Tame the Primitive Brain

28 Ways in 28 Days to Manage the Most Impulsive Behaviors at Work

Mark Bowden

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118436981
• eBook ISBN: 9781118566732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Workplace Culture
• Index: Business

A new and simple system to understanding and controlling the behavior of others

Noted body language, behavior and communication expert Mark Bowden offers a totally practical, easy-to-read guide to understanding the impulsive actions of others, along with the best tools to manage them. A number one anxiety in business is dealing with problem people. In Tame the Primitive Brain, Mark Bowden's fresh approach is the fastest and most effective way to understand why someone acts towards you the way they do; why you react to their behavior in the way you do; and most importantly, what exactly to do about it to achieve the right outcomes.

• Brings new and fresh perspectives to business readers for dealing with tricky behaviors
• Explains how to effectively manage those around you at any level in an organization
• Shares the latest evolutionary behavioral theory, neuroscientific evidence, and the tried and tested tools and tricks based on these premises

This simple model of how we humans can and do relate to each other brings increased depth of understanding and expands your toolset to better manage yourself and others to achieve anything.

Week I

You

A First Look at Everything

You can’t process me with a normal brain.

—Charlie Sheen

What is this first week all about? In a single word: you. But then again every minute of every day is, in effect, about you, because you are living it. You experience life in a very personal way; we all do.

For example: Although you didn’t write this book, and can’t take responsibility for the words on the pages, you are, as you read, interpreting those words in a very specific, individual way. You cannot help but bestow your own meaning upon them. Yes, I, the writer, am supplying a stimulus with a specific response in mind for you, the reader. But in the end, your reactions are your own.

That may sound like a bit of a disclaimer. And it is. I have taken responsibility at my end. Your end I leave to you to hold up.

This section, therefore, is not only all about you and how your primitive reptilian brain innately makes initial judgments of everything in your life; it is also about the selfsame way that everyone else’s reptilian brains first see and judge their environments—the places, people, and things that exist both outside and inside of them. By reflecting, understanding, and learning some tips about how your most primitive brain instinctively operates, you will have the knowledge you need to develop the skills for managing the impulsive behavior you observe in everyone else.

By the end of the chapters in this part, you’ll be able to recognize the brain’s most primitive actions, reactions, default judgments, innate prejudices, moods, and motivations that activate the behaviors of some of your colleagues, and can make them a complete nightmare to work with.

Let’s begin by understanding how you started it!

Day 1

Shared Instincts

No One Taught You to Breathe

There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.

—Malcolm Gladwell

Today you’ll tame:

• Your automatic response

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The following is a completely true story that someone once told me about his worst presentation experience—ever. After working all morning—skipping breakfast and lunch—to fully prepare to give his first pitch to the senior leadership team, a new vice president of marketing triumphantly clicked onto his final PowerPoint slide. He dramatically pronounced the end of the presentation with the obligatory prompt: “Any questions?”

No response came, bolstering his confidence that he had given the audience every bit of information that they needed. He flipped the lights back on. The boardroom flooded with light. But to say that the reaction of the senior team was disappointing would have been an understatement.

Instead of the applause he had been counting on, all that could be heard was the embarrassingly loud snoring of the CEO—who was fast asleep at the head of the table.

Awkward—and true!

But not as awkward as what followed from the VP who had presented: His face turned bright red, just before he violently hurled his laser-pointer across the boardroom and stormed out, shouting obscenities.

Luckily, the CEO wasn’t awake for any of that, either.

I’ll return to this story at the end of the chapter.

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There are some things to which you react immediately, without thinking. You have a knee-jerk response—a reflex. Like when, on your first day back at work after vacation, you gag upon taking your first sip of coffee made with milk that has been in the staff-room fridge for over two weeks. It’s an impulse to “throw-up” the unexpectedly sour-tasting—and, potentially threatening to your health—drink.

Then there are those things you feel deep-down, at a gut level, that have to be done, and done now. You are drawn to act—it’s an instinct. Like when, after spitting out the bad coffee, you spray a whole can of Lysol into the fridge to kill all the microbial aliens you are sure must be living in it—never mind that the site-manager’s birthday cake is sitting there, ready for a staff celebration. Your compulsion to “go to war” on the contents of the cooler just kicks in; you see red, grab your chemical weapon, and all listeria must die!

So, you’ve got reflexes and you’ve got instincts. These are the initial impulses that motivate us all to take action. But what’s the difference between the two?

Well, for a start, one fact is the same about them: Nobody taught you to activate either. Both are genetically programmed.

Impulse Buying

Take, for example, your blink reflex. (This is not what happens when you pick up a Malcolm Gladwell book and buy it just because it’s there.) Rather, it’s the involuntary movement of the eyelids caused by stimulation of the cornea. If your blink reflex is working right, then some dust, a bright light, a loud noise, movement close to the eye, or a plain old poke to it should cause both your eyes to blink simultaneously.

The evolutionary purpose of this reflex is, of course, to protect your eyes. Just the sudden appearance of something in your vision is enough to cause the cranial nerve that emerges from your reptilian brain to react, as if you are definitely going to endure damage to your eyes.

