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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Rewarding Experiences Are More Rewarding to Extraverts

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rewarding experiences

Introverts and extraverts alike have a reward system in the brain that has the same purpose and that functions the same way. However, all brains don’t process rewards identically. Whether intrinsic or extrinsic, rewards are an important element of behavior change, which is why I became interested in the subject after noticing that some of my clients have a harder time than others in getting the hang of using rewards.

It’s commonly believed that the primary difference between extraverts and introverts is each group’s desire for alone time. Introverts want and need more of it, and extraverts want and need less of it. Although that’s not necessarily inaccurate, it’s wrong to assume that extraverts always prefer social interaction over alone time. And even if they do, that isn’t what differentiates one group from the other.

Research suggests that what distinguishes extraverts from introverts is sensitivity to rewards in the environment. A preference for social interaction—independent of the reward/enjoyment of the interaction—is not what’s at the core of extraversion. According to Colin G. DeYoung, Ph.D. (researcher in the field of personality neuroscience):

People who score low in Extraversion are not necessarily turned inward; rather, they are less engaged, motivated, and energized by the possibilities for reward that surround them. Hence, they talk less, are less driven, and experience less enthusiasm. They may also find levels of stimulation that are rewarding and energizing for someone high in Extraversion merely annoying or tiring (or even overwhelming). Their reserved demeanor is not likely to indicate an intense engagement with the world of imagination and ideas, however, unless they are also high in Intellect/Imagination.

It’s All in Your Head

Extraversion/introversion isn’t merely a psychological concept. The differences can be observed in the brain. According to DeYoung, the unifying function of dopamine is exploration. The release of dopamine increases motivation to explore and facilitates cognitive and behavioral processes useful in exploration. When dopamine floods the brain, both introverts and extroverts become more talkative, alert to their surroundings, and motivated to take risks and explore the environment. Both introverts and extroverts have the same amount of dopamine available, but dopamine is more active in the brains of extroverts than in the brains of introverts.

Here are some of the other differences that have been observed in the brains of extraverts and introverts.

GENES

Although no one gene determines temperament, D4DR (“the novelty seeking” gene) is found on the 11th chromosome which has been deemed the personality chromosome because of its influence on behavior, particularly exhilaration and excitement. Thrill seekers examined in a study conducted by geneticist Dr. Dean Hamer were shown to have a long D4DR gene and were less sensitive to the neurotransmitter dopamine. Those participants with more reflective and slower paced natures had shorter D4DR genes and a higher sensitivity to dopamine.

BLOOD FLOW

Rev up: In extraverts’ brains, blood flows in shorter pathways toward parts of the brain where external stimuli (visual, auditory, touch, and taste—but not smell) are processed. The neuropathways most used by extraverts are activated by dopamine. Extraverts, who tend to have a novelty seeking personality and can process a higher amount of external stimuli, are less sensitive to dopamine. Their brains use adrenaline to make more dopamine.

As a result, the brain becomes alert and hyper-focused on its surroundings. Blood sugar and free fatty acids are elevated to provide more energy, and digestion is slowed. Thinking is reduced, and the person becomes prepared to make snap decisions. While extraverts thrive on the dopamine-charged good feelings created when they engage the sympathetic nervous system, for introverts, it’s too much.

Throttle down: Introverts have more blood flow to their brains than extraverts, and the blood in introverts’ brains travels longer, more complicated pathways and focuses on parts of the brain involved with internal experiences such as remembering, solving problems, and planning. The more dominant neurotransmitter in introverts’ neuropathways is acetylcholine, which affects attention and learning, influences the ability to stay calm and alert, utilizes long-term memory, and activates voluntary movement. Acetylcholine makes us feel good when we think and feel.

GRAY MATTER

A 2012 Harvard University study revealed that introverts tended to have larger, thicker gray matter in their prefrontal cortex—a region of the brain that is linked to abstract thought and decision-making—while extraverts had less gray matter. The study’s author concluded this might account for introverts’ tendencies to sit in a corner and ponder things thoroughly before making a decision, and extraverts’ ability to live in the moment and take risks without fully thinking everything through (which has its cons and benefits, of course).

FACIAL RECOGNITION

The brains of extraverts pay more attention to human faces than do introverts. Introverts’ brains don’t seem to distinguish between inanimate objects and human faces.

