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Friday, February 28, 2014

Why People Behave in Self-Defeating, Irrational Ways and How to Really Change



 

Our brains are simply not set up to produce rational behavior. But there's a way to change that.




 
The following story first appeared in Psychotherapy Networker. For more great content, read their current issue. 
At the tail end of a sweltering, humid Chicago day in 1993, I took my family to the community pool for a dip. As the children splashed gleefully, I sat nearby reading Robert Ornstein’s new book, The Evolution of Consciousness, unaware that my life was about to change.
Seven years earlier, I’d emerged from my doctoral studies utterly dissatisfied with existing answers to the question of why people continue to behave in self-defeating, irrational ways despite clear evidence that their methods aren’t working. Few questions were more important to the enterprise of psychotherapy, yet the answers at that time were highly speculative—running the gamut from unresolved childhood issues to low ego strength to family homeostasis to secondary payoffs, with little scientific evidence to support any of them. Deeply discouraged, I wondered if I’d chosen the wrong career.
From the first page of Ornstein’s book, it was clear to me that he was on to something new. Using hard neuroscience data, he proposed that we behave irrationally because our brains are simply not set up to produce rational behavior. Throughout history, he argued, we’ve been operating under a great deception—we tend to believe that our thoughts and actions result largely from our conscious intentions. In fact, while our rational mind has a degree of veto power, the inclinations that fuel our perceptions, interpretations, and actions primarily come from neural processes that operate beneath the level of awareness. The fact that most of us have fallen for the great deception isn’t our fault. Because we’re aware only of our conscious thoughts, we readily assume that they’re the prime movers in our brains. We’re a bit like the men in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, who think that because they consider themselves the “head of the house,” they’re in charge. But remember Maria’s famous quote? “The man is the head, but the woman is the neck. And she can turn the head any way she wants.” In the brain, nonconscious urges and impulses are the neck, and conscious thought is merely the head.
To support this idea, Ornstein cited the work of Benjamin Libet, the University of California San Francisco researcher who found that by monitoring brain activity, he could tell when subjects were going to initiate simple wrist-flicking movements before the subjects were aware of deciding to flick their wrists. Libet’s findings ran contrary to the way most of us experience ourselves. Most of us think, “When I move, it’s because I decided that I was going to move.” But Libet’s studies showed that impulse and inclination preceded conscious intention. It was as though somebody else in the subject’s brain decided when he or she would flick his or her wrist. Initially, Libet’s study stirred a storm of controversy, but over the next few decades, his findings would be replicated time and time again, with more and more sophisticated technologies, leading to him winning a Nobel Prize for his contributions.
The sun was setting by the time I reached the end of The Evolution of Consciousness. I hauled the kids out of the pool and herded them into the car. On the drive home, I remember thinking that if Ornstein were right, I’d need to rethink my assumptions about nearly everything concerning human behavior, including psychotherapy. For me, reading his work was a genuine eureka moment. But figuring out a way to actually use this new brain knowledge with my clients would turn out to be tough, painstaking work. Still, I decided that I was up for the challenge—if my clients were.
The Knee-Jerk Brain
Investigating the studies cited in Ornstein’s book soon plunged me into the work of other pioneering researchers in the as-yet-unnamed field of affective neuroscience. Researcher Antonio Damasio’s work played a key role in furthering my understanding of the power of automatic processes in the brain. Damasio studied the brains of people who’d suffered a unique kind of brain damage that had left their cognitive abilities intact, impeding only their ability to experience emotions normally. Despite testing that confirmed that all the building blocks of rationality were in place, these people couldn’t make effective real-life decisions. At first, Damasio was puzzled. Why would impairment in the emotional brain interfere with practical decision-making? He eventually realized that the emotional brain plays a crucial role in the machinery of rationality: the brain generates quick, gut-level emotional reactions that collectively serve as a guidance system for reasoning.
Until reading Damasio’s studies, I’d assumed that successful people were effective because they resisted the pull of their emotions of the moment and used reasoning to guide their actions. Damasio’s studies powerfully challenged this notion, suggesting that disciplined people are every bit as much influenced by emotional impulse and inclination as undisciplined people are. The difference is that their impulses are more balanced.
This was a revolutionary concept for me. I’d never considered the possibility that disciplined people took too much credit for their efforts. According to Damasio, a disciplined person was simply someone whose nervous system naturally generated a wider range of gut-level emotion reactions than an undisciplined person. Whereas undisciplined people are influenced primarily by the gut feelings they experience in the present moment (e.g., wanting to blow off a homework assignment and watch a movie), disciplined people are equally influenced by good and bad feelings generated while remembering the past (e.g., feeling bad remembering the grade reduction resulting from missing an assignment) or envisioning the future (e.g., feeling good in anticipation of a job completed).
Gradually, I began to accept the concept that conscious understanding and effort weren’t the mighty forces that I’d assumed they were and that automatic urges and inclinations were much stronger than I’d ever imagined. In fact, confirming evidence seemed to pop up everywhere. In my therapy practice, I began to notice the wide range of my clients’ natural inclinations. I saw some people naturally plunge into rumination whenever they got upset, while others let go and refocused with relative ease. Some naturally experienced an abundance of feelings of warmth, tenderness, and playfulness, while others rarely had these feelings—even when life was going pretty well. Some intensely felt a measure of what others were feeling, while others could only infer what people were feeling from their words and actions. The list went on.
Just as the Cookie Monster couldn’t decide one day that he liked broccoli more than Oreos, the apparently automatic reactions that determined how people behaved in these areas seemingly couldn’t be changed at will. Such behaviors appear so deeply ingrained that they seem to be part of our second nature. Nevertheless, they wield tremendous influence on the quality of our lives. People who tend toward knee-jerk defensiveness don’t function as well as those who respond less defensively: they’re impervious to corrective feedback, and their partners regularly feel dismissed. Likewise, people who don’t feel much affection toward others seem to have more trouble forming close relationships than people who experience loving feelings freely.
Up to this point, most of my therapeutic efforts had been focused on helping clients develop better understandings of their lives and, as a result, make better choices. I’d wanted to help them live more consciously, but my confidence in the effectiveness of awareness and effort was waning. With my new understanding of the brain, I knew gut-level inclinations were more likely to sit in the driver’s seat, and the most that our conscious, willful selves could do was to try to influence these inclinations from the back seat, unless—and this was a big unless—there was a way to retrain the emotional brain.
Focused Practice
One of my first experiments in trying to help a client engage in emotional reconditioning involved Steve, whose wife, Debra, had attended a few sessions and then dropped out of therapy. Steve continued on his own, recognizing that many of his relationship habits were dysfunctional. During previous conjoint sessions, I’d noticed that whenever Debra had voiced a complaint, Steve had predictably become upset and defensive. I knew that Steve would need some way to practice thinking differently at the moments when he was actually upset. So I suggested that he ask Debra if she’d record complaints on a cassette tape, which he could then use to practice being nondefensive. Surprised and intrigued, Debra agreed.
I sent Debra a message asking her to make short 15- to 45-second recordings whenever she felt upset with Steve—the more recordings, the better. After she’d made a week’s worth of recordings, she was to give the tape to Steve to bring to our next therapy session. During our next several sessions, Steve and I listened to Debra’s recordings together, and I helped Steve pay attention to his automatic reactions when listening to her critical tone. Without feeling the immediate pressure to respond to Debra, he came to recognize that when he felt criticized, his face typically flushed, his features scrunched into a scowl, and his hands tingled slightly. He also noticed that predictable thoughts popped up—such as She’s so controlling!—and that he always felt an immediate urge to dispute every possible detail of her complaint.
