Power shapes everything. So why don’t we understand it better?

That question became Neurology of Power™, my inquiry into power in the brain and body. It connects social neuroscience, lived experience, organisational practice, artistic practice, and Indigenous knowledge. This is the work I was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to pursue.

My working definition is simple. Power is the ability to influence how other people think, feel, and behave, whether they want you to or not. Agency sits alongside it: our ability to influence our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.

Power is not only something held by politicians or chief executives. It moves through families, workplaces, relationships, and systems. It affects who speaks, who is heard, who makes decisions, and who carries the consequences. It can shape our health, sleep, and capacity to work. It even shapes our relationship with place and planet. One side of my family comes from Barbados, a country that contributes comparatively little to the climate crisis but lives with its effects. Who creates risk, who carries it, and who gets to decide are questions of power.

My Fellowship took me to South Africa and Canada to explore these questions in practice. At the University of Cape Town, conversations with social neuroscientist Dr Melike Fourie helped me examine power, empathy, and dehumanisation. At Zeitz MOCAA, conversations opened up questions about art, culture, the body, and collective knowledge. Interviewing Vanessa September and meeting Albie Sachs showed me how ideas about power are lived, challenged, and rebuilt.

In Canada, Professors Sukhvinder Obhi and Sari van Anders expanded the inquiry. I explored how power can affect our attention to other people, and the difference between empathy and compassion: between noticing someone’s experience and acting usefully on what we notice. I also encountered research showing that hormones do not only shape social behaviour; social behaviour can shape hormones. These encounters reinforced something central to my work: power is relational, embodied, and constantly moving between us.

Our brains use past experience to predict what might happen next, while managing the resources our bodies need to keep us alive. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett describes this as allostasis, or body budgeting. Crucially, we influence one another’s body budgets. The conditions I create can add to, or drain, the resources your brain and body are managing.

This matters in organisations. Power and agency influence decisions, collaboration, performance, and whose knowledge shapes strategy. They affect whether people can adapt to change, contribute their best thinking, or become exhausted by systems over which they have little influence. Culture and strategy are often treated separately, but both are shaped by how power is understood and used. That has consequences for people, purpose, profit, and long-term sustainability.

The Fellowship did not give me one neat answer or one defining expert. It gave me a rich network of people, places, disciplines, and ideas, across cultures and ways of knowing. It gave me better questions, stronger connections, and greater confidence in my way of working: following curiosity, joining apparently separate dots, and testing scientific ideas against lived experience.

That learning now shapes how I lead Alleyne&, how I work with organisations, and how I develop my artistic practice. My hope is that readers begin to see power not as an abstract force that belongs somewhere else, but as something we all experience, carry, and influence.

If we can notice how power is operating, in a meeting, a relationship, a workplace, or a global system, we gain more choice about what we do next. Understanding power gives us the possibility of using it with greater care, building agency, and creating conditions in which more people can thrive.

Suzanne Alleyne is a Cultural Thinker. Her work encompasses her research, artistic practice and consultancy work. She is the founder of Alleyne&, an incubator and consultancy and a 2020 Churchill Fellow.

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