Dr. Andrew Newberg
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
It's a really interesting question. And I guess, as I often wind up answering questions about the brain, it's always far more complex than we ever hope. It's never an ability to say, oh, yep, here it is. This is the end. It's just their amygdala is to this or their hippocampus is to that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Because part of the problem is, as I was just pointing out, we come into each perspective through our genetics, through our brain processes, our development, our parents, and all these things, all these factors, which then, while we have... fairly similar brains, we all have frontal lobes, we all have temporal lobes, we all have limbic systems.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
The way they're connected, the amount of different neurotransmitters, chemicals in the brain like dopamine and serotonin and so forth, are all a little bit different.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And I think part of the challenge that we have is while we can look at different groups of people and say, well, overall, if you have a sense of meaning and purpose, you're more likely to have more dopamine than somebody who doesn't, for example.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
There's too much overlap and it really does become a challenge, I think, to figure out all the different elements, all the different factors that make up those differences. And again, even when you think about something like meaning and purpose, some people may find meaning and purpose through a spiritual lens that God has created me. I'm in the image of God and I have a very strong faith.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Christian belief, whatever it is that the person believes. And that's where they derive meaning and purpose. I know before we got on, we were talking about football. For a football player, maybe meaning and purpose is by playing football. There's been some great movies where it's like you were born to be a football player, you were born to be a hockey player, whatever.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And that's a sense of meaning and purpose. And in today's world, I think where the political spectrum has really risen to the fore and that becomes their sense. It's being a Republican, it's being a Democrat that sort of gives them that sense of meaning and purpose. So those distinctions then wind up leading to different ways of thinking about things.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And of course, scientists will say, yes, it's about asking questions about discovering the world and things like that, which is my sense of meaning and purpose. So some of them are more cognitive, some of them are more emotional. And I think in the end,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
We don't really see clear way of distinguishing those people who are more religious or less religious or more have a greater sense of meaning and purpose than others. We can point to certain areas of our brain.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
We know having that sense of meaning and purpose does involve a lot of our sort of cognitive areas, parts of our frontal lobe that help us to focus our mind and focus our consciousness on different ways of thinking. There's certainly some elements of emotional content to make us feel comfortable and calm within that sense of meaning and purpose.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And so those are all aspects that are part of that process. But the exact thing that kind of leads towards a given individual's perspective on things is often very challenging to really unravel as far as a brain scan study goes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Right. And for someone like myself, I actually find somewhat the lack of ability to say, oh, it's just right here. It's just this. I guess somewhat comforting. There is a complexity to it. There's layers to it. And you mentioned David Yadin. We published a book called The Varieties of Spiritual Experience. And A lot of it was based on a survey we did of a couple thousand different experiences.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And it's wonderful because they all have a unique element to it. They all have a unique character to them, which to me is important because it does really speak to the uniqueness of each person. On the other hand, we are able to try to isolate certain aspects of how we think about things. And when we talk about a sense of meaning and purpose, how do we relate objects to each other?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
How do we relate ourselves to something greater? And those aspects, those elements, can actually become part of a kind of a larger perspective on how we actually see our sense of meaning and purpose. And then we can try to relate those two different areas of our brain to different structures and networks.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
As I mentioned, you have a sense of when things have a certain order to the world and how we relate to the world, there are areas of our brain that help us to do that. But again, since each person does it a little bit uniquely, it becomes harder to isolate those particular points.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Well, this may be something that is maybe a little easier to nail down, at least as far as the brain goes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
When we have done some of our brain scan studies and we look at what goes on when people are engaged in different practices, different rituals, one of the things that we had always proposed was that there's an area of our brain called the parietal lobe that takes sensory information and helps us to get a spatial representation of ourself.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And that when people are engaged in these kinds of practices, as the practice goes on, this area of the brain quiets down. And so when that happens, what these practices, what these rituals are doing is we then lose that spatial sense of ourself. And we actually begin to break down the boundary between ourself and the other. And that's now leading to the answer to your question.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
So if you are part of a religious group that is engaged in a ritual, it could be a ceremony, it could be a meditation practice, a prayer program, then you have a whole bunch of people whose parietal lobes are now quieting down. And as they engage this practice, that boundary between themselves and the other people that are with them begins to go away. They begin to feel
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
