In this episode of 'Inside Learning,' Dr. Helena Boschi, author of 'Why We Do What We Do,' delves into the mysteries of the human brain and its pivotal role in learning and behavior. Host Aidan McCullen explores with Dr. Boschi the brain's function as a 'prediction machine,' its adaptation in the digital age, and the impacts of technology on cognitive abilities and attention spans.In this episode:
- Understanding the Brain: The Prediction Machine
- Impact of Technology on the Brain
- Neuroscience-Backed Learning Techniques
- Challenges of Remote Work and Digital Workspaces
- Neuroplasticity: Adapting to Change
Transcript
Aidan McCullen: Despite new advances in neuroscience, neurobiology, and neuropsychology, the brain remains the most mysterious, complex, and relatively unknown organ in the human body, the brain is the basis of everything we do, how we behave, feel, remember, pay, attention, create change, influence, and ultimately live.
Learning about how our brain functions is an important starting point to understanding why we do what we do. an excerpt from the author of Why We Do What We Do, we welcome to the show, Dr. Helena Boschi.
Helena Boschi: Hello, Aidan.
Aidan McCullen: Great to speak to you once again. I absolutely love this book. Why We Do What We Do. There’s so much in it. It’s a thesis to the brain and I learned so much about it and I thought no better person to have on our show to talk about the future of work and the science of learning. So I thought we’d start Helena with some of the foundations about the brain and learning first.
And then we’ll talk about the future of work and then maybe some takeaway tools and tips for everybody’s brain so we can get more out of ourselves. But I thought we’d start the way you open the book, describing the Brain as a prediction machine and how. If we understand it’s a prediction machine, we can frame how we learn and how more importantly we fail to learn in today’s business environment where learning is probably more important than anything else.
Helena Boschi: So if you think about this, the brain sits in a dark silent box, which is our skull and. It receives a huge amount of sensory signals. This is set called Sense data in through all our senses, and it doesn’t always know why or what’s going on, and it has to make a best guess, it doesn’t just. Receive this sense data. It is actively anticipating and interpreting, what it is and what we have to do about it based on everything that’s gone before. So our prior experiences and expectations help us out. it is and what we need to do. So it’s predictive, it’s not reactive, it’s predictive.
It’s always trying to stay one step ahead slightly in order to help us deal with information in real time. So our reality is based on this really complex interplay of sensory input, our feelings, our beliefs, our memories, our best guesses, and our imagination. this is why we can never be quite sure that what we’re experiencing is actually what is out there, because our entire experience is based on this myriad of different factors coming together.
Aidan McCullen: I mentioned the importance of learning, and there’s a great quote by the sci-fi writer, Alvin Toffler, who said, the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn once again.
The impact of technology is something that you talk about on the brain, and you said that technology is changing the structure of our brains.
If we give much more of our thinking to machines, we go through digital dementia. But apart from that, we lose our attention span probably when we need it most.
Helena Boschi: Yes, we’ve certainly lost the ability to focus. The brain is trying to, with so much distraction and input. We are being bombarded all the time by information and. are dealing with a different workforce to even five years ago. The workforce we now have who are coming in have attentional systems that are very fragmented are very distracted, and the brain, if you look at the brain and think about the brain. As how it’s set up. We had to be distracted back in the days when we had to be able to spot instantly a real threat to our life. So the brain rewards itself for being distracted because it’s saying, good. You’ve stayed alive. You’ve kept alive. You’ve spotted that lurking in the undergrowth. So we have now a brain that has been distracted so much and it’s been rewarded for distraction.
So frequently that we can’t pay attention anymore, and this is why. I was seeing a lot of people diagnose themselves with ADHD or think they’ve got ADHD because their attentional system has weakened so substantially. In addition to that, everything is speeding up and we’re thinking less. We know there are so many things that are going on with the world of technology.
