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Transcript

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0:01Who are the characters behind science? This is Science Behind the Glass, illuminating the human side. In this podcast, we unveil the human side of laboratories and science. Scientists share personal experiences and we discuss their meanings from different perspectives and fields of research.

0:31Welcome to Science Behind the Glass, where we explore the profound intersection of science and humanity. Today, We are joined by a revolutionary thinker, Dr. Mark Williams, whose life and work break long -held myths about the human brain and will offer a blueprint for a kinder, more connected future. Dr. Mark is an international neuroscientist with over 25 years of experience in behavioral and brain imaging research focusing on social skills. He has published more than 70 scientific papers and work at MIT in the USA and multiple universities in Australia. He is co -director of BrainCamp, a neuroscience program for kids where he translates complex science into transformative action, providing educators with tools to replace outdated practices like ranking students. He’s also the author of the bestseller book, The Connected Species, How the Evolution of the Brain Can Save the World. Today, we are diving into one of the most complex organs in the animal kingdom, the human brain. But to truly understand it, we have to go behind physiology and anatomy. We need to ask what this organ has made possible, from brain -baking technological advances to deep social risks we are still trying to heal. Mark, it’s a pleasure having you here.

1:59Thank you for accepting this invitation. Thank you for having me, Linda. It’s great to be here. So, can you tell us a little bit how your background shaped the person that you are today and how this has influenced your neuroscience studies and the path that you have taken? That’s a very big question to start off with. I actually grew up in a fairly small country town in Victoria, in Australia. and I wasn’t very academic at all actually to begin with. My mother had mental health issues and I avoided school. The town had very high unemployment and so I and back then we had corporal punishment so you’d get the strap or the cane if you did anything wrong.

2:46So myself and my friends used to try and avoid that by going down to the lake and fishing and smoking pot most of the time. So when I was 15 I was told by my principal I’d be dead or in prison by the time I was 25. and I should leave school and get an apprenticeship at the local abattoir. And so I didn’t really like school at all and didn’t think I was very intelligent. Until I was 25 and two of my friends had drug overdoses and I decided I needed to go back to school and do something different with my life.

3:19And so I did, and there was a physics teacher there at the TAFE, basically the college that I went to, to do my HSC, to do my final year. and he convinced me that I should go to university. We sort of bonded over records, you know, back then we had records, black vinyl records and I used to collect them and so did he and we sort of bonded over that and then he, yeah, convinced me that I was more intelligent than I was. So I went back, I did a Bachelor of Science and I majored in psychology because I wanted to learn why I was as messed up as I was and members of my family were as messed up as they were and I… I also did a major in physiology because I was really interested in who we are as humans.

4:04And so I was lucky enough, I got into a special strain, which was that neurophysiology strain, which was a select group of students and sort of took off from there. I then did a PhD in medicine and ended up getting a fancy fellowship to go to MIT and work at MIT for a number of years, which was amazing. But yeah, I really just fell in love with. understanding who we are as humans and how our brains have evolved. Wow, that’s amazing. You have collective experiences and mentors and it’s so important to highlight that, like the mentors in life. I think that for me it was important that my school teacher that was a biologist, actually he was living like breadcrumbs to try to understand biology and cosmos. that serious at that time. But it’s amazing what you have done, Mark, and all the decisions that you have taken. And especially understand the brain and why we take decisions and how we get influenced by others, especially. And something that has been very interesting, well, at least for me, is that we always oversimplify the concept of natural selection. And then there’s like harshest phrases that says like a… people only associate Darwin with only the strongest survive or life is brutal competition or the weak should be left behind but this is not natural selection and and this is not what natural selection is it

5:37about it’s not about the strength or domination but about adaptability and the evolution doesn’t aim for progress It is simply a response to changing environments. And in fact, traits like cooperation, caregiving, and empathy can be just as important as a physical strength or speed. And human evolution, in particular, has been deeply shaped by our ability to live in groups and share together and have this communication and help and care for each other. In your book, The Connected Species, you argue that our brain didn’t evolve through competition, but through connection. Could you please explain how that works neurologically in beautiful and simple words? Which one are those brain structures that work? How is the network? How the changes that support this idea?

6:32Yeah, so when you think about it, like us as humans, we became the alpha species on this planet Earth. I don’t think there’s any argument about that. We’ve taken over. every continent on planet Earth, which no other animals managed to do, and we’re now changing the environment, doing all sorts of things. But we weren’t actually the most likely species to do that, when you think about it, because we’re not the strongest species on this planet Earth. Lots of species are much stronger than us. We’re not the fastest species. There’s lots of fast, you know, much faster animals out there that would take us down.

7:08We couldn’t outrun a lion or a tiger or anything. And we don’t actually have the largest brain. There’s lots of animals that have much larger brains than ours and much more complex brains than ours. So, you know, you have to ask, why did we become the species that we became, the selfish species? And it was through collaboration. It was through our ability to actually communicate with each other and to support each other. to empathize with each other and to want to help each other that we ended up where we actually are. And so we selected for empathy. We selected for, you know, we as humans, there’s areas of our brain that activate just to touch, for example.

7:47So when we get touch on our skin, there’s C fibers that only activate the touch. and they they release, activate an area of our brain that releases oxytocin that makes us feel more connected to the person that we to just touched us and that’s the only reason they’re there is to actually connect us with other people and to make us feel as though we’re part of the group and then we have face perception abilities which allow us to recognize faces and thousands of faces and faces across long periods of time right you can run into someone who you haven’t seen for 20 years 30 years 40 years and still recognize them even though their hair’s changed and they’re you know they’ve got more wrinkles or they’ve got fat or they’ve got skinny or you know all these different changes that are good you’ll still recognize them which is quite amazing that we’re able to do that and again there’s these dedicated areas in our in our cheesy form gyros that they’re just for us to be able to recognize who’s who and so we know who is somebody who we can trust and somebody who maybe we can’t trust and then and then we We thrive on connection, right? We get all these really happy endorphins and neurotransmitters, serotonin, oxytocin, when we’re actually with other people. And when we’re lonely, we don’t get those neurotransmitters and we find ourselves really fearful. So we now know based on the Harvard study, which has been going for 75 years, that the number one way to actually increase your lifespan by 10 to 15 years, decrease likelihood of having neurodegenerative diseases later on, improve your cardiovascular system, decrease

9:19likelihood of having mental health issues, increase your IQ, is just to spend time with people that you trust and chat to them on a regular basis. I mean, that’s what our brains have actually set up for. And that’s how we’ve become this alpha species through that collaboration. And it’s only really in the last couple of thousand years that we’ve been setting up society in a way which is in competition. And that’s a fairly recent thing, something that I think we need to think about it from a societal point of view because our brains haven’t changed in the last 35 000 years in actual fact they got a little bit smaller when we when we moved from hunter -gatherers because we actually had better diets when we’re hunter -gatherers so they got a little bit smaller but otherwise they haven’t really changed and so most of that evolution has been around us being friendly to each other not competing with each other yeah and we have done so many changes in like our technological advances but then we go i would say forwards and backwards many times and then I think that I don’t know like in your opinion it would be more like the lack of connection that we are having not only now or these like a disparities or biases that we are having or we take one party or the other one in extreme cases so how we can find a middle term to like a you know of discussion what is the like a good advice to get a middle kind of discussion when everything is so biased or like when we have completely different opinions but

10:51then he says like oh you just listen what the other has to say but how to get there? Yeah well we need to do it face to face I think that’s the biggest problem is that most people try and communicate over the internet and when we do that we don’t connect with the other person and we feel just dividing being nasty over the internet because it’s not natural right the other person doesn’t feel real because they’re not actually there right in your face whereas when you actually meet up with when you’re on the internet you don’t get all important neurotransmitters released because you’re not face -to -face with them when we meet someone in person First thing we do is we touch each other appropriately and with consent, but all societies have some way of touching each other when we meet each other. So we shake hands or kiss each other on the cheek or even the Inuits who are fully clothed will rub noses because it’s only part of their skin that’s actually showing. And that releases oxytocin so we feel more connected to the other person and more likely to trust the other person. And then serotonin is released because of body language and because of our closeness to the other person at times.

11:53and then lots of endorphins as well, because we’re actually interacting with someone face to face. And then we also are less likely to be nasty to a person because they’re actually there. They can actually harm us if we are nasty to them. So we’re more likely to actually speak to them in polite ways and actually be willing to actually listen to what they have to say. So we need to stop trying to solve our problems online. We need to actually be spending time face to face with people when we actually want to connect with people. Because that’s so important for us and that’s how our brain actually involved evolved and on the internet Of course, you have all these algorithms which are driving the information to us and are forcing us into groups that is really taking advantage of the way our brains have evolved but taking advantage of it in a really negative way and I think we need to realize that that these algorithms need to stop when governments need to legislate against them so that we’re not being driven normally into groups that we’re going to isolate us from the general population. Yeah I completely agree and something that is really that you mentioned the these algorithms that are behind all the scenes for example in social media or Instagram or there’s a I remember in a program that they were mentioning, for example, how, depending on the colors of the lights, or they are all the time observing how many clicks to give. What are they similar? It sounds crazy, but it’s true. Like a profile in the person.

