I recently read Mirroring People The new science of how we connect with others by Marco Iacaboni

It’s got a lot of very interesting information about how our brain works. When I have more time I may write about the ideas in the book. for now I’m just presenting my notes:
As adults, our gestures can be divided into two categories:
Iconic – pretending to do the thing being described.
Beat – don’t reflect what’s said. Are usually rhythmic.
Iconic gestures stimulate mirror cells.
Broca’s Brain – a major language center, imitation, hand motor actions
Babkin Reflex - Press a newborn’s palm and they’ll open their mouth
Babie open mouth before hand arrives.
9-15 weeks old extending index finger co-occurs with opening mouth and even vocalization.
Speech–gesture mismatch, gesture more advanced.
Mirror Neurons (MNs) – imitation, intention, goals, vision & sound, self-recognition, can acquire new properties like tool use & goals), pre-motor cortex.
Premotor cortex is linked to primary motor cortex.
Gestures lead, speech follows.
Embodied cognition – our mental processes are shaped by our bodies.
Words activate MNs.
McGurk Effect - “Ba” heard, “Ga” seen in lips, “Da” is “heard.”
We hear talk and mirror talking, which is necessary for understanding speech.
We synchronize bodies & bodies, actions, and speech.
Empathy: mirroring others’ feelings.
With a pencil in the mouth, mimicry is restricted and then it’s harder to detect others’ facial changes
We mimic expressions before recognizing them. MNs send signal to the limbic (emotional) system and then we feel expressions’ emotion.
People liked others who copied their actions, gestures, and stances better than people who didn’t copy.
The more imitative, the more empathetic people are.
The Parietal Operculum (receives sensory info from hands) had higher activity during imitation compared to real movement (hands). No MNs there. It’s related to the sense of self.
MNs fire for actions of self and other, but more strongly for self.
We have some MNs at birth, but the MN system is shaped by imitative interactions between self and others.
The MT, the brain area that responds to motion, responds to still photos.
Autism may be a problem with MNs imitation helps them.
Mu Rhythm is reduced when motor regions are active. Also when thinking about actions.
Imitation adds up action and observation MN activity.
Individual cells remember a person: “Grandmother cells” and sometimes “associates” ( like Granny’s husband, friends, etc.).
People who thought of professors answered later questions consistently better than those who thought of soccer hooligans.
Super Mirror Neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex & presupplementary motor area fire when an action is performed, but shut down while observing actions.
Studies show that people do imitate media violence.
How autonomous are we really?
“Thirst” & “Dry” encourage increased drinking
Asked about attractive faces (pics) then asked about the one not picked why it was picked, only 10% of people realized they hadn’t picked that one.
Men had similar brain reactions to women’s faces , as to sports cars.
Blindfolded people chose Pepsi unless told brand names, then they chose Coke. The evaluating part of the brain vs. the executive control part of the brain.
Super Bowl Ads – verbal reports didn’t match brain mapping.
Negative ads win elections.
Political sophisticates answered with their Default State Network which has higher activity when you’re doing nothing.
For many, social relations are the Default State.
Intersubjectivity – the sharing of meaning between people.
Our sociality is a limiting factor of our autonomy.

Dan Ariely gave a TED talk called ‘Are We In Control of our own Decisions?’
These are some notes I took, plus some of my comments.

Whatever is the default choice, or is in motion already, has a tremendous influence on what choices are made.
The form at the DMVs for in different countries ask if you’d like to be an organ donor. This resulted in between 4% and 17% participation. In other countries, the form asks if you don’t want to participate in the organ donor program. People don’t check the boxes, so the result is very different: 86% - 100% participation. Not deciding on this question is not because it’s trivial or we don’t car. In fact, we care a lot, it is a difficult decision, and it is so complex that we don’t know what to do so we do the default. Dan looks at it as the decision is made for us and that’s what we go with.

The choices we’re presented with make a huge difference.
Some doctors were given the situation that they sent a patient for hip replacement, then remembered that they hadn’t tried ibuprofen for the patient’s problem. When asked, most doctors pulled the patient from the hip replacement track and had them try ibuprofen. When other doctors were given the situation that they sent a patient for hip replacement, then remembered that they hadn’t tried ibuprofen, or piroxican for the patient’s problem, most doctors chose to send the patient on because the decision to pull the patient out of the track to get a hip replacement became more complex.

People reported that if the choices are an all expenses paid for a trip to ‘Rome with coffee,’ ‘Rome without coffee,’ or ‘Paris,’ people chose Rome with coffee.

When presented the choice of Jerry, Ugly Jerry, and Tom, women chose to date Jerry. When presented with Jerry, Ugly Tom, and Tom, they chose Tom!

When students were presented with the choice of Online for $80, Print for $125, and Both for $125, most chose Both. When Print alone wasn’t offered, most chose Online.

We don’t know our preferences that well and are susceptible to influences.
Dan finds ‘behavioral economics’ exciting. When it comes to building the physical world, we understand our limitations and build around them. For building our mental world, things like health care, retirement, stock markets, we forget we’re limited. If we understood our cognitive limitations as well as we understand our physical limitations we could design a better world. That is Dan’s hope.

