cafecuriosity

Watching the Detectives

I read an odd snippet in yesterday's The Daily Telegraph. According to statistics revealed by the newspaper, police stations are increasingly targets for robbery and vandalism. Last year they experienced 628 robberies and vandalism - or almost 2 a day, a brisk clip by anyone's standards. My old home town of Penrith finally won something in a bleak year for its rugby league team with 15 incidents, just sneaking in ahead of Manly police station (14). My other home town Orange in the mid-west came in 5th (10)! What does this say about the complex relationships police have with the community it protects? Should we read anything into the suburbs topping the break-ins list? What does this say about the safety and security of the police's working conditions?

PS. The Top 10 most vandalised police stations in 2005 - 2006 were: Penrith (15), Manly (14), Redfern (13), Mt Druitt (10), Orange (10), Newtown (10), Dapto (10), Parramatta (10), Blacktown (9), Surry Hills (9), Liverpool (9) and Armidale (9).

Thanks For the Memories

CafeCuriosity's memory is all downhill when it comes to remembering parties and meetings, so it was curious to come across French research into whether parts of the hippocampus - the bit that runs learning and memory specialise in processing our memories of people or social settings. Our ability to precisely remember people and relationships is at the heart of our ability to function as social animals. If knowing where memories form is useful, understanding how memories are processed is vital to preserving those memories. A protein called CREB controls the ability of stable memories to form and channels those memories to receptive brain cells. Why is this important? Well, social interaction frequently provides a context for exchanging ideas, theories and experiences. Without it, we would struggle to collaborate effectively or to work in communities. Memories have purpose, they help us make sense of our experiences and provide information we use in coping with future situations. Recall shapes our lives. Our memories define who we are - its part of what makes us human. In today's knowledge economy, our relational skills are key enablers. Our future is always built on foundations laid down in our head in the past. http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/892.htm   http://www.ucnewswire.org/news_viewer.cfm?story_PK=6864& Image: Medial prefrontal cortex, www.neuropolitics.org 2. CREB protein, www.ec.europa.eu

Bali's Hard Lessons Learned

It's well established that humans learn far more from failure than we ever do from success. It's seemingly one of the quirks of our brain's wiring. Few lessons came harder than the importance of mental health to the treatment mix in the aftermath of the Bali bombings. The 2002 bombing at Paddy's Bar and the Sari Club in Kuta was Australia's terrorism initiation. Staff at the Royal Darwin Hospital found themselves on the front line. Victims and medical staff alike experienced profound mental health problems immediately after the bombings. By the 2005 bombing, trauma care and psychiatric support were more closely linked and the hospital's ability to cope was significantly enhanced. So what were our lessons learned? Unsurprisingly, it revealed the need for experienced mental health professionals on-site ahead of the first influx of casualties. Secondly, medical staff was just as likely to need support as the victims themselves. Some staff became highly anxious waiting for the first victims to arrive. Still others reported smelling burnt flesh - a throwback to the chemical burns they associated with the 2002 bombing. Thirdly, the mental health nurses had to be become part of Royal Darwin Hospital and not just add-ons. In 2005 mental health nurses were on-site at Royal Darwin Hospital, supporting the staff during their wait for the first casualties to arrive. (In stress situations, anticipation and our empathy are not our friends!). Many victims couldn't eat because they associated meals with the explosion (the bomb went off around mealtime). Others experienced depersonalisation, disassociation, disbelief and anger. As with other emergency services situations, trauma responses improve the more those involved understand the experience ahead of them and adopt a holistic approach to dealing with crisis situations. The better prepared we are, the better our skills, the greater our resilience and ability to adapt and cope.  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1365-2850.2007.01068.  Image: 1. www.answrs.com, 2. www.afp.gov.au, 3. www.news.bbc.co.uk

Parking the Memories

CafeCuriosity's memory has been dodgy ever since his parachuting accident. While I can't remember landing my memory of coming to, to find someone ripping me out of my parachute harness and peeling back my eyelids is quite vivid. Somewhere along the way, I lost the context around that total memory (having your head smashed into the ground at 40kph is likely to do that!)   It appears our memories are experienced as an event comprising multiple contextual details and we use a particular part of the brain to bind those contextual fragments together. As the director of University of Southern California's Center for Neurobiology of Learning and Memory puts it, "You can't get out of memory what you didn't put into it. It is not possible to remember things later if you didn't pay attention to them in the first place." In my case, being unconscious clearly interfered with my ability to pay attention!) The bit that binds our memories together and processes them in integrated form seems to be the intra-parietal sulcus, part of the parietal cortex. http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1539 Image: www.answers.com

