Neuroscience of Personality | Dario Nardi | Talks at Google

Speaker 0:01 So welcome everyone. It's a pleasure to see you both here in Mountain View as well on VC. Thank you so much for joining us. I have the immense pleasure of welcoming Dario Nardi to come speak with us today. Welcome.

Dario Nardi 0:13 Thank you.

Speaker 0:13 Welcome. Wanted to give a little bit of background on Dario, and then we will have, um, an hour and twenty minutes with him. So, um, we are, we are truly, truly grateful for his expertise today. I invited Dario to come speak with us because he is truly an expert in the field of personality type. Um, this area is, is of greater and greater interest to us here at Google as we start to use some of the tools that are associated with understanding personality type and because as a, as a culture, we really value the ability to communicate and work effectively with people of all different types and approaches and preferences. And equally, in the products that we design, we really strive to design things that are highly usable, u- usable and relevant for our users. And so the, the awareness of personality types, the awareness of, of preferences and how people tend to interact, behave with one another, make decisions, can only add to both our effectiveness individually with those that we work, but certainly with the products that we create for the world. Dario is really taking the research into personality type to the next level with his neuroscience research that he's been doing at his lab in, uh, in UCLA, working with his students to really understand and, and really see what are the patterns of brain activity that occur and how do those connect with people's personality types when they have truly identified for themselves what they know to be their best fit type. And when we talk about type, we're referring primarily to the MBTI instrument, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which many of you may have come across in your careers either before or, or at Google, or perhaps even earlier than that in college. So there will be some, some clear references to type as identified by the MBTI. A little bit of background on Dario. As I mentioned, he works at UCLA. He's a professor of human complex systems there. Um, several Googlers have been through his program, which is exciting. He is also the author or c- or co-author of ten books on personality type. In fact, his latest is called The Neuroscience of Personality, and it is hot off the presses, and I highly recommend it. He has some books here for sale here in Mountain View for any, any of you folks that are interested. Um, you can buy those from Yasha here in the back at any point. They're twenty-four dollars plus two dollars tax. Dario is also the, the owner and publisher of Radiance House, which is a publishing company for authors of systems, games, and personality. So check that out whenever you get a chance. Today, based on his groundbreaking research, Dario is really gonna clue us in on what are those patterns of personality type or, or brain activity that correlate with personality type, and what does that mean for us personally in terms of how we tend to interact and also how we can flex our style to meet others more clearly where they are. So without further ado... Oh, actually, let me say one more thing. As the structure of this presentation will be such that it'll be an hour of Dario presenting to us, and then we'll have twenty minutes from ten AM here in Mountain View to ten twenty for questions. So you're welcome to ask those here in Mountain View and as well on VC. We have someone taking questions via chat. You can ping your questions to Nidhi Sharma, and that's N Sharma, S-H-A-R-M-A. So feel free to do that, and Nidhi will, will represent your questions here in the room. Um, that's it. Welcome, Dario.

Dario Nardi 3:57 Fantastic. Thank you. [audience applauding] Thank you everyone for coming this morning, and, uh, it's my pleasure to share with you what is the culmination of five years of lab research firsthand looking at brain activity, um, primarily of college students. So you know what that age range is like.

Speaker 4:23 Yeah.

Dario Nardi 4:23 But it's eighteen to twenty-five actually, so that may include some of you. And, uh, you're generally spending two to three hours with each student. So really-- A- across a whole bunch of different activities. Uh, among, among those activities are going to be whatever is their big area of interest or expertise. So in other words, allowing them, if they're a drummer, to actually come in and play their drums and, and to see what happens with that, in addition to the usual things. And, uh, and what's come out of that, primarily everyone is different. I mean, truly that comes out. There's this individual difference that's there. And, um, the other thing that has come out of it, there really are these patterns that are consistent for an individual, and those patterns correlate very well with the student's best fit personality type selection. Keeping in mind that personality type is itself a model that we have in our mind in order to help us simplify the-- and people we encounter and, and how we work and so on. It's really interesting to see that, yes, there actually is some meaning to it and, and some grounding with it. And, uh, here we go. Okay. It's, um, what I hope you're gonna get out of today is some of the-- some idea of the research. Now, I usually do a whole day workshop on this. In fact, folks have been pushing for me to do two days because there really is a tremendous amount, not just of information, but of applications that come out of it. But give you a little bit idea in an hour of what's fun. And, uh, oh, my voice is changing as I talk. [audience laughing] Perhaps there's... Okay, I know I won't talk too loud, otherwise there's reverb in it. Uh, numerous implications for how you and other operate, maybe give you a little bit of idea of what that is, and then I'm gonna focus on different ways that we can enter the state of creative flow. And this is a state that might last anywhere from just a few seconds to 10 minutes, or even longer, and what are those kinds of things that, that what kind out-- activities lead us into this state? This

Dario Nardi 6:27 is my lab. It's actually pretty informal. It's not some fancy dark space somewhere with lots of equipment, and it's a... No, there's no Frankenstein here. And, in fact, what you don't see is there's a beautiful set of windows like you all have in the building next door in the cafeteria, so students can look out, and they see, like, the squirrels and the trees, and it turns out that's actually very important. So for the students who identify with one of the SP personality types, so they have S and P in their code, they actually have shown more brain activity when they're looking out the window than they are doing the tasks that I give in front of them. And if they're standing and looking out the window, then that's even more so. So that reminds us how important windows are to some people, sort of looking out at nature and the patterns that are there. Uh, otherwise, students wear this little, this little red cap right here. And, you know, we, we... They put on the cap, and it has these little pickups. It doesn't shock them or anything like that. It's a purely passive device. And, uh, then we take a nice little syringe, but I show them the syringe is blunt, and, uh, inject water-soluble gel throughout all of that. And the gel helps maintain a connection between the pickups and the skull, so that even as they move around, it's going to be picking up the electromagnetic activity on the surface o- of the brain. And it actually is remarkable that that information is detectable even through our skull. Might get an idea of then of, of how strong those signals are. So they, they sit there for a couple of hours, then we also do a, a few things. This is an inadvertent advertisement for V8. I didn't plan on that. Um, and, and sometimes the students come in, and they know each other, and there's this sort of friendly social environment, and they also include confederates at times, so individuals who come in that the subject doesn't know. And, uh, none of this is formal study. I've done one formal study. Um, but it... Primarily, I want there to be an open-ended discovery environment. So what I say in my book is that all of the, this material and research for the past five years is like one giant, really, really big, rich pilot study. This is what I see at my end, and this is the sort of color representation of what's going on in the brain in real time. So I'm using a technology called EEG, or electroencephalogram, and it divides up the, the brain here into various regions that roughly match where there are different lobes and fissures in the brain, so it isn't completely arbitrary mapping. And, uh, I see this nice color representation, and it's more than color. So there's actually two pieces of information. There's the color, which indicates frequency, and then there's the, the length of the bar here, which indicates amplitude. So when... After I spend two or three hours with a student, there may actually be something like 60 megabytes worth of data o- on their brain activity. So that's a statistician's nightmare, and, uh, fortunately, I'm not a statistician, so I don't have to deal with all of that. And, uh, so that's a little bit of what I see from my end, and it does change in real time. In fact, a really funny thing is, the brain activity comes about 300 milliseconds before the person executes the action or behavior associated with the brain activity. So as I'm watching, uh, and you would see it too, you would actually see something light up in the brain and think for a moment, "Oh, the person's about to do such and such," but by the time that thought occurs to you, they've already gone ahead and done it. So it's a little bit like mind reading, but there's such a short period of time that, you know, the mind reading is not that helpful. There's no time to take notes or anything like that or even say anything. It's just enough time for it to register in my brain, which coincidentally between perception and the thought, the matching is also about the same amount of time. So it's, uh, it's, it's really wonderful, very quick. When they're doing mathematics, for example, and they're going to, like, carry the one, y- you can see that as the brain does something. So to, to sort of summarize what it is that I'm working with here, electroencephalogram, and it's measuring activity in the neocortex only. So there are different layers of the brain, and this is the outer layer. Really, really important in human beings. Our, our neocortex is huge compared to even the other great apes, uh, and certainly monkeys on down, the very, very small neocortex compared to what we have. It's fast, it's simple, uh, it's cheap. Uh, contrary to what people might think, professors are actually paid terribly, and we have very little funding, um, except for the few who somehow manage to wrangle up something. So it, it's great to do s, uh, research that doesn't cost ten or twenty thousand a student. The different colors, know that red sort of follows the color spectrum, so red indicates that that region is showing the most activity there. And if we go down then from yellow, that's a little bit less. Green, less still, that's sort of on the low end. Blue, much less, that's sort of a, a, a relaxed state. If the brain were all blue, that would indicate you're sort of on maybe the edge of sleep, or at least you're... You might even be aware, but you're not active in any way. And then black indicates no activity. And yes, uh, what's... Something that's really interesting is most people have one or two regions, even after I go through and calibrate and whatnot, one or two regions that simply show no activity, except under the greatest duress or stimulus. So as we go through the different regions, uh, and mention those, you might consider which ones not only do you use or prefer a lot,

Dario Nardi 12:01 which ones do you not use? It also could have higher resolution than it does, but that's the way it goes. What do I have people do? I have two to three hours, so plenty of time. Usually 30 to 45 minutes we spend doing more introverted activities. So they do meditation, they solve math problems, um, a whole bunch of sort of fun... Feedback.

Speaker 12:32 Uh-huh.

Dario Nardi 12:32 In the land of feedback.

Speaker 12:35 There you go.

Dario Nardi 12:35 There we go. Okay. I know there's, like, a boundary space here.

Speaker 12:38 [laughs]

Dario Nardi 12:38 Okay. Um, so we're playing games, card games, word games. They do physical tasks like juggling. They might juggle by themselves or they have a partner to do it with. Um, math problems, analogies, and many of these are laid out so that the math problems, say, start easy and then get more difficult, or with the juggling, we start with one ball and then it moves up to more of them. Um, communication, so speed dating, both real and virtual. So how does the brain interact when we are interested in someone or not? And some actually really funny anecdotes that have come out of that. Uh, I can tell when a student is sitting there and they really like the person they're with or are not so interested. Um, and I remember this one time, I could tell this, uh, this student had seen... He had been on real dates, essentially real speed dates, five minutes each, and this was the third girl in a row. And it was clear from the brain activity... I'm sitting like 20 feet away from them, but it's clear from the brain activity that he's interested, he's attentive in a variety of ways. And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, as in the conversation that they're having, she mentions that her whole family has converted to evangelical Christianity, and in that one moment, all of the interest disappeared.

Speaker 13:50 [laughs]

Dario Nardi 13:52 And then we all had to laugh, even though we like, you know, we try and keep quiet until the end of the task. And, uh, and, and they're like, "What? What- what's going on?" So we explained it, and she said, "Oh, you know what? That's actually not me or even my immediate family." Because what she meant, she was from Latin America, so when she said her family, she meant, like, her, you know, 30 closest relatives, and, and even not her immediate family. So the definition of family was different. And, and so then you would think after explaining that, you know, this was something that, okay, maybe he might be more open. He wasn't. His brain never regained that level of interest. Although they both remember the event to this day, which is, you know, sort of interesting that first impressions are very important. And, uh, you know, so be careful about what you say on your first date. No sex, no politics, no religion, no death, and, and you'll be good. Um, so they also do simulated speed dating, and they do a role play with actors. And I've actually, a couple of ENFP theater students have come in and, uh, concocted a variety of situations. Uh, recalling items on a list, details in a scene, and then some open-ended stuff, like go back to your childhood or foresee into the future and where is your life gonna be ten years from now. And we might think with something like this, um, you know, maybe it's memory. So recall an event from your childhood that maybe there'll be visualization and a little bit of memory regions. But there are some individuals who stand out as recalling information very, in a very special way, and some individuals who visualize the future in a very special way. So the-- all of them have the sort of potential to show some individual differences. And, uh... Oops, there we go. So this is an example o- of an easy sort of open-ended task, what comes to mind. And, uh, a lot of folks will mention stories. I ask, you know, as we go along, maybe what are some possible interpretations of the story. Something telling is how many different interpretations can the person give. Some folks are like, "Well, there's one, and maybe two," and then they sort of peter out, peter out, and others can continue on for a while and, and be able to sort of offer different scenarios. I mean, perhaps she's upset because she's just poisoned him. Um, and there's a whole bunch of things you could read into it. And then they think that task is over, but it's not. Fifteen minutes later, we come back to it. I don't show them the picture, though. I just say, "Remember that picture I showed you. Could you recall for me as many details as you can?" And so they remember the details and the things they don't mention. I'll say something like, "Does the dress go down to her ankles? To her knees? Um, does it cover her feet?" All that kind of stuff. And, and it really is amazing. It's very consistent with personality type, who remembers more. Um, in fact, it's great because there are, uh, one type, all of the, well, ENFJ and ENTJ, if we have any of those in the room, um, those two personality types actually remember a lot of details, but incorrectly. [laughs]

Speaker 16:52 [laughs]

Dario Nardi 16:52 So it's important to know. Otherwise, the SP types are the ones who actually remember the most, and, uh, which I found maybe people thought that was a little bit of a surprise. But, uh, I think because there's enough drama in the image, they remember it. So, um, what I have found overall, one is that there are these regions of the neocortex that light up when they're being used for an activity. And really each region has what is called a threshold to activation, that if you receive just a little bit of input and it doesn't pass that threshold, the region doesn't light up at all. But the moment you pass the threshold, then it begins to light up. For some folks, that threshold is very low, so almost any kind of stimulus will light it up, and then the more stimulus they get, the, the more it gets active. For other folks, the, the level to the activation to... Threshold to activation is much higher. So that there's a lot of input that will come in, and it doesn't, doesn't get active, doesn't light up, and then all of a sudden it will be really, really active out of nowhere. So there's a region back here that's related to embarrassment. Now all of us love to be embarrassed, right? Some of us more easily embarrassed than others. So, um, ENFJs, for example, are, as a personality type, are really pretty easy to embarrass. And in fact, you can point out, "Oh look, the embarrassment region is lighting up," and then they get more embarrassed. And then, ooh, look, you're getting even more embarrassed, and then it lights up even more. Um, and, uh, other folks, very, very difficult to activate, but INTPs, so those are very different folks, generally speaking, that region is quite dark. They don't even notice the social feedback, so why would they get embarrassed? But when they do get embarrassed, oh boy, does that activate. Not just in that region there, it floods over like a little tsunami to all of the neighboring regions as well. And so, uh, it was funny because one of the neighboring regions to this area here is one responsible for dexterity and for moving smoothly in the environment and having a sort of boundaries between self and others. So if you've ever known someone who doesn't get embarrassed very often, but when they do, all of a sudden, you know, becomes flushed red and they're klutzy, that's those folks there. So that's sort of r- representing how the brain works. And, uh, dark regions indicate what's, uh, not in use or has really become automatic. Signing your name should be pretty easy, mindless experience. Um, there are various also holistic patterns, the, the, or for the whole brain, and there are zigzag sequences. And so we'll take a look at some of those. My environment here is very dynamic, I have to say. [laughs] Yeah. It is lighting up and down. This is, we, we're, we're in the brain right here. It's a test. We're- It- That's right ... watching your brain. Yes. Yes. Yeah. We're inside the Google brain. [laughs] So this is, this is what I was coming with, um, is I would see the... What I would do over the two or three hours is I average the brain activity. That's not the only thing I do, but statistically, it makes it really easy when you have 50 or 60 megabytes of data. And, um, these are real people. They're not their real names. But I would have Maria and Ross here, and they happen to identify with these particular personality types. And I had 10 weeks to, to let them get to this best fit process. So I felt that was very important in doing research. If you're gonna make connections to personality, you better make sure that it's accurate connection. And, uh, again, red regions are the most active, and then yellow and, and going all the way down, green, blue, and then black. And they look quite different from each other, don't they? Really, really quite different. But one thing we notice is that the, um... I'm, no, I'll point to this one. I'm afraid of walking too far over there. Um, this region here and this one here, there's really on average like no brain activity, which is remarkable. But there's this nice halo and then it's very sort of light because it's just blue. Light activity, this little bridge across the halo here. Um, others might describe it as, you know, the rim of a volcano, but because she happens to identify with INFP, and I think INFPs would prefer the halo metaphor- [laughs] ... as, uh, you know, good and evil. Over here, you can see the letters are very different. So even if you're not that up to date with the, the Myers-Briggs terminology, it's absolutely fine. You can tell that just I versus E, N versus S, F versus T, they're pretty different from each other. And they're, in the interior here, they're practically mirror images. At the same time I was doing these experiments, I was also reading quite a bit about what others have discovered, primarily using EEG, but other technologies like fMRI as well, uh, what these different regions tend to do. And, and as I mentioned, the regions are a little bit, um, arbitrary, like we could be more fine-grained about it. So sometimes there's some overlap in what goes on, but, uh, I wanted to know

