Neuroscience, Brain & Mind

N:  Humankind has made so many breakthroughs in the last years or last decades. We went to the deepest parts of our oceans. We sent man-made objects outside of our solar system and lately, we are talking about putting our foot on Mars. But despite all of this, we still don’t know exactly how our brain works. On this subject, we are going to talk today both from the angle of innovation as well as the perspective of neuroscience and our guest is Dr. Nikos. Right now he’s the head of Neuro Consulting Services at Optimal HR Group. Nikolaos, welcome to Chair.

Dr. Nikolaos Dimitriadis: Thank you very much for having me.

N: How did you enter this field? It’s so interesting.

Dr. Nikos: So the story is always personal, right? Something happens usually in your life that pushes you to embrace something with all your energy. Okay. And this is actually the way to judge if something is important in your life by how much energy you put into that. In my case, something happened at the end of the nineties decades. So 97, I had a car accident. And in that car accident, I was knocked unconscious. It was not life-threatening, but for some period of time, which I cannot tell you how much, I was unconscious. Was it one minute, 30 seconds, five minutes? I don’t know. I blacked out. And then I came back to my senses and hospital and all the process. And after this event, I started thinking. Who switched me off? Because when I blacked out, the moment that I blacked out was actually when I was driving the car and I realized that I was about to have a crash. And at that millisecond something, somebody decided “Oops, Nikos has to go.”So switched me off. Because it was not a conscious, voluntary decision. So I completely blacked out and coming back was not also my decision. So I didn’t say: “Okay, now let me come back”. So I started searching a lot about decision-making, human nature, behavior, and who’s in control, that’s the big question in life.

Coming from business studies and especially from marketing, which is heavily psychology and sociology, even anthropology, I always had these questions in my mind. But this personal experience really pushed me to say:“Who’s in control?”. Are you in control? Since I haven’t decided to switch off? Of course searching I found out that it’s a very known phenomenonfor the brain to switch you off when you’re about to experience something traumatic. And of course the advantages you switch off. Because you will have a better ability to make decisions afterward, to save your life than if you really experienced the trauma. So my brain decided ‘’Oops, a crash is coming. Bye, bye Nikos”. And then when, because my conscious consciousness was switched off, but the brain was still listening, feeling it. So when the brain realized that the worst part was over, it brought me back. So then I realized, you know, just started going deeper into the rabbit hole.So is the brain taking over only in very difficult life-threatening situations and then it allows me to be in control in my everyday life?

And of course, the answer is no, the brain is in control even in my everyday normal life. So that was the personal experience that pushed me to explore what’s happening with the brain.

There’s also a professional reason. The fact that being in marketing, I always had this dissatisfaction with the models that we had to explain why people buy or embrace an advertising campaign or reject it or they are ready to go and to recommend something, etc. So consumer behavior, if you take a book of consumer behavior, you will see many theories, many theories from years of cognitive psychology and behavioral psychology. But very little on neuroscience. So being a marketing consultant, you know, somebody that worked with companies and tried to help them achieve their objectives. And also as an academic teaching new marketers, new generations. These models, these theories we had did not satisfy my approach to doing business. Because they were always letting more questions unanswered than answering questions. At the end of the day, it was a matter of luck. So around 2005, combining my personal experience with a car accident and my deep dissatisfaction of predictability and effectiveness in achieving behavioral change in marketing, I was forced but positively to search for new answers. And I saw the light in neuroscience.

N: It’s incredible how some accident can put you on a completely new path in life. And since here we are talking about innovations mostly from the business perspective, as it’s said in the business if it’s not measurable, it’s not manageable. So we are coming to that part of the narrow assessment in leadership, where you need to measure empathy. That was very interesting to me to ask as the first question of this part. How do you actually do that?

Dr. Nikos: This is fascinating. After all, empathy is one of my big passions in life, because empathy seems to be ‘the thing’ that makes us human. Many people believe that intelligence and IQ are what differentiates us from other animals on this planet. And indeed we do have the ability to think abstractly and do mathematics, well we know that an elephant cannot do that. But to me, mathematics and abstract thinking is a side effect. The key issue that helps us achieve in humankind what we have achieved, is actually the ability to understand each other on a very deep level. Thus react to each other in a way that creates groups, teamwork, and collective achievement. Because if you think about it, we don’t achieve anything alone, nothing, zero. Actually, if you leave a human in a jungle alone, they will achieve very little. So it is teamwork and human social interaction that makes us who we are. And the brain function that allows us to be so successful is actually empathy.

Humans have the ability to predict what you think up to the sixth degree. What do I mean? What is Nemanja thinking about me? Nemanja, maybe if I say something, will think that. So if I respond to this, he will think that. If I say this, he will say this — up to six degrees of this plan in my mind about our interaction humans can do. Imagine what kind of predictability power this gives us to make sure I say that I think, so you say that I think, so I say that I think. And this is empathy. Now, one of the things that fascinate me in empathy is that empathy is not one thing. There are different empathy networks in the brain. One type of empathy is what I just mentioned. It’s called mentalizing or theory of mind. What is the theory of mind? I have a theory that you are thinking something. I cannot have a theory that the chair is thinking something. So I look at the chair and this empathy network in my brain is not activating because there is nothing to see in the chair.

But when I see you and not only humans, maybe even my dog, but mainly in humans. Automatically the brain says “Okay, what is Nemanja thinking? What is Nemanja about? How is Nemanja feeling at this moment, this is one type of empathy. Put me in your shoes, but it’s not the only empathy. This is a kind of analytical empathy. We call it cognitive empathy because it has to do with me stopping and thinking. But that’s not the only empathy that exists. There is another type of, actually, there are two more types of empathy. But the one that we measure is the second type of empathy, which is called emotional empathy. And emotional empathy is more intuitive. It doesn’t have to do with me stopping and saying: “Hmm. Nemanja is looking at me like this. Moves like this. He told me this. So this is what Nemanja is thinking.” It’s not that. It’s intuitively, automatically, experiencing the emotion that you are experiencing.

So if you come to the office crying, and I tear up, this is emotional empathy. You can also call it emotional synchronization or emotional contagion because you pass your emotion. And this is very powerful also in human beings. And this is the empathy that we measure.

So what we have done, and we are kind of innovative since, we talk about innovation, and pioneering in the whole world. Me and my team, I have developed a protocol by using neuroscientific equipment. So we actually put an electroencephalogram on your head and we put in front of you a laptop. In this laptop, we show you the faces of people with basic emotions. There is this theory of basic emotions, you know, that are portrayed on the face. It depends on whether the theory can be five. Four is the smallest number, there can be eight and nine. And we show you from some scientific databases that they’re confirmed, such faces. You see the faces. And we measure in this few seconds that we flush the faces on the laptop screen. We measure through an electroencephalogram of the brain, your brain mirrors, the motion that you see on the screen, we don’t ask you if you feel it, that’s a completely different thing. So actually we do separate emotions and feelings. It’s not the same phenomenon. It’s a completely different thing. Few seconds that you look at anger, we try through the electrons, to see if anger was registered in your brain. Actually, if your brain experiences anger. We have a lot of algorithms of course. The more accurate your brain is in recreating and experiencing the emotion you see, the higher score you get.

So in the end, there is a composite and aggregate it through the algorithm average, but it says “Yes, Nemanja scored very high on emotional empathy because his brain in most of the emotions that we sought to you scored very high.” And what does that mean for Nemanja as a leader, as a professional, as a person in society? This means that your intuition about somebody’s emotional state is very accurate, and this has a big advantage, evolutionary. What is the advantage of this? It’s not only me theoretically, abstractly saying: “Ah, Nemanja is thinking this”. This gives me some amount of information. But I know much better what Nemanja is going through. If I also experienced the emotion that you experience, this means that I have internal experience and information. Which not only tells me theoretically what you’re feeling but makes me also experience it. And thus, I can respond much deeper and much more appropriately than just knowing what you’re feeling. Now I’m experiencing it. So this is the one advantage. The second advantage is that if you see me cry, the moment you cry, you bond with me. Evolutionarily speaking when we lived in caves in the Savannah, it’s not only if Nikos knew theoretically what Nemanja is feeling, it’s having the same emotional reaction. The fact that you and I had the same emotional reaction towards the same thing made us part of the same team. So emotional empathy not only gives me deep, intuitive information of what you go through, but also it makes you bond with you because the moment I will portray the same emotion that you have, your brain says: “Nikos knows. Nikos is with me”. So bonding in society is based on this ability to share emotions, not just to understand theoretical emotions, but to share emotions.

N: You took me as an example for measurement, and it’s interesting. But I want to ask you about the data, broad data that you get. What do you do when you have as many people as you did scan? I see here 5500 brains in more than 25 countries, so different cultures, different languages. How are you leveraging to use this data, to get the conclusions for different people, different groups, and so on?

Dr. Nikos: Right, this is a great question and many of our clients and partners are asking this. First of all, I have to look at that, the more you go down to how the brain operates, the more you understand that we are all one on this planet. And then you understand that the way sometimes that we stereotype different cultures or countries does not apply so much to how the brain operates. What do I mean? I mean, that empathy, for example, it’s a human universal. It’s not like some countries, some brains in some cultures have empathy. All human beings, if they’re born with a functional brand, we call it neuro-typical. We don’t anymore say healthy and not healthy. That’s not politically correct. So we call it neuro-typical or neurodiverse.

So if you have a neurotypical brain, you are born with the ability to empathize and cognitive empathy, the analytical one, emotional empathy, this synchronization, and there is also behavioral empathy. We’re all born with this ability.

You know the old dilemma of nature vs nurture. The way that your brain experiences different situations in life say to the brain — use more empathy or less empathy. So there is a learning process in life, even though we are all born with more or less the same neuro possibilities and then neural competencies like empathy. But growing in life the brain learns what to do more or less. And I have to say that personal experiences are stronger than cultural experiences in shaping who you are. So if, for example, in your life, you went through a very tough childhood then, I don’t want to say abused in a sense, but it was, let’s say not so caring and not so warm environment. Maybe your brain learned: “Hey if I use empathy, I receive worse results than if I’m not using ever so better not to use them”. And this is what the brain does. So maybe you will grow later to use less empathy than other people. Still, the networks are there, but you’re using them less. This is what we’re doing. And of course, if we go beyond personal experiences, there are also cultural norms. There are cultural and social norms that say, this is not good to do in life. This is good in life and you learn these again and the brain also will try to adjust. So there are differences between cultures but they are not biological differences. There are more learned differences. This is why, if you change the culture if you marry somebody from another country.

N: Like you did.

Dr. Nikos: It’s true. But the Greek culture and the Serbian culture are quite close. So my brain didn’t have to learn too much. Maybe liking pašteta. You know, I didn’t like it so much when I came. Now I love it. Rakija was very easy to love, very easy. I didn’t have to learn to love rakija. So what do we do in different countries? We always observe different brain reactions to different things. And we have clients that may have products and brands in various countries, but ask us to do comparative studies and even in countries in the region that are very close. For example, we did a big study for a relaunch or a revamping of a very known FMCG brand in the region. And we did studies in Belgrade. We did in Zagreb and we did in Ljubljana. And we did find differences. I would say the differences between Ljubljana were much stronger than the difference between let’s say Belgrade and Zagreb. This was closer than the brain differences in Slovenia. But there are differences even in close cultures. So let’s say within the same region, and it always fascinates me to find these differences and they can be very interesting. There can be differences against cultural objects, like gender roles, for example, but also a specific brand. This specific brand was a legacy brand for Slovenia. So of course the Slovenia brain, the Slovenian sample they had a much stronger response from let’s say the Croatian or the Serbian one. So yes every culture has its own cultural objects that it has a relationship to.

N: You told me that you’re measuring, how you’re measuring it, but how are you applying, leveraging this to change the leaders and leadership?

Dr. Nikos: So what was the traditional way of measuring leadership competencies? And if you look at the science and the practice around the world is actually psychometrics. You take a questionnaire, there are many famous companies and brands in the world, they offer this competence testing. You can do it for leaders. You can do it for Salesforce online. Then you get your score or some HR consulting company can do this for you. And then there is also, you know, it follows with coaching and you try to develop. But this is very old science. If you see psychometric measurement science go back many decades, and the new kid on the block is neuroscience. So we’re trying to do the same thing, measure your ability or your knee-jerk reaction to various situations in life. So one of these is empathy. What is your readiness stage of empathy? So we do this through neuroscience.Now, I wouldn’t say that yet we have replaced psychometrics, but this is where it goes. Very soon this will happen. They will be replaced by neuroscience, and where can it be helpful? And we have even an academic paper that was just accepted for publication as a fantastic verification, scientific verification of our methodology. Because we always say it’s not objectively good or bad if you score high or low on empathy, that’s not the point. Oh, you have low empathy, let me lock you in a room, prep your empathy and then you come back. Usually, our results are not like this. It’s not only high or low empathy, it’s also which emotions. This is fantastic because maybe you have higher empathy for anger or fear or sadness, but less for joy. And we find this very often. So the idea is that first too many empathy scores or empathy levels or empathy neural footprint with specific jobs. Because there are job positions that require you to have extremely strong empathy — when you cry to cry. But others do not and require you to have lower emotional empathy.

N: If you cry, I would say, don’t cry. Right?

Dr. Nikos: Right. Or let me give you this to make you feel better. Maybe it’s a bit stereotypical, but maybe in some sales positions where you need your salespeople to go and have quick wins. Them crying when the client is crying, maybe not the best for the short term for the long run is always best because you develop trust and bonding. Maybe you want their brain to work very analytically. Understand what is the main pain behind the crying and offer faster solutions. When the high emotional empathy does not fit. High analytical empathy should be there. So our approach is that there is no absolute good or bad. Let’s see what your job requires you to be, and to make sure that your empathy is matching. The other thought is improving because what is wonderful about the brain is maybe you’ve heard that — neuroplasticity. The fact that the hardware is changing. This is one big difference between machines and the brain, for example. Which I hope we discussed a bit. The fact that it’s not hardware and software, the software is a result of the hardware. It’s not something different that comes to be downloaded.

The hardware, the neurons produce the software and the software has the ability to change the hardware, which is absolutely fascinating and completely different from how we deal with machines.

So neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to strengthen or weaken competencies, connections that create the competencies. So even if you score low or very high in some of our measurements, we don’t measure only empathy, we measure resilience. Which is very appropriate and fitting to the pandemic now, the global crisis. We measure mindset. Growth versus fixed just by electroencephalogram. Neuroplasticity is the biggest and the most important finding of neuroscience because your brain changes, and this is amazing. Whoever was using neuroscience or psychology to say, this is Nemanja is and that’s it. This is why I don’t like personality tests, for example, because if I asked you to take this personality test, that’s your personality. Can you change it? You say: “Nikos, that’s my personality. Usually it’s built up over decades. Maybe I can change it out. I will try”. But in brain science, that’s not the case. This is why neuroscience does not fully accept personalities. We talk more about cognitive strategies rather than, or brain strategies rather than personality traits. So instead of looking at you as somebody, that is the product of tens of years. I will not reveal your age. Tens of years.

N: I am not that old.

Dr. Nikos: Okay. I’m sure. Tens of years of you know, life and interactions. The brain actually can change quite fast. Faster than what we thought personality can change. And this is the big hope message that neuroscience brings. So we measure leaders, we work, we try to match their brain footprint with jobs, but we’re also helping them to change, to reinforce some aspects, and maybe weaken others, so they can become better in life, in what they want to achieve.

N: You mentioned the connection between the human brain and the machine earlier, and I have a question about it. Does our brain function like a machine, or it’s completely different? Where is the truth?

Dr. Nikos: So we tend to anthropomorphize. You know, we see something, and immediately because of empathy, we immediately project the way we see things to them, even to animals and now to machines as well. My current belief is that machines and humans, might share some common characteristics, but we’re fundamentally, extremely different. We cannot be more different. So all these conversations about the singularity moment.

N: Waiting for some big AI to kill us or put us up there.

