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Episode #83~Insights from Neuroscience: The Role of Empathy in Shaping Well-Being and Coaching with guest, Anthony Jack
Discover how your brain's battle between analytical thought and empathy shapes your understanding of the world as we sit down with Professor Anthony "Tony" Jack. He is a Beamer-Schneider professor of ethics and research fellow of the Coaching Research Lab at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Jack has a PhD in psychology and trained at world-leading centers for neuroscience in Europe and the USA. He started the Brain, Mind & Consciousness laboratory for brain imaging, psychology, and experimental philosophy in 2007.
Anthony "Tony" Jack's lab has published critical reviews of overhyped uses of neuroscience, revealed the cognitive basis for brain deactivation and anticorrelated network phenomena, and conducted the only brain imaging studies of coaching.
Prepare to have your mind stretched as we delve into the intricate relationship between neuroscience, psychology, and mental health. Tony, straddling his roles as both scientist and coach, offers a unique vantage point into the challenges neuroscience poses for coaching, while also revealing how empathy and 'soft skills' play underrated, yet pivotal roles in our mental and interpersonal wellbeing. Join us for a profound journey into the human psyche, one that promises to leave you with fresh insights for personal and professional growth.
Watch the full interview by clicking here
Find the full article here: bit.ly/BTP-AJ24
Learn more about Antony Jack
Grab your free issue of choice Magazine here - https://choice-online.com/
In this episode, I talk with Anthony Jack about his article published in our December 2023 issue.
Welcome to the choice Magazine podcast, Beyond the Page. choice, the magazine of professional coaching, is your go-to source for expert insights and in-depth features from the world of professional coaching. I'm your host, Garry Schleifer, and I'm thrilled to have you join us today. In each episode, we go guess what?, beyond the page of articles published in choice Magazine and dive deeper into some of the most recent and relevant topics impacting the world of professional coaching, exploring the content, interviewing the talented minds like Tony here, and uncovering the stories that make an impact. choice is more than a magazine. For over 21 years, we've built a community of like-minded people who create, use and share coaching tools, tips and techniques to add value to their businesses. And, of course, what all coaches want to do, make a difference with their clients.
Garry Schleifer:In today's episode, I'm speaking with Professor of Ethics, Anthony Jack, who is the author of the article in our latest issue "Neuroscience and Coaching Separating Myths from Reality His article is entitled Intuitive Dualism how the Disconnect between Neuroscience and Coaching Leads to neurohype. Anthony, or Tony as his friends call him and hopefully I can be there too, is Beamer- Schneider Professor of Ethics and Research Fellow of the Coaching Research Lab at Case Western Reserve University. Dr Jack has a PhD in Psychology and trained at World Leading Centers for Neuroscience in Europe and the USA. He started the Brain, Mind and Consciousness Laboratory for Brain Imaging, Psychology and Experimental Philosophy in 2007. His lab has published critical reviews of overhyped uses of neuroscience, thank you, right on target, revealing the cognitive basis for brain deactivation, an anti-correlated network phenomena, and conducted the only brain imaging studies of coaching. Thank you so much for joining me today, Tony.
Garry Schleifer:And I watch you laughing. It's like Dr. Jack right. Right, nice to be here. Thank you, and I usually ask the authors why they decided to write, but I asked you to write and Beth speaks very highly of you. Anybody who's anybody talks about you or refers to you and your work at Case Western Reserve. So we're very honored to have you write for us and to be here to talk with us. So thank you.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Well, that's very kind, but I think there are lots of talented people who don't know anything about me, but that's okay.
Garry Schleifer:There's very few that I know of that don't know Tony Jack. Okay, I want to get into your article. In your article you talk about how neuroscience reveals a difference between analytic and empathic modes of thought, and many people may be more familiar with thinking fast and slow, or automatic versus deliberate. Is that the same as analytic or empathic?
Anthony "Tony" Jack :No, it's not the same although it's very easy to get them confused. It's the most common confusion I get when I talk about them because that talk about fast and slow, sometimes called dual process theory, has become very popular. I mean there's a big selling book by a Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman about it. It's really become part of the vernacular to talk about that, and I think it is very useful to talk about the fact that sometimes we just make very quick decisions and we make very quick impressions.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :If we think more carefully about it, we may reach a different conclusion. But actually there are two different ways in which we can do those things, those quick and automatic things and those deliberative things, and I could bore you a length about the academic.
