I’ve already noted that our unique way of operating and the treasure trove of data we accumulated brought us to the attention of some world-renowned organizational psychologists and researchers. Bob Kegan of Harvard University, Adam Grant of the Wharton School, and Ed Hess of the University of Virginia have written about us extensively, and I have learned a great deal from them in turn. In a way I never intended, our trial-and-error discovery process has put us at the cutting edge of academic thinking about personal development within organizations. As Kegan wrote in his book An Everyone Culture, “from the individual experience of probing in every one-on-one meeting, to the technologically integrated processes for discussing . . . issues and baseball cards, to the company-wide practices of daily updates and cases, Bridgewater has built an ecosystem to support personal development. The system helps everyone in the company confront the truth about what everyone is like.”

Our journey of discovery has coincided with an incredibly fertile epoch in neuroscience, when, thanks to rapid advances in brain imaging and the ability to gather and process big data, our understanding has accelerated dramatically. As with all sciences on the cusp of breakthroughs, I am sure that much of what is thought to be true today will soon be radically improved. But what I do know is how incredibly beautiful and useful it is to understand how the thinking machine between our ears works.

Here’s some of what I’ve learned:

The brain is even more complex than we can imagine. It has an estimated eighty-nine billion tiny computers (called neurons) that are connected to each other through many trillions of “wires” called axons and chemical synapses. As David Eagleman describes it in his wonderful book Incognito:
