335. Unlocking the Power of Neurodiversity in Decision-Making - A Conversation with Sigi Hale

Welcome to episode 335 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Dr. Siggy Hale.

Ready?

Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello everyone.

My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I'm joined by Dr. Siggy Hale. Siggy was a National Institute of Health funded neuroscientist and principal investigator at UCLA before entering the private sector. He's now principal neuroscientist and director of research at Alpha Diver, the market research and consulting firm that applies neuroscience to understand marketplace behavior more deeply. The firm's behavioral scientists and strategists work with leading brands, retailers, and the Wall street analyst community to explain, measure and predict consumer behavior. Ziggy is here today because earlier this year I did a post on LinkedIn where I asked who my next guest should be on the Brainy Business podcast as well as what topics you were interested in hearing about. It was so great to hear from listeners to find out what they wanted and who they wanted on the show, and several of the guests this fall are due to that post, including Siggy. A big thank you to Mary Mathis for your recommendation. This was such a fantastic conversation and what's really cool is, as you're going to hear about in our chat today, Siggy actually filled two requests in one because someone else asked about ADHD brains and how to optimize for them at work, leaning into their superpowers and working with them better when things are less.

Superpowered, as she put it.

And so we were able to have a wonderful conversation that addressed both of those points today. I really, really love this chat and I know you will too. So let's get to it just really quickly. Before we do, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show notes for everything, including related past episodes, links to articles and books, and so much more. It's all within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com335 now let's jump right in. Dr. Siggy Hale, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. I'm super excited to chat with you today, as I know I will have mentioned in the intro and outro we got introduced because I had done a post on LinkedIn asking listeners what they wanted to hear about if there were any guests I should connect with. And you were someone who was tagged and meant mentioned by name. And so here you are by, by fan request, everyone gets to meet you and hear about the work you're doing. So with that in mind, can you share a little bit about yourself, your background and the work that you do?

Sure, sure, yeah. So I'm a kind of a natural born scientist. I've been interested in understanding humans, you know, as far back as I can remember. That brought me to a career originally in academia. I was at UCLA for a very long time where I was an assistant professor in residence at the Semel Institute there. And I was studying big picture Systems Neuroscience. My PhD is in neuroscience. And we were trying to understand how, I guess the best way to describe it is we were looking at big picture aspects of the brain's operating system, how it relates to neurodiversity and how it relates to different types of psychopathology. And as I was doing that, I started consulting with various groups in the private sector. And I discovered pretty quickly that I had a deep passion for seeing science applied in the, in the quote, real world. And I got really interested in that. I enjoyed it quite a lot. And in 2015 I made the jump to the private sector full time and the rest is history. I've been working to bring science to life out in the quote, real world.

Well, you're definitely in good company with people that like to see I talk about bringing things out of academia and into application. Right. Want everybody to know these things and use them in a responsible way as well because that's, you know, sometimes you read a research paper or something gets hyped and it's not quite the way that we would want to apply it. So having deeper understanding throughout business I think is really important. So definitely can see why you were recommended as a fit of someone to talk to on the show when you say that you started doing some consulting, know, in that private sector and then being there full time. Like what type of consulting, knowing, you know, obviously can't always talk about everything but you know, what type of projects were you brought in on and what type of work do you do now?

Yeah, it, there's a lot of different types of projects actually from tech development, things had to do with the development of EEG based products, some cognitive training tools for adhd. But really where I landed more definitively was in this group that I now work with. Out here in Cincinnati, we're now called Alpha Diver. And they were really looking to, as they were tradition. They started off as a traditional market research company, but they realized that in market research, as people went towards the questions of why people did what they did, that the sort of set of tools that were readily available in market research were insufficient. And so the president of this company was essentially on the hunt for like additional ways to be able to get at that, these kind of deeper whys. And the why is a very different question than the what. As you know, like what is that's doable? Like with very limited sort of set of tools, you can track what people are doing, even what they're saying and what they're thinking to some extent. But to try to figure out why is a totally different game. And so he was looking for tools to be able to get at that in more meaningful ways. And so, you know me, coming from my background, I was, did a lot of work looking at information processing and that's related to decision making and attention and diversities of ways in which these systems get expressed. And what I found out was that a lot of the models and the tools and the mechanisms that I was leveraging in academia could be applied to the kinds of challenges and problems that this company was working on. And I found that to be really exciting. And so that's really where I put the bulk of my focus as a consultant is sort of trying to adapt some of these models and methodologies to the market research space and how that worked. And that was just really fun. And so that's where I put the bulk of my effort. And that's where I ended up moving from UCLA to Alpha Diver.

