I’ve been super excited for this episode of the podcast for a while! This week, I speak with John Medina, author of one of my favorite books on the brain—Brain Rules! John and I talk about brain science generally and also dive into some specific aspects that are particularly important to the work of any data communicator: the importance of capturing and maintaining audience attention during presentations, emotional engagement as a way to counteract boredom and stress, and how stories can be a powerful tool for enhancing audience connection and retention. You’ll learn how the brain prioritizes meaning over details, driven by survival instincts, and how storytelling effectively taps into these instincts by involving emotional elements.

Resources

Check out John’s amazing book, Brain Rules, and visit the Brain Rules website for more great resources!

Guest Bio

Dr. John J. Medina is a developmental molecular biologist with special research interests in the isolation and characterization of genes involved in human brain development and the genetics of psychiatric disorders. Dr. Medina has a lifelong interest in how the mind reacts to and organizes information. In addition to research consulting, Dr. Medina speaks often to state legislatures, business professionals, school boards and psychiatric conferences on issues related to behavior, education and mental health.

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Transcript

00:00 – 00:04
Hello, John. It is a pleasure to meet you. Thanks for coming on the show.

00:04 – 00:06
Well, thanks for the invitation. John, pleasure to meet you too.

00:06 – 00:09
I am very excited. Brain Rules sits in a prime spot.

00:09 – 00:11
I think I actually have 3 copies of it.

00:12 – 00:16
I have a soft back back there, a hardback over there, and I actually have an ebook version.

00:16 – 00:18
I don’t know why I have so many copies of it. But, Yes.

00:18 – 00:18
Yes.

00:18 – 00:21
I’ve never coalesced my notes, which is which is a real problem.

00:21 – 00:23
So excited to have you on the show.

00:24 – 00:28
I wanna start, like, right off the bat in brain rule number 4.

00:28 – 00:31
So folks haven’t read the book, they’re gonna have to now.

00:33 – 00:35
Brain in number 4, you talk about grabbing people’s attention

00:36 – 00:36
Yes.

00:36 – 00:37
In a presentation.

00:37 – 00:38
You talk

00:38 – 00:40
about, like, 10 minutes is sort of like the magic number.

00:41 – 00:47
And to regain people’s attention and restart that clock, you know, use something emotional, something relevant.

00:47 – 00:49
So so kind of 2 2 part question here. Okay.

00:49 – 00:52
Why is 10 minutes like this magical number? Yes.

00:53 – 01:01
And what do you say to folks, particularly scientists, researchers, professors about using emotional content when I’m guessing

01:01 – 01:03
many of them are like, that’s not serious.

01:03 – 01:06
That’s not, you know, that’s not scientific. So yeah.

01:06 – 01:11
So so I’ll just let you spin on that. Those are my 2 big ones. Okay.

01:11 – 01:16
Why let’s do the first one first. Why is it 10 minutes? Well, that’s gonna be easy, John. We have no idea.

01:20 – 01:21
Okay. That’s a good one. Alright.

01:21 – 01:21
You have

01:21 – 01:23
no idea what’s special about 10 minutes. The,

01:24 – 01:28
it’s it’s the number appears to be stable, interestingly enough.

01:28 – 01:34
It was first shown in an empirical form by a guy named Bill Makechia at the University of Michigan, and he published in 1999.

01:35 – 01:37
And he called it the 10 minute rule.

01:37 – 01:42
If you don’t do something dramatic at about 9 minutes and 59 seconds, you’re gonna lose your audience.

01:43 – 01:51
That was confirmed again many years later in 2018 in a paper published in arguably the world’s most prestigious scientific

01:51 – 01:58
journal, Nature, where it’s still about this is Bob Euler’s stuff. It’s still about 10 minutes.

01:58 – 02:01
In fact, it’s 11 minutes 32 seconds, I think, is what they have.

02:01 – 02:06
Or you begin to watch in with, tools that are much more sophisticated to show the same thing.

02:06 – 02:10
That after about 10 minutes, your audience gets bored and it gets disengaged.

02:10 – 02:15
And he put enough numbers underneath it that nature ended up publishing it. Now Wow.

02:15 – 02:22
The world of of information transfer in 1999 was very different than the world of information transfer in 2018.

02:23 – 02:29
So it surprised me like a son of a gun that 2018 that, Bob, you were still it’s still around there.

02:29 – 02:34
So we have no idea why it’s 10 minutes, but we can say that it’s fairly stable.

02:34 – 02:41
I don’t know how stable it would be in the world of TikTok because even the world of information transfer in 2018 ain’t the

02:41 – 02:45
same world that it is in 2024, but, there you have. Okay.

02:45 – 02:46
So to the first question, we don’t know.

02:47 – 02:48
So that’s a real long way for them.

02:48 – 02:51
So so so real quick, when they do those studies

02:52 – 02:52
Yeah. Are

02:52 – 02:56
they putting people in front of MRI machines and and having them watch something?

02:57 – 03:02
No. In general, it’s usually either self report or in some cases, they’re looking at eye tracking to see where their eyes are are moving if

03:02 – 03:03
they’re moving at all.

03:04 – 03:09
There have been I’ve seen not published, but certainly presented in papers, cortisol levels.

03:09 – 03:11
When people get bored, they get stressed.

03:11 – 03:18
And so you’re starting to look at cortisol levels beginning. Cortisol is a stress hormone. The Right. And those tend to go up.

03:18 – 03:21
And those all send the collapse around the 10 minute mark.

03:21 – 03:27
So it’s it’s safe to say that you’re beginning to lose somebody’s attention at 10 minutes if you don’t do something drastic.

03:27 – 03:31
So So if something drastic is this is the part of your second question, I think.

03:31 – 03:32
Yeah. Yeah. What do you

03:32 – 03:35
have to do at 10 minutes to get people’s attention?

03:36 – 03:42
And it’s fascinating that you should say it because I’ve run into it too. I call them emotionally competent stimulus.

03:43 – 03:45
You have to pro or stimuli, ECSs.

03:45 – 03:53
You have to provide an emotionally competent stimuli at the 9 minute and 59 second mark, or you’ve got a minute and 30 second

03:53 – 03:56
grace period before you they they permanently check out from you.

03:59 – 04:07
So to the point of asking the question, my research interests are the genetics of psychiatric disorders, and a lot of those are disorders of emotional regulation.

04:08 – 04:14
So it’s not a foreign field at all in the world of neurosciences to say the word emotions, except to say the following.

04:15 – 04:18
You if you push me and ask me, hey, Medina, what is an emotion?

04:18 – 04:23
I will answer, I have no idea. We don’t know what they are.