Garry Schleifer:Yes, you did bore me about that.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :All right, all right, all right about like these two models, but I think the best way to do it is just giving an example, right? So often, a good example of talking about thinking fast and slow is this issue of bias that we have. So that we often make quick, stereotype judgments about people, and that's part of what can lead to issues with diversity, equity and inclusion so it's probably something familiar to many you. So how do you get past that, right? There are some people who claim that empathy is one of the causes of bias, but that's a very shallow version of empathy. That's just our most immediate emotional reaction. So there are a couple of ways in which you can get past your sort of immediate biases. One is you can take a very analytic approach and you can be like well, what are the numbers, like how many people applied for this position and how many people do we accept, and what are their objective criteria to assess them, et cetera, and that's all good.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :That's a very useful way of doing it, but it's not the most, I would argue, the most important, the most ethical and the most human way of doing it, which is actually to really take the time to put yourself into the experience of someone who's had a very different life experience from you and to understand their point of view and where they come from. And that is using your empathic understanding and that fights with your analytic understanding. So you can do both. You should do both right. You should look at the numbers, you should try and look at objective criteria, but it's a very different thing to put yourself into someone else's shoes and I would argue that's the more important way in which we can really understand human diversity and address those issues in a sort of more human way.
Garry Schleifer:Thank you very much. Yeah, that really gets one thinking. Especially when you put in the biases and then the concept of its impact on DEI. One of our issues recently was about that. So, hey, maybe you'll write for our next iteration of diversity, equity, inclusion. Are we making progress? I've got the habit right. Yes, you do. So I need to take a step back because I realized that we didn't get clear on what is intuitive dualism.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Ah yes, intuitive dualism is a very natural human tendency that we have to think of the mind as different from the body in a mechanical sense, right? So if you ask many people like, would you agree with the statement that your thoughts and feelings are nothing but the activity of neurons? There may be many who would agree because they're kind of taking a scientific point of view on it. But most of us feel some resistance even though we might be like, oh, I guess that's technically correct, right? If you ask people, do humans have a soul? Many of us are inclined to say yes, although that's really a very extra scientific concept, right? So what's going on there? Why do we have this tendency?
Anthony "Tony" Jack :In the academic community, most people treat this as just being a problem, right?
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Because they're like no, the scientific point of view says that you just use science to understand everything, and I think when we go back in everyday life we realize that is not actually a good way of navigating the world. Y ou can't use science to understand everything and a lot of my research has been about that. It's been about the fact that, indeed, there is a whole set of brain areas that support scientific understanding, and they're wonderful and they do lots of good work and we're very good at educating them. A lot of our education is focused on that sort of analytic thinking. But then we have another way of understanding, which we're really not doing a good job of educating, and that's more like this ability to put yourself into someone else's shoes, but also to come up with a narrative for your own life and to regulate yourself and your own emotions through that. So that's what these empathic brain areas do, and the empathic brain areas, because they fight with the analytic brain areas, you can only do one at once.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Now you can integrate them. After you do one then the other and then you kind of integrate the results. But you can't really integrate them in the moment. You've got to either do one way of thinking or another or else they get in the way of each other. So when you're in that empathic mode you can't really think of another person as just a machine because that kind of interferes with your ability to relate to them as a human. So that is the origin of our tendency to intuitive dualism and it really is a reflection of this story that has emerged recently as neuroscience. But it's also something that creates a problem for neuroscience because, as you read from subtitle of the piece, it gives rise to these confusions about neuroscience and quite how informative it is.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :So there's a lot of translating that has to take place to really make neuroscience relevant to the details of how to coach. But what neuroscience does do is it hits us in the face with like wow, you mean my brain really changes when I'm coached? Yes, it does. We're so surprised by that because of our tendency to intuitive dualism. W e think, oh, this kind of soft stuff is completely different from bodily changes but it isn't. They're all intertwined in reality. I can say I think intuitive dualism is, in a way, very useful to coaches as well.
Garry Schleifer:Yeah, thank you, and for our listeners and subscribers, there's a wonderful image that Tony's given us for the article and you know, when you say that, you know it's like ike you drive a car with your foot on both the gas and the brake at the same time, right, ight? you're, when you're , you're thinking one way. If you're empathic, you're thinking and acting in a different way. So it's kind of like a yeah, so definitely the dualism. I get that a lot, you know. I want to go back to something you just said and bear with me here, because I'm going to a of places in your article. First of all, to your point about the subtitle, how the disconnect between neuroscience and coaching leads to neurohype. And secondly, what you said is coach training programs that claim to be misleading primarily on neuroscience are misleading. Good evidence based approaches to coaching are based first and foremost on psychology, which is in turn, informed by neuroscience. Bring it all together for me, like, what was your thinking about the disconnect?
