Positive Intelligence pt.III

You might want to skip the intro, if you’ve already read the other installments

In a previous article, I wondered why we overengineer calming down so much:

I’m often struck by just how much of the pop-psych/neuroscience advice one sees for the average working person boils down to little more than “just cool the fuck out, and you’ll be better at stuff”. I guess, more to the point, I’m often left wondering why we feel the need to over-engineer this kind of thing so egregiously, particularly when most of these theories seem to produce as much bad advice as good advice.

It’s a wide-ranging article, that explores a bunch of pop-psych theories which bother me. In the process I mentioned one that was introduced to me by a start-up founder friend of mine: Positive Intelligence. They’d come across it during their executive coaching sessions, and were keen enough to walk me through it. In the course of investigating, I thought it was a good example of needlessly complicating simple advice, and spent a short paragraph teasing it.

This was a mistake.

It invited a number of emails from defenders of the company. I cannot emphasise enough how unlikely it is that your email is going to convince me to take some consumer-facing faux-brain science seriously. One day, I will play a different tune. One day, I will have my own consumer-facing brand of faux-brain science. But until then, no.

However, one of these emailers offered to pay me to evaluate it, and this admittedly does have an attention-grabbing quality. I offered a discount to publish the results as an article, and so here we are. Positive Intelligence, the review.

As usual, I overestimate how much content fits in a weekly blog, so I’m going to split this into more than one. The first article wasn’t about the content of Positive Intelligence. It was about the context.

We looked at this first because, actually, this context is the same as many of the pop-neuroscience things you’ll find out in the wild, so it’s quite nice to have it as a standalone.

Also, because, frankly, after reading it, you might not even feel inclined to read about the content.

But you should, because the content is amusing. The last article was about the core claims. This one, because it’s my bag, is just on the “neuroscience”.

¶Why brain science?

One question worth asking is why does PQ need neuroscience at all? As we talked about in the first article, it isn’t really any different from any of the parts-work stuff from the 60’s onwards. Parts-work is perenially successful because it allows you to have a dialogue with parts of your mind you’re unhappy with. Why overengineer it?

It could be because, as I detailed in the first in this series all coaching programmes were desperate to science-wash their methods in the 2000s, and this coincided with a boom in both brain science itself, and corporate interest in brain science.

It could be because, as I wrote about last week, the science-washing they did on their core claims outside the parts-work stuff was shoddy stuff, so they wanted to do more science-washing as a distraction.

It could be. Or, it could be because the different mental ‘parts’ PQ cares about live in different parts of the brain! That’s what Chamine reckons. So, let’s see.

Edit: My initial idea with this article was to, as this intro hints at, barely give Chamine the benefit of the doubt, and slowly reveal the extent of his grift as it became clear to me. But actually what happened is I got carried away with the brain stuff. I doubt you’ll find that as fun as I did, because even I got tired of it after a while. So let me suggest a better approach to reading this article than going top to bottom.

Chamine’s use of “neuroscience” is pretty bog-standard for airport non-fiction. It’s a fantastic example of the neuroscience confidence game, where people use brain-sounding words to trick you into believing their claims about human behaviour.

So, first, look at this article as an opportunity to read like a brain scientist. You’ll see how things that sound logical, when teased apart for truth by someone who knows what they’re looking for, become silly. So, read only as far as you can be bothered reading, to get a sense of just how easy it is to make absurd claims sound sensible by attaching brain stuff to them.

Once you’re bored, just skip to the outro, where I’ll wrap it all up, and show you what Chamine’s book would look like without the faux-brain science, and you’ll see just how anodyne Chamine’s claims really are. Hopefully you’ll walk away better armed against the con for your next non-fiction read. Let’s see.

¶Brain houses

If you haven’t read the previous articles, I should get you up to speed. In the book, Chamine describes ten ‘saboteurs’—different flavours of inner critic. The idea is to identify them, and work to weaken them by engaging in more positive thinking.¹

This is standard parts-work fare, and positioning ourselves to be scared of internal criticism is equally standard for self-help. I agree with Chamine that you probably should get support if you’re like him, and your inner critic’s criticism is:

that I was deeply flawed and unworthy of my perfect parents’ time: Why should they show any more affection for someone so undeserving?

This is a troubled person. But, ordinarily, inner criticism is actually quite helpful, whether you have this kind of disturbing stuff going on at the margins or not, and I wondered if it was productive to be demonising it like this.