Dr. Nikos: It’s completely PR. Startups need to attract investors so they need to have some groundbreaking story. And these groundbreaking stories have to be sensational. And the more sensational the story, the more investors are going to put money in, but it’s all about the startup ecosystem. So what is the big difference between machines and humans? It’s actually very simple. If you believe that humans are born empty, it’s called the blank slate theory. Tabula rasa. When we are born we are an empty book. And then we are molded into whatever society molds them in. Then, of course, machines can be like as, because when we create the machine it is empty and we program it as we want, but that’s a debunked theory.Actually this black slate, tabula rasa theory came mostly out of French and philosophers in the 18th century mainly. And it was used in communism.So communism to create a society, an ideal society, how they thought, the communist thinkers.

N: And that everyone should think the same way.

Dr. Nikos: The same way going in a specific way. They said: “Okay, humans are born empty so we can actually educate their minds to be exactly. But now we know that’s not the case that humans come into life — factory ready. With human universal — empathy, sense of morality. Specific sense of morality also is factory ready and many other things. Now, who programmed us? This question reveals the arrogance of us believing we will create machines like us. Because we believe that we program each other. Society, education, culture, of course, it’s complex and big and chaotic, but we do it. Humans do it to humans, but it’s not. Nature does it to us. Also, humans do it, but it’s a small part of who we are, the machinery is already there. The algorithms are already there. We can find them. Who programmed these algorithms? When we are born, not all connections are ready. The connection creates, but genes have specific information of how this is going to be created. And this is why I believe is both arrogant and dangerous. And it was proven by a Microsoft bot. So they created a Microsoft bot that they launched on social media and they said to the bot to learn and behave as a human online with its own social media account. They had to kill it at the end of the day, they had to stop it because it became a racist nazi. Because it learned online. Because the bot does not have millions of years of evolution behind it. So who we are today, the machinery that creates the software, the software is not downloaded to the machinery. So in the human brain, body, environment, brain, body environment, system, the machine of the software and the hardware are one thing. The hardware creates the software, the software impacts the hardware. So we are so arrogant to believe that actually, what we are is a phenomenon in my mind. What I see, what I recognize, the thoughts. So if you can train robots to recognize pieces of art. Are they human then, because I can recognize pieces of art? But my recognition and the way that these works do not come out of the vacuum, it comes through a brain that has evolved through millennia, but the robot has not. So if we allow robots to evolve for millennia, then yes, we can. But then it will not be, it will be something completely new. Something else that I find completely fascinating. We are products of evolution. Evolution is a specific way that nature works. And sometimes some changes are happening to us because of mutations, it’s how evolution works. Small ones that might not be important for generations and generations and generations some mutations that happen. And you think that it is evolutionary garbage, but after 1000 generations, this trait becomes useful. There is a great experiment that a biologist, I think there was a biologist. He started it in the late 80s. He took some single-cell organisms like specific bacteria and you put them into a bottle, not a simple bottle, of course, in a lab. And he left them there completely locked and everything. And he’s observing different generations because they copied themselves very fast. There are thousands of generations very fast. He sees mutations. And how do they adapt to the environment of the bottle? Full of water, of course.

N: So he has the speed effect of evolution?

Dr. Nikos: Exactly. And what did he find out? In the 22nd thousand generations, because he was checking the genetic changes of the mutations. He found out that in the 22nd thousand generations a mutation happened. But this mutation had zero evolutionary advantage for them living there. These became useful in the 30th thousand generationswhere the water that we’re keeping them in, had a specific change on the chemical composition, and that gene helped them to be more efficient. So you see that we are very arrogant to think that we can create something like it’s a caricature. There are many more arguments. I’m just mentioning some. So instead of saying, we will create consciousness and free will and another, if free will exist, I’m not sure if free will exists as most of us think. But this is arrogant because we take just the phenomenal experience of what we live. We will recreate this, but it’s not that simple. Now, this does not mean that what we create is not fantastic. I’m actually fascinated by AI and about machine-learning. I’m fascinated, but we should stop the stupidity of thinking we’ll create it. I mean, this is, as I said, PR, and people try to sell things by saying these things. Let’s tone this down and focus on the fantastic technological advancement for what they are, not what we project on them.

