Understanding “Quiet Cracking” in the Workplace
Melina Palmer: Hello. Hello, everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast.
There’s a workplace term getting a lot of attention right now called “quiet cracking.” And unlike quiet quitting, which was about people deliberately pulling back and drawing a hard line around their hours, this isn’t a conscious choice. It’s what happens when employees genuinely still want to do well. They show up, they care, but there’s something underneath that isn’t holding up the way it used to.
Recent research suggests more than half of workers are experiencing some version of this right now. Maybe you’ve felt some of this in yourself or seen it in others. With half of the workforce dealing with it, the odds are good you’ve been exposed to it in some way, even if you didn’t have a name for it yet.
And with so many people feeling like this, we of course have to ask why? Why are so many people dealing with this? And can we ever get our motivation mojo back?
My guest today is Dr. Masoud Husain. He has been researching the mechanics of motivation in the brain for decades and his findings can help to explain why motivation may erode even when someone genuinely wants to be doing a good job.
Masoud is Professor of Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow at New College, Oxford. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Brain, and for more than 30 years, he’s worked as a practicing clinical neurologist alongside his research studying how the brain creates attention, memory, motivation, and decision-making in healthy people and those navigating brain disorders. His new book, Our Brains, Our Selves, won the 2025 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize and was named a Best Science Book of the Year by the Financial Times, the Times, and the Guardian.
While we don’t talk about quiet cracking specifically in the episode, as you listen, I encourage you to think about yourself and your team. Are there signs of cracks that you need to address that what we talk about today could really help to look at?
Really quickly, before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch, and more. It’s all within the app you’re listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com/595. Now let’s jump right in.
Introduction to Cognitive Neurology and the Brain
Melina Palmer: Dr. Masoud Husain, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.
Dr. Masoud Husain: Thanks for having me, Melina.
Melina Palmer: Yes, I am super excited to have you here today because as everyone probably knows, with a company and a show called the Brainy Business, learning more about our brains is one of my very favorite things to do. So excited to share that with everyone. Before we jump into some of this more current work, or the book specifically, can you share a bit about yourself and the work that you do?
Dr. Masoud Husain: I’m a cognitive neurologist. That means I’m a clinician—I see patients weekly—and I’m also a cognitive neuroscientist. I study our brains, healthy brains, as well as patients’ brains, to understand how cognitive processes like attention, memory, motivation, and decision-making work in brains. We can learn a lot from studying our brains, but we can also learn a lot from studying the brains of people who might have brain disorders and are having difficulty with one of those functions.
Melina Palmer: Do you remember when you kind of think back to when you were a kid, or was there a formative experience that got you super interested in brains and cognition?
Dr. Masoud Husain: Not when I was a kid. I think when I was an undergraduate here at Oxford, our second year in medical school was neuroscience. I just could not get over the fact that this was such an amazing thing to study. Although we understood lots of things about nerve cells and how they might interact, we didn’t really understand how brains thought, how they created our personalities, and how they might vary in how they make decisions.
It seemed to me like it was what we would call “tiger country”—nobody really understood how this worked. So this is the thing that I really wanted to get into. You know, the heart, the lungs, your big toenail—all these things are pretty well worked out. But the brain, that was something that really people didn’t know much about, and we still don’t. It’s a young science, neuroscience.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, definitely. I love all of that. And while we appreciate those who do study the big toenail, the brain is maybe a little bit more exciting.
Dr. Masoud Husain: There is more complexity!
Melina Palmer: At least a little bit, yeah, for sure. So for everyone who is just learning a little bit about the brain stuff, do you have some ways that you would explain neurons, synapses, and all of that? What’s the quick science lesson for people who are less familiar?
Dr. Masoud Husain: Well, I think the key thing is you can understand the brain at different levels of explanation. Many textbooks and courses will take you right into that reductionist approach: let’s get to the nerve cells, how do they fire, how do they operate in terms of talking to each other across synapses (the gaps between them), and what are the neurotransmitters?
Then we might get to a different level and look at the circuits, the connections between different areas, the functions of those different areas, and how networks of neurons might operate.