Together, Steve and I developed a practice plan that involved relaxing physically as he listened to her complaints, slowing his breathing down, reminding himself that he could afford to take his time and hear her out, maintaining eye contact without scowling, and then searching for and commenting on understandable aspects of her complaint. For several weeks in our therapy sessions, Steve practiced this sequence while listening to complaint after complaint. Then one day, he came to our session with a grin on his face, exclaiming, “I think this is beginning to work!”
A few days before, Debra had become upset with him when she’d learned that he’d forgotten to tell his parents that they needed to cancel their plans to get together. “You know what?” Steve said excitedly. “When she was yelling at me, I actually noticed that my breathing was slowing down, and I was really listening to her. I had the urge to justify why I didn’t make the call, but I remembered that I could do that later if I needed to and that I could take my time and hear her out.” Instead of offering an excuse, Steve told her that he should have made calling his mother a higher priority. “You should have seen the look on her face!” Steve beamed. The fact that Steve’s automatic reactions had begun to change after only a few weeks of focused practice made me believe that I was on the right track.
The Wages of Blame
Soon enough, however, I realized that the reconditioning exercises worked so well for Steve because he was highly self-responsible and motivated to change, while most of the people I saw in therapy didn’t think they needed to change—at least not nearly as much as they thought their partners needed to. Motivating partners to take personal responsibility was the most frustrating part of being a couple’s therapist for me. Every time I challenged partners to behave differently, they’d counter with some version of “Well, I wouldn’t be acting this way if my partner wasn’t so selfish (or insensitive, irresponsible, inattentive, immature, misguided, unrealistic, irrational, short-sighted, or biased.)”
They usually had a point. Their partners often behaved just as badly as they themselves did, but to them, it seemed that their partners’ actions were far more egregious. Before I could do anything even approaching “brain retraining” with such clients, I needed a way to help them see their negative habits and understand the role that these habits were playing in the deterioration of their relationships.
I honestly don’t know if I’d have succeeded in motivating these clients had it not been for the fact that I’d already read John Gottman’s book Why Do Marriages Succeed or Fail?, in which he reports on his research finding that the most effective partners in intimate relationships were able to avoid “negative affect reciprocity” (the tendency to respond to negativity with more negativity) and the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling) when they felt provoked. Additionally, Gottman found that it was especially when partners were behaving badly that the differences between couples who were destined for satisfying relationships could be most clearly distinguished from couples who were destined for serious trouble.
Gottman’s research enabled me to cut through the blame game that so often plagues ailing partners and help them—at least some of them—understand that the ability to respond effectively when they didn’t like their partner’s actions was a nonnegotiable requirement if they wanted their relationships to thrive. Gottman’s research was also valuable because of its precision. He’d zeroed in on the specific habits that were required for relationships to succeed, which helped clients identify exactly where they tended to get off track in their relationships. However, while most Gottman-influenced therapists I talked to were trying to teach clients these skills, I knew that clients wouldn’t be able to conjure these skills at a moment’s notice as long as their automatic emotional reactions kept getting in the way. To successfully implement these skills, clients would first need to rewire some of their automatic reactions.
The Brain on Mindfulness
For almost 20 years now, I’ve been exploring methods for helping clients develop new, automatic inclinations that allow better self-regulation, self-attunement, perspective-taking, and empathy, especially in their intimate relationships. But one of the studies with the biggest impact on my approach was published in NeuroReport by a team of researchers from Harvard and Yale who’d found that mindfulness meditation may produce growth in brain areas known to be involved in mood regulation, attentiveness, and empathy.
As it turned out, this study was just the first of its kind. Since then, 18 additional studies have been published finding that meditators have significantly greater volume in areas of the brain that produce automatic tendencies relevant to social functioning, including several that found that periods as short as eight weeks of regular mindfulness created predictable changes in the brain. In fact, in 2013, a team of researchers from Brazil and the United Kingdom found that they could distinguish the brains of experienced meditators from those of non-meditators with 94.9 percent accuracy. The evidence is clear—meditation conditions the brain to produce automatic inclinations that help people be more attentive and optimistic and less affected by stressful circumstances and anxiety. In other words, the nervous system changes promoted by mindfulness can serve as a stable platform that enables people to act more skillfully in all areas of their lives.
Using Brain Science for Behavioral Change
Over the years, I’ve come to recognize that there’s no one-shot, magic-bullet approach to retraining the human brain. Instead, I’ve developed a process that systematically combines what we know about the power of the emotional brain, the particular strengths of the rational mind, the mechanics of mindfulness meditation, and the brain’s impressive flexibility to help clients learn to calm their nervous systems and navigate their lives more effectively. This process includes:
  1. Conscious pursuit of understanding and change. We need to use our conscious minds to understand our lives, develop ideas about what’s healthy and unhealthy, and pursue concrete changes that move us toward health and well-being.
  2. Stress reduction and rejuvenation. We need to develop nervous system inclinations that reduce stress, relax the mind, and rejuvenate the body.
  3. Distress tolerance and self-regulation. We need to develop nervous system inclinations that help us tolerate the inevitable stress that accompanies making difficult changes and self-regulate in emotionally charged situations.
  4. Emotional accessibility. We need to develop nervous system inclinations that produce feelings that connect us to others.
At our treatment center for couples, my colleagues and I begin stress reduction and rejuvenation in the first week of therapy, asking partners to start mindfulness classes in conjunction with therapy. While mindfulness training alone won’t heal broken relationships, we consider it an indispensable part of the relationship improvement process. Years of experience have taught us that there’s only so much that we can do with clients whose default nervous system impulses and inclinations keep them perpetually stressed, edgy, and preoccupied.
While partners engage in their first eight weeks of mindfulness classes, we use therapy sessions to engage them in the conscious pursuit of understanding and change. Specifically, we help them (1) become aware of studies suggesting that people who believe their partners are “the main problem” are usually mistaken, (2) consider evidence suggesting that this mistake is of no small consequence to relationships, (3) become receptive to our opinion that their habits have been as damaging to the relationship as their partner’s habits, (4) listen with an open mind as we paint a clear picture of their problematic habits, (5) understand why it’s in their own best interest to explicitly acknowledge and accept responsibility for their roles in the deterioration of their relationships, and (6) become determined to develop the full set of habits that are characteristic of people who know how to get their partners to treat them well. We also help partners accept mutual responsibility while in the presence of each other. Then we move on to identify the underlying needs, worries, fears, and insecurities that are beneath their previous blaming and defensive postures, and we help them talk about these vulnerable feelings without accusation or blame.
The combination of stress reduction and rejuvenation (facilitated through mindfulness classes) andconscious pursuit of understanding and change (during therapy sessions) is powerful, and couples often make significant strides in the first two months of therapy. But in my experience, that’s rarely enough. Up to this point, the shifts that clients make during sessions are heavily therapist dependent.We help partners self-regulate during sessions. We create the conditions that enable them to connect with vulnerable feelings. The biggest challenge for them is still ahead: learning to rewire their brains to produce automatic inclinations that enable them to do these things on their own. This is hard, gutsy work, but it can produce substantial change, so we help clients walk the arduous path toward self-regulation through exercises in distress tolerance and self-soothing and in emotional accessibility.
Developing Calm in the Storm
