During my lengthy cancer recovery I became a big fan of certain types of Reality TV shows. From The Profit, to Alone, to Extreme Makeover Home Edition, to Back in the Game, I’ve become pretty hardcore. It’s especially easy to become hardcore with over 700 Reality Shows currently being produced around the world for weekly viewing.
Surprisingly, I’ve only recently found a show that’s managed to broadcast 19 seasons without me: Restaurant: Impossible. The premise is simple and repetitive, Master Chef and successful restauranteur, Robert Irvine visits a failing restaurant somewhere in the U.S. He samples the food, tells the owner it tastes like crap, walks them around the restaurant pointing out defects and flaws like dusty lights, stained carpets and faded upholstery. The owners, already under significant stress, now have it added to. Next Robert has the owner and their staff empty the restaurant to the bare walls. Then he brings in his personal designer and construction people, and in two days transforms the place into an inviting, elegant eatery.
While all that’s going on Irvine takes the owner and head chef aside and teaches them how to calculate food costs and margins, while also teaching them to pare down the menu and prepare a few simple, savory, high-margin entrees. It’s not brain science! Except, as I explain below, it actually is!
Each show ends with Robert walking the owner(s) blindfolded back into their newly renovated restaurant. The response, when the blindfold is removed, is almost universal: The owner(s) put their hands to their face, exclaim, “Oh my God!”, and begin to cry. Depending upon how much I’ve empathized with the owner(s), I find myself tearing up as well. Why? Because Robert has brought The Golden Rule of Social Neuroscience – It takes a more organized brain to help organize a less organized brain – to bear, while at the same time answering The Big Brain Question – Are you there for me? – with a resounding “Yes!” In my experience this is a powerful, healing, integrative, interpersonal dynamic.
The Golden Rule of Social Neuroscience
Each of us navigates the days of our lives with our own unique neurodiversity and network organization. All of which is dependent upon and conditioned by the world that’s operating all around us and inside us. The Golden Rule of Social Neuroscience recognizes this reality along with the importance of a more organized, integrated brain’s ability to help organize and integrate a less organized and integrated brain. Healthy parents, teachers and clergy often function as the former, children and students in the the latter role. This is generally true at the cognitive/learning level, but socially, it’s especially true at the emotional or spiritual level. Noted psychedelic researcher Richard Alpert/Ram Dass details in his autobiography, Being Ram Dass, how encountering a wise man in India completely changed all of his sense perceptions, especially his cognitive mind – evidence of The Golden Rule of Social Neuroscience operating at pretty rare integrative levels.
On a more material level, Robert Irvine’s lifelong immersion in cooking and the restaurant business has organized his brain in a much more effective, integrated way than the restaurant owners he elects to help. It is this gift of growth and change that he brings to each of them.
The Big Brain Question
In bringing the gift of his life experience and his organized brain to bear, Robert also answers a fundamental question that at some level we are all looking to have answered positively – The Big Brain Question. I’ve written extensively about the BBQ over the years, especially about how powerful a positive answer can impact a human life. You can review some of those accounts here, here and here.
The thing is, unless we’ve served in the military or trained as tag-team wrestlers, most of us have never been taught about this question or about the human need to have it answered “Yes”, beginning before birth! As a result, few of us go about consciously asking (or answering) this question deliberately for ourselves or others. But when you think about it, isn’t it this the question that underlies the grand Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you? Ideally, it’s just a more proactive invitation to take more initiative in beneficially “doing” unto the people we care most about.
The Committed Parent 
“Healthy parents, teachers and clergy often function as the former, children and students in the the latter role.”
I’ve worked professionally in education in some capacity (teacher’s assistant, substitute teacher, tutor, computer lab supervisor, instructor, etc.) with all levels from preschoolers to college students.
One thing that bothers me is that being a college professor is generally considered more important than begin a high school teacher, which is more important than being a elementary school teacher, etc.
i believe it’s the beginning that matters most–and that happens before a child ever enters school. I believe parenting is the most important occupation in the world. And yet, to be a parent, there is only one qualification: fertility.
I believe the Golden Rule–which is actually part of us as social beings–needs to be taught by demonstration long before those children ever enter school. And that hopefully means parents, and, if not, preschool workers, who can understand it, practice it, and can thus teach it.