IDIO: The Quantum Zeno Effect

The Quantum Zeno Effect (QZE) is an impenetrable piece of particle physics that has something to do with the Observer Effect. 'As any fule kno', this latter says that the act of observing a phenomenon will change that phenomenon (or something like that). QZE says that an unstable particle (one that ought to decay), if observed, will never decay. It also has something to do with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Schrödinger's Cat, Zeno's Arrow and other subjects of popular science books that may stand eagerly awaiting you on your bookshelves.

The QZE is of interest to lay people because of what it tells us about focus, habit, ingrained behaviours and so on.

"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."

David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz: The Neuroscience of Leadership

So, some conclusions for organisational life might include:

• Confirmation of the received wisdom that practising a skill (or an approach or a way of thinking) over and over again will lay down neural pathways that make us better at it.

• Recognition that accountants (say) or 'creative types' or scientists really do have brains that work differently (and, therefore, need managing differently).

• Further confirmation, if any were needed, that multidisciplinary and multicultural teams are enormously difficult to manage and require particular attention to the members' different preferred modes of perceiving, thinking, working, interacting and so on.

Credits and references:
David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz