← Mindset Neuroscience Podcast
Mindset Neuroscience Podcast
Your brain doesn’t do reality – it does probability: And this is how we update the code.
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- [00:09]
A
Welcome to the Mindset Neuroscience Podcast. Today's conversation is one that I believe has the power to shift how we see ourselves not just as individuals, but as a species. Navigating uncertainty, conflict, and multiple challenges that relate to power dynamics and situations that can feel out of our control. My guest is Dr. Nicholas Wright, a neuroscientist who has had a very interesting journey from treating patients as a neurologist in London and Oxford, to advising the Pentagon on nuclear strategy and the neuroscience of decision making under extreme pressure. What struck me the most about his work and this conversation is that whether we're making decisions about global security or navigating a difficult moment in our lives, we're working with the same fundamental tool, the human brain. And the better we understand how our brains work, where our reactions and strategies and decisions come from, the wiser we can become. Nicholas introduces us to the RAF reality, anticipation and flexibility. These three capacities our ability to stay grounded in what's actually happening, to imagine possible futures, and to update our understanding when reality doesn't match our predictions. These are essential not just for military strategy, but for how we show up in our relationships, our work, and our own growth. We explore how our brains are constantly running models, making predictions about the world based on our past experiences. And here's the thing, we don't see reality directly. We see our brain's predictions about reality. Understanding this changes so much about our lives and our understanding of ourselves and others behaviors. Because once we recognize that we're operating from a model, we have the chance to start asking, is this model serving me? Is it accurate? And a really important question, what am I missing? What I love about Nicholas's work is that it's grounded in both rigorous science and deep optimism. He works with people at the highest levels of power who are reflective, thoughtful, and genuinely interested in understanding how we can improve our chances for peace and human thriving through self knowledge. And that's the invitation of this conversation to recognize that understanding ourselves better isn't just about benefiting ourselves. It's also an essential strategic tool for building the world we want to live in. At the end of the day, there's no one on this planet who isn't affected by war or by conflict and by the accumulated decisions of generations before us. We're all a part of these interconnected systems. And the more of us who understand our own mental models, our predictions, our assumptions, and how we interact with uncertainty and conflict, the more powerful we become as a collective intelligence. And that is my optimism for our species that the more we tune in and understand how our brains work, how much prediction and our past experiences and assumptions play a role in how we operate, the more we might be able to really understand deeper roots of behaviors and the patterns that intertwine and interconnect all of us and that intertwine throughout our lives, from our past to our current moment to our future. And I believe that type of understanding and complexity based systems thinking is our best path forward as a species to become not just intelligent in the sense of being clever or accumulating more information, but wiser in really asking ourselves what honestly matters, what questions are worth us pursuing, and how do we tap into our highest levels of collective intelligence to innovate ourselves out of many of the problems that we have created. So I invite you to listen to this conversation with curiosity, to notice your own mental models as we talk about how brains shape war and war shapes brains. I invite you to consider where in your own life you might benefit from more anchoring into reality, to really tuning in to what your mental models might be missing, how you can have more thoughtful kind of anticipation and more flexibility in your approaches, in your pathways to understanding what is happening for you and what is happening for others. Because this conversation isn't just about strategy at the Pentagon. It's about the strategy of being human, of understanding ourselves well enough to make choices that serve not just our own well being, but the collective flourishing of all of us. Thank you for joining. Hi Nicholas. Thank you so much for joining me on this podcast.
- [05:42]
B
Thank you so much for having me.
- [05:44]
A
I'll have done a little introduction before this for my audience to know a bit about your work, but how I always start my interviews is asking a little bit about your journey, about how you got to the place where you are at now, what, what has inspired you and motivated you over the years. So I'd love to hear that.
- [06:03]
B
Yeah, so I was a, I was a neurology doctor, so I treated patients in London and in Oxford. And you know, I did that ultimately because I love science and because I wanted to help people. And I know that sounds very cliched, but I think that's actually why a lot of people go into medicine. And then I became just obsessed with the brain, fascinated by the brain and our new technology we had for understanding the brain, so functional brain imaging and so on. And so I then spent a number of years using functional brain scanning and computational techniques to look at how people make decisions so about things like rewards and risks and punishments, fear, emotions, social motivations. And so I did all of that at the lab that DeepMind was spun out of in London, the people who do a lot of AI work. And I then moved to, I really wanted to apply that, all of these new things we were learning about the brain, we were learning so many new exciting ideas about the brain, but obviously they need to be applied to the real world if they're going to have traction. And so what I wanted to do is I wanted to apply them to a really big set of challenges, which is insecurity. So I moved to Washington D.C. through a slightly securitist route and then worked at a think tank, one of the big think tanks working on nuclear strategy, nuclear weapons. Because actually what you're trying to do when you're thinking about nuclear weapons is influence how other people are thinking, right? You can't win a nuclear war. You don't want to fight a nuclear war. What you want to do is influence others to prevent a nuclear war from happening. And then if there is one that occurs, then how can you control escalation? So I moved to Washington and I started working with the Pentagon and I've worked, now I moved back to London, but I've continued working with the Pentagon, now the joint staff, for over 10 years. And I advise on a range of different things to do with the brain. And they, you know, talk to me and bring me loads of really exciting and interesting challenges and really important challenges to do with the real world. And, and that is the origin of this book. You know, we're in a really important time and we need to understand ourselves better as humans so we can avoid wars. And if we must fight a war, we can hopefully win a war.