But then there’s another layer on top of that, which is brain function. Imagine that we weren’t necessarily interested in the hardware—exactly how those neurons connected or exactly what the networks were—but we’re interested in the behavior of this wetware, this thing we call the brain, and how it controls the behavior of individuals, why those individuals vary so much, and how brains interact.
Now, you cannot necessarily explain everything on the reductionist basis. Maybe centuries from now we might be able to. Of course, we are closer to doing that in simpler animals like the fruit fly Drosophila, or in the worm C. elegans, where we can kind of pinpoint neurons which are involved in a particular process. But in humans, we have billions of neurons, so it is an enormous task to think we would ever be able to explain everybody’s behavior on the basis of this or that neuron firing in this or that way.
So there are different levels of explanation, and at the top layer, as I was mentioning, it’s behavior. But that’s also what psychologists are interested in. They might be interested in that behavior without necessarily having any understanding of the way neurons connect to each other. I think the real challenge for neuroscience is connecting those layers of explanation from the molecules, the genes, the nerves, the connections, the networks, right through to behavior. That’s what the big ambition would be for neuroscience over the next few decades.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, it’s fascinating as things are discovered and shared, and just how much there is to learn.
How Brain Circuitry Impacts Drive: David’s Story
Melina Palmer: You mentioned motivation science, which I’m particularly very interested in, and some aspects of the work that you do in neuroeconomics. Can you share a bit about getting into the business side of some of that and just that human element?
Dr. Masoud Husain: Well, it all started, like much of my research, with a person. In this case, the person was a relatively young man—he was only in his 30s—called David. He came to see us because, unfortunately, he’d suffered from a stroke. Actually, he’d recovered physically really quickly—within a week, back to work.
David was an incredibly productive, highly motivated, very sociable individual. You know, someone who’s a role model in all those spheres. But suddenly he seemed to be completely different. He seemed to lack motivation, wasn’t at all interested in his work, and wasn’t interested in socializing. Understandably, his friends and his employers thought he’d become depressed. So they nudged him to go and see his doctor, who tried him on an antidepressant, but it made no difference.
Eventually, David got fired because he just wasn’t doing his job. But he was so apathetic—he’d lost so much motivation—that he couldn’t even be bothered to get unemployment benefits. So his friends thought, “Well, you can’t pay the rent. Come and live with us for a little while.” And they regretted it very, very soon because this man did nothing. He did nothing around the house. He didn’t clean, he didn’t cook, he didn’t do anything domestically. He just sat in a chair waiting for them to come home so that they’d cook for him. He needed prompting to go to the shower to do anything.
When I eventually saw him—because, you know, he was so apathetic he couldn’t be motivated to come and see me in the clinic—he was a very disheveled, very sad-looking guy, but in many ways incredibly happy. He wasn’t depressed. He was quite content, completely indifferent to what had happened to him.
It turned out that he had what we call clinical apathy. He had lost motivation because he hadn’t had one stroke; he’d had two strokes. They were tiny, but they were strategically located in what we call the basal ganglia. These are deep nuclei in the brain which are evolutionarily very old. They go back to the lamprey, 360 million years ago. The lamprey is the oldest vertebrate with these sort of basal ganglia.
In the lamprey, the basal ganglia link signals about motivation to action. If the lamprey is hungry, those signals go through the basal ganglia and connect to the circuits which link motivation to action. What had happened in David was strategically placed strokes had taken out that connection between motivation and action. He was a complete eye-opener for us because he had all his motivation extinguished by these strokes.
I mean, it got to the point where I asked him, “What would you normally do if you were at home sitting in a chair?” He said, “Well, I’d listen to music.” “So why aren’t you listening to music?” “It would take me five minutes to put my music system together.” And he couldn’t be bothered to do that.
One way of framing his problem was, for David, everything was far too effortful compared to the outcome that would happen. He could get the rewarding outcome of listening to the music, but five minutes worth of work was too much effort.
In a way, that’s a neuroeconomic framing of what we all do all the time. We’re making a decision about whether we think this particular course of action, this behavior, is worth our effort. It could be physical effort, cognitive effort, or emotional effort. But we’re always making these computations and deciding, “Nah, I don’t think I’ll do that. I’d rather do this instead.”
