Power and the Brain

There’s new research that having power and feeling powerful can functionally damage the brain, at least for the period of time during which such a feeling persists, causing a lack of normal neural activity with, among other consequences, a serious drop in empathy for others. The powerful person becomes blind to many things going on in the lives and feelings of people around him or her. Situational knowledge that it may have taken to get the power oddly drops precipitously once that power is won.

I’ve felt this in my own life, oddly enough, I’m both embarrassed and now also very glad to admit. When I left university life, I found myself on the equivalent of an unexpected rocket ride. I was overwhelmed with speaking invitations that offered me the rough equivalent of my Notre Dame starting salary, or more, to talk for an hour in front of 500 or 5,000, or even 10,000 people. Publishers gave me crazy advances for the rights to publish my books. The New York Times wanted to profile what I was doing. Twice. And then I started getting positive mentions in The Economist, Fast Company, Newsweek, and on and on. Before I knew it, I was sitting on the sofa with Regis and Kathy Lee, chatting with Matt Lauer on the Today Show, visiting CNBC to share philosophical perspectives on business, and going to the CNN studios in Atlanta to present some thoughts for their international broadcast. Some of NPR’s best people would call to talk philosophy live on air. The top German newspaper Die Zeit even sent a journalist from Deutschland to Dallas where I was speaking, to walk with me through a high end luxury shopping mall and ponder life together, while he took notes for a big article they were going to do. It was all just too much.

Philosophers write articles and books so that other philosophers can tell us that we’re wrong, and how, exactly. That’s usually the best we can hope for. Now, people were mostly praising my work—well, at least in my hearing. Too many accomplished individuals who had run nationally known companies now wanted to help me and even, in some notable cases, switch careers and become my partners or even my lieutenants. It was a whirlwind of amazing, positive, overwhelming stuff. At some point, I found myself so focused and wrapped up in what I was doing that I lost perspective on a lot of more important things and couldn’t see the deeper needs of some of the closest people in my life. I’d do household chores with an ongoing inner irritation that I'd try to keep to myself, but I'd actually say to myself, “Norman Lear doesn’t have to mow the grass.” Yeah, I was inwardly becoming a real asshole. And I didn’t realize it. Neither did most other people, because I tried to be nice to everybody, seeking to live understanding kindness in every professional interaction as I did my work. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know and couldn’t even feel anymore. The poor brain.

I could not be more thankful that I finally had enough of a crisis of inner pressure, outer results, and budding self awareness as a consequence that I was forced to look within and deal with the problem. Over a period of two years full of very intense and difficult self examination, I was able to wake up and snap out of that spiral, re-integrating myself emotionally and psychologically. This happened many years ago. And, gradually, everything changed for the better. The little irritations of life didn’t bother me so much. Work stuff didn't seem so urgent. I could still enjoy a standing ovation or a Ritz Carlton but didn't need either to be happy, or even content. I learned to zen out and enjoy cleaning up my mess at home, and washing dishes, and watering outdoor plants, while speaking to each of them with appreciation as I did so, and even theoretically ... mowing the grass, though by then we had long hired a lawn service to take that one over. But I promise, I could now do it with relish.

I hadn’t been the president or CEO of a big global company. I may have traveled on a lot of corporate jets, but I didn’t own one. I wasn’t featured on the covers of magazines. And for good reason. I was just a philosopher raised up for a while by a public sense of need, or novelty, or both. I now realize that even this gave me an illusory sense of power that was enough to mess me up for a while, though I certainly didn’t know what was going on at the time, and no one who came into professional contact with me seemed to sense that anything was amiss. Most friends had no idea of what had been going on inside me. My dogs liked me just as much. But I had a problem from which I had to recover and heal.

There's a reason that "recovering narcissist" seems like a classic oxymoron. Lots of people who had tough childhoods with an impossible to please parent come to feel a deep and pressing need for positive attention and achievement, and praise. They don't realize that something like an inner desperation takes over and comes to drive them. If there's a problem from their actions and obsessions, it's someone else's fault. Too often, the brain or heart that needs to heal doesn't even suspect it has a problem. So, not many truly powerful people in corporate or governmental positions take the time for the hard self examination and inner work required in order to wake up from such a plight. And that’s behind many of our other current systemic problems that the powerful unintentionally cause.

We need to understand better the entire complex of power, grandiosity, hubris, and self-focus that’s deeply damaging some of our most important institutions, from capitalism, to government, to organized religion. My own journey gives me hope that many who are in the throes of such an inner plight can recover from it. Not all will. Most likely won’t. But some may. Yet, like any other problem, we don’t seek to solve it unless we realize it’s going on. In my own case, I’m just glad I eventually gave away and so put to good use lots of the resources that had come my way, and managed to shed as well any unseemly and improper sense of power that had accompanied them, along with all its complications.

That made room for joy. And this has been the greatest surprise of all. It’s something that more people in leadership positions need to understand, and experience.

I’ll excerpt from a recent article in The Atlantic about this phenomenon. I’m sure you’ve seen it in action.

<<If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage?>>

<<Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, ended up after years of lab and field experiments. Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.>>

<<Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at McMaster University, in Ontario, recently described something similar. Unlike Keltner, who studies behaviors, Obhi studies brains. And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what Keltner has termed the “power paradox”: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.>>

<<Power, the research says, primes our brain to screen out peripheral information. In most situations, this provides a helpful efficiency boost. In social ones, it has the unfortunate side effect of making us more obtuse. Even that is not necessarily bad for the prospects of the powerful, or the groups they lead. As Susan Fiske, a Princeton psychology professor, has persuasively argued, power lessens the need for a nuanced read of people, since it gives us command of resources we once had to cajole from others. But of course, in a modern organization, the maintenance of that command relies on some level of organizational support. And the sheer number of examples of executive hubris that bristle from the headlines suggests that many leaders cross the line into counterproductive folly.>>

<<Less able to make out people’s individuating traits, they rely more heavily on stereotype. And the less they’re able to see, other research suggests, the more they rely on a personal “vision” for navigation. John Stumpf saw a Wells Fargo where every customer had eight separate accounts. (As he’d often noted to employees, eight rhymes with great.) “Cross-selling,” he told Congress, “is shorthand for deepening relationships.”>>

There’s another lesson in all this. If you feel yourself to be without power, then there’s an upside. You can perhaps see more clearly, feel most sensitively, and know things situationally that may allow for a change. But then, beware the accompanying problems.

For the article in its entirety, click HERE.