Neuroleadership and Brain Training at Work

Of all the branches of science, the study of the brain may be the hardest one to look away from. Stanley B. Prusiner once put it this way: every human brain is different, and that difference is what makes each person who they are. That idea sits underneath a growing area of workplace practice that Dr. David Rock named neuroleadership, which pairs what we know about the brain with how people are managed and trained on the job.

The technology and training methods behind neuroleadership keep getting better, and a fair number of people in the workforce are paying attention. If that trend holds, the way companies train their employees a decade from now could look quite different from what we see today. Recent work on learning and memory points toward one possibility in particular: pulsed, non-invasive transcranial stimulation, often shortened to tDCS and sometimes just called brain stimulation.

The basic idea is to re-train the brain using low electrical currents. Electrodes get placed on the scalp or forehead, over the regions tied to the functions you want to work on. Steady, gentle pulses of energy pass through those electrodes into the brain tissue. One form of this constant flow is called transcranial alternating current stimulation, or tACS. Because nothing is cut or implanted, the method is considered non-invasive and carries little in the way of lasting side effects.

Though it can sound futuristic, this is not a new invention. Versions of brain stimulation have been around for decades, mostly inside medicine rather than the office. Clinicians have turned to it in limited cases to help with conditions such as depression, anxiety, stroke recovery, headaches, joint and chronic pain, dementia, muscular disorders, and epilepsy, among others (Nauert, 2017).

Dr. Shapour Jaberzadeh and colleagues in the Department of Physiotherapy at Monash University pushed the technique past its usual medical boundaries. They worked out a newer variation aimed at territory like learning, memory, and employee training rather than treatment of illness (Nauert, 2017). That overlap with how people acquire new skills is where neuroleadership enters the picture.

Across a run of studies, the Monash group reported that this lesser-known method could speed up how fast the brain takes in new material and tasks. Students, or in a work setting employees, seemed able to pick up new information both faster and more accurately, which in turn lifts output in a classroom or on the job. Part of the trick, they found, was limiting the stimulation itself by cycling it on and off rather than running it continuously (Nauert, 2017).

The spacing of the pulses mattered. Jaberzadeh and his team saw that the intervals between bursts of electrical energy could produce positive shifts in the brain, and that shorter gaps between pulses tended to raise brain excitability, meaning more brain activity (Nauert, 2017).

Animal work set some of this up. In 2011, researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas looked at how brain stimulation affected learning in rats and measured them on how well they completed tasks. Rats that received stimulation carried out the tasks faster and more accurately afterward. Even once their brain responses drifted back to where they were before the stimulation, the animals could still perform what they had learned. The researchers suggested the same acceleration in learning and task acquisition might carry over to humans (Science Daily, 2011).

Human testing followed a similar logic. In a study led by Sandia National Laboratories, participants spent 30 minutes playing either verbal or spatial memory games while stimulation was applied to the left or right side of the forehead, the regions tied to learning, memory, and reasoning. The right hemisphere handles spatial work; the left handles verbal work (DOE/Sandia National Laboratories, 2017). The researchers expected that people stimulated on the right while doing spatial tasks would improve on the spatial test but not necessarily the verbal one, and that people stimulated on the left while doing verbal tasks would improve on the verbal test but not necessarily the spatial one.

The results did not break down quite so neatly. The spatial/right group improved on both the spatial test and the verbal one. The spatial/left group showed no clear gain on the spatial test. The verbal/left group improved only on the verbal side. The researchers explained it by pointing out that the right hemisphere governs not just reasoning but strategy, so stimulating that region during a verbal task seemed to sharpen strategy skills the participants could then apply to both kinds of tests (DOE/Sandia National Laboratories, 2017).

Carried into the workplace, and employee training specifically, this kind of approach could pay off for staff, managers, and the business at once. As firms put more weight on employee satisfaction, some sectors may start using brain stimulation to strengthen training programs, surface where each worker is strong or weak, and raise productivity, which feeds back into revenue.

How would it actually operate day to day? For individual employees, brain mapping and stimulation could help identify which jobs suit them, steering people toward roles that make the most of their abilities. During training it could help newcomers learn their responsibilities faster and help veterans refresh old skills or take on new ones.

Managers stand to gain as well. The results would let them spot each person's strengths and weaknesses and hand out tasks accordingly, then point employees toward the areas where they need to grow. Anyone needing extra training could get it and be tested again. Better training plus stimulation, the argument goes, would show up as higher company profit. At its core the method re-trains the brain so people learn faster and retain more, and the catch is less about the science than about convincing companies to spend the time and money to make it work at scale.

Until that day arrives, firms can approximate the concept by dropping the stimulation itself and leaning on memory and learning games as a lead-in to training. That means building an interactive program centered on specific skills taught through gameplay, whether on a computer or off, and then measuring those skills through observation, tests, or games tuned to the actual job.

Memory training would come first. Employees would spend time with memory and learning games chosen for the skills the job demands, and the selection matters, since the games should target the brain functions that line up with doing the work well.

The second piece would be the psycho-educational part: a neuroleadership classroom setting built around teaching people how their own learning works.