Episode 8: Dr Mark Williams - Shifts and the Brain
I’m thrilled to share the latest episode of The Shift with you, where I had the incredible opportunity to speak with Dr. Mark Williams, a renowned neuroscientist with over 25 years of experience in brain imaging and behavioral research.
In this episode, we dove into some truly fascinating topics about how our brains handle biases and social interactions. Dr. Williams brought his wealth of knowledge to the table, explaining how our brains are wired to form in-groups and out-groups, and how these biases shape our interactions with others.
One of the most striking takeaways for me was Dr. Williams’ optimism about our ability to shift these biases. It’s easy to feel stuck in our evolutionary programming, but Mark’s insights revealed that we have the power to mold our brains and change the way we respond to others. This idea—that we can consciously choose to move beyond our automatic biases—is both empowering and motivating.
As someone deeply invested in cultural intelligence, I was especially encouraged by the neuroscientific foundation supporting the idea that we can improve our interactions and understanding of different cultures. Dr. Williams’ ability to break down complex concepts into relatable ideas made the discussion incredibly enlightening and hopeful.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode. What did you find most interesting or surprising? Do you have any questions or reflections about how our biases shape our behavior and how we can change them?
Please feel free to drop your thoughts in the comments below. And if you have any questions that you think I should have asked Dr. Williams, let me know—there were so many intriguing topics we didn’t have time to cover!
Check out Dr. Williams’ website, his book, and connect with him on LinkedIn for more on his groundbreaking work.
Looking forward to continuing this exploration with you!
Warm regards,
Trisha
Listen below on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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Trisha 00:00:00:01 - 00:00:14:10
I would like to acknowledge the Tharawal people, the Aboriginal people of Australia, whose country I live and work on. I would like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging and thank them for sharing their cultural knowledge and awareness with us.
Trisha 00:00:40:02 - 00:01:05:01
Hi there, everyone. I'm Trisha Carter, an organisational psychologist and explorer of Cultural Intelligence. I'm on a quest to discover what enables us to see things from different perspectives, especially different cultural perspectives, and why sometimes it's easier than others to experience those moments of awareness. The Shifts in thinking. As those of you who have listened to some of the earlier episodes will be aware,
Trisha 00:01:05:11 - 00:01:41:13
Cultural intelligence - the capability to be effective in situations of diversity is made up of four areas. There's the motivational, the knowledge, the metacognitive, and the behavioural. As a neuroscientist, our guest today can bring the wisdom from his research into a number of these areas. Let me introduce Dr. Mark Williams. He's an internationally recognized professor of cognitive neuroscience with over 25 years experience conducting behavioural and brain imaging research, focusing on our social skills.
Trisha 00:01:42:05 - 00:02:02:11
He has taught the fundamentals of neuroscience to a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as publishing more than 70 scientific articles. Mark has been awarded numerous high-profile fellowships and grants and worked both at M.I.T. in the USA and at universities in Australia. Welcome, Mark.
Mark 00:02:02:22 - 00:02:03:18
Thank you for having me along Trisha.
Trisha 00:02:04:08 - 00:02:21:16
I'm really looking forward to this and what we're going to uncover. But I'm going to start with the questions that we always start with. So I'd love to know, Mark, what is a culture other than the culture you grew up in that you have learned to love and appreciate?
Mark 00:02:23:03 - 00:02:27:19
Yeah, I've spent very, a few wakeless nights over that question.
Trisha 00:02:28:03 - 00:02:29:01
Oh no!
Mark 00:02:29:01 - 00:02:30:06
I’ve travelled a lot.
Trisha 00:02:30:16 - 00:02:31:13
Yeah.
Mark 00:02:31:13 - 00:03:05:17
I love so many different cultures. My my sister actually married a Balinese man, and that was fascinating to actually spend time up in his community. I did that on several occasions. I spent quite a long period of time in his community in Bali. And, absolutely amazing culture. And especially as somebody, I do a lot of work with teenage boys, especially around consent and appropriate behaviour and actually building relationships and so on.
Mark 00:03:05:22 - 00:03:36:15
And the definition or that their understanding of being masculine is very different to ours in that men walk around holding hands with each other and heterosexual not… You know. And they're happy to sit next to each other and cuddle each other and actually cry in front of each other. And it's such a beautiful culture from that point of view, from a man's point of view, he's aware of the issues that we have in Western society and in patriarchal societies.
Mark 00:03:37:06 - 00:04:15:18
I find that really fascinating. And I also find their belief in superstition really fascinating because I remember I've never been very superstitious myself, and I find that beautiful that they can really believe in things outside of that control to explain things that go bad in their lives so that they can move on. Because I think we miss out on that sometimes in more Western societies where we don't have some way of just letting go through us, which is really beautiful as well.
Mark 00:04:16:11 - 00:04:20:02
Yeah, but I had travelled a lot, so there's so many other ones I'd like to.
Trisha 00:04:20:18 - 00:04:45:10
Yeah. And I wondered if you're going to come and talk about the USA, where I know you lived for a while as well, and I'm. Do you know if there's any, you know, that the sort of population data around, you know, obviously suicidal risk and things like that that might be less in the Balinese culture because of those I guess, protective features around masculinity.
Mark 00:04:46:05 - 00:04:54:15
Yes, there does seem to be much lower suicide rates in those cultures. It's really hard to know, though, because it's seen as very taboo as well.
Trisha 00:04:54:16 - 00:04:55:06
Right.
Mark 00:04:55:07 - 00:05:18:03
Suicide, where it's just not as taboo as in Western societies. So it's hard to know whether or not it's associated with that aspect to it. But then we also, of course, the most Western societies, Christianity's the dominant religion and of course it's taboo in Christianity as well. So it still happens here. But it is hard to know, but it is much, much lower in those cultures.
Mark 00:05:18:08 - 00:05:25:21
And you've also got the family units, which are much greater. They have larger family and all across generations and all those things, which is so important.
Trisha 00:05:25:21 - 00:05:27:10
For a greater sense of belonging.
Mark 00:05:27:16 - 00:05:54:14
Yeah, got a sense of belonging. Long term, they have compounds that they're living where all the families, all generations living and they’ve lived in it for over hundreds and hundreds of years and all of those things, of course, are going to really impact on mental health. And of course, I also I've been talking to actually writing a book with a good friend who's a psychologist, and we've been talking a lot about Western psychology versus other psychology.
Mark 00:05:54:14 - 00:06:30:09
So he's worked all over the world. And that's really interesting as well, that we have things like ADHD and depression and anxiety because of the way our society set up. A lot of other cultures don't have those disorders because they just don't exist because of the way they cultures are set up. And so I wonder and actually just something I wonder about whether or not the fact that we label these things means that they're more prevalent or that they become more stigmatized and people are being labelled constantly and therefore that's where they end up, which is sad.
Trisha 00:06:30:18 - 00:06:53:19
Yeah, Yeah. And then the whole question around the measurement increases and yes, but that's another issue. And we'll wait for your next book maybe before we discuss that one. I reached out to Mark after reading his book, The Connected Species, which I heard about on the podcast of some friends who are also psychologists who are talking about leadership.
Trisha 00:06:53:19 - 00:07:17:14
And Mark was a guest on their show and he spoke about some of these aspects. And I thought, Oh, I think some of these things relate to my concept of Shift and and anyway, I'll put those details in the show notes. For those of you who have become intrigued, just as I've said that. But let's think about the Shift and can you tell me about a time when you experienced a shift, Mark, when you suddenly became aware of a new perspective?
Mark 00:07:18:05 - 00:07:34:03
Yes, I think the big one was, I actually hated school. I was a truant when I was at school for most of those years, and I was well, there was multiple things happening in my life. I came from a small country town. It was there was high unemployment. There's a lot of violence. There are drugs in the town.
Mark 00:07:34:09 - 00:07:57:20
And my mother had a mental illness. So that family life wasn't great. And I was actually told when I was 16 that, by my principal that I'd be dead or in prison by the time I was 25. And I should go and do an apprenticeship at the local abattoir. And I just basically lost it from then on until I was about 25.
Mark 00:07:57:20 - 00:08:12:06
I travelled a lot and I spent a lot of time couch surfing. We used to call it couch surfing back then. They call it homelessness these days, but it used to be couch surfing, which is I think, a much nicer way of phrasing it. And yeah, and I used to travel a lot to Asia and so on during those years.
Mark 00:08:12:06 - 00:08:40:15
But when I was 25, two of my friends had drug overdoses and so I decided I needed a shift. And because of that, I went back to school and got my HSC and then went to university, had a physics teacher that convinced me that I should go to university. And arriving at university was a huge shift in who I was because all of a sudden, all of my past and all of the bad things I'd done were almost erased because no one knew who I was.
Mark 00:08:40:15 - 00:09:04:08
Or where I’d come from and I had this whole new perspective and also seing people who were aspiring to be something greater, they were there because they wanted to become a doctor or they wanted to become a lawyer or they wanted to become an engineer or and this is something that I've been striving for for a long time, and there was nothing that was going to get in the way of actually doing that.
Mark 00:09:04:08 - 00:09:23:04
And I'd never really seen that before because of the people in I mixed with and because of my awareness of the world. Yeah. And so that really made a big shift in my my head and the way I saw the world and the way people saw me, which was quite a big change, quite a stunning change.
Trisha 00:09:23:16 - 00:09:45:00
Sounds a bit like multiple shifts. And like the teacher who who told you you could go to university, it probably opened up your mind to the possibility, which maybe hadn't been there before. I don't know. And then how the environment created a sense of a different You. I haven't really thought before about how space might help us to shift?
Mark 00:09:46:02 - 00:10:14:14
Yes, space is extremely important. I mean, before. Well, we still we have a lot of trouble with rehabilitation, with drug addicts and rehabilitation. But prior to the Vietnam War, the success rate was horrendous for people who were in rehab. And then we had a big shift in our understanding of rehabilitation, because during the Vietnam War, a lot of the personnel over there actually got addicted to heroin and other drugs.
Mark 00:10:14:14 - 00:10:35:05
And that was an awful situation and not something we want to repeat. But then when they came back to Australia, the vast majority of them were killed overnight because they shifted environments. There were those who with PTSD, who continued on. But it was a very small percentage compared to the percentage of people who can't or had had trouble getting off drugs normally.
Mark 00:10:35:12 - 00:10:59:14
And so you've got, you know, 98, 99% of the people who came back from Vietnam who were addicted to drugs over there were off it basically overnight. And it made us realize that it is a situation that's actually causing it. And that's the cue, that’s actually causing it. So in most societies, what we do is we send someone away or put them in rehab and we get them off the drug and then we send them back to whereever they came from.
Mark 00:10:59:14 - 00:11:17:08
And they're pretty much, on back on the drug. Within a couple of weeks because of the fact that they’re back into the same situation that they were before. And if you actually move them to somewhere else and take them out of that situation, then they're much more likely to not fall back into those those traps of they were in before.
Mark 00:11:17:08 - 00:11:34:01
So the situation does make a huge difference And and moving because I know you talk a lot about moving, but moving gives you the opportunity to Shift those things, right. To actually change those. Those things, which is really cool. I can be very negative too because of course you can me that in a negative way, rather in a positive way.
Mark 00:11:34:05 - 00:11:35:19
But it's a great opportunity.
Trisha 00:11:36:01 - 00:12:07:15
Yeah. I always say to people, this is your chance to create different habits, to create, you know, different different ways of being because you've changed everything. So, you know, if you always wanted to do something different about about your life, maybe about your habits especially. So yeah, it is, it is a great opportunity. And I guess from that perspective, because we're immersing people into culture, then it makes it that much easier to, to be able to be aware, apart from the fact the things that might stop us.
Trisha 00:12:07:15 - 00:12:34:23
And I guess that's where I want to jump into your research, because you've done a great deal of research and teaching and and you also speak to schools and organizations about this research. And one of the core areas that you've looked at is faces and facial recognition and how that relates to what you describe in your book as our drive to create groups and automatically associate with them, which is our drive for connection.
Trisha 00:12:35:13 - 00:12:40:08
So I'd love to hear more about that. So yeah, tell us about that.
Mark 00:12:40:08 - 00:13:04:04
Yeah. So we have I mean, we're an amazing species because we connect within groups, but we also will, will collaborate across groups, which is quite amazing. And we're the only species in the world that will actually collaborate across groups. So if you think about like honeybees, I have amazing hives and they all have their roles within the hive and they all support each other and all the rest of it.
Mark00:13:04:08 - 00:13:31:24
But one beehive would never talk to another beehive and say, We've got extra honey. Do you want some? And we'll switch it for something else. We're the only species that does that, which is pretty amazing. And so which means that our ability to know who is in our group is really important for us. But also that to be flexible enough that we can actually expand it or decrease it is also really important so we can change and we can perceive larger groups or smaller groups.
Mark 00:13:32:13 - 00:13:54:16
But one of the ways that we actually do perceive and one of the original ways that are actually seems to be in all mammals is this face perception template. So even cows recognize each other by their faces, by this area called the fusiform Face area, which is pretty amazing. And they recognize there are the people who care for them as well by their faces.
Mark 00:13:54:16 - 00:14:14:24
And your dog does as well. And your cat and all those things, which is why we we love animals and they recognize us when we come home. Which is really cute. But that face template is amazing because it enables us to recognize thousands of people And across long periods of time, you run into someone you haven't seen for ten or 15 years and they've lost their hair and they've gone grey.
Mark 00:14:14:24 - 00:14:29:19
They got more wrinkles and they put on weight or they're lost it and all these things. But we still recognize that person automatically because of these face templates. And the way it does that is it's based on the ratio of where the eyes and the nose and the mouth all look different parts of the face to each other.
Mark 00:14:29:19 - 00:15:02:01
So this is a template which has the average of that and everything is compared to that. And it's everything's a little bit bigger, a little bit smaller and all its ratios to that template that we have and that template is the average of all the faces we've ever seen. So all the faces we sees is based on that and that average is based on all those those faces, which means that the faces we see a lot, which of course are normally our family and people of our race are closer to that template than people are who are from other races.
