TERS
B Y M A R K H E N R I C K S
AS SCIENCE UNLOCKS
MORE AND MORE
OF YOUR BRAIN'S
SECRETS,LEARN
HOW HARNESSING
THE POWER OF YOUR
GREATEST ASSET
CAN CREATE A
MORE PRODUCTIVE,
MORE PERSUASIVE,
MORE COMPETITIVE
BUSINESS.
The sun rises as you leave work and head for an early breakfast.
You smile eheerfully at the server and decline eoffee. While waiting
for your food, you glanee through a business magazine and
mentally file several items for further thought later on. You and
your sales and marketing vice presidents have just puiled an allnighter
preparing a presentation, and the client meeting is in two hours. It's a
new prospect and a new market, and none of you had heard of either before
yesterday. But you fee! relaxed, alert and confident that if the business can be
won, you and your team will win it.
Can this story be true? After staying up for 24 hours, you should be sleepy, jittery,
irritable and anxious for more caffeine to add to the buckets you've already
gulped. You should have trouble reading, much less memorizing pages of text. Your
employees should feel the same. And you should never count on any marketing effort
to work, especially one with less than a day's worth of preparation behind it.
But this story can be true. All you have to do is take note of recent strides
in understanding how our brains control sleep, learning, memory and other
functions, and—even more important—how we can improve these faculties.
Improved brain imaging has opened windows into how we learn, remember,
recover and rest. Coupled with new insights into the genetic underpinnings of
brain development as well as new products in neuropharmacology—brain
drugs—it is a revolution in brain management.
Before long, staying awake for extended periods while effortlessly learning
new material and remembering large chunks of information may seem normal
for entrepreneurs and their employees. We—as well as some of our competitors,
unfortunately—may have new ways of marketing to prospects and customers that
make our efforts more effective than anyone had dreamed of before. Our brains may
go from being our biggest constraints to being our bi^est competitive advantages.
The Origins of New Brain Science
By now, everybody's heard ofthe antidepressant Prozac and other new drugs
and supplements that tinker with brain workings. Many of us have had MRI
scans of our body parts, if not of our brains. Some of us have heard of neuromarketing.
which aims to craft marketing efforts that overcome obstacles and
exploit loopholes built into our brains.
What may have been missed, though, is the fact that Prozac's latest successors
are the leading edge of a new wave of drugs and supplements that do far
more than lift blue moods. They actually improve memory, ease learning and
?Q • ENTREPRENEUR JANUARY 2006
r'n
i
banish sleep. Neuroscientists use MRIs and related scanning
technologies to discern areas of activity in the brains
of people doing such things as recalling recent memories.
That reveals how specific brain structures are used
in different tasks. And neuromarketing, while doubtless
containing some hype, may well be the revolution its proponents
promise.
Brains, in short, are hot. One reason is that Congress
declared the 1990s the "Decade of the Brain," and pumped
tens of billions of dollars into brain research. That generated
advances now beginning to bear fruit. Annual federal
neuroscience funding still tops $4 billion. And private
sources including VCs are getting into the act, flinding
startups to commercialize drugs and procedures for modifying
our brains and the way they work,
Joel Garreau, an editor and reporter at The Washington
Post and author of Radical Evolution, a new book about
applying technological advances to human bodies and
brains, says the turning point came when we began directing
our curiosity inward, rather than outward, "Now,
for the first time." says Garreau, "our technologies arc
going through a wholesale process of being aimed inward,
modifying our minds, memories, metabolism, personalities
and what it means to be human."
The Entrepreneurial Brain
There may be something special about entrepreneurs'
brains. Many have a condition called attention-deficit dis*
order, or ADD. "There's a very high incidence of ADD
among CEOs in small companies," says Daniel G. Amen,
M.D., a brain researcher and director of Amen Clinics
Inc., a group of four brain-imaging centers in the U.S.
"These are people who take risks, need people to help
them stay organized, don't like working for other people,
have a lot of energy and are good at multitasking."
Eventually, even the most finely tuned entrepreneurial
brain runs up against human limits. Take sleep. Most
people who use caffeine to try to stay awake for long periods
find it makes them jittery and anxious, and interferes
with concentration. The same goes for prescription
stimulants such as amphetamines.
But new anti-sleep drugs dispense with side effects and
actually allow you to focus better. Modafinil, for example,
was developed for patients with narcolepsy. When healthy
people take it, they can stay awake 80 hours or more without
losing focus or concentration. "If you can stay awake
with your cognitive functions thriving for a week, think
of what that does," says Garreau. "Imagine lawyers with
photographic memories who never sleep."
