Look Within Yourself - For Higher Performance

Awareness and personal awareness can increase performance according to recent research

I have reported on research into self-reflection previously and new research also points to the benefits of reflection in multiple ways that can benefit personal performance at all levels.

I have previously reported on self-reflection. I have also written about the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC). This is important because more recent research published has given us some more evidence of the importance of firstly the ACC, and secondly of introspection. The ACC is involved in both of these processes, with other regions such as the insula, which I reviewed here.

The first line of evidence, I have already written about in the article “The Brain and Behavioural Change”, is that we can see activation of the ACC, or rather deactivation, leading to suboptimal strategies, or relying on habit rather than the best course of action. So again, again, the ACC is at the crossroads of prediction and effort.

As I have already said, this has many implications in human beings — but could also easily be applied to the business world and how quickly and effectively individuals and organisations adapt to changing circumstances.

Because the ACC is part of the awareness and introspection network, engaging in mindfulness may help stimulate it and strengthen its function to a degree. Similarly, certain cognitive games that require responding effectively to input, e.g. the Stroop test, may help to train this brain region. Indeed, some other recent work on mindfulness itself has also given us some interesting additional insights into how this can also impact performance and though this didn’t directly connect the ACC, I assume it is strongly involved as we know its importance in introspection.

Lin et al. at Washington State University recruited around 200 volunteers for a study into meditation and error awareness. This an impressive size for this type of study. They aimed to research how open monitoring meditation affected error recognition. Open monitoring meditation is meditation that focuses on one’s own feelings and mind, rather than, for example, trying to focus on a single thing such as a candle or one’s breath, as some forms of meditation do. This encourages participants to become an observer of their feelings and emotions as their mind wanders in meditation.