May 2010 – Page 8 – Simon Fowler

rLiving Day 11: Neuroscience 1 (Directness)

It turns out, according to neuroscience research gathered together in David Rock’s popular book, Your Brain at Work, that our brains are wired for social connection.

No WAY!? I hear you thinking.

Sorry for the sarcasm. But just writing that first sentence made me realize how ‘duh!’ it is that the brain would be wired in such a way that matches how we experience life. Anyway, here’s a tidbit of the neuroscience (social cognitive neuroscience, to be precise) that appears to support “Directness”. And it’s all based on recent (since 1995) discoveries of “mirror neurons”.

Image: UCLA

Relational Proximity Dimension #1 is “Directness”. My relationship with someone is better and healthier the less mediated it is. It can be mediated by technology or other people: these reduce our ability to communicate fully. It can also be mediated, even when face to face, by dishonesty and fakeness: there’s a real me and a real you, any fronts we put up reduces directness.

It’s a pretty cool discovery actually (despite my ‘duh!’ comment). Mirror neurons, scattered throughout the brain, light up when they observe “intentional action”. That is, they won’t light up if they see random acts, but if they discern intent behind the action, the same neurons fire in their brains as though they themselves were doing it. (Effects of commercials on children, anyone?). The powerful limbic system that triggers a response to threats or rewards obviously kicks in once the intent has been discerned. Here’s the explanation from Christian Keysers, a leading mirror neuron research based in Holland:

What happens is that when we witness another’s facial expressions, we activate the same in our own motor cortex, but we also transmit this information to the insula, involved in our emotions. When I see your facial expression, I get the movement of your face, which drives the same motor response on my face, so a smile gets a smile. The motor resonance is also sent on to your own emotional centers, so you share the emotion of the person in front of you.” (p160)

Here are a couple of other quotes from the book that seem to support the idea that ‘directness’ is an important factor in building good relationships:

“The more social cures that are stripped out of communication, the greater the likelihood that the intent will be misread. “The more we can see each other, the better we can match emotional states”. (P160)

Collaboration with people you don’t know well is a threat for the brain. Perhaps, after millions of years living in small groups, the automatic response to strangers is “don’t trust them”. (p162)

An abundance of social cues makes people connect more richly, perhaps in challenging ways at times. For example, when there is an abundance of social cues, emotional information can travel swiftly between people in a type of contagion. p161

And now a few application thoughts/questions (some mine, some from the book):
1) Workplace learning. What learning performance is lost with online training? Do virtual worlds provide a close enough approximation to real-life that our brains might learn social behaviors from avatars? Is there an optimum amount of time a team needs to gather face to face to be most effective? (I’ve misplaced a piece of research MIT did on that, something to do with a ‘pulse’ (gathering, moving away to research, coming back again, pulse-like).

2) Management. Think that your attitude or stress-level has no effect on your workers? Their brains can’t help but be affected by you.

3) Communication. Precisely because we don’t want to discern another person’s reaction (and therefore trigger a reaction of our own), we resort to sending emails, or doing nothing, rather than face them.

4) Autism spectrum. It appears that mirror neurons show damage in people with autism. It also appears that therein lies a clue to a better response/treatment.

What would you add?

rLiving Day 10: Family (Relational Proximity)

The girls were playing around in bed tonight, avoiding going to their own beds. They’d had a few spats today, as most days. But they were having a laugh now and suddenly M~ (3yrs old) grabbed C~ (5yrs old) around the leg and gave her the biggest squeeze saying, “I wuv you C~!”. I’m sure tomorrow at some point they’ll be screaming again. That’s what happens in families.

Who are the people most important to you? With whom do you have the most significant relationships?

I suspect you included, perhaps exclusively, ‘family’.

Why is that? Is it just, well, because? Maybe relational proximity explains why families end up being the most significant relationships we have even if they’re not the best. Relational proximity doesn’t guarantee relational health, it provides the basis of possibility for health. Here’s a quick attempt at working through the model in the context of families. I’m going to try it as though looking back. But first here’s a quick recap of the five dimensions:

1. Directness – the degree to which the relationship is unmediated and truthful
2. Continuity – the degree to which it has a history, the parties meet regularly, and it has an expected future
3. Multiplexity – the degree to which the parties know each other through different contexts
4. Parity – the degree to which there is a symmetry in power
5. Commonality/Purpose – the degree to which they share a sense of common purpose or identity

So here’s an attempt at looking at all five with respect to the health of family relationships.