Better memory may come from other drugs. Tim Tully
is a scientist who studied the gene that controls memory
and learning in fruit flies. Helicon Therapeutics, a Farmingdale.
New York, company he founded in 1997, has developed
a drug, now in trials, that may help humans learn
faster and remember better. When given to mice with
age-related memory problems similar to those that older
humans experience, the drug, HT-0712, works well. "Old
mice, roughly 50 years in human equivalents, have the
memory capacity of young mice, roughly 25 years in human
equivalents," says Tully. "And the potential is there
to enhance memory for all of us."
The Employee Brain
Entrepreneurs can also improve employees' memory,
alertness and concentration by making work a brainenriching
place to be. Amen recommends offering employees
opportunities to educate themselves, including
cross training for other functions in the company as well
as learning that goes beyond work. "A learning brain,"
he says, "is a happy brain."
A brain listening to music is also a happy brain, and
one that enhances learning. University of California,
Irvine, researchers found that people who listened to
Mozart before taking a pattern-recognition test improved
their scores 62 percent after two days of practice. Those
who spent the time in silence improved just 14 percent.
While piping in Mozart may not be all that practical
at the office, removing brain-damaging elements is imperative.
Be alert, especially for toxic chemicals. "I can't tell
you how many indoor painters and cabinet refinishers
we have looked at, and their brains look terrible," Amen
says. "Make sure there is good ventilation if [people are]
going to work around toxic materials."
Pay attention to workplace food and drink, too. "We
kill people's brains by bringing in doughnuts," says Amen.
"I have a policy in my office that people are not to have
candy dishes on their desks. People eat it, get blood sugar
spikes and crashes, and then they're stupid." He also recommends
against workplace coffeepots, because caffeine
interrupts brain blood flow and impairs sleep.
Stress from overwork also affects sleep, and experts say
fewer than six to eight hours of sleep daily over the long
haul is bad for brains. "Chronic stress kills the memory
area of the brain," Amen says.
Encourage physical exercise, which increases brain blood
flow and reduces stress. You might even sponsor meditation
classes, suggests Martha Farah, director of the Center
for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Penn.sylvania
in Philadelphia. Says Farah, "Meditation and mindfulness
programs have been sbown to enhance brain function."
The Customer Brain
No brain research has spurred as much business interest
as the studies of marketing and brains. The hope is that
72 ENTREPRENEUR JANUARY 200G
we'll learn to market in ways far more effective than anything
anyone has come up with yet. Early results are promising.
A couple of studies did MRIs on people exposed to
celebrity faces and brand images. One found Coca-Cola's
logo triggered impulses in the midbrain, an area that sits
between the primitive hindbrain and the more developed
forebrain. A Pepsi logo didn't have the same effect. The
study suggests a brand's image can drive behavior in a
way that neither instinct nor conscious thought controls.
These and other findings are being translated into practice
by Patrick Renvoise, co-founder and president of SalesBrain
LLC in San Francisco. Renvoise, co-author with his business
partner, Christophe Morin, of Neuromarketing: Is There
a "Buy Button" Inside the Brain?, says we should rethink
marketing to reflect current brain understanding. To start
with, marketing should be more visual and less verbal.
Areas of the brain controlling vision are much older than
those for language, Renvoise says. That has imphcations
for anyone attempting to influence decision makers. "A
lot of entrepreneurs talk about their benefit or solution
and don't use a strong visual metaphor," says Renvoise.
"And it's very hard to convince people using words when
their organ of decision is primarily visual."
In addition to strong visuals, marketers should present
their solution in sharp contrast to other options. To
Renvoise, brain research says too many entrepreneurs rely
on "me, too" marketing slogans such as "We are a leading
provider..." when they should be finding ways to say "We
are the only provider...." It's a critical distinction. "Without
contrast," he says, "the brain cannot make a decision."
It's also important to tell the truth, because customers'
brains are better at detecting untruths than even they
know. Renvoise's book reports on one neuroscientist who
had people play games with decks of cards rigged to produce
unfair results. Players were occasionally asked
whether the games seemed fair. After a number of rounds,
players started reporting the decks were stacked. But
skin-conductance tests revealed that they became nervous
when reaching for rigged decks well before the knowledge
reached their eonscious minds.
Another study Renvoise quotes asked people to accept
money for placing a large billboard in their front yards.
The success rate was more than seven times higher if the
homeowners had first agreed to display a much smaller
postcard in a window. The moral: Don't underestimate
the power of starting small.
Brain Boundaries
Brain understanding appears to open up limitless possibility.