Experiencing Rewards

Extraverts tend to experience more positive feelings and get more out of rewards in general, and they are more likely to seek and spend more time on rewarding activities. When they do, they also experience a higher boost in momentary happiness as compared to their introverted counterparts. This partly explains the direct relationship between extraversion and momentary happiness. [The relationship between extraversion and happiness or subjective well-being (SWB) is one of the most consistently replicated and robust findings in the SWB literature. –W. Pavot, E Diener, F. Fujita]

Extraverts are more likely to go for immediate gratification, while introverts tend to delay rewards and instead invest in the hope of a larger payoff down the road. They are significantly more likely to prefer smaller, immediate rewards compared with introverts overall. When extraverts are in a good mood, they are even more likely to choose an immediate reward. Regardless of mood, introverts were more likely than extraverts to prefer delayed rewards.

Extraverts are already sensitive to rewards, so when they are in a positive mood it primes the brain’s reward system even more, so they’re focused on immediate opportunities. That may explain why extraverts are so impulsive, since when they are exposed to potential rewards that puts them into a positive mood, which in turn cues them that now is the time to pursue that reward.

The reason extraverts seem to experience stronger positive emotions may be based on how their brains process the memory of rewards. Dopamine affects how we feel when we recall a reward. Stronger dopamine response in relation to the memory of a first kiss, for example, carries with it a certain rush (associative conditioning).

The brains of extraverts show an extremely high level of associative conditioning, while the brains of introverts showed essentially none. Over time, the brains of extraverts “collect” an increasingly more robust network of reward-memories. Recalling these memories triggers their brains’ reward system, eliciting positive emotions.

Introverts brains don’t do this sort of reward collecting—or at least they don’t do it nearly as much or as strongly as the brains of extraverts. On a day-to-day basis, introverts have less of a reward-memory network to rely on for a “boost,” while their extraverted counterparts are able to tap into their networks for boosts aplenty.

Extraverts report more happiness than introverts during effortful “rewarding” activities, such as sports and exercise, and financially rewarding work tasks. No difference was found in extraverts’ and introverts’ happiness during low-effort, low importance “pleasurable, hedonic” activities, such as watching TV, listening to music, relaxing, and shopping. Given that extraverts experience more happiness during rewarding activities, but not during pleasurable activities, it may be that extraverts don’t have a more responsive pleasure system, but rather a more active and responsive “desire system.”

Extraverts experience a bigger happiness boost than introverts when they perform rewarding activities with other people, rather than alone. Extraverts spend more time on rewarding activities than introverts, and they tend to have more social contact during their daily activities.

The brain’s reward system generally operates outside our conscious awareness, so it can be difficult to identify rewards. Some people are more resistant to rewards than others. As far as the brain is concerned, anything that produces a hit of dopamine is good regardless of our opinion of it. If you want to get serious about long-term behavior change, it’s important to understand the role of rewards and the way your particular brain responds to them.

The Seductive Lure of Online Brain Games

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lure

You may have heard that Lumosity has agreed to settle with the Federal Trade Commission to the tune of $2 million in response to charges of deceptive advertising:

The FTC alleges that the defendants claimed training with Lumosity would 1) improve performance on everyday tasks, in school, at work, and in athletics; 2) delay age-related cognitive decline and protect against mild cognitive impairment, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease; and 3) reduce cognitive impairment associated with health conditions, including stroke, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, ADHD, the side effects of chemotherapy, and Turner syndrome, and that scientific studies proved these benefits.

This didn’t surprise me since I’ve been following various researchers’ attempts to substantiate the many claims made by such companies. I was also aware that in 2014, a group of 70 cognitive scientists and neuroscientists issued a statement warning consumers of the hype over brain games:

We object to the claim that brain games offer consumers a scientifically grounded avenue to reduce or reverse cognitive decline when there is no compelling scientific evidence to date that they do. The promise of a magic bullet detracts from the best evidence to date, which is that cognitive health in old age reflects the long-term effects of healthy, engaged lifestyles. In the judgment of the signatories below, exaggerated and misleading claims exploit the anxieties of older adults about impending cognitive decline. We encourage continued careful research and validation in this field.