13:26So that kind of thing that is very biased. And then also, we have a guest. She works for a privacy. and she’s very good in blockchain and privacy and she was mentioning that they are developing actually their company the way to just block creating noise when you are using a channel or talking with someone because actually are the patterns when are the patterns that the machine learning is using to get all that information from you. Not the regular conversations or the slang that you use with your friends but like these really focused patterns that you use and the punks use and then… So she was saying that, like, yeah, I asked her, like, I should be interested to see if criminality goes up because they are going to mask. This is like a word, but it should be like water, not because some of them, you know, they are misusing the word that we have the right to privacy. And I think that I agree with you in the sense that we have to control more, at least, or the government had to be put like a boundary in these companies getting everything.

14:40affecting our brains and affecting teenagers and the way that we are connecting and thinking. And having said that, how our brains are different nowadays compared to the pre -internet times. You mentioned before that it hasn’t been changing too much, but then how this has influenced our brain, like all these technological advancements. Yeah, it’s pretty concerning. We know that there’s a lot of evidence now that when kids are given screens at a young age, at preschool age, that they are white matter tracks. So the areas that connect, the corpus callosum connects the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. And then we have a whole bunch of other tracks that connect the frontal areas to the rear and all over the brain. And it’s sort of like the highways in a city, right? And they connect all the suburbs together. We know they’re abnormally developed in kids who are using devices. from a young age so those areas aren’t developing properly and we don’t really know what the outcome of that will be later on. We do know the younger a child is given a device or the more time a child spends on a device the more likely they’ll be diagnosed with ADHD or with autism which is a real concern.

15:51We know that our intelligence levels for the first time have dropped. There used to be what we called the Flynn effect where our intelligence levels were getting higher and higher and higher because people were becoming more and more educated. The trend has now gone the opposite way and we’re actually getting dumber than we were before because we’re not actually learning. We’re not holding the information anymore. Reading, for example, has gone down dramatically in the last 10 years, which is really concerning because that also impacts our emotional intelligence. So we actually learn a lot. of our emotional intelligence by reading fiction books because we get into other people’s lives and we experience what other people are doing and you can have imagination and you can put yourself in other people’s places and all those sorts of things especially as a teenager but we know emotional intelligence is now dropping and a lot of that has to do with the fact that teenagers are no longer reading books the way they used to read books. So they’re not actually having those experiences that they really need to be having so that they can understand how other people feel in different situations and so on. And we all need to be reading more. And then, of course, our attentional networks have been affected as well. We can’t attend to things for as long as we used to be able to attend to things because we’re constantly being distracted by devices. And then the notifications are always beeping and buzzing out as we capture our attention as well, which again affects our attentional networks, which is a big concern. We think that our working memories also dropped. So we used to talk about magic number seven in relation to our working memories, which is sort of like

17:23a consciousness, what you’re aware of in one moment in time, which is why phone numbers used to be limited to six numbers because you can only hold six numbers at a time and then dial a phone number. And we believe that that’s now dropped down to about four rather than seven so it used to be seven and we think it’s gone down to four now with most teenagers. So yeah there are a huge number of changes that are occurring not because our brain’s changing but because we’re not using our brain and so therefore those things aren’t developing and what really concerns me is that we um whether you get Alzheimer’s disease for example or other dementias depends very much on whether or not you have extra capacity, extra cognitive capacity that is your brain really strong. And if it’s really strong, you’re much less likely to get Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. And that’s on the rise. Neurodegenerative diseases are increasing significantly, and especially early onset neurodegenerative diseases in two years. So the last report came out two years ago, and the previous two years there was a 400 % increase. in neurodegenerative diseases for young onset, which is between 25 and 35 year olds getting dementia. The 400 % increase for 25 to 35 year olds getting dementia, which again, it’s specific to that age group because they grew up with the devices, right?

18:44They went through their teen years through those really formative years with the devices. And now we’re seeing that they’re getting dementia at a really young age. And early onset dementia is very Acute so those those individuals will die very very quickly, which is very sad Wow, that’s very scary Yeah Yeah, because you might think that like at these neurodegenerative diseases are more related with the age or aging people, right? But then now like in 20s and 30s Yeah, for the first time we’ve had a 19 year old being diagnosed with early onset dementia. So he’s 19 he will probably have to live a couple of years now that he’s been told. And actually that leads to my question to one study, actually the MIT study that Jorain on CharGDP found that using AI tools like CharGDP can make students think less and remember less. How can educators use these tools in a way that helps a student learn without hurting their brain development and actually cheating and thinking, critically thinking, because it’s not happening anymore? No, it’s not. And that’s really sad. I mean, in universities, we’ve always had trouble with cheating and getting around it. In the old days, students used to pay other students to write their reports. And now they’re using ChatGPT rather than paying other students. which you could argue it’s not very fair on those students that used to make

