Neuroscience has become increasingly high profile in the past few years. It seems that you can’t pick up a magazine or newspaper without a picture of a brain staring you in the face. Often these images show parts of the brains lit up in fantastic electro-colours – but what do these images mean and how can they actually help?The applications of neuroscience are varied – from life-changing medical advances, to the legal process, military applications, and influencing new technology.Many organizations are watching from afar with interest wondering how all this actually applies to them. These organizations are, of course, made up of people – so neuroscience can make a real and lasting difference in many areas. https://cyborggainz.com/f/neuro-grips-a-natural-way-to-biohack-your-brain
Advances in imaging
Those images you see of the brain can be misleading. They are usually produced by fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and the images themselves are stylised to represent areas of the brain that are most active.When study participants are subjected to an external stimulus, the resulting response in the brain is measured and indicated in these images; but it is not only this indicated area of the brain that is active. The interconnections between neural pathways within the brain are extremely complex and most brain responses are equally complex, involving many parts of the brain working at the same time.With that said, how do these images actually help us make insights into people’s behaviour? That is our main concern here.
Interpreting the science
Behavioural neuroscientists study the brain and interpret the data to apply it to human behaviour in order to answer the question: ‘why do people behave the way they do?’The answer of course potentially affects everybody on the planet. And therefore every organization.But being able to accurately assess the data to make observations about the way the brain works and how that translates into behaviour is clearly extremely complex. Much of the jargon is unintelligible to most of us and it is definitely not a place for amateurs: there have been claims of ‘pseudo-neuroscience’ making phony conclusions about behaviour; and that great leaps of faith are needed in order to link relatively simple isolated studies to the complicated reality.Translating the science into something that has meaning to average human being is a skill in itself. Professionals able to understand the science and then apply it to organizations are few and far between, though in the past five years there have been more frameworks and approaches that purport to use neuroscience as their basis.