> Neuroscience says the brain naturally resists change
I hate the stuff so much. A: how would you ever provide evidence in favour of this wildly generic statement and B: even if you did, individual differences would trump whatever tiny effect you could prove significant.
> Studies, such as those highlighted by Jeffrey M. Schwartz in "The Mind and the Brain," illustrate how our neural pathways strengthen with repetition, making familiar behaviors easier to perform over time. When change is introduced, the brain must adapt, creating new pathways and weakening old ones, a process that can feel uncomfortable and energetically expensive.
There's a useful label for all this technobabble: Not even wrong.
You don't "feel" neural pathways in any sense of the word. While the description of how pathways strengthen may be correct on a high level, there are likely details that matter how those processes actually work (I'm won't pretend to understand this stuff), but that doesn't matter here because an individual neuron is a completely different thing than a complete brain, and the inner workings of the brain is a completely different thing than the social mechanisms of the workplace.
They could just as well have described a proton-electron pair and saying it's the same attraction mechanism behind heterosexual love. Not wrong but not true in any meaningful way.
I took the time to borrow Schwartz's book from Libgen, skim through it, and read the parts that seem relevant to that claim (it didn't look worth reading in full--lots of fluff about "quantum theory rehabilitating the basic premise of moral philosophy" etc. etc.). I also took a glance at a few of the cited studies. Schwartz's main point has nothing to do with the brain "naturally resisting change"; the book argues rather that our brains remain malleable and are continually shaped by our behavior, and the studies he highlights are in support of those points. In his own words, he is arguing for "the brain’s astonishing power to learn and unlearn, to adapt and change"--so it looks like the article-writer drew a very different conclusion from the same undiscussed studies.
The article also mentions neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps's research to support an attendant claim that "When the prefrontal cortex is under stress, our capacity for learning, memory, and decision-making is compromised". But her research on stress's effects on cognition that I can find actually suggests stress is often beneficial to learning and performance, and her work on fear response conditioning focuses on timing of interventions, not energetic expense or discomfort.
What's so worth hating about this kind of vacant-eyed patronizing crap, this "neuroscience-based approach" and "blueprint for L&D professionals", is how it authoritatively name-drops experts and science-y words as an appetizer, without inviting any actual engagement or understanding, and proceeds to dish up warmed-over PD workshop slop for the next 9/10ths of the article. Those L&D professionals may have no substantive understanding of neuroscience, but they know that you need to feel "discomfort" and bear "energetic expense".
That sounds like the kind of over/misinterpretation of a scientific result which is typical with this stuff. How do you get from "neural pathways strengthen with repetition" to "people are resistant to change"? Is "can feel uncomfortable" in the scientific article, or is it just the pepped-up management consultant assuming that anything which takes energy must feel uncomfortable sometimes? (By logic!) Presumably salamander neural pathways also strengthen with repetition. Are they resistant to change too?
"Repetition is to education what repetition is to education". It tooks me time to strike me with its second mesmerizing effect: I had to hear this sentence a single time before it deeply engraved in my mind, in such a way that it most likely will stay there until I die.
Not all learned/acquired behavior works like that, at least at the subjective level that we can experience as human being (putting apart obviously the fact that we all have different subjective experiences).
There's a whole generation that proves that the brain tends toward resisting change. We call them Boomers in the US, although that word is used to describe more or a mindset than an age group these days, but one of the key components of said mindset is a resistance to changes.
But it makes a lot of sense. Generalized as all these statements may be, who here can argue that humans are not more inclined toward the comfortable and familiar, preferring instead to stick with what we know rather than struggling through the unknown? We all do this, to some degree, with some of us being a bit more adventurous or seeking different knowledge, or whatever, but returning to the known comforts feels safer to all of us.
> Imagine walking into your office on a Monday morning, buzzing with ideas from a recent leadership retreat.
Imagine, walking into your office on a Monday morning, and your boss wants to reinvent everything after having gotten drunk and dipped into a hot tub with the HR people.
Ok but I’d like to see an analysis of why humans are so resistant to change. It’s such a universal characteristic that there must be some sort of advantage to it, right? What is that advantage?
We are resistant to change only when someone else is trying to impose a burden over us without a clear picture of how such burden is going to profit us. I don't think we need any study to understand why!
