The comments on the recent Bad Science posting on Brain Gym included several in which the commenters indicated not having the courage to question the introduction of pseudoscience nonsense in their school or business. I've had corporate managers tell me that they've submitted to the indignity of performing pseudoscientific activities such as those of Brain Gym and Neurolinguistic Programming, rather than protest and being seen as not "being team players".
I've mentioned before that nonsense congregates. It also migrates. Brain Gym has moved from the school environment to the corporate environment. It is one thing for a grade one child to press his Brain Buttons, it is something quite different for an adult manager. Yet, this kind of indignity is often expected when companies embrace pseudoscience.
Harvard University's Bob Sutton of the No-Asshole Rule and Evidence Based Management fame, has 15 rules he believes in. I'd like to single out number 11, which in a small way is relevant to this discussion:
"The best people and organizations have the attitude of wisdom: The courage to act on what they know right now and the humility to change course when they find better evidence."
The message? Employees have to be able to question something as simple as the introduction of a pseudoscience technique and know that their argument and their evidence will be heard. Bringing in nonsense activities into an organisation will not normally threaten the future of that organisation, although it may divert valuable resources to nonsense. The question is whether organisational culture that suppresses dissent at that level, will allow it where more important issues are at stake?
Dr Ben Goldacre, writing for The Guardian over at Bad Science, smote Brain Gym, and again, and again, and again, and again, and (sigh...) yet again! Will Brain Gym, a quackish granfalloon, react officially? I can find no evidence that they have in the past reacted officially and publically to accusations of quackery. Brain Gym's guru, Paul Dennison, seems to believe in just lying low in the knowledge that things will quieten down again.
Brain Gym has now also been exposed as pseudoscience nonsense in the commentary Neuroscience and Education by the British Economic and Social Research Council and in this scholarly article by Keith Hyatt. The evidence against Brain Gym is mounting and the education establishment worldwide must surely now take note.
Up to now Brain Gym was spread like a virus in schools throughout the world by scores of consultants whose only required qualification seemed the completion of a series of Brain Gym courses. They were ably assisted by thousands of well-meaning, but gullible teachers. The picture below shows teachers doing a mindless Brain Gym exercise during a training session (from Bangor Daily News via Bad Science). Apologies to these ladies who probably did not bargain on having their faces spread all over the internet.
Many commenters on Brain Gym denounce its pseudoscience nature and the excessive claims of Brain Gym practitioners. They see some merit in the exercises, however, claiming that any physical exercise would be beneficial to children at school. I beg to differ. Most of the exercises have some pseudoscientific or plain nonsense rationale. They make no sense in the absence of the explanation given for them in the Brain Gym manuals.
An example is the "Brain Buttons". The Brain Gym Teachers Edition (given to me by a disgusted teacher), describes this as follows:
"The Brain Buttons (soft tissue under the clavicle to the left and right of the sternum) can be massaged deeply with one hand while holding the navel with the other hand"
This is supposed to improve the brain's contralateral functioning and "increase the flow of the body's electromagnetic energy".
The explanation from the Brain Gym Teachers Edition:
"Brain Buttons are known in acupuncture as Kidney 27's. ... This is known in Applied Kinesiology as ocular lock ..."
How can a teacher teach this nonsense exercise without giving the child the pseudoscience explanation? The same applies to most of the other exercises.
In South Africa Brain Gym was taken on by Christian churches because they perceived it as New Age with Eastern religeous influences. The reaction by some of the Brain Gym practitioners was to remove all references to the origin of the exercises from their literature and to declare it to be science based. As to the honesty of this, you be the judge.
"Three policemen. One service pistol. No clip for the firearm ... and no bullets! That's how police had to patrol the town on Friday night. Their worst fears were realised in the early hours of Saturday morning when robbers opened fire on them."
Patrolling with an unloaded pistol anywhere in the world is stupidity, but in South Africa it's suicide. Surely the police's standard operating procedures should not allow it to happen? A pistol with no magazine is a single shot weapon, with no cartridges (bullets) it becomes an inefficient and dangerous baton.
South Africa has some of the best and most experienced "gunfighter" police officers. The story is told of a top American police trainer who came to train flying squad officers (an elite unit) in South Africa. He had never been in actual combat. He asked his trainees whether any of them had ever been involved in a gunfight. He was dumbfounded to find that many had lost count of the number of times they had been in gunfights.
How then for these capable and experienced police officers to transfer their expertise to their less capable colleagues, such as those who went to a gunfight with an empty pistol?
Basic target shooting training and participation in practical shooting exercises are of course prerequisites before any higher lever tactical training can be done. The problem is that even the best training do not necessarily transfer to real life situations.
Interestingly, the opposite also sometimes applies. Jim Cirillo, while on stakeout duty for the NYPD, was involved in a much spoken about shootout. During the incident he shot and hit three armed robbers, firing six shots, three of which were head shots. Cirillo was never able to repeat this feat on the shooting range.