Hmm, yeah, interesting. And I know that I had mentioned to you that in the same post where I asked for all the insights of what people would want to hear about people they would want to hear from, that someone else had asked about something that was related to what it turns out you have some expertise in. And so you get to answer this other fan listener question, at least, you know, starting a conversation here. So listener had asked, what I would love to see is an episode about ADHD or neurodiversity, mainly how behavioral economics can be used to help business owners or entrepreneurs make the most of the super powered aspects of an ADHD brain while managing the parts that are, er, less superpowered was the way they asked it.

Yeah, that's a great question. That's a great question. Um, and there's a lot of depth underneath that question. So I'll try to make it as succinct as possible. But in order to get at that question, we have to kind of consider some important things about the way that the brain works that are also very much relevant to the work that I'm doing. Looking at decision making, psychology, and looking at the whys behind what people do. And that is that for a very long time, people often thought about the brain as a machine, but it's really a lot more like a musical instrument than a machine. And what I mean by that is, and this is a sort of truth about biological systems in general, is that biology is really good at capitalizing on what I, to use a scary sounding phrase, multifunctional building block relational systems. But really what I mean is that nature does this thing where it takes these sort of modular building block elements and then it figures out ways to dynamically reorganize them to make really complex systems emerge. A simple example example of that is color. You know, with three primary colors and the achromatic scale, you can make the infinite variety of colors that we encounter in the real world. And so similarly, similarly, the brain works like this. And what that means is that it's combining all of these different modular elements and these elements in these functionally emergent ways to create these different abilities. And so it's not just whether a brain like a machine is broken or it's working, it's whether or not we are actualizing these emergent states in a way that brings out these different potentials that we have. This is a really important thing to think about with regards to ADHD and the story of neurodiversity and neuroevolution. Because the other part of this story is that we figure out these different emergent states that unlock these different abilities. In many ways, they are diametrically opposed types of abilities. Like we have to be really good at, just as in a, for example, and this is relevant to the adhd, in some instances, we have to be really good at very focused task directed operations like, I have a series of things that I need to get done and need to march through those steps in a very focused way and execute that task. On the opposite side of the spectrum, we might want to do something that requires a very opposite type of mindset and set of abilities where we want to have, say, for instance, a sensory immersive experience where we drop into some kind of sensory flow to listen to an orchestra or watch a sunset, or even a bit further out, we might be, say, from an evolutionary perspective, you know, you might imagine a society where there's certain people who are running the, you know, the task operations kind of in the middle of the society. And then you have people who are sort of in charge with kind of guarding the perimeter. And to guard the perimeter you have to have a very different type of brain state where that allows you to sort of scan lots of things very quickly, process lots of information with a kind of wide attentional orientation and react very quickly. And these are very different ways in which the brain organizes itself to actualize those different kinds of abilities. And humans vary with respect to their tendency to orient towards these different brain state orientations. The story of ADHD is very much tied to the story of our species learning to orchestrate these different potentials in different ways across individuals because we need people to do these different actions and behaviors. The ADHD brain is classically defined as having limited ability to do this task focused type of behavior. But it's not just an absence. There's a counterweight to that. And the counterweight to that is it tends that it ends up being very good at these distributed attention, sensory, immersive kinds of orientations and behaviors and the whole slew of cognitive abilities and potentials that come with that type of brain state orientation. And one of the things that. Because when I was doing my research at ucla, we were developing systems neuroscience models about how the brain works in general, but we were using ADHD to sort of demonstrate some of the principles, some of the ideas. And one of the things that I was perpetually sort of impressed by is this balance. And that ADHD wasn't just a deficit, but it was a variation in how these brain systems were being orchestrated. And that along with that, there were all these benefits. So that could lead us to a conversation about, okay, so what is the ADHD brain very, very good at? And what kinds of cognitive abilities are associated with being in that type of a brain state? But before, before I'll go forward, I'll pause if you have any thoughts or questions.

No, I'm, I'm, I have, I will have some follow up questions as we continue potentially of the, like applying it. But I think you're getting there, so I'm going to let you keep going. I, I love it. I think it's really fascinating. So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And another way to think about this is using like a sports analogy, right? Like there are certain people who really love to play offense. I don't know if you play soccer. Like there are people who are strikers and then you have defense and Defense is all about read and react. Like you have to sort of scan the field and react spontaneously.