Our brain main role is not thinking (that's more like a side-effect) but keeping us alive/safe at lowest energy cost. Changes A) are risky B) require energy to adapt. For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, doing things the way that their priors did was pretty good bet usually.
I recommend book "Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain" by Lisa Feldman Barrett where she talks a bit more about that.
Advantage is a false sense of security and predictability of future. False sense cause your human brain has no idea whether the current situation you are in is good for you long term. If just blindly assumes so.
Disadvantage is you ruin your life by living a repetitive life. Probably the #1 regret in death bed.
The "regret in death bed" thing is a modern preoccupation, as is novelty seeking. Those are not that organic either, they're cultural trends starting from books, movies, etc., that later got marketed and sold to people by the advertising/life coaching/self help industries too.
For millions of years of evolutionary history the main concern was making it alive, having a family, building a homestead, putting food on the table, keeping dangers (including enemies) off, and so on.
If you had those things, the "current situation" was good. They didn't aspire to get a promotion, start a startup, or become a travel vlogger.
The "novelty seeking" has been the exception, and even the novelty seekers didn't consider it a primarily purpose of one's life.
a) there was once more of an advantage, back when change had significant impact upon survival
(horses are notorious for being change-averse, but ours are, at least for equines, fairly novelty-tolerant; I ascribe this to their having learned, via experience, that the people are always trying new stuff, and some of it is more fun and some of it is less fun, but none of it has any impact on whether the food in particular, and safety in general, is available)
b) > I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid. —GKC
People are not necessarily always resistant to change.
When you try to bring something that ease their life without introducing huge additional cognitive load, or threats to whatever they feel like an island of stability in the chaos of life, they will certainly appreciate it and praise you for coming with it.
Also there is a acceptation threshold of how many breaking regressions are induced as an unintended side effect, no matter how brilliant the change proposed is for its intended purpose. Especially if change come in a top-down condescending know-better-than-you approach, rather than a "let’s take time together to improve your daily experience."
The old people might be wrong (at least as much of the rest of humanity), but they did survived for some time. So to improve survival rate of younger people, if the environment is stable enough, as clumsy as elder approach might be and all other meaningful information let apart, imitation seems a safer bet than trying random audacious moves with unknown results. Note that it’s all supposing much to comfort a rather conservative under a pseudo-scientific form of social darwinism. I wouldn’t agree to make that this could taken as a well balanced perspective.
You adapt to deal with particular difficulties. When something new eases your life and eliminates those difficulties without introducing huge additional cognitive load, it does the same for everyone else, rendering your previous adaptation no longer advantageous—enabling competition may, in fact, indirectly threaten whatever you may feel like an island of stability in the chaos of life.
(It’s just one angle of looking at this, of course, it may not always apply, but it could explain counter-intuitive instances of resistance to change.)
You might have just explained how these days, IT, rather than activism, drives lasting social change in the West. (Too bad about cryptocurrencies, but maybe it's just in a deeply eutectic potential well in the hype surface? Sorry about the not even wrong chemical physics analogy!)
Historically, this dynamic (=set of tradeoffs) fails most often in turbulent times ("chaos is a ladder" trope from GoT) but I suspect that, (in addition to the opiate of tech) worldwide literacy today (not to mention ease of survival) confounds the youthful naive.
i.e. most young people today have been indoctrinated about how to identify locally bad social theories (in the abstract!!), plus the smarter ones don't get their kooky theories weeded out violently enough for the unfunny ones to evolve in a meaningful way uh memetic darwinism?
(But perhaps you can have a theory of how IT kills unironic memes like machine guns the aristocratic infantrymen of WWI)
Watch out for unusually literate/numerate AND lawless places of formativity. I supppose..
(Ukraine, soon Taiwan, middle east in the intraorganizational (not individual) level once the Arabs/Hamas level up in organizational sophistication )
Something to think about: where are the lasting new social abstractions from kibbutzim? What the hell goes on in Adam Newman's head, has he ever published his conjoined triangles (<<Silicon Valley>>)
I think the original kibbutzim social abstractions may have had a longer life on shelves, in descriptions of Anarres et.al., than they've had in their second and third generations among the Sabra?
I hate the stuff so much. A: how would you ever provide evidence in favour of this wildly generic statement and B: even if you did, individual differences would trump whatever tiny effect you could prove significant.