Neuroscientist and psychiatrist Daniel Siegel notes that the process of turning toward and soothing upset feelings (rather than focusing exclusively on the external threats) is what good parents do in responding to feelings of distress in their children. Before helping children solve their problems, skillful parents relax, turn toward and welcome their children’s feelings while providing direct physical soothing—often through hugging, holding, and other forms of nurturing contact. Similarly, distress tolerance and self-soothing exercises help clients turn toward their own upset feelings and engage directly in physiological soothing, temporarily postponing thoughts about problems. This process of self-accompaniment elicits a sense of calm in the storm, allowing clients to avoid alarm or panic when things aren’t going well.
We begin by asking clients to notice when small annoyances or disappointments occur in the course of each day. When they notice these frustrations, clients stop what they’re doing and spend one to three minutes resisting the urge to analyze their upsetting circumstances. Instead, they’re encouraged to slow down their breathing and focus attention on their physical sensations.
We’ve found that the key to reconditioning automatic reactions involves frequent reconditioning exercises that are practiced in close proximity to each other. The brain will acquire a new habit more quickly if a person practices the new habit once a day for 14 days than if a person practices it one time per week for 14 weeks. I learned this concept decades ago from Albert, the white lab rat I worked with in my college experimental psychology class. Albert learned new behaviors, like running to a specific area of his cage, with fewer conditioning trials when he was rewarded for desired behavior once per hour than when he was rewarded for it once per week. This is why we ask partners to practice with every upset feeling—no matter how small—that they experience on a daily basis. We emphasize that most of the work involves simply remembering to do the exercises and being willing to interrupt whatever they’re doing for a couple of minutes. If practiced faithfully, these small moments will change their brains within weeks. We want clients to understand that each day that goes by without practicing distress tolerance and self-soothing decreases the likelihood that their brains will begin to produce calming instincts and inclinations automatically.
Clients begin by practicing with mild upset feelings. Once they’ve worked with mild upset feelings every day for at least a week, they move on to more intense feelings. For this level of practice, we want the upset feelings to be stronger, but not so difficult that clients get hijacked by them and are unable to practice. One method involves having clients listen to complaints that their partners have prerecorded, as I had Steve do with Debra’s complaints in the days of tape recorders. (Now we have the added convenience of making recordings on our smartphones.) Some clients don’t need to listen to recordings to activate upset feelings. They can feel upset just by setting aside times to regularly remember recent upsetting events. To many people this sounds crazy. “Why would I want to deliberately make myself upset?” they balk. The answer is so they can practice calming themselves frequently enough to wire their brains with an instinct to remain calm during upsetting situations.
Although the point of triggering is to learn how to calm oneself and eventually not get triggered in the first place, it’s undeniably painful work. When clients lose their nerve I empathize with them, readily acknowledging that there have been weeks, months, and even whole phases in my life when I just haven’t had the energy or motivation to engage in practices that would’ve been good for me. Sometimes life is like that; you just can’t sustain the courage or motivation to press on, and it’s wise to cut yourself some slack. I support clients who need to back off, but I don’t want them to delude themselves. Even as they’re backing off, I encourage them to consider that at some point, they’ll probably need to find the motivation to engage in difficult practices such as these if they want their habitual reactions to change.
Intense upset feelings during actual arguments are the most difficult for clients to practice with; however, clients who have practiced diligently with mild and moderate feelings can usually soothe intense feelings as well. First, we familiarize them with the process of working with intense feelings in advance, when they’re calm and can fully take in each element of practice. Then during conjoint sessions, we ask them to discuss hot issues, the ones that trigger strong feelings. Ahead of time, clients agree that when they’re triggered, they’ll take session breaks for the purpose of practicingdistress tolerance and self-soothing, and I give them the set of instructions in the box on the next page to help them through each of the steps.
Once partners have gone through the steps described in the box to the right, they resume the session and continue discussing the troubling issue. Sometimes another break is needed, and often there isn’t time for issues to get resolved by the end of sessions. To feel okay about this lack of resolution, clients must care more about acquiring the ability to self-soothe and tolerate distress than they do about resolving issues quickly. They must believe that ultimately, the ability to react less intensely and operate with less desperation will lead to easier resolution of differences—and this benefit will extend over time throughout their relationship. They must be willing to exchange the value of quick resolution for the long-term benefits that will come from investing time in reconditioning their brains for calmer reactions in upsetting situations.
After they’ve had success on their own during session breaks, we ask clients to begin practicing at home by taking breaks during real-time arguments. When people have difficulty engaging in distress tolerance and self-soothing exercises at home during arguments, it’s usually because they’re not fully committed to getting better at them. Deep down, they may not believe that calming themselves will matter much. They may feel that they’ve been calm during arguments in the past and it hasn’t made any difference; their partners were still unresponsive. I agree with such clients, acknowledging that staying calm by itself won’t be enough—they may also need to stand up for themselves. To heighten motivation for these clients, we spend quite a bit of time discussing studies showing that the ability to calm oneself in the face of conflict is highly correlated with getting satisfying responses from one’s partner. We then ask clients to complete logs in which they record each upsetting incident, how much time they spent trying to shut down mental chatter and focus on physical self-soothing, and how much calmer they felt after practicing. The good news is that for clients who practice diligently with the full range of mild, moderate, and intense feelings, changes take place in their nervous systems within a period of weeks.
The Power of Mental Rehearsal
As partners become better able to self-regulate and resolve differences respectfully, feelings of warmth, interest, fondness, playfulness, sexual interest, and other forms of loving attention often increase spontaneously. However, this doesn’t always happen. Years of animosity and indifference often shut down the neural systems that generate such feelings. In his 30 years of studying the neural systems that create social bonds, neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp identified four special operating systems in the brain, which, when active, automatically produce feelings that bring people closer together. One creates a longing for emotional closeness and contact, a second produces feelings of tenderness and the urge to care for others, a third produces the urges for spontaneous and playful social contact, and a fourth activates sexual desire. Any of these systems can go dormant when stressful life circumstances occur. But some individuals, even before experiencing the relationship distress that drove them into therapy, never had an abundance of easy access to some or all of these intimacy-generating neural systems. Is this emotional coolness a fixed state, or can it change? A number of studies in the past decade suggest that, just as our nervous systems can be groomed for better self-regulation, these neural systems can be primed to enable a natural emergence of feelings of connection. We help clients do this through specific, focused mental practices that we callemotional accessibility exercises.
Coaches and trainers have long utilized focused mental exercises to help athletes enhance performance by visualizing goals and concentrating on steps toward goals, but only recently have we discovered just how powerfully mental exercises can change the brain. In a Harvard study conducted by neurologist Alvaro Pascual-Leone, subjects who’d never played the piano before were given instructions and asked to practice a piece for five days, two hours per day, for a total of 10 hours. Before and after these practice stints, their brains were scanned. As anticipated, subjects showed brain changes in the areas of the motor cortex that corresponded to the physical movements that they’d practiced.
Another group of subjects randomly assigned to a second practice condition did the same thing as the first group, with one crucial exception: they never pressed the keys of the piano. Instead, they mentally focused on each of the practice movements. Researchers were amazed to find that these mental-rehearsal-only subjects evidenced almost the same changes in their brains as the subjects who’d practiced using their hands. In other words, mental practice produced changes in the motor cortex even though subjects hadn’t moved their fingers—they just visualized moving their fingers.
But how did the purely mental rehearsal, with its accompanying brain changes, affect the subjects’ ability to play the piece? Here, the results were stunning. Although the people in the mental-rehearsal-only group had never practiced physically, they could play the rehearsed piano piece almost as well as the group who’d practiced physically for five days. And after only one day of physical practice, they could play just as well as them.