Dario Nardi 21:56 sort of what does this mean? You know, they, they're showing this consistent use of these regions. Does this say anything about their personality? I did discover, and we'll just point out the red regions here, that on this side here, this is for listening to words specifically. So diction, grammar, word selection. Not like a logical word selection necessarily, but at least what fits grammatically. Over here on this side, at least for right-handed folks, this is about tone of voice. So, uh, it, part of listening to tone of voice, and part of tone of voice, there's a little region around here that branches over to this area slightly, which is responsible for evaluating intention, motivation. So if you ever wonder, "How can I better assess people intentions?" Well, hopefully stimulate the neighboring area. Get that, you know, sort of pay attention to tone of voice and what's going on there. So when people emphasize words, that'll tell you right there. You'll also notice this region up here is red. This does two different things, and this actually wa- was really well fleshed out by the work with autism because autistic individuals tend to have a lot more activity here than on this side. And this region, one that handles how much you like or dislike something. So when musician would come in and he would say, "My guitar and my music," every time he would say, "My guitar and my music," this region would light up. Whatever happens to be important to you. Now, some people will say sort of a meta type of statement, so they'd be like, "My values," and, and that will light it up as well. The region also handles something else. It really gets active when people remember detailed information accurately. And at first, this was thought to be a little bit strange, like why is it that something for like and dislike, belief, and in fact, this region is also associated with religious beliefs. When people talk about their religious beliefs or irreligious beliefs, this region gets active too. Um, why would, why would it also be related to detail? But if you tease it apart, you understand really quickly what's going on. If something is important to you, it's not just happens to be important, say, here today at Google. It's something that is important, generally speaking, across your life no matter what situation it is. And so you take those beliefs with you as something that, that holds across different contexts. The reason this region gets active around detail is a lot of the time people get information, and then when y- we ask, you know, say, you know, "What did you do earlier this morning?" You may not remember every detail. You don't need to, because you can fill in with context. It's like, were there other cars on the road this morning? You probably weren't paying attention to specifically, was somebody gonna ask me later how many cars did I see? But you can guess pretty well based on context and past experience. But guessing based on context is handled on the other side. When this side is more active, it's again about we're not gonna pay attention to context, this idea that something that holds across situations. So if we forget about context,

Dario Nardi 24:59 we're not gonna do any guessing and context. We're always gonna think something is true no matter what. Now we understand why this region is really good with detail. Because the detail, we're not trying to fill in the blanks or do guessing. It's just what we remember, and that's it. Finally, this region over here, so this is right up here on the front. This is really, really important, this region on, on both sides. These are sort of the executives. Um, sometimes we th- can think of them as CEOs. Now, what is a company like when it has two CEOs of equal power and authority? Well, that's a really interesting question actually to ask at this company.

Speaker 25:36 [laughs]

Dario Nardi 25:37 Um, but it's a little bit different. You know, people still have defined roles and, and, there, there's a difference between founders and then all of the responsibilities that happen for day-to-day. And it can work out, but for the most part, people have a preference for one side or the other, either this executive or this executive, even if they're right-handed. So the stereotype is all right-handed folks are more active on this left side over here, but that's actually not the case. Uh, it has more to do with personality type than it does, um, handedness. This f- this region here is for explaining and deciding. So if I give you... Okay, I'm gonna give you three fingers. Which finger do you like the most?

Speaker 26:15 Not the middle one.

Dario Nardi 26:16 Not the middle, okay.

Speaker 26:17 [laughs]

Dario Nardi 26:17 So it's gonna be this one here. Okay, good choice. Okay, and then why did you select that one?

Speaker 26:22 It's very useful.

Dario Nardi 26:23 Very useful. Okay, where you can point with this and that, and it's not the middle one. So you've made a choice, you've done some decision-making, and you gave an explanation. We might think, oh, was that a logical explanation you gave? But if you actually had to work out the logic as you were speaking, like, the situation would go on, right? You, you... It takes so long to work out the logic of is that really the logical choice. So most of the time, we don't actually use our whole brain. It feels like we're thinking and making logical decisions, but actually it's just the executive making up something. It sounds perfectly reasonable and, and is pretty workable. And, and that's what goes on with this region right here. So uh, I suppose you could say INFPs are really good at, uh, coming up with reasons and explanations and, and making long-term life decisions that revolve around their personal identity and values, and they're very good at listening and working with words, whether those are literal words and composition or word choice, uh, or perhaps reading. It's, it's not just writing, it's reading as well. And also very attentive to tone of voice and intentionality. And, and if you're... So if you're a little bit aware of Myers-Briggs, great, that sounds like a good match with IN- INFP, especially when we notice that the yellow sections over here, that these are related, this area, to asking "what if?" and, and visualizing some possibilities. And down here, this is also noticing visual impressions. If you don't know Myers-Briggs, I've actually given you a pretty good description of INFP in terms of their capabilities or their skill set. And so it's really wonderful to see that match that was there. Conversely, with ESTP, I won't go into detail about this one, but you can see that, that sort of the other executive is the one that's more in charge. And this side over here, this side here, is much more about managing process, about af- allowing new information in and, and sort of dwelling on, on that information and allowing it to affect, uh, what it is that you do. These regions here are for logical reasoning. So if A equals B and B equals C, then...

Speaker 28:25 A equals C.

Dario Nardi 28:25 A equals C. Yes, absolutely. So this region, um, will hopefully... Now, that's a little bit, you know, folks already know that, so they don't need to think too much about it. But if you really wanna go through the logical branching, this is the region that is gonna be really fantastic for that. Over here, a great example would be, um, a porpoise. Is that a mammal or a fish?

Speaker 28:46 Mammal.

Dario Nardi 28:47 It's a mammal, yes. In fact, you would even think it's strange to sort of mix those categories that are there. This region is about weighing... Something comes in, and it has a spatial relationship actually. It's, it's, there's thousands potentially of categories and subcategories. Where does something fit when it comes in? What is, what is the category that it fits well in? Down here, this is for weigh- weighing odds for, for risk and, and uncertainty. So you go to Vegas, and you want to know wh- is this a better game or is this a better game, and if I put this amount, how much might I lose? But I could put this amount and I might lose something. So there's all these different options and sort of there, there's these risks and uncertainty there, and weighing those all at once. You see this is very active for, for economics graduate students. And then this is not just me, like this is known in the literature. This is very, uh, active for econ graduate students. And so right there, we can just see by these red regions here that I've given you some idea of the analytical skills of ESTP. Maybe they don't show them all the time. Notice that none of these here are connected to, uh, uh, there... Well, I suppose there's a little bit of adjacency over here and a little bit here, uh, on the corners, but they're, they're not immediately adjacent to the speaking areas. So they may not necessarily verbalize what they're saying. It goes on in the interior of the neocortex. I think this is the part where I normally ask are there any questions. I don't think I've lost anyone. Okay. I

Dario Nardi 30:18 know I also learned I'm supposed to count to five after I ask are there any questions. It's a good rule to know. Yes? Mm-hmm Can you quantify them into the 16 boxes of the Myers-Briggs [laughs] if possible? Um, it's- Can you repeat the question? Yes. Oh, g- right, right, right. Repeat the question. Um, if I were to just see... Oh, I already advanced this for a moment. Go back here. Uh, if I were to just see this activity, I would say if I'm sitting there with the computer, I'll have some ideas. If I were to get the sort of the, the statistical average, that would give me a much better idea. Uh, would I be able to guess the person's Myers-Briggs type? And I would say quite a bit of the time, yes. Right away, there's the sort, is this side or this side more active? That will immediately narrow down from 16 to eight. And from there, I might do something like, are one or more of these regions on the interior active? That indicates a, an, an interest in, it's called introverted thinking, uh, which is not the same as being an introvert with a thinking preference, but we'll get to that. Uh, do they have a lot of listening? Um, those same folks who show a lot of activity in the middle here tend to have a lot less listening, so that would be a sort right there as well. Um, I've seen the halo a number of times. I've had seven INFP subjects, and you can pretty well tell them, not just from this activity here, but what I'm also gonna describe as the whole brain activity that happens. And, uh, now I would say, though, still everyone is unique. Like, that's why I start with Maria, who happens, in parentheses, to identify with INFP, because I've had other INFPs, let's say one who does sports, and he had much more activity in this region here, which would sort of be very useful for, for doing sports. So a person's background and, and their skill sets will definitely do it. So I'm just gonna sort of... I- I'm not gonna go through all of this, but give you a sense o- of what it is that ends up on this chart. Everything that I put up here is both found in the literature, so not by me, other people have located these things, and I saw it, it worked out in my lab from the lab data, and I didn't wanna talk about anything that, that wouldn't meet those two criteria. Thought it was really important to be able to say, "Yes, this is happening here, and so on, and, and I've seen it for real." Otherwise, it's so easy to draw a connection between what I read and thinking like, "Oh, yeah, that sounds like such and such. Mm." The other thing you'll notice, you may be... You may have stumbled across some theories about maybe people are more left-brained or right-brained, uh, if they use more, like, one quadrant of the brain over the other. Uh, sorry, our brains are much more complex and interesting than just having a simple, like, left and right or different quadrant, something like that. Like the... All of these regions... A- and really, the- these are the results of sort of, uh, evolutionary forces. So sometimes you have things grouped together, and you're sort of like, "Well, why are these neighbors?" I don't know. That's just sort of the way it worked out. Um, and, and, you know, th- there's down here, this section on doing rote mathematics and integrating vision and sensation, that also comes with reading. Reading skills. I had a, a woman from Saudi Arabia asking, um, me, "Why is it that going to a Quranic school where they memorize, they read the Quran and memorize it and repeat it verbally, why is it that it improves their ability in mathematics?" I said, "That's actually really not a surprise, because reading and math are both, especially rote, uh, mathematics, so, you know, what is five times five kind of thing, uh, and reading are both really

