Transcriber: Reiko Bovee Reviewer: hila scherba
It's a delight to be here, I think these events are very important.
One thing I discovered is great ideas don't spread by themselves quite often;
they need a little help.
Case in point being: the rest of the world
would all have wonderful Japanese toilets.
If great ideas spread on their own.
So I think these events are very important.
I spend my days doing something that I'm very excited about.
I help leaders and managers in mostly large organizations,
make better decisions, be more reflective, stay cool under pressure,
and most importantly,
be better at influencing others and collaborating with others.
You can imagine I'm fairly busy; there's plenty of work to do there.
But one of the things I discovered about five years ago,
which was very surprising to me,
was I discovered that teaching people about their brain
had a profound effect on their ability to understand themselves,
and understand others.
Teaching people about their brain made them far more effective
at whatever they wanted to achieve.
I was very surprised by that,
it wasn't where I'd expected I would end up.
But for the last five years
I've been really passionate about decoding, deciphering, translating
the incredible neuroscience coming out and making it accessible to people.
So those of you who are change agents in the room,
and I dare say that many of you here are change agents,
I want to let you in on a few secrets, I want to give you possibly some tools
that will help you spread your ideas more effectively.
What I found is learning about the brain does change everything,
and I'm going to give you four reasons how this happens.
I've been thinking about this for some years now.
There are four reasons why it's so useful to learn about the brain.
First one is a thing called a novelty effect.
This is my daughter at 18 months.
She had a wonderful experience at that time in her life
of being at a TED conference all year round,
because everything was kind of new and innovative and exciting.
When you're young, new things really impact your dopamine levels,
and you get very excited, when we're older we don't see new things very often.
When you talk to leaders or teachers or government people, educators, anyone,
from a brain perspective, you're giving them a novel perspective,
and that novelty effect has quite an impact.
It's kind of what Businessweek focused on when they wrote about this field;
they said it was kind of just the novelty effect,
actually, it's much more, but the novelty effect is really useful,
it does get people's attention,
and as I'll mention, attention does change the brain.
So the novelty effect is powerful,
but it is so much more than just the novelty effect.
I'll give you an example if I tell you that the circuitry or network in the brain
involved in high level strategic thinking, planning, decision making, all of that;
that network is very different to the network
for understanding yourself and other people.
If I tell you that those networks are inversely correlated,
so when one is active, the other is deactive,
you kind of see why people who spend their lives in their intellect
often need a bit of work on the other side,
because one circuit kind of loses its connections there.
When I say that to you, it's a new way of thinking about
why leaders need development, and it opens up new connections.
So talking about the brain does give you a novelty effect,
but it's something much more than that.
The second reason I find the brain is very effective
as a way of creating change,
is that when you try to get people to see something,
basically, the word "see" is the key.
The tangible is so much easier to see,
the tangible is something you can access in your mind.
If I say, "See an elephant," you can see an elephant,
if I say, "See cognitive dissonance," you go, "What?"
But if I say, "See a region of the brain,
taking all the oxygen and glucose from all these other regions,
and your prefrontal cortex suddenly has very little resources to do much,"
you can see that, right?
So then you can spot that coming.
So the tangible is easier to see, it's a well understood fact,
and so if you can speak in terms of physical aspects of biology,
you get more buy-in because people get what you're saying, more easily.
The third reason is an important one.
We get to improve our theories, and theories create the world.
It says, "Where Earl gets his ideas,"
an executive having a shower to come up with ideas.
Has anyone noticed that you had these great insights in the shower?
If you noticed, you have them maybe when you're swimming, doing laps.
Well, it's not the water, but many people make this false correlation,
and many other false correlations,
because we don't have the science to understand the theories.
It turns out great ideas actually come -
we've only just learned this in the last couple of years -
great ideas come when you're able to notice subtle signals,
that things like happiness improve that, and other things improve that,
but it's the able to see subtle signals
that actually facilitates great ideas from our brain perspective.
So we get to improve our theories
by getting in and studying the brain directly.
I'm going to give you some examples of some of the surprises
that are coming out of the enormous body of neuroscience.
There are about 50,000 practicing neuroscientists right now,
it's an enormous field.