Brain-based business, however, has eosts, limits
and risks like everything else. For instance. Amen says
pre-employment screening using brain scans will likely
become common practice in several years. But at the current
price of $1,000 per MRI scan, these tools will be used
only by wealthy companies filling high-value positions.
Brain drugs aren't free, either. Modafinil costs about
$3 a dose, and newer drugs are likely to cost more.
Similarly, neuromarketing may not mateh promoters'
claims. "There's only one area of real importance," says
John Philip Jones, a professor of advertising at Syracuse
University in New York. "It destroys the supposed differentiation
between rational and emotional advertising."
To Jones, brain studies suggest that most ads need emotional
appeal to get people to pay attention long enough
to get in the rational selling proposition. "That's the key
thing, and there's nothing more to it than that," he says.
There are also side effects. Modafinil apparently has
few—except that it allows people to do without sleep. And
doing without sleep, while a major short-term productivity
booster when you're facing a crunch, is ultimately
bad for the brain when engaged in long-term. "Sleep deprivation
is a real trap for the ambitious," warns Farah. "You
might think the extra hours on the job are helping, but
in many ways, you'd work smarter if you were rested."
While it may be possible to change your brain, it's not
inevitable, says David Weiner, an entrepreneur and seience
writer who authored Reality Check: What Your Mind
Knows But Isn't Telling You. Weiner says practices such
as thinking positive thoughts will actually change brain
structures, but not without a lot of repetition. He says,
"Your brain is stubborn and doesn't change easily."
Brain Futures
The idea of fielding a work force equipped with enhanced
memory, never needing to sleep and able to learn any subject
quickly and easily, may sound like Utopia, but brain
boosting probably won't create super-employees or superentrepreneurs.
Nor will just anybody be an entrepreneur.
Tbomas Harrison is a cellular biologist as well as CEO
of Diversified Agency Services and author of Jnsfmct;
Tapping Your Entrepreneurial DNA to Achieve Your Business
Goals, in which he shows bow highly suceessful people
use genetic advantages to overcome their own weaknesses
and exploit competitors'.
At bottom, Harrison says, we are who we are. While
we can change much about ourselves, we can't change
everything. He says, "You have to be genetically inclined
to do what you want to do." •
MARK HENRICKS is Entrepreneur's "StaffSmarts"co!umniit.
JANUARY 2006 ENTREPRENEUR 73
B Y M A R K H E N R I C K S
AS SCIENCE UNLOCKS
MORE AND MORE
OF YOUR BRAIN'S
SECRETS,LEARN
HOW HARNESSING
THE POWER OF YOUR
GREATEST ASSET
CAN CREATE A
MORE PRODUCTIVE,
MORE PERSUASIVE,
MORE COMPETITIVE
BUSINESS.
The sun rises as you leave work and head for an early breakfast.
You smile eheerfully at the server and decline eoffee. While waiting
for your food, you glanee through a business magazine and
mentally file several items for further thought later on. You and
your sales and marketing vice presidents have just puiled an allnighter
preparing a presentation, and the client meeting is in two hours. It's a
new prospect and a new market, and none of you had heard of either before
yesterday. But you fee! relaxed, alert and confident that if the business can be
won, you and your team will win it.
Can this story be true? After staying up for 24 hours, you should be sleepy, jittery,
irritable and anxious for more caffeine to add to the buckets you've already
gulped. You should have trouble reading, much less memorizing pages of text. Your
employees should feel the same. And you should never count on any marketing effort
to work, especially one with less than a day's worth of preparation behind it.
But this story can be true. All you have to do is take note of recent strides
in understanding how our brains control sleep, learning, memory and other
functions, and—even more important—how we can improve these faculties.
Improved brain imaging has opened windows into how we learn, remember,
recover and rest. Coupled with new insights into the genetic underpinnings of
brain development as well as new products in neuropharmacology—brain
drugs—it is a revolution in brain management.
Before long, staying awake for extended periods while effortlessly learning
new material and remembering large chunks of information may seem normal
for entrepreneurs and their employees. We—as well as some of our competitors,
unfortunately—may have new ways of marketing to prospects and customers that
make our efforts more effective than anyone had dreamed of before. Our brains may
go from being our biggest constraints to being our bi^est competitive advantages.
The Origins of New Brain Science
By now, everybody's heard ofthe antidepressant Prozac and other new drugs
and supplements that tinker with brain workings. Many of us have had MRI
scans of our body parts, if not of our brains. Some of us have heard of neuromarketing.
which aims to craft marketing efforts that overcome obstacles and
exploit loopholes built into our brains.