- [08:14]
A
Yes. So powerful. What I love about the premise of your book, and it sounds like your work, is this idea that when we think about war shaping the brain, the brain shapes war. And you go into this field of uncertainty and these very big decisions, it still comes down to one human brain and another human brain or brain body system, and they are interacting. And there's this accumulation of our past and all of our predictive models and histories that kind of come into a point, a moment in time and then all of that mixing together. So even if people are not necessarily making giant decisions like they are doing in the think tanks, we are still humans who are constantly interacting, being affected by these bigger decisions. And then also I think having this idea of reflecting on our own self, understanding is something that could change the world, that the more of us who understand our models, our predictions, our assumptions and how we interact with uncertainty and with Whatever is happening in our world, the more of us who understand that, I think the more powerful we become as a species, collectively and wiser, which is a topic that you bring up in your book. So I'd love to explore. The first kind of premise that I looked at in your book was the idea of models. That is a very big part of this book of our understanding of ourselves. And you also talk a little bit about the RAF framework, reality, anticipation, flexibility. So I'd love to explore that for, for my audience to understand. Like this is, this is one of the pillars of us understanding ourselves better is understanding models and how they affect us. I'd love to explore that.
- [10:04]
B
I mean, I would love to explain it. I've written a whole book about it. So obviously I find it fascinating. And this is one of the central ideas of modern neuroscience. So the question, like a question is, why do you have a brain, Stephanie? Why does every listener, viewer out there have a brain? Why do I have a brain? The reason we have a brain is to. And the reason why every organism has a brain is to link senses. It's a process that helps link senses to actions that help us achieve our goals. Okay. And in fact, you don't even need a brain to do this. So if you have an amoeba, you know, one of those tiny single celled organisms you might remember from, from school, from high school, an amoeba senses what's going on in the environment, maybe some chemicals or whatever, and then it moves in a direction to try and, you know, achieve its goal of getting some food and surviving and reproducing and, and that's ultimately what our brains are for. That's what all brains are for. And so we have this model that helps link senses to action to help us achieve our goals. And it sounds very simple and, but obviously, as you get to ever more complex creatures, you can layer more and more and more onto that. So, for example, right down in the brainstem, we have really simple models that do things like pain. Okay, so that's so pain is a tissue damage alert system. So it's saying, you know, there's some sensation comes in and then, you know, there's some actions that come out that help us withdraw our hand from a sharp object or whatever. But the model that sits, the process that links sensation to action is more useful than just, ah, you've been poked in the leg, now you need to right, move your leg. So we have much more sophisticated models than that. So for example, if you're a Spitfire pilot, say you're flying in a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain and you get hit by a bullet, you're not immediately overwhelmed by pain. Your model can actually dial pain up or down, depending on what you need to do. And so often people hit by bullet will describe it as a. Something like a prodding finger or being hit by a lump of mud, right? And the reason is, is that they, they, they can then when the pain is dialed down like that, they can then decide, you know, do I fly, continue my mission, Do I take down the German bomber, Do I fly back to base, Do I warn my comrades that there are measure smiths behind us, whatever it might be? So that's one example for model right at the very base of our brain. Then as you go through the brain, that there are many more models layered on top. So emotions, for example, models that help us take in something like a looming, fearful stimulus. And then there's some responses, right, that help us, a broad set of responses to help us react to. That's kind of what emotions are. And then we get to really amazing models which are actual simulations of the world. And, and these are quite remarkable. So a little bit above emotions, a little bit in the brain, above the areas that deal with emotions, is an area called the hippocampal entorhinal cortex. So a bit of a mouthful, but the gist is a long, thin area. And it literally has models of the terrain of the world around you, models of the physical world. Maps, right? These are maps of the world, and that's not a metaphor. These maps are literally in there. So you can literally see, right, if you just put a grid of electrodes into a rodent's br brain. You take a rodent, you put a grid of electrodes into the brain, you can read out exactly where that rodent is just by looking at their map in their brain, where they are physically in the real world. Okay? And you have exactly that kind of map in your brain. We now, we've shown this in humans. That's how we navigate around the world. We have these maps. And so those models are much more sophisticated. And then we can get to all sorts of other layers of models. I won't give you, obviously, I've written a whole book in which there are so many of these types of models. But, for example, I now have a model of you. So I can model you, I can simulate Stephanie in my head and try and predict what it is that you're going to do. So we can collaborate together or if I was playing tennis against you, so we could compete with each other, right. Am I going to try and hit a cross court or down the line to try and, you know, win a point in tennis, for example? And then, as you said, there's this remarkable capacity. We actually have models. We can model ourselves so we can think about our own thinking. So we started at the brainstem, right at the very base of the human brain. And the book goes all the way through the brain through to the frontal pole, which is this area right at the very other end. And that's the most distinctively human area of the brain. It's the most different in humans compared to other animals. The frontal pole, the bit just find your forehead. And it's really important for thinking about our own thinking. So for modeling yourself, for saying, for example, I've just made a decision, how certain am I, how uncertain am I? Right. When should I change my mind? Right. How confident am I in this decision? Or, you know, if you're a leader, you're, you know, how confident am I that this is the right course for us to take? How confident am I that people are going to follow me, whatever it might be? And so we can do this really remarkable thing of thinking about our own thinking. And so what we end up with is an orchestra, not one model, but in our brain, an orchestra of models. And that orchestra of models in our brain helps us navigate the world in so many remarkable ways, including to make wiser choices which involve self reflection and asking how we are operating in the world to understand ourselves better.