Mark 00:15:02:04 - 00:15:20:01
But now if you think back in evolutionary history, we would have originally spent most of our time with our family. We would have been in really small groups and we would have been traveling around and we would have wanted to know who was in that family. And therefore that that template and method works really well, because what it does is it sets off the fight or flight response.
Mark 00:15:20:01 - 00:15:41:03
If you see a face which is greatly dissimilar to your template. So something that deviates a long way from it, isn’t somebody who's a member of your family and so therefore is somebody that might be potentially dangerous and it sets off a fight or flight response, which gets your heart rate racing. It pumps blood to your muscles and makes your eyes widen.
Mark 00:15:41:03 - 00:16:01:02
And all those things are associated with fight or flight response. And it does it automatically and it does it without us realizing it. So the more narrow your template, that is, the more people you see you are of the one race, the more likely you are to have that response. And the stronger that response will be. And so they've shown that.
Mark 00:16:01:02 - 00:16:29:02
Say people from really homogeneous countries such as Japan, where there is a lot more racism which isn't talked about because there's not many other races there. So therefore they don't get, that doesn't get noticed as much. But they have their template is much more narrow and I have a bigger response to other races. And of course, Japanese people can tell the difference between Japanese and Chinese, which to us as Westerners is a really difficult thing to do.
Mark 00:16:29:16 - 00:16:56:07
But because the template is so narrow, they're able to do that and they get those responses too. But us, as in the more heterogeneous societies, we have a wider template. But of course not, not hugely wide. Well, here in Australia we hardly ever see Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and so therefore we still have this response to individuals who we don't see a lot and we need to just widen that template.
Mark 00:16:56:07 - 00:17:16:14
But the really cool thing is that you can widen that template by just seeing a lot of faces. So if we actually were constantly seeing lots and lots of different faces that would actually widen the template, but unfortunately we're getting the opposite effect because all the social media programs of course, run algorithms to make sure that we're seeing what we're used to and what we like.
Mark 00:17:16:14 - 00:17:36:06
And so if you look at anyone's feed, that will usually be the same faces that they would like to see, which of course ends up being same race. And so therefore we're actually making it more narrow rather than wider. But hopefully at some stage governments will start legislating. Then we'll get rid of those algorithms and that won't happen anymore.
Mark 00:17:36:06 - 00:17:40:17
And hopefully we will, um, get, um, head back in a good direction.
Trisha 00:17:40:24 - 00:17:42:16
Appreciate your optimism. Yeah.
Mark 00:17:43:20 - 00:17:45:18
I can only hope.
Trisha 00:17:46:23 - 00:18:10:07
That’s right. And I guess really what you're talking about here is and in your book, you spoke about the brain's limited capacity to think. And because we can't sort of stop and think, we therefore lead to that automatic fight or flight which which then I think is part of what sits behind what we talk about as unconscious bias. Would that be correct?
Mark 00:18:10:21 - 00:18:42:09
Yeah, beautiful summary. We be we because the world's extremely complicated. It's a very complex world and we our perception of the world is based on what we call our working memory. And you can call it consciousness if you like, but it's, it's, it's your working memory. And your working memory is really limited. It's what we originally talked about seven slots in your working memory, so you're only able to, which is why phone numbers used to be limited to six or seven numbers because that's all you could hold in your working memory while you dial those numbers.
Mark 00:18:42:09 - 00:19:04:11
So it's really, really limited and there's lots of cool experiments that you can view online around. This is monkey business where, you know, there's a bunch of basketballs or tossing basketball, and if you concentrate on the basketballs, all you see is the basketballs. But then if you actually are told there’s actually a monkey walk through the middle and there’s lots of other examples of that.
Mark 00:19:04:17 - 00:19:26:17
But we don't see everything. We only see what we're actually attending to, because your attention is what determines what goes into your working memory. And then your working memory is really limited. So you can only have a certain amount of information in that working memory at any one time. And so most of what we do is automatic. It's stuff that is habitual or it's stuff that's already in our heads as this is the way the world is.
Mark 00:19:26:17 - 00:19:47:04
And this is the way I'm going to see it. And so we walk around the world most of the time doing stuff which is habitual. So there's cues that then set off, trigger either a behaviour or a thought, and then we get rewarded for that. And that gets reinforced and we keep doing whatever that happens to be. And it's amazing how much of what we do every day is is really, really just habitual.
Mark 00:19:47:04 - 00:20:13:10
You probably note I keep drinking water because it's what I automatically do and I just notice it's three quarters gone already, even though I hadn't realized I was drinking water. And we do a lot of those things every day, which is why it is so hard to shift in organizations and organizations they have. They go through all these processes where they want to shift to a new culture or they want to shift to a new working environment or something within within the organization.
