Connecting ‘I’ to ‘We’: the Increasing Brain Load

Primate studies have determined that one reason for the development of the large human brain is the documented correlation between brain size and social group size.

Bigger group size increases brain load. Group members have to be smart enough to balance their individual needs with those of the pack. It has meant cooperating and managing individual needs and desires. It’s a challenge to understand and deal with our individual place in our ever-shifting alliances so that we do not find ourselves isolated in the bigger group.


From David Dobbs, “The Gregarious Brain” in the New York Times, 7/7/07 Link

“In this and other ways a group’s members would create, test and declare their alliances. But as the animals and groups grew, tracking and understanding all those relationships required more intelligence. According to the social-brain theory, it was this need to understand social dynamics — not the need to find food or navigate terrain — that spurred and rewarded the evolution of bigger and bigger primate brains.

“…The bigger an animal’s typical group size (20 or so for macaques, for instance, 50 or so for chimps), the larger the percentage of brain devoted to neocortex, the thin but critical outer layer that accounts for most of a primate’s cognitive abilities. In most mammals the neocortex accounts for 30 percent to 40 percent of brain volume. In the highly social primates it occupies about 50 percent to 65 percent. In humans, it’s 80 percent.”

So perhaps we could say that we are so ‘smart’ among species because we are social and need one another, and there are so many of us.  Perhaps our social nature has been the cause of our growing intelligence, not the effect.

It’s also instructive to note that if the challenges of the ‘I’ in the ‘We’ are great enough to have had us require larger brains to cope with increasing social complexity, then it might be a good idea for us to pay more attention to that most important dynamic between the ‘I’ and the ‘We”, the collaborative matrix.

Q: How might we pay attention to this matrix in our daily work? Where are the key touch points in paying attention to the ‘I’ dancing with the ‘We’?

Wired for Connection

Why all the focus on the science of relationship and connection?  Because the research tells us we are “wired for” connection, compassion, communication, and cooperation. In fact, all of life appears to be wired for connection even across species. Research into the intricacy of biological communication mechanisms across multiple disciplines is showing that all life has mechanisms for communication and connecting and the mechanisms are remarkably similar across very different species.  Animal behaviorists have shown that mammals, insects and reptiles all have similar mechanisms for communication, with many able to communicate across species: dogs have been shown to understand complex human language concepts. Baboons can learn words. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, learn to use sign language to communicate with humans.   

Mycellium, the intricate root system of fungi that runs throughout the earth’s surface, communicates using many of the same neurons that are found in the human nervous system. Scientific American recently reported that for all intents and purposes, plants feel, see, smell, hear, and remember; they too are wired for connection and communication.  Scientist Daniel Chamovitz writes,  “If a maple tree is attacked by bugs, it releases a pheromone into the air that is picked up by the neighboring trees. This induces the receiving trees to start making chemicals that will help it fight off the impending bug attack. So on the face of it, this is definitely communication.”  

The Australian Aborigines, Shamanic cultures, and many indigenous peoples form deep connection with all of life that includes cross-species communication. Lynne McTaggart, the award-winning author of The Bond, The Field and The Intention Experiment, discusses the Andaman tribes who escaped the Tsunami using their intuitive relationship with nature. In this interview with Nicholas Beecroft, McTaggart advises us to move towards a more connected, conscious, intentional, holistic, relational way of being with all of life.

How might this influence collective intelligence? What is your experience of connecting with others—humans, animals or plants—of thinking beyond your own biology into that space of collective intelligence?

Connection and social systems

The human brain is a social organ. Developmental psychology tells us that our minds only develop in relationship to other minds.  Our minds are fields that constantly interact with each other to create larger social fields.

Social connection is necessary for survival...as well as for learning and development. Given our need for connection, our brains experience the workplace as a social system, a system of relations.

We find that we have the same needs at work for belonging, acceptance and inclusion as we do in the rest of our lives. The better organizations do at creating environments where we can form healthy connections, the better they will be able to tap the collective strengths and intelligence.

Q: What might support organizational capacity to help us develop our minds together?

More on Compassion Research: Compassion meditation

Other researchers at the same conference in 2010 sponsored by HH The Dalai Lama, including Barbara Frederickson, Mattheu Ricard, Phillipe Goldin, Richard Davidson, Charles Roison, and  Geshe Lobsand Tenzin Negi, all spoke to research outcomes showing that we can cultivate compassion, in ways that build healthier bodies, relationships, cognitive alertness, willingness to help others, courage and fearlessness.

