Neuroscience of Achievement

Question 1

What is the lower brain (red brain)?

Answer 1

• Survival tasks
• Impulsive
• Irrational
• ‘Two year olds’
• Selfish

Question 2

What is the basal ganglia?

Answer 2

• Where our procedural memory is
• The part of the brain that does things without thinking

Question 3

What is the upper brain (green brain)?

Answer 3

• Overrides impulsive
• Plan
• Sequence
• Time management
• Abstract
• Empathy

Question 4

What is the emotional (orange) brain?

Answer 4

• Consider it the processing centre for incoming information
• If safe = green brain allowed to activate
• If unsafe = activate survival brain

Question 5

When will each brain be activated?

Answer 5

• The red brain decides our actions; unless red brain feels safe, green brain doesn’t get to operate
• As a coach, you won’t get the learning or performance unless the person feels safe with you otherwise red brain decides

Question 6

How do we get our emotional brain to communicate with our green brain, not our red brain?

Answer 6

Ensure we are practicing the right behaviour:
- Feeling a tolerable level of activation (fear, fatigue, anxiety etc.)
- Successfully repair from it
- This needs support form relationships around them
- This requires a consciousness at first
- More practice can ‘move’ this knowledge to the basal ganglia (but this takes a lot of practice)
- Mostly we need to remain as ‘calm’ as possible to retain a level of control over the emotional brain

Question 7

How to Keep the Survival Brain Calm?

Answer 7

• Some - See me…
• Boys - show me I Belong…
• Hate - tell me what is
• Happening
• Carrots - give me some Control