A large percentage of the population is concerned about cognitive decline. And they’re willing to pay for what appears to be an easy and even enjoyable quick fix. Quick fixes have become increasingly desirable in the internet age, so the concept of using your electronic device to play games devised by someone else to keep your brain in top form is brilliant marketing, if nothing else. It’s a mini, no-stress, workout for your brain.

The jury is still out as to whether brain games offer any long-term effectiveness. One thing that is known is that improving your performance in a particular game leads to improved performance in that particular game. In that regard, computerized games are no different from playing Scrabble or working crossword or Sudoku puzzles. The more crossword puzzles you work, the better you get at working crossword puzzles. The more Sudoku puzzles you complete, the easier the “challenging” puzzles become. That’s just how the brain works. The more often you attempt any task, the quicker and easier it is to do it. Practice may not make perfect but it definitely makes better.

According to David Z. Hambrick, associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University:

[I]f you find that people get better in one test of reasoning, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re smart; it means they’re better on one test of reasoning.

In fact, there’s some indication that just playing video games is better than so-called brain games at improving short-term memory capacity and reasoning.

If you like the experience of playing—and getting better at—computerized brain games (and paying for the pleasure), then go ahead and continue doing it. But computerized brain games are unlikely to have any far-reaching or long-term effects on your cognitive abilities.

And, as an article in Scientific American points out, they take up time that could be put to better use. I’ve been saying for some time now that the two things you can do to grow new neurons and increase the number of synaptic connections in your brain (thus expanding your mental model and your cognitive abilities) are:

  1. Move! Engage in physical exercise.
  2. Learn! Study something new and challenging.

That’s it. Do those two things every day and you will not only be doing something effective to forestall cognitive decline, you will also become healthier and potentially even higher-functioning than you already are.

Power Up:
Fake It till You Become It

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WonderWoman2

It’s difficult to make the kind of difference you want to make—in the world, in your immediate sphere, or even in your own life—if you lack the power to do so.

When stated directly, it seems obvious, doesn’t it? Yet, so many people who want to make a difference, or who just want to be effective, shy away from the very idea of power. Quite a few of them are women, but not a hundred percent of them.

What struck me the most during my collaborative group’s follow-up discussion on the subject of power this week was the extent of the mixed feelings that were expressed about being powerful. After listening to the comments and then doing a bit of research, I’ve concluded there’s a widespread tendency to conflate power itself with the use—and especially the misuse and abuse—of power. But power and the use of power are not at all the same thing. So this is likely the result of the unconscious part of the brain (System 1) taking one of its shortcuts, thereby sacrificing accuracy for speed.

Power is like water. Water is essential for life on this planet. A person usually can’t go for longer than three days without water, for example, and annual rainfall is critical for crops. Having enough water to sustain life is good. But tsunamis, tidal waves, floods, and hurricanes are not good. So both too little water and too much water can lead to negative, sometimes devastating, consequences. And when water is coming out of a firehose that’s being used to put out a fire, it’s good. But when water is coming out of a firehose that’s aimed directly at you, it’s bad.

Similarly, power unchecked is often power that’s misused or abused. But power kept too much in check is useless. If you want to be effective, you need to be powerful. In fact, a good working definition of power is: the ability or capacity to act or do something effectively. I can’t imagine there’s anyone reading this who wouldn’t be happy to be more effective.

Besides, powerful people tend not only to be more assertive and confident, but also more optimistic. And they tend to be better at abstract thinking.

If you don’t feel powerful or you’re making a concerted effort to avoid giving the impression of being powerful, you may unwittingly be expressing your powerlessness (which is probably not your intention). That’s because our bodies give us away. Whether subtle or readily apparent, nonverbal communication has a profound effect not just on the person or persons who might be observing us, but also—and most importantly—on us.

Posing for Power

body-language-power-poses

Research by social psychologist Amy Cuddy reveals that sitting or standing in what she calls “low-power” poses can decrease your testosterone level by about 10 percent and increase your cortisol level by about 15 percent. Lower testosterone and higher cortisol will alter the way you feel about yourself—and not in a good way.

On the other hand, sitting or standing in “high-power” poses can increase your testosterone level by about 20 percent and decrease your cortisol level by about 25 percent. In effect, more power = less stress, which makes sense. [Please note that if you’re female, your testosterone level will not rise to the same level of a male. It will increase as a percentage of your own baseline level.]

