- Suzanne
Welcome to the Be Good podcast, where we explore the application of behavioral economics for good in order to nudge better business and better lives.
- ERIC
Hi, and welcome to this episode of Be Good, brought to you by BVN Nudge Consulting, a global consultancy specializing in the application of behavioral science for successful behavior change. Every month, we get to speak with a leader in the field of behavioral science, psychology, and neuroscience in order to get to know more about them, their work, and its application to emerging issues. My name is Eric Singler, Managing Director of the BVA family and CEO of BVA Nudge Consulting. And with me is my dear colleague, Suzanne Kirkendall, CEO of BVA Nudge Consulting North America. Hi, Suzanne.
- Suzanne
Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me back. I'm very happy to be part of another episode today and to be introducing our guest, Professor Joe Devlin. Joe is professor of cognitive neuroscience and a former head of experimental psychology at University College London, or UCF. Joe is a leading figure in the field of neuroscience, especially renowned for his work in language processing and consumer neuroscience. He's been a driving force in advancing our understanding of how the brain interprets and processes language, as well as exploring its remarkable adaptability through neuroplasticity. He's also widely recognized for his contributions to debunking common neuromyths, such as those surrounding brain training programs and learning styles. Joe is the author of over 80 articles in top scientific journals, including Science, Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Current Biology, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But Joe is also interested in the application of the most recent advances in neuroscience, behavioral science, nudge, and AI to finding solutions for businesses. His work has expanded into areas such as advertising effectiveness and using neuroscience tools like fMRI to measure the brain's response to marketing strategies, which is research that's becoming increasingly relevant for business leaders and marketers alike. So today we're very honored to have Joe join us on the Be Good podcast to share his insights and discuss his recent work at the intersection of neuroscience and leadership. Welcome, Joe.
- Joe
Thank you so much. I really appreciate the invitation to be here. So thank you, Suzanne. Thank you, Eric.
- ERIC
So, Joe, time to start this very promising conversation. I think we met a few years ago when we both attended a conference in Japan. I was, I have to confess, very impressed by your presentation. And since then, I have been closely following your fascinating work and publication, particularly on LinkedIn. It's impressive how you are active. on LinkedIn with very detailed and insightful posts. So before talking about this, I'd like to start our conversation by going back to the beginning of your career. I believe you earned a PhD in artificial intelligence, but you found it more interesting to focus on human intelligence and how the brain works. I don't know if you remember, I think it is a quote. attributed to Amos Versky. My colleague works on artificial intelligence, and I work on natural stupidity. So it reminds me of this. Could you tell us more about why this interest in cognitive neuroscience?
- Joe
Yeah. Well, when I was a kid, I really love the idea from science fiction, really, of being able to speak to people or creatures or whatever that were different from us. The idea of aliens, right? But I also liked the idea of being able to speak to computers. And they just fired me up when I was a young lad reading these stories. So, when it actually came time to do my PhD, I thought, this is great. I want to be part of the artificial intelligence movement and try to be able to communicate with computers. But... As you said, I did my PhD a long time ago, and the tech really wasn't there. Finally got there about two years ago. And it made me a little bit frustrated with what the state of the art was in AI in the 1990s. So I did some work in artificial neural networks, and that was the basis of my PhD thesis. But I got frustrated with how artificial they were and how far they were removed from the things I wanted them to be able to do, like chat with them. So I thought, well, I should learn something about the brain. And the time was right because all... And at that moment, these new non-invasive brain imaging tools had become available, positron emission tomography, functional magnetic resonance imaging. And it allowed you to look at people using language in vivo, like as they were doing it, without doing any of the more invasive things that neuroscience sometimes does. So it was such an exciting opportunity. I thought, I'll learn a little bit about the brain. I'll come back to the whole AI thing. I got stuck for 25 years learning about the brain. And fortunately for me, I feel like AI has come back to me with all of the advances in the last couple of years.
- ERIC
Your journey into neuroscience has led now to significant, very significant contribution in understanding language processing in the brain. What initially drove you to this field and how did your early experience shape your research path?
- Joe
Well, I was... I was always convinced that language was the thing that differentiated us from other species. So fundamentally, we're all animals, but we do a bunch of things that other species don't, right? And language seemed to be at the heart of it for me. So that seemed to be the key aspect of being a human. And that's why I was so fascinated by it. I was very fortunate early on in my career to get to work with Kathy Price, who is based at University College London. who is a real pioneer in studying language in human beings using these kind of non-invasive tools. And the opportunity to work with her and learn from her meant that that just fired up my enthusiasm. I was thinking, this is this brand new space that there's so little known, and there's so much opportunity to contribute. And I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time to be able to contribute my part to those things. It was a very fortunate time because there were a lot of brilliant people around me who I had the opportunity to learn from. Kathy was one. Paul Matthews was a mentor of mine when I was at Oxford. And Paul was stupendously influential in terms of being able to give hard advice with a smile, which is a real skill, right? Like I tried to learn that from Paul even at the time. But I remember one thing Paul said to me was, Joe, you do good work. but nobody cares because you don't make it interesting, which is like a tough message, right?