We’re offloading a lot of our thinking ability. It’s called cognitive offloading. We’re offloading it into ChatGPT. We allow technology to do that thinking for us. We have a digital outsourcing. We store our memories in our phones. We don’t remember phone numbers anymore. There’s something else called a shallowing hypothesis where people aren’t deep reading anymore.
It’s about skimming and taking in information in a very superficial sense. And then of course we are very connected through our phones and our technology and our social media, but we’re more disconnected than we’ve ever been socially. Even though, we see people very well versed in using social media to make connections and have conversations, the face-to-face, emotional intelligence and social skills. Are not quite as advanced as they probably should be we have to pay attention to what we’re paying attention to, and the more we are reliant on our technology, the more attention we have to give to human relationships as well, because that’s what’s going to suffer in a world of increasing technology.
Aidan McCullen: At the end of each chapter, Helena, you offer tools and tips, many acronyms, et cetera, to make it easy for us to remember, but let’s share some of the neuroscience backed techniques for our audience to help improve their learning or retention.
Some tool that we can have as a takeaway.
Helena Boschi: Well, there are quite a few things we can do to, help us learn and if we consider learning, the definition of learning is the acquisition of new knowledge or skills. I. is all about how we remember, and it’s how we retain information. So the first thing I would say is pay attention. Learn to focus and this is a muscle that we can strengthen, but we need to focus the eyes first, and then often the brain will follow. It’s called the Pomodoro technique, and you can do this in little bursts and you can lengthen the time you spend doing this, if you find it really difficult to focus for five minutes, then focus for four minutes, then take a quick break, focus for another four minutes, take a quick break, and over time you can lengthen that focusing period so that your brain gets used to focusing again. this muscle is really important. other thing that’s really good to do to help us learn and retain information is to help other people learn. When we teach other people and help other people know more, Charlie Munger always said, this is the best thing a human being can do. We actually cement and reinforce that learning. our own heads. So that those two things, I would say pay attention and find a way to communicate. What you know to other people in a way that they find interesting as well. We can improve our memory muscle. We need to keep revisiting, reinforcing new learning all the time. We lose a lot. It’s called memory decay. We lose a lot of information. In the early stages of acquiring knowledge, relatively soon after the event. So we need to keep improving our memory muscle. doing things like learning a new instrument creating something. Playing Sudoku or chess learning a new language. Those are good cognitive exercises. Social relationships, talking to each other about what we’ve picked up. Helps us cement learning in our own head, it’s that transfer that helps us uncode memories in a really strong way.
Sleep is obviously. Really important to help information become embedded in the brain. this is a really good one. This is, I’ve had to do exams well into my adult years And what I used to do is exercise is revise on a treadmill while I was running. So I’d have my notes in front of me on the treadmill and I’d be running and trying to remember at the same time hippocampus, which stores a lot of our.
Personal memories and memories of what we know that we rely on for future reference. The hippocampus only really started to develop when we learned to walk. So when we moved as young children the hippocampus was then starting to grow, and the hippocampus grows beautifully when we engage in heart pumping, sweaty exercise, and it shrinks all my stress. So stress is very dangerous for the hippocampus. And one way of keeping the hippocampus healthy and our memory function healthy is to engage in movement and really good, quick burst of exercise, improves our cognitive sharpness, improves our memory, and it helps us think better. So those are some things we can do.
Learn new things, teach somebody else. Pay attention, sleep, have good social conversations and relationships and move.
Aidan McCullen: And is it the movement, Helena, that it almost distracts other parts of your brain? So you can have access to different parts of the brain. ’cause different parts of the brain are responsible for different actions like learning, and that some of them may be that’s on the fight or flight response duty.
If that’s distracted or it’s chilled or it’s relaxed, you have more access to learning, et cetera.
Helena Boschi: Well, when we are in a heightened state the brain sends all its resources and blood flow away from the frontal regions which helps us. They help us think, they help us make good decisions. They’re good at our functioning, but resources are drawn away from these areas. Straight into, the amygdala, the hippocampus, the hypothalamus.