20:14money out of it, but they don’t have an income anymore because of ChatGPT. But the real problem, yeah, is that they’re not thinking, right? Learning is about thinking. It’s about putting the information into your long -term memory. And innovation and creativity comes from information in your long -term memory. So you need to get the information into your long -term memory so that you can then put different ideas together and actually come up with something new. And we know artificial intelligence is It’s artificial, right? Artificial means that it’s fake, it’s not real. It’s a fake intelligence and we’ve just been tricked into thinking that it’s intelligent. And it can’t come up with new ideas. It’s incapable of coming up with a new concept or a new idea or be innovative or creative. It is just regurgitating the information that’s actually out there and putting it in different ways so that it looks as though it’s intelligent.

21:01And so to come up with the next great idea and the next innovative… idea, the new technology or whatever, we have to have that information in our long -term memory and we’re not putting it, we’re not analyzing into our long -term memory because we’re not concentrating on things for long enough to put it into our long -term memory which is because our attention mechanisms aren’t as good as they used to be which means the information is not going into our working memory and our working memory is not as long as it used to be because we’re not using it in the same way and then that information is not being downloaded into our long -term memory. So those are the issues with it and that’s why if you use CHAT GPT, you won’t know the information because you’re not actually attending to it, whereas students who actually do the thinking themselves, that information gets downloaded into their long -term memory so that they’ll actually know it better.

21:51They’ll be able to pass exams and do all the rest of it and come up with innovative and creative ideas later on, be great entrepreneurs and all great scientists. be able to solve all the problems that are coming down the line. And what would be the suggestion or the advice for the educators to try to handle this? Because I think that AI is here to stay. It’s not going anywhere and it’s like moving super fast. And I would say that it’s a good tool if you know and understand the basics and you use it as a tool. But as you mentioned, because we have this fake perception that because with our we take pictures with our phone, for example, and that picture is in your memory. It’s getting stored in your phone. So it’s something similar what happened with these AI tools. So what would be the suggestion to lead or deal with these issues with AI or child GDP? Yeah, I think we just need to be a little bit more clever about giving students. In old days, we used to often ask students to write drafts first right that you’d write an overall summary of what you were going to write for example and that would be handed in and then the teacher would give it back based on you know some notes and so on and then they’d have to write the next stage and then that would be looked at and so on or getting the kids to write down each stage as they go through those stages and so you’ve actually got a map of how they came up with these ideas and and how they evolved and how they ended

23:21up in the in the way they were by the end. and having the teachers look at all of those stages and mark all of those stages as part of the process and so you’re actually helping the kids or the students actually learn how to learn and learn how to go through that whole process rather than having a situation which we have now which is you you get given an assignment and then you get the details as to what is expected for each stage of it and then they just hand in the final report which could have just been written by chapter gbt whereas those other stages will be different for each individual. And if they’re not different for each individual, then you know that they’ve actually achieved it rather than actually done it properly. Yeah. So I think that one of the lectures we’re doing here is like a, they were giving up. It’s like a, we can avoid that you use CiaoGTP, but we are going to offer you like the tools. You can use this as a tool, but you have to present to us without any resource.

24:19Here you come. I personally come here, write down everything. Like you use all the tools, but you have to understand the context and the basis, because that’s the big issue that, as you say, we have it, right? Like we just put it there and it’s done. Yeah, it’s done. Paint it in, get a mark and then forget about it. And how can we understand the brain’s mechanisms for forming memories and habits? and that is going to transform our approach to education and personal development. What approaches have you seen, for example, with your brain camp, that make bigger changes in our education system?

25:08For example, I read that you work a lot with kids that are very distracted or they can’t… focus or they are not interested. So what are the best approaches to educational skills or tools? Yeah, one of them is to give them a little bit more freedom in what they’re expected to do. So, for example, reading, I think, is the number one thing that we should be teaching all kids and kids should be spending all our time learning how to read. Because, A, it’s really, really difficult because our brains never evolved to read. And most, the majority of people have only started reading in the last one or two generations.