The Harvard piano studies aren’t the only ones that show brain and performance-level changes in response to mental rehearsal. A study at the Cleveland Clinic found that subjects could increase their finger strength 53 percent through physical exercises over a 12-week period, but amazingly, a second group showed a 35 percent strength increase through mental visualization only. In a 2007 study conducted at Bishop’s University in Quebec, college athletes who engaged in hip flexor exercises increased their muscle strength 28 percent, while a mental-rehearsal-only group strengthened the same hip flexor muscles by 24 percent.
Can feelings, too, be changed through mental exercise? The answer appears to be yes. Over the past decade, dozens of studies have been published on a particular form of mental rehearsal known as compassion meditation. The exercise involves spending extended periods of time focusing on the intent and desire to develop feelings of compassion and loving-kindness for others. Just as mental rehearsal promoted changes in the motor cortex of Pascual-Leone’s piano players, brain scans have revealed that brain circuits involved in empathy, positive emotion, and emotional regulation are dramatically changed in subjects who’d extensively practiced compassion meditation.
A 2013 study from a University of Wisconsin research team, published in Psychological Science, showed that focusing daily on the intention to be loving and compassionate not only strengthened feelings of compassion and related neural underpinnings, but also increased the concrete altruistic behavior of subjects. A 2013 study from Emory University published in Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience found that compassion meditation boosted something called “empathic accuracy,” a person’s ability to read the facial expressions of others. In this study, the meditators, in comparison to those in the control group, showed significant increases in neural activity in areas of the brain important for empathy, and these brain changes accounted for changes in the participants’ empathic accuracy scores.
These studies suggest that simply dwelling on the intention to develop a specific feeling activates the neural circuits responsible for producing that feeling. In focusing on the intention to be compassionate, meditators primed their brains for compassion. It’s reasonable to assume that the same principle applies to other feelings. Thus, if you spend five minutes a day thinking about things you’re grateful for, you’re likely to energize and create more connection with brain circuits that produce feelings of gratitude. If you spend five minutes a day remembering vividly times when you felt happy (or playful, affectionate, sexual, and so forth), you’ll energize and strengthen brain circuits that can produce these feelings. As neuroscientists explain, anything you consistently give attention to teaches the brain to produce more of it, and this is true with negative thoughts.
At our clinic, we ask partners to spend five minutes each day doing nothing but thinking about things they like about their mates and about good moments that they’ve spent together. The primary value of this emotional accessibility exercise is that each time partners dwell on the good feelings they have toward each other, the neural circuits that generate feelings of connection—such as the middle insula, superior parietal lobule, right periaqueductal gray, left ventral tegmental area, and left rostro-dorsal anterior cingulate cortex—may be strengthened.
However, studies on mental rehearsal and compassion meditation suggest that it’s not just any kind of attention that produces these significant changes. Once again, regular, sustained work is essential. The subjects in Pascual-Leone’s piano study didn’t just wish occasionally for increased piano skills; they spent hours per day specifically imagining the piano moves necessary to develop the skills. Similarly, those involved in the compassion meditation studies didn’t just entertain fleeting thoughts about wanting to feel more compassion and loving-kindness; they regularly spent time dwelling on the desire to have more compassion—in some studies up to 40 minutes per day over the course of eight weeks. Reflecting on his experience, one of my clients said, “I can’t make a good feeling walk through the door on command, but if I keep holding the door open, sooner or later it’ll walk through.”
Many people live out their lives without holding this door open. Generally, people fail to do this because they believe it’s useless. Early in our lives, most of us are told, “Wishful thinking won’t get you anywhere! You need to get off of your butt and make things happen!” While wishful thinking alone won’t get people where they want to go, people who bolster their concrete efforts with focused, sustained intentions are likelier to make desired changes than those who use behavioral efforts alone. Numerous studies over the past decade have shown that surgeons who engage in mental and physical practice together are more skillful than those who engage in physical practice only. Similarly, stroke victims who engage in mental visualization in addition to physical therapy recover functioning faster, and athletes and musicians who combine mental and physical practice perform better.
Doing the Work
When I think back on that afternoon years ago when Robert Ornstein was first blowing my mind, I realize that since then almost everything about the way I conduct therapy has changed. I still help clients develop insight and make concrete plans for operating more effectively in their daily lives, but truthfully, this part of my work is more of a sideline. These days, my central concern is reconditioning the brain. Modern neuroscientific discoveries suggest that William James was right in 1890 when he proposed that the basic organizer of the human mind is habit, not rational thought or understanding. Thus, I believe that in the coming years, the most important developments in mental health will involve refining technologies for isolating and intervening in automatic nervous system habits.
Reconditioning the brain isn’t the stuff of brief therapy. I ask a lot of my clients, and some weeks I’m better at motivating them than others. Over the years, I’ve noticed that their willingness to do the work seems to correlate with what’s going on within me. The calmer my own nervous system is, the easier it is for me to connect with feelings of love, nonjudgment, empathy, acceptance, and excitement about the possibilities that lie ahead for my clients. When clients sense qualities in me that they’d like to develop in themselves, they’re sold. I can talk about the scientifically proven benefits of mental practice until I’m blue in the face, but unless they sense that I know what I’m talking about through their felt experience of me, they don’t buy in. Good for them. In this business, there’s no substitute for the real thing.
Distress Tolerance & Self-Soothing: Guidelines for Clients
  1. Stop what you’re doing and say to yourself:
    • I can afford to slow down and try to relax.
    • I’ve got some time to figure out how to handle this situation.
    • I’m not going to just let it go without saying something.
    • If I can get calmer, I’ll be more powerful.
  2. Now identify the behind-the-scenes facts that are making you feel upset. Write your answers to these questions:
    • What seems to be the sad or disturbing truth about why this person is acting this way?
    • What bad thing is happening here that seems similar to a bad situation that’s happened before? Is the same bad thing happening now?
    • What will happen if I can’t get this sort of thing to stop happening?
  3. Propose to yourself that the answers to these questions may not be as clearcut as they seem. One by one, go back through each question and say to yourself: “Maybe things are as they seem, and maybe they aren’t.”
  4. Set your thinking about these questions and about the upsetting situation aside for now. Assume a first-things-first attitude: “First I’m going to get myself into a state of mind where I feel less upset; then I’ll think things through and figure out what to do.”
  5. Pay attention exclusively to the physical sensations that go along with your feelings. Welcome these sensations. Avoid trying to change them. Just accompany them while “giving them air” through slow breathing. Think of slow breathing as like putting an oxygen mask on the part of you that feels upset. Take big inhales and then long, slow exhales.
  6. If thoughts pop up, acknowledge them. Then without judging yourself, gently bring your attention back to the physical sensations. Do this as many times as needed.
  7. Alternate between paying attention to physical sensations that go along with the feeling and giving mindful attention to your breath, other body sensations, and your immediate surroundings. Use any mental images that help you feel more at ease.
  8. If you can’t seem to stop ruminating about the upsetting circumstances, engage in an activity that requires your full attention. Later, when you’re feeling better, go back and give some thought to how you can best respond to the upsetting circumstances. If you begin feeling upset again, start at #1 and follow these guidelines one more time.
Brent Atkinson, PhD, is director of postgraduate training at the Couples Research Institute in Geneva, Illinois, and Professor Emeritus at Northern Illinois University. He’s the author of Emotional Intelligence in Couples Therapy: Advances from Neurobiology and the Science of Intimate Relationships and Developing Habits for Relationship SuccessContact: atkinson.bja@gmail.com.

Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership

Harvard Business Review




Magazine

September 2008

Article Preview To read the full article, sign-in or register. HBR subscribers, click here to register for FREE access »




In 1998, one of us, Daniel Goleman, published in these pages his first article on emotional intelligence and leadership. The response to “What Makes a Leader?” was enthusiastic. People throughout and beyond the business community started talking about the vital role that empathy and self-knowledge play in effective leadership. The concept of emotional intelligence continues to occupy a prominent space in the leadership literature and in everyday coaching practices. But in the past five years, research in the emerging field of social neuroscience—the study of what happens in the brain while people interact—is beginning to reveal subtle new truths about what makes a good leader.






The salient discovery is that certain things leaders do—specifically, exhibit empathy and become attuned to others’ moods—literally affect both their own brain chemistry and that of their followers. Indeed, researchers have found that the leader-follower dynamic is not a case of two (or more) independent brains reacting consciously or unconsciously to each other. Rather, the individual minds become, in a sense, fused into a single system. We believe that great leaders are those whose behavior powerfully leverages the system of brain interconnectedness. We place them on the opposite end of the neural continuum from people with serious social disorders, such as autism or Asperger’s syndrome, that are characterized by underdevelopment in the areas of the brain associated with social interactions. If we are correct, it follows that a potent way of becoming a better leader is to find authentic contexts in which to learn the kinds of social behavior that reinforce the brain’s social circuitry. Leading effectively is, in other words, less about mastering situations—or even mastering social skill sets—than about developing a genuine interest in and talent for fostering positive feelings in the people whose cooperation and support you need.

The notion that effective leadership is about having powerful social circuits in the brain has prompted us to extend our concept of emotional intelligence, which we had grounded in theories of individual psychology. A more relationship-based construct for assessing leadership is social intelligence, which we define as a set of interpersonal competencies built on specific neural circuits (and related endocrine systems) that inspire others to be effective.

The idea that leaders need social skills is not new, of course. In 1920, Columbia University psychologist Edward Thorndike pointed out that “the best mechanic in a factory may fail as a foreman for lack of social intelligence.” More recently, our colleague Claudio Fernández-Aráoz found in an analysis of new C-level executives that those who had been hired for their self-discipline, drive, and intellect were sometimes later fired for lacking basic social skills. In other words, the people Fernández-Aráoz studied had smarts in spades, but their inability to get along socially on the job was professionally self-defeating.
What’s new about our definition of social intelligence is its biological underpinning, which we will explore in the following pages. Drawing on the work of neuroscientists, our own research and consulting endeavors, and the findings of researchers affiliated with the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, we will show you how to translate newly acquired knowledge about mirror neurons, spindle cells, and oscillators into practical, socially intelligent behaviors that can reinforce the neural links between you and your followers.

Followers Mirror Their Leaders—Literally

 
Perhaps the most stunning recent discovery in behavioral neuroscience is the identification of mirror neurons in widely dispersed areas of the brain. Italian neuroscientists found them by accident while monitoring a particular cell in a monkey’s brain that fired only when the monkey raised its arm. One day a lab assistant lifted an ice cream cone to his own mouth and triggered a reaction in the monkey’s cell. It was the first evidence that the brain is peppered with neurons that mimic, or mirror, what another being does. This previously unknown class of brain cells operates as neural Wi-Fi, allowing us to navigate our social world. When we consciously or unconsciously detect someone else’s emotions through their actions, our mirror neurons reproduce those emotions. Collectively, these neurons create an instant sense of shared experience.
Mirror neurons have particular importance in organizations, because leaders’ emotions and actions prompt followers to mirror those feelings and deeds. The effects of activating neural circuitry in followers’ brains can be very powerful. In a recent study, our colleague Marie Dasborough observed two groups: One received negative performance feedback accompanied by positive emotional signals—namely, nods and smiles; the other was given positive feedback that was delivered critically, with frowns and narrowed eyes. In subsequent interviews conducted to compare the emotional states of the two groups, the people who had received positive feedback accompanied by negative emotional signals reported feeling worse about their performance than did the participants who had received good-natured negative feedback. In effect, the delivery was more important than the message itself. And everybody knows that when people feel better, they perform better. So, if leaders hope to get the best out of their people, they should continue to be demanding but in ways that foster a positive mood in their teams. The old carrot-and-stick approach alone doesn’t make neural sense; traditional incentive systems are simply not enough to get the best performance from followers.

Here’s an example of what does work. It turns out that there’s a subset of mirror neurons whose only job is to detect other people’s smiles and laughter, prompting smiles and laughter in return. A boss who is self-controlled and humorless will rarely engage those neurons in his team members, but a boss who laughs and sets an easygoing tone puts those neurons to work, triggering spontaneous laughter and knitting his team together in the process. A bonded group is one that performs well, as our colleague Fabio Sala has shown in his research. He found that top-performing leaders elicited laughter from their subordinates three times as often, on average, as did midperforming leaders. Being in a good mood, other research finds, helps people take in information effectively and respond nimbly and creatively. In other words, laughter is serious business.


It certainly made a difference at one university-based hospital in Boston. Two doctors we’ll call Dr. Burke and Dr. Humboldt were in contention for the post of CEO of the corporation that ran this hospital and others. Both of them headed up departments, were superb physicians, and had published many widely cited research articles in prestigious medical journals. But the two had very different personalities. Burke was intense, task focused, and impersonal. He was a relentless perfectionist with a combative tone that kept his staff continually on edge. Humboldt was no less demanding, but he was very approachable, even playful, in relating to staff, colleagues, and patients. Observers noted that people smiled and teased one another—and even spoke their minds—more in Humboldt’s department than in Burke’s. Prized talent often ended up leaving Burke’s department; in contrast, outstanding folks gravitated to Humboldt’s warmer working climate. Recognizing Humboldt’s socially intelligent leadership style, the hospital corporation’s board picked him as the new CEO.

The “Finely Attuned” Leader

 
Great executives often talk about leading from the gut. Indeed, having good instincts is widely recognized as an advantage for a leader in any context, whether in reading the mood of one’s organization or in conducting a delicate negotiation with the competition. Leadership scholars characterize this talent as an ability to recognize patterns, usually born of extensive experience. Their advice: Trust your gut, but get lots of input as you make decisions. That’s sound practice, of course, but managers don’t always have the time to consult dozens of people.

Findings in neuroscience suggest that this approach is probably too cautious. Intuition, too, is in the brain, produced in part by a class of neurons called spindle cells because of their shape. They have a body size about four times that of other brain cells, with an extra-long branch to make attaching to other cells easier and transmitting thoughts and feelings to them quicker. This ultrarapid connection of emotions, beliefs, and judgments creates what behavioral scientists call our social guidance system. Spindle cells trigger neural networks that come into play whenever we have to choose the best response among many—even for a task as routine as prioritizing a to-do list. These cells also help us gauge whether someone is trustworthy and right (or wrong) for a job. Within one-twentieth of a second, our spindle cells fire with information about how we feel about that person; such “thin-slice” judgments can be very accurate, as follow-up metrics reveal. Therefore, leaders should not fear to act on those judgments, provided that they are also attuned to others’ moods.