- ERIC
Okay, it reminds me, we have just interviewed some weeks ago, Kim Scott, who has written a wonderful book, Radical Candor, which is exactly about care and being demanding and which is supposed to be the good way to manage people.
- Joe
Well, it's certainly the case that I admire Paul's leadership to this day, and he's had such a lasting influence on my career. Because once I could actually hear his message, it took me a little bit of time, I really started thinking about, well, how do I share this information? How do I make it accessible? And to some extent, that's kind of culminated in things like my LinkedIn profile at this point, where I regularly try to communicate science and make it interesting for a general population, which is something I really enjoy. And honestly, I don't think I would be here. but for that level of candor from my supervisor.
- ERIC
You have started to talk about your mentors. Any other mentors or influential figures that guided your focus towards studying the neural basis of language and cognition?
- Joe
Well, one of the people who really made a big difference early on in my career was Jay McClellan, who's one of the founders of artificial neural networks. So some of the work that Jay and David Rommelhart and Jeff Hinton... who just won a Nobel, was incredibly influential. So, he was this towering figure in my academic life, but I had the opportunity to meet him early on and he was such a wonderful man. He was absolutely lovely and very interested in what a young graduate student was doing and helped encourage me. And it was funny because that made a big difference because I thought, oh, okay, if you can be as important and influential as Jay, member of the National Academy of Sciences, et cetera, and still have time to listen to your junior colleagues and promote them and be helpful. That was a big deal. Like it made a difference and it shaped the way I try to mentor my students over time. And then later, obviously Kathy and Paul had a big influence in my career, but I've been very fortunate to just be in a very rich community of incredibly smart people, both the people who are sort of more senior than I am. And often my students, you know, who more junior, but incredibly sparky and bright people with great questions who just don't stop. They want to answer it and they want to do it in a good way. And that is incredibly inspiring to me.
- Suzanne
To transition from understanding your career path and to talking more about the content of your work, I want to first start by grounding us with some fundamental questions about the brain. So can you just start at the most basic level? telling us what our brain's for. What is the fundamental role of the brain in human life and behavior?
- Joe
So this is admittedly a controversial answer because people argue about it. But from my perspective, if I just look at it from the lens of evolution, the reason that we have a brain at all is to help us survive and pass on our genes, which is true at a species level, not necessarily at an individual level. It doesn't mean that anyone who hasn't passed on their genes doesn't a perfectly good brain. I'm not trying to say that at any level. But the reason that all of us have brains is to adapt to our environment and survive and pass on those genes, right? So, what that means is that Your brain takes a ton of energy to do this. So, the more effective it is at helping you survive in your environment, the better. But also surviving now is slightly different than surviving in our, you know, Neanderthal caveman kind of era. But the brain hasn't changed that much in those 10,000 years or 100,000 years, which means that some of the things the brain does that were very effective back then are a little bit maladaptive now. Just as an example. Throughout most of our history, the central problem that we faced in survival was getting enough calories. Literally, do you have enough to eat and live and survive for you and your family? Which means that things that are high in calories are incredibly rewarding in our brain, like fats and sugars in particular. The problem is that now, many of us have access to all the calories we need plus. I'm certainly an example of that. But it does mean that your brain still responds incredibly strongly to things like chocolate that combine sugar and fat. And it's a problem because it can lead to things like type 2 diabetes if you sort of overindulge in these things. So, even though the response was perfectly sensible when it evolved, it's a little bit maladaptive now. And there are lots of examples of that, which is one of the things I think is really important about trying to understand why we have a brain, how it functions, where it came from, and why it's doing what it's doing now. Because... sometimes it doesn't seem like it makes sense. You have to understand it in context to understand why it acts the way it does, and then to try to manage it appropriately in the environment that we actually live in.
- Suzanne
I think we can all relate to that. So there's a growing focus in neuroscience now on the relationship between the brain, the body, and the environment. So can you tell us a little bit about how those three things interact to shape our thoughts, our actions, our overall cognition?
- Joe
Yeah, I think this is a really exciting area in neuroscience and it goes by the name of embodied cognition. The sort of central idea is that our thinking, reasoning, emotional things aren't just a product of our mind. They're actually influenced by our body and our body's interactions with its environments. So, for instance, there was an amazing study that Sarah Garfink and her colleagues did a few years ago where they were looking at gut instincts, right? So everybody knows intuitively what that is. You have this gut feeling and sometimes you ignore it and sometimes you go with it. But it turns out there's a whole part of the nervous system called the enteric nervous system that are nerve cells that line your gut that actually give you information about its internal state and that affects your sort of mental processes and emotional processes. And of course, vice versa, it also affects the gut. And what they did was this study with financial traders where they looked at a series of these. people who worked in financial trading on the trading floors. And they measured how sensitive they were to their sort of gut reactions. And you can do this a lot of different ways, and they used a few. But what they found was that the people who were more sensitive were more successful financially in the year that they studied them. But also the people who are more sensitive were the people who lasted longer in financial trading. So it seems to have absolutely real world applications that go beyond just our almost gut instinct to say, yeah, sure, I believe that, that's the way I feel. But it's so often easy to ignore your gut, as it were, and make decisions that you think are cognitively rational, even though they don't necessarily fit your instincts. And there's a reason we have those instincts. It's part of our nervous system and it's part of our survival mechanisms. So not all of us are, you know, financial traders, but all of us have these interactions between the body and the brain, and they really very much influence the way we act, think, live, and feel. So, it's an important area in neuroscience and really developing quickly, I'd say.
