The neuroscience of leadership … how your brain changes as you age … and how you can actively change your brain to achieve more as a leader
January 5, 2024
Cradled in your skull, immersed in protective fluid, your brain is your body’s mission control. It changes radically throughout a human’s life, starting work not long after they’re conceived and continuing even beyond your final breath.
As a business leader you are asked to step up, to see business and markets from new perspectives – and in particular to make sense of fast, complex and dynamic futures. As a leader, rather than functional expert, your challenge is to connect the organisation, to ask the big questions rather than having all the answers.
This is a huge mindset shift, and particularly for leaders who are also probably getting older, and could easily fall into old habits, as their brain starts to fall into standard ways of behaving, and naturally diminishes with age, and without stimulus.
As a leader, now is the time for peak performance, to dream of new possibilities, to drive innovation and change, and to act in ways that are different from what got you here. Now is the time to recharge, and even reshape, your brain.
How your brain changes
We used to assume that we each have our established ways of thinking and behaving, and as we get older the capability of our brain to learn and adapt declines. Medical science suggests that the volume of the brain and/or its weight declines with age at a rate of around 5% per decade after age 40 with the actual rate of decline possibly increasing with age particularly over age 70.
Yet our brain can grow new neurons at any age.
Each neuron can transmit up to 1,000 nerve signals a second and make as many as 10,000 connections with other neurons. Our thoughts come from the chemical signals that pass across the synaptic gaps between neurons: the more connections we make, the more powerful and adaptive our brain can be.
Tara Swart is a neuroscientist, practising medical doctor, and executive coach, with a background in psychiatry. I first met her on stage in Bratislava, where we both were delivering our “Big Idea” for Europe. Her first book, “Neuroscience for Leadership” was more of an academic text, while her new book is “The Source” is more populist, and claims most of the things we want from life – health, happiness, wealth, love – are governed by our ability to think, feel and act. In other words, by our brain.
Keeping the brain fit through exercise, continual learning and rich experiences, enhances your mental agility. In the past leaders relied more upon experience and procedure, in today’s world we need leaders who can make sense of new patterns, imagine new possibilities, thrive on diversity of thought and complexity of action. Leaders need to have a mind that is always ahead, seeing and anticipating what next.
“Think of the brain as the hardware of a computer” says Swart. “Your mind is the software. You’re the coder who upgrades the software to transform the data (your thoughts). You also control the power supply that fuels the computer — the food and drink you consume, when and how to exercise and meditate, who to interact with… You have the power to maintain or destroy your neural connections.”
Mindful activities such as yoga or meditation reduce levels of cortisol and increase the fold of the outer cortex of the brain, allowing the pre-frontal cortex to better regulate our emotional responses. Swart says just 12 minutes a day, most days of the week, will make a noticeable difference. New experiences such as travel, learning a skill, such as a foreign language, and meeting new people can stimulate the growth of new neurons.
How to change your brain
Brain plasticity allows you to learn new skills, gather and use new information, and recover from brain injury. How can you rewire your brain?
There are some obvious ways to improve your brain function, such as drink more water, get more exercise, and don’t read from electronic screens in the last hour before bed. But there is much more besides. Some are obvious, some less so. Some are just good healthy tips for everyone, some require deliberate focus in order to achieve your goals.
For starters here are 10 simple ways to start changing your brain:
1. Run
Physical activity can improve your brain’s plasticity, a cerebral quality that affects memory, motor skills, and the ability to learn – according to a study conducted at the University of Adelaide in Australia. A small group of adults in their late 20s and early 30s participated in a 30-minute session of vigorous activity. Immediately after the session, their brains showed a significant increase in neuroplasticity. If that’s not enough motivation to get out for run, research shows that exercise also release chemicals in the brain that make us feel happy. Endorphins and a protein called Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) are released in the brain as you do physical exercise, two chemicals which help fight stress and promote happiness.
2. Sleep more
Sleep is an essential activity that not even science can fully explain. You feel better with it, but really bad without it. Going without sleep can make you irritable, lead to memory loss and false memories, and, in extreme cases, cause slurred speech and even brain damage. So what happens when you sleep? Your brain gets to work archiving memories, making creative connections, and cleaning out toxins. Even a short afternoon nap can provide you with a boost of energy equivalent to roughly one or two cups of coffee, as well as increased retention of facts and greater creativity.
