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EMILY FORTUNA: I'm Emily Fortuna.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: And I'm Timothy Jordan.
We're joined by special guests Eve Ekman,
director of training at the Greater Good Science Center
at UC Berkeley, and collaborator William
Russell, creative director of MONOM Berlin's
Center for Spatial Sound.
Welcome both of you.
It's great to have you here.
WILLIAM RUSSELL: Great to be here.
EVE EKMAN: Yeah, thanks.
EMILY FORTUNA: So tell me, you've
created this really excellent art installation here
at Google I/O. Why make it here?
EVE EKMAN: Yeah, so I was really fortunate.
William's artistic vision wanted to build upon a project
that my dad and I had collaborated
on about three years ago.
And this was an atlas of emotion.
The inspiration for this came from His Holiness
the Dalai Lama, who is so passionate about all of us
finding our way to a calm mind.
He thought maybe we need a map to get there.
So the idea was to take the best of what we know from emotion
research and create a way for people
to actually visualize emotion.
And then here at I/O, we are giving people
an opportunity to know what it's like to experience emotion.
So it seems so simple to be aware of our emotions.
And yet, for most of us we avoid, suppress,
deny anything that doesn't feel good,
which actually doesn't help us understand ourselves
or understand others.
So this is just one more portal and way for people
to get into these ideas of emotion awareness, well-being,
empathy, connection, and compassion.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That sounds really powerful.
William, could you describe the work?
What is it going to be like for those
of us that can't be there?
WILLIAM RUSSELL: Yeah, well, the piece
has been created using a sound technology built by 4D sound.
So the experience is there's about 85 speakers spread
out evenly throughout the room.
And the idea is that it creates sounds more naturally,
more the way that we perceive them in the real world, how
we've evolved to perceive them, which
allows us to connect more deeply to people's awareness of sound
and how this interacts with their body.
But the idea in this piece is actually
we have an artist, Amanda Gregory, who
will be singing and sort of theatrically
performing and controlling elements
of the sound in the space as well as being triggered
by the soundscape that is around her.
So the idea is she's actually in real time trying
to embody as much as possible the experience around her
and respond to this in a way.
And to just be fully open and aware
to her emotional landscape at the time
through this natural sounds but also tones and frequencies
that we've learned have certain effects
on the emotional awareness essentially.
There is an area of universal things
that we're finding that do stimulate generally
everyone in a similar way.
But then there's a mysterious other more complex world
that we're looking forward to explore further as well.
So yeah.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: This idea of paying attention
to our emotions and understanding those triggering
states, I think is really relevant to us
and our audience in software development.
We were talking a bit earlier about this,
and I think it's really interesting
that software development of any sufficient complexity
requires lots of people.
And therefore, the most interesting software problems
are actually people problems.
And a lot of that dynamic is governed
by our emotions, how we react with each other,
how we react with this big thing that we're all
trying to do together.
And I think, in that way, it's really important for us
to study emotional intelligence.
And that's, I think, why I'm really excited
about this work being here.
EVE EKMAN: Yeah.
Yeah.
I completely agree.
And you know, I've been a trained emotion scientist maybe
since I was born, since my dad is
the founder of this field, Paul Ekman,
and really mapped the human face.
So how do we recognize the universal language of what
I'm showing you right now?
This little anger versus I'm feeling really good.
And when we can understand how to interpret these signals,
we have a lot of capacity for clear communication.
We are born with this skill not only to read faces
but to ourselves kind of show what we're feeling.
And then, as William was saying, at an embodied level,
we resonate to the emotions of others.
So even if you're trying your hardest,
like actually this project for this team,
we don't need emotions here.
We just got to be efficient.
Good luck.
We are hardwired head to toe for emotion.
We absolutely have no control over what
triggers us emotionally.
We have some capacity to recognize, OK,
I'm feeling frustrated, annoyed, or anxious,
and then respond more constructively.
So the whole goal with emotional intelligence
isn't to change from lots of emotions to no emotions.
It's to understand and identify, what
is the message this emotion is telling you?
And then respond in a way that's the most
effective and constructive.
And really, that's empathy, right?
That is an ability to recognize what's happening to another
and then identify what's the best response.
This is a core value of humans.
And without it, we wouldn't have survived as a species.
So how do we harness that for creativity, productivity,
and engagement?
EMILY FORTUNA: So I think you've already
gotten a little bit at this, but if there's
one thing that you hope that attendees or viewers would take
away from your work and the general trend
of your future work, what would you, what would it be?
EVE EKMAN: Yeah, I bet we both have a different response.
I think that I would be really excited for people
to become deeply interested in their emotions
and not at a, I'm going to fix this, thinking way,
but, oh my gosh, my emotions exist in my body.
When I feel angry, there's tightness in my jaw
and constriction in my chest.
And when I feel anxious, wow, there's some shoulder.
And just that level of awareness,
what we call a metaawareness or metacognitive awareness,
means you have some space away from the experience
and you might not be quite so reactive.
EMILY FORTUNA: And William?
WILLIAM RUSSELL: Yeah, I mean, I mean, I agree with all of that.
But the idea is that, yeah, we want
to create these experiences so that they
can feel these things as deeply as possible
and to really be able to learn them
through the use of their whole body.
Because the idea is not that there's good or bad emotions,
they're all equal to each other.
They all have their role.
And for me, this has been an incredible learning process.
But it's just beginning.
I mean, this is experiment one.
So I'm learning a lot from Eve about, what
is the real science that we have and what
is still to be explored.
And I think this is going to be a constantly evolving process.
I mean, it came from a discussion between the Dalai
Lama and Paul Ekman originally.
And it will continue to be a discussion,
because this is such a rich territory to explore.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Awesome.
William, Eve, thank you so much for being here.
We really appreciate it.
And thank you for your work.
EVE EKMAN: Yeah.
And I just really want to thank whatever
mastermind behind this conference
wanted to do AI for good.
I mean, as a representative of the Greater Good Science
Center, of course, I believe in that.
But I think it's so nice to infuse this experience with how
technology can help us and really support us in being
the humans we want to be.
Thank you.
EMILY FORTUNA: Well said.
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