Your calculus on this might be different to mine, Melina. I might think this is actually worth the effort, and you may think, “No, actually, that outcome is not for me. I’d rather do something else.” But for David, there was nothing that incentivized him. Nothing was rewarding enough.
The way we got around this was, in the lamprey, the neurotransmitter chemical that is important in linking motivation to action is dopamine. In David, we used a drug that we already have which affects the dopamine system. Although it didn’t initially make any difference, three months later he came back to us completely unrecognizable. He’d had a shower, he had a suit, and he had got a new job, which was absolutely amazing. Most impressive, he had a new girlfriend, because in the state he’d got into, nobody was going to meet him.
For me, it was a real revelatory moment where someone could have their motivation extinguished because of a biological stroke—something that had happened in the brain—but we could restore it biologically by giving this man a drug that affected the dopamine system.
The Cognitive Costs of Effort vs. Reward
Dr. Masoud Husain: It opened up a whole bunch of work for us in terms of thinking about you and me: how do we make these decisions all the time?
In fact, we took a bunch of Oxford students and we chose them based on their levels of motivation. So, some were highly motivated, and believe it or not, we have some Oxford students who are very apathetic. We got them into a brain scanner, an fMRI scanner, and we looked at their brain activity when they were asked to make a decision like we’d asked David: “Is this activity worth the effort? Is this particular reward worth the physical effort?” We could vary the level of reward we offered them, and we could parametrically vary the effort required.
We’re in this neuroeconomic space where we’re saying, where are you willing to work? Which combinations of reward and effort do you find sufficiently attractive that you’d say, “Yes, I’m going to work”?
We found, really interestingly, that the level of motivation people had was associated with different levels of activity in the brain, including the basal ganglia—the areas that had been affected in David—and also the frontal lobe, which is very important in action and decision-making.
Curiously, what we found was the people who are more apathetic, the less motivated ones, actually showed more brain activity than the motivated ones. At first, we found that really perplexing. But the way we sort of understand it now is that there is a brain cost to making decisions: “Is this worth it or not?” There’s a brain cost. And the people who are apathetic are actually having to put more brain cost energy into making that decision.
Maybe they can do that when we ask them to in a scanner, but in daily life, maybe they just think, “It’s too much effort to think of this. It’s too much in terms of my brain effort. I just won’t do it. I won’t make those decisions. I’ll just do nothing. I’ll be inert.” That’s, in extreme form, what David was. He just didn’t think anything was worth the effort.
It was a really interesting insight and an entry into thinking about why different people vary in their levels of motivation. We’ve taken that study that we did in Oxford students and now looked at patients with brain disorders like Parkinson’s disease, comparing people with Parkinson’s disease who have apathy versus those who are highly motivated. What we found is a very similar story: everybody’s willing to work for high rewards. Everyone says, “Yes, I’ll do that.” But it’s the low rewards that distinguish the people who are motivated from those who are apathetic. Apathetic people are not willing to invest effort for low rewards.
I think that’s a repeated finding for us across many different types of brain disorders. So, you know, we started with David, and that work has really opened up our way of thinking about deconstructing motivation in terms of how we weigh up the effort required to obtain a reward.
Of course, it doesn’t always have to be a positive outcome. You and I have made decisions where we’ve regretted it immediately: “Oh my goodness, that was the wrong thing to do.” I’m sure your listeners have. But that means that was an aversive outcome; that was a negative outcome. So next time we have that choice, we’re going to really down-weight our idea about whether that’s worth doing or not. That’s how we learn. It’s a sort of reinforcement learning method that animals have, and we’ve also got in our sophisticated brains. We learn from the outcomes.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, there is so much useful information there for the audience. Thank you so much for sharing that story. I enjoyed all the stories in the book, and that was one I think is important for people, too. My understanding in learning about David was that he was a pretty successful finance guy—a highly motivated guy before the strokes, right? And then fully, totally a different person. Like you said, not motivated to do anything, which helps you to learn these things. So it’s not like this is someone who had been apathetic his whole life; it was a big change.
Dr. Masoud Husain: Yeah, exactly. Of course, we could wonder about the variation in levels of motivation we see in the people around us, like the students I mentioned. It’s a question about whether they were born that way or whether they’ve learned habits which mean that somehow they find things more effortful than others. We haven’t got the answer to that one yet.