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Well, you know, neuroscience is a long way from behavior and it's also a long way from how we intuitively understand the mind, right? So psychology is really sort of a bridging discipline in that sense. So there are things that go on in the brain and they result in behaviors and thoughts and you need to put the neuroscience into context. So there is quite a long history of people getting very excited by various neuroscience findings and then sort of rushing to a conclusion about what that means for how we think or how we behave. But you know, all science is complicated and difficult and in the article I briefly mentioned the analogy of drugs for mental disorders.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Now, you know, there's a lot of research about mechanism that goes into coming up with drugs for mental disorders, but so far very few drugs have actually been created for the condition they ultimately like treat, right? So yeah, the scientists figure out like wow, it changes the brain. It also sees neurotransmitters that's likely to have some kind of effect on, you know, mood or behavior. And then they start doing trials and they go through this whole long process and they see how it actually works.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :And then it turns out yes, it does have an effect, but it's often a little bit different from what they actually thought. Wellbutrin is a good example. Turns out people find it easier to give up smoking when they're given this drug that was developed as an antidepressant. Incidental finding, but a very useful incidental finding, right. So I see psychology as playing the same sort of role as that laborious and long and difficult process of clinical trials to get a drug to market and that's a very important process.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :You don't want people just taking some substance without understanding how it actually affects us. We're very complex organisms. So just because you see some neural effect, that's surprising and amazing. How does that play out in the whole complex dynamic of this homeostatic system that balances itself? Well, it can turn out in different ways than you expect. So that's how I see the relationship between neuroscience, psychology and then sort of practically useful advice about what to do.
Garry Schleifer:I find it very interesting when you're talking about all this, about the whole neuroscience, and Ann Betz, in her article in this issue, gave a little bit of history of the decades starting like up to the 90s and then the 2000s and stuff like that. So you know, I love how it resonates with what you're saying. Here's a weird question. How much do we really know about the brain? We're nowhere near done, obviously, but are we literally like 1%, 2%, 20%?
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Gosh, I mean we are. We are not yet at the stage where we could quantify how much we see, that's how low.
Garry Schleifer:But that's a good perspective for people too. To your point about all the hype about neuroscience, it's like, yeah, but we can't even quantify the amount of knowledge we've learned about the brain because we know that what is unlearned is way bigger than might be discovered in our lifetimes or research.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Right, and I think it's useful to bear in mind that the brain is the most complex single object in the universe. This informational complexity is unbelievable. There is a distributed object that's more complex than the brain. That's the internet, but that's the only thing that we know of that is more complex and maybe we're getting beaten by the internet for a reason.
Garry Schleifer:There's been references to technology and research in the brain having followed each other in a way. Ann was writing about that as well, and I just thought that was really kind of interesting that you mentioned the internet and the brain.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :It's certainly transforming how we think, and I would say that in the end we'll never fully understand the brain because the act of understanding it changes it. So it has a kind of recursive nature to it. Also, I don't think in a way, it is the ultimate prize to fully understand the brain. I have really come to think that it's appreciating our humanity that's more important.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :I mean I love science, I mean that's my whole career, right, but I mean I do think there's a way in which we kind of sometimes push it out of the way. So I would turn it back to your audience and say you know what you do, in terms of bringing out the humanity and the best in people, which I think coaching is tremendously powerful at doing, although there are other things that people should also do to sort of supplement it. I think that's really where the world is lacking, where we really are desperately in need of upping our kind of education and performance levels.
Garry Schleifer:Tony, I don't know if I'm just imagining it, but I think you really tapped into the empathic side of your brain right there. Yeah.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Well, I think that's what coaches are very good at doing. And I am a coach as well as a scientist. Now I managed to round myself out a little bit these days.
Garry Schleifer:Well, and we're all the winners for that so thank you for all the work that you do. You talked about the hype, but what are the obstacles for neuroscience addressing practical applications like coaching?