04:23 – 04:27
There’s a lot of disagreement about how many there are and what they Yeah.

04:27 – 04:30
Even though we don’t know what they are, we do know what they do.

04:31 – 04:36
One of the things that emotions do is that they track very closely with the attentional systems of the brain.

04:37 – 04:40
Something in vision research that used to be called the attentional spotlight.

04:40 – 04:43
You can sort of think of emotions like post it notes.

04:43 – 04:49
If you think you see a stimulus and it’s gonna incite an emotion in you, what’s happened is that you have actually put a post

04:49 – 04:56
it note on there so that you pay attention to it in, in subjugation to other inputs that might also be available.

04:57 – 05:03
And not only do you put a post it note on it immediately and then Jon then lock your attention onto it, you also put a post

05:03 – 05:06
it note on it so that you can save it for further processing.

05:07 – 05:13
Because one of the things that emotions are going to give you is a memory, a strong memory that is gonna be immediately available to you.

05:13 – 05:22
And so if you think about it for a second, the idea of being able to get somebody’s attention is also going to change their recall and retrieval rates.

05:22 – 05:26
Well, you’ve got something that could be potentially very relevant in a classroom experience.

05:26 – 05:28
For god’s sakes, you gotta keep their attention.

05:28 – 05:32
The mantra is people don’t pay attention to boring things.

05:32 – 05:35
And if and if you’re boring, they won’t pay attention to you.

05:38 – 05:42
So what do you use what is your strategy in the classroom?

05:44 – 05:47
We should probably talk about what an emotionally competent stimulus is.

05:47 – 05:48
Okay. Yeah.

05:48 – 05:51
Then I’ll show you how it is that we use it in the classroom.

05:51 – 05:53
Actually, I can answer that second question first.

05:53 – 05:55
I put it every 10 minutes, bottom line.

05:55 – 05:59
Every 10 minutes, they get an emotionally competent stimulus, and I’ll tell you what I do.

05:59 – 06:04
I won a couple of of teaching awards for this, one national award.

06:04 – 06:13
The, but it’s not because I did anything other than just pay attention to the attentional spotlight, if that makes sense. Okay. So write this across your heart.

06:13 – 06:15
We’re Jon talk about what an emotion is.

06:15 – 06:20
The human brain processes meaning before it processes detail.

06:21 – 06:24
It wants the meaning of what’s happening before it wants the detail.

06:24 – 06:32
It wants to know if that saber tooth cat’s mouth is gonna clamp down on your thigh before it wants to know the number of vertical

06:32 – 06:36
lines in the saber tooth tiger’s mouth. Mhmm. Okay? Straight up.

06:36 – 06:42
A lot of speakers, a lot of presenters, a lot of professors screw that up. They will put the detail first.

06:42 – 06:46
And many times, they already know the detail, and that’s what they’re fascinated with.

06:46 – 06:49
They don’t wanna do the 40,000 foot meaning of something because Yeah.

06:49 – 06:55
You know, they found the meaning of this back when they were undergraduates, and they’ve tended to poo poo it, and so they don’t start with it.

06:55 – 07:00
And the audience says, fine. Goodbye. Right. Right.

07:01 – 07:06
And then they sail off. So now the question you can ask is, what does meaning mean?

07:06 – 07:11
When I say that you have to process meeting before detail, what does meaning mean? And there you can divide.

07:11 – 07:18
And in the book, I have divided it roughly into 6 questions that the brain, interrogates a piece of information that comes

07:18 – 07:22
in once it’s coming in because it has to know whether it’s gonna process it or not.

07:22 – 07:26
These are all strictly Darwinian principles except in one case.

07:26 – 07:28
The one case is actually pretty pretty interesting.

07:28 – 07:31
There are 6 questions it asks, John.

07:31 – 07:39
And then and then there’s a I’ll add a 7th one that is probably the one ring that binds them all. Okay. Shall we go through the Yeah.

07:39 – 07:41
Yeah. Let’s go through them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

07:41 – 07:47
Number 1, will it eat me? The first Good rule.

07:47 – 07:50
The brain is the world’s most sophisticated survival organ.

07:50 – 07:54
Its job isn’t to learn in a classroom. Its job is to survive.

07:55 – 07:58
And so one of the quest first questions it asks is is it a threat?

07:58 – 08:01
If there’s a mild threat, then this Jon pay attention.

08:01 – 08:04
Here’s how you can introduce mild threat to the brain.

08:05 – 08:13
Suppose, John, you and I are talking and then all of a sudden, I raise the amplitude of my voice and I assume a threatening posture. Look at that.

08:13 – 08:15
It’s damaging finger I’ve just held up.

08:15 – 08:21
See, I’ve known you for not even that long, but I can’t or I’m already I I don’t know if I could take that as a threat, but

08:21 – 08:22
I get your I get your point.

08:22 – 08:27
Yeah. Yeah. What it is is the brain is going, I should be paying attention to this. Now if you’re in a classroom,

08:27 – 08:28
it’s gonna know that you’re

08:28 – 08:31
not in a battlefield or you’re not on the sides of the ingot and go crater.

08:31 – 08:36
I mean, you know, it’s it’s gonna realize that, but still those mechanisms are in place. Will it eat me?

08:36 – 08:41
First question to ask. 2nd question, can I eat it?

08:43 – 08:50
We pay tons of attention to energy resource as anybody who’s ever tried to project a commercial at 9 o’clock in the evening

08:50 – 08:59
in a football game trying to get you to go to whatever venue of restaurant they’re at is is, knows. There’s a reason for that.

08:59 – 09:12
The, the brain is only roughly 2 2a half percent of your body weight, but it consumes 20% of all the energy you throw at your body. It is an unbelievable energy hog.

09:12 – 09:21
It’s so powerful it is that it’s constantly asking the question, do I have an energy resource that’s available to me? What can I look at? So will will it eat me? Can I eat it?

09:21 – 09:23
Are the are questions number 1 or 2. Alright.

09:23 – 09:31
Questions number 3 and 4 are also Darwinian and are the entire reason why the brain is interested in its survival.

09:31 – 09:34
It wants to project its genes to the next generation.

09:34 – 09:37
So the question number 3 is, forgive me.

09:37 – 09:43
I’ll keep this family, as a family podcast. Can I have sex with it?

09:47 – 09:54
It’s interested in reproductive opportunity. And question number 4 is related to it. Will it have sex with me?

09:57 – 10:05
Is there enough of an opportunity to pass along my genes such that it will be surviving to the next day?

10:05 – 10:13
So there’s lots of ways that you can get at that, pleasurable dopamine related, work, the things that are involved in.

