Basal Ganglia, Liminality and Other Big Words I Know
The subtitle of this post is: “What did the basal ganglia say to the prefrontal cortex? Why are you always pushing your liminality down into me! And other jokes for doctoral students.”
This week, I read Your Brain at Work by David Rock. This book is a confluence of psychology and leadership, applying insights about how the brain works to effective leadership. The book’s brilliance is the stories of Emily and Paul, who initially navigate issues poorly; after Duffy discusses his insights, he retells their stories with better outcomes. He structures the book themes as acts in a play. Rock furthers the idea of the play by describing attention and the prefrontal cortex as the stage.[1] Each actor on the stage is a thought on which we focus. Later in the book, Rock presents meta-cognition as the play’s director.[2] The idea of the book is that by intentionally having the director change the actor on stage, we can generate better outcomes using the insights Rock develops.
In my leadership, I am trying to apply a few things from the book, such as the SCARF Model, and building creative thinking in others. I could have taken this blog post in that direction. I am trying something different and asking questions I cannot answer. With this blog post, using Bloom’s Taxonomy, I want to evaluate critical thinking as a threshold concept with the role of the prefrontal cortex and the basal ganglia.
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the “seat of our conscious interactions with the world.” [3] Rock uses the PFC as the play’s stage where we hold ideas. The basal ganglia is our routine auto-pilot function. He describes the process of driving somewhere and not remembering how we got there as a function of the basal ganglia.
In this program, I am learning critical thinking as a threshold concept. Threshold concepts are ideas that, once learned, cannot be unlearned. They are problematic because, as Land and Meyer say, “they demand an integration of ideas and this requires the student to accept a transformation of their own understanding.” [4] In threshold concepts, we pass through liminality, a state between an earlier understanding and a fuller grasp of the concept.
The basal ganglia are where we sequence patterns. Rock says: “The basal ganglia are highly efficient at executing patterns. Use this resource every way you can. Once you repeat a pattern often enough, the basal ganglia can drive the process, freeing up the stage for new functions.” [5] I want to present and expand on the following questions:
- Is there a connection between liminality and pushing information down into the basal ganglia?
- Part of Bloom’s Taxonomy in Evaluation is understanding limits – what are the hard limits of the basal ganglia?
- Can critical thinking be pushed out of the prefrontal cortex and into the basal ganglia?
Rock writes, “While this process is obviously not possible with higher-order tasks such as writing a complex new proposal, you might be surprised how much can be embedded.” [6] Long-term potentiation is the process of hardwiring the brain for new patterns. From the first week, In How to Take Smart Notes, Ahrens wrote, “Expertise comes through embodied experience – experts have a feel for the process.” [7] Is Ahren’s description of expertise and embodied experience another way of describing the process of long-term potentiation, the pushing of critical thinking into the basal ganglia? This is a question on the limits of the basal ganglia and its implications for my future work.
As I continue in this program and ideally grow into an expert, how am I pushing the pattern of critical thinking into my basal ganglia? Or is critical thinking beyond the basal ganglia – will it remain a ‘higher-order task’ forever? I don’t know how to answer these questions. Bloom’s Taxonomy ends with the syntopical creation of new information. I am not at that stage yet; I have unanswered questions based on the reading.
Here is my hope: as I learn, try, improve, and continue growing in the program, the patterns will become easier. I can already see this happening in inspectional reading. I look forward to seeing how the process of writing a blog post develops. Thinking further into the future, what tools and skills am I modeling and teaching the people around me that are being pushed into their basal ganglia?
[1] David Rock, Your Brain at Work, Revised and Updated: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2020), 7.
[2] Rock, 87.
[3] Rock, 6.
[4] Jan Meyer and Ray Land, Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2006), 196, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203966273.
[5] Rock, Your Brain at Work, 40.
[6] Rock, 40.
[7] Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking: For Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2017), 65.
About the Author
Robert Radcliff
Hi! I'm Robert, and I'm seeking to understand who God is calling me to be in my community while helping others do the same. I enjoy reading, training for triathlons, and using exclamation points!12 responses to “Basal Ganglia, Liminality and Other Big Words I Know”
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Robert –
As someone who did a post on SCARF, I feel attacked.
In all seriousness, I really enjoyed your interactions here and the process of asking questions that can’t be readily answered. I’m grateful for your invitations to all of us to think more deeply and intentionally, even as you allow us to peek into your own process.
What do you perceive are the greatest barriers to cultivating the pattern of critical thinking and then priming it as a reflex? Because critical thinking involves some active thinking about thinking, making it more reflexive sounds great from a conservation of energy standpoint… and really challenging from an application perspective.
Jeremiah, I don’t think critical thinking can be totally done by the basal ganglia. Let me put it this way: How often have you been working on a sermon or a paper, then stepped away and got in the car or the shower, where you can auto-pilot, and insight came?
