The healthy human brain is no dummy. By the time it reaches adulthood, it knows a lot about what works and what doesn’t work. Where it gets in trouble is when things that it thought worked no longer do so, at least not well enough.

When that brain was much younger and in the body of a child, change was much easier. The child brain is quite malleable. When it wants or needs to do something different, doing that different something usually isn’t nearly as difficult as doing something different is for adults.

At one point in his widely admired book, Brain and Culture, Yale psychiatrist Bruce Wexler explains it this way:

“During the first part of life, the brain and mind are highly plastic, require sensory input to grow and develop, and shape themselves to the major recurring features of their environments. During these years, individuals have little ability to act on or alter the environment, but are easily altered by it. By early adulthood, the mind and brain have elaborately developed structures and a diminished ability to change those structures. The individual is now able to act on and alter the environment, and much of that activity is devoted to making the environment conform to the established structures.”

A brain that “backs” its way into maturity
A lot of what happens as the brain ages and matures on the long, arduous journey from birth to adulthood has been a career-focus of the husband-wife research team of Drs. Stephen Rushton and Anne Juola-Rushton at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee. A couple of weeks ago, the Rushtons were sharing their views with parents in Mumbai, India.

My interest was immediately captured by Stephen’s comment (as quoted by an Indian reporter) that “The child’s brain develops from the back to the front.” The two Drs. Rushton took their child-rearing audience on a tour of just how the child brain develops beginning with the spinal cord and cerebellum and moving more or less sequentially over the years to the occipital lobes, parietal lobes, temporal lobes, motor cortex and finally to the frontal/pre-frontal lobes. This doesn’t mean that there are empty spaces where those later-developing organs are, but I understand exactly what the Rushtons are describing: an advancing “biopsychosocial” locus and focus—a forward-moving frontline—to a person’s cerebral capabilities.

While I’ve not had the opportunity to talk with the Rushtons about all this but hope to—we have family in Sarasota and are there often—what I’ve heard thus far sounds highly supportive and endorsing of many of Brain Technologies/Brain Me Up’s applications and explanations. This is particular true of those based on the late Dr. Clare W. Graves’ “biopsychosocial” model of human development. That is to say, our Dolphin strategy models and materials.

My colleague, Dr. Paul Kordis, and I wrote our first “dolphin”-based work more than 20 years ago. Other works on the Graves model followed. Thus far, however, none seems to have caught the attention of a globe-spanning audience with quite the magnetism and usefulness of our book, Strategy of the Dolphin™: Scoring a Win in a Chaotic World. This work appears to speak directly to the desire of its admirers for a better way to understand the marvelous, mysterious dance between brain and culture and for better ways to use that knowledge in their own self-development, organizing and relationships.

From ‘best ever’ lists to the House of Lords
The assignments with which Strategy of the Dolphin have been tasked and the list of its admirers continue to grow.

Just the other day, we learned that our dolphin strategy provided the Inspirational Forum for Organizational Health with the theme for its 31st annual conference at The Hague, Netherlands—in the late 1990s. We’d never have known had not a report on a speech delivered in England’s House of Lords by the organization’s president about a year after Princess Di’s tragic death been recently revisited by a blogger.

While we know of no parents who have named their newborns after the dolphin (or us) because of the book, more than a few organizations have put “dolphin” in their name or dolphins in their logo in the book’s honor. (Alas, our company lawyer has had to remind more than a few enthusiasts that “Strategy of a Dolphin” is one of our trademarks.) In one language and then another, the book is frequently reviewed; here’s a recent French language review—of the French language version of the book, natch—written by a Belgian blogger. Self-development writers can’t seem to stay away from the book and its compelling metaphor for very long, as this recent U.K. article confirms.

And business students who gave oral book reports on SOD years ago sometimes discover that their professors never forgot how moved they were by their students’ enthusiam for the book’s content.

Earlier this year, we learned that SOD is on the short list of “best business books ever” that management professor David C. Wyld maintains. Dr. Wyld has opined that “the authors’ insights are brilliant and so very relevant to the challenges most individuals and organizations faced through the nineties and still grapple with today: going for the elegant outcome; leveraging the wave; breaking set; being on purpose; seeing through the brain’s ‘time window’; releasing to a higher order; pushing the envelope; shifting in time. It’s deep and intelligent, but not intellectual. It’s a thoughtful blueprint and practical road map of useful insight.”

Thanks, Professor!

