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!3 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.
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?
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.