Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently (10 page)

The hormonal stress response may seem convoluted, but there is good reason for using hormones in addition to neurotransmitters. While neurotransmitters cause instantaneous reaction in the body, the effect of hormones is more subtle and long lasting. Hormones direct different organs in the body to change their physical configuration, especially in response to stresses that don’t go away. Chronic stressors, such as physical injury or starvation, require the body to shift its resources to either repair damage or deal with an ongoing lack of nutrients. The human body is amazingly flexible in this regard. It is well evolved for
dealing with the stresses that our ancestors encountered thousands of years ago.

Modern stress is different. If your stress system is activated, it is probably for a reason different from physical injury. Today, the major stressor for most people stems from social reasons. Social stressors come from conflicts with spouses, bosses, and competition with peers. Add on top of that an increasing perception of lack of control over the environment, and you have a recipe for ongoing stress that takes a toll on the body. The toll, of course, is collected in the form of all the major medical ailments, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes.

The brain is not immune from the effects of stress either. As the flashpoint for the stress response, the brain is the organ that initiates the cascade. The brain responds to perceived threats and activates the sympathetic nervous system, and the brain initiates the cascade of hormonal responses. On the receiving end, the brain remodels itself in response to stress. Some of the remodeling occurs at the neuronal level through simple learning mechanisms. Other changes occur under the effects of hormones such as cortisol. These physical changes may have wide-ranging effects on behavior. Repeated stressors, for example, cause changes in key parts of the brain related to decision making and even iconoclastic thinking.

The Accidental Iconoclast: Fear and the Dixie Chicks

Nobody knows the stress response like people who have had their life threatened. Time and again, history has shown how iconoclasts like Jackie Robinson are treated. The truly unpopular have been killed. We would like to believe that such possibilities are a thing of the past, but they are not. Sometimes the iconoclast arises out of the most unlikely circumstances, a sort of accidental iconoclast. Natalie Maines, lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, is exactly this type of iconoclast.

Maines’s comment on a London stage in March 2003 was almost an afterthought, an off-the-cuff remark between songs from someone well known for speaking her mind. But when Maines announced, “We’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas,” all hell broke loose. The United States was on the eve of invading Iraq, and support for Bush was at an all-time high. To make matters worse, patriotism and country music had always gone hand in hand, and Maines’s remark was taken as a direct insult by large segments of their fan base. Intentionally or not, Maines and the Chicks became iconoclasts when they took a stand against the dogma that said “country music = unflagging patriotism.” They were one of the most popular acts in country music, and overnight they plummeted to one of the most reviled targets.

Public destructions of their CDs looked eerily similar to Nazi book burnings. Emily Robison, who plays banjo and guitar in the band, recalled, “A radio station said they had our picture on the side of one of their vans, and they were just driving down the highway when a car pulled up with a shotgun and pointed it at them. Just because our picture was on their van.”
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The death threats were the worst. Maines received the brunt of them. One, in particular, was quite specific: you will be shot dead at your show in Dallas. Although Maines already had around-the-clock protection, she had to extend it to her family, including her parents. Three years later, Robison still shudders at what the Chicks endured. “It was like the McCarthy days, and it was almost like the country was unrecognizable.” Maines’s view of the conservative media: “If you don’t share their opinions, they label you as a terrorist or a person who doesn’t have any family values.”
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When the Dixie Chicks released their next album, three years after the incident, a curious thing happened. The tide of public opinion about the Iraq war had changed. Much of the United States supported troop withdrawal. The Chicks’ ties to country music, however, were damaged. Their single “Not Ready to Make Nice” floundered on
Billboard
charts
but, at the same time, was the number-one download on iTunes. Maines understood what was going on with the radio stations that still wouldn’t give them any airtime: “When a hundred people e-mail you that they’ll never listen to your station again, you get scared of losing your job. They caved.”
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What is most impressive about Maines and the Dixie Chicks, like Jackie Robinson before them, is how they did not let their fear of public ridicule, or even fear of death, prevent them from standing up for what they believed. Where most people would succumb to these pressures, Maines learned to embrace her now very public role. “I feel a responsibility to do it now. I didn’t realize how quiet I was being. But it’s exhausting to keep doing it. You feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle. But, it’s just not in me to shy away from things that I truly believe in. I’m not afraid.”
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Maines’s comment illustrates a common attribute among iconoclasts and how they deal with fear. They transform the emotion into something else. While Jackie Robinson transformed his fear into anger, Maines changed hers into pride. Recognizing that fear can paralyze action, the iconoclast takes the autonomic arousal associated with fear and uses it for something productive. The prefrontal cortex is largely responsible for this override control, but before we get to how it does this, a closer examination of where fear resides in the brain is called for.

Fear Conditioning

Remember Ivan Pavlov, the good old Russian psychologist who got his dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell? He was the guy who discovered
classical conditioning
, the simplest form of learning. In classical conditioning, a neutral stimulus, such as a light or a bell, is paired with something that evokes a response, such as food. The latter is called an
unconditioned stimulus
(US) because it causes a response, such as salivation, on its own. The neutral stimulus is called a
conditioned
stimulus
(CS) because pairing it with the US
conditions
the animal to respond to the neutral thing. In Pavlov’s experiments, the US was something desirable—food—so this type of learning is called
appetitive conditioning
. It doesn’t have to be that way. Classical conditioning also works for things that animals don’t like. Electric shocks, bitter liquids, loud noises, and air puffs to the eyeball are all common “unconditioned stimuli” used in
aversive conditioning
. Such tactics have been used as part of behavior modification therapy for things such as smoking cessation and invisible fences for dogs.

For fear conditioning, one brain structure serves as the critical processing center. About the size and shape of an almond, the
amygdala
lies deep within the temporal lobes just off the midline of the brain. The amygdala is a structure critical for emotional processing, and the bulk of the evidence supports its role as a gateway for fear vis-à-vis the autonomic nervous system.
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The amygdala also influences the functioning of cortical regions, including perception itself. In a famous series of experiments in the 1970s, neuroscientists discovered that the amygdala can fine-tune the response of neurons in the auditory cortex. First, the researchers used a technique in which they recorded from neurons in the auditory cortex while playing tones of different frequencies to the animal. Auditory neurons possess a tuning curve in which they respond maximally to a specific range of frequencies. The neuroscientists then picked the frequency that was just off the best frequency for a particular neuron, and paired that tone with an electric shock. After just a few such pairings, they found that the auditory neurons had shifted their preference to match the tone associated with the shock. Moreover, this change persisted for weeks. These results demonstrate the powerful effects of fear conditioning on perception itself. The amygdala, by associating a particular tone with a shock, rewired the cortex so that the brain became more attuned to this frequency. These changes are profound and long lasting.

Many scientists believe that fear conditioning cannot be undone. For an unpleasant stimulus like an electric shock, it doesn’t take long for fear conditioning to occur. Typically, it only takes a few pairings of sound and shock. If, however, you began presenting the CS without the shock, the animal will stop responding to the CS. The process is called
extinction
. For many years, scientists believed that the animal actually forgot the association of the CS with the shock. More recent evidence suggests otherwise. Although the responses to the conditioned stimulus diminish over time, it turns out that they are inhibited, not eliminated. This has important implications, because it means that conditioned fear responses can reappear with only the slightest provocation. The key structure for extinction turns out to be the prefrontal cortex. Although the amygdala is still necessary for the expression of fear responses, it is the prefrontal cortex that keeps it in check. Damage to the prefrontal cortex, or conditions in which the prefrontal cortex is occupied with other tasks, may result in the release of the amygdala brake and the reemergence of a fear response.

So while it is true that time heals all wounds, as far as the brain goes, scars remain.

Computer Associates and the Fear of Failure

The fear of public ridicule figures prominently for many people, but the fear of failure deserves equal billing in terms of its toxic effects to both the individual and the organization. The story of Computer Associates (CA) provides a case study in how both types of fear can tear an organization apart.
¹¹

Charles Wang, born in Shanghai, immigrated to the United States when he was eight years old. In 1976, with one piece of software for mainframe computers, he founded Computer Associates International. With an aggressive management style, Wang grew his company rapidly.
Computer Associates’ expansion was fueled largely through the acquisition of smaller companies and competitors. A favorite tactic of Wang’s was the hostile takeover of a competitor, followed by an ultimatum given to the workers of the acquired company: accept a new contract with a pay cut or be fired. All in all, Wang engineered at least fifty such takeovers.

Fueled by his appetite for acquisitions, Wang grew Computer Associates to a company with $1 billion in annual sales by 1989. He seemed to have a magic touch for exceeding Wall Street’s expectations for earnings. He ran the company like a family business. He rarely used e-mail or written documents to communicate with his management team, and former employees described a management style based on fear and intimidation.

Wang and his CEO, Sanjay Kumar, ran Computer Associates driven by the overriding fear of not meeting earnings estimates. The company’s products, which came largely through external acquisitions instead of internal innovation, derived from the shrinking mainframe market. Computer Associates developed a reputation of playing hardball with its clients, essentially locking its customers into long-term maintenance contracts for outdated equipment and software. In an effort to pump up its earnings, CA evolved a set of questionable accounting practices that ranged from booking revenues from maintenance contracts all at once (instead of the normal practice of distributing those revenues over the length of the contract) to the infamous thirty-five-day month, in which sales after the end of the month were booked retroactively.

Ultimately, the accounting practices were outed under lawsuits from CA’s investors. Criminal investigations against senior management were launched by the Justice Department. Kumar pleaded guilty to fraud and was sentenced to twelve years in prison in 2006 and to pay $800 million in restitution. Wang resigned from CA’s board in 2002, and the board subsequently launched its own investigation against him. He
has never been indicted. What is interesting about the investigation’s report is the culture of fear prevalent within CA:

Mr. Wang caused additional harm to CA by creating a “culture of fear,” which caused CA employees, at all levels, to refrain from offering dissenting opinions. He did this by making personnel decisions in an arbitrary manner, routinely firing CA personnel on a subjective basis. This had the effect of suppressing corporate dialogue, by both lower and midlevel employees, as well as in the highest ranks of senior management. According to one witness, CA employees felt as if they were constantly “hanging on by their fingernails.” In the SLC’s view, this culture was the breeding ground in which the 35-Day Month practice originated and later flourished. This atmosphere proved particularly toxic at CA, since, under Mr. Wang, missing Wall Street estimates was to be avoided at all costs.
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Computer Associates provides a good example of how to inhibit both innovation and iconoclastic thinking through fear and intimidation. Even Wang’s and Kumar’s decision making was distorted by their own fears of failing to meet earnings expectations. Although it is possible to run a company this way, it is not possible to foster iconoclastic thinking when fear is pervasive. Such a company can only grow through the acquisition of others’ innovations.