Welcome to Your Brain

In case you're worried, yes, I haven't given my life over entirely to American Idol at the expense of my schoolwork. (I've only given it over at the expense of my accounting class.) As a matter of fact, I've recently been doing a lot of reading outside of my classes.

My brand management class (which is probably my favorite BYU MBA class to date) began with a discussion of the brain--we couldn't understand branding, my professor said, until we understand how the brain works.

It was shortly after this that I was listening to an NPR podcast--an interview with the author of Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life. The interview was absolutely fascinating as the author debunked a few myths (such as the old wive's tale that we only use 10% of our brains) and explained several interesting brain facts. Here are a few:

• Our brains aren't designed to use logic. Instead, our brains our designed to make a pretty good decision really fast. (The author explains that this is a product of evolution--if we see something in the bushes, our brain needs to immediately tell us "That's a lion! Run!" rather than "There's a 30% chance that's a lion.")
  
  
• However, good decision making is tied not only to logic, but also to emotion. Several studies were cited where people with brain damage in the emotional part of their brains were indecisive and slow to act.
  
  
• Contrary to popular thought, the way our brains record memories is very different from the way a VCR records a TV show. When we remember something, we're actually remembering the last time we remembered it. (So, to ultra-simplify, if Event X happens to me Monday, and I remember it Tuesday, and then I remember it again on Wednesday--on Wednesday I was actually remembering the thoughts I was having about Event X on Tuesday, not the true memories of Event X on Monday. Make sense?) Anyway, this is why we often remember things about our childhood differently than they actually were.
  
  
• One thing I found particularly fascinating was the author's refutation of the traditional left-brain right-brain idea. The myth is that the left brain is the logical side of the brain and the right side is emotive/creative. While there is some truth to that, she said, there are also some huge exceptions. For example, the left side of the brain is where storytelling comes from, derived from something called confabulation. What this basically means is that the logical part of your brain wants things to make sense, and if they don't make sense then your brain makes things up to fill in the gaps. (Studies have shown, for example, that witnesses to car accidents or crimes often report details that they've never seen--the brain is trying to make sense of something senseless.)

Though not the point of the book, the author also referenced several tangential studies that I found interesting:

• There is an enormous correlation between female test scores and declaration of their gender. The author said that, if the first question on a test is "Gender: [] Male [] Female", women/girls will tend to score about ten percent lower than they normally would. (The implication being that society still reinforces in women the notion that they're not as smart, and having to state their gender raises all sorts of unconscious self-doubts that affect their abilities to perform on the test.)
  
  
• Even though males and females have almost idential average IQs, male brains tend to have a larger distribution of IQ--a wider bell curve--meaning that men are more likely than women to be brilliant--and stupid. The explanation for this was evolutionary: women are more essential to a society than men, and so nature gives men more variance. In other words, biology takes more risks with men--hoping for a few geniuses--because men are expendable. (I find this whole study to be 18 kinds of bizarre.)
  
  
• The oft-repeated theory that listening to Mozart is certainly misunderstood and most likely bogus. The original study was done with a group of college students, and it was shown to increase their test scores in a very specific area of thought. (I believe she said spatial reasoning, but I'm not 100% certain.) Since that study in 1993, people have projected that theory onto all kinds of things--such as the Baby Einstein products--despite the fact that (1) the IQ increase was only in a very specific type of thinking, (2) it was only proven to work in college students, not babies or children, (3) it was only proven to work for 15 minutes after the music was turned off, and (4) they've never been able to recreate the study--so it might not actually work at all.

Anyway, after looking into that book, I decided to pick up another book on the brain, this one focused on marketing: How Customers Think. This one is quirky but interesting. More than anything, it's a rather damning diatribe against traditional market research. Early on, the authors point out that all other facets of business seem to change and evolve--new management techniques, new organizational models, Six Sigma, Lean, etc.--but market research seems to be deeply entrenched in the same old surveys and focus groups.

This book also gets into the brain. I'm running out of time before I have to get to my next class, but here are a couple highlights:

• 95% of our decision making happens unconsciously.
  
  
• People don't think in words--we think mostly in images.
  
  
• Because of those previous two, asking people (in words) why they made a decision (like buying a product) will seldom give you a true explanation. The book describes this as the difference between "knowing that" and "knowing why". We can do market research showing that 18-30 year old men buy Product X, but that doesn't explain why they buy it.

Anyway, the book is fascinating, but I've got class in twenty minutes. I'll try to write more about it later.