CIMPA Conversations

“Get Connected. Join the Connected international Meeting Professionals Association”, the CIMPA postcard with the multi-colored linked hands, suggests.

“Why?” My 8 – year old granddaughter asks her perennial question.

“Why what, Honey?”, I answer her question with a question.

“Why do you want people to get connected?” 

“We’re wired to connect”,  says bestselling science writer Daniel Goleman. Our brains are designed to be social – and they catch emotions the same way we catch colds.

Mark Matousek writes in a recent issue of AARP Margazine, “Thanks to recent breakthroughs in neuroscience, experts are able to observe brain  activity while we’re in the act of feeling—and their findings have been astonishing. Once believed to be lumps of lonely gray matter cogitating between our ears, our brains turn out to be more like interlooped, Wi-Fi octopi with invisible tentacles slithering in all directions, at every moment, constantly picking up messages we’re not aware of and prompting reactions…in ways never before understood”.  

Terrence Sejnowski, a Salk Institute expert in computational neuroscience is currently collaborating with Scott Makeig at the Swarz Center for Computational Neuroscience at the University of California in San Diego to analyze patterns seen in social neurobiology – studying, for example, what happens in the brains of people as they engage in conversation.

“The brain itself is social—that’s the most exciting finding,” Goleman explains “One person’s inner state affects and drives the other person. We’re forming brain-to-brain bridges—a two-way traffic system—all the time.”

That is one good reason why people should travel and attend meetings and events.

Social Intelligence. I am obviously less interested in the logistics of meetings (there are experts in every facet of meeting/event planning) than in the interaction of people and the development of social intelligence. I will venture to say that social intelligence is better learned in social environments like meetings and travel than in formal classrooms. We define social intelligence as the human capacity to understand what’s happening in the world and responding to that understanding in a personally and socially effective manner.

“Social exchange — also known in biology as reciprocal altruism or more commonly,  tit-for-tat -  is an ancient part of human social life.  This mutual provisioning of benefits, each conditional on the others’ compliance, is rare in the animal kingdom.  Some species – humans, vampire bats, chimpanzees, baboons — engage in this very useful form of mutual help, whereas others do not.  This is itself telling: Social exchange cannot be generated by a simple general learning mechanism, such as classical or operant conditioning.  All organisms can be classically and operantly conditioned, yet few engage in exchange.  That strongly suggests that engaging in social exchange  requires specific cognitive machinery, which some species have and others lack”. 

Social exchange is universal in our society.  It is richly expressed in all human cultures – we exchange gifts, share food, price our goods, engage in trade and so on. Paleoanthropological evidence (e.g., hunter-gatherer archaeology) suggests that this form of cooperation existed in hominids at least 2 million years ago – long before we heard about Diversity and Multi-Culturalism.

We continue to do it – as we travel the world, forming friendships and learning about other people and ourselves.

The other point I want to make are people who travel are generally happy people. “We actually catch each other’s emotions like a cold”, Goleman says. Neuroscience is behind him on this one, as I will explain below. Spreading happiness and causing a joy epidemic is, in my view, a wonderful thing to do.

Mirror neurons have been referred to by scientists as one of the most important neuroscientific breakthroughs of recent history. What these neurons do is amazing–they activate in the same way when you’re watching someone else do something as they do when you’re doing it yourself. This mirroring process is thought to be behind our ability to empathize, but you can imagine the role these neurons have played in keeping us alive as a species. We learn from watching others.

Although the neuroscientific findings are new, our parents didn’t need to know the cause to recognize the effects: “Don’t hang out with the wrong crowd”; “Choose your friends carefully.” “Watch how the experts do it.”

Spend time with a nervous, anxious person and physiological monitoring would most likely show you mimicking the anxiety and nervousness, in ways that affect your brain and body in a concrete, measurable way. The reverse  is true when you associate with happy people. This is not mumbo-jumbo–it’s simply the way the brain works.

Travel and meetings is a happy industry generally populated by excited, happy people. We need more of them to create a happy world.

There is great value in creating organizations where social connections are fostered. We need to recognize the power of conversations – in telling our stories and listening to other people’s stories . This is how friendships are formed. This is how tolerance and understanding are developed. Ultimately, it may be the way world peace can be attained, one friendship at a time. Indeed, the raison d’etre of the meetings industry.