The Surprising Reason Brain Science Won’t Change Your Life (written by an ex-neuroscientist)
I bet you can’t tell which of these statements is true.
I bet you can’t tell which of these statements is true.
You’re either right brained or left brained.
Love is really just dopamine.
Half of all people can’t tell the difference between a walnut and a brain.
Are any of them true? All of them?
I spent a few years running a multi-million dollar developmental neuroscience lab at one of the top research institutions in the U.S.
I was bright eyed and eager when I started. I was working with some brilliant people, and the best part was; I was almost always the dumbest person in the room.
(It was hard. Here’s another post I wrote about Imposter Syndrome. TL;DR: it’s normal. Don’t freak out.)
The whole reason I got into neuroscience was because I felt like the field of Psychology was too wishy-washy. It didn’t feel ‘sciencey’ enough.
Hard science shows results, right?
Well, if you haven’t already predicted what happened: I found out that science (in general) makes many assumptions.
These size of these assumptions can mean whether or not we should believe the results. Sometimes, the assumptions are small enough that they don’t really matter for the problem we’re trying to solve.
Sometimes the assumptions are so big, that we need to break the experiment down into smaller pieces to feel confident enough that our results aren’t just due to chance.
Okay, what does science have to do with productivity, projects, startups, motivation, or any other content on Medium?
Here’s the thing: most of us aren’t scientists (or ex-scientists). Most of us have no idea how to design an experiment.
And I don’t mean design an experiment with dry ice, beakers, and lots of swirly glass . . .
An experiment is anything you do to figure out a solution to a problem.
Why aren’t customers buying our product from our “Buy Now!” page?
Why is our open rate so low?
Why is it that we have such high staff turnover?
It’s your job to figure out why. Not guess.
THAT’S an experiment!
When I was in college, I spent a lot of time criticizing sophomoric grad students as they designed experiments for the fMRI scanner that essentially asked questions like “let’s have people do this thing and then see what lights up.”
This is absurd.
This is like saying: let’s put up a billboard that says “Come eat at our restaurant and stuff!” and then walking back to the restaurant and waiting to see what happens.
Why does this suck?
You’ve set up no way to track which people saw the sign.
You have no way of knowing which people saw the sign and still didn’t eat at your restaurant.
You have no way of reaching out to sign readers who are on the fence about eating at your place or at your competitors’ place and swaying them one way or the other.
The bottom line: If you see an increase in customers, you have no way of knowing if it was due to the billboard or that conference that happened down the block.
You have just spent a lot of money on something that is now useless to you.
I soon discovered that there were plenty of published papers in neuroscience that had the same hypothesis: let’s put a lot of people in the scanner for $500/hr and then speculate about the results.
PUBLISHED PAPERS!
And they weren’t in garbage journals, either. They were published in journals like Science and Nature!
If you don’t have an expectation that can be falsified before you start, you’re not proving anything.
This is easier than you think. All you’ve got to do is ask:
What should happen?
What shouldn’t happen?
It’s usually easier than you think to use this mentality of “experiment design” to solve problems in your business, projects, and in your personal life.
Here are some really quick tactical examples:
Share a coupon code to see how many people saw your ad and took action.
Build a free ‘heat map’ to track click behavior on your website.
Create two restaurant menus (an A/B test) to see which one generates a higher dinner check.
It takes an extra 5 seconds to put some intention into your life — and it will make all the difference.
Still not convinced?
Here’s a study that a few scientists did at The University of California Santa Barbara that showed valid brain activation in a cold, dead, Atlantic Salmon:
I’m not kidding. You can’t make this stuff up.
This is same technology being used in neuroscience across the globe.
And these scientists found brain activation in a DEAD, frozen salmon.
(for those of you who choose to read this, a ‘voxel’ is just a 3D ‘pixel.’ It’s just how we partition 3D stuff into little blocks that we can study and talk about.)
Okay, so here are the spoilers from the intro:
There’s no such thing as right brained and left brained.
Yes, while it’s true that the brain has lots of different types of cells organized into circuits that relate to certain hormones, neither hemisphere corresponds with personality types, creativity, or logicality.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson unpacks this here.
Besides, I’m a firm believer that creativity is requisite of expert-level analytical thinking.
Love is not just dopamine and stuff.
Emotions are complex, nuanced interactions between lots of different hormones, stimuli, biologies. Just because dopamine plays a major role in your “pleasure and reward system,” doesn’t mean it’s as simple as saying it’s love.
Science has no definition for love. There’s even a real scientific debate over whether or not love is an emotion at all.
My personal belief (and this is my opinion) is that love isn’t an emotion, but it sure as hell makes you feel emotions.
(Aside: would seriously love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments. )
50% of people can’t tell the difference between a walnut and a brain.
When I took my first graduate level class in fMRI physics, my professor showed us a picture of two brains on the projector (yeah, we still used projectors).
He said: “Look closely. One of these is a brain. The other is a walnut.”
About 50% of the class guessed correctly. These are the same odds as a coin toss. That means the class would have scored the exact same, even if everyone closed their eyes and guessed.
TAKE ACTION:
How will you experiment in your life and work?
How will you choose to intentionally move your project, business, or family forward with your test results?
Either you’re using your brain in your work and life or you’re not — and your brain is getting better at whichever you’re doing right now.
If you build a habit of analytical and creative experimentation, it’s not only going to get easier every day, but it’ll help you think that way in every aspect of your life.
Your choice to use it or lose it.
I’ve scanned a lot of brains, and let me tell you, there are plenty of adults walking around out there in the world and functioning — without any brains at all.
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