Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

Increasing research in neurobiology supports the potential of both emotions and reasoning as problem solving tools. Think of it as the hammer and electric saw of building … and you’ll see that while these differ they also go together as basic tools. One tool cannot do the part of the other – and both help you to build a better outcome. Have you heard people ask others to leave their emotions out of it? Consider what happens next….

Emotions help you to problem-solve since they are at the core of learning. Your brain’s amygdala … which is an almond shaped gland deeply rooted in the brain … exerts huge influence on your cortex.

It turns out that your brain craves information that adds emotional impact, and facts with emotional contexts keep the long term memory running.

Your amygdala processes sensory information for its emotional affects. So you experience pleasure, pain, anger, sorrow, humor, or nostalgia, and these experiences relay the facts into long term memory – so that you can retrieve accurate scenes at a later point.

Interestingly, researchers found that removing the frontal lobe had little effect on intelligence test scores, even though it is related to problem solving.

Remove the amygdala however, and you’ll almost obliterate imagination, decision making, creative responses, laughter, playing with ideas, relationship building or musical appreciation.

Reasoning, in contrast,  draws from your logical mathematical intelligence, and fuels the left brain for brilliant results that emotions cannot offer. So how do we distinguish between these two at work?

You mostly see the emotional or amygdala roles of the brain jump into play for storytelling, art, music, debates, drama, field trip planning, or interacting and relating facts to new insights from guest facilitators.