Your Brain on Zoom: Not Good?

Fortune's Orianna Rosa Royle reported this week on a new study by Nan Zhao, Xian Zhang, J. Adam Noah, Mark Tiede, and Joy Hirsch, published in Imaging Neuroscience.  The research examined the brain activity of people engaged in Zoom meetings vs. in-person meetings.  The scholars discovered that face-to-face interactions led to enhanced brain activity.    They wrote that,  "the exchange of social cues is greater for the in-person condition."  Specifically, the scholars reported:

Findings from this investigation suggest that differences occur at the visual sensing level (mean and standard variation of eye contact duration); the behavioral level (coherence and diameters of pupils); the electrocortical level (theta oscillations); the neuroimaging level (contrast between in-person and on-line faces); and the dyadic neural coupling level (coherence between neural signals in the dorsal parietal regions).   

Co-author Joy Hirsch told Fortune, “Zoom appears to be an impoverished social communication system relative to in-person conditions. Overall, the dynamic and natural social interactions that occur spontaneously during in-person interactions appear to be less apparent or absent during Zoom encounters.”  She concluded, "“Online representations of faces, at least with current technology, do not have the same ‘privileged access’ to social neural circuitry in the brain that is typical of the real thing."

What does it mean for those of us who do engage in hybrid work?  We have to think carefully about the type of work being done virtually vs. in-person, and we have to focus on the intensity of the collaboration required during meetings.  Some types of collaboration may be more suited to in-person interaction.  Moreover, we must consider how virtual engagement with others may affect our ability to read social cues and ultimately how the ability to read those cues impacts our ability to build effective working relationships.     

Curiosity Affects the Brain, Enhances Learning

Several years ago, Daisy Yuhas wrote an interesting article about new neuroscience research regarding curiosity and leanring. I came across the article today, and I thought it was worth sharing the key lessons. Yuhas explains the findings from a study about how intellectual curiosity affects the brain and shapes learning.

Neuroscientist Charan Ranganath and his fellow researchers asked 19 participants to review more than 100 questions, rating each in terms of how curious they were about the answer. Next, each subject revisited 112 of the questions—half of which strongly intrigued them whereas the rest they found uninteresting—while the researchers scanned their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

During the scanning session participants would view a question then wait 14 seconds and view a photograph of a face totally unrelated to the trivia before seeing the answer. Afterward the researchers tested participants to see how well they could recall and retain both the trivia answers and the faces they had seen.

Ranganath and his colleagues discovered that greater interest in a question would predict not only better memory for the answer but also for the unrelated face that had preceded it. A follow-up test one day later found the same results—people could better remember a face if it had been preceded by an intriguing question. Somehow curiosity could prepare the brain for learning and long-term memory more broadly.

To me personally, the implications are quite profound.  As a professor, I should strive to tap into and stimulate a person's intellectual curiosity about a particular subject.  If I can do that successfully, they may learn more effectively.   Similarly, we can leverage these findings as we think about how we train workers in our organizations.  If workers approach a new task with curiosity, then perhaps they will learn the required skills more effectively.   

Disrupt Your Routine to Ignite Creativity

Blythe Harris, Stella and Dot's cofounder and chief creative officer, shared a few tips for stimulating creativity with Fast Company's Elizabeth Segran. For instance, Harris suggested that people should purposefully disrupt their usual routine on occasion.   They need to seek inspiration by learning and seeing new things, meeting different types of people, and exploring domains where they have little expertise.  Here is an excerpt: 

"Harris believes strongly in taking inspiration trips. She was just in Chile, learning about local artisans. She's created entire collections after particularly inspiring trips to India and France. To this end, Stella & Dot invests heavily in sending Harris and other designers to foreign countries.  But you don't have to spend a lot of money to see things you wouldn't ordinarily see. An important part of this process is learning new things. So Harris also encourages her team to take classes in new fields. For instance, architecture has been particularly helpful to members of the design team. "If you don't have the budget to travel, you can disrupt your routine by going to work a different way, go to a new restaurant, or find ways to meet new people," Harris says. "When you disrupt your thinking like that, it actually slows down time, and you start to be able to take in all your creative inputs differently."

I concur wholeheartedly with Harris' recommendation. In fact, neuroscience supports this suggestion. Research shows that "pure novelty spurs the brain." Specifically, the substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area of the brain has a substantial impact on learning. According to Science Daily, "Researchers Nico Bunzeck and Emrah Düzel report studies with humans showing that the substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area of the brain does respond to novelty as such, and this novelty motivates the brain to explore, seeking a reward."

Can Exercise Enhance Creativity?

In this video, NYU Professor Wendy Suzuki explains her research that explores the link between physical exercise and creativity. 

Creativity, How Ideas Must Ripen, and the Aha! Moment

Daniel Goleman has a good article for creativity over at Bloomberg.com.  He describes research by Harvard's Teresa Amabile, which suggests that workers must have "periods of sustained focus" in order to engage in creative work.  Moreover, Goleman explains how Joy Bhattacharya's research on the brain's functioning supports Amabile's conclusions.  Here is what Goleman writes:

The Harvard researchers also recommended that supervisors protect workers’ time and resources so they can have periods of sustained focus on their projects. This advice -- to manage staff time well -- is supported by new brain research that reveals what happens at the moment of Aha! Joy Bhattacharya at the University of London has found that in the moments just before a creative insight, the mind is typically relaxed and open to new ideas, as indicated by an alpha brain wave.   As the Aha! approaches, there’s an abrupt shift marked by high gamma-wave activity. This indicates that far-flung neural circuits are connecting in a new network. A third of a second after the peak of this activity, a novel idea floats into the mind.  This finding indicates that creative insights can’t be concocted on demand; they need to ripen. The first step in the creative process typically involves immersion in the problem and current thinking, and then gathering any information that might be relevant. But in the next stage, intense effort should give way to letting what is known as the "cognitive unconscious" work on the problem by making novel connections. Constant distractions interrupt the mental space where creative insights simmer. That’s why so many Aha! moments come in the relaxed space of downtime -- when we’re doing something other than tensing to be creative. 

This work suggests that one of the most critical roles that a mid-level manager can play is a "buffer" for a creative team.   That manager can protect that team from other organizational demands and pressures, and insure that the team members have the time and sustained focus required to be creative.