant choices when in reality that’s all they could get – take it or leave it. Although I have to admit that my 247 includes some ‘they’ll do if no one else will talk to me’ options – lol.

I read an interesting book, “Consciousness and the Brain” by Dehaene. It’s been on my stack for months and as I started reading it I thought, ‘oh I should have read this months ago’. But I am realising I can think that about almost every book so I’m just glad that I have now read it. The book is about what he calls, Conscious Access – we become aware of something.

Here are some of the highlights from it:

• The image at your eyes moves around a lot and all the blood vessels are in front of your rods and cones, so images are blurred, blotchy and moving, yet we don’t see any of that. It seems that this can be tracked through the lower visual processing areas. It is not until it gets to higher neural areas that it’s sorted out; therefore, we see a clear and stable picture of the world.
• Even if we are not conscious of it (eg. Famous gorilla and basketball experiment) the input goes a long way up into our brain. So, at any moment our brain is processing a lot of information that we never get to be aware (conscious) of. And some of it affects or biases our thinking.
• These inputs get weaker as they travel upwards but some trigger higher neural areas which then send a signal back down to the sensory input. From my understanding, this signal is checking out what it thinks could be happening. If the sensory input comes back as agreeing then the higher cortical area gets more excited. A reinforcing loop gets set up and gains strength.
• About 300ms after the initial stimulus the excitation gets strong enough that suddenly the cortex ‘ignites’, as he puts it, into lots of activity. It’s quite sudden and extreme.
• This activity is the higher cortex sharing that information all over itself with lots of long-range axons firing. This neural network sends signals back and forth in a way that creates an oscillation of electrical activity, in the Gamma band (33+ pulses per second), which can be monitored outside of the brain.
• The other thing that happens is that the active neurons tightly shut down (inhibit) other neurons so that your attention becomes very focussed. New sensory input will find it hard to trigger another neural circuit into activity, as at this time the brain deems that information to be irrelevant. In fact, the wave of activity is a positive voltage at the top of the head not a negative wave because there is more inhibition activity going on than excitory.
• It seems that when we get stressed, the neurochemicals that cause vigilance increase and therefore we are more vigilant. This means we respond to fainter stimuli – I think this shows up as people perceiving things as more threatening when they aren’t. (It could be that when we talk about how important relationship is in coaching, that what we are doing is reducing the amount of these neurochemicals being released.)
•  It appears that in babies the wave of ignition happens but at about 1 second - probably due to the lack of myelination at this age.
• He talks about Schizophrenia and how a disruption in creating a connected, excited neural network could create similar symptoms. It seems the brain gets the bottom-up sensory information but the top-down check from the higher areas to the sensory areas is impaired. This is checking for “I think it is this, are you sensing that?”. If it gets a signal back which matches its expectation of what it thought then there is no mismatch between expected and sensory input and the brain is satisfied it ‘knows’ what’s going on. If this loop is disrupted then the neural circuit does not get closure so the person will be ‘left’ with a feeling that something isn’t quite right or is missing. As the brain doesn’t like discrepancies, it invents a story to make sense of it. Also, when we do something, that part of the brain alerts the sensory areas to expect it – that’s why we can’t tickle ourselves and when we hear ourselves echoed back in a phone call we get disorientated as we weren’t expecting that. Again, if this is impaired then the person would not always realise it was them doing it, hence the claim of ‘other voices in my head’.
• The brain is in a constant state of flux so these ignitions are happening without external stimuli. In fact, he reckons that the brain creates more of these ignitions internally or randomly than are externally triggered. 

Dehaene, and others, are doing some amazing work with Comma, Vegetative-state, minimally conscious and Locked-In Syndrome patients. They are developing a test for consciousness in these patients. It seems that they have detected consciousness in Vegetative state patients who months later regain a further level of consciousness. Also in one very special 2007 case, a neuroscientist triggered a patient’s Thalamus area (electrodes) which is heavily involved in the system that determines how awake or vigilant we are. They thought this overall system might have been stuck in the ‘not awake’ mode and they managed to ‘kick-start’ it so the patient went from minimally conscious to a more stable state of consciousness. There are also some specific drugs which can bring back conscious to patients at the time they have them which points to the fact that if the system is not damaged then there could be a point in the future when we can awaken these people.