Dario Nardi 33:51 heavily associated with this one region right here." And so there was a natural carryover between those. Now, uh, another... This is, this is a favorite for, for folks who use the, the, um, for use personality type to explain preference. And I thought, "Oh, this will be a really great example. I'll just try this in sort of a lab and see what happens." And, and I was actually ended up being really shocked. Th- this e- one exercise turns out to be a fantastic sorter between S in the code or, or N in the code. So I asked them to sign their name with their preferred hand, and then I asked them to sign again. Actually, they do several things. So they sign again with their non-preferred hand, and then they sign again backwards, but with their preferred hand, and then sign yet again a fourth time backwards with their non-preferred hand. And the expectation, we might sort of think as, as a common sense hypothesis that signing your name should not require too much work, and too m- it won't evoke too much brain activity. But signing your name again with your non-preferred hand backwards will definitely... It should evoke more activity, right? You're, like, trying to figure out which letter comes next, and you have to sort of work your hand knowing I have to be left-handed about it, and how does it go? So I thought, "Well, this is gonna be really easy. I'm just gonna demonstrate signing u- with your non-preferred hand takes more work in the brain." And I was wrong. I wasn't completely wrong, though. It turns out that folks who have an intuiting preference, so they have an N in their type code, that that holds true. They try harder with, with the, the second activity. For folks who have a sensing preference, so if they have an S in their code, it's actually the reverse, that signing their name, you see some brain activity, and when I ask them to do, you know, with your... Sign backwards with your non-preferred hand, it doesn't really show any activity. Now, why might that be? Well, as one student said, um, who had a sensing preference, "Signing your name backwards with your non-preferred hand, that's like just some random, weird, like, you know, fun activity to do. Like, that doesn't really have any meaning to it. Like, when would I do that in real life?" So there was no attempt. I mean, it's, it's not important, which really highlighted to me that motivation, it's not just about competence, it's about motivation as well. Whereas for someone with a sensing preference, often signing your name really nicely is important to them. They don't just sort of randomly repeat it. There's actually some brain activity that goes into it. What really is... And, and that sort of got me thinking that maybe there's something interesting going on, and then I really sort of tried that out more. And I had a student who, um, knew French and Arabic and English, and I said, "Fantastic." And he's very good at English. I mean, you wouldn't know, um, that Arabic was his original native language. And I said, "Could you write your name in Arabic?" Backwards with your non-preferred hand, in addition to writing it the usual way. And he had an intuiting preference. So I thought, you know, writing his name in Arabic, it's gonna be no brain activity, and then writing his name backwards in Arabic, it'll evoke more brain activity. Didn't happen. Why not? I said, "You know, you didn't show any brain activity here," after we debriefed the task. "What, what happened?" And, and he said, "Well, none of you in the lab can read Arabic, so it didn't matter how I wrote." [laughs]

Speaker 37:08 [laughs]

Dario Nardi 37:08 Yeah, so, so it really was... I'm like, "Oh, of course." Uh, so really, the, the motivation and context do play an essential part in how it is that we use our brains. So say competence plus motivation together, and that's then what I call the... this engagement curve. Being engaged means being competent and/or motivated, preferably and. I think we, we can be somewhat engaged if we have competence just because, um... I don't really... I'm not like a big math nerd or something, but I did a lot of math. I did probably three solid years of calculus, linear algebra, and the matrices, and all that kind of stuff as, as an engineering student. Uh, I, I don't remember any of it. I recognize what part of the book I need to look to, to, to understand to do it, but that's it. Um, so yeah, I could do that. And also somebody could be motivated and terrible at it, but they're gonna try. But ideally, it's both. So engaging activities evoke progressively more brain activity as challenge and motivation increase. So assuming the student is motivated to do the math problems and not look like a fool because they can't subtract 17 from 34, as the problems get more diff... more challenging, this curve will move up, assuming they're motivated. The moment they reach the point where they're like, "Oh, I don't know this math, I can't do it," and they give up on it, the motivation is lost. There is an instant drop in brain activity. So it really could go in, in particular, several regions, one, two, three, you know, go sort of from blue to green to yellow to finally some red that's there, and then it just drops off to black, nothing. So if I said, "Please, all of you now take a moment to sign your name in Urdu," there might be one person who can, okay? But, but for most of you, probably not. Uh, so I think that's really important and, and that's one of the things that I hear about, 'cause I don't see it firsthand, but I hear Google really is, um, very welcoming for their employees to have time to do their own projects. Which is great, because presumably you're motivated to do your own projects, and you're picking something that you have some competence

Dario Nardi 39:09 in. So that is going to engage you and get you in there. Um, now I'm gonna talk about some of these holistic activities. This is... It comes out a light blue. It's darker blue here. Um, it should be sort of like the color of the sky because the brightness, it reflects something a- as, as well as just the, the frequency, the color. This is every region is in sync with every other region. All of them have the same, it... are dominated by the same frequency and amplitude of electromagnetic activity. What does that mean? That means it's not just a mansion filled with rooms and each person is doing their own thing. It's everybody is in sync and working with everyone else. People can maintain this for a few seconds. Say you win at a, a hand of cards, or even just the process of shuffling cards may evoke this. Uh, or it may remain there for two minutes, three minutes, 10 minutes, whatever it is. And, uh, when doing a task as an expert. Now, there's actually, uh, an exception to this, and that relates to, to two of the personality types. But let's take a look at what are those activities. With the question that you might consider as we look through these, are any of these like what you do? And what's interesting, because somebody asked me, do people know when they're in the state of flow? Sort of do we have some kind of s- self-reflective intuition, something like that? I don't think so from my lab. Like, none of them s- could report when they thought they showed this or not. Um, so I think it's important to then... Actually, this is an example why knowing personality type would be really helpful because, in general, these were associated with either your skill area, like music or dance, something like that, or they were related to the person's personality type. Um, acting by following a highly rehearsed scene. So we had an actor, an ENFP actor, by the way. Um, and, uh, when he did a cold reading, didn't show up. And when he did improvisational acting, it didn't show up either. It was only doing what ENFPs love to do, right, which is lots of memorization and rehearsal. No. But that's when they, they reach the state of flow is after he really forced himself to spend all this time in repetition, so doing practice. Uh, describing the ultimate meaning of why people live or die. So I give out this little news article, and, uh, usually I read it to the person, and it's a fictitious article and it's about something sad, uh, that reflects a little bit of, of irresponsibility from one of the people mentioned in the article. And after I read it, and it involves death, and after I read it, I ask people, "Could you use one or two words to describe how you feel right now?" And most people will say, "I'm sad," or, "I'm angry," or some combination thereof. However, this one student with ENFJ preferences, ENFJ, um, refused to answer with one or two emotions. She said, "That's too easy. That's childish. It would be so easy to just say I'm angry or I'm sad." So she began to give a philosophical reason for why people are put on the earth and, and what are our responsibilities to each other as human beings. And all the while, while she's sort of giving me this answer and drawing from the article and composing a response that fits with her philosophy, there was solid blue. Every region was participating and contributing to her philosophical response. In contrast, by the way, her opposite type, ISTP, I had a student like that recently, and I read the same article and asked the same questions. And the ISTP, she said to me, I asked, "How do you feel, one or two words?" And she said, "I feel nothing." She says, "I wasn't there. It didn't involve anyone I know. I haven't really had time to think about how I feel." So I think that was even, even not just looking at brain activity, but just listening and watching how people do activities in the lab and the kind of responses they give are, are... It never occurred to me that someone would have no emotional response to it. She said, "If you give me some time to think about it and I read it over again, I can give you an emotional response." [laughs] That sort of was, you have to like manufacture where you send it to the plant and they make it and bring it back and-

Speaker 43:21 [laughs]

Dario Nardi 43:22 Yeah. Um, it's like with my brother also, my younger brother, ISTP pref- uh, yes, ISTP preferences, and, um, and he used to do a lot of track, uh, racing and, um, I asked him after a win how he felt, and he said, "I think I feel happy." [laughs]

Speaker 43:39 [laughs]

