Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders (16 page)

For innovative leaders, tapping into these brain regions means putting themselves at risk of what may happen at the second half of the U-shaped curve. A schematic is presented in
Figure 4.2
.

Figure 4.2. Schematic representation of the risks of innovative thinking

There is some evidence that analogical reasoning (mapping similarities between concepts) is necessary for innovation. In
Figure 4.3
, the creative brain may make a connection between the
ten
colored boxes and a
ten
-sided polygon, a
rainbow
shape (because the boxes contain the colors of the rainbow), or
10
Downing Street (the home of the UK prime minister). As you can see, some of these associations are more loose than others, but could lead to a creative solution if the brain continues to find associations even within each of these associations.

Figure 4.3. The creative brain making connections

The extent to which two concepts are related is called
semantic distance.
(In the figure, the UK association has a great semantic distance from the colored boxes.) Innovation requires identifying similarities across great semantic distance. The left frontopolar cortex (the part of the frontal cortex right at the front of the brain) has been implicated in mediating semantic distance.
⁷
Thus, when associations
are presented to the brain for a long enough time, the left frontopolar cortex will map these similarities. This may not occur immediately, but the brain is wired to find these connections.

Creativity (divergent thinking and creative achievement) itself has been associated with a smaller lingual gyrus (which usually plays a key role in recalling dreams
⁸
) and the left lateral orbital cortex (when this is damaged, severe disinhibition occurs—usually gambling, drug abuse, swearing, or hypersexuality
^9
,
10
), and a larger right posterior cingulate gyrus (when malfunctioning, this has been found to be associated with disorientation in time and space
¹¹
) and the angular gyrus (thought to be important in understanding metaphors and cross-model abstractions as well as spatial relations
¹²
).
¹³

Table 4.1
summarizes what happens when these regions implicated in creativity are damaged.

Table 4.1. Consequences of Regional Brain Lesions

Although we cannot deduce what the largeness or smallness tells us about these functions in creativity, we can know that these functions, being associated with these brain regions, are critical for creativity—that is, dreaming, disinhibition, disorientation to time and space, metaphor comprehension, and cross-modal abstraction. (An example of cross-modal abstraction is: when people are asked to associate the words “kikki” and “bouba” with a jagged shape and an amoeba, 98% of people associate “kikki” with the jagged shape and “bouba” with the amoeba, but people with angular gyrus damage cannot; see
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0402s.pdf
).
¹⁴

One of the major ways in which creativity is measured in brain imaging studies is by “divergent thinking” (DT), which is a thought process that explores multiple solutions to a given problem. Although studies have implicated better network connections between the right and left brain, recent studies have shown that the brain-bridge (or corpus callosum) is smaller in people with higher DT, thereby leading researchers to believe that it is not the number of connections but the efficiency of connections that determines greater creativity. Furthermore, the “incubation” of ideas is therefore facilitated by this decreased connectivity by keeping the idea in the hemisphere in which it originated.
¹⁵

Another study that examined the brain substrates of creativity has shown greater brainwave synchronization in the posterior parietal regions and in the right hemisphere as well.
¹⁶
This phenomenon of greater synchronization of brain regions in the creative state has been reported by other studies, too.
¹⁷
Furthermore, greater frontal activity with creative processes has also been shown on numerous occasions, as has involvement of the parietal cortex,
^16
,
18
,
19
although at times, hypofrontality to suppress analytical processes has been implicated in the flow state.
²⁰

Numerous other studies have also confirmed the critical integration between different brain regions, especially in the frontal lobe, involved in thinking, memory, emotion, and novelty response as being of significance in creativity.
^21
,
22