All these structures are now working for our survival. So we literally can’t think straight when we are in a heightened state, when we’re stressed, when we’re anxious, and the brain then becomes focused on survival. So to get the brain to think straight, we need to. Find ways of keeping that frontal lobe region active and healthy.
Now this, even though it’s underdeveloped in the teenage brain, it behaves just like a teenager. It’s always hungry and it’s always tired. So we need to find ways to keep that fresh in our head. and that helps us think our memories get stored in different parts of the brain. So, procedural memory. So this is memory of how to ride a bike or play the piano that’s in a different. Area to our personal memories of how, where we’ve been, who we know, birthdays, that sort of thing. And so you can wipe out your personal memories.
And this was a very famous story of a fantastic musician called Clive Waring and he suffered encephalitis, herpes encephalitis, which wiped out all his memories. He exists in, I think, a ten second window. but he can still sit down and play the piano. So our memories get stored in different areas. The brain’s lobes set up to help us do different things. we need to keep each of them trying to work together as an integrated whole. But when we are in a state of stress, we shut down one region to plow resources into the other, and we need to try and reset that. there are techniques you can engage in to help you do that. One of them to help us start to think straight is something called the physiological sigh, which is two sharp inhalations. So you go and then you do one really long exhalation. If you do that three or four times, you bring the parasympathetic mode back online. You deactivate the fight or flight response.
Aidan McCullen: The sigh is actually is something you see more and more with athletes. So
Helena Boschi: Physical exercise where you are increasing your heart rate, produces something called brain derived neurotrophic factor BDNF. And this is really important to improve your blood vessels grow.
This is called angiogenesis. We create neurogenesis, which is the creation of new neurons in the hippocampal region and synaptogenesis, where you actually increase new connections in the brain. So the brain literally grows when we are exercising. Which I think is phenomenal and it’s a really good reason why we should move ’cause it keeps our brain beautifully healthy.
Aidan McCullen: So I was thinking about how this all affects then the digital workplace. So many people like you speak at events all the time, you run workshops. I find it funny, when I do the same thing so many people have met for the first time you constantly see this. It’s this is the first time our team have been together since the COVID times, and you’re going, wow.
That means that people are working at home in digitally designed workspaces. Constantly on a screen, all the things that you said are challenging to the human brain are now becoming par for the course, including the lack of exercise maybe for sitting at a desk all day. And I wondered what advice you had for people who maybe find themselves in that situation when they’re working remotely.
Helena Boschi: Yeah, so the remote working day is a real challenge to the human brain because it’s not designed to sit for long periods of time. The brain does need the body to move. Our commute has gone down to about 16 steps while we’re working from home. That’s mainly to the fridge, and it’s really not good for us to be in a sedentary state for long periods of time.
Trying to focus an attentional system isn’t designed to focus for prolonged periods of time. So carve up your day into chunks where you are planning in movement regularly to move away from the screens and come back to something with a fresher mind, even if it’s a short break. Plan your digital day to include. Frequent breaks. Try and engage with people, even if it’s virtually try and see them. So turn cameras on look at them. And so that where your neurons, your mirror neurons will activate. Smiles. Will activate smiles. We feel much more uplifted when we’ve engaged with someone who is smiling and positive around us.
So that’s really important if we find ourselves. Working on our own, but the brain isn’t great at solitary working All great progress throughout our civilization has been built on human cooperation and brains really need other brains. Ideas need to bump into each other and collide in order to produce better ideas. So we do need to find ways to engage socially with other people. We are sociable creatures and loneliness is rising. Rapidly because people are sitting behind screens on their own all day and the less we find ourselves around people, the less we think we need them.
And I think this is a very dangerous place to be.