Dario Nardi 43:40 I was like, "But how do you feel?" Um, drumming a familiar beat. So we had a drummer, and when she drummed her favorite familiar beat, not other times, but when she did that. Handling dramatic crisis in a role play scenario. So this is what I've seen with all the types with S and P in their code, especially ESFP and ESTP. As, you know, the actors come in, the theater students, they, they can get up, so the subject can get up. They can't like swivel their head around a lot. I discourage that, but otherwise they can move a little bit. And they're engaged in a crisis role play and, and they like getting into it. They absolutely do. Um, and they're very creative. They pick topics that I would never think of, um, you know, involving like, uh, well, I won't even get into it, things that are not repeatable here. Um, but they know Dario is cool and, and will be okay with it. So as they get into it, they go from having brain activity about listening and seeing and so on, and all of a sudden as it sort of ramps up the crisis, their brain shows a little bit blue here and blue there and some regions starting to hold and then disappear, and then they just hold like this, like really tightly. And they remained there for two or three minutes until the crisis began to resolve itself, and then it would slowly start to come apart again. So there, this, the ability to be in a state of flow with a crisis, and they didn't know what was gonna happen next. So I wouldn't say that that was an area of expertise, except maybe they're good at crisis management and, and good at role-playing the situations. Listening intently to somebody else. Um, I've had some students who can debate contentious topics like gun control, and by some I mean only the INFPs, um, and maybe some ISFPs a little bit as well. So those are two types that have a lot of similarities to each other. They're good listeners. One student, he sat... And you know, normally when we hear something we disagree with, what is our natural response? It's to come up with counterarguments even as the other person is still speaking, because we sort of guess what they're gonna say, and then we start coming up again with what is our own view. He didn't do that. For ten solid minutes, whether he was speaking or whether his, his argument opponent, his, his opponent in the argument was speaking, he remained, every region was in the state of awake but alert. And then finally after ten minutes, that pattern broke, and there was a lot of activity in the, the left prefrontal areas as he decided and explained his final opinion. And he's like, "I gave you ten minutes to sort of, you know, give me an, a, your, your point of view, and I really did consider it," so that's what we mean by truly active listening, "and now I have decided my perspective on it." And that was the end of listening. So I would say with folks who are really good listeners, keep in mind they're not always really good listeners. Once they make up their mind, that's it. And, uh, it was great to see. Now, I also had one student, um, he would only show that pattern of active listening when he listened to me or another professor. So this was about listening to authority figures. Anyone know someone like that? You know, they, they don't, you know, they, they're, "Oh, yeah, what, what did the authority say?" Also had one student, um, who would only listen that way to women, but not to men. And it was really funny 'cause he and his, uh, his fraternity brother were both in the lab. So his fraternity brother could sort of back this up. They would... His fraternity brothers would sort of make fun of him. They're always like, "Kareem, you never listen. I mean, you never listen. You never do any chores. You don't remember to do anything. When we say stuff to you, it's like it just goes, you know, in one ear and out the other." And, and he said, you know, that just didn't make sense. I mean, he was saying, um, he's like, "I have all these female friends." He, he, he has like... There are two... It's like having, just keeping to one date is difficult because they all want to date him. And all of them, he says, "My female friends tell me, they're like, 'Kareem, you're a fantastic listener.'" And well, now we know why. He enters a state of active flow when he's listening to women, but not to men. Maybe he might want to work on that. I don't know. Um, uh, pointing while talking or using a finger. So I always noticed my mom when she would read, she uses her f- She never took a speed reading class, but she uses her finger to read. And one time I asked her, "Why do you do that?" And she's like, "It helps me focus." I'm like, "Okay. I don't feel like I need to use my finger and I can focus, but I'll trust that it works for you." So I saw a student do this in the lab of a similar type, and I said, "Hey, what's going on?" And he said, "Oh, it helps me focus." And so the whole is, is his finger was there, it was all blue. He takes the finger away, all of a sudden it breaks up into pretty much nothing. I said, "Okay, now reapply your finger." Suddenly blue again. Take your finger away. I mean, really it's like that fast. That's the great thing about EEG. It's like instant. And, and I'm like, "Wow, that fing- Make sure you don't lose those fingers."

Speaker 48:20 [laughs]

Dario Nardi 48:21 "Okay? And don't give them away to somebody else."

Speaker 48:23 [laughs]

Dario Nardi 48:23 Um, you know, d- you want that. That's a good thing to know. So then there are all these other things that came up. Uh, reviewing the past or, or visualizing the future. If I ask you what your life is like and going to be ten years from now, the natural sort of tendency is to think about what we'd like to happen or what stereotypically happens to people or logically what will probably happen. Um, but some people really open up. Every region of the brain gets involved in the state of flow. So it's a coordinated, synchronized contribution. To say, "Yes, what will happen in the future?" Or for the past, the same thing. Review your life. Something that happened to you, say, 20 years ago or... Well, the students didn't necessarily live that long, uh, they won't remember, but you know, when they were kids. S- this is, I, I think, where some of the stuff really began that might be relevant for you. Singing a unique song. So the student was a musician. We're playing guitar. Um, he's a professional singer and guitar player. Singing other songs did not evoke that flow, only when he did his own. Singing other songs, you know, there would be sort of like this motor activity that goes on with the hands and so on, kinesthetic activity and some, some auditory. But it was doing his own stuff. For the entire song, he'd remain in that state. And I've seen this time and again, that when the students would do things that were directly related, it was a unique product. So that's why I say it's more than just expertise. A lot of times, it's creative expertise. It's what the person has done individually that really evokes that state. They sort of internalized it and made it their own. In fact, one student, she was a dancer for 15 years, from age 3 to age 18. So that's probably pretty burnt into the brain. All she had to do was sit back, relax, close her eyes, and visualize dancing, and every region of her brain was in sync with every other. And sometimes this has interesting implications. I had a student sorting between... His parents wanted him to go to dental school, and he wants to be a rap musician. Very different. And I guess if... The, the parents feel like, "We paid for you to go to UCLA. Like, you're gonna graduate and become a dentist." Uh, and he comes from a Persian family, and if you may know, Persian families tend to be very, how can we say, hands-on with their kids, uh, in guiding them. And, and it was... It... When we talked about dentistry, that didn't really evoke any... E- even this region up here about importance, it just did not evoke anything. Uh, when he did his own rap songs that he had made up... So this was really funny because this is like a Persian guy, 20 years old, and he's singing like ghetto rap songs an- and even his own versions, and he went into this total state of, of blue creative flow. So I sort of, you know, just reported that to him that you do seem to have some kind of special affinity, talent, expertise, creative expertise with this. I understand it's been like four years since he's graduated, and he's been studying for the dental exams for those four years. Hasn't actually gone to dental school yet. There are also some other patterns, and, uh, these are

Dario Nardi 51:26 hilarious actually, because people ask, "Well, okay, so we could be solid blue. What does that mean?" What happens when the person holds a state that's solid? And this doesn't happen all the time, but you can usually find it somewhere. Uh, blank. This is what you... And I'm-- It's not just me, okay? This is in the literature. Watching television evokes almost no brain activity in the neocortex. I've seen two exceptions, and I did a whole like very structured research study with this student, with like randomized introduction of film clips and so on. All very nicely done. The APA would love me for it. Uh, I did all the right things. Only two things. If you're familiar with the movie Memento. So the movie Memento follows a man who his short-term memory doesn't write itself into long-term memory, and it's filmed in such a way that y- you experience some of the same confusion that the character does. That evokes some brain activity. Um, everything else from... Well, the other thing is, is there was an ending scene in the first Charlie's Angels movie, which has each char- each of four different, uh, protagonists, each in a different location fighting somebody different, and we're just thrown as a viewer into the middle of all of these different shots and cuts. So it takes a while for the viewer to figure out who's where and what is it that they're doing. All the other 10 examples from Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Teletubbies evoke no brain activity. Uh, so what I, I tell parents, "You know, if you have a choice between TV and video games, at least let your kids play video games. That's so much better than TV." Um, now green. What happens when it's solid green? I've noticed when, um, they're doing speed dating and you dislike someone, it's green. Uh, when a person is engaging in an argument. Now, if they get really active in the argument, it may look like this, but a lot of the times it'll just be... It'll have a, a... quite a bit of green. Um, losing at a game of cards. And I began to think about, okay, these and other situations. I said, "What did they all have in common?" And I would debrief them after the activity. It has disassociating in common. Disassociation means i- in sort of psychological terms that you don't want to feel your bodily sensations and your emotions. You want to, to sort of separate yourself from what's going on so that the cognition is separate from all those impulses and, and emotions that might sway you. And it does make sense. Like, if you don't like someone, you don't want to feel the feeling of disliking them. Um, how about losing at a card game? Anyone want to dwell with that feeling of loss and failure? No. Um, focused thinking, though, also helps. And sometimes I saw the reverse in card games. A person would lose, and all of a sudden it was solid green, okay, and then they would win, and it would be solid green. But fortunately, I debrief them and they're saying, "Well, th- I thought, you know, I'm just gonna try and redouble my effort." And so there was this, this focused thinking it's allowed. In contrast, when it's solid yellow, this is a great also sort for, for, for doing sensing. That doesn't mean y- you only show it if you have an S in your type code. But when any of us, because we all can do, it's about preference. Like I have right hand, left hand, I can use both. Um, I might have a preference for my right hand, but I use both. So people use both intuiting and sensing, both thinking and feeling. Um, but people would show this when they really like somebody, when they're really feeling bodily sensations. Like I ask them to close their eyes and they're listening to music and to feel the beat. Uh, when they win at a game of cards. As I began to add all of these things together, I realized a lot of this is about assoc- being in an associated state, when you really allow those body sensations and those emotions from, from the midbrain and from the body to well up and influence your thinking and to experience those. Finally, when it's solid red, so this is the highest frequency possible. This is like when the mercury on the thermometer goes all the way up to like, w- how, what, what, what do they max out at? Like 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit, for those of you who are in countries who use Celsius, which is probably just about everyone, right?

