As we make our way into the summer months, I am often asked "What would you recommend that I read this summer as I lie on the beach?" After suggesting everything from Grisham to Flynn (while strongly endorsing Andrea Camilleri), I have come to realize that by jumping to alternatives I am not practicing what I teach. The question is clearly a decision analysis requiring criteria or objectives before making any recommendation. Correct? After a few such encounters over the years, I know understand that most people have far better sources for action novels than me and what they really want are recommendations on what to read to gain a better understanding of neuroscience and its applications to business. Still, we would all agree that taking a highly-technical, scientific journal to the beach is more than likely to add only a bit of exercise as one carries it from the car to their lodging of choice and then back to the car at vacation's end; the probability of it actually making it to the beach are pretty low (I know as I have carried a few myself).

So against this understanding the most important criteria are that any such recommendation be both informative and entertaining - with "entertaining" measured from the perspective of being able to deliver on the "oh wow" factor thereby increasing its probability of actually arriving at the beach. Evaluated against these criteria, and assuming you have not already read his Phantoms in the Brain, I suggest

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran's The Telltale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest For What Makes Us Human. Ramachandran does a very good job of introducing the basics (informative) while at the same time fully exploiting his ability as a good storyteller (entertaining).  Those of you beyond the introductory stage will be similarly rewarded, again assuming you have not read his Phantoms in the Brain.

Through the NeuroLeadership Institute and its annual Summits (this year in San Francisco in early November) I have had the good fortune to meet many of the leading neuroscientists most influencing the application of neuroscience to day-to-day life. Ramachandran is one of the few that I have not had the opportunity to meet personally. I first encountered him in a very interesting video on Mirror Neurons (Google "NOVA Mirror Neurons video" and take the time to watch this interesting, informative, 14-minute video). A simple search on YouTube under his name generates several other interesting videos that will add significantly to your understanding of developments in the field. I particularly like, and can relate to, the way he positions himself within the science:

As the biologist Peter Medawar pointed out, "All good science emerges from an imaginative conception of what might be true." I realize, however, that in spite of this disclaimer I will probably annoy at least some of my colleagues [by this book]. But as Lord Reith, the first director-general of the BBC, once pointed out, "There are some people whom it is one's duty to annoy." [Tell-Tale Brain, at xvii (emphasis in original)]

True to his convictions, and what causes him to be both interesting and controversial, is his willingness to look beyond the science - specifically, the data or better the lack of data - and speculate as to what he thinks lies just beyond our current reach. In our applications of neuroscience to leadership, this way of thinking is an integral, indispensable ingredient. As we absorb Ramachandran's thinking where he speculates, our particular experience with the application of neuroscience to leadership not infrequently comes to a different conceptualization, which only serves to make the importance of the integration of neuroscience and leadership research so very fundamental.

Within our development model - in brief, self-awareness, social-awareness, understanding the brain's threat and reward circuitry, and self-regulation - the fundamental neuroscience notions of neuroplasticity and the functioning of our mirror neuron system play a significant role. Neural plasticity refers to the brain's ability to change as a result of one's experience; in this sense, the brain is said to be "plastic" or "malleable" (A very informative and entertaining - our criteria - on this subject is Dr. Norman Doidge's The Brain That Changes Itself). Ramachandran is recognized for exploring the phenomenon of a "phantom limb" -- when an arm or leg is amputated, some patients continue to feel the presence of the missing limb - on the basis of neural plasticity. Ramachandran was the first to suggest that phantom limbs might be due to changes in the brain, rather than in the peripheral nerves (He tells the story of how he was able to discover a map of a missing hand on a patient's face by using a damp cotton swab and a glass of water - a fascinating story!). Within our personal development system, neural plasticity forms the scientific basis for change, working to alter an individual's ineffective habitual responses to various situations based on self-regulatory ability and their SCARF profile. In fact, next month we will be looking at a very important book to be released in early June by Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz entitled You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life. Most of you are aware that Jeff works with us directly.  Recall that Jeff pioneered the first mindfulness-based treatment program for people suffering from OCD, teaching patients how to achieve long-term relief from their compulsions. Based on Jeff's work, our development system is a mindfulness-based program for leaders and managers who want to be more effective in working with others.