- Suzanne
Super interesting. And, you know, beyond that gut instinct, can you talk about how the brain processes and integrates all sensory information from the environment and how that affects how we respond to our surroundings?
- Joe
Again, a controversial one, so I'm going to go with it anyway. But there's a traditional perception that we have this world outside of us, and it impinges on us through our senses. We can see things, we can taste things, we can smell, etc. And what happens is that gets into the brain, we process it, and then we can act on that information. I would say that the dominant thinking in neuroscience these days is that that's actually backwards. That our brain is actively trying to predict our environment. all the time. And it's not something you're conscious of. It's just what brains do. And the reason it does this is because if it's effective in predicting its environment, then when the sensory signals come in... they don't really need to be processed very much because it already knew roughly what they should be. You have little differences, but that's relatively computationally simple to do. In contrast, if all you're doing is constantly processing signals that are changing millisecond by millisecond, that turns out to be an incredibly computationally intensive task, which means that your brain's spending a ton of energy on it and we're back to calories, right? It's a hard thing to do. So, we have these signals that we encounter all the time. And the more you are familiar with your environment, the more you are good at predicting it unconsciously, not really an active thing, the easier life is. But the problem with that is it leads to kind of a fixed mindset, right? So that is if you're good at it and life is fine, you're getting enough calories for you and your family.
- Suzanne
Fine. You don't really seem to need anything else. You don't have to learn. You don't have to grow. Which makes it challenging for us because we have to consciously override that if we want to continue to grow and learn. I mean, you do. You'll just do it slowly. But if you're actually looking for opportunities to improve in things, in your job, in your relationships, in your family life, whatever, in your sports that you're playing, then you almost have to actively seek out feedback because your brain is basically content to say, yeah. These signals all match basically what I thought. Life is good. I don't need to do anything to get better. Whereas if you want to get better, you need to find the places where you're not doing well. And that's where the feedback from the outside world makes a big difference.
- ERIC
Fascinating. Well, I thought we were going to get into the controversy with Eric's questions on neuromis.
- Joe
Yes. Now that we know a little more about the brain and the interaction with the environment and the body, I would like, because I have been very interested by your... post on LinkedIn about, I think, key topics, neuromyths, or I think you have called it neuromilks, which are common misconceptions about how the brain works. So could you explain, Joe, what neuromyths are and share maybe some of the most prevalent examples?
- Suzanne
Neuromyths are these common misconceptions that are kind of culturally shared. And a really common example is we only use 10% of our brain. So, we've known forever that that's just not true. You know, you use 100% of your brain. If you didn't use 90% of it, it would die and sort of dribble out your ears and you'd smell like a zombie. So, it's just a myth. But it's incredibly prevalent in popular culture. You see it in movies, in self-help books. You see it all over the place. It doesn't have... that many serious implications, right? I mean, whether you use 10% or 100% of your brain, how does that affect you on a day-to-day life? It does, however, make for movies like, you know, Limitless or Lucy and things like that, which can be entertaining. It's always good to hear Morgan Freeman explaining how you only use 10% of your brain, because he's very believable. But I would say that the neuromyths are kind of the low end of the spectrum. Things get a little bit more serious. So, there's another myth or misconception about lizard brains. So, this idea that, you know, your brain actually is three parts. There's sort of a lizard brain down at the center and that's the oldest evolutionarily speaking and basically is centered on simple needs, feeding, fighting, fleeing, those kind of things. And then above that, maybe you have some sort of mammal brain like a chimp brain, sometimes people call it, where you get some more emotional information in that. And then on top of that sits this human brain that sort of tries to regulate all the little monsters underneath. And this one, I think, is obviously false. We've known that for a long time. We actually knew that when it was proposed in the 60s. But it leads to making decisions that aren't ideal, right? So, this is really common in the neuromarketing field. And we have agencies that are making decisions. to try to appeal to people's lizard's brains because they think that that's where they make their decisions. They don't. And it's a misunderstanding of the way evolution works to even think about it that way. It's a misunderstanding of the way we make decisions. So, if you're making business decisions on that, it's not an ideal solution. It has real world consequences. To my mind, even worse is that there are some areas of therapy that are based on this lizard brain idea. So, literally, if you're trying to help patients based on a misunderstanding of how their brain works. I'm not at all convinced that you're helping them at all, which maybe that doesn't make things worse, but it does stop them for the opportunity to getting therapy that would help, right? So, I think that there's levels from myths that are shared that maybe aren't super important that we get wrong, but bother me as a little neuroscientist, to misconceptions that I think do have real-world implications, all the way to kind of the misuse of neuroscience. And- There are lots of examples of that. You see it, I mean, a silly example is things called like neuro water. You can buy these bottles of water that say neuro water and they're about three times the price of a bottle of non-neuro water. And all they've done is they've just plunked the word neuro in front as if that's meaningful and they say, you know, you need this for your brain. Well, yeah, that's true. You do need water for your brain and for the rest of you. But that doesn't mean you should be spending three times the amount of money on it. That's just exploiting consumers in my mind.