Melina Palmer: Right, right. Well, it was making me think a little bit about how, like you were saying, it’s the cognitive effort—if it’s more draining to even think about making the decision, you say, “No, I can’t be bothered with it. It’s not going to be worth it on the other side.”
Then we think about things like research into grit, right? And how you’re willing to do the little stuff, push through, and find motivation, whether that’s intrinsic versus extrinsic or however that’s coming about. It’s making me think about ourselves and our teams. While you, of course, are researching people where they have a disorder or something traumatic has happened to their brain in that experience, if someone does realize—maybe they’re listening and thinking, “Yeah, I am in this a little bit more apathetic state than some others,” or “I have people I want to motivate on my team that just don’t seem to have that drive”—do you have some advice on what to look at there?
Dr. Masoud Husain: I think that’s a really interesting thing. First of all, it turns out—and we’ve been studying this—grit is highly correlated with our measures of apathy. Negatively correlated: the more gritty you are, the less apathetic you are. So that’s really interesting that those terms that have arisen in different kinds of research are actually highly related. People who persevere are very motivated people.
In terms of lessons for business or people who might be listening to you, the kinds of insights we’ve got from patients we have transferred directly to healthy individuals and how they operate. When we look at individuals, we’ve talked about variations across individuals, but our motivation within individuals fluctuates, too. Some days we are really on it. Other days we just don’t feel like doing this. We fluctuate.
That could be for physical reasons—it could be sleep, stress, and all the rest of it. But crucially, it could be also to do with the workplace and the task at hand, right? So if you suddenly feel, “I’m not motivated to do this,” maybe rather than blame yourself, you might think, “Well, why not? What is it about this task that isn’t motivating me? Is it the potential reward of doing this task? I just don’t really value that. Is it the effort required to do this task?” It could be physical, cognitive, or even emotional because you have to interact with people. Is it, “I just cannot get on the telephone and start talking to a bunch of people about this to try and get this moving”? Or is it that you just do not see the meaning of doing that task?
If you did yesterday, but you don’t today, maybe it’s worth a bit of self-reflection and thinking, “Well, what has changed? Is there anything about the way I’m evaluating this that has changed? Have I got some new information that makes me think, ‘Oh my goodness, this is really not worth the effort’? Or is that illogical and I have no new information?” I think we could try to deconstruct why our levels of motivation fluctuate. If there isn’t a physical cause or some stress in your personal life, why are you now feeling less motivated by this? It’s worth using that simple approach.
Of course, if you’re an employer, you also have to think about whether you can make that workplace a place where making those decisions isn’t seemingly so effortful, where there’s less friction in terms of doing that. But also think about how long someone has to wait before the outcome of this work.
What we’ve learned is brains like rewards sooner rather than later. We don’t like to wait long because we discount those rewards—we devalue those rewards if we’re going to have to wait a long time. People vary in the levels of their delay discounting: how quickly they devalue something and how long they’re willing to wait for an outcome. There are the slow burners, and there are the people who want it now, straight away.
Maintaining Workplace Motivation through Small Wins
Dr. Masoud Husain: One other way to think about it from the employer’s point of view is, are there ways in which you can have rewards earlier, even if they’re small rewards? Are there ways in which people can get some positive outcome from getting through stage one of this process to stage two, rather than think they have to wait all the way to the end to get the reward?
Melina Palmer: Right. Yeah, because for a lot of these things and in so many companies, they don’t even celebrate when you do get the big thing. It’s just like, “And next!” So taking some time to celebrate wins—big, small, and otherwise—right?
Dr. Masoud Husain: Small wins, I think, are really important.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, and in that way, breaking up our tasks into some smaller things. Someone was on the show talking about a paper they did on the “streak-end rule.” So not peak-end, but streak-end, and how if you have hard task, hard task, hard task—too many of those stacked together—it’s demotivating. Whereas if you interject easy stuff and don’t have too many streaks of hard tasks, it keeps people going through days and weeks. That definitely lines up with a lot of that.
Neuroscience and the Philosophical Concept of “Self”
Melina Palmer: Through the book, you ask some very important questions, like “Who are we and what makes us who we are?” and “What is the self?” Knowing that no one has the full answer to those questions yet, can you share a bit about what it means, philosophically and scientifically, to know who we are and where the self is?