Anthony "Tony" Jack :I think it's the challenge of integration that's the biggest one. Academia is so powerful in many ways, and I made the point in the article that I think universities have to play a role in developing our understanding of coaching because you just need to support people to do the research and learn all the things that you need to integrate to really move coaching theory forward as best it might. But then academia suffers from some structural problems at the moment. People are too disciplinary bound, you know. They see things through too narrow a lens and actually that has really kind of got in the way of neuroscience and it's one reason why you haven't heard more widely about analytic versus empathic processing. Because really that understanding of that fundamental division in the brain comes from integrating two different approaches. One of which is a kind of cognitive neuroscience approach and another one is a network neuroscience approach. And it often amazes me when I look at the literature that still people in the network thing they don't really understand or appreciate what the cognitive neuroscientists are doing and vice versa.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :And you're like but wait, you both use SMRI and other techniques to study the brain. You know, come on, it's not that big an ass that you could understand this other field. But I mean, so you know, I think in academia we have to work more on supporting the interdisciplinary, integrating type researchers. So I think that's a bit of an obstacle and it's just a hard thing to do. It takes that much more effort to understand multiple disciplines and then integrate them then it does to just sort of be a star within one discipline and so that's an obstacle.
Garry Schleifer:Well, and we have people like you that can help us integrate it and bring it forward to the coaching profession. So thank you.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Well, thank you, I do my best. I'm a big believer in the interdisciplinary, but boy, it's been a somewhat painful path. It's easier to be a professor who just does their narrow thing.
Garry Schleifer:Yeah, exactly so, thank goodness you're also practicing the discipline of coaching and doing your work. So what's the single most important thing that coaches should take away from the latest neuroscience?
Anthony "Tony" Jack :I think the latest neuroscience has a very surprising and shocking message for a lot of academics, which is going back to this point that I was making about what the tremendously important role that coaches play, which is that analytic way of thinking, that scientific but not just scientific, and sort of systematic logical, mathematical way of thinking is so valuable, but it's not our most valuable way of thinking. And we have just as much plastic cortex that is learnable cortex, which is devoted to self regulation and understanding other people, and that is where we are falling down. We are not educating that network well, and the latest neuroscience tells us that that is the core network of the brain.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Those are the brain areas that the determine how well you function day to day more than anything else the brain. You see signatures of dysfunction in them in virtually every mental disorder, or you see a failure to kind of separate them from an analytic thinking. So I think one of the biggest mistakes we can do is to think that science should be the model for everything we do and all the ways we think. No, actually, the most important way is this interpersonal human way of understanding, and coaches are great at that and coaches can tell their clients about the latest neuroscience and and about how it shows how important it is for them to develop those soft skills, and that's a very powerful message, I think. So I think that coaches should feel very emboldened and validated by the latest neuroscience and they should make use of it to to really motivate their clients and and get past that barrier that many people have of thinking of sort of soft skills as something that's not important.
Garry Schleifer:You know even the word soft right? Yeah, it's a discounting word. It's like a yeah. Soft skills are important skills. The most important. Tony, what would you like our audience to do as a result of your article and this conversation?
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Well, I would like them to feel emboldened to get hold of some of this latest neuroscience and show it to their clients and get excited by it. I think neuroscience also has, in its details, a lot to offer to the details of the coaching process. So neuroscience is great, just be careful. Sometimes it over impresses us and then we run away with it.
Garry Schleifer:Run away and to your point, in the article and in this conversation, it informs coaching. Lots of things inform coaching and it's all about the relationship.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Right, and we mustn't get lost in this reductive way of thinking that then is dismissive of cultural context and kind of dehumanizes people.
Garry Schleifer:Yeah, thank you. Tony, what's the best way for people to reach you if they want more information or guidance? Oh, I wasn't expecting that question. Oh, you just thought we were one and done.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Now I'm like pausing, like do I want to give out my email?
Garry Schleifer:LinkedIn, email, your website.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Yeah, I think probably LinkedIn. I mean, I think I'm easy enough to find on LinkedIn as Anthony Jack at Case Western Reserve University.
Garry Schleifer:Yeah, thank you. Wow, all these really big questions, and that one stumped our speaker.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Garry, I mean your magazine is very popular and I my inbox is already pretty difficult to deal with.
Garry Schleifer:Exactly, exactly. And his phone number is five. I don't even know his phone number but we have him here, Tony. Thank you so much for joining us for this Beyond the Page.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Thank you, thank you.
Garry Schleifer:That's it for this episode of Beyond the Page. For more episodes, subscribe to your via your favorite podcast app, like Spotify and Apple seem to be where people are getting it. If you're not a subscriber, you can sign up for your free digital issue of choice magazine by going to choice-online. com. I'm Garry Schleifer. Enjoy the journey of mastery. Thanks again, Tony.
Anthony "Tony" Jack :Thanks, Garry, all the best.