- Joe
Yeah, very important. And I think for those in our audience who are interested to know more, you described precisely the 10 main neuro misconceptions that you have identified. So why do so many people believe these false ideas? And it's about close to fake news. He said... specific kind of fake news.
- Suzanne
Yeah, that's exactly the way I see it too. It's a very specific example of fake news. I think that there are a couple reasons and they're linked to the fake news phenomenon. One is just that brains are pretty complicated. Most of us have never really been taught anything about brains. So you hear a story that sort of explains something that sounds sensible. Sure, you're happy. You know, if it's a good story, it's easy to process. You remember it well and you can then relate it. And that's kind of the advantage of stories. The problem... is that some stories are more damaging than others, right? And you see this with fake news. One of the things that's happening, you know, right at the moment is there have been these hurricanes in Florida that have caused enormous amounts of damage, right? And there's a narrative among some people in the United States that the deep state controls the weather and is purposely, you know, attacking Florida with these things. That's a damaging narrative, right? The fact that the deep state controls the weather, that's just goofy. But the fact that it's being used against people, that's not the kind of story that in a perfect world you'd like to share because it's not true and it has direct influence on many people's lives, particularly vulnerable people. So, I don't think any of this is specific to neuroscience. I mean, that's the area that I know. But the prevalence of stories and their role in our society means that they're really powerful. And I think it's important that we try to tell stories that are at least based in evidence. That doesn't mean that we have to just give people the dry facts, right? Because that doesn't work. It's really boring and nobody remembers. You have to make sure that your stories fit the evidence. And that's not hard. That's a relatively easy thing to do. But I think that sometimes the science community gets a little bit messed up and they think, no, stories are the problem. So we're just going to give you the evidence and you can decide for yourself. And fair enough. But if somebody then comes along with a quick and easy story that contradicts that evidence, that's easy to remember. Most people will remember the story and forget the evidence. And you haven't been very effective in your communication in that case.
- Joe
So from your perspective, what can be done to debunk or prevent the spread of this myth in both? educational and professional settings?
- Suzanne
Debunking is hard. Any question? Yeah, yeah. It's one of the reasons why I think it's so important to tell the stories that are evidence-based, right? To try to educate people who are busy producing the evidence in not only doing good science or producing this new evidence, but in conveying it to a general audience. And one of the good ways to do that is... developing a good story around it, coming up with case studies that illustrate the fundamental principles, sharing anecdotes that are actually based in fact, as opposed to, you know, opinion or whatever the case may be. So, I think that from the scientific community, there's an obligation on us to do a better job conveying our information to the world. And if all you do is sit around and say, oh, no, that's wrong, you'll interest a few people. Everybody likes the idea that everything you know is wrong and they can feel clever at dinner parties. But I don't think you'll have the sort of widespread sort of benefits that we need. The other side that I think is really important is early education. And I feel like this is something that we don't necessarily do that great a job of here in the UK or in the US. As I said, brains are complicated. You don't want to take a kid who's eight years old and try to explain brain structure. That's a nightmare. However. All of those kids are experiencing the same things that, you know, adults are in terms of trying to understand who they are, why they think the way they do, how they feel the way they do, why people are different from them and think differently and feel differently. That's a very familiar experience to a kid growing up. And we can start to address that from an early age and say, look, it's not the case that you just have, you're a left brain kid and that kid over there is a right brain kid. You have different. personalities and you have different interests, but your brain's actually very, very similar between the both of you. And what's different are your personality and things like your life experiences. And I think that by understanding those things, you're actually going to try to promote a more critical thinking in kids as they grow up and sort of seed the correct stories from the beginning. If you're answering questions that they're wondering about, they care. If you're trying to give them facts about numbers of brain cells or something like that, man, they don't care.
- ERIC
Good advice for eight-year-olds and adults, I think. So, Joe, in our audience, we have a lot of business leaders and professionals, and I know that part of your work is to help leaders apply learnings from neuroscience in specific areas. So I know in recent years, you've explored the connection between neuroscience and education, as you were just talking about a little bit. Can you talk more about how you think your work on language processing specifically can inform teaching methods and how we approach learning?