I. Yeah, I was a defender. Yep, yep.

I already knew that. Because of your purple brain.

Yeah.

Purple is any. That's a whole other story there.

Oh, no, no finish. Okay. Purple is what?

Now it's very interesting that like going back to this and this ties, we're sort of jumping around now, but tying to this idea of asking people to tell you why they like things is a very like, if you ask someone what's your favorite color and say, oh, I love purple, you say, why? The chance of them being able to actually tell you why is near zero. Because they're actually physiological phenomenon under the hood that are associated with why we like certain color frequencies. Because color actually bears on our level of physiological arousal. And there's reasons across individuals why they like certain interaction with certain colors because it's impacting our physiology in certain ways. And anyways, this is totally hypothetical, but I have theories building in my work that purple is a color that people who tend to like these more sensory, immersive, more ADHD side of the continuum, types of processing states tend to also like purple. But that's a, that's a whole other thing. We have a bunch of data on that. It's sort of a skunk works part of some of the work that we're doing. But to go back to where we were. So people with ADHD are oriented towards this type of information processing that has a very sort of wide attentional birth. And it's using a manner of processing information that very much ties to personal experience. And this goes into the decision making work. So when we are making decisions, we can use these different systems that have evolved over time. You can think of them roughly as our instincts give us an impression about something that can help us make a decision. Our personal experience can guide us in deciding what something is and what we should do about it. We call that episodic knowledge. Then we have the sort of system of knowledge that's associated with language which we would call semantic knowledge. And that's where all of our social consensus, sort of ideas about the world and reality that are contained in language would play out. And then we have a capacity for rational thought. Right. And so all of these systems give us advantage by which we can interpret what something is and what it does for us or what we should do about it. And what's interesting is that they all function in parallel and how we orchestrate their relative influence on our experience, moment to moment is a really big predictor as to the nature of our decision making. So are you in a state that's really emphasizing your instincts? Are you in a state that's really emphasizing your personal experience? Are you in a state that's really emphasizing socialized view of the world? Are you in a state that's really emphasizing some kind of rational thought process that's unfolding? If you really want to understand decision making, you, you can't really do it unless you understand how those different mechanisms are being orchestrated. So the ADHD brain is more inclined towards either the sort of instinctual process or the personal experience process. And when you're making decisions based on episodic knowledge, personal experience, what you're essentially doing is mapping the world onto the things that are in your episodic memory. So you're sort of saying, how does this relate to something that's happened to me? It's also a mechanism of empathy. It's like a very potent way in which we come to make, make things feel familiar, we familiarize the world. And it turns out that the process of experiencing the world in that way also produces a different kinds of information processing that's much more sensory, immersive. You could think of it as more high definition, much more inclined to kind of sensory wandering. And so, and that relates to an ability to have what we might think of is one more self transcendent, more empathy type of experiences. And one of the interesting things that came out of our work at ucla, we were doing a very large family based genetic study. We had this, a few different measures that got at this, that it was a construct we called self transcendence. And, and the ADHD adults in our study were off the chart on it as compared to people that weren't classified as adhd, which fits with this sort of narrative that I'm describing. And so, and then now with a little bit of conjecture, I would say that that manner of engaging the world that's using your instincts and your sort of direct personal experience to familiarize things and get a, get a beat on what they are and what they mean and how you should react to them. And if you're using that system that lends itself to more diffuse, sort of creative, more flexible types of thinking, so more flow state type of processes. Everybody experiences this to some extent, like say anybody who goes on vacation in their entirely novel environment, they