Unravelling the mysteries of the brain part 2

Prepare to have your mind stretched as we navigate the human brain with the esteemed neuroscientist and psychologist, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. In this captivating discussion, we explore how social media is rewiring our brains, why the parent's role is critical in helping a child's brain develop, and what the challenges of puberty mean for cognitive development. Dr. Barrett offers unique insights into the delicate art of knowing when to step in and when to step back, helping our children handle the complexities of daily life.

The conversation then takes a turn towards the workplace, shedding light on the pressing issue of work-life balance, and the strategies organizations can adopt to promote healthier working environments. From the provision of healthy snacks and walking breaks to a no-email-at-night policy and trust-building exercises, we explore practical measures that can boost brain health and manage the demands of modern life.

Finally, we delve into the fascinating realm of predictions, mental models, and niche construction in business. Dr. Barrett elucidates how humans often adapt their environment to align with their mental models, underlining the crucial role of flexibility and trust in today's fast-paced world. As we wrap up, we emphasize the critical importance of sleep for our mental and physical wellbeing, and the impact of sleep deprivation on our performance at work. Join us for an enlightening journey.

This episode is part 2 of a two part special.

AWA Hosts: Karen Plum and Andrew Mawson 

Guest: 

• Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, Neuroscientist and Psychologist, and author of "How Emotions are Made" and "Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain." University distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University, Boston MA

 AWA Guest details: https://www.advanced-workplace.com/our-team/ 

 CONTACTS & WEBSITE details:

AWA contact: Andrew Mawson 

 AWA Institute contact:Natalia Savitcaia 

Music: Licensed by Soundstripe – Lone Canyon

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Thanks for listening to the DNA of work podcast

Transcript

Karen Plum: 0:01

Hello there and welcome to the second episode of our two-part special where we're unravelling the mysteries of the brain with neuroscientist and psychologist Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett. In this episode, we look at the impact of social media on our brains and explore the challenges for organisations in navigating the new world of work that we all find ourselves in, particularly as many people try to return to the tried and trusted models and methods that they used pre-pandemic. Here we go. Welcome to AWA's podcast, which is all about the changing world of work and trying to figure out what's right for each organisation, because we know that everyone is unique. We talk to people who have walked the walk, who've got the t-shirt and who've learned lessons that they're happy to share with us. I'm your host, Karen Plum, and this is the DNA of Work.

Karen Plum: 0:59

If you haven't listened to part one of this two-part special, then you might want to skip back to that episode, so you get the full picture. If you're still listening, you'll remember that AWA's Managing Director, Andrew Mawson and I have been talking with Dr Barrett about our brains. W ell, not just our brains, but, you know, brains in general! Because in our business, we try to help organisations to embrace and navigate change and to help them create the conditions for people to do their best work. Our strong belief is that part of curating those workplace experiences requires us to understand how people work and, critically, what their brains need to function at their best. So let's pick up where we left off. At the end of part one, Lisa had just said that the best and worst thing for a human is another human, and clearly other humans come in all shapes and sizes and we interact with other humans in a variety of ways, including these days on social media. Andrew was reflecting that this landscape has changed a lot since he was a kid growing up in the UK.

Andrew Mawson: 2:04

We had, in the UK we had three TV stations, we had some newspapers, of which there were probably know more than about eight, and some radio stations, and those were the ways that we learned about the world. Of course, we had interactions with real people and sometimes they were good, sometimes they were bad, sometimes they added loads, sometimes they didn't. What's your view about the kind of current situation with social media and all this stuff? Because it's almost like we're almost giving ourselves the opportunity to have extra budgetary deficit. The demand and the anxiety that this constant flow can create, particularly for young minds, young brains. Are we creating the conditions that are naturally leading to this kind of situation?

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 2:53

Yeah, I think we are. I think we are. So what I would say is that a little infant brain is not a miniature adult brain. It's a brain that is waiting for wiring instructions from the world in order to finish wiring itself. I mean, brains never finish wiring themselves, they just slow down. Like for those of us who are older than 25, our brains are rewiring a little more slowly as the environment is constantly changing. But for the most part, little brains are getting that wiring instruction from their caregivers.