Speaker 55:20 [laughs]

Dario Nardi 55:21 Um, hyper-stimulated is when it shows... Uh, I took all my setup to Burning Man. I, I know some executives from Google go to Burning Man every year. They get flown in, too. That's so nice. They don't have to wait in line for three hours in, in a car. Um, Burning Man is... How many of you know about Burning Man? Okay. Oh, wow, almost every one of you. What a good company to inform their employees about Burning Man. Uh, they, all three subjects, from completely sober to completely not, and I did this at dusk, which is like the perfect time when there are lights and sounds, and everybody's getting really active, and there's still enough light to be able to see what's going on clearly. All of the brains were at maximum frequency and amplitude. They couldn't go any higher on the device. They might have been higher, but I couldn't measure it. And in fact, in order to do an activity like, saying, uh, economic odds-making or something like that, they actually had to come down. So, like this region here would go from red down to green in order to get active. So hyper-stimulated. It's also been seen in experiments on myself when people have an aha moment. "Oh my God, that's what you mean." Um, and learning a new game, especially a game of cards. And, and so that's why I say, okay, if your kids don't... N- TV not so much. Video games evoke some brain activity for sure. It depends on the video game. Do like a board game or a card game, and that e- evokes even more, especially if they're learning a new game. If you keep playing Solitaire 500 times, you're, you're not gonna be there. It's about learning new games. Um, so those are some of the, the very broad patterns.

Dario Nardi 56:53 Uh, not to oversimplify then, we might consider times when we see a circuit. So here is the circuit, and you'll s- I'll see this really quickly in like one second. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And it just repeats two or three times, maybe even four or five times, as it just sort of goes around. And it's almost like the person must have some kind of like super highway built in. I'm not sure, because you're, there really, there's no connection that goes from here like this to here. It's not a typical trunk connection. Either they go this way or they go this way. Um, but there it goes. It just sort of dances around. And, um, it's great, because they hear words. They're gonna w- to, to do some, uh, evalu- logical evaluation of those words. They're gonna weigh what the belief is about those, or maybe how it compares to facts they remember, and then they do explanation and decision. Very fast. The two types that showed this consistently were ENFJ and ENTJ, which are both known to be very in charge social style. Um, ENFJ being sort of a more emotional, uh, warm and fuzzy, in charge, still in charge, mind you. Uh, ENTJ being let's, the get right to it and, and implement. And consistently, they have like this super highway built in. So it's sort of like a freeway with no off-ramps. Now, what does that mean that when they're presented with new information that doesn't fit with this convenient circuit? It's like you wanna stop at that town, but there's no off-ramp from here to the town. What do you do? Surprise. Uh, so it, you know, it, it highlights that we have trade-offs when we are, um, when our brain is developing, that, that we specialize in some ways invariably, and therefore, there's going to be some side effects that come from those. Not just regions we don't use, but side effects. Uh, this is the last sort of brain pattern I'll look at. I call this the Christmas tree, and how it looks on the screen, it's not static like this. This actually keeps, um, moving back and forth and up and down like the lights on a Christmas tree. Except that each, each light can actually be a different color. So this is just one moment in time, and in the next moment, this could be black, and this one will be red, and, and this one will be blue, and it just keeps changing all the time. And I saw this with subjects, um, when, when... So a few types would show this quite a bit, almost like their default pattern. For other people, it would really become active when I would give them input. So I could say to all of you, and I could ask you, "Please visualize a cat and a dog." And most people will show some auditory as they think about those words, and probably a fair amount of visual and maybe some memory activity. Memory is actually deeper in the mid-brain, so sometimes the memory doesn't show up at all. Um, for these folks, though, if I say cat and dog, even if I ask them specifically, "Please visualize a cat and a dog," it could light up a whole bunch of things. They could be memories of the cat and the dog they had before. Oh, it's raining cats and dogs. Um, let's see, uh, I've been to many presentations before, and some of them are dog presentations, and some of them are cat presentations. Not literally, but in terms of their style. Some people are dog people, not just they own dogs. They're sort of like dogs in a way. And some people are like cats. Uh, and so there's all of these sort of metaphors and ideas that can come in, and when I give them, uh, wordplay tests, things like, um, I know this gal, and she married a rock. Immediately, there are two possible meanings to that. The literal meaning, they're walking down the aisle, and she has a rock with her, preferably on like a silver platter or something. Uh, this is the, the imaginative answer. And then there's the, you know, somebody, she married someone who's very stoic and quiet and so on. And, and so there we, this really, they're really quick with those. They think a lot of, uh, think of a lot of them. They don't necessarily give answers right away quickly, because what happens with those folks is they'll give them something interesting, like she married a rock, or so use something, let's... If I said desktop computer, and you use that in a sentence. Most people can say, "You know, I went to my office and I cleaned my desktop computer." Or, "I turned it on." And I say, "Okay, that's great. How about underwear computer? Use that in a sentence." Most of us, if we work at it, we can think of something. Some students will say to me, "Oh, that's not a real thing." They refuse to do the task. Others are gonna be like, "Hmm, underwear computer," and then they just sort of think, says, "Well, I have an underwear... Um, Dario has given me the phrase underwear computer." [laughs] I mean, you used it in a sentence, but that doesn't really count. Uh, for a few students, the ones who show this pattern, they actually think of, like, 10 different answers at once, and then it's really hard for them to pick which one. They're like, "Can you give me some time to give you all the things I just thought of?" And then in that time that they said that their brain actually produced like 10 more things. And, and they really can keep on giving those analogies quick, quick. And, and so that really is... There's this wonderful process called transcontextual thinking, the ability to see patterns and relationships in one situation and match those to many other seemingly very different situations, but where that context still holds. So one of my favorite activities is that they do these little tasks, and these are very similar. I have to... Oh, here's a much better choice. Okay. So we see these two here. Um, and just, you know, for the purpose of demonstration, which one would you like to date? [laughs] This one. This one here, and why is that? It's taller. It's taller. Okay. Ah, got it. Okay. So, uh, by the way, a good sign that we're using transcontextual thinking is that people smile and/or laugh. That's like an external, uh, evidence of what's going on, and that's what we just did. You took it from one conte- a set of relationships about being taller, shorter, fatter, thinner, uh, different kind of markers and colors, and mapped those onto a completely different situation. You think it's useful for creativity? Tremendously so to be able to analogize from one kind of situation, say, "Hey, is there anything to learn?" There might be nothing. Just 'cause the relationships match over pretty well doesn't mean that they match smartly. We can compare the atom to the solar system, but,

Dario Nardi 1:02:58 you know, they, they work a little bit differently. 10:05. Okay, it says 57 minutes here. Is that also... Is that on track with it? Mm-hmm. Okay. Um, so, so just some summarize, some things that I found. Various regions do similar tasks for all of us who are right-handed. Um, then you're like, "Well, what if I'm left-handed?" Interesting question. How many lefties do we have? Oh, we have like a deficit of lefties statistically. That's sort of interesting, and one of them I brought with me. [laughs] Hmm. Um, well, you sir, have a 50% chance of just being the mirror image of a righty in terms of your brain organization, otherwise it works the same. You also have a 50% chance that your brain has an arbitrary organizational pattern. You could have regions that are next-door neighbors that, like, nobody else has as neighbors, which could make you a really unique or, um, special thinker. [laughs] Well, well, apparently Google hired you, so it sounds like you're more in the unique creative category. Um, being engaged... Oh, but people vary greatly in how much stimulus is needed to engage a region, and engage means, uh, being competent and/or motivated. There are whole brain patterns, such as being in the zone, that solid blue that comes in the creativity. It could also be, though, it doesn't have to be creativity because we saw with some personality types that it seems to clearly be related to or at least matches with, correlates to their personal- their Myers-Briggs type. Um, and there's also the, a Christmas tree pattern, and there are many other patterns that happen too. There's one called the tennis hop, and the ten... For those of you who are attending the, the session after this on the, the coaching, uh, and, and learning, uh, techniques, we'll talk about the tennis hop and so on. And personality type, mainly, uh, Carl Jung's eight functions model correlates to brain activity. Now, you probably heard of the Myers-Briggs, but what you may not realize that Myers-Briggs was an assessment that was created to get at Carl Jung's eight functions model. Now, Carl Jung was an Austrian psychiatrist, and, um, he was a student. He was one of the, the two or three principal students of Freud, and he left Freud. He broke away from him and was very much interested, not only in culture and symbology and the collective unconscious, and terms like introversion, extroversion, and having a complex and a dark side and a shadow. Like, all of those come from Jung. Our, our, our sort of our, our pop psychology is filled with Jungian concepts. Uh, but he postulated that there were eight mental functions, and he meant functions for those math folks, like it's a math function, which is, is a set of relationships. That's what he meant by function. We have these eight mental functions, which are now also called cognitive processes or whatnot. And, and he really, um, proposed that people have all of them. We use all of them, but we definitely have a strong preference for one and usually, uh, to, to, say two or three, uh, to sort of cover all the bases of what's needed. And I have found it's... If I just use Myers-Briggs, the instrument, I would not have found all the correlations I did. But because I really sort of went back to what it was originally trying to assess, which are these eight functions, then that is where I saw all the beautiful correlations that went with it. And, and that is where the, the excitement is. Um, and I know we, we can actually skip to the last slide. Oh, I just wanted to say here, there's one more slide before the, the end. Uh, individual uniqueness is still there. So let's say, are there any other... We have one ENFP. Do we have any other ENFPs in the room? Anyone know? Mm-hmm. You might not know? Okay. Um, but you probably know some ENFPs. Yeah. Um, what's the chance that you are going to have almost identical brain activity to them? It's that little blue slice up there. That's your percent chance. It's like 3%. However, there's a huge percentage chance, 50%, a little bit over 50%, that you'll have mostly the same brain activity. It turns out to be at, like, 80%. You'll have 80% of your brain activity in common. You also have a big chunk, say 35% chance, that you will have half of your brain activity in common. And then the sliver here up here with the purple, which I forget what percentage that is, you all can add up and find the difference off of 100%, um, and that's the chance you only have somewhat similar. So by the way, that's much better than if we just compare any two people randomly in the population. Say like ENFP and ESTP, the chance that you'll have almost identical or, or mostly similar brain activity is like almost nothing. It's like very small. So really good validation in terms of does type actually point, personality type point to something? It does, but it is not an assurance because you could have two ENFP, say, and they might have quite different brain activity. Now you'll still show the Christmas tree, which is well associated with all the types with N and P in their code, uh, but beyond that, there might be some big differences. So individuality still matters quite a bit and, and it, I think that feels natural to all of us. We're not surprised to hear that. And that's a picture of the brain from the side. Um, and that's the end. Thank you. [audience clapping] So now is the opportunity for Q&A, and we did skip a few slides, so I probably may have some resources for folks as they answer questions to use that.

Speaker 1:08:32 Great. Thank you, Dario. So we'll take some questions here from the audience in Mountain View, and also if we have any questions from VC sites, go ahead and ping Nidhi Sharma, N. Sharma, if you'd like her to ask your question. Any questions here in Mountain View?

Speaker 1:08:48 So I was curious what your, um, studies show or what your thoughts are in terms of how these personality types interact and what that shows about in brain activity or how that shows up.

Dario Nardi 1:08:59 So how, what, what is it that we see when people interact with each other? Um, I have never looked at two people's brains at the same time as they interacted, but I do frequently look at what's going on as they interact with one other person, either around an activity. Uh, one thing is you do is they give them like, uh, a, eight tarot cards, and they have to create a story together. Uh, or they're engaging in like mock speed dating or something like that, playing a, a, a competitive game, tossing balls. Uh, it seems some of it is driven by our feeling of relationship with the other person. So in the speed dating example where it's almost the task and the relationship to the person match with each other, um, that, uh, um, that you're going to see brain activity indicating liking, disliking and so on. If it's something like the ball toss, what you really see is the tossing of the ball back and forth and so on. And I don't know, it, just as a brief break, Yasha, if you wanna help them out.

Speaker 1:09:57 Yeah.

Dario Nardi 1:10:01 Yeah. So that, it re- it seems like it's more task-oriented, and that makes sense for, for the, the neocortex. As we look a little bit deeper into the midbrain, I suspect it would be quite different, but EEG doesn't reach that far down there. And when the task is socializing, that's when we see a lot of the activity. It's relevant. Yes.

Speaker 1:10:21 You talked a little bit about motivation, um, as being one of the things that, um, sort of lights up certain parts of the brain. Did you, did you look at external, uh, motivation, or was it just assuming internal motivation?

Dario Nardi 1:10:34 Uh, I do believe external motivation... Oh, right, right. So the question is in terms of motivation and competence, uh, there's sort of this, this sense that competence primarily comes from the inside. Motivation can come from the inside, or there can be peer pressure and social influence or guidance to help that come from the outside. There was a region back here, T5, which is really strongly responsible for, um, helping us respond to social feedback from others. And the more active that region was, it seemed like the more the person was driven to do behaviors based upon looks that they got from other people, um, verbal feedback they got from others. In contrast, if they had much more activity in this region, which is actually diametrically opposite, so right this region here, uh, and almost no activity on this side, it seemed like no matter what we did, the person might notice the feedback, but they have no interest in responding to it. Uh, in, in fact, it might even show, they might show some activity here when, um, when they're curious what others are thinking. But once they hear the feedback, actually the activity goes away, and they don't respond to it. So a good example is I'm in a writing group, a fiction writing group, and there was a woman with INFP preferences, and she's, and I would predict that she would have a lot of activity here and a little bit here. So she's not really big on social feedback. Um, and she brings her stories in, and we give her comments, and she never incorporates the comments. But she's always asking for comments, and it's not just to be nice. And f- you know, then she said one time, she explains, it's like, "I'm sort of just trying to confirm what I think your feedback is going to be." But it's, unless it's like a missing period or something, she doesn't actually, you know, make the change. And so that's an example where I think the motivation in her case really comes from the inside. But for others, I, I've seen a couple of subjects where it's just like y- it's almost like they have like a hundred buttons on the outside, and you can just say or do things, and they just like keep following for the feedback, whatever you do. Yeah. I mean, amazing sometimes. I think I'm not even giving them feedback, but if I just glance this way, all of a sudden they'd like... You know, I had one kid, he had his feet on the table. And I didn't even turn my head. I just looked this way, and I noticed it, and I don't care actually. And all of a sudden he's like, "Oh, I have to put my feet down," and this and that. He's like hyper-attentive to that external feedback. Great question. Yes.

Speaker 1:12:56 Have you noticed any, uh, cultural differences as you've, with the, with the subjects you've had? Like people who are, say, like either raised more in a language system that's more symbolic versus phonetic-

Dario Nardi 1:13:06 Mm. Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:13:06 ... or, and how that's played into the brain activity and some of the reactions to the interactions you've seen with that difference?

