Ambidexterity and the Brain part twelve, Stress and Control, Consciousness and Reality: Dr. Eric Zabiegalski

Between fight and flight is the blind man’s sight and the choice that’s right- Jewel

 I don’t know the origin of the expression “blind man’s sight”, but I think pop and country singer Jewel Kilcher captures its meaning beautifully in the lyrics from her 2001 song Standing Still. The visible world can be a shockingly pervasive, in-your-face experience. Consequently, it distracts, confuses, challenges, sometimes terrifies, and occupies virtually every moment of our waking lives. With one of our senses removed you might think our mind would have a better chance at thinking clearly and processing reality more accurately, helping us make “the choice that’s right”, but you’d be wrong. As Jewel hints there is another layer of noise to contend with if we removed sight, the noise within our heads. Even when we can filter out the external world we are left with an often stressful internal world within our mind. In order to get the best picture of life it’s imperative to know who’s giving you advice, learn self-control, and understand a few things about consciousness before you can think about picking best choices.

           If you’ve been following my monthly articles by now you should be picking up on a common theme. In the ambidextrous world of organizations (the world of exploitive and explorative practices), it’s imperative to find balance. If you don’t you’ll stamp an expiration date upon your head and eventually go extinct, and 40 years of research on the subject backs this up saying that exploitation drives out exploration. What this means is most organizations converge on one or two things they’ve learned to do well, stop growing, learning, and changing, and eventually when the environment changes, go extinct. Just as organizations get out of balance so do people. So, unless you want to squander your best years like a sad character in a Leo Tolstoy novel or find as Thomas Merton said, “your ladder leaning against the wrong wall”, you’ll want to consider these articles carefully and adjust your balance, and reality, accordingly.

 Last month we started a new conversation around understanding exploitive and explorative balance in the mind, and the linkages to the outside world. We discussed the experiencing of things like synchronous events and watershed moments, signs from the universe we are on a more productive path. This month we continue the conversation and introduce fundamental reasons why hurdles to achieving optimal states of consciousness (reality) exist, where they come from and ways to get over them in our lives. The thing about hurdles is this, though they may at first look like permanent obstructions they’re actually moveable structures, once mastered they can easily be kicked down and reduced to mere pebbles in the road.

 Hurdle 1: know who’s giving you advice

The oldest part of our brain, the amygdala, is 300 million years old and handles basic functioning. The amygdala knows four things, I call them the four “F’s”, they’re fight, flight, food and for the sake of being civil, fornicate. This primordial brain is all early humans needed to keep themselves out of trouble, fed, and continue the bloodline. Later came the limbic brain (100 million years ago) which brought with it emotion and short-term memory and most recently the pre-frontal cortex 3 million years ago giving us consciousness and higher order thinking.

In our 21st century world when you go about your daily activities the different parts of the brain check in with help and advice. Just because you left a meeting in a glass and chrome office building or flew in an airplane across the country you may think you’re getting information drawn exclusively from the higher functioning part of the brain (the pre-frontal cortex), but this would not be the case. You’re actually taking council from all the parts of the brain (old and new), and one of the loudest advocates is the ever-vigilant amygdala. Ever feel as if there’s a war going on inside your head? Well there is, that’s the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex fighting. While this part of our brain works 24/7 to keep us out of trouble, it’s also at a disadvantage today. The amygdala was created to cope with a different environment millions of years ago psychologists call the “immediate return environment.” In the amygdala’s world spears are flung from rival tribes and sabre toothed cats leap from rock faces above, regardless of what the current 21st century situation might be. It’s a world of startle, and response, everything is going to kill you and everything requires immediate action, and then just as quickly as it started, to the amygdala it’s over. By contrast, the environment of today is known as a “delayed return environment.” We now live in a world where cause and effect, and action and response can take longer and are usually non-life threatening, though we still feel as though losing our job or blowing an important presentation may result in certain death, and the farther out the potential threat the harder it is for the amygdala to see it. 

           And it gets even better. As if to add insult to injury the 21st century emergencies our primordial brain should be alerting us about it’s completely blind to. We all know people who have no problem using tobacco and other carcinogenic substances or participating in repetitively detrimental habits like overeating, worrying, and dubious lifestyle activities. Where is the cautious amygdala in these instances? Its silent and oblivious, yet these are the sabre toothed cats of our day. So Jewel is right, we are often pinned between feelings of wanting to attack or run away. Combine this with a world that feels ominously dangerous which we don’t know how to instinctively respond to in helpful ways and you’ve got stress. What can we do about it? one answer is “bio-hacking.” 

In the book Game changers, Dave Asprey shows us how to overcome unhelpful patterns of behavior which hold us back and get the body and mind working together by updating our personal operating systems default settings which control the nervous system. Techniques like avoiding decision fatigue, taking control of your diet, adjusting sleep schedules and quelling undefined fear are a few examples of how to edit long established default settings using bio-hacking.  Fear and worry have many negative effects. While some stress is good for the body, sustained fear triggers stress which releases chemicals like cortisol, and long-term release of cortisol corrodes the nervous system effectively oxidizing the body, fear also consumes large amounts of energy, a finite resource. Additionally, fear discourages us from taking risks which could otherwise lead to our success. To the primordial mind, a risk is a gamble that if gone wrong could lead to failure, and failure in prehistoric times often meant death, as a result we are hard wired (defaulted) to be ill disposed to failure. You can overcome fear with courage but courage, again, requires energy (effort), a finite resource. Adding up the problems which come along with a fearful amygdala can leave you with an exhausted, unfocused and risk averse mind. Furthermore, Asprey says the subconscious mind doesn’t just want you to find an absence of threats to feel safe it also wants to find confirmation of safety.

Hurdle 2: you are not your brain; you are the user of your brain

This advice comes from one of my heroes’ Rudy Tanzi. There are a small group of neuroscientists who have moved beyond the reductionist view that our brains are nothing more than synapses firing, and electro-chemical processes and leading Alzheimer’s researcher Rudy is one of them, he’s courageously exploring the nature of human consciousness and reality in his neuroscience research. 

           The newest part of our brain, the pre-frontal cortex, gives us consciousness and higher order thinking. It also gives us the ability to stand outside of ourselves and witness what’s going on without instinctively getting caught up in it and immediately reacting. This part of our brain gives us empathy and the advantage of standing back and assessing situations, provided the amygdala doesn’t attempt to intervene. As Rudy explains it “you have a brain, but you are not your brain”, you are the owner of your brain, it doesn’t own you, that’s an important point to remember. Similar to Rudy’s explanation I like to think of the brain as a faithful dog. As such, it should be nurtured and loved, walked, fed, trained, let out to run at times and kept on a leash at others, oh and keep it out of your neighbors’ trash and from getting in fights with skunks and other dogs. 

           Perhaps most compelling of all, Rudy says the only job of our brain is to create. We create thoughts, deeds, words, facial expressions, artwork, etc. and that which we create ultimately comes back to govern, regulate, and monitor us. Consciousness, Rudy says is simply awareness. More specifically, it’s “awareness of our own awareness” in an amazing amount of feedback loops. Pull something into your noticing awareness, a tree, a coffee mug, a blue sky, whatever, and now you’re creating reality! See you next month. EZ

 Dr. Zabiegalski is available to talk to your organization or venue about this ground-breaking research or speak informatively and eloquently about organizational culture, leadership, strategy, learning, complexity, neuroscience in business, creativity, mindfulness, talent management, personal success, emotional intelligence, and Action Learning. Contact Eric Today.