- Suzanne
Yeah, I think this is an area that's changing. Certainly in higher education, for me, it's been changing over the last 10-15 years. The old school model was that you just kind of talked at students. You gave them the information, you had some slides or in the old days, you wrote on a blackboard and they copied everything down and then sort of went away and thought about it. And I think that that is a very limited model. It works to some extent. We all, well, I'm older than you guys, so maybe it was just for me. But nonetheless, there's a lot more opportunity to engage and make learning an active process. And one way to do that is to... intersperse the kind of learning that you're just providing in terms of lecture material or whatever with more interactive sessions where they have question and answer periods, they're doing interactive quizzes, even quizzes that don't count towards your final mark because that leads to a lot of anxiety for many people. Have an important role in consolidating the information that you're learning and help people learn more quickly and more effectively. So, I feel like there's a lot of good neuroscience out there. That's suggesting ways of enhancing the teaching methods that we currently have. And very much the same from early kid education, kindergarten, five-year-olds, all the way through higher education like universities. And those are really important. The other thing that comes up here is related to this myth of learning styles, right? So, for anybody who's not familiar, there's this idea that... Some people are visual learners, some people are auditory learners, some people might be kinesthetic learners, meaning that they're more with their hands and touching. And to some extent, this is really appealing because everybody knows somebody who learns differently than them. That happens. And all of us have a sense of what they prefer when they're learning. The problem is that whenever we've actually gone and tested this, it turns out to just be false. If you just give people information in the form that they most prefer it. They learn the information less well than if you give it to them in multiple forms. And when we look at what's happening in your brain, this makes a great deal of sense because when you sort of combine sensory modalities, vision, hearing, touch, etc., you get a much deeper processing of the information. It gets encoded in memory more deeply. So, you definitely wouldn't want to just limit learning to individual styles. You really want to constantly integrate all of them as much as possible. And these are the things that I think are... you know, really prevalent in education. And these are positive changes that are happening.
- ERIC
Yeah. So more myth busting, learning styles, not a thing for those who are listening, just to reiterate. So another area you've recently been focusing on is advertising effectiveness, examining how neuroscience can help us better understand what makes an ad successful. So can you talk about the key insights your research has uncovered in terms of what drives consumer engagement with ads?
- Suzanne
Yeah, sure. This is a really interesting area for me because a colleague, Daniel Richardson, and I have developed a method for trying to measure audience engagement non-invasively, like without asking people. And we've tested lots of different creative content, TV shows, ads, movie trailers, et cetera. And one of the things that we find is that for advertisements, the thing that drives engagement the most is a good narrative. Now, that's not to say that all ads need a narrative. It serves different purposes. Like some ads are just purely informational. Hey, this week there's a sale on at the grocery store, get over why you can take advantage of it. There's no real narrative to that and that's fine. It doesn't need one. But for things that are intended to develop brand awareness, brand consideration, things like that, then you do see a real value in the narrative. And that seems to be the biggest single factor. It doesn't have to be any particular kind of narrative. It just has to be an interesting one. And interesting in this case means it's got to have an emotional connection. It doesn't have to be positive, laughing kind of emotion. Sometimes the right emotions are sort of darker or more introspective kind of things. Sometimes a combination works very well. But if you don't engage any kind of emotional response from your audience, then... the narrative doesn't tend to land with them. Having said that, there are other things that influence it. So we can measure the effect of the soundtrack. Like above and beyond the sort of spoken component, you can then just layer on music and you can see the effect that that has an increasing engagement. You know, an appropriate music track can, well, in our data, increase engagement levels by about 4%, which doesn't sound like a lot, but if you're having massive reach with your ad, then it could be really significant. Getting your themes right of your story makes a big difference too. So we did some work with an energy company here in the UK, and they had these two ads that they were putting out where they were brand consideration kind of ads, brand building. And one was around, well, they're the biggest green energy source in the country. And one was around using smart meters and basically saving you money. And their sort of intuition was, Well, saving you money has direct influence on your pocketbook. Of course, that's going to be the ad that's going to do better. But what was really interesting was it wasn't. The ad that produced the greater engagement was this idea that, oh, this is a company that's getting like 80% of their energy from renewable sources. So, more than I can save £3.50 a week. I was interested in the idea that maybe this is reliably environmentally sourced energy and that I can... contribute a little bit and feel better about my green credentials by using them as a supplier. So, you know, getting those themes right makes a big difference. And of course, that means understanding who your audience are, what they want, what they're looking for, which is what traditional market research is really, you know, a lot about.
- ERIC
Yeah. So, it sounds like brands should be focusing on narrative, emotion, perhaps music and Getting the right themes to create more impactful content. Is there anything else that you would give advice about when the world's getting more and more sophisticated with its marketing?