Annoyingly, I can remember an accident 20 years ago but struggle to remember where I left my car in Sydney airport's long term car park. Columbia University research indicates too much memory makes it harder to filter out information and increases the time it takes for new stuff to bed down in the short-term memory. Ironically, the more new neurons the brain grows, the in the hippocampus, the poorer our working memory. We see forgetfulness as a problem when actually forgetting is important for normal cognition. Indeed, most scientists assumed new neurons were good for our memories. No so. Working memory is sensitive to previously stored information so new tasks require us to delete information from our short-term memory. This seeming contradiction was summed up by research scientist Gael Malleret, "those with better working memory may have fewer new neurons being developed in their hippocampus which helps them forget old and useless information sooner and enable them to take in new information faster." I hope I'll remember that next time I get off my plane and can't remember where I've parked my car!  http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/news/press_releases/malleret_pnas_memory.html  Image: www.brainconnection.com

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Reflections on (Bad) Behaviour

A couple of weeks ago, CafeCuriosity's finished an engagement with a Branch of Australia's Defence Force. While we identified a new business model, new organisational structure, new systems and ways of engaging with internal clients, the most challenging aspect involved transforming the organisation's executive group into a high performing team. This team had a history of division and working in silos. Their issues revolved around the degree of empathy they displayed for each other and their clients, their dysfunctional social behaviour and especially the language they used with each other. Individually, each Director had underestimated the social nature of their organisation and their staff. Reading the May 2007 edition of the Association for Psychological Science's 'Observer' journal, I made the connection between the behaviour I'd witnessed and mirror neurons - the neurological structures in the brain that fire up when we perceive an action or take it. The mirror neuron concept turned psychology on its head by proposing that the same part of the brain that observes and perceives behaviour also controls "real life" behaviour - hence social interaction lies at the core of learning. Traditional psychology was based on the idea that a solitary mind looked out on the world in a detached way. Mirror neurons actually enable us to internally replay the behaviours we witness in others before we act. Mirror neurons may even codify the behaviours we observe, enabling us to regulate our behaviour if we are sufficiently self-aware. In retrospect, CafeCuriosity's clients hadn't spent nearly enough time considering the impact their actions had on others and in consciously regulating their behaviours. The strategy workshop while anchored around business issues, was really all about how the executive team interacted, defining what acceptable behaviour was and what was unacceptable, and forging agreements about how best to move forward collectively as a team rather than a collection of individuals. In the beginning, CafeCuriosity had deep misgivings about how the engagement. The potential for failure was high and the turbulence clear. By the close of Day 2 of the workshop, it had become one of the most enjoyable engagements we'd been involved in. Mind you, that could just be our mirror neurons overloading on empathy! http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2167

Image: www.metatime.blogspot, com

Curious Great Tits

Are our genes capable of turning curiosity on and off from one generation to another? Biologically, curiosity is an important predictor of how we respond to our changing environment and how well we cope with those changes. In the 1990's, researchers found a promising link between the Drd4 gene and curiosity but it was tricky to establish definitive proof of the link in humans. Enter the great tits. Parus major or the great tit is a songbird that displays strikingly different personalities within their population. The Drd4 gene carries instructions for a receptor in the brain for the neurotransmitter dopamine. Researchers from the Max-Planck Society found birds with a variant of this dopamine (the single nucleotide polymorphism at location 830) exhibit strong exploratory behaviour. Yes, they're more curious about the world around them. What remains unclear however, is the role variation in curiosity plays in evolution. Do populations change in response to environmental pressures? Does this occur within contemporary human populations as social and economic forces such as globalisation, iPods and the internet impact on the nature of work and leisure? For our part, CafeCuriosity will look at great tits with rather more respect in future! http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentation/documentation/pressReleases/2007/pressRelease20070427/index.html

Image: 1. Young great tits exploring artificial trees in the experimental room, 2. Hungry young great tits exploring unfamiliar objects, Kees van Oers

Intent Counts

CafeCuriosity has recently been slaving over an ERP strategy for a multinational manufacturing client. One of the potential performance barriers in migrating to a new system is always the ability and the desire of staff to learn the system. My client organisation is dynamic, flexible and has delivered impressive growth over through international acquisitions. However, it doesn't display many of the behaviours associated with effective learning. We all know the old rule of thumb, "one third learn by listening, one third learn by reading and one third learn by doing." Transferring system skills is heavily dependent on showing how the system interfaces with their routine work be it warehousing, logistics, batch manufacturing or finance, then have them replicate what they have seen themselves. I was grappling with the implementation approach for my clients rather relaxed operating culture, when I came across a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Researchers from the University of Oregon investigated which part of the brain fires up when we watch a demonstration of a task we later intend to replicate. They found the intraparietal sulcus - the same part of the brain used in goal-related motor learning through real life physical practice does the heavy lifting in these learning situations. Interestingly, the intraparietal sulcus is the part of the brain we use when actually performing manual tasks. The researchers speculate that the intraparietal sulcus provides an indicator of how well an individual translates what they observe into actual performance. As with my client, intention is the key to learning, not just the visual stimulus provided by sexy screen displays and cool navigation. It's about desire! Now all I have to do is find a way to strap my clients into a magnetic resonance imaging facility and I'll be good to go! http://waddle.uoregon.edu/?id=651

