The Neuroscience Of Awe, Distraction and Anxiety - Beau Lotto | Modern Wisdom Podcast 376

One of the most attractive features of another person is their authenticity. We're highly wired, highly tuned to detect someone's authenticity. Why? Because to be lied to, to be tricked, during evolution, it was a really bad idea. And also, the authenticity of a company. It's not enough just to have a purpose. You know, you can have these wonderful purposes, but unless you're authentic in it, it's just a slogan, and people will detect that inauthenticity.

Ohlotto, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much, Chris. Good to be here.

We were just talking about what happens if you can hear your own voice briefly after you say it. So it's like your mom's old phone on loudspeaker, and you're speaking, and then her microphone catches the audio out of the speaker and sends it back to you. What happens with your brain? What were you talking about there?

Uh, well, if your, um... If you actually hear your voice a fraction of a second after you've spoken, your, your brain doesn't know what to do. And eventually, if it keeps happening, you'll just stop talking. You'll literally... Your brain just says, "Shut up." You just stop talking, and not just because of the content. I mean, part of, part of it is-

(Laughs) You're boring.

... to actually hear what you're actually saying. So you actually bore yourself. But it's, it's more than that. It's actually the, um... It just can't cope with that because, of course, we are used to hearing our voice immediately. So now if I hear it almost like an echo, uh, your brain can't deal with it.

That's-

And so it just, just stops.

That sounds-

Just gets worse and worse.

Sounds to me like the audio version of when you see a face that's got two sets of eyes on it. Have you seen this where they stack two eyes over each other and you're... When you look at it, there's a skull on a wall on my drive to the gym in Newcastle, and there's a skull with two sets of eyes, two eye holes, perfectly done.

Ah.

And even looking at that, my brain just isn't quite happy.

Yeah.

It knows there's something amiss here.

Knows that there's something wrong. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Uh, absolutely. I mean, we're, we're... People don't realize, of course, how strongly, and we'll get into this I'm sure, how strongly we're wired to see what's familiar. Uh, and how, in that sense, we're actually wired to detect the unfamiliar, because your brain is constantly sort of adapting to what's average. Uh, and there's a, there's a really good reason why that's true. But it also, there's some really strong consequences to that from, from political onwards.

How would you describe what you do for work?

How do I describe... (laughs) How long do you have? Oh, wait, we haven't... Um, what do I do for work? So I'm sort of like professionally a neuroscientist, okay? So I study perception. I study how the brain makes meaning, how it makes meaning of itself, how it makes meaning of the world, of other people. So that's what I, in some sense I am. Uh, but we're kind of like lunatic fringe neuroscience in the sense that, um, the world becomes our lab. So what I do is we, me and not just me, my lab who I call the Lab of Misfits, and what we, what we do is we basically try to understand the principles by which we, we see, the prince... And hear and touch, the principles by which we make perception. And then we try to give people insight into those principles, uh, through immersive experiences and so they can actually embody it. Uh, and then through that hopefully give them understanding, which then gives them freedom to then do something about their perception. So, I mean, you, you do amazing things in nightclub immersive experiences. For us, that becomes a lab, right? The world is effectively... The world isn't a stage for us. The world is a lab, literally.