In fact, we could speculate that all reflexes are designed to ensure your survival in some way.

You experience reflexes as a result of the most basic of neural processing. For example, the withdrawal reflex, which occurs when you pull back quickly from something dangerous—only takes a couple of individual synapses (connections between nerve cells). Let’s say that you accidentally touch a hot object. The heat stimulates temperature receptors in the skin, and then a sensory impulse travels to the central nervous system, followed swiftly by motor impulses that flex your muscles and move your body away. This reaction is so impulsive that it doesn’t even get to the reptilian brain, but happens in the spinal cord. Certain actions are so vital to our survival—such as stopping ourselves from getting burned—that no part of the brain has a chance to think about anything. Your body just reacts—and fast.

Primary Schooling

Remember when you were born?

No, of course you don’t. You weren’t conscious of it. That’s why, if everything was working out well for you, it was a reflex that took your first breath. It was not a conscious choice you made, or even something that your mother had to teach you, because that would have been too risky. If breathing needed to be taught, then your mother would have had, at the outside, a maximum of five minutes to teach you—which is, of course, impossible. So, instead, you inherited a reflex that’s hardwired into your central nervous system to do the job of taking your first breath, and most others from that moment on.

Here’s how it all works: Before you were born, your lungs were filled with amniotic fluid; and, if you were born by being squeezed through your mother’s birth canal, the pressure on your chest forced that fluid out of your lungs. Once you emerged, that pressure was released from the chest, and the lungs expanded, taking in air.

Prior to birth, you got your oxygen through the blood delivered via your mother’s umbilical cord. That cord continued to provide you with oxygen after you were born, until the placenta detached from the uterine wall. Once this happened (or the cord was cut), then the lack of oxygen and heightened carbon dioxide levels caused the arterial blood to become acidic. This was sensed by the vessels sending blood to your brain, your heart, and your lungs. They in turn sent a message to your reptilian brain, which sent a message to your diaphragm to contract, and so expand your lungs to breathe in. Thus, here you are today, reading this.

Well done, reflexes!

Thank goodness you did not have to think or learn how to carry out that complex procedure, because you would have killed yourself trying, for sure.

So how does this relate to the way your reflexes function in the workplace?

Say someone comes up behind you and touches your shoulder without announcing his presence. Most of us will respond by being startled. Or let’s assume you prefer to keep the “notification” feature of your e-mail program turned on; and although you try and concentrate on the document you are writing, your attention keeps being diverted by the little “ping” that emanates from your computer speakers whenever a new e-mail arrives. You can no more ignore that alert than you can stop yourself from jumping when someone touches you unexpectedly from behind.

Suppressing Thoughts

The fact is, you cannot stop your reflexes. As long as your reptilian brain is fully functioning it will continue to stimulate you to breathe and to perform all of the other reflexes that it controls.

Under most conditions, your reptilian brain will always fight for breath on your behalf; cause you to blink when you get something in your eye; sneeze when you get something up your nose; or stretch your deep tendons so that you do not fall over when you walk.

It is extraordinary that the part of your brain that supports consciousness can be totally destroyed, and yet, as seen in some coma patients, its most primitive parts will still cause your eyes to scan the environment and lock onto and track any moving object. However, this eye movement, triggered by the reptilian brain, could no more be considered a sign of consciousness than could a sunflower turning its “face” toward the sun.

That is the nature of reflexes; they are automatic, and initiated unconsciously. So what about instincts?

Ingrained Habits

The simplest example of an instinctive behavior is what is known as a fixed action pattern, a short sequence of actions that you perform each and every time in response to a very specific stimulus.

Your instincts set in motion more complex sets of behaviors than your reflexes do. But like your reflexes, you perform these behaviors without any prior experience. So, once again, instincts aren’t lessons that someone teaches you, that you learn over time. They are preprogrammed in the same way that newly hatched sea turtles are preprogrammed to automatically move from the beach, where they were laid as eggs, toward the ocean.

It is only because some instinctive behaviors depend on our getting older that they appear to be actions we’ve learned. For instance, we commonly refer to children as “learning to crawl.” In fact, it is that they have come to an age in which the built-in instinct to crawl kicks in.

A number of our most important instinctive behaviors embedded in our reptilian brains include fighting, fleeing, courting, and preparing to give birth. We’ll look at some of these later this week, especially the most “famous” instinct of all: fight or flight. But first we will look at how we think when we have an instinctive reaction. For that we turn to the topic of . . .

The Unconscious Process

Out of the continuous flow of sensory input to which your instinctive behaviors respond, the reptilian brain “forwards” or distinguishes what might be important for your Limbic social brain and sometimes your intelligent critical thinking Neocortex and tells it, “Pay attention to THIS!”

Of course, a huge amount of processing is going on before it makes you aware of any of that. And you cannot tell anyone about that processing, because you are not aware of it yourself: it is preconscious thought...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Week One You
• Week Two Relationships
• Week Three Tribe
• Week Four New You
• Conclusion
• Further Reading and Resources
• About the Author
• Index