As a final snippet. I read (3 hours) a lovely book called, “The Little book of big stuff about the brain”: It is an easy and informative read about learning and reward, plus a bit on consciousness, and how to make those work well. Another book that took my eye, is called “Predictably Irrational”: looks like a thought-provoking business book although I haven’t read it yet.

Have a wonderful Christmas and I wish everyone the very best for 2018.

Deni

Is it really a month ago since I did the last blog? I suppose that means a lot must have been happening. Not quite so much on the neuroscience side as I have been working hard to get my resubmission sorted but I am reading (trying) Damasio’s latest book ‘Self comes to mind’. I definitely think I have learned more about human nature and behaviour through reading these types of books than any ‘Neuroscience for ...’ book. I find the neuroscience elements go in subliminally as they are often being used and I don’t feel anxious that I need to know all that stuff. Anyway I have a proper textbook for that if I need it.

Let me give you a few themes from the book:

Simple cells, in order to survive, must be able to detect internal and external changes. They must have a response policy for these and be able to act to avoid the threat. The response policy needs to have conditions which if met trigger a movement as the simple cell does not ‘think’. It appears as if the cells act with intention but they don’t. They are just doing what they do which all adds up to a lot. Brains evolved to make this more effective and varied, so they can ‘sense, decide and act’.

The basic intention of the organism’s design is to maintain structure with the overarching purpose to survive so genes can be reproduced. (Easy to forget when life seems to be about which mobile phone or App to buy.) Therefore incentive mechanisms are needed for guidance, so chemicals are released to signal good things (dopamine, oxytocin) or threats (cortisol , Prolactin) to optimise behaviour towards or away from. However, if you have senses you have far more information on the external situation. Therefore, we have developed beyond mere survival to having certain ranges of well-being.

He’s also big on the brain making maps; maps of everything. Brains are constantly up dating their map of the body so it knows that it’s ok or whether it has to do something to get in back within that tight range of requirements needed for survival. He also suggests that event maps make up our memories. He feels that it is more efficient to store ways of recreating maps than every detail of a memory. In essence, the map retriggers the detail of that event within us. There certainly seems to be a lot of evidence that there is neural firing similar to the original event, which happens when we recall it. This can mean that if a memory gets triggered in some way – of which there are many – then a response happens whether we like it or not. Depending on its strength and our abilities to control it, it may undermine what we are doing at that moment. Sometimes we will know this is happening (typically from explicit memories) and sometimes we just know how we feel, and assume that the current situation is making us feel that way (usually from implicit memories). Useful to know when the other person acts ‘irrationally’.

He talks about how we might learn due to mirror neurons. These mimic in our brain what we see others doing. This means we encode how to do things and may be partly how we learn so many things as we grow up.  He talks about how if we have encoded it through mirror neurons then we can act it out as required. It makes me think in coaching that maybe I might need to do more real-plays of situations that my coachees want to handle so that they have a memory of doing it. In essence it puts it in their system. I wonder if this is why visualisation has an effect. Seems like a topic that could have more relevance once further explored and understood, so maybe one to look out for.

The saga of my panel has continued and it has been interesting to notice how I have been going through the change curve and what has helped that. It definitely helped to know that I have passed, although the conditions I need to meet are as stringent as I’d feared. Knowing was a mixed blessing as it rekindled some of the emotions but at I least understood the size of the task. Later that week we met as a group and it was helpful to talk about it. Partly it ‘normalised’ the experience and partly it enabled me to explore my options going forward. I also untangled what I felt I could have done differently, from the situation’s dynamic. This certainly helped me think more rationally and tempered the emotional response. I read in LaDoux that the emotional response is about creating action to re-stabilise the system and that once that action happens, the inhibitory neurons are fired to turn off the fight/ flight response. So the act of creating a response quenches what initiate it.

Another week passed until I spoke with my Advisor about the conditions, so I started by tackling the obvious ones. Doing one thing helped me to think clearer and then another condition made more sense, so I started working on that as well. Then I understood another, so by the time I spoke with my Advisor I had sent through my plan for addressing 5/6 of the conditions.

One useful outcome is that I now feel even more certain that my research method is well chosen as I have had to put up a stronger defence of it. Martin Seligman in ‘Authentic Happiness’ says that people move on when they can make something ‘good’ out of the situation, no matter how small. I’d go with that. And although begrudgingly at first, I have got to ‘acceptance’ on the change curve mainly because I have separated what I feel is inexcusable behaviour from the extra thinking the conditions have made me do. Now I can handle the two things independently.