Prism Brain Mapping

Prism Brain Mapping is an online assessment package that promises… Well… it promises all kind of things, from “Enhanced selling skills” to “Developing female leaders” to 360 degree assessments”, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. It appears to be a pretty big deal, with practitioners all around the world and a certification program for new ‘practitioners’.

So, what is it? It’s basically a re-packaging of some old psychometric tests with a neuroscience-y sounding spin. Or in their words:

“It represents a simple, yet comprehensive, synthesis of research by some of the world’s leading neuroscientists into how the human brain works, and why people, who have similar backgrounds, intelligence, experience, skills, and knowledge, behave in very different ways. The instrument’s graphical representation of the human brain serves, not only to remind people of its biological basis, but also to help demonstrate the equally valuable merits of specific cerebral modes.”

The central idea seems to be to divide the brain up into four colour-coded segments, like so:

…and then produce a matching colour-coded report that divides the responses up into several behavioural domains:

Quite what those four domains have to do with the colour-coded segments of the brain is never really made clear. Of course, this is just another version of the hoary old left/right brain neuromyth. Needless to say, it also has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘brain mapping’ in any even vaguely-meaningful sense.

Prism also provides an exhaustive 42-page ‘Professional report’ (sample version here) that incorporates all kinds of psychometric-type measures, including emotional intelligence, the ‘Big Five‘ personality traits, and ‘Mental toughness’ as well as their custom (i.e. made-up) colour-coded profiles. The whole site is awash with neurobollocks, particularly their “Science behind Prism” page which basically waffles ‘Because: BRAINS!’ for 1500 words.

I got curious about who was behind this. The ideas behind it are utter drivel, but the implementation is actually fairly sophisticated, and they’ve certainly done their homework on the brain stuff. There are no names at all on the site, and that only made me even more curious; however, one of their promotional leaflets mentions something called the Center for Applied Neuroscience. A quick whois look-up on that domain reveals it was registered by someone called Charles De Garston who (from his LinkedIn profile) is the owner of another business named Team Dynamics International. Also heavily involved in Prism is Lisa De Garston, who runs a Prism-related group on LinkedIn.  Neither of these two seem to have any (higher) academic qualifications at all, let alone any in neuroscience or psychology. The only other name I can identify who’s involved is Andrew Sillitoe, who runs a coaching/leadership/consultancy/pointing-out-the-bleedin’-obvious business called Managing the Mist.

So, a good example of an apparently successful business built on a slippery foundation of the most reekingly odious  effluent. I’m pretty much in awe of their audacity to be honest; they’ve spent a great deal of time researching this stuff and coming up with something that’s just plausible enough for an uninformed audience to swallow, and their implementation is highly professional and very slick. I almost feel like cheering them on, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’d get about as much insight into ‘brain mapping’ from holding an actual glass prism up to your ear than from doing these online psychometric tests.

Prism Brain Mapping was previously the subject of a brief post by NeuroSkeptic, which is (of course) worth a read. Also, many thanks to Amy Brann who brought it to my attention on Twitter.