'You're not as conscious as you think you are,' says Harvard Medical associate

The human brain remains a mysterious thing – with scientists and philosophers spending lifetimes trying to fathom its complexities. For HR leaders, understanding how an individual’s mind ticks, how people will react, and what it takes to make them perform, grow, and thrive – well, it’s all in a day’s work.

This is something Dr. Brynn Winegard understands better than most. As an associate researcher at Harvard Medical School and an expert in applied neuroscience and positive psychology, she says that if HR professionals want to improve workplace productivity, they first need to know more about how their people’s brains really work.

“If your job is to motivate people, ensuring they’re productive, happy, and doing the right work, knowing more about the inner workings of their brain is paramount,” says Dr. Winegard. “The research has advanced: we now have neuroimaging from people in situ, that helps us understand what's happening in their brains, even while they work.”

Debunking brain myths

The first element for truly understanding worker's brains involves debunking the myths and misconceptions surrounding it – something that Dr. Winegard indicates is part of the impetus for her practice.

“One of the reasons I started to do this work is because we saw so much myth and misconception when it came to the ‘black box’ of the brain, even among professionals and knowledge workers,” she says. “I really wanted to clear up some of those ideas for people, so they were better informed, they could understand and use their brain better at work, and because these faulty beliefs often proved harmful.”

One such popular myth? That we only use 10% of our brain.

"That's false,” Dr Winegard clarifies. “Every neuron in there is working as hard as it can to be as part of as many neural networks as possible. We used to believe that 10% of our brain was involved in conscious thought. Depending on who you ask, this answer is as small as 0.01%, but no longer as high as 10%, with most agreeing it hovers around the 1% mark. In other words, most of what’s happening in the human brain at any given moment is non- or sub-conscious. ”

This understanding is crucial for HR professionals. Recognizing that a significant portion of our brain's activity is subconscious can change the way we approach motivation, productivity, performance, probable action, and reactions from others.

We can’t assume our people’s thoughts, beliefs, actions, or behaviors are necessarily conscious, logical, rational, objective, or well-thought-out all the time: they themselves don’t necessarily have direct, conscious access to why they think, feel, or act as they do. What it means also, necessarily, is that despite their best efforts, everyone lacks self-awareness, to some extent – an important thing to remember when you manage, lead, or direct others.

"You’re not necessarily as conscious, logical, rational, objective, or unemotional in your decision-making as you think you are," says Winegard. “And as an HR director, or anyone looking to try to understand and motivate people, you really do need to appreciate that we are not necessarily fully conscious actors. There's portions of the brain that make the decisions, and then feed those decisions to the conscious realm, to the language and speech centers, as examples.”

This is perhaps a twist to the popular ‘Hanlon’s Razor’, which states that we should not assign to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence: we should also not assign to conscious intention that which could reasonably be explained by subconscious processes or decision-making.

As managers and leaders, this revelation helps us understand human behavioral decision-making better, while also giving us reason to be more patient, compassionate, and forgiving with and toward our people. Another popular myth Dr. Winegard aims to debunk?  The notion that the brain is akin to a machine or works like a computer.

“The idea that you have eight hours every day of uninterrupted concentration, focus, productivity, and uptime -  like a machine might - is false,” she tells HRD. “We now know that the brain works on what we call an ultradian rhythm, which is a much shorter cycle than the body’s 24-hour circadian rhythm, as example. At its longest, the ultradian cycle is thought to be about 90 minutes - followed by a 15-minute ultradian healing response of downtime - and we suspect it's actually something much shorter than that because of high levels of tech use - closer to 45 minutes or so, perhaps.”

According to Dr. Winegard, this rhythm suggests that our workdays should be viewed as a series of sprints – as opposed to an eight hour marathon, as example. Recognizing this can lead to more effective work patterns and improved well-being, at work and beyond.

PERMA Model in positive psychology

Debunking brain myths is, by itself, helpful for understanding those we lead and manage, but Dr. Winegard goes on to advocate for the application of positive psychology and applied neuroscience insights for people in the work environment – the topic, in fact, of her upcoming book, entitled ‘The Working Brain’.  

Positive psychology, pioneered by Martin Seligman, focuses on enhancing the positive aspects of life, work, and experiences. “Seligman proposed the ‘PERMA Model’, stating that we as humans need these five areas fulfilled to engage in what he called ‘the engaged and meaningful life’: Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement,” reports Dr. Winegard. While positive psychology proposed the relevant constructs, Winegard asserts that neuroscience can provide deeper insights into each of these areas.

For instance, positive emotions are nearly inextricably linked to our social environment, experiences, and interactions. "In the brain, social cognition, social processing, and social affect feed directly into the neural networks associated with and responsible for emotional processing,” adds Dr. Winegard. This means that fostering a positive, active social environment in the workplace has the most direct impact on employees' emotional well-being and potential experience of positive emotions, as example.

Activating reward networks

Another example of how neuroscience can inform psychological phenomena: achievement, the fifth pillar of positive psychology’s PERMA model, is known to activate the brain's reward networks, releasing feel-good neurohormones like dopamine and serotonin. However, it's not just the big achievements that matter in the brain: "While it's great to get a major award, an accolade, or a big promotion, you also want to experience every day, accomplishments more consistently – we know that the neurochemical boost you get from every day, smaller, more consistent accomplishments (as opposed to rarer, major achievements) are at least or more effective for motivating people through tough times or challenging tasks.”

As a final example, we learn from neuroscience that the quality of human relationships from the brain’s perspective  – Seligman’s third element for positive psychology - is enhanced when there's direct, real-time, in-person interaction.  "We often joke that the eyes are not the window to the soul, the eyes are the window to the mirror neuron system,” laughs Dr. Winegard. “It's the idea that you can't hope to create as high-quality, lasting, trusting, real human bonding between people who’ve never met in person or who never have the opportunity to interact in person.

“At a fundamental level, humans are social, physical, and emotional: the more they interact in person, the higher the potential perceived quality of their relationship. As leaders, we should strive to foster friendships among and between our people – both virtually and in person. We know that people who have what they perceive to be ‘friends at work’ experience higher levels of creativity, psychological safety, happiness, camaraderie, motivation, job satisfaction, productivity, commitment, and overall wellbeing.”

“If I had to say, the number one thing we learn from both positive psychology and applied neuroscience, and I hearken to it often, is the idea that humans need physical, proximate, human interaction at least sometimes, especially at work. It is very important that people have the opportunity to come together and work together. One of the foundational insights she shares is the irreplaceable value of human interaction.

“Human interaction is an incredibly fruitful area for creativity and innovation – whether it’s two, three, four, or ten brains coming together, discussing, and interacting, they create new perspectives, new ideas, new innovations, and ultimately, human-to-human interaction is where new knowledge comes from.”