1 cubic mm of brain tissue has tens of thousands of neurons, a billion connectivity sites and 4km of connections (Churchland, 2013). Wow, I still struggle to comprehend that even though I’ve been reading about it for over 4 years now. I think struggling to comprehend the scale of what the brain truly is just from that perspective is partly why we view it as magical, but simplicity at that scale could create the complex behaviours that are us. When it comes down to that level, computers are pretty simple although that simplicity is exquisitely woven together and the end result is pretty impressive.

I’ve enjoyed reading Patricia Churchland’s book “Touching a nerve”. As she is a neurophilosopher it has some interesting discussions which intrigue me. She bravely tackles the conversation about the soul whilst illustrating her points with related information about what the brain actually has to do to get us to behave as coherent human beings. I like how she concludes the soul chapter with “brain science seems to have the leg up on soul science” which cleverly allows for the possibility that soul science may catch-up at some stage. She also covers morality, aggression & sex and warring tendencies with some interesting diversions and thoughts. I agree with her thought that if a criminal pleads that his brain did it and he wasn’t in control, that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be locked up for everyone’s safety. In fact, I felt that that type of argument would make it worse for the criminal as he’s effectively saying “I can’t control this problem I have within me”. Currently, with little chance of changing these brain issues, then surely the criminal is effectively saying, I should be locked up. Strange how we’ve taken “It wasn’t me. It was my brain” to imply that the person should be set free regardless of what harm they may cause to others.

However, I found the chapter on consciousness a little unsatisfactory as I felt she didn’t distinguish that well between being conscious and knowing you are conscious. Someone put it as ‘knowing’ and ‘knowing you know’. Which without language are pretty hard to research. She did talk about being conscious through images rather than auditory (that voice in your head). I gave it a go but unfortunately, I needed the voice, like a narration about the images. Although a colleague gave a different perspective on that today. She said that at times she had a feeling about someone that, say, she didn’t trust. We then debated whether she needed to name the feeling with language and what it meant, or whether it remained just a known feeling.

Also, if you can ‘know you know’ without language then it makes me wonder whether an animal knows there is a tomorrow or that it’s going to die? Perhaps that’s too far but do they know another animal in their group has just died, which doesn’t require a sense of time. It’s an intriguing puzzle to ponder on: whether different animals have various greater or lesser forms of being conscious depending on how much ‘processing ability’ and ‘storage’ they have.

Just attempting to think about what that would be like was difficult. I can do ‘just being’, where I am just getting on with stuff and time seems to not be on my mind – I am just doing, absorbed. But having a lesser form of ‘knowing I know’ was hard to compute. For a seemingly objective subject neuroscience certainly wanders into the subjective.

On another note, I am developing my presentation at the UWTSD Coaching conference in November: What angle am I going to take from my research? My supervisor suggested that people would probably like to understand, as a coach how am I using the neuroscience knowledge that I am learning? Good question, very good question. The essence of the question is “well it’s great that you know a lot about the brain, but how does that help your coachees?”

Anyway, fear and determination made me really think about pulling something together and a new coachee provided just the catalyst I needed. This coachee is successful and a cautious decision-maker; they like enough information and time to reflect. When they think about having to make a decision faster than they would like and with less facts, then they feel anxious. Perfect.

So, once we’d explored the situation and set the outcomes etc, I sat down and proffered that I believed it would be useful to know what we might be up against – how they might be self-hindering and thwart their own progress. I’d thought beforehand about doing this and decided to only explain as little as I needed to. I’ve never believed in needing to use lots of big neuroscience words when ‘a part of the brain’ will suffice. Also, I decided to start by asking them if they’d really thought about how the surge of anxiety was actually generated and why? It seemed a good way to raise their awareness to needing to understand this a bit more with respect to their coaching goals.

We discussed neural pathways being shaped by experience and the need to navigate life when younger; how strong emotions from years back are triggered in current situations; how those neurochemicals affect threat level and cognitive ability. To understand the seemingly conflicting dynamic that a surge of anxiety may not be appropriate for the current situation, but it will drive your actions unless you can start to erode into that emotional response. It allowed us to explored quite targeted actions for reducing anxiety and therefore have a chance of experimenting with faster, less-informed decision-making.