Chamine answers my concern in the book. He reckons that good inner criticism actually comes from a different part of the brain! He writes:

your Saboteurs and Sage are controlled by two different areas of your brain. The Saboteurs are fueled by the parts of your brain that were initially focused on your physical and emotional survival, what we call your Survivor Brain. The Sage, on the other hand, is fueled by the areas of the brain we call your PQ Brain.

Importantly:

all your distress in the forms of anxiety, disappointment, stress, anger, shame, guilt—all the unpleasant stuff that makes up your suffering—is generated by your own Saboteurs.

The Sage, on the other hand, is still a critic, but a happy one:

The Sage perspective is about accepting what is, rather than denying, rejecting, or resenting what is. The Sage perspective accepts every outcome and circumstance as a gift and opportunity.

So, let’s have a look at these two brain houses—the PQ brain and the survivior brain—where are Sage and Saboteurs are supposed to live.

¶The book on the Survivor brain

Chamine writes:

To understand the PQ Brain, it is helpful to first understand its counterpart, the Survivor Brain. The Survivor Brain consists of the most primitive parts of the brain, the brain stem and the limbic system, both of which are involved in initiating our response to danger.

Now, to the extent it exists, the limbic system comprises a bunch of the middle of your brain, and it isn’t by any means “primitive”.² This is an echo of the once popular, but entirely discredited triune brain theory of Paul MacLean. You should probably read about this if you don’t know about it. There’s no such thing as a lizard brain, and we’ve known it since the theory really started getting popular around the late 70’s. A lot of consultants still shill this and a lot of high-powered C-suite executives still parrot it, and it makes everyone sound like children to anyone who has more time to read non-fiction than them.

Here’s a nice chunk on this little myth in particular from Wikipedia, to clear up any confusion. I guess Chamine missed this, in his research.

The brain stem, on the other hand, could be considered more primitive, I guess. It’s much more phylogenetically conserved than other brain regions, which is what brain-people say to indicate that it looks and behaves pretty similarly in humans as it does in less sophisticated animals. It mostly does a lot of very basic survival stuff. Breathing and heart-rate in particular seem to depend on it. It also plays a role in basic conscious attention.

So a 50% hit rate. Which is looking like a theme of Chamine’s because he goes on to say:

The left brain is the primary hemisphere involved in the survival functions.

The brain is split into two hemispheres—two sides of the brain. So, in the same way you have an arm on either side of your body, most brain structures are duplicated on either side of your head.

So Chamine is saying that actually, 50% of your brain is the survival brain? It’s quite weird to say that an entire hemisphere of the brain is involved in anything, nevermind survival. It’s sort of like saying ‘the left body is the primary side involved in living functions’, raising the question of what, on this account, the right side of the body is doing while all this living is going on. So, I don’t really understand what Chamine means by this. My best guess is that it’s some attempt to hook into the ‘left brain rational, right brain creative’ myth, but he doesn’t elaborate on it further, so I won’t bother trying to figure it out unless it comes up again.

So, we have outlined the ‘survival brain’ now. The brain stem, lots of the middle, and half of the rest. And according to Chamine, the hallmark of all this brain is “the fight-or-flight response”. Now, I’ve spoken at great length about this, but the fight-or-flight response is a literal survival response, reserved for states of hyper-arousal. I’m glad Chamine isn’t forcing this response into the amygdala, like a lot of others do, but I’d actually go a bit further. I’d suggest that, when you’re facing a threat to your life, then all of your brain probably steps in, not just most of it.

But he’s not talking about the actual fight-or-flight response. He’s talking about something else:

Most people today live in relatively constant distress and anxiety. This is related to a low-grade but perpetual fight-or-flight response masterminded by the Judge in reaction to the challenges of life, both personal and professional.

Now, there is no such thing as ‘low-grade’ fight-or-flight. Remember, it’s hyper-arousal. You don’t have low-grade hyper-arousal. It’s like saying a ‘low-grade’ lighting-strike. Either you get hit by lightning or you don’t, and even if you don’t die from it, it’s going to be pretty significant.

Similarly, I suspect that few would agree with the idea that most people live in a constant state of distress and anxiety. At any given time, only about 10% of the population will meet criteria for disordered mood (clinical levels of distress in the form of anxious or depressive symptoms), and it’s about an even split between between anxious or depressive sub-types.³ A key criterion for clinical levels is that the person themselves reckons it intereferes substantially with daily life, so if only about 10% feel that way, you’d have to lower the bar pretty substantially to jump another 41% to most people.

Chamine goes on to say:

Though the fight-or-flight response originally evolved to get us out of acute, short-term danger, most of us run the Survivor Brain continuously.