25:50It’s a really, really new skill that’s really, really difficult to actually do. And what amazes me is that so many people learn to read, not that we have problems with kids. learning to read. So they’ve got to spend a lot of time actually doing it and so giving the school having the first half an hour where all the kids read that’s all they do they just read and and in fact all of the staff also read because adults aren’t reading enough today either so everyone just spends the first 30 minutes reading but the kids are allowed to choose whatever they want to read so they’re actually reading stuff that they’re interested in so if they want to read a surfing magazine they can read a surfing magazine. they want to read whatever it has to be on paper it has to be a real thing book or whatever but they can read whatever they want to and then you you end up creating an environment where they’re all interested in reading because they’re doing something they’re reading something they’re interested in so they’re willing to do it but also they’ll start talking to each other about what they’re actually reading so then they it becomes that the whole community reads rather than what we’ve got at the moment when nobody basically reads anymore for pleasure. And so it becomes a pleasure, it becomes a habit, right? It becomes something that they just do naturally and the teachers do naturally as well. And that, I think, is a number one. We know that reading ability is the best indication of how successful someone will be later in life, whether or not someone will go to university and whether or not someone will do well at university and whether someone will

27:21actually end up. being successful in whatever area they go into. And it doesn’t matter what subject you do. The number one thing you’ve got to be able to do is be able to read because reading is where we get the information and how we transfer information from one person. That’s very interesting. And what do you think about the test and ranking based on the knowledge? Yeah, we should get rid of it completely. There’s no reason to have tests at all because tests don’t actually test what a student knows. Tests actually just examine what a student can retrieve from their work, their long -term memory, when they’re in that testing situation. And some kids learn how to do tests, how to be good at doing tests, and they get good marks. Not because they have more information in their long -term memory or know the information or have more intelligence than the other kids, just because they learn how to manipulate the system. And so… We should trust teachers to be professionals, and we should do what a lot of the Scandinavian countries do, which is not have any testing until they go to university, because that’s when we actually need, right? You don’t need to be able to rank someone in their history test, or their history. thing in year nine or year seven. It’s completely meaningless.

28:44I have no idea what my marks were back then. I’m sure you probably don’t either, right? It doesn’t impact whether or not they’re going to be successful at university. The students that do really well in their HSC or in their final year and get into university aren’t the kids that actually do really well at university or are amazing PhD students or amazing postdocs or very successful CEOs or whatever. They’re the kids that… Love to learn and then the kids that love to think and that’s very different to being able to just pass the test That’s true.

29:14And actually something that you mentioned also is that anxiety plays an important role? How do you feel like a related with tests, which I’m one of those I feel really nervous and those like a multiple choices was just so horrendous like i think i was like i know the topic but i don’t know maybe it’s a b c or maybe that’s wrong and then you just erase the previous question that’s horrendous and it’s not like i want one size fits everyone i did That’s very wrong. Yeah.

29:47And it teaches kids that school and learning is anxiety provoking, right? It teaches kids that this is what learning is all about, is doing these tests under these exam conditions. And that’s not what learning is about. Learning is about becoming better, right? Becoming thriving and being able to have conversations with people and to think and to do all those really cool things. Not about… where you rank in your class compared to everybody else which is yeah it’s really sad that we set kids up like that and some of the best school systems in the world don’t have testing because they trust their teachers because teachers know how well students are doing right that they know all these students are doing really well because they’re happy and these kids are struggling because they’re messing up and they’re doing all the rest and so we need to focus on these kids and help them and we don’t need to focus on these kids. They don’t need to give them a test, and a good teacher does.

30:43Yeah, I agree. It should be just demolished. And also, why does punishment often fail to change behavior? And what does neuroscience suggest we should be doing instead in classrooms, homes, and even in the justice system? Yeah, punishment makes the person who’s giving the punishment Feel better right because they’re like I’ve done something about this But it doesn’t actually help the person who’s actually been punished all the research shows that it only stops them from doing it when they think they’re gonna get caught So if they think they’re gonna get caught they won’t do it And then if they don’t think they’re gonna get caught then they’ll continue doing whatever the behavior actually is so it’s not about changing that we also know you know the a lot of schools use dojos and all sorts of things where they give kids little merit badges and all sorts of things. We know none of that actually works either. It’s been shown that one study which was really interesting is that they got students to do a really difficult project that took a couple of weeks to complete and they either got the teachers to walk around the classroom and talk to each student and tell them that they were doing really well and you know all this positive reinforcement or they got the teachers just to walk around and give all the students high fives. Well randomly give students high fives and they found that when they did the positive reinforcement the kids often Gave up fairly quickly when they weren’t getting the positive reinforcement

32:13So they needed the positive reinforcement to keep going and they were soon as that went away They gave up when they got the high fives. They were much more motivated to actually do it And they they pursued they continued doing it even though that when they weren’t getting the high five So, you know just giving them that positive reinforcement where you’re touching them through the high five which gives them the oxytocin and makes them trust you more and makes you actually feel involved but not actually positively reinforcing their behavior. So yeah, we should be doing things like that. I mean, coaches I think are great, right? Sports coaches, a lot of sports coaches are amazing because they know, they use those sorts of things, high fives, you know, pat on the back, all that stuff, which is really important for us as humans and that’s what we should be doing. And we actually don’t use as much in the classroom. It’s like a positive reinforcement.

