Here is an excerpt from an article written by John Boudreau for Talent Management magazine. Brain science can teach us a little something about how to optimize talent management. Boudreau breaks it down. To check out all the resources and sign up for a free subscription to the TM and/or Chief Learning Officer magazines published by MedfiaTec, please click here.

*     *     *

Brain science shows there are differences between consciousness in wakefulness, sleep, deep anesthesia and a coma. The distinctions can guide talent leaders to create more conscious organizations.

Giulio Tononi, a chairman in consciousness at the University of Wisconsin, measures consciousness levels. For an experiment, Tononi and colleagues placed a net of small magnetic coils on volunteers’ heads. The coil can deliver a burst of magnetism lasting one-tenth of a second to one small part of the brain, causing the neurons there to fire, then tracks the reaction in other parts of the brain.

In conscious brains for awake and sleeping volunteers, the brain reverberates like a ringing bell, with neurons firing in a complex pattern across large areas for 295 milliseconds. However, in volunteers who were under anesthesia, the reverberations were limited to a much smaller region and only lasted about 100 milliseconds. As anesthesia wore off, the pulses produced richer and longer echoes of the original stimulation. In other words, a larger connection of integrated signals is a consciousness hallmark.

Yet consciousness is more than just lots of connected firing. Tononi and colleagues note that during an epileptic seizure, brain waves are hyper-synchronized, with large areas of the brain firing together, and seizures result in unconsciousness, not hyper-consciousness. To further study this, Tononi turned to information system engineering, and discovered the concept “phi,” which measures how much distinctive and integrated information is contained in a system.

*     *     *

To read the complete article, please click here.

John Boudreau is professor and research director at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and Center for Effective Organizations, and author of Retooling HR: Using Proven Business Tools to Make Better Decisions About Talent.