This, again, is not true. Even people who suffer a great deal of hyper-arousal (e.g. those with PTSD) don’t “run it” continuously. This perspective is a common myth. Though, this part:

The consequence of … perpetual stress and anxiety is heightened blood pressure, increased cardiovascular disease, reduced immune system function, reduced longevity, and reduced happiness and performance…

… is true. It’s called allostatic load, or you can just read anything about the effects of chronic stress.

So. Perhaps Chamine is just talking about stress? But this isn’t something that anyone would say is managed by the brainstem, lots of the middle, and half of the rest. It’s one of the most basic functions of the nervous system.

So perhaps he’s talking about something else. But whether he’s talking about hyper-arousal, just run-of-the-mill stress, or some third thing, it’s not really made any clearer by his highlighting of most of the brain. Most of the brain is involved in most things. When Chamine says that this thing:

activates the mind’s survivor agents, the Saboteurs … diminishes access to Sage powers, which are more about thriving than surviving … is so focused on seeing signs of danger and finding something or someone to blame that it misses signs of opportunity and fails to appreciate what is right

… I am failing to make the connection between these features of cognition and the brain bits he is interested in.

Luckily, he came back with a whitepaper! So I’m sure things will become clearer. Let’s go see if I can make sense of the PQ brain.

¶The book on the ‘PQ’ brain

The PQ brain is:

the middle prefrontal cortex (MPFC), the Empathy Circuitry, and the right brain.

Now, look, naming brain regions is, as I say elsewhere:

usually vague and haphazard process. If you’re ever in the habit of reading neuroimaging papers and have time on your hands, look up the coordinates of any brain region. You’ll notice that the same region’s coordinates differ from paper to paper. Very annoying.

So it’s not precisely clear what Chamine means by the MPFC. The prefrontal cortex is the entire front bit, and the middle of it isn’t that specific. Chamine tries to clarify, saying that it’s:

a relatively small region of the brain that plays several critical PQ functions. These include observing yourself, pausing before action, soothing fear, staying centered in the middle of challenging situations, and gut wisdom.

But people say this is true of the orbitofrontal cortex, which is small, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is a bit larger. We use the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex alot when we’re trying to investigate cognitive control—when higher-order brain functions coordinate lower-order ones.

The ‘gut wisdom’ thing makes me think that it’s orbitofrontal cortex though. It’s small, and Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis set this region up as a place where we make value judgements, which has sort of been interpreted in airport non-fiction as the gut-feeling brain.⁴

The empathy circuitry is, according to his Appendix A:

(a) the mirror neuron system; (b) the ACC; and (c) the insula cortex of the MPFC.

And look. Fuck me. This appendix hurts. The discovery of the mirror neuron really made people lose their minds. It’s thrown in as the answer to every problem of social-science: language learning, autism, altruism. Name it. All because, when we plug an electrode into the brains of monkeys, we can record neurons which fire when monkeys do an action and also when they see that same action being done by another monkey. That’s really as far as the research goes there.

Chamine takes this finding and interprets it to mean:

mirror neurons pick up on the physiological and emotional state of others and automatically have us experience similar states, including changes in our own heart rate, blood pressure, or respiration in response to others around us.

Which is… overstating the case, somewhat. He then goes on to say:

Think of the mirror neuron system as the “tuning fork” of the brain. If you are vibrating at the energy frequency of Saboteurs, you are more likely to automatically trigger the Saboteurs of the person you are interacting with. If you are vibrating at the Sage frequency, you are more likely to help shift the other person to Sage mode. This is understood almost intuitively by great salespeople and leaders as a way of impacting others.

Which is… not brain science, to be generous.

Let’s move on. The ACC is the next one. It’s actually quite a popular brain region in my field. Like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which might be part of “survival brain”, we reckon this is a good target for a place that helps coordinate lower-order processing. This is particularly true of the dorsal (top) bit. The rostral (front) bit seems to care more about mood regulation, and people studying depression with deep-brain stimulation like to play with it. This actually probably is because, as Chamine says:

The ACC sits between the thinking cortex area and the feeling and sensing limbic region

We call bits of brain that sit in between specialist regions ‘associative cortex’, because they seem to become active when we do tasks that require multiple kinds of information. The ACC sits in an associative cortical hotspot at the side of the head that seems to be about concepts and ideas, and next to prefrontal regions which are associated with controlly-type functions. It gets excited when concepts and ideas come into conflict, and so we think it might play a role in detecting and resolving these conflicts. The upshot is that we use it in all kinds of aversive tasks, where we are required to do something we don’t want to do. The empathy thing, I assume, comes from the fact that the dorsal ACC gets excited when we watch people get hurt. But it’s a long bow to draw from that to empathy.

