Our brain is awesome, but sometimes it puzzles us in everyday life. Why, for example, does feedback from other people mean so much to us, even if we would love to be above it? The neurobiologist Professor Doctor Martin Korte explained it to us.
What does it matter what other people think about me. How do you rate my performance? Whether they find me likeable or attractive. What do you think of my decisions? The main thing is that I’m happy with what I’m doing and can be proud of myself. That’s the theory. And to a certain extent also my mantra. After all, who wants to be dependent on the opinions of other people? I certainly don’t. After all, I often don’t share the opinions of other people at all.
But in practice? Sometimes a single compliment can save my day. Conversely, negative criticism can completely spoil my mood. If I expect feedback from other people and don’t get any, I’m irritated to insecure. If, on the other hand, a person surprisingly praises me, of whom I may also think particularly highly, this may ignite a small emotional firework of joy in me. Why is that so? Why are theory and practice, intent and reality so far apart when I deal with other people’s feedback? Why can’t I, like most people, just be above what others think of me? I spoke to the brain researcher Professor Doctor Martin Korte about this.
Empathy as an evolutionary advantage
“First of all, to answer this question, it is important to understand that we humans are not only competitive, aggressive beings, but that we are above all cooperative and look for ways to act as a group,” says Martin Korte is what makes us unique as a human species. In the course of evolution, it was not our long teeth or our fingernails that gave us the decisive advantage, but our ability to cooperate with other people.” That our ancestors worked together, for example in finding food, raising children, building shelters and the like, it has asserted itself against predators and other disruptive fellow earthlings – often with fatal outcomes for the latter, as is well known – and paved the way for us to be able to live in a world with supermarkets, heated apartments, drainpipe jeans and epilators.
However, harmonious cooperation does not usually succeed so easily. “In order to cooperate successfully with one another, it is necessary to put oneself in the minds of other people, it requires empathy,” says the brain researcher. Empathy, on the other hand, which is the ability to sense what is going on in other people, requires that we are interested in it and that we are attentive to the signals that they give us. “You could say that we are genetically calibrated to interact with other people and always try to find out what they think and feel,” says Martin Korte. And against such a calibration, which in the course of evolution has turned out to be advantageous and essential for survival, the individual decision made on the basis of certain considerations and moods to give a damn about the opinions of other people can only do something to a limited extent.
Our brain reacts remarkably strongly to personal feedback
To make it easier for us to appreciate the importance of social connection and cooperation in our lives, feedback from a person has been shown to trigger a reaction in our heads that is difficult to ignore. “If we experience personal appreciation from another person, it activates the reward system in our brain extraordinarily well,” says the neurobiologist. For example, when we receive praise or a compliment that, mind you, seems honest and authentic to us, a particular segment of our brain called the nucleus accumbens responds by releasing endogenous opium-related substances—we experience a kind of high. The same thing happens, says the brain researcher, as soon as we reach a certain goal that we have set ourselves, for example, or eat nice, red, ripe strawberries, but not with the same intensity as with appreciative feedback. “The reward reaction with real personal appreciation is much stronger than with a bonus payment or when we eat chocolate,” says Martin Korte. This feeling of exhilaration can only be increased if the compliment comes as a surprise to us – then our nucleus accumbens really pours out.
Apart from this short-term happiness reaction, in which a rather original and archaic part in the front third of our brain below the cerebral cortex is significantly involved with the nucleus accumbens as the main person responsible, which we have in common with other mammals, feedback from other people gives us long-term orientation and can strengthen our resilience, says Martin Korte. The experience of having received confirmation in a comparable situation can give us self-confidence in the face of a new difficult or confusing challenge. “By the way, criticism can also have this effect,” says the scientist. “Children up to the age of 12 react primarily to praise, but young people and adults can also perceive criticism as appreciative and motivating.” On the other hand, receiving little or no feedback on our behavior almost inevitably leads to uncertainty and irritation. And even the sweetest strawberries can hardly help.
Feelings of happiness versus contentment: Why we still don’t have to live in a way that is determined by others
On the one hand, there is something comforting about this: it is not necessarily due to our exceptionally weak character or our lack of willpower if we care about the opinion of other people and if we do not manage to do our thing in a cool and independent way, no matter what rest of the world thinks of it. It is in our nature to be interested in the perspectives of our fellow human beings because it has proven itself for our (survival) life, and we share this supposed weakness of character with many, many other people.
On the other hand, we might be a little depressed: are we doomed to spend our lives chasing praise and feedback and putting aside what we consider good, important, and right? No, luckily it’s not that simple. After all, we no longer live in caves, but in heated apartments. Social connection is still central to us as human beings, but unlike our cave-dwelling ancestors, we don’t have to devote most of our time to the mere survival of our kin and ourselves, but can go beyond that to seek out ways of life that make us bring the greatest possible satisfaction – and these are not necessarily the ones with the most and most intense moments of happiness. “A feeling of happiness, for example triggered by feedback, is short-term, whereas satisfaction is something that sets in in the brain over the long term,” says Martin Korte, “it is also not encoded in the nucleus accumbens, but rather can be located in brain areas in the cerebral cortex, such as in the frontal cortex.”
Archaic orientation aids such as certain feelings of happiness, which have prevailed and have remained with us to this day because they ensured our survival, do not always show us the way in our modern world on which we can find satisfaction. In a similar way to how we have learned to live with an oversupply of food without constantly overeating, we are able to adapt to a more complex societal structure and changing social life: we can differentiate between feedback that comes from different reasons is important to us and what may be less relevant, for example because it comes from a person whose values and goals in life are different from ours. We can seek feedback when we’re unsure, but when we’re actually 100% sure about something, we can at least put aside the opinions of others to some degree. We can gratefully accept compliments as mood lifters without becoming dependent and bending over backwards to get them. We can be social beings who have a lot in common and share with each other, and at the same time individuals who develop their own path and world view. In any case, our brain will not get in the way of us. But on the contrary.
©PR
Professor Doctor Martin Korte is a neurobiologist and head of the department “Cellular Neurobiology” at the Technical University of Braunschweig. His research focuses include the cellular basis of learning and memory and the interaction between the immune system and the brain in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. In his books “Hirngeflüster”, “We are memory” and “Jung im Kopf” he prepares findings from brain research that are relevant to everyday life and for a wide audience. TV viewers may know Martin Korte from the RTL quiz show with Günther Jauch “Bin ich smarter than…”, for which he developed the questions.
For our “thought out” column, the neurobiologist will from now on regularly address phenomena that puzzle us in our everyday life and make us wonder about ourselves. Would you like an explanation of such a phenomenon? Then you are very welcome to send our author your suggested topic by email ([email protected]).