Dr. Masoud Husain: Yeah, Melina, you’re absolutely right. Obviously, people have been thinking about who we are and what makes us who we are for centuries. Philosophers have been doing it, psychologists have been doing it, and now neuroscientists are doing it, too.
The question about who we are and what makes us who we are is a very big one. Some of your listeners might be thinking, “Well, what’s the big deal here? I occupy a particular body. Masoud occupies a particular body. Melina occupies another body. We’re different selves. What’s the big problem here?”
The thought experiments done by philosophers like John Locke went like this. He sort of said, “Okay, yeah, but imagine that Masoud’s consciousness could swap bodies with Melina’s consciousness. So your consciousness entered my head, and my consciousness entered your head. Who would we say is Melina?” Now, most people would say, “Well, wherever Melina’s consciousness is, that’s Melina—not the body.”
Locke said, “Yes, that’s because that’s a first-person perspective. That’s Melina’s perspective of the world.” But we need more than that, because Melina has grown up, she has memories, decisions she’s made, and choices she’s taken. All of that is Melina. So it’s not just her consciousness or her first-person perspective, but it’s this psychological continuity over time that makes Melina, Melina, and Masoud, Masoud.
That psychological continuity over time relies on memory, but as we said, it also relies on the decisions and choices you’ve made, the interactions you’ve had with other people, where you’ve grown up, and how that’s affected your brain. A whole bunch of other things have really affected yourself. For many people, that’s really important in terms of defining the self.
For neuroscientists, the way we would think of it is, yes, that is all correct, but the way we can think about the self from what we understand about the brain is that it’s an emergent property of a constellation of interacting brain systems—what Marvin Minsky, the pioneer of AI, called a “society of mind.” It’s a society of cognitive operations that defines us, and most of those cognitive operations are going on under the hood—95% of those things are occurring subconsciously. All of those things are being done by the brain, and a fraction of that is conscious.
That constellation of interacting systems will include your perceptual systems, attention, language, memory, motivation, decision-making systems, and social cognitive systems—the things that give you empathy, the ability to see a problem from another person’s perspective, and so on. That constellation is what we would define as a self.
My book, Our Brains, Our Selves, is essentially saying our brains create our selves. We can see how important that is when we look at people who might lose one of these cognitive modules, like motivation in David. There are others in the book: someone who might lose their memory, someone who might lose their concepts, or someone who has lost their empathy. All you need is one of these modules to become dysfunctional and the self changes. Your personal identity changes.
What is really important, I think, is your social identity changes. You can’t really have a self without the “other.” You can’t talk about selves without thinking about how we define the self in relationship to others. Our relationship to others depends on our brains. In David’s case, he not only lost motivation, but he really annoyed his friends. He was in danger of losing his friends because they couldn’t understand what had happened to him.
Similarly, other things that might affect us—losing our memory, losing our concepts, or suddenly not being an empathetic person—make our social persona, our social self, a different self. The book is really an exploration of how neuroscience is helping us understand what people have been struggling with for many years. As you say, we haven’t solved it, but it’s a template for thinking about what creates our personal identities as well as our social identities.
Melina Palmer: Knowing that, it was really evident and I really appreciated in reading the book as you go through these seven stories to help showcase the points that you’re making. As people were getting more isolated—either by shame or fear, or unintentionally repelling people—it got worse, right? It was harder to kind of overcome as you got more scared. But in a lot of cases, when they were willing to just have the conversation, when people understood what had happened to them, it relieved some pressure. They were able to have that social aspect back and have a little bit of that forgiveness, which is an aid in recovery.
Dr. Masoud Husain: Well, that’s right. One of the patients in the book was in complete denial that she had a problem with her memory, and she did have a real problem with her memory. But it took a long time for her to admit that she was just scared. She was just scared of the fact that she had this problem. Once she could admit that to her children and her friends, it became easier for her because people had an understanding of what the problem was.
That’s one reason to get a diagnosis—it can help. We do have some symptomatic treatments and some success stories. There’s David in the book; we were able to restore his motivation. There are new ways in which people are treating these brain disorders, including deep brain stimulation—surgical methods in which we can stimulate different parts of the brain. But that depends on understanding the circuits which underlie a particular function. You don’t want to go around stimulating any part of the brain; you want to stimulate the part of the brain that you think will make a difference.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, you don’t want to be willy-nilly going in there, for sure!