And the insula, as I talk about in a footnote below,⁴ is about taking snapshots of how the body is feeling, not:

basically a highway that connects the signals from the mirror neuron system down to the limbic area and the brain stem, enabling our body to react with empathy for another

We think these snapshots have something to do with physical and emotional regulation, probably something to do with consciousness, and maybe social-emotion processing. But it’s weird to call it a highway. I wondered if he meant the more classic ‘relay station’ of the brain, the thalamus, but that lives in the middle of the brain, and he specifically says that the insula of the MPFC. The insula is insular (hidden by) to the prefrontal cortex (among other things). The thalamus isn’t really of the prefrontal cortex. So I don’t know, really, what he thinks the insula is.

And more generally, I’m not really convinced that any of this is ‘empathy circuitry’.

But it’s ok, because remember he said the last bit of the PQ brain was the right brain. And the appendix confirms that his left-brain right-brain thing is the old ‘left brain rational, right brain creative’ myth. I’m not going to repeat Chamine’s claims here and give them air. When Wikipedia has a section on the myth you’re writing about, it’s embarassing for everyone to write more. What’s certainly true is, as Chamine says:

The right brain is much discussed and much misunderstood…

… including by Chamine.

¶The whitepaper

The whitepaper starts off introducing brand new stuff—some network neuroscience. I’veve already predicted this is going to be the next frontier of nonsense pseudoscience, so this is gratifying. Look:

Recast in the language of Positive Intelligence, most of our Judge and Saboteur responses are creations of mind wandering DMN activity, while our Sage arises from the mindful actions of the TPN

You know this isn’t serious because he’s using a network no-one talks about anymore. The TPN, or ‘Task Positive Network’ and the DMN, or ‘Default Mode Network’ were our first forays into brain networks. The idea was that when you’re thinking about a task, it seems like one collection of brain regions (the TPN) is active. When you’re relaxed, then another collection (the DMN) is active. Our understanding of brain networks is substantially more sophisticated than this ‘brain on’ and ‘brain off’ distinction now, and while the DMN is still a thing, the TPN has sort-of died off. And in fact, mindfulness is very often associated with the DMN these days. So, no, Chamine. Whatever your Sage might be, it’s not arising from the TPN. Though, since the DMN is associated with reflective processes, I could imagine that all of your inner-critics, both good and bad, are associated with it.

And, as I scan through the rest of this thing, I’m just seeing more of the same thing we’ve seen throughout this entire programme. Chamine comes across some neuroscience finding that’s vaguely relevant to his ideas, and claims it for PQ. And I’m getting tired now, so I’ll just summarise. So, we have a scattering of the attentional-control literature—that which demonstrates that practicing attention helps you attend better, and is associated with changes in the brain. This is taken to justify Chamine’s particular brand of mindfulness (“PQ reps”). Then there’s more on mirror neurons, because I guess he was still pretty excited about that, but it’s just a more detailed version of his logical leap there. He tries to go through the route of mental visualisation, which if he’d used studies that weren’t 20 years old, may have alerted him to the fact that this is now considered DMN fare.

And that’s actually it. It was a lot of words, but mostly it said if you practice thinking positively, you might find thinking positively easier.

He did not, in fact, clarify anything I was confused about earlier.

It’s a 25-page version of the neuroscience confidence game again, where people use brain-sounding words to trick you into believing their mundane claims about human behaviour.

¶Outro

Look. Chamine is doing a grift. That’s the lesson here. He’s trying to trick you into accepting his parts work over other parts work by attaching his stuff to brain things. If you were to summarise his core messages, stripping the nonsense neuroscience, you wouldn’t have nearly enough content for a book. It’s the intellectual equivalent of packing foam. Look:

We can be overly critical. When we’re overly critical, we experience negative emotions. Negative emotions feed each other, which can bring us down even further. You don’t want to be too critical or too negative. Bad. Instead, a better way to go about self-criticism is to recognise the opportunity in the critique for growth. We can look for ways to be better by recognising where we fell down. This is hard. You need to practice. That will make this easier. Good.

That’s really it. You could make it even punchier. When I asked GPT-o3 to summarise it, it said:

In sum: inner-critic bad, inner-cheerleader good. The rest is neuro-garnish—lizard brains, tuning forks, and a hemispheric morality play—all lovingly arranged so a bog-standard parts-therapy brochure can pose as hard science.

I… couldn’t fault it.