33:05And related to the justice system that is very criticized, especially now that in Australia there’s a new law, the brain of the kids or teenagers develop properly until the 25th. You are the expert in this. What do you think, why is failing the justice system? Do you think that just putting them in a place confined? punish them what has to be changed or done because it’s easy to criticize from one party with one point of view like well they’re recurring doing this over and over and it’s getting worse and the other ones is like yeah but it doesn’t work just putting them there so what would be a good suggestion or not like a one extreme to the other one what has worked previously or like what studies have shown that actually this is not going to work, it’s just going to keep them there for a while. Yeah, we know that we behave based on the people around us, right? We mimic what other people are doing and that’s because we want to be part of the group and so the group is so important to us as a species because that helps us survive and we don’t for hundreds of thousands of years we relied on the group. for survival as we talked about before we weren’t the fastest or the strongest or anything like that so if we didn’t have our group if we got rejected from that group then we would die and so we needed to work within

34:36that group and and our brains are still set up for that and through the mirror neuron system which mimics what other people are doing which is why you know you’ll see teenagers they’re all mates and they’ll all walk the same and they’ll all have their jeans hanging down or whatever it was saying and all the rest of it they’ll talk in similar ways and they’ll have similar mannerisms and all the rest of it because of this automatic processing through the mirror neuron system which is to bond us to make us more connected with each other if you take a child who’s done who’s made a mistake and then stick them in amongst a whole bunch of other kids who have also made mistakes and are constantly making mistakes they’re all just going to learn from each other and they’re going to bond with each other and they’re going to continue making those mistakes, right? What you need to do is take a kid who’s made a mistake and put them with kids who haven’t made mistakes so that they learn a different way of doing things, rather than sticking with a whole bunch of other kids who are making the same mistakes so they continue to make the same mistakes. And I think that’s a mistake we make, is that we’re training these kids to be criminals, right? Because we’re sticking with kids who are making mistakes. They’re making mistakes, right? They’re young kids. They’re not doing it because they want to. There’s something in their lives which meant that they didn’t have the right support that they needed to make the right decisions at that point in their life.

35:57And then we go and stick them in amongst with a bunch of other kids who are also in the same situation so that they just feed off each other and all become worse and become criminals. rather than giving them the support and help that they actually need. So this is more, and it’s really important what you said, because it’s like people say like, oh, nature versus nurture. When they say like, oh, well, they grew up under these conditions, have horrendous experiences. There’s nothing else to be done, which I actually disagree.

36:29But then a lot of people say like, oh, no, there’s so many cases that it doesn’t work. Like the family structure is done. It’s terrible. the kid is not going to behave in this way. But as you say, if we put it outside, what the chances are that these kids recover? Have you seen it in other examples, like for example, in other countries? Yeah, I mean, there’s lots of mentoring programs that get set up and work really, really well, where rather than putting them, there’s a great guy in Frankston in Melbourne, who he was an Olympic wrestler. from the Eastern Bloc and then he came to Australia and he actually went over and worked in Mongolia as their their main coach and then he came back to Australia and saw that there was really high youth crime in Frankston and so he set up a gym and he talked to the police and he gets kids who are having a rough time and on being on that track to go to youth detention and so on and gets them into the gym and gives them something to work for right gives them that the wrestling which gives them lots of touch and also lets them vent all their anger and gives them somewhere to go but also puts them in amongst a whole bunch of other kids who are learning how to wrestle and are aiming for something and they’re getting fit and they’re getting healthy and then they have programs they have you know some counselors there as well for them to talk to but they also talk about nutrition and how important food is all

37:59the things that we know as educated people are really important for us that they don’t really know and the information they don’t really get in their homes and so they can also take that back to their homes and that program is doing great stuff because again it’s giving them the information that they need and giving them a community of people who are trying to better themselves rather than just you know being punished for something that they’ve done because of the situation, the sad situation they’re in. Yeah, I agree. I think that the justice system needs to ask first instead of taking decisions. Yeah, a big problem, whether you’ll talk about a justice system or the political system, that both of them are set up as competitions rather than being about collaboration, right? Our justice system is set up as the prosecution and the defense actually fighting against each other and one of them trying to win. whereas what we should do is we should have a justice system which is about finding justice and so everyone goes in there looking for how do we what’s what’s actually happened and how do we actually remedy this situation in a just way rather than let’s put these two groups together and get them to fight each other and a similar politics is the same right we have two or three different groups that are actually fighting against each other which is a ridiculous way to run a country what we should be doing is having a system where they all work together to better our country and better everybody. Because it’s the way our brains evolved. Yeah, exactly.