You don’t have to go out and strut your stuff in front of the world every day. That isn’t even a good idea. What matters is whether or not you perceive yourself to be a powerful (effective) person. And you can increase your self-perception by altering your levels of testosterone and cortisol, which in turn will affect the amount of confidence you have in yourself, which is what others will then perceive.

Pick one of the high-power poses and stand or sit in it for two minutes. That’s it. If you’ve been ambivalent about experiencing and/or expressing power, you may find adopting one of these poses awkward or even uncomfortable. You may think it’s silly. Do it anyway. There are things you want to do in the world and for yourself. You’re up to something. If you want to be effective, if you want to able to translate your intentions into reality, you need to empower, rather than disempower, yourself.

Is What You See All There Is?

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As you move through the world, you probably have the sense that you’re aware of whatever there is to be aware of as it is. This applies not only to the sensory world, but also to events, situations, interpersonal interactions—actually to everything that exists or occurs within your world. But the capacity of conscious attention is much too limited for this to even be possible. The 11,000,000 bits of information being processed by the unconscious part of the brain at any given moment need to be considerably (and swiftly) condensed and summarized into the 40 bits you can process consciously.

Consciousness is a way of projecting all the activity in your nervous system into a simpler form. [It] gives you a summary that is useful for the larger picture, useful at the scale of apples and rivers and humans with whom you might be able to mate. —David Eagleman, Incognito

What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI)*

Your brain maintains a model of the world that represents what’s normal in it for you. The result is that you experience a stripped-down, customized version of the actual world. To a great extent, each of us really does inhabit our own world. But it would be incorrect to say that we create our reality; rather, our brain creates our reality for us.

Much, if not most, of what you do, think, and feel consists of automatically generated responses to internal or external stimuli. And it isn’t possible to consciously mediate all of your responses. It wouldn’t even be a good idea to try.

In addition to helping you navigate the world, your mental model gives rise to your sense of the way things should be. It generates expectations (that are either confirmed or denied), assumptions, biases, etc. that determine what you pay attention to, what you perceive (even what you are able to perceive), how you interpret and respond to what you perceive, and the meaning you make of it all. Your mental model is the result of your genes and your experiences, of both intention and accident. Your brain has been constructing your particular model of the world since your birth, and it is continually updating and modifying it—most of the time entirely outside your awareness.

But while the contents of your particular mental model determine what you think, feel, do, and say, you can’t search them—or follow a bread-crumb trail backward through them—to find out precisely which aspects (and when and how they came to be) give rise to any specific facet of who you are and how you react now.

The significance of your mental model in your life can’t be overstated. Although you aren’t consciously aware of it, your mental model circumscribes not only every aspect of your present experience but also what is possible for you to do and be. It determines what you see and how you see the world, both literally and figuratively, as well as how you see yourself.

But…Your Brain Can Get It Wrong

System 1, the unconscious part of your brain, uses associative thinking to develop and maintain your model of the world. However, there are some problems with associative thinking. For example:

  • It sacrifices accuracy for speed.
  • It doesn’t discriminate very well.
  • It takes cognitive shortcuts (aka cognitive biases).

Your mental model can—and sometimes does—lead to erroneous conclusions and inappropriate responses. It’s the job of consciousness (System 2) to check the impulses and suggestions it receives from System 1, but consciousness is slow, lazy, and easily depleted. Most of the time, it’s content to go along with System 1, which means it’s susceptible to cognitive biases. By definition, cognitive biases are distortions or errors in thinking. They actually decrease your understanding while giving you a feel-good sense of cognitive ease.

Confirmation bias is the easy acceptance of information that validates what you already believe. It causes you to selectively notice and pay attention to what confirms your beliefs and to ignore what doesn’t. It underlies the discomfort you feel around people who disagree with you and the ease you feel around people who share your beliefs.

Information that confirms what you already believe to be true makes you feel right and certain, so you’re likely to accept it uncritically. On the other hand, you’re more likely to reject information that is inconsistent with what you already believe or at least you hold inconsistent information up to greater scrutiny. You have different standards for evaluating information depending on the level of cognitive ease it generates.

Evidence has precious little impact on any of us if it conflicts with what we believe simply because the cognitive strain of processing it is too great. To a very real extent, we don’t even “see” conflicting evidence. While total commitment to our particular worldview (mental model) makes us feel more confident, it narrows—rather than expands—our possibilities. That means it limits our powers of discernment, our ability to increase our understanding of the world around us, and our creative potential. It closes the world off for us instead of opening it up.

