Currently, it seems that all sorts of snippets are coming my way about the way the brain works and the impact on such things as emotional intelligence. I am reminded of the French phrase jamais deux sans trois – receiving the brief description below, it’s as if all the buses have turned up at once.

I was curious about the following brief description of an experiment by Benjamin Libet, who died in 2007. Libet’s experiments challenged our traditional view of how we make decisions. This description was part of an invitation to a talk this evening which, sadly, I am unable to attend.

Benjamin Libet (1916-2007) was a pioneering scientist in the field of human consciousness. His classic experiment showed that when subjects were asked to press a button, prior to their decision to do so, their unconscious brains had already started getting them ready to act. This implies that things happen in the following order: first comes automatic brain activity, then a conscious decision, then the action itself.

These findings seem to challenge our common sense idea of ourselves. ‘We’ seem to be nothing more than conscious decision-makers with the occasional power of veto over unconscious forces.

The role of the unconscious mind has been the subject of exploration and conjecture throughout history. Freud stands out in the twentieth Century as having made attempts to understand the unconscious mind, for example, and many therapeutic approaches explore the unconscious.

I think of neurolinguistic programming (or NLP) as one area in my own experience which engages with the unconscious mind on an ongoing basis, recognising that it’s possible to speak directly to the unconscious, and also inviting the unconscious to speak. As I write I recognise how many questions in coaching are addressed directly to the unconscious mind.

We live in an extraordinary era in the science of the brain, an era in which, increasingly, scientists are able to understand what is actually happening in the brain that creates the behaviours we observe. I regret that I shall not be hearing more about this this evening.