My comments: We can’t really know what we would decide about something until we need to make a decision about it. Sure, we have opinions on plenty of things, but there are a lot of things we haven’t had to think about.

One thing DG makes us do is think about the issues that come up in a circle and make decisions about them. To some extent, it is the same learning curve that a new manager goes through. We can be afraid to make the decisions at first because we know they’ll affect other people in a way we haven’t been in a position to do before. We also then start thinking about other aspects of our environment and deciding that it would be good to think about them and have an opinion on them.
I call the process of making decisions about the world around us ‘differentiation.’ Our opinions and decisions make each of us different from each other.
If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.

I heard Dan Pink’s TedTalk on ‘Motivation’ and took some notes that appear below. I also saw his very similar talk that was illustrated at RSA Animate [It's the third video clip from the top.] Pretty cool. Watch the “animated” one and check out some of the others on this same page. I have to find this artist and get a DG animate made!

The point is made that monetary incentives work for very simple tasks, but once someone is doing more complicated and creative tasks, their performance goes down when given more financial reward. He says, give people enough money to take that issue off the table and they’ll do well.

The three elements that Mr. Pink says are the building blocks of a new operating system for our businesses, autonomy, mastery, and purpose are built into DG. We tend to call them equivalence, continuous improving, and vision/mission/aim. That DG creates higher intrinsic motivation is well known.

My notes:

Extrinsic motivators work for simple, straightforward tasks. For anything else they slow people down. “Higher incentives led to worse performance.”
1) Extrinsic motivators only work in a surprisingly small band of circumstances.
2) If/then rewards often destroy creativity.
3) Secret to high performance is not extrinsic consequences, but intrinsic ones.

The building blocks of a new operating system for our businesses:
Autonomy – the urge to direct our own lives.
Mastery – the desire to get better and better at something that matters.
Purpose – the yearning to do what we do in service of something that is bigger than ourselves.

Management is great for compliance, but not for self-direction. Get the money issue off the table, then give people autonomy.
ROWE – the Results-Only Work Environment.
We are purpose maximizers.

I am nearing the end of editing my 45 minute introductory DG video for the first North American sociocracy conference ‘The River Flows Both Ways - A New Era of Organizational Governance’ June 14-15, 2010 at Yukon College in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. At this point in my editing I am often waiting for the computer to render and to save clips as Quicktime files. So, during some of that time I am writing about some things that the video has brought up for me including the idea of ‘freedom.’
We tend to think of freedom as being free from being constricted, chained, and jailed, etc. We look at it as being able to do what we want, but there is a completely different way to look at freedom. Perhaps freedom should be thought of as how much influence do I have to affect the world around me? Whereas, in the old paradigm, we might say that my freedom to swing my arms ends at your nose. We probably wouldn’t say having an influence in the world around you should end at some limit. If others like your ideas and you strive to be a leader, then there might be no limit to your influence. Freedom, then, isn’t a question of limiting the negative aspects of others and increasing our own.
We also have to differentiate between power and freedom. Power is fairly clear. DG shows us that we can have an equivalent amount of power reserved for each participant in a system. When we use it we start seeing that all other systems don’t do that and we see how we give up power. For instance, when we consent to using majority vote, we are consenting to allow ourselves to be ignored if we are in the minority. When we agree to work somewhere, we are consenting to do what we are told, even if we don’t think it is the best course of action. Freedom is a little more murky, but related. Being free to do whatever I want, would be, to some extent, having power over the people around me. Instead, I want to be free to have influence over the important aspects of my life. I can do that with other people. I don’t need to have power over them.
I think the old way of looking at freedom comes from thinking of people as individuals instead of as groups. We can’t survive without each other so why only look at freedom in terms of only how it affects the individual? The old way also looks at actions as being negative and destructive, or ,at least, potentially so: swinging the arms for instance. If we are limited by DG’s ‘consent decision-making’ in what we do, we already have restricted our doings to those which no one objects to, which we can consider to be morally acceptable. How limited should our moral, positive behavior then be? It doesn’t make sense to think about it in this way.
If we have equal power reserved for us in the systems we use, then we will have the maximum amount of freedom possible. Our influence will only be limited by our own creativity and work ethic.