tend to shift towards this kind of a processing state because everything is hypernovel. Also this happens to people under sleep deprivation. It happens to people during these different, it happens sort of rhythmically during time of day effects. There's a thing called ultradian rhythms where we cycle. It's like a sub, it's a nested rhythm inside of the circadian rhythm where we seem to shift in our brain state orientation throughout the day. And there are times when people experience getting a little bit better at say, writing. You have a verbal ability, it's a little bit sharper. And then there's times when we start to get a little spacey. We might get up and take a coffee break or stretch our legs or surf the net for a bit. But there are these biorhythms that are shifting the relative expression of these states. And any, in any case, when we shift towards this brain state orientation that is more ADHD like that emphasizes these other systems to a greater extent. Our capacity for detail, empathy, creative fluid thinking, all those kinds of things. I expect to go up and to give you an example of why that might be more concrete, imagine like a very, I don't know, like a decorative coffee cup of some sort that has a lot of like aesthetic artistry to it. Like maybe it's like a handcrafted coffee mug. For the most part you're just engaging with that in the course of some kind of task oriented mindset. Like you're in the process of working, you're doing, so you just grab your coffee cup and drink out of it. It's optimum under those circumstances to process that stimuli with the minimal amount of detail needed to identify that's my coffee cup to be able to pick it up and drink from it. Right. And so you're just your brain and under that task oriented state is sampling the world. Almost like in a kind of stick figure kind of outline drawing kind of way. It's just getting contours, just getting edges and identifying. That's the thing that I'm looking for and I'm using it. Now imagine how different you could process that stimuli. Say for instance, if you were an artist painting a still life portrait of that coffee cup. In that case you want to sensory immerse and deep dive into all the nuanced details and to be able to sort of almost transcend the construct. And you'll probably start to experience tangential associate ideas that might get triggered by contours and shape and aesthetic features of it, whatnot. Your mind starts to go on. All these different trajectories of thought and associated things can, can unfold. So they're really entirely different ways in which you can engage with the world around you. And what's underappreciated about humans in general, and even most rank and file neuroscientists is this aspect of the nervous system that how it works is a function of how we use it to a much greater extent than is understood. And given neurodiversity, there are tendencies within people in our population to use it in certain ways, but there's also a lot of flexibility in how we can grow to learn to use it. And so I often laugh when people say, well, I'm not good at parallel parking. There might be in very rare cases something fundamentally broken in a given individual's brain to where they can't actualize the state that allows that behavior and that ability to manifest. But for most people, it's just a reflection that they haven't exercised that brain state to a sufficient level to where they can go to that brain state and hold it and actualize it sufficiently to be able to perform that behavior in an optimal way. But it's not a limitation of some sort of mechanistic machinery. It's that they haven't practiced playing their instrument in that way sufficiently to be able to get to that state. And so I'm very interested in these things because I feel that in most organizations, certainly in education, that part of the neurodiversity continuum that orients towards those kinds of processes that we would think of as being ADHD like, are being marginalized to a very large extent because of the nature of how school works. But it's only in our recent history that we learn things the way that we do, like in classrooms, sitting in rows, listening to somebody talk at us versus doing things more experientially. And so it's only in our recent history where that part of our neurodiversity is kind of getting the short end of the stick at a societal level. But inside of organizations out in the real world, people discover that those kinds of brains play vital roles, like inside of an organizational structure. And the key is to be able to identify these different features of neurodiversity and line them up in systems and teams to where you can sort of actualize the full breadth and width of all of the sort of potentialities that are part of a human brain. And that's one of the things that we also think quite a lot about and sort of design our own organization. So it functions like that.

