The Neuroscience of Resistance to Change

There's a useful label for all this technobabble: Not even wrong.

You don't "feel" neural pathways in any sense of the word. While the description of how pathways strengthen may be correct on a high level, there are likely details that matter how those processes actually work (I'm won't pretend to understand this stuff), but that doesn't matter here because an individual neuron is a completely different thing than a complete brain, and the inner workings of the brain is a completely different thing than the social mechanisms of the workplace.

They could just as well have described a proton-electron pair and saying it's the same attraction mechanism behind heterosexual love. Not wrong but not true in any meaningful way.

I took the time to borrow Schwartz's book from Libgen, skim through it, and read the parts that seem relevant to that claim (it didn't look worth reading in full--lots of fluff about "quantum theory rehabilitating the basic premise of moral philosophy" etc. etc.). I also took a glance at a few of the cited studies. Schwartz's main point has nothing to do with the brain "naturally resisting change"; the book argues rather that our brains remain malleable and are continually shaped by our behavior, and the studies he highlights are in support of those points. In his own words, he is arguing for "the brain’s astonishing power to learn and unlearn, to adapt and change"--so it looks like the article-writer drew a very different conclusion from the same undiscussed studies.

The article also mentions neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps's research to support an attendant claim that "When the prefrontal cortex is under stress, our capacity for learning, memory, and decision-making is compromised". But her research on stress's effects on cognition that I can find actually suggests stress is often beneficial to learning and performance, and her work on fear response conditioning focuses on timing of interventions, not energetic expense or discomfort.

What's so worth hating about this kind of vacant-eyed patronizing crap, this "neuroscience-based approach" and "blueprint for L&D professionals", is how it authoritatively name-drops experts and science-y words as an appetizer, without inviting any actual engagement or understanding, and proceeds to dish up warmed-over PD workshop slop for the next 9/10ths of the article. Those L&D professionals may have no substantive understanding of neuroscience, but they know that you need to feel "discomfort" and bear "energetic expense".

That sounds like the kind of over/misinterpretation of a scientific result which is typical with this stuff. How do you get from "neural pathways strengthen with repetition" to "people are resistant to change"? Is "can feel uncomfortable" in the scientific article, or is it just the pepped-up management consultant assuming that anything which takes energy must feel uncomfortable sometimes? (By logic!) Presumably salamander neural pathways also strengthen with repetition. Are they resistant to change too?

"Repetition is to education what repetition is to education". It tooks me time to strike me with its second mesmerizing effect: I had to hear this sentence a single time before it deeply engraved in my mind, in such a way that it most likely will stay there until I die.

Not all learned/acquired behavior works like that, at least at the subjective level that we can experience as human being (putting apart obviously the fact that we all have different subjective experiences).

The "regret in death bed" thing is a modern preoccupation, as is novelty seeking. Those are not that organic either, they're cultural trends starting from books, movies, etc., that later got marketed and sold to people by the advertising/life coaching/self help industries too.

For millions of years of evolutionary history the main concern was making it alive, having a family, building a homestead, putting food on the table, keeping dangers (including enemies) off, and so on.

If you had those things, the "current situation" was good. They didn't aspire to get a promotion, start a startup, or become a travel vlogger.

The "novelty seeking" has been the exception, and even the novelty seekers didn't consider it a primarily purpose of one's life.

People are not necessarily always resistant to change.

When you try to bring something that ease their life without introducing huge additional cognitive load, or threats to whatever they feel like an island of stability in the chaos of life, they will certainly appreciate it and praise you for coming with it.

Also there is a acceptation threshold of how many breaking regressions are induced as an unintended side effect, no matter how brilliant the change proposed is for its intended purpose. Especially if change come in a top-down condescending know-better-than-you approach, rather than a "let’s take time together to improve your daily experience."

The old people might be wrong (at least as much of the rest of humanity), but they did survived for some time. So to improve survival rate of younger people, if the environment is stable enough, as clumsy as elder approach might be and all other meaningful information let apart, imitation seems a safer bet than trying random audacious moves with unknown results. Note that it’s all supposing much to comfort a rather conservative under a pseudo-scientific form of social darwinism. I wouldn’t agree to make that this could taken as a well balanced perspective.