Elephants and Riders – How The Brain Works
Elephants and Riders – How The Brain Works
Throughout this site readers will find a variety of resources that will help them make better decisions quickly in regards to any number of topics. “Elephants and Riders” is a module in many of my training programs to help people understand How The Brain Works.
I encourage the reader to spend some time researching Emotional Intelligence to develop a much more thorough understanding of the massive topic that I am about to over-simplify with this post. For a bit more from my perspective, the reader could also check out my post on Critical Decision Making. In that post, I replace the agents of Elephant and Rider for Dog and Handler. Essentially, though the gist remains the same.
The Agents In Our Heads
Imagine please that your brain is made of two different individual agents of an Elephant and a Rider. The rider sitting on top of the elephant, high and to the front. The analogy of an elephant and a rider is not one that I came up with. Chip Heath and Dan Heath draw upon the analogy in the book, “Switch; How To Change Things When Change Is Hard” and do a great job explaining the concept in more detail than I will here.
- The Elephant
- The Rider
- The Team
The Elephant
This large portion of our brain is the more mature in terms of age of evolution. Researchers show that this part of our brain dates back to prehistoric times when the mammal brain was little more than smell receptors sitting on a stack of sensory and motor control nerves. At this point in history – our noses would inhale an odor and our Sense-Making System would sort that odor into very basic categories…
- I can eat it
- It can eat me
- I can mate with it
After sending the signal to the appropriate area the body would react accordingly. Over time in what looks to this casual observer as a bad spackling job our brains evolved and the limbic system developed followed by the neocortex. Goleman does a great job breaking this evolution down in his book. Suffice to say that after a great deal of evolution, luckily our brains are capable of so much more. Even the pre-cognitive portion that we’ll call the elephant can be trained to respond with direction far beyond those original three. But it is for that basic psychological need to survive and procreate that we as humans are still around.
The more modern elephant is focused on two basic tasks
- Survive and procreate
- Ease the burden on the conscious mind (letting the rider ride)
It is the elephant who jumps when we are startled, it is our elephant who eats when we are hungry, and it is our elephant who drives us home at the end of a long day on what seems like auto pilot.
The Rider
If the elephant is the auto pilot who takes us to and from work unconsciously and through other routine functions in our lives than it is the rider who suddenly realize she forgot to get milk as she pulls into the driveway. The conscious mind of the rider sits on top of the elephant and is much less mature. Like the Millennial who shows up at the office and asks, “why do we do it this way?” The elephant may respond with, “because we always have” and the rider has the choice to accept or challenge the response. The rider is the agent we rely upon for matters that require calculation and critical perspective.
2+2?
For most of us, the elephant answered that but, 347+294 will require the involvement of the rider. That being said, did you actually answer it or just skip the math to get to the point.
Riders are lazy. The rider operates off of choice and will perform tasks that serve a purpose and will skip those that do not. At this point, if you haven’t answered the second math problem there is probably a struggle occurring between your elephant and rider as to who the problem belongs to.
The Team
The elephant or the rider would be helpless without the other. They function as a team to move us from meeting basic physiological needs to self-actualization. It is this team of two, each with their own unique strengths and weaknesses that make us whole. So, that being said, the most effective teams train together and challenge each other. It is largely the part of the rider to set a path for the elephant.
Cookies for breakfast… I often ask audiences if they’ve ever eaten junk food for breakfast. With rare exception, I generally find that most audiences are full of people who have at least once. In those few instances where I’m speaking to a group of superheros, I am the willing fall guy who readily admits to having eaten cookies for breakfast. When we explore the scenario, in nearly every case we find that the junk food was stored in close proximity to the breakfast food. In this moment it becomes easy for our rider to auto-pilot and let the elephant run.
Setting the path for the elephant. In my post on, “Basic Leadership” I talk about four factors. When we lead ourselves it is imperative that we create a situation by intentionally defining the path our elephants are allowed to travel down.
I know this is an over-simplification
I know this is an over-simplification of a complex science. I am posting this as a reference for the sake of clarification and as a conversation starter. I mention the concept of elephants and riders in the blog and in my course but I haven’t had a chance to explain it on here yet. The analogy I like to use when talking about the power of elephants is by asking the audience to image they are the rider sitting on top of an elephant when the tiger attacks. Will the elephant respond before the rider even realizes what’s happening? probably. Will the rider have much say in how the elephant responds during the attack? Probably not. So, I’ll come ack and revisit this later. There is a lot more to this conversation than I could capture in 1,000 words.