So my follow up question just to that specific piece, I have many thoughts from.

All the things that you were talking.

About would be, you know, when you talk about developing that in that kind of optimized way for the team and being. Being able to put people in the right roles and help it to. So that the whole organization is able to perform at this higher level. You know, how does one go about doing that? Especially for those of us that don't have a siggy? What do we. What do we do?

Well, I think it's not that hard to identify if we just start to realize that there are a few key stopping points on a continuum that get us from sort of new information and ideas to like manifesting it in the real world. Right. You can kind of think of it as like an innovate, like a. Like a bring new information to the world pipeline. Right. And on one end of it are your. What I would. You could think of as sort of extreme academic types that love to just delve into mystery and mine for knowledge for its own sake. It's intrinsically rewarding for them to get stuck in a puzzle and they just love to sit there and think and go deeper and deeper and deeper. And there's a certain brain state orientation that's associated with that. And a lot of them end up in sort of academic types of circles. So that's at one end and they're really good at sort of finding new pieces of information at the very other end of the continuum. Well, let me just. I'll actually start on one end of him. So like next to the person who's really academic and is just finding new information, kind of hunting for new knowledge type of person. There's a step in from that are people who then love to invent things. They love to take new pieces of information and go, let me innovate something with this. What if we took this and we did that and we made it like this, and then that's a next sort of rung out on the kind of neurodiversity scale that I'm describing. So you have like the people that find the new information and the person that envision kind of exciting new things to do with that information, sort of the inventors, in a way. But in order for those inventors to actually get anywhere near close to manifesting something in the real world, you need this kind of person who, for lack of a better word, I would call a charger. And these are these kinds of people who are. They enjoy the heck out of moving the ball down the field. Like they want to see the ball move down the field. And there are. They would be the last person on the planet who would want to just go, you Know, go down a rabbit hole and study something just for the sake of like studying it. Their whole sense of control, the way that their brain is working, I didn't mention earlier, but these different systems that we use for decision making, what they're really trying to do is give us a sense of control. Decision making is a mechanism of saying I'm going to make a prediction about the world, that's going to be more helpful for me than hurtful. These different modes that we go into are leveraging these different systems to different degrees with the intended purpose of making a good prediction about the world. That gives me some sense of control. For the academic person, discovering new information and their manner of functioning gives them a sense of control to be able to sort of solve these mysteries. For the inventor, being able to create new things provides that for the charger type of person, being able to kind of take something and push it forward and to be able to make things happen and like bring them into the world. And they have a very kind of fast and I would say shallow, but I don't mean that negatively, but they don't sweat the details because the details aren't practical. If you're trying to break something new into the world, like you're trying to get people to buy onto something, you're trying to manifest something, you've got to get a lot of kind of forward manifest energy going behind it and get people to adopt it and break it into kind of like new social norms and get it to be acculturated. And then once that's there, you need people to kind of manage in place systems who are really good and love orchestrating and managing systems. And so you can kind of look at people in your organization and kind of think, okay, this guy's a super academic who just likes to solve mysteries. This person's really likes to just create, have creative ideas and think of things. But left to their own devices, probably wouldn't do anything with them. They'd just be like an idea machine like all day long. And then you have the people that just love to make things happen, like these charger types who don't sweat the details, it doesn't mean anything unless they can do something with it, unless they can make something happen. And then you have people who just love to manage operations, they just love to optimize systems that are already in place. Da da da da da. And if you can make a perfect system to where you have all of these different notches of this pipeline sort of represented and people kind of work in this relational symbiosis, you can really efficiently pull things from the sort of minds of knowledge and then bring them all the way out to the world, get them manifest and have them well run and executed. But the different people who are playing roles at those different parts of that pipeline are really ill suited to do the different jobs. If you start moving around and then people start to really experience stress and frustration and there's even communication problems. So like if you have the hyper manager type of brain trying to talk to the hyper kind of academic type of brain, there's a lot of tension. There's not a lot of like middle ground for them to be able to kind of find successful symbiosis. Symbiosis, you almost need those intervening steps to kind of mediate the interaction between them. So that's sort of a long winded way to go, go at that. But that's some of the stuff that comes out of thinking about humans and these, these ways that are associated with neurodiversity and understanding that the brain is this instrument that we train it over time to orient towards different brain states that actualize these vastly different kinds of abilities and that together synergistically we sort of actualize a kind of collective potential that otherwise doesn't get activated.

That's really, I really love the way you talk about all of this also. I mean, just really like celebrating each brain for what it is instead of like you say talking about something as a deficit or anything. Right. It's like there's amazing potential in, you know, each brain and how it, how it is and how we can put them together. And you know, that the, you know, some is greater than the parts sort of a vision to it, I think is just a refreshing way to think about all of that. And I have, you know, many friends and that are, you know, have ADHD or other aspects and people that I talk to all the time and just love to think of. For everyone to be able to see the value and potential in whatever their unique brain space is, I think that's a great way to look at it.

Yeah. I mean, historically, if we didn't have ADHD people and we just had quote, taskmasters kind of walking the perimeter looking for danger, they would fail miserably.

Right.