One of the big surprises is how limited our attention is,
and it comes back to how small and fragile the prefrontal cortex is.
Some of you probably noticing that now -
you're thinking about lunch and other things,
and finding it hard to focus,
some of you distracted try to work out what my accent is,
it's half American, half Australian, just to confuse everyone.
But our attention is very limited, and it's biological,
and really, we do a very small amount of quality thinking per day
and we need to treat that as an asset.
There's a huge amount of research in there,
quite surprising how limited it is.
The second big surprise is how wrong we get emotions,
there are some cultural things here, but it seems to be fairly universal.
When people are asked,
"What will happen if they speak about emotions?"
people say that it will make those emotions worse,
Would you agree with that?
So what we do is we don't tend to speak about emotions;
we tend to try to suppress them, try to bottle them up,
Actually it's a very good body of research saying that
if you've got some emotional arousals,
speaking about those emotions in simple terms,
reduces them significantly.
But even after people have seen those studies,
it takes some practice to experience it, for people to actually try it,
because we've been wired to think we shouldn't speak about emotions,
actually speaking about them reduces the effects of them.
So what do we do instead?
If we're not speaking about them, what do we do?
We suppress and we think suppression is a great idea.
This is where the neuroscience comes in,
If you try to suppress an emotion,
your limbic system stays at the same level of arousal or gets worse,
and that level of arousal takes away resources from your cognitive functions.
So, suppressing emotions makes you basically less smart,
it also, funny enough, kills your memory,
if you try to suppress a feeling
you want to remember what someone else is telling you
which explains an enormous amount of conflicts in life,
at home and everywhere.
The third thing is, when you suppress emotions,
other people's blood pressure goes up.
It actually creates a threat response in other people,
which is quite surprising.
We get these things wrong,
and as a result we build these theories and models and frameworks
that actually work against the way our biology really functions.
And just like we thought the Earth was flat once, and now we know it's not,
the science and technology can catch up, and make quite a change in our society.
This is a final thing on emotions;
this is a study, a summary of a study of about 500 people.
They are able to categorize people into whether they suppressed emotions
or reappraised emotions, which is a fantastic strategy.
The reappraisal is difficult; it requires alot of cognitive resources.
You have to look at the situation
and look at it from a whole other perspective,
something that happens in a TED conference.
Reappraisal, for example, might be you're having an argument with someone,
and you actually manage to see the situation from their perspective.
You know how that is? If you're upset, it just feels physically impossible.
We divided people into two groups:
those who suppressed more, those who reappraised more.
The people who suppressed more were dramatically below the average
on all these factors,
people who reappraised more were above.
Here is one of the really interesting kickers,
most of the emotional situations we all deal with everyday are internal,
it made out of fears, anxieties, concerns;
I thought about the fact, "Do you have my right or wrong slides?"
at least 30 times in the last 24 hours, and it takes up space.
These internal kind of threats;
the more you know about your brain, the more you can say to yourself -
"Oh, that's just my brain doing something crazy,"
and you become someone who actually reappraises much more about yourself.
I was in Chicago last week, talking to someone from a large organization,
and she was kind of laughing at herself,
and I caught her laughing at her own experience,
and she apologized, and I said,
"Oh, no no, actually that's wonderful."
Some of the healthiest people
are people who are able to observe and laugh at themselves.
By the way, humor is one of the cheapest and most wonderful forms of reappraisal;
it takes less resources.
We get emotions wrong; we don't speak about them;
we try to suppress, thinking that is the best thing to do,
when it comes to working with other people,
actually, it has some surprising consequences.
The third set of surprises, is probably one of the most significant,
and it sort of links to some of the things that Barry Schwartz was saying earlier,
very inspiring session.
We've completely misunderstood how important the social world is,
you know, that list of job descriptions,
we don't see how social the brain is;
huge amounts of the brain are dedicated to social interactions
because we don't survive without the social world
for the first 10 to 12 years of our lives.
So just like a wolf has incredible sense of smell,
we have incredible sense of exactly what's going on in the social world.
It's quite surprising.
What we're discovering about social world is that
it's as important as the physical world from the brain's perspective.