Mark 00:20:14:07 - 00:20:40:08
But they don't change all the cues and most cues are environmental cues. And so they say you've got to do all these things, but unless you actually change the cues that are actually causing the bad edges that are actually happening, everyone would just go back to the way it was because that's the way our brains actually work. And what you've gotta do is set up different cues and different um, you know, different environments so that people will shift their behaviours to that.
Mark 00:20:40:08 - 00:20:41:17
Why is it doing this.
Trisha 00:20:42:01 - 00:21:06:07
And sort of a side thought, but because it's in my head and because I know some of my listeners will be thinking it as well, because over the years I've worked with a number of people who have grown up globally and often referred to as Third Culture Kids. You've probably heard of them and people who are, you know, who’s mums and dads might be from very different cultures, so Cross-Cultural Kids.
Trisha 00:21:06:07 - 00:21:33:10
So the TCKs and the CCKs will be saying, well, I didn't grow up with a limited, you know, a limited palate I grew up with, with great exposure. And so if we could all help everybody to see more, we’d overcome that, which I guess is possibly part of those cues. But is there any research around that? You know, we're looking at people who have grown up with different templates.
Mark 00:21:34:13 - 00:21:59:07
Yeah, there is a bit so there’s been quite a bit worked on in the US because, you know, they have quite a multicultural society and even in the US, most of the people, they actually have quite a narrow template and they have a bias towards seeing white people as being the more positive and black people have been more negative because of the media, because now we spend a lot less time actually socialising with each other and a lot more time just watching media.
Mark 00:21:59:12 - 00:22:24:12
And in the US, most of the media portrays white people as being the good ones, being the heroes being the ones that actually have more leading roles in all of the shows and look at Friends and all those things, right? It's all white people, and the black individuals are usually the ones that are in the more negative roles or in side roles or secondary roles.
Mark 00:22:25:01 - 00:22:47:01
And all the analysis shows that white people are on TV they're more. And so even though you've got you can even look at a black person will actually have often their template will be quite narrow and will be narrowed around the white face rather than the black face, even though their family are all African American. That's what they're seeing on TV.
Mark 00:22:47:01 - 00:23:15:21
And they will have those normal, you know, those biases, which is why even that African American police officers will often do things which are quite racist towards African Americans within society because of those templates and because of those biases that they that growing up in that society. So, yes, it can really help. And it's that's good. But it also depends on all these other levels of society that are being constantly being bombarded.
Trisha 00:23:15:21 - 00:23:26:19
Reinforced. Yeah. So is there a way to know when we are relying on bias? You know, is it always unconscious? Can we bring thinking to bear on our bias? Can we use our metacognition in that way?
Mark 00:23:27:12 - 00:23:48:24
Yeah. So I think A. what you need to realize is you are always relying on your long-term memory. You are always relying on these biases, these, these templates that we've got. And so we need to first acknowledge that and then just slow down. And so, you know, the reason we rely so much on the habits is because we're always so busy and we're always trying to react to everything.
Mark 00:23:49:03 - 00:24:10:01
So, you know, when you walk into a room, walk into the room, and stop and breathe and look around and work out how you’re feeling before you actually start interacting with people. Because if you just walk in in a bluster and it happens to be that there's everybody in there who's from a different race, you're going to have this physiological response.
Mark 00:24:10:01 - 00:24:34:23
If you walk walking slowly and realize that you're having this physiological response and breathe deeply. And as you would know by breathing deeply, we slow down our heart rate and slowdown all those fight or flight response. And so on. And so you've been aware of the fact that we all do have these biases. I think it's sad because we talk about it as racism, and as soon as you say we are Australia's go racist country, everyone jumps up and down and it's bluster and all the rest of it.
Mark 00:24:34:23 - 00:24:51:18
Whereas I think if we just said, hang on, everyone is biased wherever you come from, so therefore we all need to be more aware of it. I think that would be a nicer thought. I'd actually tackle it and everyone could then go, okay, we're all like this, so we all need to slow down and we all need to be aware of these issues.
Mark 00:24:51:20 - 00:25:09:10
But slowing down, that's the real thing. And I think that's why it's becoming worse now, because we've all got less time and we're all so busy these days and we all feel as - well we're not really we actually are less productive today. If we slow down, we actually get more done, which would be actually much more beneficial for us all.
Mark 00:25:09:12 - 00:25:12:08
We don't feel better and we’d all relate to each other better.
Trisha 00:25:12:21 - 00:25:40:22
Yes, agreed. So, Mark, you've looked at many brains, which, you know is not something I say to people very often, but what's actually going on in our brains when we are trying to think, you know, when we're trying to to stop, stop the bias or something like that, and and does metacognition show up any differently in the brain from, you know, just just learning or thinking knowledge?