What may have been missed, though, is the fact that Prozac's latest successors
are the leading edge of a new wave of drugs and supplements that do far
more than lift blue moods. They actually improve memory, ease learning and
?Q • ENTREPRENEUR JANUARY 2006
r'n
i
banish sleep. Neuroscientists use MRIs and related scanning
technologies to discern areas of activity in the brains
of people doing such things as recalling recent memories.
That reveals how specific brain structures are used
in different tasks. And neuromarketing, while doubtless
containing some hype, may well be the revolution its proponents
promise.
Brains, in short, are hot. One reason is that Congress
declared the 1990s the "Decade of the Brain," and pumped
tens of billions of dollars into brain research. That generated
advances now beginning to bear fruit. Annual federal
neuroscience funding still tops $4 billion. And private
sources including VCs are getting into the act, flinding
startups to commercialize drugs and procedures for modifying
our brains and the way they work,
Joel Garreau, an editor and reporter at The Washington
Post and author of Radical Evolution, a new book about
applying technological advances to human bodies and
brains, says the turning point came when we began directing
our curiosity inward, rather than outward, "Now,
for the first time." says Garreau, "our technologies arc
going through a wholesale process of being aimed inward,
modifying our minds, memories, metabolism, personalities
and what it means to be human."
The Entrepreneurial Brain
There may be something special about entrepreneurs'
brains. Many have a condition called attention-deficit dis*
order, or ADD. "There's a very high incidence of ADD
among CEOs in small companies," says Daniel G. Amen,
M.D., a brain researcher and director of Amen Clinics
Inc., a group of four brain-imaging centers in the U.S.
"These are people who take risks, need people to help
them stay organized, don't like working for other people,
have a lot of energy and are good at multitasking."
Eventually, even the most finely tuned entrepreneurial
brain runs up against human limits. Take sleep. Most
people who use caffeine to try to stay awake for long periods
find it makes them jittery and anxious, and interferes
with concentration. The same goes for prescription
stimulants such as amphetamines.
But new anti-sleep drugs dispense with side effects and
actually allow you to focus better. Modafinil, for example,
was developed for patients with narcolepsy. When healthy
people take it, they can stay awake 80 hours or more without
losing focus or concentration. "If you can stay awake
with your cognitive functions thriving for a week, think
of what that does," says Garreau. "Imagine lawyers with
photographic memories who never sleep."
Better memory may come from other drugs. Tim Tully
is a scientist who studied the gene that controls memory
and learning in fruit flies. Helicon Therapeutics, a Farmingdale.
New York, company he founded in 1997, has developed
a drug, now in trials, that may help humans learn
faster and remember better. When given to mice with
age-related memory problems similar to those that older
humans experience, the drug, HT-0712, works well. "Old
mice, roughly 50 years in human equivalents, have the
memory capacity of young mice, roughly 25 years in human
equivalents," says Tully. "And the potential is there
to enhance memory for all of us."
The Employee Brain
Entrepreneurs can also improve employees' memory,
alertness and concentration by making work a brainenriching
place to be. Amen recommends offering employees
opportunities to educate themselves, including
cross training for other functions in the company as well
as learning that goes beyond work. "A learning brain,"
he says, "is a happy brain."
A brain listening to music is also a happy brain, and
one that enhances learning. University of California,
Irvine, researchers found that people who listened to
Mozart before taking a pattern-recognition test improved
their scores 62 percent after two days of practice. Those
who spent the time in silence improved just 14 percent.
While piping in Mozart may not be all that practical
at the office, removing brain-damaging elements is imperative.
Be alert, especially for toxic chemicals. "I can't tell
you how many indoor painters and cabinet refinishers
we have looked at, and their brains look terrible," Amen
says. "Make sure there is good ventilation if [people are]
going to work around toxic materials."
Pay attention to workplace food and drink, too. "We
kill people's brains by bringing in doughnuts," says Amen.
"I have a policy in my office that people are not to have
candy dishes on their desks. People eat it, get blood sugar
spikes and crashes, and then they're stupid." He also recommends
against workplace coffeepots, because caffeine
interrupts brain blood flow and impairs sleep.
Stress from overwork also affects sleep, and experts say
fewer than six to eight hours of sleep daily over the long
haul is bad for brains. "Chronic stress kills the memory
area of the brain," Amen says.
Encourage physical exercise, which increases brain blood
flow and reduces stress. You might even sponsor meditation
classes, suggests Martha Farah, director of the Center
for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Penn.sylvania
in Philadelphia. Says Farah, "Meditation and mindfulness
programs have been sbown to enhance brain function."