blended, connected, again, unified, different words that people use, but a sense of oneness with the other individuals that are part of this process. And this goes back to some of the very early work that I did with Dr. Eugene DeQuilly, who was one of my mentors, who was a psychiatrist and an anthropologist by training.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And we frequently talked about the value of ritual bringing people together as part of that process. And we think a lot of that does occur through what's going on in the parietal lobe, that sense of connectedness. Other imaging studies actually show that when at least two people are engaged in a very intimate kind of conversation,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
that their brains literally resonate with each other areas of the brain become turned on and turned off together and so when that's happening your brains i don't say this too strongly but they become one you have this sense of oneness and the brains themselves are resonating with each other and so these kinds of practices become very important for facilitating that these rituals are part of that process now interestingly the other elements to this is well what do you feel connected to
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
So right now I'm just talking about the group and so there is certainly this connection that you have in the immediacy of that to the group around you. But there's also the other piece to the rituals are the mythic elements the stories the ideas that are behind that. that we also then feel connected to. And so you could be a very small group.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
You could be a group of five people, for example, doing some kind of meditation practice. And if in your story, if in your mythos, you feel connected to all of humanity, then you create this sense of oneness with every human being, with all humanity.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
as a whole on the other hand and this is sometimes the downside of rituals is that you could have a small group of 20 people where they feel connected to themselves but within their ideology it is all about their own personal story and their personal connection to the world and so now if you're not part of that myth if you're part of a different tradition or a different perspective now you are viewed as external you're viewed as not real as some of the things that we talked about earlier
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
So, these practices and religions can be a great way of bringing people together through the power of rituals, through the power of myths, so that we really have an idea, a very profound idea about who we are, how we're connected to each other, and how we're connected to the world. But sometimes that can become problematic if you begin to exclude people who are outside of that ritual.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And it can actually foster a great deal of animosity and rituals are used towards great evil as well as they are used towards great good. And that therein lies part of the problem. But our brains seem to be designed that way. In fact, the most recent book I published called Sex, God and the Brain talks a lot about the rituals that we have as human beings. that bring us together.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Well, where did they come from? As I mentioned, my late mentor, Eugene De Quilly, was an anthropologist by training. So if you take an evolutionary perspective for a moment and you say, well, the rituals in the human brain theoretically had to evolve from rituals in animal brains. Well, what are animal rituals? Well, all animal rituals are mating rituals.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
But actually what happens in mating is that you're connected, you're bringing two animals together. So you blur the boundary between self and other, you come together, and that process becomes a very powerful experience for the animal and obviously for us as human beings, so that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
all of these rituals really are at a very fundamental level of who we are and drive very powerful emotions, very powerful senses of connection, and really make us feel that our ideas and the people that we are connected to, who we consider to be a part of the same group, that whole in-group concept becomes a very strong and powerful effect for human beings, which again can be for great good, bringing everybody together, but sometimes can be for great bad.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Well, I think if what we have been talking about holds, then when you lose that sense of connection, you do begin to feel more isolated. You can become more anxious, more depressed because you're not engaging the world properly. Our brains were designed to be social. Going back to this whole idea of mating and so many of...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
animal species and mammalian animal species, the chimpanzees and apes and so forth, all the way to lions. And they're such social creatures and there's a social hierarchy and you want to feel part of that. That whole group makes you feel connected, makes you feel comforted, knows that your survival is going to be protected through that process.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
So when you lose that process, when you lose that sense of connection to a group, when you lose that sense of connection to another person, then it can become anxiety provoking. People can wind up withdrawing. And one of the things that's interesting also about how the brain works is that it very much cycles in different ways. And so when you are actively engaged with other people,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
your brain and the social areas, they become enriched and they become more vibrant and more active. And so it's kind of like the more you do it, the more it becomes a part of who you are. On the other hand, the more you withdraw, the brain cycles in the opposite direction. And suddenly these social connections and reading people's ideas and listening, as you were talking about,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Those skills and those abilities and those aspects of our brain begin to go away and the brain does work. Two kind of cute ways of thinking about the brain is that neurons that fire together wire together. So if you are being social and engaging people, then you're going to have a great deal of neural connections that support that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
and then the other thing is the use it or lose it and so over time if you're not making those social connections you will ultimately lose that ability it becomes more and more challenging and with social networks and social media and so forth it it's interesting our brains were not fully designed for us to interact in this way there's some elements that make it work better but on the other hand as many people know even though you can all be sitting in a zoom meeting
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