Because that brain type is always running a protocol. It's like, what's my task sequence? And the way it sees the world is pre, sort of ordained by the task sequence that's being run and they see the world very sort of narrow parameters associated with that task that type of brain would fail miserably at being sort of like, you know, someone who's looking around the perimeter for unexpected things that need to be attended to. So really, I agree with you 100% that we really need to appreciate this diversity and tying this back to the market research world. There's a couple really key points is that when we're trying to understand why people do what they do, it's really important to consider that there is this diversity at play. And depending upon people's different brain set orientations and how this plays out in the population, people are making decisions in different market spaces for vastly different reasons. And the things that make one set of people feel in control and empowered in a given decision challenge is not the same as another group of people. And you know, like a really good salesman comes to intuit this over time, right? Like just imagine a car salesman and they know that certain people that walk onto the lot, they got to sit them in the car and let them feel the leather and, you know, play with the dials, take it for a drive. And it's all experiential. And for another type of person, it's all facts and figures and data and they want to know all the performance metrics and this kind of thing. Another person is just like, look, everybody loves this. This is the most popular thing. They're going to go with kind of a social group mind kind of decision making protocol. For other people, it's very instinctual. They'll walk on a lot and get the thing that their sort of instinctual mindset is most attracted to, whether it's like a giant truck or a red sports car, whatever it is, that instinctual mindset is going to go, oh, because they're in that mode and that's what they respond to. And a good salesman figures this out and learns to adapt their communication to the different kinds of brains that they encounter. But what we're doing now is, is proactively measuring these things in populations of people. We're measuring it in different cohorts in different market spaces with different levels of interest for different things. We're also measuring it in gen pop and looking at how collectively the expression of these different decision making styles is changing over time. We saw some really interesting things during the pandemic, but yeah, and I think that without this additional understanding about this neurodiversity and how it plays out, people are really at a disadvantage to make sense of human decision making. And that's on top of just the idea that if you ask somebody why did you do that? You're very unlikely to get close to the actual biological physiologic underlying truth as to why they did it. They'll give you a narrative, but it'll be a narrative devised to give them a feeling of agency that they'll create, literally create creatively, post hoc, like after the fact, to go, oh, well, this is probably. This is why I did that. Why do you like? Well, I think I like it. Like I asked you, why do you like purple? You know, it's very difficult to come to those kinds of conclusions. But yet the industry remains largely dependent upon that as a methodology to try to understand consumers.

No, it's really, really interesting and I love the understanding and layering in that. Like it's not anything within behavioral science and behavioral economics. Is why I always talk about context really mattering. Right. And we understand. So, you know, Will Leach has a really great book, Marketing to Mind States. And we look at like, what. Where is someone when they're making the decision? What's happened? What are they doing? Where are they now? Where were they yesterday? Like, what, what. All these little things are important. And like you were saying, you know, there's some. That's understanding a tendency and what will make someone feel like they're in control where something that makes my husband, who's that, very analytical, facts and figures, research, all the things he's really good at, optimizing systems. I hate all of that. I hate it so much. And like, what he needs to feel like we're making a good decision is so far from what I want to need in making a good decision. And the things that I would be using to make a decision is very stressful for him because there are other things I haven't thought through that he thinks are really important. So, you know, understanding those tendencies, like you say for teams, for the way we relate to significant others or friends and like when we're thinking about people that are buying from us and who we may be targeting and what their, you know, what the pain point is and what they need to hear. So it's just really in the niching down aspect and knowing that you may have a product or a service that is beneficial for everyone, but being able to divide where you look at just even these four areas that you were talking about, right? So like, are we here for the inventors or are we here for the doers? Like system maximizer people? Like, that's another dimension to be thoughtful about as you are considering how you talk about your product, how you help someone to understand the value and what it's going to do for them. And it may fit on both sides. And maybe you have multiple customer journeys or maybe just pick one and that's okay too, right?

Yeah. What we tend to do, we just had a really interesting study that we just got through because. Okay, well, so what we typically do is we come up with ways to classify people in terms of relative interest in the thing that we're studying. So like, how into something are they? Right? And then we can kind of look at where we see these meaningful changes in decision making psychology along that continuum of interest. So the people who are really into us kind of seem to be using this kind of decision making psychology. People who are kind of into us are sort of like this, and people who are not into us at all are kind of like this. So that's usually a very interesting and productive way to look at a market space. And what we find is like you were saying, the situation matters, right? So we measure the expression of these decision making psychological phenomenon in relation to people's sort of sense of their core personality in the course of their sense of their daily life. And then in the specific situation that we're looking at, like in a given marketplace. So we kind of see how they transition from this decision making, how they may transition, how they express decision making in this specific circumstance against their daily life, and is it different? And we usually see some differences and we see that a given situation will push people a little bit. But we also see that a lot of times the way people are sort of persist in a given context because the context isn't that provocative. We just did a study that works in a context that is extremely provocative and it harmonized everybody's decision making style. And you could think of like a simple example of this would be, you know, we all kind of have very similar brain states when we're doing our taxes. You know, if you're doing your own taxes and you're sitting down doing a bunch of math, or we'll have similar brain states if we're deep into the throes of watching a sunset or listening to a beautiful piece of music, if we can successfully get there. Right. Some people can get to that brain state in a second. Some people might take a few margaritas on vacation to get there. But the point is, is that there are certain things under which the way in which these systems are being orchestrated sort of harmonizes like species wide to some extent. Another example would obviously be like a real fight or flight type of circumstance, like a Real dangerous situation, like you're getting mugged in an alley or something like that. And that was a really interesting finding to like think through and to look at as we were doing this work.