Dario Nardi 1:13:13 Great question. So have I noticed some differences in brain activity based upon cultural background? For example, if, uh- A person was raised, uh, learning Kanji, or the symbolic writing system, as opposed to the sort of simplified alphabetic system that we use in English. Um, the answer is yes, and in fact, I really wanted to explore cultural differences, so I selected, um, three... well, two primarily, but I would allow some other students to come in, too. Um, Japanese exchange students and students who were, um, like first generation or Persian or Middle Eastern immigrant. I'd say mainly Persian, but there were some Lebanese and, and so on. Um, and, and tried to keep it to that. What I found was that in activities that are more learned, for example, performing mathematics, and I would ask them, they sort of have a, a, an interview sheet as they come in, and I ask them to do some sample math problems and to reflect on that, and let me know like what kind of math, uh, methods, if they remember, how is it that they learned math. Um, and it was really fascinating to see the differences in brain activity that reflected... I could understand in terms of personality, but it also seemed clearly related to the method that they learned with math. And a great example, the Japanese students, incredibly efficient brain activity, and these were all students, I made sure to pick ones for the math when I did the comparison that were all students who would use math as part of their majors. Um, incredibly efficient brain activity, just like one perfect region, this P3 region, whi- which educators would sort of hope would be like the region for simpler mathematics, a- as opposed to over here, P4, for more like spatial and, and, uh, multivariate mathematics. And, and no other regions were really active. So very fast, efficient. You don't wanna be using your brain at like maximum capacity when you're doing math problems if that's gonna be your job to, you know, do a lot of it. Um, in contrast, I had a student raised in, a Middle Eastern student who, uh, had the French method of learning math, which is a lot about sounding out and repeating. So we showed a lot of auditory activity. The hassle is though the auditory areas need to also keep track of what they're hearing in the physical environment. So he had difficulty doing the math problems because there was noise in the environment, and he expressed he needed to work alone in a really quiet space in order to do math. I had a student finally who, uh, came from Northern California and learned in one of the new math systems where students are sort of allowed to discover principles for themselves and so on, and she worked quickly, and she got all the problems right, and she used well over half her brain to do it. And unfortunately, the, the, the, the half that she used, it didn't involve any of the key reasoning centers. And as she described it, she says, "I'm trying to remember what we did and remember the formulas, and then I was visualizing the problem, and then I was wondering if I was taking too long." And so she ended up using everything that would be sort of part of an experiential process, and apparently the new math methods for imparting principles didn't actually impart any principles to her, um, which sort of contradicted her personality type preference, too, which I thought, boy, if it didn't work for her, then, then, then what does that mean, uh, at least for the school that she attended to or, or the teacher she had? So it does seem there's some elements around that. I also thought it was interesting that when I compared INFPs, since I had seven of them and could look at their ethnic background, that the one who was like the perfect listener, in every situation, she was like, "What? You're talking? I'm gonna listen with my whole brain," was the Japanese INFP. And I know having lived in Japan and speaking Japanese, it's really interesting with the grammar. You have to wait until the end of the sentence to know what the s- what it, what the verb is, and essentially the most important part. So you really need to be a good listener in Japanese. And, and then she was female, which in Japanese society would like push it even further. She's gonna be a great listener. INFP are already sort of stereotyped as listeners to begin with, and, and I'm expecting that from the brain activity, and she was like super listener. And, and just really, and she listened to everyone actively. Um, uh, she might want s- to consider whether she wants to keep doing that all of her life. I know now that she's learned this, that's up to her what she does with that knowledge. Whereas, uh, I had an INFP who was very sort of like, uh, European background, grew up in America and, and so on, and he did listening, but not nearly as much. And those are specific students, but if I sort of put them along a, a spectrum, I can see that there's definitely... uh, where, whereas the Persian INFP didn't, uh, probably did the least listening of, of the seven that were there. Yeah. Yes.

Speaker 1:17:51 Um, going back, Professor Nardi, to something you had said earlier, I'm wondering, um, you know, a lot of the, what you're describing is correlation of these personality types to the brain activity. Is there anything, um, that you'd suggest is translatable to, you know, our lives in terms of how to cause changes?

Dario Nardi 1:18:08 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:18:08 You know, for example, um, like how one, if you're one personality type, how you might interact with another or how you might become a better listener by engaging brain activity in a neighboring region or something like that?

Dario Nardi 1:18:22 Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, so the question is, is are there ways to take this information we've learned about the brain and translate into, uh, practical applications in our everyday lives? And some examples would be, um, having a better idea of how to interact with somebody else. Um, can we actually im- improve perhaps a particular ability, um, or develop particular skill around something? I have... So I can think of three options right off. One is that you go to Australia, and you do their like, um, transcranial stimulation. You participate in that. So they turn off certain regions of the brain by stimulating them or turn on other regions, and they've really had some nice success in, in terms of shifting people's activity. Many of us apparently are really good artists, and we don't know it, and the trick is to actually turn off regions i- in the, the left frontal areas, and especially in this, this region right around here. And all of a sudden, for two or three, maybe four hours, we're gonna have significantly better drawing ability. Uh, because apparently there's signals from here that are sent out to block signals from the other hemisphere So that's an example where we've seen some nice stuff. But that's a very sort of high-tech end, but maybe Google could arrange that for you.

Speaker 1:19:28 [laughs]

Dario Nardi 1:19:28 Um, uh, another is that after this session, there's a break, and then there's a human resources, uh, another sort of hour and a half activity workshop, and that's when we'll talk about actually what are those, um, coaching tips and techniques for those eight types, and there really are a lot that come out of it, much more than I ... I ... You know, I've just sort of mentioned personality types without saying for this, for this, for that, for that, 'cause personality type, we would say, like some colleagues have asked me, "Well, okay, well, now that you've sort of gotten this point, isn't personality type, like Myers-Briggs, just sort of nice scaffolding to problem-solving, and now that you've figured out what the brain does, you can, you know, throw it away?" And I said, "No, because I'm not done yet." And also, most of the time, we really don't know what's going inside, on inside a person's brain, and it turns out to be pretty good if we also know the person's sort of expertise skill sets. Those two pieces of information together can give us a pretty good picture of what, of what's likely to go on. And then from there, we can actually do some interactive things. We can say maybe this is the kind of person who needs to have windows in their office, uh, or at least be able to get outside or something like that. And, um, the third, my third answer is, um, because these really are skill, cognitive skills, as I would call them, we can't develop them instantly, but I believe with anywhere from probably three to six months of practice upwards of three years, that we can develop particular regions to work better as long as we know we're working activities that actually cause the brain to, to function in that area and don't allow us to sort of rely upon other areas to fill in. Like, we really ... You sort of understand what I'm saying? That, that we ... Our natural inclination is say, "Hmm, there's a new task. What familiar resources can I bring to bear from the brain to solve it?" No, we wanna design a task that forces them to use an area that they're uncomfortable with, and naturally it will be unpleasant at first. But I can certainly say now, and then just re- rewinding some 20-odd years ago, that my region F7, as I read, it must surely work much better than it did before. I don't know. I didn't have it done before. But I'm thinking it works a lot better now, and that had to do with specific trainings that I got and so on, and over many years. Yeah. So probably going to Australia would be the easiest one. But, um, but I think all of them, you can do the workshop today, and, and that's a good start. Yeah.

Speaker 1:21:49 Time for one more question and then we'll end. Any other questions?

Dario Nardi 1:21:55 Yes.

Speaker 1:21:55 You can learn a lot about yourself by actually going through this study. So is there a way ... Is this study still going on or no?

Dario Nardi 1:22:04 Um, I will agree with you that, yes, you can learn a lot from doing this. In fact, the last two people I did, both students, uh, were a couple. And they gave permission for the other person, their partner, to watch as they did it. Now, they had been going, they'd been going together for a while, so they weren't completely surprised. But it did confirm a lot of things that they sort of felt were the case. Uh, one of their jokes is she's the one who wears the pants in the relationship. He's the one who listens. His preferences are INFP, and we really saw, yes, he's the listener. Um, there were also some really funny moments. So, uh, one of the things they do with the virtual dating is they see pictures of potential dates, so men and women that are their age, young men and young women. And I ask them to pick. Uh, towards the ... They have the virtual experience, but towards the end, they can pick down, they narrow down to three and then down to one. Uh, all of the females and all of the males, they pick the same people. So all of the males pick the same girl at the end, and all of the females pick the same guy, regardless of personality type or whatever. Uh, all of the females pick the guy who's wearing the football jersey and has blonde hair. I'm not kidding. Like, that really is.

Speaker 1:23:09 [laughs]

Dario Nardi 1:23:09 All, all of the, all of the guys pick the blonde who's on the beach in a bikini and has really great abs. Um, and the, the ... So in this couple, the guy sort of thought that his girlfriend would select in, in the gallery of options, would select the guy that sort of looked like him. And she didn't. That guy didn't even make it to the top three.

Speaker 1:23:30 [laughs]

Dario Nardi 1:23:31 Much less the top one. Uh, and he seemed a little surprised and disconcerted by that. Um, I think from her point of view, that wasn't why she was with him. And I think that's a great example of, of looking at, I would say it's this, because that who we like and dislike, a sort of instant sort of sexual response, is coming from the limbic system. I mean, it's, we see things and we smell things and so on, and it comes from there. But the neocortex is designed to override that or at least give us more options in decision-making. And, and so it's not really surprising that she would have an immediate reaction on one level and yet for a long-term partnering would say, "No, I want somebody else," and make that sensible. In fact, she even felt that the football player would probably not make a good mate. I mean, that was part of the questioning. But, um, s- allowing people to see that is tremendously illuminating. I mean, I would say the, the biggest and the, and the most fun is sort of voyeuristic. In those two or three hours, I get to know the person at a level that would probably take months or even potentially years if I, if I didn't live with them to know, sort of to figure out their responsiveness and so on. So it, it's ... I hope for the day that, that more people will be able to do this. In terms of is this still going on or not, I am doing some minor research. I wanna fill out my, my subject set, and then I, my focus, my desire is to actually create wireless technology that a person can wear the cap throughout their working day. And then there'll be a computer program that automatically analyzes what's going on so that I can have a lot more subjects and not be sort of tied down with it. Um, I have one possible funding source, but I, I'm looking to, to move to that level first before doing more, 'cause people naturally ask, "What about my brain?"

Speaker 1:25:14 [laughs]

Dario Nardi 1:25:14 And, um, and I'm, uh, I'm working on that. Yes. Thank you. I appreciate the invitation. [clapping]