Image:  1. Scott Grey, Uni of Oregon, Jim Barlow, 2. intraparietal sulcus

Discriminating Against Distraction

In the world of curiosity, it's a fine line between distraction and discovery. Serendipity and happenstance has catalysed numerous breakthroughs in science, the arts and technology. So CafeCuriosity was interested to read of Harm Veling's work at the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research where he demonstrated the brain's ability to selectively choose between incoming information streams and identify "useful" things. It seems our brains can discriminate between "useful", "neutral" and "distracting" information states. Trial subjects who were better at excluding distracting words performed tasks in the laboratory more effectively, leading to the perspective that suppressing distraction is useful a skill. Two things struck me about this research. Firstly was the assumption that "distraction" = bad. Not so in the worlds of innovation and discovery where breakthroughs are frequently emergent, spontaneous and unplanned. Secondly, was Veling's focus on functionality rather than its implications? Interestingly, the test was based on a categorisation methodology where subjects associated common subjects such as fruit (peach, mango etc) or animals (giraffe, sheep). I wonder if the findings would have been similar in the context of an Eastern society where there is greater empathy for a systems approach (sheep, grass, skies, rain). Is the Eastern emphasis on expanding our consciousness and raising self-awareness a response to our brains distraction limiting functionality? Vierling also found that tired subjects were less able to suppress distracting words. Our suppression skills are not automatic and require energy to apply and maintain. Again, in many civilisations the transition into adulthood is marked by fasting and meditation - in some cases it involves a quest or a trial in the wilderness to open the individual's consciousness, followed by a feast. These ceremonies appear designed to bypass our suppression filters and open the mind to new insights - or is that new distractions! http://www.nwo.nl/nwohome.nsf/pages/NWOA_6Z3CC8_Eng?Opendocument

Image: www.contemporaryartproject.com

The Seductive Illusion of Control

We're all too familiar with the 'Rat Race' metaphor for our contempory take on organisational life. Some argue that we're all rats in a maze, unable to control our day-to-day lives and surfing the stress that comes with that lifestyle. From the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health comes a study on resilience that feels remarkable familiar or it could just be me - you work it out! Rats exposed to uncontrollable stress develop symptoms similar to depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome. Researchers (and I don't want think about the mechanics of the study!) found experiencing control over a stressor, activated the brain's prefrontal cortex, subtly altering it so it kicks in later even if the stressors aren't controllable, immunising the rat from developing depression. Not only is the prefrontal cortex the brain's command center but it also appears to be the source of our resilience against adversity. I suspect many organisational leaders are already onto this and are giving their staff a just taste of control to immunise them from a post-globalisation future! Or this study may explain the surge in Reality TV and the booming sales of wide screen plasma televisions. Spooky! Still, at least the rats are happier! Catch mildly gruesome experimental background at: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/press/stress-resilience.cfm

Image: 1. James L. McGaugh, darwin.bio.uci.edu, 2. prefrontal cortex, www.seroquel.info

Screaming Jets

We all like to make sense of what happens to us. It's almost a physical need.  This is especially in cases involving highly traumatic experiences. For all our technology, we still in our heart of hearts need to KNOW! So it was interesting to read an account of a Purdue University team's advanced simulation of the effects of a jet airliner crashing into the World Trade Center's North Tower on September 11, 2001. The simulation took 80 hours to produce and required the equivalent of 128 personal computers in a 'nano-regatta' computer developed by IBM. It analyses in aching detail how many I-beam columns were destroyed in the crash and how the structure reacted to the extreme heat generated by the post-crash fires. On an emotive level, there is something eerie in seeing the physical structures of a plane and a tower reduced to mathematical representations before being whanged together. On a theoretical level, the researchers believe, "we have a better understanding of what happens when a tremendous mass of fluid such as fuel hits a solid object at high velocity." Now I can't help thinking that at a macro level we already knew that. However, it illustrates just how powerful our belief in causality is and just how strong is the human need to know the "why" of what happens to us. http://www.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/2006/060911.Sozen.WTC.html

Image: Purdue University Department of Computer Science