There’s a connection between insights from critical thinking and auto-pilot that I don’t fully understand yet.
Robert –
Thanks! I’m tracking you now. I have had many of those experiences and I’m with you–I would love to understand how it works so I can better prime those moments.
Thanks again!
Robert, I enjoyed the questions you’re asking, and I would like to add one if I could. With the concept of patterns, repetition, muscle memory and the basal ganglia…Do all things become easier with repetition?
I know it’s a stretch but Dr. Laurence J. Peter
Book: The Peter Principle pops into my mind (surely a byproduct of the loose connections that Rock talks about). Do we “max out” at some point and are not able to cross the threshold to the next level of understanding or competence?
Darren, I agree; a sense of limits needs to be honored. It’s that old saying if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will go its whole life feeling stupid. Perhaps I’m asking tree-climbing questions of the basal ganglia. Maybe the PFC was always meant for critical thinking, and I’m drawing the wrong connections.
Hey Robert,
After reading your questions, and perhaps because of my own post, I think about my experience playing music. Practice and rehearsal push functions to the unconscious and develop “muscle memory.” From there, it allows for more capacity in the pre-frontal cortex. For example, instead of thinking, “This is how to play an E,” I can be forecasting, “The next chord coming up is a G major, and I’m imagining how playing a D bass note on top of that will sound.”
So, to answer Darren’s question, my experience is that repetition and practice are absolutely key to cognitive ease. I’m not certain whether we “max out” or it’s more a case of diminishing returns.
When people ask me what I’m studying in my doctorate, my answer is something along the lines of “people and thinking,” which feels awkwardly naïve. I think from now on, I’ll just blind them with some niche doctoral in-jokes. It sounds way more impressive.
Joff, I just tell people that the first book Jason recommended was How to Read a Book, and ever since then, I’ve been learning about how wrong I can be. I think people appreciate that I’m finally seeing what they’ve known all along.
Joff, I love your analogy of learning guitar. I think it works so well to describe my post. Thank you.
That is funny 🙂
After a day or so of more thinking, I think there’s also something important to be said about threshold concepts in moving things from conscious to subconscious and creating more space on the stage. Sometimes there is a barrier to be passed that achieves that.
Thanks for you honest thoughts Robert. I love to read about your thinking and journey.
My understanding is that critical thinking will always require the pre frontal cortex and there is no way around that. BUT, the process of critical thinking, the mental journey that happens and the speed at which it can take place is what becomes easier and faster, the more practice humans have. The basal ganglia is the place which holds the repeated experiences as a template and hopefully critical thinking templates which this course is about, will become stronger and more automatic processes, but sadly each new piece of information has to go on the same journey and starts with the pre frontal cortex and the usual processing journey.
Using Joff’s excellent metaphor, I think that once we learn the notes on our instrument we can become confident in that, but each piece of music we play needs to use the pre frontal cortex to learn the order, rhythm and interconnection between the notes and other instruments. The basal ganglia can hold the knowledge of the notes as that has been repeated and is not hugely unique, but has to support the cortex. It can start to recognise patterns but the higher brain processes will always be the area that is responsible for deep thinking. The pre frontal cortex is the part of the brain that analyses, evaluates and solves problems because each time we need to do, that there is different content.
I think the ‘max out’ is when we have too much information to absorb and our PFC is ‘full’ so we cannot process easily and begin to feel stupid. That’s what has happened to me this last few months with too much work and juggling too many ‘important deadlines.’
And how come you can all write short questions and answers? I seem incapable of that.
Betsy, writing short questions and answers is easy when I don’t know anything.
Your answer helps provide nuance that Rock’s book doesn’t cover. Thank you. I don’t know about you, but I return to the same tools whenever I encounter a new problem. That problem-solving process is intuitive to me, but each new problem is analyzed in its context through that lens. If I understand correctly, the process is low energy even though understanding this unique context and problem is high energy.
Your mention of interconnectedness of the books we have read, makes me wonder if others in our class have actually applied some of the principles to their life and stuck with it.
Is anyone still taking smart notes regularly and do they use the filing system?
Is anyone keeping the boundries they set for kingdom leadership from Camacho’s book?
Did Poole’s book Leader-smithing continue to inspire anyone to delegate responsibility?
There is higher thinking that comes as we integrate, assess, transition to a new way. But for now I feel in that place of liminality hoping to emerge out of the other side before the paper is due.
Jess, that’s a good question. I still use a form of smart notes on Zotero. I try to note connections between the books as I notice them. I think for the final paper for this class, I’m going to write about a connection between Camacho’s sweet spot and Rock’s ideas about prioritization. I’ll be trying to answer the question, what are the things I need to prioritize in my life to allow my brain to live out of my sweet spot?