Dave’s Whiteboard

Series: The brain rules!

John Medina’s brain rule 11 says, “Mail and female brains are different.” He’s examining gender differences, which can be genetic, neuroanatomic, or behavioral.

Genetically, all men are momma’s boys. Women inherit two sets of X chromosomes (one from mom, one from dad), and apparently individual cells choose, randomly, which inheritance to activate. But men receive the X chromosome only from their mothers. And many genes on the X chromosome create proteins involved in the manufacturing of the brain.

So what are some of the neuroanatomical differences?

• Difference in the size and thickness of the cortex.
• Differences in the limbic system, which influences emotions.
• Differences in the amygdala, which controls and remembers emotions.
• Differences in regulating serotonin, which regulates emotion and mood. (Men synthesize serotonin 50% faster than women.)

Do these differences mean anything? Medina says we don’t know. But we’re trying to find out.

You have probably heard the term left brain vs. right brain. You may have heard that this underscores creative vs. analytical people. That’s a folk tale, the equivalent of saying the left side of a luxury liner is responsible for keeping the ship afloat, and the right side is responsible for making it over through the water.

Both sides are involved in both processes. That doesn’t mean the hemispheres are equal, however. The right side of the brain tends to remember the gist of an experience, and the left brain tends to remember the details.

Behavioral differences

Males suffer more from mental retardation, and the X chromosome is often involved. (Remember, women have a backup set of X chromosomes; men don’t.)

Men are more severely afflicted by schizophrenia; women, by depression.

Most alcoholics and drug addicts are male; most anorexics are female.

Medina discusses the work Deborah Tannen has done in studying verbal behavior. His summary: “Women are better at it.”

How much is genetic and how much is socially influenced may be impossible to tell — but the differences are clear early in life in such areas as building relationships and negotiating status. Those patterns are reinforced and greatly influence our interpersonal verbal behavior as adults.

Some final thoughts from Medina on using this data in the real world:

Get the facts straight on emotions.

Emotions matter because they make the brain pay attention. Men and women process certain emotions differently. That means they pat attention in different ways.

Medina recounts an experiment dealing with how men and women reaction to emotional stress. The tendency is for men to activate the right side of the brain (the gist), and for women to activate the left (details).

Question gender arrangements.

Are single-sex classrooms better? We haven’t experimented enough to know. They may depend on age, on subject, and certainly on the techniques for fostering learning.

Notice gender in the workplace.

Here’s Medina, recounting a presentation at the Boeing Leadership Center:

I said, “Sometimes women are accused of being more emotional than men, from the home to the workplace. I think that women might not be any more emotional than anyone else.”

I explained that because women perceive their emotional landscape with more data points (that’s the detail) and see it in greater resolution, women may simply have more information to which they are capable of reacting. If men perceived the same number of data points, they might have the same number of reaction.

Take management training, Medina says. Often it involves various complex simulations. Have unisex teams and mixed-gender teams. Then give one team of each type some training related to these real gender differences and their implications.

So you’ve got uni-untrained, mixed-untrained, uni-trained, mixed-trained. Real-world outcomes (and maybe a master’s thesis).

Which side of your brain is firing right now?

Photo of the General Post Office in Dublin by informatique / William Murphy.
Detail of the GPO’s name in Irish by jaqian.

My side trip yesterday, griping about the less-than-helpful response to a local water problem, has blossomed into a case study. From today’s Washington Post (Montgomery’s Alert System Stayed Silent):

• “…The two employees who know how to operate [the county's e-mail 'emergency alert' system] were out of town…”
• “…A third employee who was supposed to run it said that he had never been trained…”
• “…A fourth employee who was found eight hours later knew how to operate it but failed to send out any alerts.”
• “The e-mail system is the county’s primary method for contacting residents in emergencies without relying on radio or television.”

According to the county’s homeland security director, “The system worked. We failed.” He also said, according to the Post, that no employees would be disciplined but that “he would look into training issues.”

I’m not sure what “worked” — the fact that they noticed a 48-inch water main had broken?

I don’t want to pile on here. It’s more that “training” in this context is a hidden discrimination — a sort of cognitive clown car with its doors shut. We each look at it and associate it with our own particular experience of cars, not necessarily another person’s experience and not necessarily what’s in this particular car.

My hunch is that under the “training” label, you’ll find lots of things: paper-based systems rather than automatic ones, an e-mail distribution list that doesn’t include outside addresses for the sender (so he’ll know people got the alert), competing expectations, dosages of “training” given about as often as tetanus shots…

So here’s a one-page guide to performance problem analysis, just in case the cause of the problem is not restricted to a lack of skill or knowledge. (Click for full size.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

I’ve been a bit inward focused the last few days. Maybe that’s why Cognitive Daily’s post about sounds in the office was so enjoyable. (The full title: Office noise: Are your homicidal thoughts about your noisy officemate justified?)