Such attunement is literally physical. Followers of an effective leader experience rapport with her—or what we and our colleague Annie McKee call “resonance.” Much of this feeling arises unconsciously, thanks to mirror neurons and spindle-cell circuitry. But another class of neurons is also involved: Oscillators coordinate people physically by regulating how and when their bodies move together. You can see oscillators in action when you watch people about to kiss; their movements look like a dance, one body responding to the other seamlessly. The same dynamic occurs when two cellists play together. Not only do they hit their notes in unison, but thanks to oscillators, the two musicians’ right brain hemispheres are more closely coordinated than are the left and right sides of their individual brains.

Firing Up Your Social Neurons

 
The firing of social neurons is evident all around us. We once analyzed a video of Herb Kelleher, a cofounder and former CEO of Southwest Airlines, strolling down the corridors of Love Field in Dallas, the airline’s hub. We could practically see him activate the mirror neurons, oscillators, and other social circuitry in each person he encountered. He offered beaming smiles, shook hands with customers as he told them how much he appreciated their business, hugged employees as he thanked them for their good work. And he got back exactly what he gave. Typical was the flight attendant whose face lit up when she unexpectedly encountered her boss. “Oh, my honey!” she blurted, brimming with warmth, and gave him a big hug. She later explained, “Everyone just feels like family with him.”

Unfortunately, it’s not easy to turn yourself into a Herb Kelleher or a Dr. Humboldt if you’re not one already. We know of no clear-cut methods to strengthen mirror neurons, spindle cells, and oscillators; they activate by the thousands per second during any encounter, and their precise firing patterns remain elusive. What’s more, self-conscious attempts to display social intelligence can often backfire. When you make an intentional effort to coordinate movements with another person, it is not only oscillators that fire. In such situations the brain uses other, less adept circuitry to initiate and guide movements; as a result, the interaction feels forced.

The only way to develop your social circuitry effectively is to undertake the hard work of changing your behavior (see “Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance,” our December 2001 HBR article with Annie McKee). Companies interested in leadership development need to begin by assessing the willingness of individuals to enter a change program. Eager candidates should first develop a personal vision for change and then undergo a thorough diagnostic assessment, akin to a medical workup, to identify areas of social weakness and strength. Armed with the feedback, the aspiring leader can be trained in specific areas where developing better social skills will have the greatest payoff. The training can range from rehearsing better ways of interacting and trying them out at every opportunity, to being shadowed by a coach and then debriefed about what he observes, to learning directly from a role model. The options are many, but the road to success is always tough.

How to Become Socially Smarter

 
To see what social intelligence training involves, consider the case of a top executive we’ll call Janice. She had been hired as a marketing manager by a Fortune 500 company because of her business expertise, outstanding track record as a strategic thinker and planner, reputation as a straight talker, and ability to anticipate business issues that were crucial for meeting goals. Within her first six months on the job, however, Janice was floundering; other executives saw her as aggressive and opinionated, lacking in political astuteness, and careless about what she said and to whom, especially higher-ups.

To save this promising leader, Janice’s boss called in Kathleen Cavallo, an organizational psychologist and senior consultant with the Hay Group, who immediately put Janice through a 360-degree evaluation. Her direct reports, peers, and managers gave Janice low ratings on empathy, service orientation, adaptability, and managing conflicts. Cavallo learned more by having confidential conversations with the people who worked most closely with Janice. Their complaints focused on her failure to establish rapport with people or even notice their reactions. The bottom line: Janice was adept neither at reading the social norms of a group nor at recognizing people’s emotional cues when she violated those norms. Even more dangerous, Janice did not realize she was being too blunt in managing upward. When she had a strong difference of opinion with a manager, she did not sense when to back off. Her “let’s get it all on the table and mix it up” approach was threatening her job; top management was getting fed up.

When Cavallo presented this performance feedback as a wake-up call to Janice, she was of course shaken to discover that her job might be in danger. What upset her more, though, was the realization that she was not having her desired impact on other people. Cavallo initiated coaching sessions in which Janice would describe notable successes and failures from her day. The more time Janice spent reviewing these incidents, the better she became at recognizing the difference between expressing an idea with conviction and acting like a pit bull. She began to anticipate how people might react to her in a meeting or during a negative performance review; she rehearsed more-astute ways to present her opinions; and she developed a personal vision for change. Such mental preparation activates the social circuitry of the brain, strengthening the neural connections you need to act effectively; that’s why Olympic athletes put hundreds of hours into mental review of their moves.

At one point, Cavallo asked Janice to name a leader in her organization who had excellent social intelligence skills. Janice identified a veteran senior manager who was masterly both in the art of the critique and at expressing disagreement in meetings without damaging relationships. She asked him to help coach her, and she switched to a job where she could work with him—a post she held for two years. Janice was lucky to find a mentor who believed that part of a leader’s job is to develop human capital. Many bosses would rather manage around a problem employee than help her get better. Janice’s new boss took her on because he recognized her other strengths as invaluable, and his gut told him that Janice could improve with guidance.

Before meetings, Janice’s mentor coached her on how to express her viewpoint about contentious issues and how to talk to higher-ups, and he modeled for her the art of performance feedback. By observing him day in and day out, Janice learned to affirm people even as she challenged their positions or critiqued their performance. Spending time with a living, breathing model of effective behavior provides the perfect stimulation for our mirror neurons, which allow us to directly experience, internalize, and ultimately emulate what we observe.

Janice’s transformation was genuine and comprehensive. In a sense, she went in one person and came out another. If you think about it, that’s an important lesson from neuroscience: Because our behavior creates and develops neural networks, we are not necessarily prisoners of our genes and our early childhood experiences. Leaders can change if, like Janice, they are ready to put in the effort. As she progressed in her training, the social behaviors she was learning became more like second nature to her. In scientific terms, Janice was strengthening her social circuits through practice. And as others responded to her, their brains connected with hers more profoundly and effectively, thereby reinforcing Janice’s circuits in a virtuous circle. The upshot: Janice went from being on the verge of dismissal to getting promoted to a position two levels up.
A few years later, some members of Janice’s staff left the company because they were not happy—so she asked Cavallo to come back. Cavallo discovered that although Janice had mastered the ability to communicate and connect with management and peers, she still sometimes missed cues from her direct reports when they tried to signal their frustration. With more help from Cavallo, Janice was able to turn the situation around by refocusing her attention on her staff’s emotional needs and fine-tuning her communication style. Opinion surveys conducted with Janice’s staff before and after Cavallo’s second round of coaching documented dramatic increases in their emotional commitment and intention to stay in the organization. Janice and the staff also delivered a 6% increase in annual sales, and after another successful year she was made president of a multibillion-dollar unit. Companies can clearly benefit a lot from putting people through the kind of program Janice completed.

Hard Metrics of Social Intelligence

 
Our research over the past decade has confirmed that there is a large performance gap between socially intelligent and socially unintelligent leaders. At a major national bank, for example, we found that levels of an executive’s social intelligence competencies predicted yearly performance appraisals more powerfully than did the emotional intelligence competencies of self-awareness and self-management. (For a brief explanation of our assessment tool, which focuses on seven dimensions, see the exhibit “Are You a Socially Intelligent Leader?”)

Social intelligence turns out to be especially important in crisis situations. Consider the experience of workers at a large Canadian provincial health care system that had gone through drastic cutbacks and a reorganization. Internal surveys revealed that the frontline workers had become frustrated that they were no longer able to give their patients a high level of care. Notably, workers whose leaders scored low in social intelligence reported unmet patient-care needs at three times the rate—and emotional exhaustion at four times the rate—of their colleagues who had supportive leaders. At the same time, nurses with socially intelligent bosses reported good emotional health and an enhanced ability to care for their patients, even during the stress of layoffs (see the sidebar “The Chemistry of Stress”). These results should be compulsory reading for the boards of companies in crisis. Such boards typically favor expertise over social intelligence when selecting someone to guide the institution through tough times.
A crisis manager needs both.