What keeps this book timely and relevant?
I was already mulling over Professor Wexler’s book and the Rushtons’ model of how children’s brains develop, along with some other ideas about how the brain deals with the need to change. Then came Wyld’s comment that the insights in SOD are still “so very relevant to the challenges most individuals and organizations face….” Why is that, I pondered? Eventually, I penned these thoughts:

To get the adult brain to change, you must work with the way that brain is already wired. It has a lot of beliefs, protocols, habits and practices already in place. It has a strong sense of how it thinks the world ought to be. The best way to make any head way changing all this requires helping people feel like they can use all that knowledge they already have but use it in exciting and productive new ways to do things differently.

The power of the Dolphin strategy is that it doesn’t require people to give up who they are. It simply asks them to take what they know and bring it into a wider, more productive context. Once they do that, then they often discover is that what they’ve added to the mix has not really been merely additive but also transformative. As the old saw puts it, the whole is suddenly more than the sum of the parts.

There’s a right time to think like a Carp (“self-sacrificially”). And a right time to think like a Shark (“controllingly”). And certainly, more and more times when it pays to think like a Dolphin (”situationally and pro-actively combinatorially”). You may need to think like all three in a short space of time. In today’s world, your audience or marketplace can change several times an hour. So at the moment, what people need more than anything else is a new comfort level for being more mentally and emotionally agile, versatile, competent.

This is what we teach with the Dolphin strategy. First, we offer a new way to think about the main ways that people believe, act and respond. There are only a handful of major filtering and belief-formulating scripts that people everywhere follow in daily life. Our goal with the Dolphin strategy is to help individuals recognize those overarching scripts and the behaviors they trigger faster than ever before. When they spot these scripts in others and themselves, they have valuable clues as to how to respond appropriately. And we may be introducing them to a new script—the script of the Dolphin thinker. In today’s marketplace, the Dolphin thinker—particularly, the Dolphin thinking executive and the Dolphin thinking entrepreneur—is going to win or achieve favorable outcomes more often than anyone else, for three reasons:

1) He or she sees change coming quicker than others (because he or she has more perspectives, and a wider perspective, with which to watch for change).

2) He or she understands better than most which change will matter and which may not (because the Dolphin worldview offers a better sense of what lies behind and beyond change and how other worldviews or belief holders are likely to respond to it).

3) He or she thrives on making new things happen, old things better and the world a more competently functioning place (because the appearance of new technologies, new viewpoints and new configurations of people working together doesn’t spook Dolphins but, to the contrary, excites their innovative spirit and outlook).

Not everyone is equipped to think like a Dolphin. But all Dolphins are equipped to help those around them think better, with less fear and inner resistance because the world is changing and needs to change even more.

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For more information about the Dolphin strategy book and the other Brain Technologies self-growth materials, go here. And you can arrange to take our online Yo!Dolphin! Worldview Survey™ here.

But does it matter whether the newly proliferating “neuro lab rats” study Chinese brains, American brains, Luxembourgian brains or Sri Lankan brains? Isn’t a healthy human brain a healthy human brain wherever it is found? And isn’t the whole idea of focusing on brains in one country versus brains in another country a slippery ethical slope that could easily dump the whole scientific neuroenterprise in the lap of—yes—racism or worse … gasp! … a kind of eugenics profiling?

Well, first off, it is already clear that studying one country’s brains doesn’t count for studying them all. That idea flies straight into the headwinds of some of the latest neuroscience. One of the very first faceoffs between brains made in America and brains made in “East Asia” revealed that, in terms of similarities, something was rotten in Denmark.

Moreover, what Professor John Gabrieli at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT discovered speaks directly to my primary thesis: the Chinese brain is like none other. And in a century that is merely a decade or two away from China inexorably beginning to rule the world, the rest of us should hasten to understand the differences.

Surprised by the role that culture plays
You can get more details on Professor Gabrieli’s experiment here. Suffice it to say, it was the findings that should raise eyebrows. Brains made in America must work harder to make judgments for which society’s answers aren’t that clear. Brains made in East Asian must work harder to make judgments where society’s stance is not in doubt.

That outcome surprised the researchers. “Everyone uses the same attention machinery for more difficult cognitive tasks, but they are trained to use it in different ways, and it’s the culture that does the training,” Dr. Gabrieli said.

In other words, it is often the culture that shapes the brain, and differing cultures shape differing brains. The reason why the Chinese brain is like none other is in sizable measure because the Chinese culture is like none other. Again, you may beg to differ. And, again, I ask that you accompany me to an expert.

Meet Martin Jacques. He’s the author of When China Rules the World. I spotted him again the other day in Macleans, the Canadian news weekly. He was explaining why China is soon going to be the world’s pre-eminent economic, political and cultural superpower. I can remember only one other newsmagazine analysis that riveted me as much as this one (that was a Newsweek piece in the summer of ’74 showing how Watergate’s corruption reached the very top of American politics).