Dr. Masoud Husain: You’d be surprised! People used to do that many years ago.
Melina Palmer: Yes, and thankfully we learned that that’s maybe not the best approach!
Dr. Masoud Husain: Exactly, yes.
Social Isolation, Connectivity, and Brain Health
Melina Palmer: Thinking about a broader societal impact: as the world is getting to be a lot more isolating in so many ways—work-from-home stuff is great, I work from home, but you lose interaction with people, there are fewer community groups, and people are behind screens—I know this leans into dopamine overload problems, too. Do you have thoughts, concerns, or tips for people regarding overarching brain health for ourselves and others?
Dr. Masoud Husain: I think it’s a really important problem because up to now, we’ve been worried about what happens to people as they get older. Let’s say you’re retiring, your social circle reduces, your roles change, and you’re becoming more isolated. The evidence suggests that when that happens, if people become lonely, they don’t just become more depressed—their risks of developing dementia are increased massively if their social circle is very limited and if their curiosity is reduced. If they’re not being challenged or challenging themselves, that’s a big problem.
We all accept that maybe that can happen when we’re in our 60s and 70s, but what you’ve pointed to is the fact that the way we’re living now post-COVID is in many ways also quite isolating. So we have to ensure that we have those social connections. Humans are very, very social. It’s really important to us, in terms of the levels of stress we go through, to have those social connections; they make a big difference to us.
I don’t think we’ve really got to that point yet because it hasn’t been long enough to understand what long-term working from home will be like, unless we make contingencies in terms of making sure, “Okay, I’m going to try and make sure that I keep connected to my friends, or that I do things with my work colleagues on a regular basis, or I do a hobby with other people, or a sport, or support a team.” We do have to be reflective and wary about how our new ways of working might impact us, because we haven’t had enough time to measure that properly to see what the consequences are. But I have no reason to believe it would be very different from what happens when people get older.
Melina Palmer: Yeah. Let’s combat that now with things that we can be doing. Like you said, it’s not like you have to go sit down at a big networking event every night!
Dr. Masoud Husain: Have you got any secrets about that, Melina?
Melina Palmer: Well, I am more extroverted, I would say, than many, but even I couldn’t handle a networking event every day! But it’s good to have some community. I have done different exercise stuff, like CrossFit or powerlifting, where you have your community of people doing the same hard thing together and bonding over that.
Dr. Masoud Husain: It can be volunteering, it could be mentoring… You’ve just got to put yourself out there a bit.
Melina Palmer: Even having focused attention with your own close family, right? You don’t necessarily need a massive diversity of people, but having connections where I’m sitting down with my young kids, learning about what they did, or doing an art project together, where we can have a good conversation versus everyone being on their phones near each other.
Dr. Masoud Husain: Yeah. You have kids around you, but of course some people might not, so that’s the difference.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, and what we can lean into on that.
Brain Function, Identity, and Belonging
Melina Palmer: As we close out the show, this is a “choose your own adventure” moment. You talked about David, and there are seven amazing stories in the book. Why did you pick these seven stories, how did you lay out the book, and what does it tell us?
Dr. Masoud Husain: I see hundreds of patients throughout my clinical career, and I picked these seven because they’re very different people with different cognitive processes affected.
- David had his motivation affected.
- Michael, a guy in his 60s who is very articulate, came to see me because he was worried that he wasn’t finding the right words in conversation. It turned out he had a problem not just in finding the words, but understanding their meaning—he had a problem in his semantic memory.
- Trish had a problem with her memory, so much so that she went on a holiday with her husband, had a great time, and while packing up to drive home, she said, “No, it’s been lovely, but you can’t come home with me. My husband’s waiting for me there.” She didn’t realize that he was her husband. That’s the level of problem she was encountering.
The seven people in the book have many different types of cognitive deficits and different underlying pathologies—in David, a stroke; in Trish, Alzheimer’s disease.