- Suzanne
Well, the other thing that makes a difference is standing out from your competitors. And of course, different companies do this in different ways. Sometimes they use humor for this. Sometimes they just simply do things that are a little bit weird with the idea that, you know, all attention is good attention. But it makes a difference, right? If everything is very samey, it's really hard to remember the content as related to this brand or that brand. And not to call anybody out, but car ads are very, very similar to one another in general, right? There's a drone shot of a car going through some dramatic landscape and then another dramatic landscape. And it's very difficult to remember which car company we're actually talking about. So some of these companies that are actually doing things that are a little bit different make it stand out. a little bit too, you know, again, within the context of having a good narrative and making sure that the themes that you're pushing are the things that your consumers are actually interested in.
- ERIC
Absolutely. And you talked about measuring in non-invasive ways, but there are also neuroscience tools like fMRI that can also measure the brain's response to advertising. How do you think those findings should be used and will influence the future of marketing?
- Suzanne
Yeah, I've done some of those studies and they're really interesting. In the sense that I think that a lot of these companies are exploring opportunities to try different things. And they try these experiments and then they measure return on investment. They measure brand awareness and things like that. So, they have a feel for whether it works or it doesn't work. What fMRI can bring to that is an understanding of why. Like how is it landing in the consumer brain and what are the influences that it's instilling? So, for instance... we did some work with a company called Finecast on addressable advertising, addressable TV ads, which are basically ads that are relevant to you as a consumer, as opposed to ads that aren't. And one of the things we know is we can identify brain systems that are involved in like emotion and attention and memory and things like that. So we can measure how that activity changes when you're viewing relevant ads versus irrelevant ads. So we didn't discover that addressable advertising was effective. The industry already knew that. What we could do is sort of provide a little information about why, what difference does it make? And it was particularly enhancing sort of the emotional engagement and the memorability of the ads, which obviously is an important aspect of a successful ad from what we just talked about. But we could then see the evidence for this play out in consumer minds and literally in their brains in this case. So I think that fMRI can sometimes answer why questions. And knowing why can then help you make informed decisions about how to implement those aspects in your ad campaigns or in your marketing.
- Joe
Maybe, Joe, now we are still speaking about communication, but leadership communication. And I would like to have your perspective on how can leaders use the insight from your research on language processing to communicate more effectively? with their teams.
- Suzanne
Another fun topic, because it's such a big one. There's some interesting parallels here with effective education. Part of it is, you know, communication is fundamentally a two-way process. It's not me as a leader conveying information to you as the followers or my team members or things like that. It actually needs to be bi-directional. And as part of that, you know, leaders need to not only speak, but they need to listen. And the listening part is at least as important as the sharing, because it gives you an opportunity to understand where your team members are, where they're coming from, what their concerns are, and allows you to sort of customize your message to your audience, which is a big deal. Because one thing that we know is as you make things more relevant, people find it more engaging, they remember it better, they listen more closely. So... I think the best leaders know all this implicitly. I think that these are people who are already doing all these things. They may not be able to say, well, this is the neuroscience behind why I do it, but they've seen its effectiveness in their teams, in their companies, in their organizations, and they have tailored their communication style with that in mind. Simple things that sort of everybody knows, you know, you can make your slides better and less noisy and all the rest of that. And there's some good neuroscience behind those things. But I think that's less interesting than the fact that communication is two way. And that's an important part of leading is not only sharing your vision, but getting people on board to follow with.
- Joe
There is something which is, I think, a fascinating mechanism. which is about how shared language can align brain activity between speakers and listeners. So could you explain how this finding might help leaders foster better understanding, better collaboration within their organization?
- Suzanne
Yeah, this actually brings together some of the things we've been talking about, in that there's a kind of embodied cognition aspect to it, and then there's... And there's, yeah, there's an engagement part. So, there's some interesting studies that just say, there's one that asked a young woman to tell a story of an event in her life and they had her in a brain scanner, recorded her brain activity. And what they did was they got 15 volunteers to come in to the brain scanner and then listen to her story while their brains were being scanned. And what was fascinating was that there was incredible alignment in the pattern of activation in the speaker, excuse me, and in the listeners. So... When she was talking about visual events, you'd see bits of her visual cortex light up. And this is what I mean by this kind of embodied experience. You actually have sensory cortices activating without any particular sight, like lying in an MRI scanner is the least visually exciting thing you can do short of being sound asleep. But nonetheless, just hearing language about this kind of vision or whatever activates those part of your brain. And so it seems like what happens in the... audience is their brain is kind of simulating the experience of the person who's speaking. And your ability to do that depends very much on your experience, your alignment with that person. So, if you started telling me about, you know, physics or French tax law or something, I just don't know enough to really engage. But as soon as we start talking behavioral science, I'm there, right? I mean, I've heard you speak about it and just... been really excited and follow along. And that's due to this kind of alignment issue. So, I think that when leaders are trying to use this, they need to make sure that they understand where their audience is coming from. What are their concerns? Are you speaking to those concerns? And are you making it accessible in a way that they can understand and empathize with? Because as soon as you do that, you get this kind of alignment in sort of the brain activity that leads to sort of alignment and intention and planning.