The application:
How, then, can coaches use this information from brain science to help leaders become more innovative? And how can managers and leaders use this information to increase their productivity? First, let’s summarize the useable facts: (1) Brain imaging studies show us that there may be a tension between creativity and madness; the same regions that are recruited for creativity, if “overrecruited,” could lead to madness or disinhibition. (Think about the Tiger Woods fiasco and the multiple examples of musicians who have killed themselves.) Thus, managers and leaders can hire coaches to work with these specific fears using
Table 4.1
to generate sequential and repetitive questions and then to “train” the brain so as to enhance cognitive control in these areas.
¹⁹
Training has been shown to exert a direct effect on the left parietal cortex; the last chapter of this book focuses more on the specific interventions. (2) For now, the jury is out about what big or small or more or less activation means, but we can deduce from
Table 4.1
what faculties need to be focused on in the development of creativity and innovation: simply put, leaders can be helped to dream more (tap into the unconscious), be less afraid of losing control, lose a sense of time and space (and know how to do this), and enhance metaphor use as well as cross-modal abstractions. (3) Essentially, leaders and managers can be helped to increase semantic distance and then make associations, knowing that this will
stimulate the left frontopolar cortex necessary for enhancing creativity. (4) We can stimulate divergent thinking but encourage incubation because we know that this likely allows ideas to grow in safety. These are the abstractions that can be addressed, and in
Chapter 8
, “Coaching Brain Processes,” we discuss specifically how to do this.

For now, this is what we can know about innovation: (1) The likely reason you are not innovating is that innovation travels together with the threat of madness (e.g., OFC lesions associated with mania and suicide
^23
,
24
in the brain). (2) However, we can identify some of these threats and help grow beyond them. (3) We know that you need to make associations between divergent things to stimulate brain regions associated with creativity, so it is important to not stop, even if the connection seems too distant. (4) Before you integrate the how and why, just stick with your initial thought and grow it (we will talk later about how to do this).

Essentially, the brain research on creativity gives us an idea of brain regions that may be vulnerable to the fear of being creative and thus helps us construct a plan to improve on this. They also tell us that anything that disrupts synchronization may also disrupt the creative process.

The Neuroscience of Intuition

The concept:
Many leaders are intuitive, but often struggle with thinking about their intuitions and how to trust them. Intuition is a “preemptive” sense that something is happening. The concept of preemptive perception is that the brain decides on an action long before knowing what the goal is.
²⁵
That is, the brain comes up with a plan because there are enough ingredients for it based on past experiences. It plots out the information it gets onto a “significance” map in the parietal cortex that has already been generated.
²⁶
In a sense, it is an accurate anticipation. Scientifically, this may be explained as pattern recognition before the entire scene is understood.
²⁷
It is also
understood as anticipatory behavior. Several important ideas that brain science helps elucidate are outlined below.

•
Our bodies respond before strong emotions are seen.
For example, one experiment showed that if you show emotional and neutral pictures to people, several parameters, including eye-blink and papillary dilation, will change before the emotional pictures are seen, especially without any clues being given.
²⁸
Horizontal eye movements in this study indicated hemisphere asymmetry.

•
Step-by-step reasoning and intuitive reasoning activate different brain regions.
Another study showed that step-by-step deliberative reasoning activates the middle frontal gyrus, the inferior parietal lobule, and the precuneus, whereas intuition (though pure coordination) activates the insula and ACC.
²⁹
The insula is deep within the brain, and as the choice for actions has become more autonomic based (e.g., heart-rate dependent) rather than olfaction (smell) based through evolution, the insula has grown and its association with the ACC is amazingly consistent in a variety of brain functions related to emotional guidance of behavior.
³⁰

To further substantiate this, precuneus activity correlates positively with how “effortful” a dominance-solvable (deliberative reasoning) game is, whereas insula activity correlates positively with how “effortless” a coordination game is. Thus, intuition is subserved by the insula, and we know that this brain region probably serves as the “gut-feeling register” that sends information to the cortex to be interpreted.

•
Intuition occurs because our brains make up their “minds” with early subtle information.
When intuition is conceptualized as pattern recognition or the vague perception of coherence, it is thought that the OFC is one of the earliest parts of the brain to get involved as it integrates coarse aspects of the input very early on before more conscious processing occurs.
³¹
The theory here is that information from the visual cortex (once you see something) goes straight to the frontal lobe and back before being processed by sensory centers in the brain so that early recognition can occur.
³²
In addition to the OFC, the median OFC, the lateral portion of the amygdala, anterior insula,
and ventral occipito-temporal regions appear to be activated by intuition as well.
³³