3. Meditate
Meditation doesn’t just help you find emotional balance in your life – it actually changes your brain. Before beginning a regular meditation habit, people tend to have strong neural connections with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, what is often called the “Me Center” of the brain. As a result, they are more likely to interpret physical sensations of anxiety or fear as a personal problem, something directly-related to themselves. As a result, they are more likely to experience repeated thoughts about their lives, mistakes they’ve made, what people think about them. In contrast, people who meditate regularly show weaker connections with the “Me Center” of the brain and stronger connections with the lateral prefrontal cortex, or the “Assessment Center” of the brain. This helps meditators to take problems less personally and approach them more logically. This means that, through meditation, we can become better at managing anxiety, stress, and potentially dangerous situations. In addition, the neural connections which grow stronger through meditation help promote empathy and compassion.
4. Drink coffee
From the time you wake up until you lay down to sleep, neurons in your brain produce a curious chemical called adenosine. As adenosine is produced, it binds with adenosine receptors in the brain, causing you to feel tired and eventually fall asleep. When caffeine enters the bloodstream and makes its way to the brain, it blocks the adenosine receptors. That’s what gives you the boost of energy and alertness, improved memory and cognitive performance, increased focus, and even increased accuracy of reactions. Over time, however, your brain will begin to build up a tolerance to the drug, and you may experience withdrawal symptoms, such as headaches, increased sleepiness, lack of concentration, and irritability. Coffee (or more precisely, caffeine) changes your brain chemistry, providing you with that boost of energy and focus you need in the morning.
5. Read
Brain scans of the most avid readers typically show heightened connectivity in the left temporal cortex, the area of the brain associated with receptivity for language. Readers also often experience something called “embodied semantics.” That’s the technical way of saying that the “brain connectivity during a thought-about action actually mirrors the connectivity that occurs during the actual action. For example, thinking about swimming can trigger some of the same neural connections as physical swimming.” That means that imagining actions as you read about them can physically alter the connections in your brain.
6. Listen to music
When some people want to truly focus, they seek total silence, but many turn on their music. When you graph the electrical activity of your brain using EEG, you generate what is called a brainwave pattern, which is called a “wave” pattern because of its cyclic, wave-like nature…When we lower the brain wave frequency…we can put ourselves in an ideal condition to learn new information, perform more elaborate tasks, learn languages, analyze complex situations and even be in what sports psychologists call “The Zone”, which is a state of improved focus and performance in athletic competitions or exercise. Part of this is because being the slightly decreased electrical activity in the brain can lead to significant increases in feel-good brain chemicals like endorphins, noroepinephrine and dopamine. So you can actually “force” your brain into this ideal “alpha brain wave relaxation” with the right frequency of music.
7. Wander
Spending time in outdoor green spaces has been linked to improvements in mood, concentration, and creativity. Brooding, which is known among cognitive scientists as morbid rumination, is a mental state familiar to most of us, in which we can’t seem to stop chewing over the ways in which things are wrong with ourselves and our lives. This broken-record fretting is not healthy or helpful. It can be a precursor to depression and is disproportionately common among city dwellers compared with people living outside urban areas, studies show. Going for a 90-minute walk in a quiet, tree-lined neighbourhood can have the effect less morbid rumination and showed less blood flow to the subgenual prefrontal cortex than those who had walked along a busy highway for the same amount of time.
8. Don’t multitask
Research suggests that humans are physically incapable of multitasking. Instead, the human brain merely single-tasks very quickly, switching back and forth between multiple tasks at a rate that makes you feel and believe you’re actually doing two things at once. If you think you spend much of your time “multitasking”, you could actually be rewiring your brain – and not in a good way. Your attention span is considerably shortened and your emotional intelligence is stunted. At the same time, you become worse at sorting through information and completing creative tasks.