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 3:30

So when you're cuddling your baby and singing to her, talking to her, playing with her, you don't think to yourself ah, I am regulating this infant's body budget, I am regulating this infant's body and I am helping to wire this infant's brain. No, you don't think that. You just think, oh, what a cute little baby. Or you think, oh, my God, will she just go to sleep. I just have to walk out of the room for a minute. I'm just going crazy, right. But that's what we're doing. And what we do with our kids is we curate a world for them, and we curate it pretty tightly when they're babies and then over time, we slowly increase the size of that world. So what we're doing is we're slowly increasing the amount of uncertainty that they have to face. And if you do it too quickly, or if you yourself are the source of uncertainty, then a child's brain will attempt, in certain ways the child's brain starts to take on some more mature features too early, because it and it treats everything as uncertain. And one of the things that happens in uncertainty is there are release of chemicals which change your heart rate and your breathing rate and so on, and so you get this kind of general arousal response. And I don't mean sexual arousal, I mean jittery, like what we experience as anxiety. So often, when we're experiencing anxiety, really what we're experiencing is unpleasant, high arousal which we've turned into anxiety, right, but it could just be, you can just experience it as uncertainty. And the reason for doing that is that you do different things when you're anxious than when you're uncertain. So we make sense of things. That's what really what emotions are, we're making sense of the simple feelings and the sense data that come with them. So for a little brain, right, when there's too much uncertainty, then they have this, they have anxiety and their brain is wired for an uncertain world. And then when they're grownups and they're predicting, the brain is predicting it's predicting, trying to deal with uncertainty - meaning it doesn't predict very well. Alternatively, if you're a helicopter parent and you're not broadening that environment for your kids enough, the brain doesn't learn to deal with the slings and arrows of everyday life, which is also its own problem, right? So part of the tricky bit in being a parent is knowing when to step in and when to step back, and we're constantly trying to figure that out.

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 6:17

But imagine what happens in adolescence, and adolescence is like the perfect storm of metabolic burden, and here's why. First, there's puberty. Puberty means that there's gushes of hormones at uncertain times. The body is just hard to regulate during puberty period, more so for girls because there's more fluctuation for girls, but even for boys there are fluctuations within the day and it's really challenging. So there's more uncertainty in the body. Also, this tends to be the time when kids go to larger schools, and now this also tends to be the time when they get access to the internet and to social media platforms, right, or maybe even a little earlier. So what have you done? You've basically ballooned, ballooned the metabolic burden on a brain that isn't finished wiring itself yet. That's what happens.

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 7:22

Now, of course, some kids deal with things fine and some kids don't, but on average, what we see is an epidemic, really, of depression and anxiety and more general cases of burnout, and we understand this to be the mood and the other kinds of related problems, related directly to this body budgeting issue, which I'm really oversimplifying in a sense because we're talking on a podcast, but the point being that just something simple like making sure your teenager gets eight hours of sleep a night and isn't on a screen. I mean you have, for example, ganglia cells in your retina that detect light and dark and control your circadian rhythm.

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 8:11

Your brain creates this circadian rhythm so that you go to sleep at certain times and you wake up. If you're on your phone or you're on a screen, at nine o'clock at night, your brain thinks it's the day, and if you do this continuously, you will have a hard time getting eight hours of sleep or seven hours of sleep or what have you and most adolescents actually need more than that. And so what you have is an accumulating sleep deficit and eventually, a circadian rhythm disorder because you're on your screens too much. That doesn't mean that you get off your screen an hour before you go to bed. That means you get off your screen at seven o'clock at night. Now I'm not gonna ask you what time do you get off your screen. I can tell you I am not off my screen at seven o'clock at night. I mean, I'm doing really well if I'm off my screen by nine o'clock at night, and you know I'm being kind to myself here right now, right.

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 9:06

So the conditions of everyday life make it really challenging to keep our metabolism and our metabolic efforts in tip-top shape. And then we add on to that social media, where, if interacting with people face-to-face is uncertain, interacting with people over social media is more uncertain because you've removed almost all of the cues. There's no face, there's no voice, there's no body. Sometimes you don't even know who the person is. You don't know so much about what the intentions or the background or the context is, so your brain just fills them in and this is very, very, very problematic.

Andrew Mawson: 9:51

If you transfer this you know the things we've just been talking to, to people beyond the age of 20 and up to whatever age people work till these days, and recognizing the organisations may have many thousands of people in them, many thousands of brains in effect, and those organizations and those individuals are also struggling to do the right thing to get the best out of their brains. What kind of advice would you give organisations? Because sometimes I think organisations themselves are creating the conditions that are adding load and they're not enabling that replacement that you talked about.