- [15:43]
A
I love that. And as you're speaking, I'm thinking about how we can apply this to our interpersonal relationships. But society, community. So I'm seeing this one realm where these predictive model, these kind of predictions and these models that we've built up over time, they can get us in trouble sometimes because we might already have these predictions about how a person is, or we've labeled them in some way, or giant groups of people. So I think there's this place where it can create some of our challenges in life because of that. So then how do you think that we can take this understanding of these models to sometimes move us away from getting in trouble because of how much bias or assumptions we're making and what could we do to improve that and update that?
- [16:35]
B
So, I mean, I think the thing to remember is that it's absolutely remarkable that we can function at all. You know, it's like, I mean, you, for example, if you so chose, you could go now and you could fold a basket of laundry, right? That is beyond the capabilities for the world's. You. You would outperform the world's most sophisticated robot at folding laundry, you'll be pleased to hear. Almost certainly. So you know, is it. But it's right. You know, we are incredible. We have amazing brains and it's incredible that can do anything at all. So we, you know, for example, your, your eyes have, you know, the retinas have about 120 million light receptors, right. Six to seven million for, for color and fine detail. Right in the center. Right, right. Just in the center. It's absolutely mind boggling that we can cope with that just daily fire hose information the whole time. So we have to use these models of the world because if we didn't, we would never be able to cope. Right. With the world as it is. Right. We couldn't sense things and we couldn't act. So we have to use these models of the world. Now that said, it's exactly as you say with anything that brings benefits. It's like a medicine. Any medicine that can actually help you can also harm you. And there are always this benefit. So the first thing is to be aware of how our models work. And you are absolutely right. You know, there are problems that arise from our models, exactly as you said. I mean, you know, we, I mean there are so many different ways we can think about this. But take for example, you talked about social groups, so you are entirely correct. And we have to categorize people very, very quickly. That's just the way it has to be. There is no alternative to that because there is again, so much. I'm looking at your face now and I'm working out roughly what you're thinking purely for, just for some, for some light, you know, some sound waves and some visual input. How on earth am I doing that? So we have to make assumptions, right? But of course what we can do is we can reflect. And this is like one of the key things about, about wisdom. So people can be very clever, right? So like the people in the Big Bang theory, they're very clever guys that, you know, those guys at Caltech in the, in the, in the comedy program the Big Bang. But they're not very wise. They come up with these clever ideas and clever schemes, but then they don't see like obvious ways in which they're missing parts of the big picture. That means they're going to end up, you know, getting themselves into a terrible pickle. And that's the gist of every episode in that, in that program. So wisdom is about stopping and Reflecting and saying, oh, that's an important part of it is stopping and reflecting and asking yourself, for example, how certain am I about this? You know, what, how sure am I? And so if we're thinking about other people, for example, what do I know about these other people? What, how does the story appear to them? But it's important to remember that this will, we can never do this perfectly. And so the answer is always to do the best that we, that we can. And also to remember that people are busy. You know, so one of my favorite quotes and like so many quotes on the, you know, you discover on the Internet now that they're not, they may, they may, may not have been said in the first place, but it was Oscar Wilde, right? Oscar Wilde said, you know, the famous playwright Oscar Wilde, and he said, you know, the problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings, right? So, and so not talk about socialism. But, you know, there's only so much people can be worried about their own biases and their brains and what they're going on about, right. I mean, I care about these things deeply, but there's only so much, you know, only so many hours in the day. And so we have to think about some practical ways that we can enhance our, make ourselves wiser, help, help us reflect and realize that that's only ever going to be part of, we're going to ever achieve something. Hopefully we can achieve enough. We can achieve enough. And, and, and that's just going to have to be the best that we can, we can, we can do.
- [20:43]
A
Yeah. Yes. And in your book, you give one practical idea, I think it was about seeing yourself in, as a third person, like seeing, looking at yourself in that way. Can you describe a little bit about how powerful and important and special it is and what brain systems we're even talking about when a person is able to actually do that?