N: And what we can get from them. So Niko, I always like to finish with a question about the future of neuroscience: big data, big brain. Can you tell me from your perspective what we can expect from this field of neuroscience science let’s say, let’s say 30 years from now?

Dr. Nikos: That’s a fantastic question and I think neuroscience already, being a new science generally, especially technologically. We can say that neuroscience is a hundred years old. Because of this guy, how the Spanish guy, that for the first time he drew a neuron and its connections to other neurons. And 1969, I think in the US their association for neuroscience was set up. But it’s after the eighties that we have the technology to really discover amazing things, MRI scan, and Toby’s pet scan.

N: To confirm your hypothesis and everything.

Dr. Nikos: To create also new ones. Of course, many things that we thought would be corrected before we’re abolished. You know, there were, there were not confirmed, the new questions came up. So from the eighties, there are many amazing things that neuroscience found that still did not get into mainstream education or understanding of who we are, or even management and leadership. So even if we just allowed, open the door a little bit more even now it would change drastically. We’ll do even more in 30 years. Because of the way that I see neuroscience, and I’m not alone, is that a little bit of how you started this interview? You said we know so many things about the oceans and we know so many things about space. So neuroscience for me is the third biggest scientific revolution in humankind. That changes the way that we perceive ourselves and our role in the universe. The first one was what we call the heliocentric revolution. Before, Aristotle thought: “Earth is the center and everything goes around it”, but we found that this was wrong. True, but there were other ancient thinkers, even back then that were against Aristotle's saying: “No Earth is actually moving around the sun”. Unfortunately, the church the Christian Church is very much based on Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle was considered the big authority in the church, and this is why actually they when Galileo said that actually, we are going around the sun. They observed they said: “No, you cannot go against Aristotelian thinking”. So when we accepted that the earth is not the center of the university it was a huge revolution because humankind’s whole planet, all of a sudden was not something special. We were just a rock going around the sun going around the galaxy. It is not just the simple, scientific revolution. It changes our place in the universe. The second slap to our ego, to our arrogance, was the evolution theory or the Darwinian theory. Now we knew even before that when the revolution happened, we didn’t know-how. So the big plus of Darwin was that not only evolution happened, but natural selection has happened, which is completely random. There is no big scheme behind, you know, or a big purpose behind nature. So the first big revolution said: “Humans just you’re just a speck of scent of dust going around somewhere in someplace in the universe, completely unimportant or nonspecific the same way”. Darwin did the same for nature. So we as human beings, we’re just another animal, and natural selection with some completely random mutations brought you where you are. If this was a big against, slapping of our arrogance that we are so special. And that we are here to tell the other animals that we can kill, we’ll do whatever. The third one is neuroscience because it kills the arrogance inside our brains. The fact that we now know, and that’s a topic for another, of course, session, the fact that we know that the brain decides before us and that what we see in our mind is it’s a very tiny process of the brain. The brain has so many processes. It also has what we call conscious experience. It knocks us from this arrogant throne of “I’m in control of my life. I know everything I decide and I’m fully responsible for it”. And now we know with neuroscience that that’s not the case. So as heliocentrism, you know, the fact that we, we are not the center and everything does not go around us, but we are just on the rock going around everything else. And then that human beings within the natural ecosystem, they’re not something special, but natural selection, random mutations brought us where we are, still kept the importance of our mind. Now that neuroscience says that our mind is another process, probably maybe it’s not even the most important process of the brain. It kind of says whoops. Then as the accident happened, and my brain that switched me off and switched me on, then I realized I’m not in control. When I say I have this very limited view of my mind. There’s whole bigger equipment in there that does what it does. I think everything changes. With heliocentrism, with natural selection evolution and now with neuroscience, we have the ability to finally understand who we are to bring us down from some theoretical mountain of importance. But then I think that’s the most important message to see what’s really important because I think we missed what is really important.

N: Thank you so much for this conversation. I enjoy it so much. And for you out there, if you enjoyed it and you haven’t subscribed do it and see you next Thursday when we talk about some new stuff, innovations.

Dr. Nikos: Smash this like button!