The Customer Brain
No brain research has spurred as much business interest
as the studies of marketing and brains. The hope is that
72 ENTREPRENEUR JANUARY 200G
we'll learn to market in ways far more effective than anything
anyone has come up with yet. Early results are promising.
A couple of studies did MRIs on people exposed to
celebrity faces and brand images. One found Coca-Cola's
logo triggered impulses in the midbrain, an area that sits
between the primitive hindbrain and the more developed
forebrain. A Pepsi logo didn't have the same effect. The
study suggests a brand's image can drive behavior in a
way that neither instinct nor conscious thought controls.
These and other findings are being translated into practice
by Patrick Renvoise, co-founder and president of SalesBrain
LLC in San Francisco. Renvoise, co-author with his business
partner, Christophe Morin, of Neuromarketing: Is There
a "Buy Button" Inside the Brain?, says we should rethink
marketing to reflect current brain understanding. To start
with, marketing should be more visual and less verbal.
Areas of the brain controlling vision are much older than
those for language, Renvoise says. That has imphcations
for anyone attempting to influence decision makers. "A
lot of entrepreneurs talk about their benefit or solution
and don't use a strong visual metaphor," says Renvoise.
"And it's very hard to convince people using words when
their organ of decision is primarily visual."
In addition to strong visuals, marketers should present
their solution in sharp contrast to other options. To
Renvoise, brain research says too many entrepreneurs rely
on "me, too" marketing slogans such as "We are a leading
provider..." when they should be finding ways to say "We
are the only provider...." It's a critical distinction. "Without
contrast," he says, "the brain cannot make a decision."
It's also important to tell the truth, because customers'
brains are better at detecting untruths than even they
know. Renvoise's book reports on one neuroscientist who
had people play games with decks of cards rigged to produce
unfair results. Players were occasionally asked
whether the games seemed fair. After a number of rounds,
players started reporting the decks were stacked. But
skin-conductance tests revealed that they became nervous
when reaching for rigged decks well before the knowledge
reached their eonscious minds.
Another study Renvoise quotes asked people to accept
money for placing a large billboard in their front yards.
The success rate was more than seven times higher if the
homeowners had first agreed to display a much smaller
postcard in a window. The moral: Don't underestimate
the power of starting small.
Brain Boundaries
Brain understanding appears to open up limitless possibility.
Brain-based business, however, has eosts, limits
and risks like everything else. For instance. Amen says
pre-employment screening using brain scans will likely
become common practice in several years. But at the current
price of $1,000 per MRI scan, these tools will be used
only by wealthy companies filling high-value positions.
Brain drugs aren't free, either. Modafinil costs about
$3 a dose, and newer drugs are likely to cost more.
Similarly, neuromarketing may not mateh promoters'
claims. "There's only one area of real importance," says
John Philip Jones, a professor of advertising at Syracuse
University in New York. "It destroys the supposed differentiation
between rational and emotional advertising."
To Jones, brain studies suggest that most ads need emotional
appeal to get people to pay attention long enough
to get in the rational selling proposition. "That's the key
thing, and there's nothing more to it than that," he says.
There are also side effects. Modafinil apparently has
few—except that it allows people to do without sleep. And
doing without sleep, while a major short-term productivity
booster when you're facing a crunch, is ultimately
bad for the brain when engaged in long-term. "Sleep deprivation
is a real trap for the ambitious," warns Farah. "You
might think the extra hours on the job are helping, but
in many ways, you'd work smarter if you were rested."
While it may be possible to change your brain, it's not
inevitable, says David Weiner, an entrepreneur and seience
writer who authored Reality Check: What Your Mind
Knows But Isn't Telling You. Weiner says practices such
as thinking positive thoughts will actually change brain
structures, but not without a lot of repetition. He says,
"Your brain is stubborn and doesn't change easily."
Brain Futures
The idea of fielding a work force equipped with enhanced
memory, never needing to sleep and able to learn any subject
quickly and easily, may sound like Utopia, but brain
boosting probably won't create super-employees or superentrepreneurs.
Nor will just anybody be an entrepreneur.
Tbomas Harrison is a cellular biologist as well as CEO
of Diversified Agency Services and author of Jnsfmct;
Tapping Your Entrepreneurial DNA to Achieve Your Business
Goals, in which he shows bow highly suceessful people
use genetic advantages to overcome their own weaknesses
and exploit competitors'.
At bottom, Harrison says, we are who we are. While
we can change much about ourselves, we can't change
everything. He says, "You have to be genetically inclined
to do what you want to do." •
MARK HENRICKS is Entrepreneur's "StaffSmarts"co!umniit.
JANUARY 2006 ENTREPRENEUR 73
No comments:
Post a Comment