Most Excellent, Mark. Like you, my early years were spend observing the behavior of animals, in my case implanting electrodes in to the brains of pigeons to see the effects of electrical stimulation in the reward pathways. Yep, I say now that my degree was in biological behavior or behavioral neurophysiology, but it was that old operant research in physiological psychology that it was anchored it.
My knowledge of brain physiology is pretty solid, as is my knowledge of human behavior. I’ve been working in organizational consulting stuff since 1978 and we can explain most things about behavior and learning pretty simply, without talking about hippocampal activity or the role of the amygdala in emotions or the frontal lobe involvement or whatever. It simply is NOT necessary, yet we see Big Bucks being spent to teach senior managers about brain function.
If we could simply get them to clarify missions, visions and goals more clearly and to structure behavioral management systems to do a better job of supporting desired behavior, and if we could turn them away from their belief that extrinsic rewards are a good thing, we could have really significant impacts on innovation, productivity and active involvement.
When 1 of 3 workers would forgo a raise to have their boss fired, my guess is that the involvement of the corpus callosum and the locus coeruleus is probably a little less important than allowing and supporting the supervisors of the world to improve their management practices. This stuff ain’t rocket science and it REALLY ain’t about neuroscience. The HEART is also involved in a lot of this stuff…