I also felt that they then knew what I knew; that we both understand the task ahead and what may hinder its progress. Also, as it was more factual, it didn’t feel at all like a therapy session or became uncomfortable: It was insightful for them.

Well you’ll be pleased to hear that I have conducted the first interview for my Delphi study. I was very appreciative as well that the participant gave me some useful feedback. I have my second one next week and again the participant has kindly agreed to talk to me afterwards about the interview process. Then the week after I have a third interview with a neuroscientist who responded to my invitation. As a Course Director at Oxford put it: “If they are interested in the topic Deni they will agree to participate”. It was said in a very matter of fact way, which made me think that we are rarely like that in the world of business. Their sub text was, ‘let go of trying to persuade them to participate and concentrate on making it interesting to them’. Maybe we should do more of that in business: How much effort do we put into persuading rather than attracting – push rather than pull. Deep down we know that the latter is more effective and yet we continue with the former far too much.

Now I am sourcing the equipment for transcribing the recording as my DProf colleagues are united in the advice that doing it yourself is really valuable in helping you appreciate what was said. Which leads me nicely into the ‘A Brain for business: a brain for life’ book I mentioned last time. O’Mara has pulled together an overview of many neuroscience concepts and texts in a useful way. It also means that if you haven’t previously read much on the topic then he brings it altogether for you, citing the most pertinent aspects. I was reassured to see that he is referencing many of the books and papers that I have read. His referencing is excellent so if you want to read more you can.

I’ve got to chapter 8 on Performance and Expertise and I felt it was worth sharing. I think I have written about this before but feel the need to reiterate the message. From O’Mara’s book, the ‘Making it stick’ book (which he also references) and other papers on learning, there are some strong themes coming out:

·         Learning is not about reading and reciting. To strengthen the synaptic pathways and embed the learning, it needs to be retrieved and used and consolidated.

·         It needs practice, especially if you are changing something. We appear to mean something quite distinct when we mention ‘learning’ and yet the brain learns all the time – it practices all the time. Then we seem to think that a 30-minute online presentation means we have ‘learned something’.

·         Sleeping on it really helps.

·         Little and often works best especially when the learning is mixed up rather than completed in logical order. At first this seems counterintuitive but it makes you work harder at retrieving the information from your memory and that helps you learn better. Of course, I am assuming that long term understanding and application are your goal rather than ticking a box to say you have watched an online presentation.

Yesterday I found it useful to position the change my coachee was attempting to make akin to learning to drive. In many ways it is very applicable to many things we attempt to learn through training courses. Also most of us would agree you are unlikely to pass your driving test if we employed the same learning strategy we take with management development training.

I also think that this style of learning might suit Millennials better and to be fair, having watched two boys grow up, I think they have been saying for a long time that the way we learn at school is out dated. Self-teaching through finding out stuff on the internet and using forums etc seems to be much more prevalent.

The other thing about driving is that it has a go/ no-go point so there is a real consequence to how much effort you do or don’t put in. This is the same with undergraduates. It has always intrigued me how undergraduates are pretty much self-directed in their learning and development at University. Then at work they soon fall into the passive ‘do it for me’ style of development where others organise development and maybe some of it is taken in and used. I reckon it is about consequences again – no effort, no degree. Maybe we should think more about creating that in work and, as managers, save ourselves a lot of effort and frustration. I suppose the hard part is letting go of those consequences too as we might end up having to recruit again or have difficult conversations.

I think the doctorate certainly falls into the ‘you sort it’ category. Not just from my experiences but also from others’ experience as well. I had a ‘ah-ha’ moment about 3 weeks ago when my supervisor made a chance comment. She said “we’ll make a researcher of you yet”. Lots of pennies dropping – so that is what this is about; it is about being trained to be a researcher and not really about the research I am doing. Now all this other stuff makes more sense. To become a seasoned, credible researcher you need to be able to review other literature and synthesis what it is and isn’t saying; you need to understand the context in which your research sits – what knowledge is appropriate; you need to understand what specific question you are answering and have rigour that your method delivers that; and that you are being ethical and robust in what you do. All the thesis chapters now make sense rather than being annoying side avenues. It would have been helpful to have ‘got this’ two years ago but I suppose ‘better late than never’ comes to mind. So, once you have the Dprof then the real focus on research opens up – because you’ve demonstrated that your research is likely to be trustworthy as you know how to do it.