These are some notes I took from a TED lecture by Simon Sinek.
Three things are usually blamed for businesses failing: under capitalization, working with the wrong people, and/or bad market conditions. Really, not understanding your message to people is pretty big, though. People don’t buy ‘what’ you do, they buy ‘why’ you do it. Three concentric circles with “Why” in the middle, “How” next out, and “What” on the outer ring.
Why (Reptilian complex - vital bodily functions. Reliable, but somewhat rigid and compulsive.)
How (Limbic – feelings: trust, loyalty, all human behavior and decision-making, no language)
What (Neocortex – Rational, analytical thought, language )
It could be that Vision, Mission, and Aim are the same as Why, How, and What.
Vision – Why
Mission - How
Aim - What
TIVO (not doing well) said,”We have a product that does blahdeeblah.” They could have said, “If you’re the kind of person who wants total control over your life, we have something for you.”
King’s 1963 speech. He said what he believed, not what the audience should do. 250,000 people showed up. No one showed up for him. They showed up for themselves. It’s what they believed. It wasn’t the ‘I have a plan’ speech.
In advertising Apple Computers could say, “We make great computers. They’re beautifully designed, simple to use, and user friendly. Want to buy one?” Enh. This is how most marketing, and indeed most interpersonal communicating is done: What, How, not even getting to Why.
Apple actually says, “Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use, and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?” Why, How, then What.
People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
So, I’ve been trying to figure out the ‘why’ of DG. It seems to me that it is an opportunity to transform yourself, your life, your world for the better. Maybe something like, “We believe we have an opportunity to transform ourselves for the better. The way we do that is by practicing ‘power-with’ instead of ‘power-over/under’. We teach the method to do this. Want to buy one?” or “We believe it is important to fit in (or “belong”?) in society in a way that allows us to live by our values and principles…” etc.
Hmmmm. What do you think?

There is a new book out that shows how much worse life is, the greater the wealth disparity.
Bill Moyers interviewed the authors and the transcript can be found here.

A book: THE SPIRIT LEVEL: WHY GREATER EQUALITY MAKES SOCIETIES STRONGER by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, who together have spent more than 50 years studying how inequality affects the health of a population.
RICHARD WILKINSON: Well, what we’ve discovered is health is just one of many issues which are worse in more unequal societies, including violence or teenage births and all sorts of other problems. These are not just a little bit worse in more unequal societies, but are much worse.
Also among their findings:
The most unequal countries have more homicide, more obesity, more mental illness, more teen pregnancy, more high-school dropouts, and more people in prison.
The more equal the society, the longer its people live.
The United States has the greatest inequality of income of any developed country except Singapore.
The United States is one of the most economically stratified societies in the western world. As THE WALL STREET JOURNAL reported, a 2008 study found that the top .01% — or 14,000 American families — hold 22.2% of wealth. The bottom 90%, or over 133 million families, control just 4% of the nation’s wealth.
Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor in this country, reminds us of the great gap that’s open between CEO’s and workers in this country since the ’40s and ’50s and now. “In the 1950s and ’60s, CEOs of major American countries took home about 25 to 30 times the wages of the typical worker… by 1980, the big-company CEO took home roughly 40 times; by 1990, it was 100 times. By 2007 …CEO packages had ballooned to about 350 times what the typical worker earned.”
KATE PICKETT: The most important pressing need is to close that income gap, to reduce inequality in society.
I think anthropologists estimate that we’ve spent about 80 percent of our time as anatomically modern human beings in quite egalitarian cooperative societies. Hunter-gatherers are very egalitarian. They need to keep the peace between each other. They share. So, we’re clearly capable of living in very egalitarian settings. But human history shows that we’re also quite capable of living in very tyrannical hierarchies as well. And we clearly have the capacity to do both.
The big story that’s come out of all this research is, for instance, that friendship is very protective of health. The quality of your early childhood is very important. And issues to do with social hierarchy are very important.

In a traditional organization everybody needs to follow the rules or they won’t work. This can make it hard for people to visualize DG, which is different in this respect. If the rule doesn’t work for you, you change it to fit your needs, not the organization’s previous needs. In sociocratic enterprises, rules have to follow the people, or they won’t work.

Some things I heard in the TED lecture called ‘Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives.’ Here are my notes:

Liberalness: openness, change,
Conservativeness: stability, status quo
We all are born with a preparedness to learn the Five Foundations Of Morality:
Harm/Care L 4.9 / C 3.4
Fairness/Reciprocity L 4.5 / C 2.9
Ingroup/Loyality L 2.0 / C 3.1
Authority/Respect L 2.1 / C 3.3
Purity/Sanctity L 1.7 / C 3.1

The numbers on the right are approximately where they fall on the graph of US attitudes as expressed on a survey JH did. Thirty thousand people have taken the online survey already.

In his graph, they all came in this order, the first two being fairly high. Liberals holding the last three fairly low, but conservatives holding those three much closer to the first two. Even fairness, only at the far right, being the lowest.
Food issues fall into Purity/Sanctity

There was a game where people could give money and on each round they can give money into a common pot. At first people average 50%, but it goes down. Later, if they can punish others who don’t, they give a lot more. It’s not enough to rely on good motives, some punishment, even if it’s only shame and gossip, to bring people in large groups, to co-operate. [Ted - I wonder if "punishment" would be more accurately labeled 'consequences,' which, of course can be good as well as bad. Looking at the incentives, consciously created and unpredicted, in any system is very important.]
Successful societies use all tools in the box.

Chris Martenson has developed a series of video clips that explain how money works, how it is tied to energy and our environment and what to do about a future that is full of risk and uncertainty. It is called the Crash Course and deals with the extremely fast and radical changes our world is going through right now. You cannot afford not to know what Chris is telling us.

We all base our daily decisions on our “theories of action.” Roy Madron writes a bit about that at his blog.