"Gunfghter" police officers are few and far between, even in very professional police forces. It is unrealistic to expect that level of expertise from the majority of officers. On the other hand, the level of incompetence shown by the officers described in the "look Ma, no bullets" incident, is unacceptable.
Good basic training is non-negotiable. For the rest, the use of competent "gunfighter" police officers as mentors to especially younger officers seems a good idea. The use of narrative in auditory format could also work, especially in a country where the majority of police officers have English only as a second or third language. The use of story telling and narrative as learning tools also feature strongly in traditional African culture and can therefore be especially effective.
These measures, however, will have to be followed up by scenario based training under realistic circumstances.
Just for interest sake, see below what shooting feats are possible!
These feats were performed by Jerry Miculek, the current revolver World Practical Shooting champion.
In a previous post on brain profiling, I've indicated that the concept is pseudoscientific and in fact has nothing to do with the differential functioning of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. I quoted Ned Herrmann, the originator of the concept, as follows: "The whole-brain model, although originally thought of as a physiological map, is today entirely a metaphor." I've further indicated that brain profilists consider their brain profiles to be metaphors, although you often have to read very carefully to distill that fact from their writings.
Now we have one group of brain profilists who claims to be able to construct "genetic" brain profiles. Nowhere in their work do I find the weasel word, "metaphor". A description of the work of Dr. Annette Lotter and Associates with the South African Springbok rugby team appears in the normally scientifically reliable South African edition of the Popular Mechanics (September 2007). The full article by Andy Colquhoun is available here.
The article has the normal left brain right brain pop psychology nonsense that you'll find in such articles. I've previously referred to this as whole-brain half-wittery.
It then goes further and describes how 32 genetically determined combinations of left right dominance of brain hemisphere, hand, foot, eye and ear, determine people's reaction to stress. Based on the genetic brain profile, Lotter and Associates claim that they are able to predict "blockages" persons will experience under stress. These "blockages" cause different parts of the brain to become inaccessible under stress.
I quote one example:
"(Rugby) Players with left-eye dominance are overly sensitive to body langauge, and if you know that, you can throw them of their game by pulling faces or making gestures. You might also wonder how they would react to the haka (the Maori war chant used by the All Blacks)"
No, this is not satire. Have a look below at the All Black haka referred to. If there was any validity to the claim, any left eye dominant player who faced the All Blacks, would go into a catatonic state! To my knowledge that has never happened.
I have been an active target pistol shooter for many years. Pistol shooting is the one sport where the participant's dominant eye is fairly noticeable. Face pulling and grimaces are very common when bad shots are fired (add to that that many of my fellow shottists are an ugly lot!), yet I've never seen a left-eye dominant shottist being phased by that. The fact that there are many left eye dominant shottists competing at the top level, is a Popperian falsification of Dr. Lotter's claim. That, however, is anecdotal and as everone knows, anecdotal evidence have little scientific standing.
Let's look at facts. Consider that about 36% of the general population is left-eye dominant, that 34% of right-handed persons and 57% of left-handed persons are left-eye dominant Bourassa, 1996). Those are the percentages of rugby players you would prefer not to select when playing the All Blacks!
The claim that left-eye dominant people are sensitive to facial expressions assumes that eye dominance has a specific and predictable relationship to hemispheric asymmetries, from which specific predictions can be made about behaviour. This is questionable. Eye-dominance and its relationship to the hemispheres of the brain is not a simple either-or matter, as it is well known that each eye is connected via the optic chiasm to both hemispheres of the brain and that each eye has two visual half-fields that project to different sides of the brain. Sally Springer and George Deutsch, in their authoritative book, Left brain right brain (1998, p.133), point out that the relationship of eye and ear preference to hemispheric asymmetry is not particularly strong.
Left-eye dominant rugby players cave in under the haka? I think not! But consider for a moment the position of a left-eye dominant player who is not selected for a team because his coach believed this pseudoscientific nonsense.
As to Lotter Associates general claim that depending on the genetic brain profile and the pattern of motor and sensory dominance, different parts of the brain would become inaccessible or develop blockages under stress, I know of no scientific evidence to support this. There are stacks of reliable information on the internet on stress and the brain, but in no reputable website do I find anything on brain blockages as described by Lotter and Associates.
This quote by Druckman and Bjork (1991) from the excellent report of the American Academy of Sciences, based upon research commissioned by the American Army, says it all:
Sports performance is a quintessential problem in complex motor, cognitive, affective, and attentional processes, and it depends on functions that are widely distributed throughout both cerebral hemispheres. Studies that characterize the cognitive, attentional, or motor components of sports as “left hemisphere abilities” or “right hemisphere abilities” are fatally flawed. Not only is it inherently insupportable to characterize sports abilities by brain hemisphere, it is also methodologically and logically flawed to narrowly localize these complex processes.