- [21:06]
B
Yeah, Well, I mean, it's areas like the precuneus, which this all but the brain areas is. Even for someone like me who spent years and years and years fiddling about with brains, there are a lot of brain areas and they all get very confusing. But there are areas we have for taking perspectives for what's called perspective taking. And so that's areas in three main sort of sets of areas in the brain that involve what's called association cortex. This is the kind of, this is the, the big, the cortex is the big bit of brain on top that you kind of imagine when you think of the brain. So I see cortex behind you. It's A big bit of immediately behind your head, there we go. That's kind of cortex, right? And there are big parts of cortex that are about sensation. So visual cortex for seeing things or hearing things or touching things. And there are big parts that are for generating actions, right? So what's called motor cortex, but what's between sensation and action is what could colloquially be called thinking, right? These bits of brain that sit for association cortex, and they're called that they're really football could be called thinking. And so three big areas of association cortex have to do with taking perspectives on others, right? These, this, this kind of perspective taking. And so how do we, how do we kind of do that practically? So if we want to make wiser choices, so not just clever, but wiser and to. Then what do we mean by wiser? So, but the definition of wisdom that I use is a definition I think fits with basically a super duper version of the model that, you know, a sparrow would have or a chimp would have. But we can do so much more with our model. So I think wisdom is seeing the bigger picture about ourselves in the world so that we can choose actions that help us live better. Right? That's kind of a souped up version of what an amoeba does or my fruit flow does or whatever. But that's what we can do with our amazing capabilities. And so what we can do when we can take a third person perspective, for example, is we can say, well, how long would you're planning a project? Say, how long would this project take? If I were advising somebody, you know, advising a colleague to do this project. And so that's a way of getting a good third person perspective. Another thing you can do, something I do in, in the book is so if you're very familiar with something, you, you can build up fluency. And fluency makes you feel confident that you know what's going on. But actually fluency can lead you down the wrong path because you're. When something feels fluent, you feel confident. But that's an erroneous degree of confidence. So, for example, we. I live through a lot of the last 25 years of history, right? So instead of seeing that history from our perspective, from the perspective of an American person or, or a British person, in the last chapter, I see that. Look at that through the eyes of a Chinese viewer, right? So if you look at the same beneficiary trying to look from a different perspective, that's not to say their perspective is better than our perspective, but it's just different. It helps US see things differently. You can get people to critique you. So for example, Winston Churchill, he deliberately chose as his chief military advisor in World War II, somebody would argue with him, right? Somebody who would stand up to him. He didn't want yes men. He wanted people who would push back. And so they would interrogate his, they would interrogate his ideas. And if you present your ideas to others, they can interrogate them because it's always easier to see nonsense when other people are talking than when you're talking yourself. So there are all these different ways we can do it. I think we're going to see this. So already people like iarpa, which is the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency. So this is like the darpa. Darpa, the defense one, invented the Internet and all the stealth bombers and that kind of stuff. And IARPA does stuff like that for the intelligence community. And they're already trying to create automated AI systems for helping us to help and critique what our thinking. Right?
- [25:25]
A
Yeah.
- [25:25]
B
And yeah, and all of this is going to start being rolled out in the near future. There will be tools that help critique our thinking, give us a third person perspective and give us some extra metacognition, extra ways that we can think about our own thinking.
- [25:47]
A
It's really exciting to hear and it makes me kind of just think about the different people in my audience. I have organizational leaders, people who are trying to make change in the world. And it sounds to me like the ability to stay open to what we would call a critique or something that is different than our predicted or just default kind of model or perception of the world is so powerful. So I feel like there's a little bit of a connection with prediction error, which I know is a very emerging also field of neuroscience too is really studying that. And even I've looked at some research, so I do stuff with brain waves and we see how depending on a person's theory about how intelligence is, whether it's something very innate to a person or it's something that's acquirable changes how their brain processes prediction errors and specifically negative feedback or mistakes. Whether a person stays open and processes the information or they shut off and they don't stay open to that information. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about this idea of prediction error and what happens for us as we get information that's different than the path we were already going down. Like how you're talking about.
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B
Yeah, no, so this is so important. So our models always have to change. You know, for example, we, we, we Perceive the world. And as we said, so our visual models, we, if you look at visual perception, for example, we perceive the world and, and we have too much information coming in for us to just see the world just like on a passive television set in our brains. And so we have to, we basically what we, what we see is a controlled model of the world, right? And an example of that is if I look right at the center of the, of the screen in front of me, the world looks colorful all the way around, right? But actually as I said earlier, only the very center of our retinas have the right type of receptors to really give you fine detail and color. So everything else should look blurry and colorless, but it doesn't. And the reason is, is that I'm perceiving a model of the world. I'm not perceiving the world like on a passive television set. But that model of the world has to be anchored to reality. Because if it's not anchored to reality, then I'm hallucinating literally, not metaphor. I'm literally hallucinating has to be anchored to reality and I have to change my model. So if I, if I'm in London now, but I lived in America and cars drive on the right hand side of the road in America, on the left hand side of the road in Britain, if I literally just don't pay any attention to where the cars are, it will just be run over. So I have to in react, you know, change, update what's going on in the world and change my models of the world and change what I expect to see. So how do I do that? So what's useful is when our model makes predictions of the world, our models are constantly making predictions of the world. And then I update my model, I change my model when those predictions are wrong, when there are errors in those predictions, when there are prediction errors, when reality violates my model of the world. And that can happen in vision, in hearing, but it also can happen in so many other things as you, as you were describing, it can happen in really high level sort of things in our lives. And so for a leader, for example, you were talking about leaders, so or if you're an analyst, you're trying to try and work out what's going on in the world. So one of the things we can do is explicitly ask ourselves how can we, how when something happens in the world, right, There's a prediction error, right? New information comes in. Well, one of the ways that, that IARPA has shown, right, that intelligence analysts who, who are better, or people who are better at predicting the future correctly. One of the ways they're better at predicting the future is they explicitly update. They make changes to their. What they think about the world. And they explicitly do that by saying, I've got this new information. How certain am I about this new information? How. How far should I update my predictions about what's going to happen in the future? So we've had this error. Our model of the world has gone wrong. So we thought that the stock market was going to be going up or down or whatever. And then how far should I change my model of the world? And by explicitly doing that, thinking about our own thinking, explicitly probing our uncertainty, we can make better judgments and update our models of the world better. And we have to change our models. We have to be linked to reality. We have to change our models. And we have to do that throughout the whole of our lives.
- [30:29]
A
I love that. And it makes me think of also just reflecting on, for whether you're part of an organization or you're just part of a family, part of a community, when we're talking about how we're actually updating our models. And I think there's space for us to be more encouraging, enthusiastic and inviting and open to prediction errors. So. Meaning that. Right. And that could even be encouraging ourselves to put ourselves in spaces where we will get information that is very likely different than what we normally surround ourselves with.
- [31:08]
B
That is a brilliant. And the thing is, is that. So two of the examples I give in the book. So I don't know if you've ever been to Robin island, which is where Nelson Mandela was in Castle. So Nelson Mandela was the leader of the African National Congress, the leader of the sort of black freedom movement in South Africa. And he was in prison for very many years on Robin island. And he was literally in a tiny prison cell. After a while, they allowed him access to books and so on. And he was a very clever guy. And he basically taught himself a huge amount learning in his tiny prison cell. Right. And he then taught that to other prisoners in. In this prison, in this really tough prison. So if Nelson Mandela can, you know, keep himself open to new and diverse and different ideas, then we can do it. Or Dwight Eisenhower. Right. So Dwight David Eisenhower, who was the Allied supreme commander at D Day and then went on to be the US President. So he obviously had a very successful career. But earlier on in his career, Dwight Eisenhower wasn't doing very well. And he was sent as a relatively junior officer to Panama, which was not like a Prime posting. He was sent to Panama. And what really changed his career was a mentor there. Made him read lots of different history, lots of different Shakespearean plays, actually gave him lots of different types of information. And he used that like Nelson Mandela did on Robin Island. He used that to improve his just tapestry of knowledge, his knowledge about the world. And then that gave him. He consciously thought about what was flowing into his brain and he could then use in the future. And if, you know, if Eisenhower can do that as a junior officer in Panama and Mandela can do it, you know, incarcerated on Robben Island, I think we can probably do it in our lives even when it seems like we're overwhelmed by TikTok or Twitter or whatever. Actually we all have the time and space to do this if we choose. And we can give ourselves better, more interesting and more, you know, heterogeneous sets of inputs to help models of the world.
- [33:22]
A
Yes. And we have this ability as humans to have an intention about what we expose ourselves to and the inputs that we take in. Your book talks about your note of optimism, exploring humanity's capacity for destruction. And you write, the more I learn about humans, the more I like them. Can you explain a little bit about what you mean by that?
- [33:54]
B
Yeah, I mean, the thing is, is that so obviously, I mean, it's a book about war and the brain. And that could be. Oh, you know, this is also. Yes. That is part of us, you know, we can't pretend. And I wrote this book because I really worry that a lot of people pretend that war and conflict is something like, you know, Steven Pinker, for example, the better angel. Better angels of our nature. Don't worry, it's fine. Or Robert Sapolsky wrote a book, you know, again, about the brain and conflict. It was like, oh, we just. Basically, the way to solve it is just be nice to each other. And I was like, we need to have a more realistic view of humans and conflict is part of us. We need to understand how that happens in order to avoid wars and win wars if we, if we need to fight them. But there is no, there is no aspect of self knowledge about humans that doesn't also contain reasons for optimism. You know, yes, for example, we have the capacity to lie and deceive and so on, but that can often be used for good. So, you know, there were resistance heroes who lied to the Germans in order to save hundreds of thousands of people from the gas chambers. Yes. The end of World War II was a brutal relief in many ways. But then actually we reconciled the Americans, the British, the French, we reconciled incredibly well with the Germans. And actually Germany is a lovely, wonderful country today. We didn't just say they're irreconcilably bad guys. And that took years. So the war ended in 1945. Right. The way up to consistently up to 1949. Polling in, in Germany showed that a majority of Germans who were polled had thought that Nazism was a good idea. Badly applied. Right. It took years. Still, in 1952, a quarter of Germans had a favor who were polled, had a favorable opinion of Hitler. Right. You can see why people would have been a bit miffed about that after, after the catastrophe of World War II, which is definitely, definitely the Germans started that one, but actually we didn't. And so you see someone like Churchill, who at the beginning of his huge book about history of World War II, he says that the moral of the, one of the key morals he has right at the very beginning is in victory, magnanimity. And yes, humans have an incredible capacity for violence and conflict, but you also have an incredible capacity for creativity and for reconciliation. And that's the kind of thing that really makes me optimistic. Not pretending we're something we're not, but understanding us in the fullness of what it is to be a human. And that's there is conflict in that and there is reconciliation and creativity and construction. And for all those reasons I'm really optimistic.
- [36:59]
A
Yes, that's really beautifully put. I'm a part of a group that was launched by mit, but we're collaborating with another kind of giant global initiative in Geneva. And a talk that we're going to be doing in November is on translation transfer and transcendence. And the theme of it is that we are trying to get more transdisciplinary kind of thinking for many different fields to talk together, but also to help people move from this place of talking about ideas and going into real life applications, which is a very big part of your book. What would be some ideas you have for people, whatever place they are in society right now, of how do they maybe get better at self understanding and even learning about the brain and all of this and how would we do some of this work in real life?
- [38:00]
B
I mean, so look, as I said, I, I, you've, we've also got to be, you know, remember the, the, the Oscar Wilde quote, You know, the problem with socialism is it takes too many evenings. Like I'm not saying people need to read, go away and spend five years like a monk or a nun in a cell somewhere, reading purely about, you know, that's absolutely not the point. So I think it's about, yes, read a little bit about war. And we didn't need to worry about that so much 15 years ago because we were in one of the best bits of history, certainly in the west, and we didn't need to worry. We weren't going to lose a war, so we didn't need to worry about it. But that's no longer the way the world is. So I think read a little bit about that. Read a bit about technology. Take some time to reflect. So Churchill, for example, when he, he, you know, he. Under the colossal pressures of, you know, literally years in World War II as the prime minister, and he valued the trips he took across the Atlantic on ships to go and see President Roosevelt, and he valued that time he had to stop and reflect. And so I think that's really valuable. And, you know, there again, like Eisenhower or, or Mandela, we, you know, who are two, you know, epic Titanic figures. So I'm not saying we can all be like that, but we can, we can have a better understanding. We can build a slightly better tapestry of knowledge. We can have better understanding of where we are ignorant, for example, which is very important. We can have better ignorance. All of these are practical, practical things. And I would say that that is really. And another thing is not to be despondent because, for example, people are, oh, you know, we're all doomed because everyone's watching TikTok or they're listening to podcasts. Although I like podcasts, obviously I'm on a podcast right now. But, you know, we're all doomed. But the thing is, is that actually, for example, in the United States, the sales of physical books is not going down. People are still reading books. Not everybody is reading books, but a lot of people are reading books. A lot of children, yes, they're on looking at Google shorts or TikTok, whatever. But the thing is, is that a lot of children are not. And those who are on looking at a lot of social media, maybe they should. It's worth just thinking a little bit and thinking, should we just stop that for a bit and try and get some better types of knowledge? We can curate the knowledge coming into our. Into ourselves. So I think those are the types of practical things. Obviously there are lots of other practical sort of things in the book, but I think in terms of building wisdom and so on, I think those are the types of practical things that we can take. And yeah, obviously I would love to talk for more, but I'll leave it at that. For now.
- [41:04]
A
Yeah. Yeah, well, and I would say too that one beauty of human brain body systems is that moment of awareness is a beginning. And sometimes just having that little moment of, oh, I didn't think about my models, I didn't think about this prediction error thing where maybe I could welcome and invite getting something that is contradictory or counter what I normally think. So even just having a little bit of that moment, I think can filter through people's day where as they're going through whatever they normally consume, they have a small moment of, oh, maybe I could pick a completely different source, completely different realm of education or whatever kind of information I'm consuming. So I think that beginning is that awareness. And it doesn't have to look like you're saying extensive amounts of training or devoting lots of time, but just letting those kinds of ideas filter into our day. Yeah. As we have our interaction, it doesn't.
- [42:08]
B
Have to be a labor. You can find the types of things that are more enjoyable. It doesn't have to. You don't have to learn Swahili or, you know, Arabic or Chinese. You can do, find whatever it is that you enjoy.
- [42:21]
A
Yeah.
- [42:21]
B
But it's about trying to find those alternative perspectives, those, those points of new perspective that can, can really benefit you and, and, and, and genuinely, you know, I spend a lot of time now reading about leaders under the most enormous pressure, under the most enormous stress. And all of them, you know, they all benefited from, from having done that in the past and from that enabled them to often then, for example, ask the right questions, which is also really important, and say, for example, and pause. And I think this idea of reflection is really, you don't spend your whole life reflecting because then you'll never actually do anything. So clearly I'm not saying don't reflect. If I'd spent the whole time reflecting about how I should write the book, I never would have written the. You do actually have to do stuff. I'm not saying don't do things, but we also have to, you know, every now and again stop, reflect and say, what am I trying to achieve here? What's the goal? That's really important because often how can I creatively achieve this goal? So you look, for example, at someone like Henry Kissinger or Mao Zedong. Right. It sounds strange, but they were very, very creative in the way that they decided to Mao Tai Dong, for example. He said, my goal is to keep the People's Republic of China Communist. Right. You can have a whole discussion whether that was right or wrong, that that was what he wanted to do. How did he do that? He creatively came up with, you know, he actually got these, set off these four marshals, come up with crazy ideas, they thought, and then he ran with it. The idea of reconciling with the United States, a country which he'd literally fought the Korean War against. Right. They were the actual enemy. And then he creatively worked out they involved Yugoslav fashion shows and ping pong diplomacy and all the rest of it. The Americans and the Chinese very creatively worked out how to build that rapprochement and created peace, you know, and we can, we can do that if we stop and reflect and think what are we trying to achieve? And then what are the means we can use to achieve that?
- [44:33]
A
I love that thinking about tapping into the brain's creativity and doing that by reflecting on our goal and just this term of reflection. And I had someone on the podcast earlier this year, Dr. Mary Helen Imodino Yang, and she does a lot of work on transcendent thinking, systems thinking, but also very much what happens to the brain when we are very externally oriented all the time, and then when we take some time for that mind wandering, that internal self reflection. And it's really powerful because it actually builds connectivity of all these different networks, the saliency, the executive control and the default mode and all that. So I think just, it's nice for my audience to just think about this idea of just simple reflection, that we're very externally oriented, our attention is always on the stimulus that's outside of us. If we can have some moments where we remove ourselves from that a little bit, reflect on what is my actual goal, what is my truest intention in my life, in whatever sector I'm, you know, interacting with and having that moment, those moments where we take that time for reflection. So would, would you agree that that's a really powerful process?
- [45:47]
B
I would. And I would say it's actually. And again, so that we know where that happens or a key region for that in the brain, which is the frontal pole, this bit right at the front of the brain. We, we know about this. We've had an explosion in our understanding of how humans think about their own thinking, how we reflect and how that happens in the brain over the last 15, 20 years. And, and again, if I had to point to one thing that was true. So that is the part of the brain that is most different to other animals. This is, I would say, in many ways, this ability to think about our own thinking is probably this, the most remarkable thing we can do as humans. Explicitly think about our own thinking. Again, we don't spend all our time doing it or we'd never do any. You'd never do the washing up or, you know, cook dinner or eat anything or do whatever. But every now and again we can make those corrections that can make all the difference, right? The difference between carrying on doing the wrong thing or carrying on doing something not very effectively and suddenly making a huge, you know, a huge leap forwards. And that really is important. And we certainly. They see that in warfare that is really crucial that all, you know, great leaders have this ability to reflect and think and change their mind. And if they can do it, you know, I think we can do it too.
- [47:16]
A
Love that. So just to. As we wrap up, the title of your book is Warhead How War Shapes the Brain. How the Brain Shapes War. There's no one on the planet who is not affected by war. Whether we're thinking past generations of our parents and ancestors and how they have been touched by war, it's just a part of our humanity, really. And I think there's that anchoring to reality that you talk about in the book. Is there anything that you would just like to share overall about your work? Whatever comes to mind about the think tanks you're part of? Uncertainty, War, your book, whatever you'd like to share with my audience?
- [47:54]
B
Yeah, I mean, again, I think it's optimism. I'm genuinely, you know, there are. There's so much pessimism now around which I genuinely find quite, quite surprising. I mean, we're living in a wonderful part of history. If you could have said in so many. Almost every part of history, almost everywhere that's ever existed, you could try. You could either live there or you could live here. I mean, we'd live here. This is great. You know, for example, I work closely with really wonderful people at the Pentagon, and I know that, you know, that sounds like an oxymoron to a lot of people almost, but, you know, for example, the. That we talk about reflection. Right. So the very first general that I briefed in person in the Pentagon, this is just over 10 years ago, he was a brigadier general at that point, and he was. It was just me and him. And he wanted to learn about the brain. He wanted to learn about how. What people thought, how he could influence others, how he could do that to create peace, how he could create the impressions he wanted to create in others. We were talking about Iran and all sorts of things, and he was very tough. He's a tough guy. But in a Tough, but thoughtful, reflective. He then, I then wrote a book about AI a few years later, edited the book and he very kindly wrote a forward for that book. And he was then becoming a major General. And now 10 years on, he is the supreme commander in Europe, right, for the American military, for NATO. He is the number one. He's a now a four star. He's got all four stars, which is the most you can get in peacetime in the American military. And you know, I've interacted with him a number of times and he is just a thoughtful, tough, reflective, interesting, interested person who I have a lot of respect for. And you know, there are lots of people like that in positions of authority. And I think there's just lots of reasons to be much more hopeful than a lot of, a lot of people are. And so I think let's be optimistic. And that's not founded in pretending we're not, you know, we are, you know, pretending with something we're not. It's seeing what we really are, understanding ourselves. And, and I think we can, through self knowledge of why we fight wars, why we lose and win wars, we can, we really can build a more peaceful world through self knowledge. And that really does make me optimistic. So that is the key message.
- [50:13]
A
Beautiful. And I very much agree. I think this podcast is a great reflection of that optimism that we are a species. That we are a species. I can edit all that out. That we are a species that is hungry for learning. And there's this, this neuroscientist that you might know, Stanislaus Dehen, he talks about. Yeah, we are not just Homo.
- [50:39]
B
Just to say. My first ever scientific paper was a debate as part of a debate between Stanislaus Dahan and my then professor, Kathy Price about the visual word form area. But that is really small part of the brain that is really very exciting. So I know, I know Stanislav, I know he's worked very well.
- [50:57]
A
Yes, oh yes. And I just love his quote, or a quote that may not be totally from him, but he talks about we're not just Homo sapiens, we're homo docents, meaning we're the species that teaches itself. And I feel like that. Right. That's a very big part of why we can be optimistic is that we do have this. And you talk about in your book too, the power of language, our ability to teach and share knowledge. And it's clear that we're hungry for it. That's why we are listening. Anyone's listening to this podcast right now?
- [51:25]
B
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And the thing is Every generation, you know, my grandfather's generation, he fought in World War II. You know, we know we know more than them and that they, they did a good job, I think, or they certainly did their best in very tough circumstances. But we know more than them. And my children hopefully will know more than me. And, and that, you know, is another reason to be very optimistic about the future because, you know, each generation can know more. And for a long time now, each generation has known more. And I think we can continue that.
