Handbook of Your Brain in Business: 2. The High-Performing Brain 2.1 What is the High-Performing Brain?

Handbook of the Brain in Business

Table of Contents

The High-Performing Brain

What is the High-Performing Brain?

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Previous: The High-Performing Brain... and Body

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I have given a brief overview to the high-performing brain in the Introduction and drawn attention to the fact that the brain operates as a unit with our bodies - so to be precise we are normally looking at the whole human nervous system, but the brain is the centralised hub. I will generally refer to the brain unless it is obvious that it is a brain-body relationship, such as with the gut-brain axis whereby the gut influences brain function, in clear demonstrable ways (of which there are many). These body-brain connections are multifaceted, and we will unfortunately only have time and space to scratch the surface here.

We are all fascinated in some way with increasing the performance of the brain or getting the best possible performance out of the lump of flesh in our skulls. Who wouldn’t be? We would also probably like to keep a highly functioning brain for many long years – preferably all of our lives. You will be happy to know that brain science is coming on in leaps and bounds and we know a lot more than just a few years ago or even 16 years ago when I started to get involved intensively with the neurosciences. The counter side is that the brain is fiendishly complex - something I underestimated 16 years ago.

Though we would all like to have a high-performing brain, nailing what this is precisely is trickier. Human beings have known that some people have better brains, are smarter, since the beginning of time, and we do have a very good idea of what intelligence is, but this is sometimes criticised because of its superficial reporting in terms of a single measure i.e. an IQ score.

IQ

Measuring brain performance has a long history – some take this to the 5th century and the Chinese who developed fiendishly difficult test/assessment for civil servants to make sure they were up to it cognitively. But our modern view of IQ was fist formed by Binet [1] a French educator who was trying to get a measure of which children were retarded, and standardising this. This was for honourable reasons it must be noted: to given them support and not just send the off to an asylum. Also interesting is that his work led him to believe that intelligence had many qualitative factors – rather than quantitative. In short shouldn’t be measured with an assessment!