Yeah, interesting. When you think about advertising when you're not in the mindset versus when you're actually in the moment, like how that all kind of changes but we don't need to go down that well.

We actually have thought about that and one of the things we do is we try to look at the type of mindset that people associate with the different social media venues that they engage with. And so the idea, just as you are think intuiting, was that if you have a consumer that orient towards your product space with a certain decision making style and so you kind of know, okay, so this is this kind of person. If we want to really resonate and align with their psychology, we need to sort of approach them in this way. And then we can identify certain digital media, social media environments where their mindset is most likely to be resonant in that state.

Interesting.

We can often sort of identify like where you can optimally speak to them, where you're likely to meet them in the optimal mindset. Cool.

Very, very cool. I have one follow up question from the ADHD piece and from optimizing the team and specifically looking at so entrepreneur and small business owner because I know that was a piece of the question that was asked. So you know, you were talking about how you can optimize when you have a team and you can kind of put people in the right spaces to help the sum be greater than the parts. And if you're a solopreneur and it's you like, what sort of advice do you have to kind of optimize what your role is and you know, knowing if you do have ADHD or tendencies, how they might best proceed.

Yeah, I mean that's being able to understand your own strengths with regards to these sort of neurodiversity landscapes is really important because then you're like, okay, this is where I'm most in my stride, this is where I'm most comfortable. This is what I'm really good at. And then you go, these other things I struggle with. And so it's a matter of understanding up front like where your weaknesses are and then creating mechanisms to buffer against those weaknesses. Whether that's, you know, other people that you can bring on to give guidance under certain, you know, there's so many different pieces of technology, different services that are available that allow us to kind of Outsource different aspects of these potentialities. You know, a lot of times I was thinking about this when you were talking about you and your husband. One of the things we found is that people almost all we did this big family study again and it always seemed to be the case that it made me think that coupling and long term coupling was somehow associated with brain training because you always saw these symbiotic brain function dynamics where you had one person who goes on vacation and they have like the to do list and the itinerary and the tour book all, you know, marked with everything they want to do and the other person just wants to wake up and wander around and bump into things and kind of just explore and that kind of a thing. And you see this so often, this symbiotic balance between people. And I think there, I think what might be happening is that we sort of long term couple with our brain training buddies who help us to kind of train towards the middle and expand our repertoire of states. So long winded answer. But the idea is to know where you're strong and then to figure out how to buffer against those weaknesses either through external resources, technology and or incrementally bringing up your own capacity in those spaces. As a neuroscientist, I was before that a musician and was really into that space. And I could see over the many years that I transitioned from being a musician to being a neuroscientist like professionally, that the, the job requirements of doing large scale complex studies in large populations of people really over the years, I mean I'm doing 20 some odd plus years has dramatically improved my ability to actualize those other states that were more foreign to me during my younger years. You know, so it's. We're not locked in a box, we can change. It does take time. So I think all of those things come into play. It's like knowing where you are, figuring out how to fill in the gaps with technology, resources and people and then also giving yourself permission to say I'm going to work towards actualizing those other aspects of my potential. And there are definitive brain states that you can get to and start to recognize and like you can feel them every now and like say if you're not good at task, like a task oriented brain state, when you do have those moments where you do sort of hit your stride in that and you self reflect on it, pay attention to it, familiarize yourself with those states, learn what it feels like and practice going back there so people can evolve their own capacities. I really believe that in most cases, it's very rare that people have some hardwired actual insult to their nervous system that limits their potential. Most of the variability we see and what we call dimensionally defined sort of abilities like we've been discussing and also psychopathologies. It's all just how you're using the instrument. It's not hardwired limitations.

Fascinating.

I, I know that for me, some of what you're talking about I will tell my husband. So, you know, he's the to do list of the trip and I'm the. Like I or I say I just need to exist. Like I want to just exist in.

The space for a while.