Mark 00:25:40:22 - 00:26:03:06
Yeah, it's a great question. Our metacognition, we believe I mean, metacognition is still debated. I was amazed, I was recently asked to do a debate at one of the universities and I was with what was against, I suppose, you’d say against, where we were discussing AI and I was talking about the fact that AI will never be able to do metacognition.
Mark 00:26:03:06 - 00:26:30:22
And that's really the big difference between AI and us as humans and what makes us intelligent. And AI just fake version of, of us, and he tried to argue that we don't have metacognition, which I don't think anybody in the audience bought it. But, but it's interesting that some people still don't believe that that we don't have metacognition, but it seems to be the frontal lobes that really enable us to do that.
Mark 00:26:30:22 - 00:26:55:06
So we have a big frontal lobe, probably a bigger one than most, but we have big frontal lobes. And that really is the thing that makes us different to most other animals. And that seems to be where our ability to actually think about how we're thinking or think about what we're doing or think about all of these habits and so on.
Mark 00:26:55:14 - 00:27:24:06
Is occurring in us. There's been arguments that octopuses also have metacognition, but they have a completely different brain than what we have. So they've evolved in a completely different trajectory to us. Yeah, because they're able to solve really complex puzzles and complex tasks. And to do that, you really need to think about what you're thinking about how you're doing it rather than just simply reacting to it.
Mark 00:27:24:06 - 00:27:46:11
But yeah, our brains at least, It seems to be that it's the frontal lobes that's actually doing the metacognition, allowing us to think about what we're doing, and then a lot of that primitive stuff in that the fusiform face area that I was just talking about and the amygdala, which fight or flight response and your early perceptual areas and everything, they're more in the back of the brain and in the inside of the brain.
Mark 00:27:46:11 - 00:27:50:19
And so that's where that dissociation between the two seems to happen.
Trisha 00:27:52:04 - 00:28:12:15
So, I mean, have you ever looked at and I know that, you know, as part of research, you give people tasks and you're looking at a functional MRI, so you're looking at areas of the brain operating in action, that's probably a better word is and I don't know what word you’d use, but yeah, I know that they don't really light up.
Trisha 00:28:12:20 - 00:28:23:24
I know that much. But yeah, so do you ever look and think, Oh, this person is a real thinker or or is it not ever apparent from that perspective?
Mark 00:28:24:13 - 00:28:39:12
It's really hard to tell because when we're doing because your brain, all of your brain is active all the time. It's one of those, you know, this whole we only is 10% of our brain is complete nonsense. Yeah, we're using all of our brain all the time and if we didn't, if we weren't, if it wasn't active all the time, then it would die off.
Mark 00:28:39:12 - 00:29:15:16
So luckily, we're using the whole brain at the same time. And when we're doing any of those neuro imaging studies, we're really just looking at the difference between one state and another state and how big a difference that is. So if somebody say when you go into a meditative state or a really relaxed state, then you get into this what we call default network, which is basically the areas that are, usually when you're doing metacognition stuff, your frontal lobes and stuff which are normally really active, they become de-active, so they become really low in activation and other areas become higher in activation.
Mark 00:29:15:21 - 00:29:40:10
And then when you start actually thinking those areas become higher and the other ones become lower. And that's how we see these reds and blues and yellows that we make up on the on the pitches. Right. But so we can only see the difference between one state and another. And so it's it's hard to know whether or not it's because the person is really smart that you're seeing a big difference or because they can really relax themselves really well in the other state.
Mark 00:29:40:10 - 00:30:01:08
And so you get a bigger difference between the two. But there doesn't seem to be any relationship between how much of a difference between two states and how intelligent someone actually is. If that makes any sense, and if you think about it, a lot of people who are extremely intelligent are on all the time. And so therefore you're not going to see the differences.
Trisha 00:30:01:08 - 00:30:01:19
No, that's right.
Mark 00:30:01:19 - 00:30:17:22
Whereas other people who can really relax. But then there are people who are extremely intelligent, you know, Buddhist. I have a colleague who studied Buddhists for a long time, and they can, of course, go into those states very aware and and so on. So they have big differences and big fluctuations in those areas.
Trisha 00:30:18:08 - 00:30:44:23
Yeah. And I we were mentioning before we began recording this that some of the research into cultural intelligence and looking at metacognitive awareness has looked at mindfulness and the impact of how that does help people become more culturally aware. And so it might be that I mean, I have often put it down to that ability to do what you said before.
Trisha 00:30:44:23 - 00:30:49:01
Walk into a room, breathe, slow yourself down, take notice.