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 10:38

I think there are so many things that organizations can do. So there are trivial things that organisations can do, like have water and healthy snacks and food available that's healthful; implement breaks where people can go for walks and things, and it sounds like you're sort of taking away from people's work time, but in fact they'll just be much more efficient with the time that they have if their brain is having an easy time regulating their bodies. I don't know this from companies, I know this from people who work in companies that they have instituted no email at night. So you can send an email but you can't expect anybody to answer you until the next morning. So from six o'clock until six o'clock kind of thing, there's no expectation that anyone will answer you unless there's really an emergency, and then you can pick up the phone. So I think, setting boundaries, work-life balance, that sounds, you know, this is all stuff people have talked about, but I think that there are other things that they can do. So I think, for example and, Andrew, this was something that you taught me that one of the best predictors of work productivity is the trust that people have in each other and in their team and also in management, because these are the people who are controlling your outcomes and you want to be able to trust them. So trust-building exercises are a really good thing.

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 12:06

And by trust-building I don't mean, like you know, you go and you, you know, walk a tightrope and while your colleagues hold a, like you know, a net underneath you, or whatever. I mean things where you know you're working together, doing something hard, that isn't about your work per se, right? So, for example, in our lab, which you know it's like a small company. They're about 25 full-time people. We're constantly criticizing each other. That's our job, right? My job is to make sure that when my students and postdocs and, you know, the young scientists under my charge, when they go out into the world and they have to face critics, that they're prepared to do that right. So I routinely make people cry in presentations with the questions I ask. And I'm not doing it because I'm a mean person, I'm doing it because I'm training them. They have to, i t's like trial by fire in a way.

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 13:00

So how do we do that with each other and not have everything fall apart? Well, one thing that we do is that we do things together where we're working hard together, but not for work. So we don't just go and, you know, drive bumper cars around or whatever, but we actually, you know we might volunteer together at a soup kitchen. For years we actually ran a haunted house in my basement and we gave all the money to the greater food bank and that can sound fun. It's also pretty arduous actually to do. We basically scared the s*** out of little kids for money and we were so successful. People still ask me about it. I mean, it's actually almost Halloween time again, right? And people are like are you going to do your haunted house? I'm like we haven't done it for five years. But we did for 13 years running and it was a lot of work and it was hard, but everyone was doing it for a really good purpose. We've also worked with a homeless shelter.

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 13:57

We have to depend on each other. The circumstances are difficult and sometimes just very challenging to your mood, right, like working with refugees, for example, is really hard, but we do and we're constantly engaged with each other. So you come to understand the intentions of your coworkers. You understand that they like you and you like them and that you trust each other, and so when they're criticizing you, they're not doing it because they want to see you fail. They're doing it because they want to see you succeed. You know, I think those are really important things.

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 14:33

I also think that people can be trained to be more responsible for themselves, like right now, we live in a culture where, you know, maybe it's a reaction to things that have happened in the past, but we're living in a culture now where we sort of outsource the responsibility of our behavior to other, to the circumstances, and, of course, the context you work in, that you live in, is in some ways responsible for your behavior, but not completely responsible. So you can be aware of your impact on other people and you can train people to do this right. So if yesterday, if I was having meetings with students, I probably would have said hey, at the beginning, you know, hey, I have a migraine headache today. Or hey, I'm having a bit of a body budgeting day, so if my tone gets sharp with you, it's not really about you. Like, I've just reduced the uncertainty right there and I'm not asking them for anything. I just want them to interpret. That their brain should be guessing appropriately. I've just reduced the uncertainty and that makes it easier for them.

Karen Plum: 15:41

There's trust between you, so you know you're in a safe place to do that, and they will see you model that behavior as well.

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 15:48

Yeah, and I think the thing that you want to do is make yourself predictable to people. Predictable. If you're predictable to them, they will be predictable to you, and that is good for everybody.

Karen Plum: 16:06

Less metabolically expensive for everybody.

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 16:09

It is, and then you can direct your spending to the things that you really need to, which is innovation or what have you?

Andrew Mawson: 16:18

So what we're seeing at the moment in most organisations certainly very strong, powerful organizations is that leaders are looking to try and limit the amount of time that people are working at home, trying to bring them back into the office. And it seems to me that what's happened during the pandemic is that we, you know, we all kind of moved from a model of the world, mental model of the world, if you like, that was about physical presence, turning up somewhere, office rituals, status, hierarchy and all those things. And during the pandemic we kind of most of the population, started to get an experience, something quite different, which was the recognition that they were being trusted. They had to get on and do stuff. They learned new skills. In many cases were quite successful. It wasn't an easy time but it was, you know, quite successful.

