Brain-based Holistic Dialogue

The great David Bohm suggests that dialogue “…will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which may emerge some new understanding. It’s something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all. It’s something creative. And this shared meaning is the ‘glue’ or ‘cement’ that holds people and society together.” When we think of people talking about issues they care about, we tend to think of debate. Each side of an argument stakes out a position in what is assumed to be a zero-sum game and, more often than not, spends most of the time trying to knock holes in the other side’s argument. The result is division, alienation, and problems that don’t ever seem to go away.

Human behavioral drivers are varied and complex, yet we tend to lump people into monolithic groupings, e.g., conservative or liberal. Once we do this we ignore any variation or nuance to their behavior or motivations. A brain-based holistic dialogic approach utilizes an understanding of our shared neurobiology to identify the drivers of an individual’s behavior in an objective, nonjudgmental way. While we might not understand another’s opinion or viewpoint on its surface, we can understand the deeper motivations leading to that position through brain-based holistic dialogue. We can begin to see in others that which we see in ourselves. Other than condemning or disregarding the views of others, we can start to ask “How are they right?”. In this way, we can harness a diverse group’s collective thinking around our basic neurologically driven needs rather than seemingly arbitrary policies.