39:32We get the best ideas of both parties and try to work together to produce a solution instead of competition. Yeah, let’s hope. Let’s hope. Not only this country, I think, but worldwide. No, no. Yeah, it’s not as… And so much of your work points to the idea that empathy and connection are not just emotional experiences, but neurological necessities. What do you think happens to a society neurologically and socially when empathy starts to fade? Oh, yeah. Oh, that’s… You only have to look at what’s happening in America at the moment, right? I shouldn’t say that, but… Oh, you can. I agree. Yeah, it’s really sad. We are empathic, right? And you see a child crying, you want to put your arm around the child, right?

40:25That’s an automatic response. We are empathic people, and we want to actually help each other. And we got to this point because of that. It really frustrates me. I hear, you know, these entrepreneurs who say, you know, empathy is weak and all these sorts of things, when they’re actually only got to where they are because of the support of all these millions of people around them, right? They’re using technology that was designed by millions of people who all worked together and collaborated and generated these amazing ideas. And then they’re using that to make lots of money. And it’s like, well, you are benefiting from all the empathy that’s out there and all the collaboration and all the goodwill of society.

41:06And now you’re saying, no, I’m not empathic and we shouldn’t be empathic. That’s just nasty. We as a race or species got to where we are because we’re empathic, because we help each other, we collaborate, we do all those things. And without it, I think we’re in a lot of trouble. And we do die, right? Loneliness kills us. We die. 10, 15 years earlier, if we’re lonely, if we don’t have people around us, we’re more likely to have cardiovascular problems. We’re more likely to get dementia. It’s bad for us. We’re more likely to have psychosis, mental health issues. So we need to be amongst other people. And it’s really sad that we have this epidemic of loneliness in our society these days. And especially because it’s amongst young kids, right? It’s the 15 to 25 year olds now are amongst the loneliest people.

41:53Whereas they used to be the opposite. It used to be the opposite. It used to be all the people who were the loneriest. So I don’t know where that’s going to go, but we really need to turn it around and really do it really quickly because it’s not healthy and it’s not good for us. We need to realize that, you know, these ideas like.

42:49Yeah, and you point out something really important because we always like we have close relatives that are the chimpanzees. And they say, like, oh, look at the chimpanzees. They are just like the way that we are, very violent. And I said, like, yeah, but look at the bonobos and these over -closed relatives. And they actually solve every problem with love and sex. Makes love no more. Yeah, no, it’s true. And we’re actually closer to them than we are to the chimpanzees.

43:20But even if you argue that, right, the chimpanzees, we are… we separated from the cheap pansies millions and millions of years ago, right? We’ve, we’ve, we’ve changed a lot since then. Yeah. So it’s a, yeah. So it’s a pitiful excuse to just pretend that we are just like a selfish and the selfish gene I have. Um, and well, I want to know, like your knowledge is about how the brain works, including stress, attention, connection. How do you apply this in your own daily life and with your family? Are there specific habits that you can or practices that you follow because you have learned through neuroscience, your life, your experience that you can give us some amazing tips? Cool yeah so we’re very careful with devices neither of my I have two teenagers neither of them are on social media because so there’s nothing social about social media and the damages it causes to kids and to teenagers is quite, it’s awful. I mean, there’s a huge amount of research now showing that does significant damage to them. And social media, we’ve got to remember that social media is about advertising. And so you’re either advertising a company or you’re advertising a beat or you’re advertising a podcast or whatever you’re advertising, or you’re advertising yourself. And so if kids or teenagers are on social media, they’re advertising themselves and they’re being taught that to get friends and to have people like you, you have to advertise yourself. And that’s an awful way

44:51to grow up. And that’s why we see a strong correlation between social media use and mental health disorders, mental health issues and anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa and all of these things. So neither of my kids have social media and won’t have social media until they turn 18. We have our devices so that they turn on to sleep mode at nine o ‘clock. All the devices go on sleep mode at nine o ‘clock and don’t turn on again until six a.m. so that we have a period of time when we don’t have access to them and then when we come home we have an area that we put all our phones so that we don’t have our phones on us when we’re at home because we’re at home right why would you need your phone in your back pocket when you’re sitting on the couch or whatever right so we have an area that they go and they go there and they never go into the bathroom and they never go into the bedrooms because we know that that is harmful as well and then I work at home a lot these days as you can probably see i’m working my office yeah And so I regularly organize to meet up with friends for coffee so that I’m not isolated. So I do a lot of speaking gigs.