So in the brain if you sense there's a threat to your life,
you'll react very intensely,
but also if you sense a threat to, let's say, your status,
which is your perception in terms of other people
you'll also react as if your life is threatened,
which is why when someone says to you,
"Can I give you some feedback?" we all go, "Oh, my gosh!"
and the stomach starts, you know how uncomfortable that is.
It explains the terrible challenges of performance reviews in organizations.
The brain is intensely social,
and we only can find that out by doing studies and putting studies together,
we see that the same brain network for feeling physical pain,
is used for feeling social pain,
here's a kind of quirky, unexpected outcome of that -
if you're feeling ostracized and people attacking you; take a tylenol.
Tylenol actually reduces social pain; it's been studied in controlled studies.
The social pain - and these are the five elements of social pain
that I've been able to weave together -
social pain or social pleasures are actually the brain's own goals,
when we set goals for people, like a promotion,
what we do is we assimilate these into the brain's own goals.
The brain has goals, basically,
to feel good, to move towards reward, which is a dopamine release,
to stay away from threat, which is a cortisol release, etc.
The brain wants to feel like we're always getting better,
to feel like we understand what's going on, to be certain,
to feel like we have the choices to be autonomous,
to feel connected safely with others, and to feel like things are fair.
What happens in organizations
is many managers accidentally do all the wrong things,
they tell people what they should be doing differently,
they don't provide clear expectations, they don't let people make choices,
they don't trust people or open up and they treat people unfairly,
you get this kind of jackpot of threats that literally makes people less smart.
But you can use these as motivators,
there's a study showing that just saying "good job" to someone
was activating the same reward circuitry at the same level as a financial reward.
That just a sense of fairness,
and an increasing fairness is also activating a deep social reward
which is why putting social justice programs in organizations
kind of makes people feel rewarded.
So understanding the brain's own drivers,
I think is an extremely important objective,
if we're going to improve our society as a whole.
This is a frame that summarizes hundreds and hundreds of papers
into something that you can kind of see it's a SCARF, you can see it,
or for the Americans it's a scarf,
but you can see it, so you can remember it easily,
and then you can notice -
"Look at that, I just threatened that person's status,
that's why they're talking all crazy, and I should maybe bring this down a bit."
So these are some of the surprises about the brain,
that our attention is very limited, we get wrong how emotions work,
and we've really misunderstood the social world and how important it is.
The final one is that attention itself creates change in the brain,
is that when you focus your attention on any particular aspect of experience,
you either embed or creates circuits.
This has a lot of implications if you're trying to create change,
you really want to think about where your are focusing attention,
on what, the past or the future, where you are going.
So it requires us to be more reflective,
to actually notice what we're doing with our attention.
There's an enormous amount more;
it's quite funny talking about the most complex thing in the known universe
in 12 minutes, I think I'm almost at 13.
My fourth reason, I think is the most profound and most important -
the fourth reason why teaching about the brain,
or learning about the brain
in organizations, in schools, even in relationships -
the fourth reason it's so helpful is quite a deep one.
When you understand your brain a bit more,
you are able to understand your experience and actually have more choices,
you're able to catch certain things before they unfold;
there's a whole interesting timing about that,
Ultimately what it does is it actually creates a tide of mindfulness,
you're becoming an observer of your behavior,
just like this woman in Chicago,
you're becoming someone who can observe and stand aside,
that makes you more reflective,
it also surprise me that makes people more empathic and more caring.
I had dinner last week with one of the founders
of the mindfulness movement, very important figure, Daniel Siegel,
and he was sitting with the Dalai Lama recently,
he told me this story, it's a third hand story,
but it really hit me.
The Dali Lama was saying,
we've kind of failed in religion to create
a really compassionate, empathic life for many many people, and he said,
"I hope that science can go a little bit further into the Ivory towers perhaps
to create greater mindfulness, therefore greater empathy."
I want to leave you with a challenge from Theodore Zeldin, a philosopher,
"When will we make the same breakthroughs in the way that we relate to each other,
as we have made with technology?"
I love these technology breakthroughs; this is awesome, I absolutely love it,
and I want to spend hours talking about it.
But we've hardly made any improvements
in how we relate to each other in 30, 50, 100 years.
and I think it's time to put some focus on that,
and really make a difference there.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)