They found that very short, simple loving kindness meditation practice builds compassion in us for others. This was the case, even among foster children who had come from living situations where they experienced some form of abuse and loss.  The building of compassion allows us to connect to others more fully, to be able to experience a collective ‘we’ and to find the empathy to work out our differences.

Q: What difference could more compassion make in our lives? What about in the workplace?

Emotional Contagion

If compassion is natural to the human brain and being, then can it also be encouraged to fuller development and use?  

This question was posed by Dr. Daniel Goleman as moderator of the day-long ‘Conference on Compassion Meditation: Mapping Current Research and Charting Future Directions’, sponsored by HH The Dalai Lama at Emory University in October 2010.

One of the presenters on the question, Dr. Franz De Naal from the Netherlands, talked about the synchronization that humans are very capable of--that we pick up on the emotions of those around us and even begin to share them in a form of ‘emotional contagion’.  We recognize ourselves, as well as recognizing the ’other’, in ways that allow us to see different perspectives.

Q: So, if we are capable of and subject to emotional contagion, what does that mean for our daily interactions and collaboration?

•   What are we passing on to others?  

• Are our emotions toxic or beneficial to our colleagues and families?  

•   What perspectives are we passing on, just by the way we feel in a given moment?

•  How do we need to be paying attention to our emotional states when we go into meetings, dialogue, or daily conversation?

We will be offering more about this conference in new posts.  Check back in with us.

Expanding the Paradigm of Human Nature: Our Natural Capacity for Compassion and Empathy

Opening ourselves up to full collaboration and the possibility of tapping co-intelligence means shifting our paradigm on what it means to be human. We’re not as bad as we’ve been taught to think we are.

One place to start is with the research pouring out of universities and institutes around the world showing that humans are just as prone to goodness and cooperation as we are to defensiveness and aggression.  In fact, our species depends on cooperation, which requires a certain level of empathy and compassion for others.

Recent compassion studies argue persuasively for this take on human nature, one that rejects the idea of the preeminence of self-interest. The research supports the idea that emotions are rational, functional and adaptive and are a part of the brain as it has evolved to date.  

In his research, Dacher Keltner has focused on the manifestations of compassion and how it shows up physically and neurophysiologically.  Using MRI technology, Keltner and others* have found significant evidence that compassion has a biologically correlated process that involves the brain and the vagus nervous system.  Their research suggests that compassion most likely enabled early humans to come together in communities and develop cooperative skills as hunter/gatherers, thereby ensuring their survival and evolution.

*Dacher Keltner Jeremy Adam Smith, and Jason Marsh in The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness, WW Norton, New York

Human Nature: The Drive to Connect, Learn and Create

It is human nature to connect, learn, and create; it is how we grow and evolve biologically, socially and culturally. In fact, physical, social and cultural evolution is testimony to our drive and our collective success at connecting, learning and co-creating. Neurophysiological research on the brain and central nervous system has identified specific mechanisms in our nervous system that support connection, learning, and creating. One neural system identified is mirror neurons.  Mirror neurons fire in the same way whether we are acting ourselves or simply observing others acting. This gives us the capacity for empathy and deep understanding of another’s experience, facilitating our ability to connect.  Watch Mirror Neurons at play!

Furthermore, research at the HeartMath Institute shows that the electromagnetic frequency and coherence of our nervous system plays an important role in learning and access to higher order thinking, where creativity and critical thinking occur.  When our nervous system has an erratic, incoherent frequency pattern, our capacity to think clearly, logically and use the whole brain diminishes. A coherent frequency pattern gives us full access to higher order thinking. An important concept in electromagetic frequency is entrainment (systems aligning their frequencies to one another). Research shows that our brain (and other organs) entrain to the strongest electromagetic frequency around--within and without us.  It turns out the heart has the strongest electromagnetic frequency of any system in the body, 5,000 times stronger than the brain!  Furthermore, that frequency reaches out beyond the edge of our bodies, easily impacting others within a 10 foot radius.  Again, facilitating our ability to connect as well as impact the capacity of others to learn and create (have access to their full thinking capacity).

The challenges and opportunities facing us today call us to consciously and intentionally design our organizations and communities so that we can access our collective drive to connect, learn and co-create.  We are called to develop structures and processes in our organizations that support and enhance these innate tendencies and to expand our capacity to access them.  We have found that the using four META strategies [Multiplicity, Engagement, Thinking Together, and Acting Together] for designing and working together, help us connect, learn and create collectively and we propose organizations intentionally design structures and processes to support these capacities.