10:13 – 10:18
It’s usually what’s called the appetitive, aspect of of sexual experience, which is the arousal.

10:18 – 10:24
It’s not necessarily the consumptive, which is the part where you’re actually doing the act. It’s more interested in the arousal.

10:24 – 10:29
But what can I have sex with will have sex with me is a great way to summarize those? Okay. 3 and 4. Okay?

10:29 – 10:33
Questions number 56, and then we’ll get to the one ring. Uh-uh.

10:33 – 10:41
Questions number 56 to me are professionally the most interesting because there’s no there’s no a priority for these, John.

10:41 – 10:45
The, question number 5 is, have I seen it before?

10:46 – 10:51
And question number 6 is, have I never seen it before? Is it unique?

10:52 – 10:59
It turns out we are terrific pattern matchers, and we are constantly asking questions about pattern.

10:59 – 11:02
Have I seen a good a good survival strategy for this?

11:02 – 11:04
It has a Darwinian under underpinning for sure.

11:05 – 11:10
The red snake with the white stripe bit me yesterday. I almost died. Mhmm.

11:10 – 11:15
If I see the same thing tomorrow, the same thing might happen.

11:15 – 11:22
So if you see that same same species of snake, or even one that even looks sort of like it, your brain is gonna absolutely

11:22 – 11:26
remember that because it’s gonna try and survive to its next for its next meal. Right. Yeah.

11:26 – 11:28
Like I said, there’s no a priority for this.

11:28 – 11:35
Pattern matching, there’s so many other cognitive gadgets that the brain could be using to process information, and pattern matching is only one of those.

11:35 – 11:41
But it seems to have the best survival valence that’s available to the brain, as a whole.

11:41 – 11:43
And so, those teachers that are really, really good.

11:43 – 11:50
It’s one of the reasons why metaphor and analogy can work so well because what it’s doing is that you’re giving pattern magic to it.

11:50 – 11:57
You’re saying it’s a lot like and then you try to give them something that they may be familiar with, but the idea is to explain something they’re not familiar with.

11:57 – 12:00
And what you’re actually circumscribing, John is a delta.

12:00 – 12:07
You’re looking at a different those 2 Right. And it just goes, oh, yeah. It’s pattern matching time. Give me my emotionally confident stimulus.

12:08 – 12:15
So at the end of 10 minutes, you’ve gotta answer one of those you gotta address one of those questions. You just do.

12:15 – 12:22
And the one ring that binds them all that at the end of this, it probably is the most powerful, the most spooky.

12:22 – 12:26
And I’m gonna argue probably the least well researched, which is weird given its importance.

12:27 – 12:34
And that was, can I detect a narrative? Do I detect a story?

12:36 – 12:42
Do I detect something that is, interactions that are occurring over time and can I put a time stamp on it?

12:42 – 12:48
If the brain thinks that it a story is happening, all kinds of cognitive gadgets light up.

12:48 – 12:57
And there you can use your fMRI studies, noninvasive imaging to look at, ask questions about is a story being developed. It’s so well understood now.

12:57 – 13:05
Mike Gonzaga isolated and he’s a researcher, isolated an area of the brain that he calls the interpreter. It’s on the left side. It’s left lateralized.

13:06 – 13:12
And it’s the area of the brain that marshals all kinds of other regions of the brain if it thinks that a story is going on.

13:12 – 13:19
So if if the brain detects a story, you might as well have given it a 280 volt shock. It’s just Interesting. It’s got it. I’ve got it.

13:19 – 13:24
It’s the least understood of the of the 6, but I do call it the one ring because it tends to bind everything else.

13:24 – 13:29
We make most of our narratives out of those 6 questions. Will it Right.

13:29 – 13:33
It it have sex have sex with me? Have I seen it before? I’ve never seen it before.

13:33 – 13:34
But if it detects a narrative, it’s there.

13:34 – 13:39
So at the end of 10 minutes, you’ve gotta give an emotionally competent stimulus.

13:39 – 13:42
And for god’s sakes, if you can turn it into a story, all the better.

13:43 – 13:47
Mhmm. Now how do you how do you think about story?

13:47 – 13:53
I mean, I’m curious because within the data visualization world, there’s all this talk about data and stories. And Yeah.

13:53 – 13:58
I have argued for a long time that, you know, most of what we create are not stories.

13:58 – 14:01
It’s a chart that’s, you know, that’s an argument. This line goes up.

14:01 – 14:03
This bar is tall, these other bars.

14:03 – 14:07
So how in this framework, how do you you you mentioned time.

14:08 – 14:08
Yes.

14:09 – 14:11
You know, is time the crucial element?

14:11 – 14:16
Like, what’s the is it the sort of Freiburg pyramid of, you know Right. You know, the the cone?

14:16 – 14:21
Like, how how does how does story like that concept of story fit in?

14:21 – 14:23
You could probably take the Frieburg pyramid with a grain of salt.

14:23 – 14:28
It was good in its data, but I am hopefully, I’m a nice guy, but I’m a pretty grumpy scientist.

14:29 – 14:32
And right now, once again, if you push me, I don’t know how the brain works.

14:32 – 14:34
I don’t know what an emotion is, and I’m about ready

14:34 – 14:38
to say, we have no idea what Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah.

14:38 – 14:40
I’m so sorry, Scott.

14:40 – 14:41
Well, it’s

14:41 – 14:44
if you’re talking to and all my colleagues would say the same thing.

14:44 – 14:46
I mean, I’m not I’m I I’m nothing special.

14:47 – 14:53
What it seems to be closest to and we’re when we’re talking about data visualizing stories where a lot of that I’ve seen in

14:53 – 14:59
presentations fall down is that they don’t take into account the extraordinary importance of the of the following.

14:59 – 15:06
Most narratives that are detected that the brain understands is an interaction of characters where an emotional response is

15:06 – 15:11
trafficking between the 2 and that response changes over time.

15:12 – 15:13
Okay.

15:13 – 15:14
Alright.

15:14 – 15:17
So there is an almost like it’s an episode. In fact Right.

15:17 – 15:25
If you do push me and say, well, then don’t be so grumpy, John. What can you say? Because we love storytelling. For sure. We absolutely love storytelling.

15:26 – 15:32
The closest that comes to it is something that is super well described in the literature, Jon, and that is something called episodic memory.

15:33 – 15:40
Episodic memory is just what it sounds like. Hey, Gilligan. You’re remembering all of it. It’s an episode.

15:41 – 15:46
It’s an episode where there are major characters where there is an emotional emotional trafficking, relational trafficking

15:46 – 15:50
that is occurring between the 2 and that emotional trafficking is changing over time.

15:51 – 15:52
Okay.