- [51:55]
A
Yes. Beautiful. And to wrap that up just with a final reflection to me is we can know more, but when we include the idea of wisdom is we're not just accumulating information just to have information or be clever. We're thinking about how it all connects together, who we are, how we take another's perspective, how we invite getting our. The theories we have to get holes poked in those theories. So it's about not just the information, but how we can share wisdom and even teach people how to increase their capacity for wisdom, which I think is a very big part of your book. So, yes, thank you so much for being on here. I would love for people to know more about where they can reach you. So where would be a good place?
- [52:43]
B
Yes, I'm on LinkedIn or Twitter. It's NicholasD Wright. I would love people send emails and comments. I do receive emails and comments often and I'm very happy to respond and I would love to come and give talks and do things. So yeah, please do get in contact.
- [53:00]
A
Thank you. It was an absolute honor to have you on the podcast. Is there anything, any final thought you'd like to share that we missed?
- [53:08]
B
I've given optimism and I think optimism for the future is a good place to end, grounded in actual science. So optimism grounded in, in science and real world practical applications.
- [53:23]
A
Yes, I love that. Thank you.
- [53:27]
B
Thank you very much.
- [53:36]
A
Thank you for joining me for that episode. As always, you can get all the links and references to what we talked about in this conversation@stephaniefay.com podcast and I want to leave you with just some thoughts that if something in this conversation resonated with you, if you felt a pull toward understanding your own mental models differently and to potentially see them with more clarity or to reflect on what might be missing from some of the mental models you have, the predictions you have about a particular person in your life or groups of people, something helpful to know is that simply that kind of curiosity and that desire to open up your model to have more information flow in that, in and of itself is a new activation of circuitry and that's the kind of brain activity that helps us become better at recognizing patterns. As I've said before, we're pattern recognition creatures and the better we get at connecting dots and seeing more expansive, exploratory, diverse kinds of pathways of how we can understand our world, the more complex and sophisticated and nuanced our thinking actually becomes. And that is part of the path to having range and repertoire of our action sequences and our ways of responding to people and events in our life. The more flexible we become, the more agile we are. And that is really what it means to be human. I talk a lot about this kind of flexibility and range and repertoire in many of my articles, so you can check any of Those out@stephaniefay.com blog. I also just want to let you know about a brand new program and also free training that I'm going to be offering in 2026. The free training is the wisdom code and you can go to stephaniefay.com and look at free training and it is part of a program that I am excited about. It is called the Neuro Wisdom Collective. The program is really about helping coaches and leaders and anyone who is having a positive impact in this world, trying to help others access their highest potential to help all of you really tap into the wisdom that you have really earned over your lifetime, over your conversations, over showing up for other people and grounding that in neuroscience so that you have another dialect, another way of talking about and explaining what you do, your perspective, your approaches. And in my decade and a half of experience now working with leaders and coaches and consultants and educators, having that neuroscience language is a very valuable and helpful way to get more buy in to what you're doing. Not everybody needs it, but for some people it is a way to engage new audiences, to increase follow through. Because people have an understanding of the mechanics, in a sense of what is happening for them and why your work matters. Whether you are helping them with their mindset or their breathing, movement, healing, any kind of the healing, helping art, all of it. There is science behind it. Anything that helps people optimize their life in some way. We will have monthly teachings and I will also be giving behind the scenes insights into how I create and curate content, the things that come up as I work with organizations and clients, metrics and measures that you can use as sparks for how you could create your own type of of baseline or other kinds of ways of helping assess where people are at and where they're going. We'll have monthly calls where all of you can join me or you can just watch the recording. A lot of people report getting a lot out of just getting the recordings. And there will also be my Wisdom Code Library which is going to be a very curated, organized library that you can access with six modules including Wisdom, Clarity, Mindset, Adaptation, Connection and Transcendence will have a different focus for each quarter. So quarter one will be all about energy regulation. We'll look at wisdom and systems goals, the metabolic cost of awareness, attunement and attachment Trusting the process. So we will look at emergence, adaptation and then failure, flailing and flexibility. And quarter four will be Ascension and Transcendence. So we will look at the science of the dark night of the soul. Nothing is wasted weaving it all together and release and embrace and you can join anytime. So it's nice to join in January or February just to have those as your first months of the year to lay your path ahead. But at any point you can join and you can get access to the Wisdom Code library instantly. Join our monthly teachings and our monthly connection calls and you will get 12 months of the teachings and access no matter which month you join. So you can check that all out just go to stephaniefay.com and in my menu I have Neuro Wisdom so that's probably the easiest place to send you if you have any questions. You can also book a chat to chat with me about it. That's on the link for that for the platform and you can also email me at hello Stephanie Fay.com I wrote a blog article recently about trusting some of the wisdom and the stillness that is there within you and I wish that for everybody over the coming weeks. This can be a dark time of year where the days feel shorter and there's less sunlight. So it can be a time that we use for some reflection and tuning in to something that is sometimes a little quieter than the noise of everything out there. So I wish you all a wonderful rest of the week or whenever you are listening to this and thank you for joining me for this episode. It.