The often-quoted statement is true: we don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are. If we want to live fuller lives, if we want to be more effective or useful or loving in the world, we first need to recognize that our greatest constraints are imposed by our own mental models.

It’s important to remember that what you see is not all there is.

*Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

You’re Not Sabotaging Yourself

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self-sabotage

Following right on the heels of a lack of will power, the number two reason people come up with for not following through on what they set out to do is self-sabotage. This is a catchall phrase that seems to refer to any behavior that is inconsistent with one’s conscious intentions or goals. As such, it’s completely meaningless.

You may routinely do things that you regret doing:

  • Overeat when you’re trying to lose weight
  • Sleep in when you want to go to the gym
  • Fail to study for an exam you want to pass
  • Put less than your best effort into a project that matters

But that doesn’t mean you’re sabotaging yourself.

Here’s the Merriam-Webster definition of sabotage: “the act of destroying or damaging something deliberately so that it does not work correctly.” Dictionary.com defines it as “any underhand interference with production, work, etc….as by enemy agents during wartime or by employees during a trade dispute.” Vocabulary.com says sabotage occurs “when you ruin or disrupt something by messing up a part of it on purpose.”

What these and all other definitions of the word sabotage have in common is the element of deliberateness. Sabotage, by definition, isn’t accidental or an unfortunate side-effect. It is intentional. So in order for us to be sabotaging ourselves, we would have to be engaging in counterproductive behavior on purpose.

This gets dicey right off the bat because we’re told our counterproductive (self-sabotaging) behavior originates in the unconscious. It is “hidden from our everyday thoughts,” according to one self-help author. But if we do something because we’re “unconsciously compelled” to do it, as a psychologist wrote, then it can’t possibly be intentional or deliberate.

Yes, it’s true—and inevitable—that we have competing or conflicting beliefs, goals, and intentions. In Incognito, David Eagleman says:

Brains…are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices. As Walt Whiteman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbor multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle.

When the hostess at a party offers chocolate cake, you find yourself on the horns of a dilemma: some parts of your brain have evolved to crave the rich energy source of sugar [System 1], and other parts care about the negative consequences, such as the health of your heart or the bulge of your love handles [System 2]. Part of you wants the cake and part of you tries to muster the fortitude to forgo it.

Brains can be of two minds, and often many more. We don’t know whether to turn toward the cake or away from it, because there are several little sets of hands on the steering wheel of our behavior.

This is relatively straightforward and in no way implies that the part of our brain that craves sugar, System 1, has an intention to undermine System 2’s attempts to manage our health. The brain just doesn’t work that way.

Eagleman proposes that the brain is best understood as a team of rivals and adds:

Remember that competing factions typically have the same goal—success for the country—but they often have different ways of going about it.

How we frame a problem determines where and how we go about looking for its solution. If we view our counterproductive behavior as resulting from self-sabotage, we’re likely to divert our attention to trying to figure out why we’re sabotaging ourselves. But we don’t have direct access to the unconscious, which is where our so-called sabotage originates, so even if we were sabotaging ourselves we could never actually get to the bottom of things.

We harbor mechanical, “alien” subroutines to which we have no access and of which we have no acquaintance. Almost all of our actions—from producing speech to picking up a mug of coffee—are run by alien subroutines, also known as zombie systems.

Looking back into the past to find the trail of breadcrumbs that leads to the behavior of today amounts to a whole lot of wheel-spinning. It can’t succeed, and even if it could, it wouldn’t make any difference in regard to solving the problem at hand: getting our behavior to line up with our conscious intentions.

That’s because it isn’t the unconscious part of the brain that’s the problem; it’s the conscious part. If we don’t know what we want, we don’t have a clear direction. If we aren’t fully committed to what we set out to do (or claim to be setting out to do), we have no urgency. Without both direction and urgency, our best laid plans are dead in the water.

We can retrain System 1 to do more of what we want it to do and less of what we don’t want it to do. But that requires repetition and persistence. Lots of repetition. And lots of persistence. It isn’t easy—and it isn’t as sexy as searching for our inner saboteur—but it’s both straightforward and effective.

Self-sabotage is nothing more than a good cover story.

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