Like that's kind of, I don't know, only want that all of the time. But especially when it's like too much of the check in the box sort of life, I need to be able to just be for a while. And that's like when I'm writing books and working on big strategy stuff, I end up like, I rent a house and go, and it's just me. And there aren't alarms and there's nothing. Like I can, when I feel like I'm ready to be doing some thinking, I can go for a walk or I get, you know, I have all that flexibility versus being like hampered by calls and things, but I separate that time out to really optimize it. And then I can be coming back and then be in a different place where I'm doing the things instead of like living within the things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's kind of what I was trying to get at is this idea of understanding that you have to undergo state transitions to actualize these different aspects of potential and then learn to consciously undergo those state transitions. Don't be hard on yourself for not being a good taskmaster whilst you're in your creative innovation mindset. You know, realize that like I'm in this mode now, so I'm going to have these set of abilities and if I need to get a bunch of stuff checked off the to do list, I'm going to transition into that state and learn what that feels like and really actualize that different state. And I have this vision of humans becoming more and more aware of these kinds of state transitions and learning to self identify as they move through these state transitions and become more masterful in the way that we orchestrate these brain state dynamics instead of having them kind of haphazardly flux kind of underfoot. As for most people, that's how they experience them. But I think that it's well within our grasp to learn to be able to do this more consciously.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

And even with regards to those decision making styles, right, like you can actually take a decision circumstance and kind of self reflect on like what would my instincts have me do? What would my per. How does my personal experience inform this? Like things that I personally experience, does this map onto that in some way? Does it give me. And what is my social brain telling me to do? And then if I think about this rationally and just look at facts and figures and kind of run experiments in my mind, what does that outcome tell me? And to understand that you have these different vantages, these different perspectives that you can consciously leverage to help make yourself better at navigating the world and understanding when each of those different systems perspective should be given more precedence, should be given more weight, should have the microphone. Sometimes you want to take the microphone away from the instinctual process and go, nope, we're going to give that back over to the rational one, you know.

Yeah.

Or. Or vice versa. Sometimes, you know, you need the instinctual one.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Well, I have really, really enjoyed our conversation and I mean I appreciate you talking about this in depth with me and answering this other listener question and I think it was just really fascinating. I think a lot of people are really going to enjoy and get really great value out of the community conversation and I guess then we have to have you back to talk about the other like four things that were on the list of you sort of touched on some of them. But I really want we'll have another conversation that gets into, you know, how science and processes can actually make things easier. Like it's simpler when you have more kind of those boundaries around things. And I think that would be a really interesting conversation as well. So as we wrap up for everyone who is super excited to learn more and find out about the work you're doing or connect maybe with. With yourself or with Alpha Diver, what's their best path to learn more?

I can be found easily on LinkedIn and also on our company website which is alphadiver hyphenated.com either one of those. I'm out there. I can be Googled.

Yes. Ah, Google. Yeah. Well we'll definitely link to those in the show. Notes for everyone and just, you know, thank you again for the conversation. It was really great to chat with you today.

Thanks for having me. It was fun.

Thank you again to Dr. Siggy Hale for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's? Conversation for me, I found Siggy's insight into the brain and how it impacts our work to be really fascinating. Shocking I'm sure. As you heard me say in the conversation, I love the way he's looking at the benefits and ways for optimizing our natural tendencies instead of saying anyone is at a deficit. We all have great potential and looking at these four types of brains and their natural tendencies is a really cool way to build teams and look for your own superpowers as well as where you may want to find support if something is outside your natural style. When we find roles and tasks that align with our brains, things just work better. Siggy and I had a little extended conversation after stopping the recording. We where we discussed personality tests and strengths finders and disc profiles and all of that and how they have sort of naturally realized, in many cases, four types or dimensions that are very similar to what neuroscience is finding now, which is pretty cool. We also talked more about color and the brain. A conversation I think I should have.

Him back to talk about more.

Maybe both of those things. Something else.

What do you think?

What would you like to hear more about either of these topics? Come let me know on social media. You can find me as the Brainy Biz pretty much everywhere and as molina Palmer on LinkedIn. And as I said earlier, Siggy's here today because a listener recommended I bring him on for a conversation. The show is for you, after all, so if you have recommendations or requests, please share them with me. There are so many fascinating people out there, I definitely don't know them all and I would love to hear who you want me to talk to or what topics you want me to dig in on in solo episodes. There are so many opportunities, so please let me know what you want to learn about. Again, the Brainy Biz is the best way to find me. And as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn, there are of course links in the show.

Notes so you can connect with myself.

And Siggy as well as find related past episodes, books and more.

It's all waiting for you in the.

App you're listening to and at the brainy business.com335 and thank you again to Dr. Siggy Hale for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business podcast.

It's going to be a lot of fun.

You won't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me and remember to be.

Thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit the Brainy business dot com.