15:52 – 15:57
If you can do that, you’re probably familiar with Made to Stick and the Heath brothers, it’s Stanford.

15:57 – 16:00
They’re they have that canonical experiment where they ask the question.

16:01 – 16:06
They were trying to teach, the kids how to do a one minute, elevator presentation.

16:07 – 16:15
And then they did but they were they’re good scientists, so they’re measuring everything. 2.5 statistics per presentation were available.

16:15 – 16:15
So Yeah.

16:15 – 16:19
We’ve got lots of, I guess, you’d call it visual storytelling by numbers.

16:19 – 16:20
Yeah. Yeah.

16:20 – 16:25
If they think that an arrow is a narrative, well, then welcome to nerd land. Right? It’s Yeah.

16:25 – 16:26
Yeah. It’s hard but not

16:26 – 16:35
a narrative. Yeah. But 2.5 statistics. Only about I think it was 10% of their crew of that cohort, the one I’m thinking of,

16:35 – 16:42
actually put a narrative in the formal way that I just described where you actually are have an emotionally emotional relevant

16:42 – 16:45
between main characters that’s changing over time even briefly. Mhmm.

16:46 – 16:52
The, but then the next question was asked was in the next day, what’s the retrieval? And the retrieval is amazing.

16:52 – 16:55
Only about 5, 10 percent of that Yeah. Possible.

16:55 – 17:05
As I remember, the the, the study could remember anything if there was a statistic involved, but that number goes up to 62% if there was a narrative involved.

17:06 – 17:12
So whatever else narratives are in the brain, it’s attached to the attentional states in such fashion that retrieval becomes

17:12 – 17:15
much more competent if you allow a narrative to occur.

17:15 – 17:23
So 6 questions in a narrative, the one ring binds them all because you can put into the narrative all any of those 6 questions, and you’ll be home free.

17:23 – 17:30
Right. So now when you work with other clients, professors, scientists

17:31 – 17:31
Yeah.

17:32 – 17:36
When you talk to them about telling stories and, I mean, I’ve run into this.

17:36 – 17:41
I’m sure you’ve run into this where people say, oh, stories is that’s that’s not real science. That’s not real serious.

17:41 – 17:48
Like, how do you what kind of stories do you do you encourage them to tell, and how do they get over that hump of that stories aren’t serious?

17:48 – 17:52
Even though I might even buy your you know, they might buy your argument they’re important, but they’re not serious.

17:52 – 17:54
And so, therefore, I’m I’m not gonna do that.

17:54 – 17:57
Sure. Sure. Yeah. And I’m I’m a biochemist for heaven’s sakes.

17:57 – 18:00
I mean, it’s a and I’m looking at the genetics of psychiatric disorders.

18:00 – 18:05
So I look at plots of tissues in the developing telencephal dorsal telencephalon at day 25.

18:06 – 18:08
There’s a lot of technical parts to that.

18:08 – 18:11
And I do Fourier transforms even for heaven’s sakes

18:11 – 18:13
because the MRIs have these complex,

18:13 – 18:15
you know, way waves coming at you. Right.

18:15 – 18:22
So you know what I do, especially if there’s, like, a technical audience or an audience that has got that skepticism? I actually show them an fMRI.

18:23 – 18:29
And I show them the signal, and I show them some of the variant processing that has to occur when we’re making and then I say the following.

18:31 – 18:35
There is a concept called theory of mind, and I tell that to them first.

18:35 – 18:40
This only takes about 3 or 4 minutes, but I do tell it to them because I’m going to try and win them over to show them that

18:40 – 18:49
an an emotion is on the back of a neuron, not on the back of an opinion. And, and it seems to work. Theory of mind.

18:49 – 18:56
Theory of mind is the ability to, peer inside someone else’s psychological interior and with very little queuing, understand

18:57 – 19:00
the rewards and punishment systems inside that interior.

19:00 – 19:04
It’s as close to mind reading as the brain can get. There’s 2 components to it.

19:04 – 19:11
Number 1, it really is, understanding the intentions and motivations of someone else by looking at what makes them tick.

19:11 – 19:19
But number 2, there’s also the tacit understanding that the emotional world that you’re living in, you react to like you react to.

19:19 – 19:22
But it’s not the emotional world I live in.

19:22 – 19:25
So you’re never gonna react like I am. You’re gonna react like you do.

19:26 – 19:31
And so I end up calling it John Medina’s second law of marriage. What is obvious to you

19:32 – 19:34
is obvious to you.

19:34 – 19:39
But then after I just give this little thing about theory of mind, I then give them an example of where you can show an fMRI.

19:40 – 19:46
I said, I can make the brain light up like the 4th July by stimulating something called the mentalizing network, which is

19:46 – 19:53
the neural substrate underneath theory of mind and by certain types of emotional processing. And it’s the old E. M. Forster quote, John.

19:54 – 19:56
The king died and then the queen died.

19:56 – 20:01
And if you do that with somebody with an has an fMRI, right, their brain just yawns and flat lines.

20:01 – 20:04
And if you do that for 10 minutes, it says, when can I leave?

20:04 – 20:16
But you can make the brain light up like it was the 4th July simply by adding 2 little words to the end of this sentence. And here are those 2 words. You’re probably familiar with this.

20:16 – 20:19
Because he enforced or used it to define what a narrative was.

20:19 – 20:23
The king died and then the queen died of grief. Mhmm.

20:23 – 20:24
And all

20:24 – 20:28
of a sudden, you’re having a psychological insight. You have a relationship that’s formed.

20:28 – 20:31
You watched it change over time, didn’t you?

20:31 – 20:36
Because they had a relationship and then the guy died and now they don’t have a relationship anymore. Mhmm.

20:36 – 20:38
Micro as it were, full on narrative.

20:38 – 20:43
When somebody who does visual processing and they don’t include something like that, they’re wasting their time.

20:44 – 20:49
Yeah. I mean, all this sounds like if I had to sum it up, sounds like empathy. Right?

20:49 – 20:53
It is it is empathy for your students, for your audience, for whomever it is.

20:53 – 20:58
No. It’s sorry. But we can define the term. It’s close to empathy.

20:59 – 20:59
Yeah.

20:59 – 21:05
But it’s not. It’s, actually all of the all theory of mind is the ability to penetrate inside someone else’s psychological

21:05 – 21:10
interior and understand it like a cartographer might. So it’s emotionally neutral like that.

21:11 – 21:12
Let’s but let’s add a component to it.

21:12 – 21:13
Okay.

21:13 – 21:20
If you are kind with what you see with your theory of mind Mhmm.

21:20 – 21:28
If if you penetrate inside someone else’s psychological interior, and you are kind with what you see, you will begin to virtually

21:28 – 21:32
transpose that interior onto yourself, and you’ll begin to feel what they feel.

21:33 – 21:35
Now you’re getting closer to something that’s more like empathy.

21:36 – 21:37
Theory of mind is just the cartography.

21:38 – 21:42
But empathy is allowing an anthropologist to come in and say, these are valuable people.

21:42 – 21:46
Don’t, you know, don’t invade this space. Right. Yep. Right. Does that make sense? Yeah.

21:46 – 21:53
Yeah. Yeah. So when you do your talks, I’m trying to think about drawing the curve for your for your talks. Like, when you when you start

21:53 – 21:54
Yes.

21:54 – 21:58
Do you start with here boom. Here’s this big story in the first 30 seconds.

21:58 – 22:04
Get into some detail and then it curves back up at the end of the 10 minutes to another big story and then continue that sort of u shaped curve.

22:04 – 22:06
That is exactly what I do. Yeah.

22:06 – 22:13
I start with a and in fact, in the first 30 seconds when somebody is first just just starting to know me, the all the all

22:13 – 22:19
the brains in those audiences are not interested in what I have to say, even though that sounds weird. They’re not. They’re interested in you.

22:20 – 22:21
Yeah. Yeah.

22:21 – 22:24
They’re interested in what you’re what what you are all about, what you’re like.

22:24 – 22:30
So I will try and tell an emotionally competent stimulus that is also directly related to something in my own experience.

22:30 – 22:32
You only need to do that for about a minute or so.

22:32 – 22:35
In fact, I would I would not do it for more than a minute.

22:35 – 22:41
But I do try and it’s the first 30 seconds so that they get to know me via, one of the things I’ll tell them.

22:41 – 22:48
I was a professional animator and a graphics artist before I was a scientist, and I had to make a choice as to what part of the field I was gonna pursue.

22:48 – 22:52
And I talk a little bit about the choice I made to go into the the neurosciences.

22:52 – 22:53
So then they get it’s just me.

22:53 – 22:55
It’s just it’s not nothing big deal.

22:55 – 23:01
Then I have a wonderful teacher, and I tell them this wonderful teacher who was a deep influence on me, name of Stan Falco. He’s dead now.

23:01 – 23:03
He was head of medical genetics at Stanford.

23:03 – 23:08
And pretty soon, you know, there’s my audience. There it is. Now I’ve got 10 minutes.

23:08 – 23:11
At the 10 minute mark though, I have to get the hook.

23:11 – 23:14
And I actually have rules for the hook, and maybe we should go over those.

23:14 – 23:22
The hook, the 10 what’s gonna happen in 10 minutes has to be either one of those 6 questions with the one ring. Any of those is fine.

23:22 – 23:28
But it should be relevant to the stream of information that you’re giving them.

23:29 – 23:35
So it can either be a summary of what you just said or a foreshadowing of what’s to come. It doesn’t matter.

23:35 – 23:40
But it has to be within the stream. 2nd, it should be short.

23:41 – 23:45
It’s not the main thing of what you wanna say. You’re not there to entertain them.

23:45 – 23:46
If you’re a professor, you’re there to teach.

23:46 – 23:54
So if all you did was when emotionally what a stand up routine is, John, is nothing more than one emotionally competent stimulus after another.

23:54 – 23:58
It’s what you do every 10 minutes, collapse it so that there’s no space between them.

23:58 – 24:01
A good stand up comic will actually just give these.

24:01 – 24:03
Think of them as pearls on a necklace. That’s not the Right.

24:03 – 24:05
That’s not the job of a presenter.

24:05 – 24:08
The job of a presenter is to relay sometimes dry information.

24:09 – 24:12
So that should be short, is the point.

24:12 – 24:14
It’s you take over it should not be a stand up routine.

24:15 – 24:18
And then thirdly, it has to be emotionally competent.

24:18 – 24:23
You have to have something in there that can address the, emotions.

24:23 – 24:27
And so, if I’m talking about, oh, there’s a million of these.

24:27 – 24:33
Because I work with psychiatric disorders, there’s a 1,000,000 psychiatric, stories to tell, and I’ll usually tell one of

24:33 – 24:38
those that is directly related to the input that I am that I’m reading them if that’s true. So yeah. Yeah.

24:38 – 24:43
And then you can buy another 9 minutes and 59 seconds. 59 seconds. Yeah. Jon 3 hours.

24:43 – 24:46
I don’t know that I’ve titrated it, you know, in in any meaningful

24:47 – 24:49
I don’t know where the ceiling is on this yet.

24:49 – 24:52
Yeah. We’ve gone 3 hours at times and Yeah.

24:52 – 24:54
Which I don’t consider to be learning, by the way. That’s insane.

24:54 – 24:59
Nobody should sit in a classroom for 3 hours. Yeah. But we have loads of help.

24:59 – 25:07
Yeah. So we’ve been talking about speaking and presenting, and I wonder if you take the same approach, with writing.

25:07 – 25:11
Like, I just finished, for example, Charles Duhigg’s new book, Supercommunicators.

25:11 – 25:17
And one thing that he does is kind of like every chapter starts with a with a story.

25:17 – 25:20
And I kinda feel like it’s like the 10 minute version.

25:20 – 25:25
I guess the chapters may take a little longer than 10 minutes, but it’s kinda like the 10 minute version.

25:25 – 25:30
So so do you think about writing in the same kind of way?

25:31 – 25:34
Every 450 to 500 words, you get a book.

25:34 – 25:39
Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. And is that is is the 4 okay.

25:39 – 25:42
So you you might you might again answer you don’t know, which is fine.

25:42 – 25:47
But is the 500 words, is that, like, is that essentially equivalent to 10 to 10 minutes?

25:48 – 25:49
I have no idea.

25:51 – 25:53
You knew I was gonna say that. Yeah.

25:53 – 25:54
I did. I did. Yeah.

25:54 – 25:56
What I’ve just found is that no.

25:56 – 26:00
I don’t think I’m not sure how much empirical support there is for any of that this last.

26:00 – 26:08
And since I I tried to deal with evidence based stuff, I’m now going to label what I’m about to tell you, opinion, caveat. Yeah.

26:08 – 26:10
I am an n of 1 economist.

26:14 – 26:21
Okay. Uh-uh. But I will tell what what I found is that I found my even my even if something I’ve written, I’ve tried to write

26:21 – 26:25
something when I was first knowing that I was gonna start writing for lay audiences. And I wasn’t.

26:25 – 26:32
It’s my career was spent mostly as a private research consultant, primarily to the biotech and pharmaceutical industries for years.

26:32 – 26:39
And what I mostly did was that I would just drop down, and, troubleshoot data that is that they’re looking at and make opinions

26:39 – 26:41
about it and then write up a summary sometimes.

26:41 – 26:45
And I found that the summaries that I would write would write up, they were good.

26:45 – 26:50
I would think I’m I’m I’m a good scientist, good troubleshooter. They were boring. Mhmm.

26:51 – 26:58
So when I knew I was going to write for a lay audience or that was gonna that I would embrace that as part of my career, I

26:58 – 27:00
knew I was gonna have to change my writing style.

27:00 – 27:04
And I found just over the I I played with it. I totally played with this.

27:04 – 27:07
Try to get more of my own attention span began to wane.

27:08 – 27:10
When did I need to bring it up?

27:10 – 27:19
So 450 to 500 words is what I’ve I landed Jon, and, you know, they became New York Times bestseller, so I don’t I’m not sure that

27:19 – 27:20
Did something right.

27:20 – 27:22
And I’m not sure that it was always 500 words either.

27:22 – 27:24
So, yeah, the a strong sense of it.

27:24 – 27:27
I haven’t seen a lot of empirical work on it at all.

27:27 – 27:31
And until then, what I just said, please do tell your good listeners. Yeah.

27:31 – 27:33
You just put an opinion, not a fact.

27:33 – 27:42
Yeah. Yeah. Well well, it’s also interesting if we think about the, again, the data visualization, data storytelling folks. Yeah. Where does a graph fall in?

27:42 – 27:45
Like, how much does a graph account for those those 500 words? Right?

27:45 – 27:53
And but if you’ve incorporated a story into that graph or a real story into that graph, an emotional story into that graph,

27:53 – 27:58
does that then become that point of that, I don’t know, that that that hook, that switching point?

27:58 – 27:59
Uh-huh.

28:00 – 28:04
So I also want to ask because you you write about this in the book, on multitasking.

28:05 – 28:10
You say multitasking when it comes to paying attention is a myth. Yes. I say this all the time.

28:10 – 28:11
Mhmm.

28:11 – 28:13
When I when I teach and when I present, Yeah.

28:13 – 28:20
People nod, and then they go back to check-in their email while I’m presenting or while I’m teaching. So,

28:23 – 28:32
I guess I just want some more something else to use when I’m talking with people. That multitasking is a myth. Yeah.

28:32 – 28:35
I was I was asked at the very end of a talk I gave for Google.

28:35 – 28:40
Google had a had a had a book tourist, component to their lives at one point.

28:40 – 28:49
And it was the well, the very last question and I and I I only had a, like, a couple of minutes left and then then I’d have to go to the next thing. So I said, you can’t multitask. Stop trying.

28:52 – 28:54
So let’s let’s get into this, though. That’s kind of Okay.

28:55 – 28:57
An important thing to to talk about.

28:57 – 29:04
We’re gonna define multitasking as the ability to have 2 simultaneous inputs processed at the same time and remember everything

29:04 – 29:09
about those inputs at the end of the exposure period. That makes sense? Yes.

29:09 – 29:14
And if that’s the case, at one level, the brain truly can multitask.

29:14 – 29:19
John, right now, while you and I are talking, there’s parts of your brain that aren’t listening to you and me at all.

29:19 – 29:22
It’s listening to your heartbeats, and it’s gauging your lungs.

29:22 – 29:24
And there are lots of decisions that are being made.

29:24 – 29:28
That’s true multitasking because you’re doing 2 things. They’re independent.

29:28 – 29:31
They’re simultaneous, and they have separate, outputs.

29:32 – 29:37
At the attentional spotlight, which is the thing we now pay attention to, that’s kind of a general term, but like I said,

29:37 – 29:42
it came from the visual visual research. The attentional spotlight cannot multitask.

29:44 – 29:51
If you try to push it if it could multitask, you could literally open up a book and read the left page with the left eye and

29:51 – 29:59
the right page with the right eye, scan everything down all at once, and remember everything simultaneously. Mhmm. That does not happen. You have to start Yeah.

29:59 – 30:03
If you’re if you’re not in the, if you’re not in Japan, it’s gonna start Yeah.

30:03 – 30:07
At the left hand corner and you’re gonna go down Yeah. Right now. It’s not an even down edge.

30:07 – 30:14
If there’s the the eye jumps around and does things with the net vector is to go down to the bottom of the page and then goes back up to the next page.

30:15 – 30:21
What you do, if you get an interrupt and these experiments have been done over and over and over again, what happens is that

30:21 – 30:24
the brain just tries to do a lot of time splicing.

30:24 – 30:30
It’ll it’ll pay attention to something and it’ll go something else, it’ll come up, it’ll go and with rapidity, the more you

30:30 – 30:35
do that, the more it will feel like you’re blurry it in such fashion that it appears to be one thing.

30:35 – 30:38
But if you slow that puppy down, there’s no blurring at all.

30:38 – 30:40
You’re you’re going here, then you’re going here, then you’re going here.

30:40 – 30:43
So all you’re doing is your task switching over and over again.

30:44 – 30:51
The more you task switch, the less good your working memory becomes, something we used to call short term memory.

30:51 – 30:56
So your retention just just gets kicked in the it gets kicked gets kicked in the head. That would be the way

30:56 – 30:57
to say it, I suppose.

30:57 – 31:03
Because if you’re looking down at your watch or you’re looking down at your, at your phone, while you’re sitting there trying

31:03 – 31:10
to listen to the professor, you are automatically, you’ve been engaged in something. So you have to disengage. You have to find the reengagement. You have to reengage.

31:10 – 31:11
And then you have to disengage from that.

31:11 – 31:14
And then you have to find the find the other students to go back.

31:14 – 31:20
So you’re going back and forth at multiple spots each time the working memory, something we used to call short term memory,

31:21 – 31:28
is being taxed in such fashion that learning becomes exhausting rather than thrilling.

31:29 – 31:37
So if you really want to gauge a student’s interest, have them put down their machinery and, by god, you better give the best lecture you’ve ever had.

31:37 – 31:44
Because especially these days where attentions are so strong and so little data is out there now that’s that’s actually studied

31:44 – 31:54
it in any meaningful kind of way, that we, abandoned to our peril, not taking into account the attentional states of the audiences that were at. Yep.

31:54 – 31:59
Right. My kids are both in high school and, our school, locked down the phones this year.

31:59 – 32:01
So they have to put their phones in a little bag.

32:01 – 32:09
And the and the email that came out from the principal Jon day 1 was, the big reason we were locking down the phones is because it’s just even the buzz.

32:10 – 32:18
The buzz is a distraction, and I think I think they said it was it takes 20 minutes for the kids to re fully reengage with with the teacher.

32:18 – 32:25
Well, that 20 minute figure probably it was 15 to 20 minutes was, I think, originally that at Microsoft where you have an interrupt and then it comes back.

32:25 – 32:32
I don’t know that the classroom has been as well, studied as That’s right. But but but you’re absolutely right.

32:32 – 32:35
There is a there is a period of time where there is a distraction that has to come.

32:36 – 32:40
And even more insidious, thank god for Faraday cages. Put those phones in those things.

32:40 – 32:41
Yeah. Yeah.

32:42 – 32:47
Is that you have long since set up a dopamine anticipatory response.

32:48 – 32:53
And dopamine, it’s very famous as a neurotransmitter. It’s usually the reward.

32:53 – 32:56
People don’t know that it’s also involved in motor functions.

32:56 – 33:00
If your dopamine system is collapsing in the brain, you’ll get a Parkinson’s like profile.

33:01 – 33:03
There’s a lot of things that go on with dopamine that’s important.

33:03 – 33:05
But one of the biggest is that it’s involved in addictions.

33:06 – 33:10
And the more dopamine spikes, the you get, the more you want.

33:10 – 33:18
So what if so and so is calling you and or texting you and you’re thrilled by that or you hate it, but in either way you wanna

33:18 – 33:23
know about it, it will distract your attention and the brain will give you a little squirt of dopamine that says, oh, thank you.

33:24 – 33:29
And when you look back up at the teacher who’s busy teaching and the teacher is not giving you the dopamine, you’re looking,

33:29 – 33:32
well, who the heck can you pay attention to?

33:33 – 33:33
Right.

33:33 – 33:39
Yeah. So you set up these addictive profiles that go back and forth and that and that’s it becomes anti teaching.

33:39 – 33:47
I will say this, when fairy tales are introduced into class situations, it should be, incumbent on the part of a lot of the

33:47 – 33:53
adults who are supervising this new to phase it in because dopamine actually has a withdrawal.

33:55 – 33:56
Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.

33:56 – 34:03
Time to I mean, you can go cold turkey and, far far be it for me to prescribe to a a school district where there is very little data about this.

34:03 – 34:06
Yeah. I mean yeah. I mean, I think they’re all trying. Right?

34:06 – 34:08
And it’s trying different places of the country.

34:08 – 34:12
I will say for our school, in the classroom, you’re not allowed to have it.

34:12 – 34:17
But in the hallways and in the lunch room, it’s fine, which is maybe the maybe that’s the ramp.

34:17 – 34:23
Maybe you get that little dopamine during your lunch, and that carries you to 3 o’clock. I don’t know. But, that’s that’s what they’re trying.

34:25 – 34:31
You cannot multitask. If you think you can, multitask, that’s as much of a myth as the fact that there’s a left brain and

34:31 – 34:35
a right brain personality, which are also deep mythologies. Okay.

34:35 – 34:37
Alright. I wish we had more time. We could go into that too.

34:37 – 34:47
But, we’re Jon, I wanted to get to my favorite, chapter from from the brain rules book, which is, the chapter on vision.

34:47 – 34:52
And I have this as a slide I’ve I think I have probably in all of my decks.

34:52 – 34:57
You write in the book, the more visual the input becomes, the more likely it is to be recognized and recalled.

34:57 – 34:59
And I sort of use that as, hey.

34:59 – 35:07
This is why graphs and data vis and charts are useful and how you know, not that tables aren’t useful or text isn’t useful,

35:07 – 35:10
but this is why why graphs are useful. And so Yeah.

35:10 – 35:13
I’m not even sure I have a question. Okay. Maybe I do.

35:13 – 35:19
If the simple question is, why is is vision so important?

35:20 – 35:24
Why is that sense so important to helping us recognize and recall information?

35:24 – 35:26
Well, the the answer is really simple.

35:26 – 35:31
Most of our predators, most of our prey are are visually understood. Gotcha.

35:31 – 35:34
And as a result of that, we are constantly they’re visually acquired.

35:34 – 35:39
And so, we had several choices available to us. We could have gone down.

35:39 – 35:42
It’s a zero sum game bioenergetically in in here. Mhmm. Yeah.

35:42 – 35:49
And so we could have deployed some resources for smell and become like dogs, or like hearing and become like bats. Nope.

35:49 – 35:54
Almost half of this freaking cortex is devoted to visual processing.

35:55 – 35:58
So we decided a long time ago that we were gonna become visual.

35:58 – 36:01
And you can actually see in our smell. Uh-uh.

36:01 – 36:03
Most of the smell and smell receptor genes have been cloned, and half

36:03 – 36:05
of them all have mutations

36:05 – 36:05
in them

36:05 – 36:07
because all that sense is going away.

36:08 – 36:11
That is not the case with vision. So powerful

36:11 – 36:14
is is a visualization stimulus that we give it a name.

36:14 – 36:25
It’s called the pictorial superiority effect because it has been, responsibly pitched against other types of input, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, haptic tactile senses.

36:26 – 36:30
And vision wins out over every one of them in terms of retrieval.

36:30 – 36:34
Not only vision itself, it’s actually been augmented.

36:34 – 36:40
If you can make the visual element move, it gets even more attention.

36:40 – 36:44
When I show a graph to my students, I no longer have the line.

36:44 – 36:46
I just have the abscissa and the ordinate.

36:46 – 36:52
And then I make the line move, and I reveal it in a wipe or I do something Yeah.

36:52 – 37:00
To make sure that the the tip of the spear that I want them to remember, which is the quantitative information of that graph, I make sure that sucker moves.

37:01 – 37:02
Right. And

37:02 – 37:08
Yeah. So that you if nothing could be more boring as a visual presentation than just something that isn’t moving.

37:08 – 37:11
But if you could make it rotate in 3 dimensions, it’s that’s even best.

37:11 – 37:16
That’s the you’ve seen this in movie houses with 3 d movies. Right? Yeah. When the

37:16 – 37:17
movie is all

37:17 – 37:22
of a sudden there and people are trying to touch it, everybody is locked on to the visualization presentation.

37:22 – 37:24
The reason why is so simple, John.

37:25 – 37:32
We lived in a rotating three-dimensional environment where, you know, if you had a hawk coming at you, that’s not a two dimensional representation

37:33 – 37:37
Yeah. Thing. And it’s not a static strobe like picture.

37:37 – 37:41
It’s a real thing, and it’s gonna claw your eyes out if you’re not careful.

37:41 – 37:44
So we just locked down on it and pay attention.