1. Directness
+ We’ve shared physical space, face to face; our real selves have been more exposed to each other (at least in the early years, but even later it’s difficult to fake it) because it’s really hard to keep up a pretense ALL the time.
– Lack of face to face time with parents or even siblings has been a grievous loss (even if we got used to it).

2. Continuity
+ We’ve seen each other daily, weekly, monthly for years and years; we have a lifetime of shared history, and an unquestioned anticipation of a future relationship until the day we die.
– Moving away to different cities or countries, while not changing the deep sense of belonging, prevents us knowing each other as we are now (so we end up regressing to our teens whenever we meet!)

3. Multiplexity
+ The number of different things we’ve done as a family, the number of contexts we’ve seen each other in, is almost uncountable. So we really, really know each other, whether we like it or not!
– We were always taken to events and other activities by other people, not our mom or dad. We only had a domestic life together – eating or chores – we never did anything else, so I never knew what they were capable of.

4. Power
+ We felt safe and protected and also respected; encouraged to try things out knowing we had a back-stop.
– We felt scared and intimidated. We loathed the pain and humiliation.

5. Commonality/Purpose
+ We all had the same last name! We had the same blood. As an adopted child I never felt anything other than their true son/brother. We didn’t exist just for ourselves, we realized that as a family we could serve others.
– I was the outsider, the black sheep. We were expected to follow the family business, as though that was more important than just being family.

I’m not sure these are the best examples. But I think it’s possible to see that you need to have all the positive elements of these five to even have a chance to loving each other.

Do these resonate with you? Do the five dimensions help explain the dynamics of your family?

rLiving Day 9: Time (Directness)

Exactly. There doesn’t seem to be enough of it, does there. It’s also the ultimate disposable item. You use it once, and then it’s gone, and you have to use up some more. We spend a third of our lives asleep (if we’re lucky). And our time will come to an end at a completely unpredictable point. So we’d better choose wisely what to do with it.

Relational Proximity Dimension #1 is “Directness”. Our relationship with someone is better and healthier if we actually encounter one another face to face rather than our relationship be contingent upon something or someone else.

People I know: I have 231 friends on facebook. I follow 409 people on twitter (followed by 374). I work with about 100 people worldwide (plus another 100 in our extended Resource Network). I think I have almost 500 people in my email list, but it must be more than that. My church, of which I’m an elder – one of 12, basically like an elected leader on a board of trustees, except it’s a church! – has almost 2,000 regular people (the irregular ones are banned! 🙂 ). I don’t know how to count people I knowI have six sisters, six brothers-in-law, and 14 nephews and nieces (none of whom live in the US). I used to know by name over 100 homeless men and women in London. I was in a church there for several hundred too. I don’t even know how to count my circle of friends back in London and now in Boston.

Time: Today I spent about 2 hrs 45 minutes “on my own”. I spent an hour praying this morning, and another hour doing some work. Then I spent about 45 minutes in the car on my own, shopping and going to and from helping someone move house. The rest, about 12 hrs, I spent with people; my wife and girls, with the girls swimming, with some friends helping them move house, and a little with the neighbors (“Adrienne” & “Keith” and their children) when they popped over. So that was one day of my life with, say, 8 of my family and friends. I’m sorry about the other two and half thousand people.

My gut tells me that spending more time with fewer people is a good idea. And probably best also to spend it with people I can actually see and touch. Let’s say we want to deepen our relationships with a few people, say, ten. If it’s true that encounter relationships are stronger, healthier, more satisfying, then we probably need to make some sacrifices of other relationships in terms of time spent. That’s because to spend time with some, especially face to face, you’re necessarily not spending it with others. There’s a choice to be made. And if you’re going to keep meeting regularly (continuity), do a bunch of different things together so you get to know the full dimensions of each other (multiplexity), then that’s gonna eat up a whole bunch of time and it’s most likely going to need you to be in the same physical space.

My main point is about time, obviously. I think we’d do well to make better decisions about spending more time, face to face, with fewer people. But it’s obviously not that straightforward because most of us have dear friends we can’t see face to face often. And we want to deepen those. I want to and need to spend more time on the phone or skype or email with my family and friends across the pond and around the world. But the main point of all this is about relationships, and relational health. And I think we think we can just keeping adding people to our lives without detriment to present relationships. But a lot of us are lonely with lots of friends.

How does the way you spend your time correlate with the quality of your relationships?