Creating Passionate Users

Think... or be afraid

The most important thing I've learned about humans came from a horse (that's us in the photo--Kathy and Kara--taken yesterday), but it's backed up by brain research on humans.

It comes down to one simple concept:

You can't be afraid and rational at the same time. Pick one.

For the science-minded, you learn more about this in neuroscientist Richard Restak's book on fear and anxiety, Poe's Heart and the Mountain Climber, but here's the basic idea:

You're about to step into the street when out of the corner of your eye a car appears. There is a gap between when your brain perceives the car and when you are consciously aware of the car and can think about it. That gap could mean the difference between you being flattened by the car and... not. There are simply too many situations where you just don't have time to wait for your cortex to kick in, so your brain has another mechanism for acting without the overhead of involving your cortex first. And even if your cortex did get the news, taking the time to think could get you killed... by the time you come up with a plan, it's too late to execute.

And thousands of years ago, the humans who did NOT stop to think were the ones who stayed alive long enough to... breed. Their "wait, I have to weigh the tradeoffs here" counterparts were clubbed to death, eaten by tigers, and flattened by falling boulders. Darwin won, and here we are stuck with legacy brains.

Fortunately, you DO have a cortex that gets the message, eventually. And it's the thinking cortex that stops you from, say, perceiving a horror movie as an actual threat to your life. But if you're continuously in a state of fear over something, your cortex is not going to be running the show; the emotional subsystems stay in charge, and you're more likely to use instinct than logic.

With my horse, if I want her to continue to think, I have to work at keeping her from being afraid. And when she is afraid, the best way to calm her down is to give her something to think about, like a puzzle to solve. Something challenging but not inherently scary like maybe a "figure out which trick will earn you a carrot" game, or having her walk backward through a gate instead of forward. And that means I have to teach her how to solve these puzzles during those times when she is not afraid, so that I have something to use when she is.

It works on people, too, but there's something else to consider... the dark side of the equation. Imagine that you did want someone to be afraid, because you specifically do not want them thinking rationally and logically. What if your goal is to convince them to do something that's not in their best interest? One approach is to make sure that they stay as fearful and anxious as possible, to make it more difficult for them to focus and think rationally. It's a trick that's been used by governments, managers, manipulate family members, and advertisers for ages.

We all need to recognize when someone's doing that to us. And I would start with the television "if it bleeds it leads" news. Unlike television shows, movies, and video games--which your brain knows aren't real--a brain perceives the news as "real" and often concludes that things are far more dangerous than they really are, thanks to the dramatic statistic imbalance (reality distortion field) between what is displayed on the news and what is actually happening outside your front door. It's not like you'll ever hear, for example, a nightly new run down of all the people in your city who were NOT in fact killed in a drive-by shooting that day. The "good news" is usually a 20-second spot at the end about a rescued kitten.

And of course if you want the best from your employees, never manage through fear. And if someone's trying to manipulate you through fear, the best thing you can do is get away from the input. One idea is to use Tivo to skip the news promos, and get your news instead from the internet or radio -- according to Restak, the brain has a much saner reaction to bad news when it's not accompanied by high-resolution moving visuals. But if you can't get away, have some left-brain activities and tricks handy to try to kick-start your cortex and shift the balance of power away from the lower-level emotional subsystems in your brain. Apparently it really does help to take a deep breath and tell yourself, "OK, it's just my amygdala talking here..."
(FYI: alcohol can shift the balance of power in favor of the emotional subsystems over the cortex. The chemicals combined of fear and alcohol (especially when laced with testosterone) can be a deadly combo, so if you're drinking... go to your happy place ; ))

Of course, I'm not qualified to be talking about ANY of this, but I can tell you it definitely works with horses : ) [and this entire post was just a shameless excuse for me to include a picture of the new object of MY passion... the cutest Icelandic horse on the planet]