9. Eat less sugar
Overconsumption of sugar may impair neurological functioning, according to a study at UCLA. Heavy sugar intake caused the rats to develop a resistance to insulin — a hormone that controls blood sugar levels and also regulates the function of brain cells. Insulin strengthens the synaptic connections between brain cells, helping them to communicate better and thereby form stronger memories. So when insulin levels in the brain are lowered as the result of excess sugar consumption, cognition can be impaired. Too much sugar can impair memory and learning skills, and may even contribute to diseases like dementia. It can also make you depressed. Sugar activates the mood-enhancing neurotransmitter serotonin in our brain. When continuously overstimulated, our serotonin levels begin to deplete, making it more difficult for us to regulate our mood.
10. Believe
Believing you can change, that you can be better, and you can achieve more, is the starting point. Open your mind to the possibility. Rather than going in to the rationale, let’s take the inspiring story of Tan Le, as I described in my recent book Business Recoded. She is the Vietnamese boat refugee who became one of the world’s leading neuroscientists.
Tan Le’s inspired mind
Tan Le was only 4 years old when she fled Vietnam with her mother and sister, crowded on board a fishing boat with 162 other people, in search of a better life. It was a difficult choice, leaving her father behind and heading out to the uncertain seas.
For 5 days they sailed, and then after losing power, drifted across the South China Sea. She remembers the long dark nights and rough seas, and everyone becoming desperate once food and water ran out.
Fortune came in the shape of a British oil tanker, which offered to rescue them. After three months in a refugee camp, the family were offered a flight to Australia. As the plane flew across the unknown country, she was struck by the huge emptiness of the land, and later reflected on it as symbolising the new opportunities which she could never have imagined.
At 8 years old, her mum says she was a dreamer, and particularly liked to pretend she had the power of telepathy, as inspired by a movie she had seen. In reality, she called herself a curious nerd, desperate to work hard and seize her opportunity. At the same time, she was very conscious about being different – her looks, her accent, her background.
Then, when she was 20, she won Young Australian of the Year for her work in helping other immigrants to settle locally, to learn the English language, and to find jobs. She was astonished that somebody like her could win such an award. It was the moment that really opened her mind.
She started to look beyond her mum’s dream of her becoming a doctor or lawyer. She qualified as a lawyer, but quickly turned her attention to software engineering, exploring how brainwaves can control digital devices. It was all about understanding the brain in context, and how it could be directed to do more productive work, to engage consumers more deeply with brands, to help people with disabilities. Her early work included the development of EEG (electroencephalography) headsets enabling people to control a car, or drone, or game, with your mind.
“When the neurons in your brain interact, they emit electrical impulses, which we can then translate into patterns that become commands, by using machine learning” she explained.
She founded Emotiv, a bio-informatics company focused on understanding the brain in context, and how it could be directed to do more productive work, to engage consumers more deeply with brands, to help people with disabilities.
Chosen to be part of the World Economic Forum’s Young Business Leaders in 2009, she sat at a dinner held in Buenos Aires with fellow participants. Opposite her sat a wheelchair-bound Brazilian called Rodrigo Hübner Mendes. He introduced himself as a Formula One racing car driver, who used a specially developed brain interface to control the vehicle.
Mendes explained how he would turn left by imagining eating tasty food, turn right by imagining he was riding a bike, and accelerate by imagining he had just scored a World Cup goal for Brazil. He explained how the technology for the car was developed by a small innovative company called Emotiv. She smiled, deeply moved by his story.
Today Emotiv is a world-leader in brain interface software, with technology that is cheaper than a gaming console, but has the ability to fundamentally disrupt and improve our lives. With offices around the world, She spends much of her time in Hanoi, where her ground-breaking technology is being developed by young Vietnamese technologists.
Lee reflects on her personal journey saying, “Like my mum, I took a leap of faith into the world of technology, and particularly into a completely new area for which I had no qualifications or experience.”
She freely admits that she doesn’t have all the answers, with “I try to make the right choices, but you never know exactly where you are going, or if doing your best” but is also an infectious optimism “The future is not hear yet. We have the chance to create it, to co-create it.”
As for Mendes, he recently found himself at a conference in Dubai listening to world champion F1 driver Lewis Hamilton. When it came to questions at the end, Mendes’ hand immediately sprung up. He challenged the world champion to a race, using brainwave-controlled cars. Hamilton, a lover of new technologies, accepted. The race awaits.
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