This and the previous report by Druckman and Swets (1988) are both available free online. Sporting bodies, even those with limited funds, have no excuse not to properly research approaches and fads they subject their players to. The Springbok team have a history of involvement with management fads. This included whole-brain half-wittery. They should also take heed of the Druckman and Bjork quote above.
Patrick Lambe at Green Chameleon had an interesting post on "Corporate Alzheimers". Lambe described how rapid turnover of staff in public and commercial corporates could lead to loss of organisational memory, particularly for slow moving events, such as developing tax policy or running major engineering projects.
Clinical and cognitive neuropsychological memory research have some useful metaphors for corporate memory loss. Now I should immediately add that brain based anything is often nonsense, i.e. brain based teaching and brain based business. Consultants and trainers often use the status of the neurosciences to sell their pseudoscientific approaches to gullible clients. Alternatively they try so sell neuroscience based ideas long before stable bodies of research have been established and before practical applications have been demonstrated for said ideas. That's why I emphasize that in discussing the mapping of personal memory on to organisational memory, I'm using a metaphor. Granted, corporate memory is largely dependent on individuals' memories - the metaphor is thus a strong one. One proviso - those individuals will hopefully not be dementic!
This article on organisational memory has a useful way of mapping cognitive memory concepts to organisational ones:
Procedural memory - work routines (I would add technical skills)
Episodic memory - stories & myths, critical incidents and other information related to a specific event or time
Lambe referred to corporate Alzheimers. Alzheimers Disease in its early stages typically affects declarative memory, which is considered to consist of semantic and episodic memory. Procedural memory deficits on the other hand, is more characteristic of Parkinson's Disease. Together I believe these dementic processes form a useful metaphor for corporate memory loss.
South Africa currently has major problems with the maintenance of its infrastructure. This affects the power network, the water reticulation and sewerage systems, the dams, the roads and much more. It is widely accepted that this is largely due to the wholesale loss of competent administrators, technicians and engineers since the early 90's. In the case of the electricity supplier, ESKOM, there was not only a turnover of staff, the workforce was almost halved.
As Patrick Lambe indicated, such staff depletion in organisations with activities that span generations, had to cause major corporate memory loss. As this happened at the time of the transition for apartheid to democracy, there was also bound to be attitudinal issues on both sides (outgoing and incoming staff) that could have compromised knowledge transfer. Those issues are now history and we have to look forward.
There seems to be a realisation among all concerned that the knowledge and skills of displaced administrators, technicians and engineers need to be captured and harnessed. The question is how to do it? How can the knowledge of those who left, be captured and lost corporate memories restored?
"We always know more than we can say, and we can always say more than we can write down".
Following on this, I believe that the best way to capture lost individual knowledge and to restore corporate memories, is to capture the knowledge of those who left and who may be returning (even if only temporarily) in narrative form. Just contracting them to write things down (i.e. manuals) will help, but too much which is important will be lost.
The second is:
"Knowledge can only be volunteered; it can never be conscripted".
The full cooperation of not only displaced persons, but also of current incumbents will be crucial. Lost memories will have to be recovered, but will also have to be integrated with new knowledge and new systems. This will require tact, wisdom and leadership from the management of organisations who have suffered corporate memory loss. It seems to me that these processes will of necessity have to be outsourced - I cannot see how an organisation can recover its own memories. Therapy to recover memory in a brain injured person, can be seen as the metaphor for such a process.
Let's trust that South African state and parastatal organisations find ways to recover their lost corporate memory and return to sanity. They need not look further than Cognitive Edge and its South African affiliate, Sonja Blignaut, to assist them.
In a previous posting "Caught between ENRON and ESKOM", I drew a somewhat tenuous link between ENRON and ESKOM. I did not for even a moment consider or suggest that ESKOM may be manipulating South Africa's power supply in the same manner that ENRON did to California early in this century.
The ESKOM official further alleged that the current maintenance problems experienced by ESKOM (but which they vehemently deny), were caused by the fact that executive bonuses were previously based on savings against budget. The savings that "justified" high bonuses also led to the loss of skilled staff and the neglect of maintenance.
These allegations must for the moment be regarded as unsubstantiated. The only evidence supplied by the official is that the rolling blackouts (euphemistically called load- shedding) started after the summer holidays, whereas there were no supply problems before the holidays.
The exorbitant salaries paid to ESKOM's top management and the obscene bonuses they declared for themselves last year, however, lend some credence to the allegations. ESKOM executive's clumsy handling of the power crisis, whether it was caused by imcompetence or design, lost them all credibility. They can restore some credibility by instituting a full, transparent and independent public investigation into the whole mess.
One can't help but to wonder whether, if around the turn of the century, both ESKOM and government had exhibited greater critical thinking skills and mindfully examined the evidence they had available to them, we would have been in this crisis? The same question could of course have been asked about Lay, Skilling and ENRON.
But then again, not even the critical thinking ability of a Socrates would have stood up in the face of raging greed.