I wanted to do more with the book than just recount the neuroscience and explain the brain and disorders. Storytelling is important to get people who might not be interested in the brain interested in the person. As I was putting this book together, I realized that the book is telling us about how we belong—how we have a sense of belonging and how easy it is to “unbelong” or lose that sense of belonging. It shows how fragile our brains and our sense of belonging are because we can lose that easily through these brain disorders.
The other way around is also important: how do you get to belong to a community, a society, or a group? That is hardest of all for people who move to a different part of the world—for migrants. I migrated to the UK when I was five in the 1960s, and it was a very difficult thing to do. Looking back on it, it’s very difficult for someone to fit into a community unless they also have the cognitive abilities and skills to understand how this new society works. What’s the sense of humor? What are the behaviors thought to be acceptable? What’s the etiquette? How do you speak?
When I was listening to myself at the age of 10, I decided I was going to write a novel—the great novel. I thought, “Let’s dictate it; that’s what people do on television.” My dad had an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, so I started dictating my novel and played it back. I thought, “Oh my God, who’s this? This guy has got an Indian accent!” I thought, “No wonder I don’t fit in. I’m going to have to work on this.” So I listened to BBC radio on a daily basis to get the accent in order to fit in.
We need our brains to learn how to belong. We need those cognitive abilities to learn how to belong. Three of the cases in the book are actually migrants—people who came from the Caribbean, from Pakistan, or from the new wave of migration into the UK from Poland.
The book is set in a particular moment in time in modern London for a reason: to describe what it was like to be in London at this time, and what it’s like for people who don’t necessarily belong to find belonging, as well as how easy it is to lose it. These are the bigger themes in the book about how brains create selves, and selves are important in terms of whether they belong in the community they’re embedded in.
Melina Palmer: I definitely felt that in reading the book. I highly recommend the audience check it out to understand those individual stories, learn about ourselves and the people we read about, and appreciate that greater sense of belonging and community as it matters more and more each day.
Thank you for your work and for sharing it with the world through this book. You delivered those storytelling aspects that we all love and are wired for. For everyone who is excited to learn more, follow you, and get the book, where are the best places for them to do that?
Dr. Masoud Husain: We have a website: masoudhusain.org. You can read a bit about the book and our research on attention, memory, decision-making, and motivation.
Melina Palmer: Wonderful. We will, of course, have links in the show notes for everyone to make it easy so they can get their copy of Our Brains, Our Selves. Thank you again for joining me on the show today!
Dr. Masoud Husain: Thanks very much, Melina.
Summary and Key Takeaways
Melina Palmer: Thank you again to Masoud for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today’s conversation?
For me, I’m fascinated by understanding memory on a deeper level, especially when it comes to the words we use and how we form mental associations. The story of the person who lost their ability to understand words was so enlightening and actually kind of scary to me when I think about how much I care about nuance, choosing the right words and metaphors, and how that ties into my own identity. Learning about these extreme cases through the seven stories in the book helps make the circumstances feel real and showcases how our brains really work.
New insights from researchers like Masoud provide an opportunity to better understand things like the “quiet cracking” phenomenon I opened the show with today. One example is delay discounting: we know that people tend to devalue a reward the longer they have to wait for it, though it varies from person to person.
One option for an organization is to wait as long as possible to celebrate and hope you don’t lose too many people along the way. A lot of businesses tend to lean on that—just keep grinding forward and assuming celebration isn’t important.
The better option is to find ways to bring celebration, small wins, and acknowledgments in more often than you think you need to. There is a lot of research into the power of celebration and how important it is for our mental state to fully close out completed projects so they aren’t living like a bunch of open tabs in our brains. Breaking tasks into smaller pieces and celebrating completed steps builds momentum and helps stave off feelings of quiet cracking.
It doesn’t have to be hard or expensive to apply this stuff when you take the time to be thoughtful about it.
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As we approach 600 episodes of this show, I’m doing a refresh of sorts. What should I do more of? What questions should be answered? Who needs to be a guest? Please share your thoughts with me on social media! You can find me as @TheBrainyBiz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn.
Links for my top related past episodes, social channels, and Masoud’s book, Our Brains, Our Selves, are waiting for you in your app and at thebrainybusiness.com/595.
Thank you again to Dr. Masoud Husain for joining me today. Join me next time for another brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful!
Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops, and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.