I’ve finally cracked Epistemology: Finding straightforward literature which resonated with me helped greatly. Epistemology is basically about what information you think is adequate and legitimate and I finally grasped that my own epistemological stance was blocking my way forward on this topic: I had been looking for an objective definition of each ‘…ism’ and I realised that this topic is actually quite subjective. Crotty says that there are numerous methods and methodologies and that terminology is inconsistently used and defined – what a light bulb moment. In essence the muddle is how it is and there is no one consistent definition for each “..ism” because it is being treated very subjectively – as long as you can state your case it seems to goes. For example, Constructionalism and Constructivism appear the same in some texts and different in others. Crotty’s Constructionalism overlaps Objectivism and Subjectivism, concluding things are a blend of fact and opinion. 

Realising the muddle was ok and I didn’t have to look for a Holy Grail was a liberation: I just needed to pick the ones to underpin my research. So now instead of ending up confused and fraught (which you may be after having just read that section) I’m just going with Crotty’s Constructionalism, as having to choose between being totally Objective or Subjective hadn’t sat well with me so finding something that blends them was a relief. Also, if there’s one thing I understand about Neuroscience at the moment, it is that it’s full of interpretation and in many cases, it can only be constructed, although hopefully it’s doing that using objective research.

So, Epistemology worked on, now time for my Theoretical Perspective which drives your research methodology and is about how you look at the world and make sense of things. Again, it seemed that the main options were quite compartmentalised – now I know why interdisciplinary research is hard work. So, digging further I unearthed Critical Realism. One author has it at the ‘facts might be tainted by research bias’ end of Post-positivism and another author has it at the ‘some things are much more fact based’ end of Interpretivism – perfect. So, I am deciding it is where the two overlap as both definitions are similar: ‘Whilst science can attempt to describe the world factually, that within doing so the researcher brings their own biases and interpretations. Therefore, things can only be known within the bounds of probability.’ Worth keeping in mind when you are reading neuroscience articles.

Having started out by wondering ‘what is the value in doing all this epistemology stuff’, I have discovered that it has helped me become more realistic about the nature of the information I am gathering and creating. And being blocked by my own epistemological bias made me realise that even when you think you clock your own biases that all you actually do is uncover the next layer and there is another one below waiting for you to discover in the future. Tara Swart talking on ‘Neuroscience and Nationalism’ has hope that our ‘in/out group’ biases can be changed, although to date they have been useful for our survival so will changing that be useful or not to our future? Interestingly, I read in Cozolino’s latest book that oxytocin is positively corelated with in-group biases so I wonder how far you can stretch that ‘in-group’ definition.

I think a big part of a doctorate is about making you find your own solid ground and being congruent with your reasons for that. One of the outcomes from this is that I am finding I am much more comfortable with asking people what is behind the question they just asked before I answer it. That has been quite an eye opener as their answers are often different to what I had assumed. That has affected how I have answered the question and, in many cases, how congruent I have been in my answer.

As I have been writing this blog, it’s also made me ponder on some of the realities around coaching. One thought that came to mind was the comment about leaving our biases outside the coaching room. I think the reality is probably closer to, we can do that to some extent although we can only ever be biased. Given we have all had different experiences, and these affect our neural pathways, we can only see things through our own perspective. We can attempt to look at it through others’ eyes, but ultimately, we can never truly do that and being more honest about that could be in service of our coaching.

We also talk about helping clients ‘reach their full potential’ but I wonder who’s ‘full potential’ we are talking about or what we mean by that. I feel that many clients would be happy with just properly embedding the things they want to work on, to improve or deal with their situation. Maybe in many cases the role of coaching is about helping clients to navigate their life now, much of which they didn’t have to handle in their upbringing. Given that much of the brain development happens in our childhood, Cozolino suggests the role of a therapist is akin to that of a parent, in aiding the person to purposefully adapt their neural pathways and make changes. His is also the first book I have read where it seems that the neuroscience is going to be in service of the topic in a meaningful way.

In his video “Nothing magical about consciousness!” Stanislas Dehaene similarly talks about how non-conscious processing influences our actions. It is also a good demonstration of how the same words are used to mean different things: I wonder how many articles on consciousness are really on conscious access? I’m sure that’s nothing to do with gaining reading figures! He mentions how new technology has enhanced neuroscience research and this includes wearable brain scanners which could be a game changer.