37:44 – 37:50
Yeah. Have you thought about have you or I’m sure people have studied have you thought about have you studied how augmented

37:50 – 37:56
reality, virtual reality are going to improve or or or ruin teaching?

37:57 – 38:02
Well, here’s where my grump factor really flares. Okay. Okay. You you know what

38:02 – 38:03
I’m gonna say next. We don’t know.

38:03 – 38:12
Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. But we don’t know with a vengeance because there’s a lot of people throwing a whole lot of money at the we don’t know. Yeah.

38:12 – 38:15
There’s several work groups at Stanford that have done really good work.

38:15 – 38:18
What they have shown, though, is that it’s it’s a little counterintuitive.

38:20 – 38:22
I’ll try and explain it this way.

38:22 – 38:28
The question you can ask is, when do you get the idea of presence when you feel like you’re no longer in the world you’re

38:28 – 38:33
at but in another environment, which should be like in a I’m in a now teaching environment where this professor who’s not

38:33 – 38:38
really there, but I feel like he’s there because I feel like his presence. When do you detect a presence?

38:38 – 38:42
What are the factors that tricks the brain into thinking it’s somewhere else?

38:43 – 38:47
A lot of people and a lot of companies threw a whole lot of money about something that doesn’t work.

38:48 – 38:57
They tried to make their virtual worlds as photorealistic as possible, thinking that the more realistic you could make it, the better it was gonna be. It doesn’t trick presence at all.

38:57 – 38:58
We’re not even sure what presence is.

38:58 – 39:03
There may be some electrical signatures that are in the back doing press, but that’s why my grump factor fails.

39:03 – 39:06
I don’t know what that is, asking me, John, what’s a pastel?

39:06 – 39:11
And I think to myself, I have no idea. What is present? I have no idea.

39:11 – 39:23
I have no idea. Right. Okay. We’ve touched on a lot, and I I wanna, sort of round this out by, I guess, asking you if you are writing volume 2.

39:23 – 39:31
I know you’ve written brain rules for babies, but if you are starting today with a new version, maybe not even volume 2, but

39:31 – 39:35
a new version of brain rules, would anything fundamentally change?

39:35 – 39:41
Oh, my field changes every 6 months. Yeah. Yeah. It suffers these Richter scale

39:42 – 39:43
Right.

39:43 – 39:55
Changes. I think, though, I would start out as an approximation because I would try to read the tea leaves of the coming 10 years. Mhmm. I would do it on stress. Wow.

39:55 – 40:01
Stress in the micro for yourself, stress out for traumatized populations over large segments of populations.

40:02 – 40:04
We now know actually, we’ve known this for a while.

40:04 – 40:10
And as you know, my as we’ve discussed, my thing is psychiatric disorders, which rise when temperatures go up.

40:11 – 40:18
So the number of anxiety and depressive disorders, the thought disorders, everything sense tends to rise the warmer places get.

40:18 – 40:27
And with global warming becoming a thing, the mental health issues, the wars that will be, incited from that, the extraordinary

40:28 – 40:34
self centeredness that will come when there’s not enough water and there’s too many people, that’s all social and group stress.

40:34 – 40:37
So I would not only do the mic micro stress, I would also do the macro.

40:37 – 40:42
The other thing I would add to that is oh, it’s the answer to your question is stress. Maybe one last one.

40:43 – 40:46
Stress tends to have echoes if you have social environments.

40:47 – 40:53
A real good question that was asked, I think, was John Maynard Key. No. No. An economist.

40:54 – 40:56
I’m trying trying to get his name.

40:56 – 40:59
And then somebody commenting on his work. Here’s the comment.

40:59 – 41:06
Question was asked was in 1929, when the stock market crashed in black, whatever, October. The Right.

41:07 – 41:18
Did the stockbrokers and and and allied, financial professionals all run up the fire escapes and throw themselves off the building? The answer is not even. Right.

41:18 – 41:24
In fact, the suicide rate in the Q4 was the lowest of the year. Now it did go up.

41:24 – 41:31
I think it was like 12.1 per 100,000, as the as the as the base. It did go up. It went up substantially.

41:32 – 41:38
It went up to, I think, one study had it at 20.3 per 100,000, which was a gigantic change.

41:38 – 41:39
Yeah.

41:39 – 41:41
But it took 3 years to get at it.

41:41 – 41:43
And so it’s called the delayed fuse.

41:43 – 41:49
And the reason why is that you had to have extracted your bank account, go through your divorces, watch your kids leave you,

41:49 – 41:54
see the kinds of things that could actually induce a stressful response, and then watch that go up.

41:54 – 41:59
So there’s almost always we’re seeing the exact same lag time, by the way, with COVID.

42:00 – 42:09
Social problems coming in the same anxiety and depressive rates that are that were you saw go up at the great depression are now being realized, for years now.

42:09 – 42:11
So the other part of that book would be watch out.

42:12 – 42:15
Cumulative stress has a delayed fuse on it, but it will blast over.

42:15 – 42:20
And people that are interested I know you’re at Georgetown and maybe George Washington, so policy is gonna be a big deal.

42:20 – 42:24
Mental health is gonna be a larger issue than we have ever had in our whole lives.

42:24 – 42:28
And I’m not sure everybody sees that coming, but it’s there in the brain sciences.

42:28 – 42:33
Yeah. And the and the impact and the impact on mental health, on the physical health, I think, is is fairly well documented,

42:33 – 42:38
but you’re gonna see the same the echo, patterns, I think, happen over the next, you know, 5, 10 years.

42:38 – 42:45
Oh, those those delayed fuses, occur. And it’s fascinating to watch that certain types of stress really are cumulative with

42:45 – 42:47
a, what is essentially a step function.

42:47 – 42:54
You raise up enough and then, boom, and all of all of a sudden the rate goes up. And there’s no anticipating. It just boom. And all of a sudden hit. Yeah.

42:54 – 42:57
Yeah. Yeah. Well, on that, on that note

42:58 – 42:59
Cheery as in very

42:59 – 43:03
We’ve had we had a fun time until the cheery end. Boy, oh, boy. Okay.

43:03 – 43:08
So we’ve learned a few things, though. Tell stories. There’s no such thing as multitasking.

43:08 – 43:14
I And and and vision is, the most important to hook people’s attention and keep it.

43:14 – 43:17
Thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been terrific. I really appreciate it.

43:17 – 43:21
Oh, my my pleasure there, John, and I’ll I’ll hold here until until you dismiss me.

43:22 – 43:23
The, I I wish your daughter all the best.

43:23 – 43:28
If she does any bioengineering at all, we need all the women we could get. Woo hoo.

43:28 – 43:30
Yeah. Fire away. Right.