Mark 00:30:49:15 - 00:31:03:22
Yeah. And I think people need to appreciate that, what we need to do is a slowdown and different people do that in different ways. I'm a surfer. You know, my wife will say when I'm starting to get too stressed or not, go for a surf.
Trisha 00:31:03:23 - 00:31:04:04
Go for a surf.
Mark 00:31:04:05 - 00:31:22:22
Go get out of here and go for a surf. And that's my happy place. And that just does bring me down. Whereas if you said to me, go and sit in a chair and meditate, it’d drive me nuts, know, and there's now actually a lot of research because there's been a lot of push to actually push meditation practices into schools into it.
Mark 00:31:23:07 - 00:31:42:20
And there's now a lot of research showing that actually can be really detrimental for both teenagers and for kids if they can't do it well. And so for some kids, it works well, but for some kids, they'll get into their own heads and they'll start ruminating about, all these or bad for them, all sorts of things. So meditation is very good for some people, but not for everybody.
Mark 00:31:42:20 - 00:32:12:12
Other people, it's going for a run. Other people. It's, you know, whatever it happens to be, you've got to find your thing that helps you relax and helps you get into that meditative state. And that's really important. I also get into flow when I'm writing and I love getting into that state when I'm writing. But my teenage daughter is an amazing artist and she does it through art and painting and things like that and she can spend about eight, 9 hours just sitting there and all sudden, yeah, you're like, You've got to stop and go to bed.
Mark 00:32:14:01 - 00:32:33:09
But, but, but that's her thing. And I think that's what we've got to we've got to appreciate that there is no one thing for everybody and you know some people like ice baths and other people don't. But some people like sauna’s, some people, you know, it's it's whatever works for you rather than this idea that there’s this one thing that we can hand to everybody and it'll work for everybody.
Trisha 00:32:33:09 - 00:32:56:16
Yes. I have a friend who's a wild swimmer in Scotland, which at this time of the year involves breaking the ice before going for a swim. So, you know, I'm sure that that helps her her her brain function well. Yeah, that that finding what works for you is really, really interesting. And I guess it's part of the sort of the uniqueness of everybody's brain.
Trisha 00:32:57:00 - 00:33:07:17
Maybe too, if we're wanting to create the conditions that will help us to shift, we almost need to know ourselves to be able to to do that.
Mark 00:33:08:14 - 00:33:34:12
Yeah, and that's why metacognition is so important and why that slowing down is so important to giving yourselves time to actually think about these things. We've also got to realize that a lot of our thinking actually happens when we’re asleep sleep, so we go through several stages of sleep and one of those is actually running through scenarios of what happened during the day to come up with better old ways of doing things, which is extremely important for teenagers. To anyone out there who has teenagers,
Mark 00:33:34:14 - 00:34:00:15
You've got to get them to be sleeping 9 hours a night because they learn how to actually empathize and how to relate to other people and how to control their emotions and everything while they're actually sleeping. So it's but it's important for all of us to be doing that. And that actually teaches us a lot also. But being aware of how we're feeling when we wake up and how that may have been because of things that happen at night or things that happened the day before.
Mark 00:34:00:22 - 00:34:18:20
is really important as well. But it's a really it’s meant to be reflective and a beautiful thing about us humans is that we do have these big frontal lobes that allow us to do that and to reflect on our own thinking. So we need to slow down and actually start doing that. Otherwise we’re no better than a lizard, we’re just reacting to our environment
Trisha 00:34:19:08 - 00:35:00:15
Yeah, right. Our problem a little bit is so I'm often doing training and you know in that the the ultimate intention is to create environments where people can shift and yet we don't really have the ability to allow people to apply their unique preferred state. And also people are coming to corporate training now with, you know, brains that have shorter attention spans and are probably looking for, you know, the catchy, the excitement, the shift and light and colour that they're seeing on social media.
Trisha 00:35:00:15 - 00:35:21:08
So often in training, I try and create connections between people and help them to share ideas, but it's, you know, as we try and think about the brain and we think about society and as you see before social media and all of the things that we're living with and working with, there are some challenges there .
Mark 00:35:22:06 - 00:35:46:07
Absolutely. And I mean, Google does it really well because Google sets up its offices where it has lots of different areas for doing things and for people to actually go to. It has these quiet pods where, you’re not allowed to have any devices and everyone just relaxes and and it has areas where you can have devices sitting and it has meeting rooms where people can get together and collaborate with each other and has boards everywhere and like that.
Mark 00:35:46:08 - 00:36:14:00
They do it really well because they realize that, yeah, people, they want diverse people. They want a multicultural environment because they know that people become more collaborative and more innovative when there's multicultural groups together and they're very good at forming teams and then breaking the teams up and reshuffling them. So that keeps people actually thinking. And so there's all these things that we've got to think about when we're actually thinking about people because our brains are constantly changing.