- Joe
There is another very important concept in neuroscience, but I think it is exactly the same in behavioral science, which is the importance of context. And here for you, the importance of context is understanding language. So how can leaders apply this idea when making complex decisions or delivering messages to? diverse teams.
- Suzanne
I think the key there may be the diverse teams. The fact that they're different from one another means that they probably have slightly different issues and concerns for them. So, knowing what those are and then tailoring your message to fit their interests, their concerns makes a big difference. So, the theme of the message may be exactly the same, but by making it directly relevant to your audience, you engage them in a deeper manner. One sort of simple example of this is there's a bank company here in the UK that does investing and they tailor the messages to their investors based on their own, the investor's personalities. So they are essentially showing exactly the same information, but the way they frame it depends on your personal scores on a series of personality measures. Your risk tolerance, your extroversion, introversion, your interest in new ideas, openness to that versus tradition, etc. And what they found, for instance, during the COVID lockdown that happened, the basic advice to investors was hold the fort for the moment, right? There's a lot of uncertainty and your best bet here is to just sort of ride things out. But if you're a very high risk tolerance, you're going to hear that message differently than if you're very low risk tolerance. So what they did was they just tailored it different. So they would say to the low-risk people, this is a really risky environment, and the safest course by far is essentially keeping the investments as they are. It's unlikely to be bad in the long run, as long as you don't need to do anything right the second, hold the fort. For the high-risk people, they said the same message, but they said it entirely differently. They said, right, tons of volatility in the market. There's a real chance that you could- gain, but the volatility means that there's at least an equal chance that you're going to lose. Your best course through this is to just stay with what you're doing right now and take advantage once the trends become clearer. So, the message is the exact same, but the way you tailor it to your audience makes a big difference. And their experience has been that the investors are much happier with the advice and they feel like they understand the advice better since they've adopted this kind of personalization message.
- Joe
Yeah, great. You have also, I think, strong interest in neuroplasticity. So what strategy would you recommend for leaders who want to cultivate something which I think is very important, adaptive thinking and learning within their organization?
- Suzanne
One of the things that I'm really impressed by are organizations that try to promote a growth mindset. So one of their values is... This idea that we're all always learning and we're on a journey. So you may be incredibly successful in whatever you do, but there's still an opportunity to be more successful and to keep learning. And in fact, the most successful organizations, teams, and individuals are precisely those people. It's a hard process. So if one of the values that they really promote is feedback, getting feedback from clients, getting feedback from your manager, your team, or the people that you lead. Um, that's a big deal, right? Because for a lot of us, feedback is incredibly threatening. You just don't want to be told all the things that you're not very good at. Um, I certainly feel that way every time I get feedback on a paper. Um, but it's an important way to continue your growth process. And if it's a value that the company sort of supports and promotes, then it doesn't have to be threatening if it's done on a regular basis. There's a strong emotional response to, uh, feedback, both positive and negative. And these have. potential to benefit growth mindsets in your employees and in your senior management team. So for me, I think that's one of the core issues that leaders face is how do you try to ensure that growth mindset and promote it within your organization?
- ERIC
So Joe, we've talked about some of your research on understanding how neuroscience can be applied to education and organizational development. What future developments in neuroscience do you think will have the biggest impact on leadership and learning?
- Suzanne
Wow, future neuroscience. So in the short term, the prevalence of these kind of wearable biometric sensors, Apple Watch, Samsung Watch, Fitbit, those kind of things, actually does offer some interesting potential. So for years, you couldn't really get access to the data, but Apple has now provided an API so that... you can and if people choose to opt in you get this kind of real-time sense of the physiology of for instance your team right um and you can measure for instance levels of arousal during meetings or um Or if you're doing change management projects within the company, you know, in response to those messages and things like that. So, I feel like there's already an intense sort of datification of both consumers and employees, particularly digitally. But, and that's kind of whether we want it or not. But there's an opportunity to do this at the physiological level too. And it seems to me that as long as people opt in in an informed way. then there's real possibility to get additional information about the way they respond. And whether they respond well or not, you can normally define post hoc and then sort of go back and look and say, okay, well, this is what was happening. I can then start to take those learnings and apply them in real time, right? Like I can start looking at, for instance, how my various teams are performing and whether or not my leaders are engaging them as well as they could be. And there's an opportunity for some feedback and growth in those opportunities. in that space. I feel like that's essentially available now. That tech exists. I don't feel like it's being used that way very much, except for possibly in big companies like Apple who own the tech. But that's something that has real potential. The other thing that's happening is that there's just incredible growth in non-invasive measurements of responses from a distance. So, tech requires that you're wearing it. But nowadays, you can do like eye tracking from the camera on your phone or on your computer. That's not like world class, but it's certainly sufficient for a lot of things that you might want to do. And like an obvious use of this that I haven't seen yet, but seems like it's got to be coming is on e-commerce sites. So if I can track in addition to your sort of clicking and scroll through, but actually see what on the page you're looking at and where it may be you're coming back with your visual attention and things like that. there's an opportunity to then use that to sort of pop up information or incentives like, hey, and if you buy now, you get 10% off. This, to me, seems like it's a gray area in terms of the ethics. Like, I think that if you make it clear to people that that's what's happening, you're using this information from where their eyes are to give them sort of customized information or offers, that's fine, right? Because then they can make an informed decision. If, however, you're recording information that you're essentially using against them, that's where I think it's dubious. However, the history suggests that when the tech is available, people will use it. And this is already in place for out of home. A lot of billboards have cameras on them. So that when you look at the billboard, the billboard looks at you. And they're recording this information that's actually used to shape what... on the screen, but also to give information back to the advertising clients. So the tech there, it hasn't been incorporated into e-commerce in a big way yet, but it seems like it's inevitable in the next handful of years.
