A new era of Management: Neuromanagement. Part #2
Part 2 of the series of articles is based on SoftServe PMO Director Denys Prylutskyi's speech at PM Good News Conf. You can find Part 1 at the bottom of this page.
People have known about the anatomy and functional areas of the brain for a long time. It started many years ago when Leonardo da Vinci began to analyze the corpses of people, dissect their heads, and look at their brains to discover certain brain diseases that lead to certain behaviors. In those days, the first brain map was created, indicating which brain areas were responsible for specific functions. There are many zones: motor area, sensory area, temporal lobe, etc. The zones of interest for us are the frontal lobe and the cerebellum.
According to modern science, the frontal lobe is mainly responsible for problem-solving and creating good reasons, such as behavioral or mood choices. We thought it was the decision-making center. We also thought the cerebellum was mainly responsible for motor functions like movements. This was true for many years and was the basis of all the therapy done with people. All the illnesses associated with the malfunctioning of the human being were seen as negative phenomena occurring in some regions of the human brain.
With the invention of functional magnetic resonance of the brain (fMRI), we could also track where the signal is spreading in the brain.
Neuroimaging: functional magnetic resonance of the brain (fMRI) is used to determine the specific location of the brain where a particular function, such as speech or memory, occurs.
As you probably know, the brain is an electrical device driven by chemical reactions. So, the electrical signal is distributed to different areas of the brain depending on what we are doing and what tasks we are trying to accomplish. We could test which brain parts are involved in specific functions with fMRI. It was quite an interesting experiment when you put a person in such a tube, give them a task to do something, and monitor how the signal spreads.
This way, we have proven many things about the anatomy of the human brain. However, one type of experiment yielded surprising results. When the task was to make decisions, the signal propagated strangely. As you may recall, decision-making is supposed to happen in the frontal lobe. Yet, for some reason, that was the last area of the human brain where the decision-making signal came from. It ended there, but it did not start there. That seemed strange because when you decide, you must engage the area responsible for making the decision first, and then maybe the signal would spread throughout the brain, but not the other way around.
And you know where the signal started to spread from? For some reason, it was the cerebellum, the movement mechanism, the motion controller. Why? How is decision-making related to motion control? Neuroscientists began to investigate this fact. One day they finally realized one thing, and in 2006 they wrote an article for Brain, the world’s most famous neuroscience journal, stating that:
“the traditional teaching that the cerebellum is purely a motor control device is no longer appears valid, if, indeed, ever it was. There is increasing recognition that the cerebellum contributes to cognitive processing and emotional control in addition to its role in motor coordination.”
What does it mean? Decision-making begins in the cerebellum. It begins with emotion. Scientists started investigating this matter, and what they found changed the paradigm for understanding how people make decisions. As said before, we think decisions are made based on facts and logic, which belong in the frontal lobe. These things are supposed to be processed there, but for some reason, it only ends there and begins in the emotion center. So, it seems that emotions are involved, and it is the center of decision-making; the decisions start there.
Part 1 is here. Be ready to check Part 3 of the New Era of Management: Neuromanagement article next week. Yet, for those striving for the content and who don’t want to wait, here is the link to Denys’s speech at PM Good News Conf: https://youtu.be/uvTmC_i3Lr0. Enjoy!
