By Michiko Kimura Bruno M.D.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
This is a pretty innocent question that all children are asked, and ask themselves. Mine was a baker, florist, musical instrument maker, and a U.N. worker at different times.
So when my friend said, “I want to be a CEO of a big company,” I was surprised. While it was probably just youthful blabber, I remember that comment vividly to this day.
The surprise was manyfold. I had no idea how one would become a CEO, or what that path would look like. But mainly, the surprise was because I myself would never want to be a CEO, even if (like a bad sitcom plot) somebody handed me that job.
Why this aversion?
It is not hard work I fear. What first comes to mind is a complicated organizational chart.
The many lines and arrows give me a headache because they symbolize this fact: the CEO is too far from, and cannot know, what is happening on the ground. The CEO reads the report without knowing exactly how it was made. Perhaps, intrinsically, I fear the lack of control, of not knowing everything that is happening.
The similarity between the brain and the corporate world
However, as much as I don’t desire to be a CEO of a human-made organization, this structure—a CEO having to be a leader without being able to know 100% of what is going on at the ground level—resembles something I am deeply familiar with: the workings of our brain.
Even though the brain is one of our organs, and we possess it and use it every day, we actually are not able to perceive the inner workings of our brain at the biological, neuronal level. We equate our brain with our self and mind, and feel emotions ranging from happiness to sadness and anger, use language, and form memories every day. But at any given moment, the brain is like a lively factory, humming and buzzing with an enormous amount of subconscious processing: sensory integration, autonomic regulation of bodily functions, memory retrieval, prediction, valuation, motor preparation and more. Conscious experience is only what surfaces and requires our attention: like an executive summary, not the underlying spreadsheet.
In this way, we are all CEOs of our own brain.
And this fits with modern theories of attention and consciousness. Experiments show that enormous amounts of neural processing occur outside conscious awareness. Philosopher Thomas Metzinger takes this idea further: the brain constructs a model of ourselves and the world, but we experience the contents of that model—not the machinery that constructed it. Most neural processing stays within specialized departments. Only some information makes it to the executive meeting.
A good CEO does not need nor will be able to know every single detail of the operation. Delegation allows the CEO to expend energy steering the ship without micromanaging every single detail.
Decision-making through complex bottom-up information
In a complex organization, there are many departments with competing agendas. Finance may be trying to tighten the belt while research and development may be embarking on a long-term project. The information coming up can be complicated and conflicting, and leaders need to make decisions factoring in competing interests.
Our brain is also incredibly complex, with different systems operating with different priorities. Basic instinctive survival needs, reward, habit, memory, social belonging, long-term planning, and prediction may point us in different directions. Simply deciding what to eat for lunch: a hamburger or salad? may involve competition among these different priorities.
In both corporations and our brains, contradiction and chaos are the norm.
Perhaps contradiction isn’t evidence that we don’t know ourselves. Contradiction may simply be what it feels like to be a complex biological system.
But who is the CEO?
In the end, this analogy only goes so far.
A CEO is an independent, separate person from the employees and the corporation; they can be removed or changed. But “we” cannot separate ourselves from our brain. It is not as if there is a small person sitting inside our head, ordering around all the other employee neurons.
So who is the “we” when I say “we” are the CEO of our brain?
The answer is: there is no single CEO sitting inside the brain.
Modern neuroscience tells us that conscious thoughts, attention, goals, and values themselves emerge from a distributed system. And yet, somehow, this system has the capacity to reflect upon itself, establish priorities, and influence what it does next.
Thus, maybe a better way to extend this analogy is this:
Let’s try to be a good CEO, using our attention and values like a mission statement, while understanding that we will never be able to perceive everything that is happening under our skull.
A bad CEO might try to micromanage every department, eliminate every disagreement, and demand that the organization behave exactly as intended. A good CEO knows that this is impossible. The organization is too large, too complicated, and filled with processes the CEO will never completely see.
What the CEO can do is set direction and steer the ship.
Our brains may require something similar from us. We cannot choose every thought that appears, every emotion that arises, or every impulse that asks for our attention. We cannot inspect the neurons that produced them. Sometimes we may not even understand why we want what we want.
But we can decide what deserves more weight. We can choose what we repeatedly attend to, what habits we cultivate, what environments we place ourselves in, and what values we return to when different parts of us pull in different directions.
Maybe that is the strange job each of us has been given: to steer an organization of astonishing complexity while seeing only a tiny fraction of what it is doing.
Thirty years later, I still don’t want to be the CEO of a big company.
But apparently, I already have the job, and cannot escape it.
References
Metzinger T. Empirical perspectives from the self-model theory of subjectivity: a brief summary with examples. Progress in Brain Research. 2008;168:215–245. doi:10.1016/S0079-6123(07)68018-2.
Michiko Kimura Bruno, M.D., is a Movement Disorder Neurologist, practicing in Honolulu.
Originally published at Psychology Today