- ERIC
And I'll just jump in with a quick terminology definition for those of you who aren't familiar with the scientific research word. Arousal in this case refers to any kind of physical activation. So like sweat, heart rate, usually stuff related. you stress or just being engaged with your environment.
- Suzanne
Right. Thank you. I'm sorry. I forget to say that.
- Joe
Joe, unfortunately, we are close to the end of this conversation. I would like to ask you two final questions. First one is for those leaders who might be new to neuroscience, but are curious about its application in the workplace, what would you recommend as a starting point? point for an initial application?
- Suzanne
There's a really great book by Lisa Feldman Barrett called Seven and a Half Lessons About the Human Brain. And it's great because it's very well written, but it's also great because it's short. She conveys a lot of information in a short space, which makes it accessible for many people. So I think that's a really good place to start. There are also online courses. So for instance, Thomas Ramsey, and I'm sure I'm not quite pronouncing Thomas's last name right. has a Coursera course about consumer neuroscience that's free to join and that's very interesting and more application-based. And Thomas is one of the pioneers in this area. So, I would certainly recommend that as well. For those who are interested in learning a little bit more about the brain and maybe how it functions and thinking about how it might be relevant, there's a book by Andy Clark called The Experience Machine. And I found that particularly accessible and exciting. So... I think that's a book that anyone who really likes the neuroscience idea would enjoy because it really is open to everyone. You don't have to be a neuroscientist by any stretch to read it.
- Joe
And maybe a new book from you.
- Suzanne
I hope. Well, I hope. I'm writing one. But I'm still in the early days. And I very much look forward to being able to offer a new book for people that hopefully will be fun and engaging as well. And it will definitely have a strong consumer neuroscience component to it.
- Joe
Okay, great. That's great news. Last question for you, Joe. Is there any emerging research or? project you are working on now that you believe will be particularly impactful for professionals outside the neuroscience field?
- Suzanne
Yeah, very much so. Again, with Daniel Richardson, we've been doing this work on measuring audience engagement. And I feel like the advertising industry uses approaches that are fine, but they're just out of date, right? So there's a ton of work that relies on self-report. interviews, focus groups, those kind of things. And it's reasonable and you definitely should. But there's very little that tries to actually get at your response at a neurological level to these ads. The things like facial coding and sort of very simple kind of biometric measures, none of which I'm convinced are particularly informative for a variety of different reasons. But I do think that there's a new approach in neuroscience. that's around neural synchrony, sort of measuring how similar the brain responses are across people that Daniel and I have been working on a lot in terms of very simple measurements, you know, using kind of these available biometric tools. So, you don't need an MRI machine or an EEG machine to do it. You can just do it using the kind of tech tools that are available already. And to my mind, it's incredibly promising because in relatively small groups of people, you can get very quantitatively second by second detailed information about how people actually respond to the content, whether that's an ad, a trailer, TV show, whatever the live performances. And I think that this is going to be a bit of a game changer, but of course it's my own work. So I'm probably overblowing it because I'm excited about it. But it does seem to me something that's its time is here. And I'm very much hopeful that... There'll be people outside of the labs who are very interested in trying these things too.
- ERIC
Amazing. Well, we're definitely looking forward to all of that coming soon. And Joe, I just want to say a huge thank you for joining us today. This was a fascinating conversation, lots of really interesting concrete learnings and examples. So I'm sure our audience is going to love it. If they want to learn more, where would you point them to find out more about you and your work?
- Suzanne
I think that certainly my LinkedIn page is reasonably active.
- ERIC
Heck yeah, it's awesome.
- Joe
Yeah, very good.
- Suzanne
That's very kind of you. Thank you. And if you're interested in the consumer neuroscience stuff, I have a website called Applied Consumer Neuroscience Labs or acnlabs.co.uk. And that's where a lot of the case studies are and some of the work that we're doing. So either way.
- ERIC
Excellent. Thank you so much.
- Joe
Thanks a lot, Joe. It was really a great conversation. Thanks a lot for joining.
- Suzanne
It's such a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on your podcast.
- ERIC
Be Good, a podcast by the BVA Nudge Unit.