Aidan McCullen: And Helena. Then, for people who are leading groups and convening groups of their teams together and maybe are managing digital workforce or multiple generations of a workforce together, what advice do you have if they’re to treat their teams, like, a team of brains, what’s the best environment they can create for them?
Helena Boschi: If you find yourself having to plan. virtual work events, teamwork events. The best advice I have is give people shared outcomes to work on collective outcomes.
So people are connecting to work together to produce or create something collectively helps people feel a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose as a group. This helps to dissolve some of the distance between them their connections will be better because they’re focusing on doing something productively together.
So shared outcomes rather than just have people together to update each other, people something really meaningful to work on, but where you can, I would urge and encourage organizations and leaders to bring people together. As much as they can, even in small groups, because the relationships we forge are the strongest we will forge. They’re much stronger than if we were trying to forge these relationships virtually. Thank goodness for technology in many ways because we are able to have teams, meetings, zooms, whatever technology people use, and we can see people through a screen, which is a huge improvement on just the voice. although the voice. its own can help to, release oxytocin in someone’s head. So a really good voice to listen to can be very calming and it can be a very nice thing to listen to, .
Aidan McCullen: Last thing then, you emphasize the role of neuroplasticity because I do feel many people. Are struggling with their attention spans, they feel perhaps they’ve lost it. They can’t learn, they can’t read the pile of books on their bedside locker that they’re hoping to get through. But your book is one of hope.
And when you understand the neuroplasticity of the brain, we can harness this both as organizations or individuals to create a learning culture for ourselves or our organizations.
Helena Boschi: Yeah, neuroplasticity is the biggest hope we have, I think for our future as a species. And the really good news is that we have an amazing ability to shape ourselves to the world, even if the world looks like it’s going bonkers around us. Human beings have capacity to deal with the tough stuff. And this is what makes us really special. We focus a lot on the neurons and we have around 86 billion neurons. But the unsung heroes are the 86 billion glial cells that work alongside the neurons. So we’ve got this incredible, resource inside our heads.
And these two teams are involved in how we communicate, store information, form memories, keep learning. And we’ve got to keep these active. it all starts with how we see ourselves. And if we see ourselves as learners, as beginners, we open up our brains to take on new information capacity for learning plasticity remains with us throughout our life, but we need to see ourselves as learners and not experts. And I can’t emphasize that enough. And when we’re in a stable environment and we feel that we’ve mastered everything that we need for the stable environment, the brain then doesn’t try and learn and adapt because it relies just on existing information that it’s already stored. So when we try then in a stable environment to master a new technique, we just think, well, that’s a waste of time and effort because we don’t actually need it. We shut down our ability to learn. if we are pitch forked into a difficult environment and an environment of rapid change, uncertainty volatility, the brain says to itself. Oh my goodness. I have reached the edge of what I know. I’m going to have to reorganize myself to take on new learning. This is really important for us. So the very thing the brain hates, which is uncertainty ’cause the brain likes to know what it’s getting, is the very thing the brain needs to push it into a new relationship with its environment. the brain reorganizes itself. It gets stronger as a result and it does its best work at the edge of chaos. And this state allows us to be flexible and adaptable and respond quickly to an ever changing environment. So this plasticity needs to be given this challenge to get it there. So I would always say to people, yes, the world is tough.
Yes, it’s changing. Yes, it’s hugely unpredictable, but actually it’s in this situation and this environment that we will find what we’re made of.
Aidan McCullen: Beautiful, beautiful way to finish, and a great call to action, Helena, for people who wanna find you. I know you’re doing keynotes all over the world. You’re joining us now from Washington where you’re about to give one as well. Where’s the best place for people to find you?
Helena Boschi: Well probably LinkedIn is a good first place, . And I also have my own little business called Checkered Leopard ..
Aidan McCullen: Brilliant. And I’ll put the links to all those places to find you, Helena, author of Why We Do What We Do. Dr. Helena Boschi, thank you for joining us.
Helena Boschi: Thank you very much, Aidan.