• • •
 As we explore the discoveries of neuroscience, we are struck by how closely the best psychological theories of development map to the newly charted hardwiring of the brain. Back in the 1950s, for example, British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott was advocating for play as a way to accelerate children’s learning. Similarly, British physician and psychoanalyst John Bowlby emphasized the importance of providing a secure base from which people can strive toward goals, take risks without unwarranted fear, and freely explore new possibilities. Hard-bitten executives may consider it absurdly indulgent and financially untenable to concern themselves with such theories in a world where bottom-line performance is the yardstick of success. But as new ways of scientifically measuring human development start to bear out these theories and link them directly with performance, the so-called soft side of business begins to look not so soft after all.



Daniel Goleman (contact@danielgoleman.info) is a cochairman of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, which is based at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology in Piscataway, New Jersey. He is the author of Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (Bantam, 2006). Richard Boyatzis (richard.boyatzis@case.edu) is the H.R. Horvitz Chair of Family Business and a professor in the departments of organizational behavior, psychology, and cognitive science at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He is a coauthor, with Annie McKee and Frances Johnston, of Becoming a Resonant Leader (Harvard Business Press, 2008).

Social Intelligence

Daniel Goleman

Emotional intelligence, social intelligence, ecological intelligence


The most fundamental discovery of this new science: We are wired to connect. 


Neuroscience has discovered that our brain’s very design makes it sociable, inexorably drawn into an intimate brain-to-brain linkup whenever we engage with another person. That neural bridge lets us impact the brain—and so the body—of everyone we interact with, just as they do us.

Even our most routine encounters act as regulators in the brain, priming emotions in us, some desirable, others not. The more strongly connected we are with someone emotionally, the greater the mutual force. The most potent exchanges occur with those people with whom we spend the greatest amount of time day in and day out, year after year—particularly those we care about the most.

During these neural linkups, our brains engage in an emotional tango, a dance of feelings. Our social interactions operate as modulators, something like interpersonal thermostats that continually reset key aspects of our brain function as they orchestrate our emotions.

The resulting feelings have far-reaching consequences, in turn rippling throughout our body, sending out cascades of hormones that regulate biological systems from our heart to immune cells. Perhaps most astonishing, science now tracks connections between the most stressful relationships and the very operation of specific genes that regulate the immune system.

To a surprising extent, then, our relationships mold not just our experience, but our biology. The brain-to-brain link allows our strongest relationships to shape us in ways as benign as whether we laugh at the same jokes or as profound as which genes are (or are not) activated in t-cells, the immune system’s foot soldiers in the constant battle against invading bacteria and viruses.
That represents a double-edged sword: nourishing relationships have a beneficial impact on our health, while toxic ones can act like slow poison in our bodies.

Virtually all the major scientific discoveries I draw on in this volume have emerged since Emotional Intelligence appeared in 1995, and they continue to surface at a quickening pace. I intend this book to be a companion volume to Emotional Intelligence, exploring the same terrain of human life from a different vantage point, one that allows a wider swath of understanding of our personal world.

When I wrote Emotional Intelligence, my focus was on a crucial set of human capacities within an individual, the ability to manage our own emotions and our inner potential for positive relationships. Here the picture enlarges beyond a one-person psychology—those capacities an individual has within—to a two-person psychology: what transpires as we connect.

Take, for example, empathy, the sensing of another person’s feelings that allows rapport. Empathy is an individual ability, one that resides inside the person. But rapport only arises between people, as a property that emerges from their interaction. Here the spotlight shifts to those ephemeral moments that emerge as we interact. These take on deep consequence as we realize how, through their sum total, we create one another.

— From the prologue to Social Intelligence

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Proton radius puzzle may be solved by quantum gravity


phys.org



Proton radius puzzle may be solved by quantum gravity

Nov 26, 2013 by Lisa Zyga feature 
 Proton radius puzzle may be solved by quantum gravity
 (Phys.org) —Officially, the radius of a proton is 0.88 ± 0.01 femtometers (fm, or 10-15 m). Researchers attained that value using two methods: first, by measuring the proton's energy levels using hydrogen spectroscopy, and second, by using electron scattering experiments, where an electron beam is shot at a proton and the way the electrons scatter is used to calculate the proton's size. 
 But when trying to further improve the precision of the radius value in 2010 with a third experimental technique, physicists got a value of 0.842 ± 0.001 fm—a difference of 7 deviations from the official value. These experiments used muonic hydrogen, in which a negatively charged muon orbits around the proton, instead of atomic hydrogen, in which an electron orbits around the proton. Because a muon is 200 times heavier than an electron, a muon orbits closer to a proton than an electron does, and can determine the proton size more precisely.
This inconsistency between proton radius values, called the "proton radius puzzle," has gained a lot of attention lately and has led to several proposed explanations. Some of these explanations include new degrees of freedom beyond the Standard Model, as well as extra dimensions.

Now in a new paper published in EPL, physicist Roberto Onofrio at the University of Padova in Padova, Italy, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has suggested that the muonic hydrogen experiment may be providing a hint of quantum gravity. He has proposed that the proton radius puzzle can be solved by considering a new theory of quantum gravity that is based on the unification of gravity and the weak force, also called "gravitoweak unification."

In this theoretical scenario, conventional Newtonian gravity holds at large distances, but morphs into a different kind of gravitational interaction at very small scales. Specifically, the strength of the gravitational interactions is equal to the strength of the weak charged interactions that occur among subatomic particles. The weak charged interactions can be considered as manifestations of the quantized structure of gravity at or below the Fermi scale.

As Onofrio theoretically shows in his paper, quantum gravity of this nature contributes an additional binding energy to the muonic hydrogen experiments, which explains the smaller proton radius value. In these experiments, the proton radius value was measured in terms of an energy difference between two energy levels, called the Lamb shift.
Onofrio calculated that the gravitational energy contribution in the atomic hydrogen experiments is about two orders of magnitude smaller than in the muonic hydrogen experiments, due to the electron's smaller mass compared to the muon. Onofrio evaluated that the energy contribution should be noticeable when measuring the Lamb shift of , and its absence in the data could imply the presence of a flavor-dependent interaction, similar to what happens already for the well-known charged weak interaction.
"Muonic hydrogen is unique in that it probes small distances at an unprecedented precision, so it may pick up any small force acting between the constituents," Onofrio told Phys.org. "Since the explanation I provide relies on the mass of the nuclei, complementary tests may be performed on variants of muonic hydrogen currently under experimental study, more specifically the measurement of the Lamb shift in muonic deuterium, and muonic helium spectroscopy. In the EPL paper, I make a definite prediction for muonic deuterium, for instance."

Perhaps the most exciting outcome of this work is that it shows that muonic may be used to test possible scenarios of gravitoweak unification, with providing evidence of gravity's effects at very small scales.
"This work shows that the combination of high-precision spectroscopy and the use of exotic atoms with size in between ordinary atoms and nuclei may open a novel way to test physics at the attometer scale, a scale at which, according to my conjecture developed in a former paper, is acting also under the form of what we now know as weak interactions," Onofrio said.