Andrew Mawson: 17:12

We've kind of now gone into this sort of back to the new world and there's a real tension between the sort of population of people who think they won their spurs and experienced the business of not turning up, not commuting, not doing all that stuff, but being trusted, working online. There's a real tension between that kind of the workers, in a way, to the what we'll call the leaders, many of whom are trying desperately to return to a world of leadership which is the one that got them where they were in the first place. What's your take on that? My view is that many of those leaders have built up a mental model of the world through their experience which is based upon that old paradigm, and most of the people have kind of now moved to a different one, and so you've got two very different lenses on the same thing. That's my idiot layman's articulation of what's going on. What's your take on that, then?

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 18:16

I think that your layman's summary is exactly right on the mark. So everyone has a mental model of the world. That's what predictions are. They're basically a model of your body in the world, and so you're not aware of the body part. But that's really what a mental model is and that's what predictions are. And, of course, the people who are successful in a particular, with a particular model, they're going to want to reinstate that model. I mean, humans are always trying to impose their model on the world. Really, in a sense, that's what predictions are, because your brain wires itself to the world, the world that was curated for you and that you know and t hen your predictions work well in a world like that.

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 19:04

I'm not saying that people deliberately go and act on the world to make it fit their model, but that is, in effect, what ends up happening. We call it niche construction, niche being the word from ecology t hat means the stuff in your environment that you care about, that matters to you. The physical world is not your niche. It's only the parts of the physical world that matter to you, that are important to your health and well-being. We're constantly like our interactions with each other, for example, is partly niche construction. We're trying to set things up not deliberately trying but that's what brains do. They end up trying to manipulate, even indirectly, things so that they can predict those things really well. Then eventually, sometimes brains are forced to learn new things in order to change their model. That's more expensive, actually, than acting on the world to make it fit your model. It's not surprising that the people who succeeded in a particular world would try to reinstate that world, because that's what made them successful and that's where their brains work the best. But I would say that when it comes to humans, variation is the norm. Really, that's the success story of our species. There are so many ways in which we are different from one another. One of those ways is that the same work structure doesn't work for everybody equivalently well, and flexibility is a really good thing.

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 20:50

And so, I would say that if I were going to make a prescription, I would say the only thing that doesn't change, is that change is constantly happening. What business leaders have to do is always be planning and actually looking for opportunities for change and then guiding that change in a particular direction, maybe also educating workers to like, informing them, teaching them that change is always happening as well and that they should expect it and maybe even cultivate it and curate it, but that they're doing it together. What I'm about to say is I don't know any research on this at the present time. I'm sure there's going to be a brain dump of research coming out in the next couple of years in response to this, but my sense is that 'trust and verify' is the way to go. If you want your peeps to trust you, then you have to trust them, but you need to verify that they're doing what they say they're doing. That's going to be different for different industries. Peeps should be taught to manage up. That is, if you want a certain degree of freedom to work at home or whatever, you have to communicate what you're doing better to your managers.

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 22:13

If there aren't institutional mechanisms for that kind of reporting, they need to be there and treat things as more provisional.

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett: 22:24

In my experience, which is much more limited with industry than is much more limited than yours, what I see is that companies go through, they go through these planning exercises where they change their strategy, they institute a set of rules, they build these infrastructures and then they try to stick with them for a really long time. I would say maybe things should be considered more provisional all the time, because change is always happening, but you should always be able to verify that things are getting done. If they're not, then it means that something needs adjustment. Maybe that adjustment is forcing people to come in, or maybe it's building better tools so they can collaborate when they're at home. But I would say flexibility and treating things as not set in stone but provisional, meaning they're working now and they're going to keep working, we'll keep them as they are until they stop working and then we'll - or hopefully we'll predict and anticipate what we need to change in order to keep productivity where we want it to be.

Karen Plum: 23:35

I thought it was very interesting that Lisa said that 'trust and verify' is the way to go, because the topic of trust is a very hot one. Going from a low trust to a high trust mode of operating isn't easy. We had to do it by default during lockdowns, but since that time, without specific ways of measuring and monitoring what their people are doing, many managers are reverting to old methods and aren't comfortable operating on a presumption of trust. We could go on, and it's a fascinating topic. I suspect we'll return to it in a future episode. Huge thanks to Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett for generously giving her time and sharing her thoughts and expertise with Andrew and I. We found the conversation fascinating and we hope you did too.

Karen Plum: 24:20

One of the big takeaways for me was the reminder to get enough sleep. Even though I know how important it is, I still forget and sacrifice sleep for other things in my life. That's all for now. I'm off for a nap. If you'd like to hear future episodes of the DNA of Work, just follow or like the show. You can contact us on our website, advanced-workplace. com. Thank you so much for listening. See you next time. Goodbye.