Looking inside our heads

The principles of neuroscience underpin everything we do. Essentially its “brain science”, although the brain operates in collaboration with the heart and the rest of our neurological system. By understanding our brains we can exercise far greater choice over our behaviour.

It is through behaviour that we see and experience others but the behaviour we see above the surface is the result of a complex mix of brain activity going on below the surface, including thoughts, feelings and instincts. To really understand people we need a camera which can show us what is going on inside their brains (and their bodies) and we also need the knowledge and skill to interpret this activity in a meaningful way. One of the best “cameras” we have today is the functional MRI scanner which can show us live brain activity. We then rely on the skill of neurologists to translate brain activity into something which relates to behaviours. So far, so good.

Understandably, those working in clinical neurological environments have to work diligently and cautiously in building a reliable knowledge base. You can’t operate on the brain on the basis of some untested theory. Yet we can use a summarised version of the same knowledge base to look more penetratingly into human behaviour drivers in the future. The insights already emerging from neuroscience are powerful and, in some cases, radical. So what we can do is examine these principles and throw in some of our own insights based on our experience and our intuition. We then start to develop an understanding which is directly relevant and immediately helpful in our everyday lives.

I will aim to share some of these insights with you in future blogs. These will include

Demonstrating why, ultimately, we are all emotionally driven beings

How we learn

The emergence of “self”