Jacques says the Chinese don’t represent a country, or nation-state, so much as a civilization, and he marvels at its “powerful centripetal quality.” He notes—and worries about—the centrality of race in the thinking of the Chinese people and their assumption of cultural superiority. He comments:

“I mean, 92 per cent of them think of themselves as of the same race. While this is clearly not true—the Han Chinese are in fact descended from many different races—it gives a kind of biological reason for Chinese unity. And you can see it in their attitude toward those within China’s borders who have not been integrated in this way. The Tibetans or the Uighurs in Xinjiang province, for example, are regarded as needing to be helped up to the level of the Han Chinese. It’s a patronizing and very assimilationist attitude.”

More than just a country called China
Part of it is the Chinese language, Jacques believes. And the Confuscian values as applied to society and governance. And above all, the notion of the state as family—as the guardian of civilization. Not even the “Century of Humiliation” dating from the Opium Wars, not even Mao, with all his ruthlessness, could dislodge the Chinese from these beliefs. “It is a very remarkable characteristic,” says Jacques.

It is very much a postmodern biological “Great Wall of China,” a neurological Maginot Line in the brains of 1.4 billion people. It is one that is ordained to shape the brains of nearly every yet unborn child of China because of a culture that has been increasingly fabulously successful at seeing itself as a civilization, not just a country.

Do I skate here on thin ice? Not if you are willing to be informed by the work of Bruce E. Wexler at Yale University. He published Brain and Culture a couple of years ago.

B&C is, in my judgment, an exemplary piece of research and argumentation that, at its simplest, says this: Up to young adulthood, the brain puts its neurons together based in no small part on what its environment is telling it. After that, the brain works mightily to shape its environment based in no small part on the way its neurons suggest it ought to be.

Each generation thus acts to shape the brains of the next generation of its offspring, and this is where the Chinese civilization excels. Nor does the adult brain stop there, Professor Wexler says. Going forward, it hungers to lay the reality it constructed in those formative, neuron-linking years on all kinds of individuals, kin or not. And this is a quality that concerns a lot of people, including Martin Jacques. And I might add people like Australian Brian Hennessy, who has taught the past three years at the Chongqing Medical University and is currently providing psychological assistance to survivors of the Sichuan earthquake.

Segueing from a crime to cultural imperatives
The other day Hennessy says he had his wallet pick-pocketed near his home in Chongqing. When he reported the incident to police, he says he and his wife became the targets of the police investigation. He says they were hassled for hours. At first Hennessy says he didn’t understand. Then he realized it was as simple as realizing that the neighborhood police officers interrogating him and his Chinese-born and Chinese-speaking wife had lost face.

You’ll need to read this with a grain of salt because these are the words of an angry man and words that I can’t check for accuracy. But in the context of what veteran China observers like Martin Jacques believe and brain researchers like Bruce Wexler have reported on, it has the ring of reality.

Hennessy says the moment of truth for him arrived when he pointed out that the theft occurred in the police precinct’s “own backyard.” The policemen’s faces froze, he says.

“Suddenly, everything that I had read about and experienced in China gelled into a one brief moment of enlightenment: I understood clearly what was really going on around me. Thank you, Buddha,” he writes. “A foreigner had been robbed in their area of responsibility, and embarrassing questions would be asked by their superiors. Institutional cultural imperatives as well as traditional cultural imperatives were guiding the behaviour of these investigators.”

Yes, Mr. Hennessy, that is also my point. Neuroscience has already shown us that the brain and its culture are inextricably linked. In some cultures more than others. In terms of internal coherence, the culture of China is perhaps the most powerful extant on Earth today. It believes itself to be superior to all other cultures. There is no reason not to believe that it believes the brains it produces are superior to all other brains.

A source of home-grown brain tissue only
Five years ago, first brain bank specializing in the study of Chinese brains was established at the Xiangya Medical School of the Central South University of China. One of the reasons given by the project’s sponsors was that “the western based brain banks do not have an adequate supply of brain tissue from Chinese subjects.”

This time, the Chinese can be forgiven some of their self-preoccupation. Their brain is different. In ways that already matter and are about to matter more, the Chinese brain has done extraordinary things over the centuries. It is doing things today that are without peer (its brilliant economic strategy of the past few decades, for example). For all its challenges, it shows every promise of having its best days ahead.

But it is a brain formulated by five hundred centuries of a civilization unique unto itself. Where the rest of us stand in the estimate of that civilization we have yet to have clarified. To say it one more time, it is absolutely critical that we know as much as we can about how the neurons work in a brain that may be about to rule the world.