Feeling a little QZE

I don't know if everybody knows this. The extract below is taken from a piece published by Strategy & Business which you can read in full at their excellent website.

I'm interested in it because it tells me something that perhaps helps to make sense of meditative practice and its effect. When I say "it helps to make sense of", I suppose I mean that it helps me to justify a belief in scientific terms - a form of justification that I'm still attached to, even though the evidence of my own experience probably ought to be good enough.

"Focus Is Power
Some of the biggest leaps in science and industry have emerged from the integration of separate fields. When the study of electricity and of magnetism coalesced to become the science of electromagnetism, the field gave us the electric motor and generator, which in turn sparked the Industrial Revolution. To understand how to better drive organizational change, we turn to another nexus, this time between neuroscience and contemporary physics.

Neurons communicate with each other through a type of electrochemical signaling that is driven by the movement of ions such as sodium, potassium, and calcium. These ions travel through channels within the brain that are, at their narrowest point, only a little more than a single ion wide. This means that the brain is a quantum environment, and is therefore subject to all the surprising laws of quantum mechanics. One of these laws is the Quantum Zeno Effect (QZE). The QZE was described in 1977 by the physicist George Sudarshan at the University of Texas at Austin, and has been experimentally verified many times since.

The QZE is related to the established observer effect of quantum physics: The behavior and position of any atom-sized entity, such as an atom, an electron, or an ion, appears to change when that entity is observed. This in turn is linked to the probabilistic nature of such entities. The quantum laws that govern the observed behaviors of subatomic particles, and also the observed behaviors of all larger systems built out of them, are expressed in terms of probability waves, which are affected in specific ways by observations made upon the system. In the Quantum Zeno Effect, when any system is observed in a sufficiently rapid, repetitive fashion, the rate at which that system changes is reduced. One classic experiment involved observing beryllium atoms that could decay from a high-energy to a low-energy state. As the number of measurements per unit time increased, the probability of the energy transition fell off: The beryllium atom stayed longer in its excited state, because the scientists, in effect, repeatedly asked, “Have you decayed yet?” In quantum physics, as in the rest of life, a watched pot never boils.

In a 2005 paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (U.K.), physicist Henry Stapp and one of the authors of this article, Jeffrey Schwartz, linked the QZE with what happens when close attention is paid to a mental experience. Applied to neuroscience, the QZE states that the mental act of focusing attention stabilizes the associated brain circuits. Concentrating attention on your mental experience, whether a thought, an insight, a picture in your mind’s eye, or a fear, maintains the brain state arising in association with that experience. Over time, paying enough attention to any specific brain connection keeps the relevant circuitry open and dynamically alive. These circuits can then eventually become not just chemical links but stable, physical changes in the brain’s structure.

Cognitive scientists have known for 20 years that the brain is capable of significant internal change in response to environmental changes, a dramatic finding when it was first made. We now also know that the brain changes as a function of where an individual puts his or her attention. The power is in the focus.

Attention continually reshapes the patterns of the brain. Among the implications: People who practice a specialty every day literally think differently, through different sets of connections, than do people who don’t practice the specialty. In business, professionals in different functions — finance, operations, legal, research and development, marketing, design, and human resources — have physiological differences that prevent them from seeing the world the same way."

Read the full article here.

Justice in Organizations

Triarchy Press is starting work on the theme of Justice in Organizations - beginning by sponsoring an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Ricky Romain at Tooks Chambers and by organizing a seminar on The Shadow Organization: the Absence of Justice in Organizations on 7th February 2007

The theme of the seminar is alienation and injustice in organizations and in society as a whole. Specifically, it suggests that our attitudes to migrant workers and asylum seekers might be projections of deeper, fundamental and quasi-hidden social issues. They might, it is suggested, reflect the complexity of behaviours that we inflict on one another in the organizations of which we are constituent members - from family to workplace to government.

I think it's great that Triarchy Press is working on this theme. Here are my own thoughts to start the discussion, which will be developed at the seminar:

* Organizations are obviously not the same as society, but the huge amount of study on justice in society could be useful and should be drawn on.

* the term 'justice' has many connotations. In tabloid newspapers today it tends to mean vengeance or punishment. The criminal justice system has similar vengeful aspects, but it could also be seen as a crime-control system and unfortunately as a crime-creation system, because prisons act as universities of crime. It may be important to define what 'justice in organizations' means for the Triarchy project.

* justice is a concept that overlaps with other concepts such as fairness and respect. Exploring these overlaps might help.

* Michael Walzer writes comprehensively of spheres of justice, which often need to be kept separate if justice is to be seen to be done. Walzer says that no one should be dominant in one sphere (e.g. wealth) just because he or she is foremost in another sphere (e.g. political power or intelligence).

I'd be interested in any thoughts or comments arising from this.

Unashamed plug for a wonderful book

Sometimes there is a book you admire so much you want to recommend it to everyone. One of these is Renate Greenshields’ A Bit of Time.

It’s rather unfair to use Triarchy’s website to praise a book not published by them. However A Bit of Time is a memoir, not about organizations or getting things done, so Triarchy wouldn’t have published it, even though it’s such a good book.

In a small town in North West Germany a happy childhood is cut short by World War II. Ten-year-old Renate has to join the Hitler Youth. In contrast, her father, a Lutheran pastor, harbours Jews in the rectory. The family is under constant surveillance from the Gestapo.

At the end of the war, Renate and the local British town commandant fall in love. In A Bit of Time Renate writes about her arrival in England in 1946, just eighteen years old, of coping with a foreign country and language, her marriage to a farmer-artist in Devon, her homesickness and bringing up her children.

The novelist Lynne Reid Banks writes: “If proof is needed – and in these noisy, in-your-face days, it is – that a book can give infinite pleasure with a low-key but fascinating story, well told, ‘Lucky Girl Goodbye’ and ‘A Bit of Time’ give it”.

To order a copy of the combined volume of these two books, send £ 7.99 to Renate Greenshields, Westhay Farm, Hawkchurch, Axminster, Devon, EX13 5XH.