Neuroscientists assert that, unlike other creatures, humans possess language, empathy, humor, the capacity for abstract thinking and self- and social-awareness. This line of thinking is particularly fundamental to our development system and relates directly to the neuroscience notion of mirror neurons (Again, against our "informative" and "entertaining" criteria, another book focused wholly on mirror neurons that I would recommend is Professor Marco Iacoboni's Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others). Recall that a mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when a person acts and when the person observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were acting. This system provides the physiological mechanism for our understanding of the emotions and actions of others (and their understanding of ours). Ramachandran, who has said that the discovery of mirror neurons is one of the most important recent discoveries in neuroscience ("They will do for psychology what DNA did for biology") goes much further and speculates that they allow for learning new skills by imitation (in this sense, are fundamental to developing language ability) and may explain autism (defective mirror neurons).  As he argues in the NOVA video suggested above, Ramachandran believes that a dramatic surge in the development of mirror neurons explains the birth of distinctively human mental abilities and culture about 150,000 years ago.

Much of The Tell-Tale Brain is a general tour of neuroscience well beyond "phantom" limbs and mirror neurons. In implicitly laying the neuroscience groundwork for personal development, Ramachandran proposes an ambitious framework to explain the self and the brain "wiring" that may constraint the self from flourishing. Ramachandran's unique background has allowed him to undertake pioneering work in the areas of visual perception and synesthesia - a family of benign syndromes in which the senses become commingled (For example, letters and numbers that are printed in black and white are perceived as being colored). Many of his findings and follow-on speculations arise from specific case histories. A patient with de Clérambault's syndrome, for example, "defined as a young woman developing an obsessive delusion that a much older and famous man is madly in love with her, but he is in denial about it." Or the amusing case of the man whose wife looked like a new woman every time he saw her. Reflective of his storytelling humor, Ramachandran tells us that when he told the man's lawyer "We should all be so lucky," the lawyer hung up on him. By uncovering the neural basis of such disorders, he hopes to come up with "deep insights into our marvelous uniqueness" - in our words, the neural bases for personal improvement and development.

In closing, I would like to add two disclaimers of my own, one specific to this book and the other intended as food for thought. I have had the opportunity to review several neuroscience books prior to their publication over the past few years. In several cases, I have felt compelled to suggest to the authors that they delete specific, unnecessary, references to politicians and political events that have little, if any thing, to do with the topic at hand. In some cases, the authors took the advice and made the necessary deletions; others, for reasons and motivations that are perhaps worthy of study on their own, chose not to. Although I did not review Ramachandran's book, it is unfortunate that his reviewers did not offer him the same advice. Although in his case he arguably makes such references in jest, some of you are going to be put off and so I feel compelled to prepare you in advance.

The second disclaimer is far more general, and perhaps more personal, in nature. As little as five years ago most people had never heard the word "neuroscience." In a very short period of time, with the continuing advent of more precise technologies, neuroscience is rapidly beginning to enter into our day-to-day lives in meaningful and purposeful ways. In this sense, I read an interesting article in the April 2011 edition of Scientific American by Professor Michael S. Gazzaniga, a noted neuroscientist. The relationship between neuroscience and the law is a subject about which he has been writing and studying now for more than five years. In that particular article, he discusses the use of brain scans to establish mental states and the veracity of witnesses in courtroom settings. In closing, he states the following:

Exciting as the advances that neuroscience is making everyday are, all of us should look with caution at how they may gradually come to be incorporated into our culture. The legal relevance of neuroscientific discoveries is only part of the picture. Might we someday want brain scans of our fiancées, business partners or politicians ... ? As the scientific understanding of human nature continues to evolve, our moral stance on how we wish to manage a just society will shift as well. No one I know wants to rush into a new framework without extreme care being given to each new finding. Yet no one can ignore the changes on the horizon.  (Scientific American, April 2011, at 59)

Inadvertently, Professor Gazzaniga  has touched upon an issue of increasing significance to our evolving field of NeuroLeadership. If you go back and reread the excerpt, note that he has unintentionally (I am very confident in so presuming) focused on using neuroscience and its supporting technologies as selection tools - selecting a spouse, selecting a business partner, selecting a politician. I wholeheartedly agree with his concern. Increasingly, we are being asked about the viability of our system technology to prescreen and identify difficult, problematic individuals. While others will clearly meet this need in the marketplace, CIMBA remains fully committed to performance improvement tools - tools whose purpose it is to make individuals more effective (raising their "Happiness" coefficient, if you will). Ask yourself: Where does a "rejected" candidate go to overcome the shortcomings "diagnosed" by neuroscience-driven technologies? Given the seeming abhorrence in the vast majority of business schools worldwide to tools, techniques, and technologies available to make significant improvements in an individual's behavioral or "Being" component, is the answer to the question a discouraging "Nowhere?" I look forward to us addressing this specific topic in more detail together in future ABCs.