The layer below the hype is worth getting to.

I found out today that my application to UWTSD has been accepted. I’m really pleased and chilling out on the fact that universities have their own pace and that’s that. I also realised that once my three assignments get passed, I will have 30 Level 8 credits which will be an achievement as they are quite special.

Apart from reading, I decided that I need to get on with identifying which neuroscientists I am going to approach as once the ethics form gets signed off I can reach out to them. In 18 months I’ve gone from worrying about whether I’d have enough to talk to, to worrying about how to pick the useful ones from the hundreds around. The reading, especially of the textbook last year, is becoming useful as I have a better ability to understand which ones look like they might be useful and which are in less relevant areas. I am also appreciating that a number of the post-docs might be better to speak with, especially as they might have more time.

So, at the moment I am creating a spider diagram (Inspiration software) of university research centres and their Heads and Post-docs. The good thing is that I can link the webpages to the names but it still means I have to look through the webpages to understand who’s doing what and there can be ten to twenty people to overview. At least I have a good starter for ten from the reading I have done which has helped.

I also feel that I need to understand a bit more about neuromodulation and epigenetics as well so I have found this great little book called “Introducing epigenetics: A graphic guide”: An easy and useful read on that subject. Fascinating area and again there’s much more going on there than I had appreciated. The DNA strands seem covered in proteins and other things which highlight what should happen with the gene (active – how or silent). There’s a lot going on in that nucleus that determines how the genes we have are then interpreted, or not.

Whilst looking at this topic I found a newspaper article about the DNA Testing Kits you can buy. If you are thinking of doing it then it’s worth a read: “What I learned from home DNA testing”. The thing I hadn’t got, is that each product isn’t absolute. The results reflect the collection of people tested to create the database and this appears to skew the results – quite a lot as you’ll read.

On another note of useful little things, I found a great set of YouTube videos called “2-minute neuroscience” which cover various topics from the Amygdala to Glutamate to Alcohol effects. On the other hand, I am also coming across some books and YouTube videos which have some interesting leaps, analogies and tenuous claims. One thing I am learning to do is to Google the person or the topic and see what others are saying about it as a way of getting a feel for where it stands.

In one video the lecturer showed how, under a certain set-up, metronomes get into sync with each other (due to being on a movable plinth). He then stated that this means that when I talk to you, my brain oscillations cause your brain to oscillate in sync. Hmm???? He ‘proved’ this by showing brain scans showing both brains lit up in the same areas. However, a few thoughts on that which are not about my brain oscillating yours: Brains are roughly laid out the same, so if you are talking about something then we are probably both using similar areas for processing and meaning, etc. And the devil is in the detail, as although the same areas are used, the neural circuits will probably be different. Many brain imaging techniques give either detail for a small bit or generalisation for a large area – i.e. something is happening in this general area but we can’t say what exactly.

At the end he then, I felt, contradicted himself. He said that if two people were primed differently (this person is trustworthy, this person is dishonest), then they would interpret the conversation differently: To ‘prove’ this he showed brain scans with different areas lit up. So how does that ‘prove’ that if I speak to both people my brain gets them in sync with me?? So, my plea to you is to look to differentiate between the good and acknowledged work and the people who are riding on the hype for a quick buck.

For myself, I’ve been experimenting with using my attention to stop me focussing on unhelpful thoughts which is nothing new I know. It is surprising powerful to do and can be like a switch and longer term it is probably beneficial for your brain chemistry. If you can really engage into the moment by reading aloud or forcing yourself to understand what the sentence is saying, or making something you need to think about or doing something that forces your concentration. The other thoughts drop away instantly and I feel quite different, so I am advocating this more in my coaching with a stronger conviction.

Also, I was reading about dopamine and learning. Dopamine helps improve synaptic function and is involved in ‘the prediction error’. If something is novel or is different to expected, the prediction error is high and dopamine is very active. As what you predict and happens gets closer, the dopamine drops. I suppose this is because you’ve learned to predict it: Helpful if what you are learning helps save your life or gets you food. So now I understand why people say that you learn most with surprise or novelty. It has made me wonder about coaching and how much during my coaching I am looking to reduce the prediction error to help make the action palatable to the coachee. I think I am going to watch for this from now on and try something different.

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