Maybe your resistance to change manifests itself in a different
way or in a different settinga refusal to throw away that old
slide rule, for example, or to look while the nurse draws your
blood, or to dance at weddings. We all refuse to change our ways
for reasons that are often hard to articulate.
Until, that is, you begin looking at it from a scientific
perspective. In the past few years, improvements in brain analysis
technology have allowed researchers to track the energy of a
thought coursing through the brain in much the same way that they
can track blood flowing through the circulatory system. Watching
different areas of the brain light up in response to specific
thoughts has brought a new understanding to the corporeal mechanics
of psychology in general and to our response to change in
particular.
Change hurts. Not the boo-hoo, woe-is-me kind of hurt that
executives tend to dismiss as an affliction of the weak and
sentimental, but actual physical and psychological discomfort. And
the brain pictures prove it.
Change lights up an area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, which
is like RAM memory in a PC. The prefrontal cortex is fast and
agile, able to hold multiple threads of logic at once to enable
quick calculations. But like RAM, the prefrontal cortex's capacity
is finiteit can deal comfortably with only a handful of concepts
before bumping up against limits. That bump generates a palpable
sense of discomfort and produces fatigue and even anger. That's
because the prefrontal cortex is tightly linked to the primitive
emotional center of the brain, the amygdala, which controls our
fight-or-flight response.
The prefrontal cortex crashes easily because it burns lots of fuel
of the high-octane variety: glucose, or blood sugar, which is
metabolically expensive for the body to produce.
Given the high energy cost of running the prefrontal cortex, the
brain prefers to run off its hard drive, known as the basal
ganglia, which has a much larger storage capacity and sips, not
gulps, fuel. This is the part of the brain that stores the
hardwired memories and habits that dominate our daily lives.
Wherever we focus our brain's attention, that's where we're making
and reinforcing connections. If our attention is focused on
negative things, those are the connections that will be made and
strengthened. 
Extracted from The New Science of Change
Nothing is more frustrating than trying to get people to alter the
way they do things. BY CHRISTOPHER KOCH