Dave Munger examines various studies dealing with noise in the workplace. Most of them looked at industrial settings. That makes sense; I spent a summer working at Chrysler’s Warren Stamping plant, and it was surprising, when I got off work, how quiet Mound Road sounded.

“…in general, when people can’t control the noise in their environment, they are less willing to persist on a difficult task.”

The post deals mostly with the study of clerical workers coping with random noise — typing, voices, doors opening and closing. Not all that surprisingly, people who couldn’t control much of the noise around them have higher stress levels and lower productivity.

(Since lately I’m working from my home office, the noise level is pretty much up to me, except on lawn-mowing day, so that can’t be my excuse.)

Almost as interesting to read is the post are the comments that follow it, including this gem:

Interesting choice of words in the title. Have y’all spent quality time in a cube farm? ;) If I had to go back, my choice of ‘natural masking’ device would be a gas-powered leafblower, or perhaps a chainsaw.

I enjoyed the following trip in the time machine.  Notice how Remington Typewriter centers its pitch on how much noise the secretary is making.  You know, she’s the one doing work.

“Stop and listen for a minute. How noisy is your office and who’s making all the noise? Chances are the greatest noise source of all is your secretary. Her clattering typewriter not only makes a lot of noise, but forces the whole level of office conversation to rise above it contributing more to the general office din. How does this noise affect you and everyone else in your offices…”

I’ve worked on assignment more than once at locations that used PA systems to contact individual employees. At the pharmaceutical plant, perhaps that made sense — not everyone had a cell phone, but everyone could dial a paging number and ask Phil Mackenzie to dial 3456. But at the office of a computer services company, with thirty or forty people working in cubicles, why have a voice from heaven every ten minutes, “Colleen Burton, line 3… Colleen Burton, line 3?”

Vintage Remington ad and caption by anniebee / Anne Bowerman.

Series: The brain rules!

In John Medina’s Brain Rules, rule #2 says, “The human brain evolved, too.” This chapter focuses on how our brains developed. One factor in that development was that our ancestors gave up on consistency. They didn’t have much choice; the changing environment slowly, steadily pushed them out of the trees and onto the grasslands.

Instead of learning how to survive in just one or two ecological niches we took on the entire globe. Those unable to rapidly solve new problems or learn from mistakes didn’t survive long enough to pass on their genes. The net effect of this evolution was that we didn’t become stronger; we became smarter. We learn to grow our fangs not in the mouth it in the head.

As Medina points out, learning to walk upright — something you can’t do in the trees — freed up our hands and was also energy-efficient, freeing energy to build and fuel our minds.

As we evolved, our brains became larger. The triune model sees three brains:

• The brain stem, or lizard brain, controlling basic functions like breathing, heart rate, sleeping.
• The mammalian brain, dealing with functions like “fighting, feeding, fueling, and… reproductive behavior.”
• The cerebral cortex or the human brain, managing most of what we think of as higher reasoning.

How did we manage this evolutionarily? We developed childhood.

Much of our brainpower develops after birth, which means our survival depends on adults who can protect children. we had to learn how to cooperate. We can form impressions about the internal states of other people, something known as the theory of mind.

Suppose you are not the biggest person on the block, but you have thousands of years to become one. What do you do? If you are an animal, the most straightforward approach is becoming physically bigger… but there is another way to double your biomass. It’s not by creating a body but by creating an ally. If you can establish cooperative agreements with some of your neighbors, you can double your power even if you do not personally told your strength.

Another major trait we developed is the ability to reason symbolically. Here, too, we need time. Under the age of three, children don’t reason symbolically very well. Past that age, they can grasp and wield powerful human tools like language; they can reason; and they can deliberately set out to learn.

Brain photo by jj_judes / Jude.

Tony Karrer pointed the way to Lifehack, which apparently had been hiding on the dark side of my conceptual moon. Perhaps because I’d been talking about feeds with a friend, I liked Dustin Wax’s post about going on a high-information diet. Here’s his input test:

• Is this input making me better informed?
• If not, is there any entertainment or social value I receive from this input?
• If so, is the entertainment or social value worth the time and effort to maintain the input?

Apply the Input Test to your email newsletters, RSS feeds, TV selections, magazine subscriptions, podcasts, and so on. Don’t let yourself fall into the trap of keeping something around in case someday in the future something important comes down the tube! There’s no piece of information so important that it can only be found amid a heaping mountain of crap — and so rare that you won’t find out about it otherwise.

Wax brought to mind Bertrand Russell’s notion that the time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. Managing your inputs is something like the principles that guided A Cookbook for Poor Poets and Others:

• Always use real butter.
• Always serve fresh bread.
• Always serve wine.

Those rules didn’t mean only do those things; they means focus on the purpose and experience of the meal. Wax is reminded me to do the same with my info-gathering. And if I’m gathering for the fun of it, be aware that’s what I’m doing, and stop when it’s no longer fun.

Healthy Diet Coke photo by Lance McCord.