Onofrio plans to continue to pursue the gravitoweak conjecture in various directions, and to investigate how it matches with what we know from the Standard Model of particle physics in which weak interactions are mixed with electromagnetic ones. He has outlined the future research landscape in a second paper, listed below.
 
Explore further: Updating the textbook: Is the radius of a proton wrong?
More information: Roberto Onofrio. "Proton radius puzzle and quantum gravity at the Fermi scale." EPL, 104 (2013) 20002. DOI: 10.1209/0295-5075/104/20002
Roberto Onofrio. "On Weak Interactions as Short-Distance Manifestations of Gravity." Modern Physics Letters A, Vol. 28, No. 7 (2013) 1350022 (7 pages). DOI: 10.1142/S0217732313500223
Journal reference: Europhysics Letters (EPL) search and more info website Physics Letters A search and more info website
 
Explore further: Updating the textbook: Is the radius of a proton wrong?
More information: Roberto Onofrio. "Proton radius puzzle and quantum gravity at the Fermi scale." EPL, 104 (2013) 20002. DOI: 10.1209/0295-5075/104/20002
Roberto Onofrio. "On Weak Interactions as Short-Distance Manifestations of Gravity." Modern Physics Letters A, Vol. 28, No. 7 (2013) 1350022 (7 pages). DOI: 10.1142/S0217732313500223


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-proton-radius-puzzle-quantum-gravity.html#jCp
 

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(Phys.org) —Officially, the radius of a proton is 0.88 ± 0.01 femtometers (fm, or 10-15 m). Researchers attained that value using two methods: first, by measuring the proton's energy levels using hydrogen spectroscopy, and second, by using electron scattering experiments, where an electron beam is shot at a proton and the way the electrons scatter is used to calculate the proton's size.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-proton-radius-puzzle-quantum-gravity.html#jCp
(Phys.org) —Officially, the radius of a proton is 0.88 ± 0.01 femtometers (fm, or 10-15 m). Researchers attained that value using two methods: first, by measuring the proton's energy levels using hydrogen spectroscopy, and second, by using electron scattering experiments, where an electron beam is shot at a proton and the way the electrons scatter is used to calculate the proton's size.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-proton-radius-puzzle-quantum-gravity.html#jCp
 
(Phys.org) —Officially, the radius of a proton is 0.88 ± 0.01 femtometers (fm, or 10-15 m). Researchers attained that value using two methods: first, by measuring the proton's energy levels using hydrogen spectroscopy, and second, by using electron scattering experiments, where an electron beam is shot at a proton and the way the electrons scatter is used to calculate the proton's size.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-proton-radius-puzzle-quantum-gravity.html#jCp
(Phys.org) —Officially, the radius of a proton is 0.88 ± 0.01 femtometers (fm, or 10-15 m). Researchers attained that value using two methods: first, by measuring the proton's energy levels using hydrogen spectroscopy, and second, by using electron scattering experiments, where an electron beam is shot at a proton and the way the electrons scatter is used to calculate the proton's size.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-proton-radius-puzzle-quantum-gravity.html#jCp
(Phys.org) —Officially, the radius of a proton is 0.88 ± 0.01 femtometers (fm, or 10-15 m). Researchers attained that value using two methods: first, by measuring the proton's energy levels using hydrogen spectroscopy, and second, by using electron scattering experiments, where an electron beam is shot at a proton and the way the electrons scatter is used to calculate the proton's size.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-proton-radius-puzzle-quantum-gravity.html#jCp
 
The quark structure of the proton. Credit: Arpad Horvath / Wikipedia.
(Phys.org) —Officially, the radius of a proton is 0.88 ± 0.01 femtometers (fm, or 10-15 m). Researchers attained that value using two methods: first, by measuring the proton's energy levels using hydrogen spectroscopy, and second, by using electron scattering experiments, where an electron beam is shot at a proton and the way the electrons scatter is used to calculate the proton's size.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-proton-radius-puzzle-quantum-gravity.html#jCp
The quark structure of the proton. Credit: Arpad Horvath / Wikipedia.
(Phys.org) —Officially, the radius of a proton is 0.88 ± 0.01 femtometers (fm, or 10-15 m). Researchers attained that value using two methods: first, by measuring the proton's energy levels using hydrogen spectroscopy, and second, by using electron scattering experiments, where an electron beam is shot at a proton and the way the electrons scatter is used to calculate the proton's size.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-proton-radius-puzzle-quantum-gravity.html#jCp
The quark structure of the proton. Credit: Arpad Horvath / Wikipedia.
(Phys.org) —Officially, the radius of a proton is 0.88 ± 0.01 femtometers (fm, or 10-15 m). Researchers attained that value using two methods: first, by measuring the proton's energy levels using hydrogen spectroscopy, and second, by using electron scattering experiments, where an electron beam is shot at a proton and the way the electrons scatter is used to calculate the proton's size.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-proton-radius-puzzle-quantum-gravity.html#jCp
The quark structure of the proton. Credit: Arpad Horvath / Wikipedia.
(Phys.org) —Officially, the radius of a proton is 0.88 ± 0.01 femtometers (fm, or 10-15 m). Researchers attained that value using two methods: first, by measuring the proton's energy levels using hydrogen spectroscopy, and second, by using electron scattering experiments, where an electron beam is shot at a proton and the way the electrons scatter is used to calculate the proton's size.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-proton-radius-puzzle-quantum-gravity.html#jCp
The quark structure of the proton. Credit: Arpad Horvath / Wikipedia.
(Phys.org) —Officially, the radius of a proton is 0.88 ± 0.01 femtometers (fm, or 10-15 m). Researchers attained that value using two methods: first, by measuring the proton's energy levels using hydrogen spectroscopy, and second, by using electron scattering experiments, where an electron beam is shot at a proton and the way the electrons scatter is used to calculate the proton's size.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-proton-radius-puzzle-quantum-gravity.html#jCp
The quark structure of the proton. Credit: Arpad Horvath / Wikipedia.
(Phys.org) —Officially, the radius of a proton is 0.88 ± 0.01 femtometers (fm, or 10-15 m). Researchers attained that value using two methods: first, by measuring the proton's energy levels using hydrogen spectroscopy, and second, by using electron scattering experiments, where an electron beam is shot at a proton and the way the electrons scatter is used to calculate the proton's size.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-proton-radius-puzzle-quantum-gravity.html#jCp
 
(Phys.org) —Officially, the radius of a proton is 0.88 ± 0.01 femtometers (fm, or 10-15 m). Researchers attained that value using two methods: first, by measuring the proton's energy levels using hydrogen spectroscopy, and second, by using electron scattering experiments, where an electron beam is shot at a proton and the way the electrons scatter is used to calculate the proton's size.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-proton-radius-puzzle-quantum-gravity.html#jCp
(Phys.org) —Officially, the radius of a proton is 0.88 ± 0.01 femtometers (fm, or 10-15 m). Researchers attained that value using two methods: first, by measuring the proton's energy levels using hydrogen spectroscopy, and second, by using electron scattering experiments, where an electron beam is shot at a proton and the way the electrons scatter is used to calculate the proton's size.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-proton-radius-puzzle-quantum-gravity.html#jCpvvv
(Phys.org) —Officially, the radius of a proton is 0.88 ± 0.01 femtometers (fm, or 10-15 m). Researchers attained that value using two methods: first, by measuring the proton's energy levels using hydrogen spectroscopy, and second, by using electron scattering experiments, where an electron beam is shot at a proton and the way the electrons scatter is used to calculate the proton's size.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-proton-radius-puzzle-quantum-gravity.html#jCp