I can’t keep up with the good stuff to read and blog about out there!

Harvard Business Review is particularly good this month–focusing on decision making. I’ve already commented on the good strategy article over on the Association Renewal blog. Chris Bailey has also posted on the article I’m pointing to here, which is about brain function.

It’s called "Decisions and Desire," by Gardiner Morse. It focuses on brain research and how that has some important implications for the way we do business. Goleman has referred to similar research in the Emotional Intelligence work–my favorite is the fact that the emotional center of your brain sends messages faster than your logic, so even in the workplace, you will have your emotions before you have a chance to rationalize them away.

This article talks about that in terms of decision making. It seems that we use emotionally based hunches in decision making in ways that most people are probably not conscious of. A famous patient once had damage to part of his brain connected to emotions and it became impossible for him to make decisions (analysis paralysis).

But there was one point in the article that I found quite important and deep. There was a study that looked at amygdala response in people’s brains as they saw images. The amygdala is that fast part of the brain that reacts before you can "think" about it. It is the place where "fear" responses lie. This makes sense evolutionarily–you’d want that fear response to kick in quickly, or you’d get eaten by the predator. In fact, they notice it responding when they show images of spiders, snakes, even frightening expressions in others.

But here’s the biggest one: the amygdala fires when it sees a face of another race. From the article:

MRI studies have shown that the amygdala becomes more active when whites see black faces than when tey see white faces; similarly, in blacks, the amygdala reacts more to white faces than black ones. Taken alone, this finding says nothing about people’s conscious attitudes. But research by Harvard social ethicist Mazarin Banaji and colleagues shows that even people who consicously believe they have no racial bias often do have negative unciosncous feelings toward "outgroups"–people not like themselves.

The article says that researchers are "very cautious in interpreting these findings." I’ll be they are! But I encourage everyone to do their own, internal interpretation of it.