45:54When I’m doing speaking gigs, I’m obviously around people, but if I’m, if I’m having a bit of time at home, I make sure that I catch up with friends and so on over coffee, um, at lunchtime or in the morning before I start work so that I’m actually doing something with other people and interacting with other people. And then I walk a lot. So I have a dog and he needs a lot of walk. So I walk a lot. with my dog, which is always important. Yeah. Those are some of my tips. Oh, yeah. How do you convince your teenagers? Because sometimes they are rebellious. How do you convince them to get on board with, like, stop using social media when they have a big influence or their friends that have social media? How do you manage?

46:38They never had social media. So I’ve always, with what we wrote from the beginning, said, no, I was at MIT when… Facebook started and I saw how it started and where it went. So we’ve always said no social media and they have no problem with it. I mean they don’t, you don’t, kids don’t actually connect on social media right. I often hear parents that will come to me when I do presentations on this and then they’ll say you know but my kids need social media because they need to connect with their friends and it’s not actually true because on social media you post stuff after you do it. So they’re missing out. What social media is about is really about advertising yourself. So what they do is they go to a party, they take lots of photos and then they post those photos to tease the kids who are at the party. Those kids were never invited to the party and so they’re just missing out on going to the party and they get to see that they’re missing out. which is really nasty and all how they actually organize parties is actually just to text each other and say hey I’m having a party or hey meet me here or whatever and that’s how you actually get invited to parties and do all those sorts of things and so there’s no reason to have social media from a group point of view for teenagers at all and my kids are yeah always going to different things and meeting up and they’re both involved in sport all the rest of it I mean there’s no and then they just don’t get to see when their friends go to things and then Skype about the fact that they’ve been to things that they weren’t invited to, which is

48:09good, because they don’t need to know about that, because that’s just mean and nasty. And so they miss out on all the mean and nasty stuff and don’t see that. Yeah, and then they’ve heard me speak so many times. They know the damages it causes. And they also talk about some of their friends that they go, oh, Alonso is really addicted to social media. It’s really sad, right? They find it sad. that these kids need to do that to get validation for themselves and it’s similar with video games like the process of like addiction is similar with video games in long term yeah absolutely yeah it is a problem um it depends on the video games so my son loves playing he’s he’s a huge basketball fan um and he plays basketball for real in a real game and goes down the basketball courts regularly to play pick -up games and all the rest of it and then he plays basketball on a video game which isn’t addictive because it ends right and just you play a game and then it ends and then it’s you can play another game but whatever the addictive aspect to video games is the ones that continue on and that there’s no about any end to it and you’ve got to get to the end of yeah whatever years to actually get to the end of it We have a guest that he developed a video game that is for learning science and adaptation and all this crazy stuff in biology.

49:36And it’s very cool because we asked them how long does it take to complete the video game. And it’s actually personalized for girls and boys, also age, and also tells them all the stats afterwards. But it has to be very short, like 10 to 15 minutes, and that’s it. That’s it. You learn there, you do the task, in what part do you fail, or what do you have to improve, and it’s no more than that. Because, as you said, the continuous ones are the ones causing this addiction. Tell us today, is it scary at the same time? We’re wonderful humans, right? And we’re going to solve the problems that we have.

50:25Yeah, I have faith. I still have faith in our humanity. Sometimes it’s tricky. But that’s the idea, connecting. Thank you very much, Mark. This has been amazing. Thank you for accepting this invitation, for sharing your knowledge and your amazing experience. Thank you, Linda. It was great to meet you. This episode was inspired by the courage to challenge deeply rooted assumptions about human nature, about how we learn, how we grow, and how we build a society that truly supports connection. Dr. Mark Williams reminds us that science is reimagining the system we live in.

51:10It’s about seeing empathy as an evolutionary strength. and it’s about asking ourselves what kind of future we are requiring our brains to live in. Science Behind the Glass is an independent podcast created and produced by your host Linda Hernandez and Daniel Esguerra. With the invaluable support of our technical director Rafael Giordano and the original music by our colleague and friend Bernardo Aguila. Follow us on Instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok. and linking, and visit our website for more stories, resources, and upcoming episodes.

51:46If you enjoyed this conversation, we invite you to support our work or contribute through PayPal. Just go to our website, click into the support us button to continue with these narratives and supporting this project. Don’t forget about critical thinking, about empathy, and about your own choices and decisions. Thank you for listening. Keep asking, keep connecting. Until next time.