Mark 00:36:14:00 - 00:36:31:23
And so your brain today is going to be different to the way it was yesterday and then it will be different again tomorrow because it's plastic, because changing it's based on what you're doing and what you're not doing. So we need to realize that if we're in a particular job for a long period of time, that will become habitual.
Mark 00:36:31:23 - 00:36:58:22
And so therefore everything will get embedded into our brains and we'll be using all those cues. And then if you want that person to then change. That's going to be extremely difficult unless you take them out of that environment, put them into another team, put them in another location. Put them, Otherwise it's going to be really, really hardwired in their brain what they're supposed to be doing, which is why you find these people who have been in a job for 25 years and someone comes along and goes there's an easier way to do that.
Mark 00:36:58:22 - 00:36:59:05
And they're like Hm?
Trisha 00:36:59:21 - 00:37:00:17
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mark 00:37:01:00 - 00:37:31:24
I'm not going there. But so we need to realize that their brains are constantly rewiring themselves to make it easier and more efficient for us to do what we're doing at the moment, which is why it's so beneficial to do lots of different things because then you’re exercising all of your brain, it's all changing the time. And so it's much better for your brain to be doing that than to be doing the same thing all the time because it just becomes hardwired and becomes really automatic and it becomes something that you just regimented over and it can't change after a while or you find it much more difficult.
Mark 00:37:32:00 - 00:37:33:16
You can change but you find it more difficult.
Trisha 00:37:33:18 - 00:37:57:15
Yeah, yeah. The work the work is as much tougher. Yeah, I think. I think this is incredibly optimistic. And that's what I felt about your your book you wrote about how the evolution of the human brain can Save the World is the subtitle of the book, which which is titled The Connected Species. And so you describe a lot of the problems that we've been discussing here.
Trisha 00:37:57:15 - 00:38:20:07
But but your tone is positive, and your tone is to encourage people to reach towards connection and and that we're not stuck in who we are today, that we can be different tomorrow. And I think that's holding that, you know, that thought is a is a very positive one and can help shape us towards working better and being better.
Mark 00:38:20:21 - 00:38:37:19
Yeah. And I think we need to realize that the society that we've created, we've created this society and the environment that we have at the moment. We've created this environment of all that we've allowed to happen. And so we can change it if we want to. And I think that's what we need to realize. I talked about patriarchy before, and I think we can.
Mark 00:38:38:02 - 00:39:06:02
Yes, yes, we're a patriarchal society here in Australia at the moment, but we can change that if we want to as a group, Right. This is is this not it's not a natural thing. Patriarchy is not natural at all. In actual fact, and so, we can change that if we want. Neoliberalism. We can change that. You know, if we decide that the way workers are being treated at the moment isn't right, if we want to start paying our nurses and paying our teachers and everyone more so that they're respected more, then start respecting them more.
Mark 00:39:06:02 - 00:39:32:01
We can do that if we want to because it's our society. We just have to have the gumption to actually go, Hang on, this isn't working for everyone. So let's do something different. We have a small number of really, really powerful multinational tech companies that are doing some pretty horrendous things. But I mean, I just noticed that the the US Senate has just subpoenaed all of the CEOs of all the big tech companies.
Mark 00:39:32:18 - 00:39:57:07
And so there's going to be huge court case over the next couple of months looking at the data, their lack of support and lack of control over - children. You know, the way children are targeted on social media. So that's great, right? So, yeah, they're becoming aware and they're going to hopefully do something about it. And that could result in jail time for these CEOs.
Mark 00:39:57:11 - 00:40:07:21
So yeah, I think we just need to realize that it's our society that we've created and we can create a different society. If we want to. We just have to be strong enough to do it.
Trisha 00:40:08:13 - 00:40:27:09
Fantastic. Well, I want to close off with a quote from your book. It's actually right at the end of the book and it's just really encouraging. So “and finally, there's a lot of pain and suffering in the world If we all love it a little harder, cared a little more, hugged a little stronger and open our circles a little wider.
Trisha 00:40:27:20 - 00:40:51:12
Fewer people would feel lonely and depressed. Our brains would be awash with happy neurotransmitters and we would all feel, as we fundamentally are part of the connected species.” Thank you so much, Mark, for sharing with us today. I'll put links to your website, to your LinkedIn profile and to your book in the show notes so that people can learn more about what you're doing.
Trisha 00:40:51:12 - 00:40:59:16
I think it's really important and it's been helpful for us here as we think about how to help people Shift as well. Thank you so much.
Mark 00:41:00:19 - 00:41:02:11
Thank you Trisha, it’s been great talking to you.
Trisha 00:41:02:20 - 00:41:09:03
Thank you.