When your brain doesn’t want you to think

The Chinese ‘Sunway TaihuLight’ is currently the world’s fastest supercomputer, capable of processing 93,000 trillion calculations per second. Even so, it would take several minutes for it to process what 1% of the human brain can do in 1 second.

The Sunway TaihuLight is twice as fast as the previous no.1, demonstrating that the computers at the heart of speeding up our world are themselves accelerating. And if that’s a frightening prospect, you’re not alone. And it stands to reason that more change will create more fear for more people.

Unfortunately, whilst great for dealing with man-eating tigers and wolves, the adrenaline-fuelled fight or flight response to fear isn’t so useful in the workplace (unless your workplace is a boxing ring or a 400m track). Look up ‘physical violence’ or ‘unauthorized absence’ in your HR manual, and you’ll probably find that both are dismissible offences.

The problem with having such a well-designed brain is that it hasn’t needed an upgrade for a few thousand years. So it’s still programmed to deal with tigers rather than an organizational restructure. And it knows that when we are faced with a clear and present danger, by the time we’d have delved into our memory, considered a range of options, decided on a course of action and then implemented it, we’d have been eaten.

That’s why the brain has far fewer neural pathways from its neocortex (which thinks in seconds) to its amygdala (which triggers the fear response in milliseconds), than vice versa. In other words, when faced with fear, the very brain that laughs in the face of supercomputing power actually prevents us from thinking. With a processing requirement reminiscent of a 1985 Atari ST, all it wants us to do is poke someone in the eye or get the hell out of Dodge.

We need to overcome these base instincts. The good news is that practical self-control antidotes exist to retrain our brains – even to use fear to our advantage, just as extreme athletes do. The bad news is that we seem to be afraid of talking about fear at work.

If we want to decrease fear in a world of increasing uncertainty, I reckon we’d better start having that conversation super-quickly.