David
 James
 Brunner

More on balancing exploration and exploitation, this time from a Science article reviewed by the New York Times.  I have not read the original article, but here’s an excerpt from the New York Times review, entitled “Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop“:

Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal and his colleagues described experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines and rote responses …

… regions of the brain associated with executive decision-making and goal-directed behaviors had shriveled, while, conversely, brain sectors linked to habit formation had bloomed.

In other words, the rodents were now cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over, to run laps in the same dead-ended rat race rather than seek a pipeline to greener sewers. “Behaviors become habitual faster in stressed animals than in the controls, and worse, the stressed animals can’t shift back to goal-directed behaviors when that would be the better approach,” Dr. Sousa said. “I call this a vicious circle.”

This could turn out to be a very vicious circle, since those conditions that seem likely to cause stress–environmental turbulence, deteriorating performance, anticipated threats–are exactly those conditions that require exploratory, adaptive responses.  In fact, my colleagues and I argue that deliberately stressing and destabilizing processes (”deliberate perturbation“) may be necessary to sustain exploration in mature organizations.