With 10 people, there's a little bit of a disconnect that you feel there. And it's different than sitting in the room and feeling the bodies and seeing people moving and all that and the sounds. And so that is an important part of how we have evolved. And our brain hasn't really changed that much in the last 100,000 years.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
So we have a Stone Age brain that's dealing with these kinds of modern technologies. And it doesn't always go that well. Yeah.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
I'm sure that there are many factors that are involved in that. And so it's difficult to isolate one thing that leads people to turn either towards religion or away from religion. I think some of the common things that have been cited as far as religions go, first of all, unfortunately, religions are run by human beings.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And there have been many, a number of different circumstances, like just as one example, like in Catholicism and the child abuse issues that came up. I think there have been certain external larger factors of different religions that have led to some distrust in people and uncertainty in terms of moral perspectives and things like that that has been a challenge.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
People do have access to far more information than we ever had before when you lived in some rural town. You went to the church and that was what you knew. And there really wasn't a lot of opportunity to learn about other perspectives or anything like that. Whereas now with a click, you can look up any religious tradition or any belief system or anything that you want.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
So you do have access to lots more information, which can be challenging for our brains to sort through and to figure out what that means. And it raises questions. And when people don't have, I think, you know, another issue that we wind up facing
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
is how to engage the world and are we being taught to engage the world in ways that are exploratory and opening and questioning and dealing with the anxieties that come from that and helping people to find perspectives that work for them. There are a lot of different issues that I think come up for people that can make it challenging.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Now, on the other hand, while to some degree, I would agree that if you look at the data that participation in more formal traditions has declined somewhat, there's a great rise of the spiritual but not religious. I think almost everyone is trying to find some way of finding meaning and purpose, of trying to connect to the world, trying to connect to something greater than ourselves.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
If you are part of a religious group that is engaged in a ritual, it could be a ceremony, it could be a meditation practice, a prayer program, then you have a whole bunch of people whose parietal lobes are now quieting down. And as they engage this practice, that boundary between themselves and the other people that are with them begins to go away. They begin to feel
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Maybe they are struggling to find a traditional approach, a traditional religion that has its kind of own way of doing it. They don't see it that way, but they are striving for that. And I think, again, part of the issue that people need to look at is, What do traditional religions offer? What are other approaches that might be valuable for them?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Obviously, the traditional religions have been around for thousands of years, many of them, so they at least know something that works. But it is something I think for a lot of people to explore and to look at. But I think there needs to be a recognition that we all are striving for that sense of meaning and purpose. And how do we help people do that?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And I know a number of scholars have looked at the education system and have pointed to the fact that we teach people that one plus two equals three, but we seldom talk about how to be social and how to interconnect with each other and how to solve problems and how to deal with someone who doesn't agree with you and conflict resolutions and things like that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
So we don't spend a lot of time anymore really trying to figure out how to learn and how to explore the world and how to interact with each other. And with today's highly technological world, that may be even more relevant today than it was back then when we did have maybe more opportunities to play with each other and go out on the playground, interact with each other.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Maybe we're not doing that as much. So being able to make sure that we have those capabilities to me is something that we need to think about, I think, as a society to figure out the best ways of trying to help people engage these questions, help people to find answers to those questions that might be helpful for them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And again, we'll have to see where we go as a society because it is really a great challenge right now.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Yeah, I think that's definitely part of the process. And I guess ultimately trying to allude to this a few moments ago, which is I don't know if it is inherently a problem. I don't think we're prepared for it right now. And can we become prepared for it? Can we find a way to embrace this kind of global village as you were talking about? I think so. We need to figure out how to make that happen.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And part of the problem is that there are these kind of forces that just keep going. It's hard to undo those forces in some way. It's hard to, none of us are going to give up our smartphones and we're going to be perpetually moving towards this kind of global perspective of things, which can be good. There can be ways of trying to embrace that, I think.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
But again, the challenge is, as you said, is that we're not really designed for that. We haven't really been prepared for that. And it becomes a real problem for many people. And the statistics you were just talking about bear that out. But maybe there are ways of trying to encourage people. We talk about this in our book.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
words can change your brain we've talked about this in some of our other books about religion and spirituality and making that connection so the ability to do that is still there and it's still within us it's a matter of how do we access that and how do we continue to foster that with people and can we find ways of of looking at where the world is now And trying to improve upon that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And yeah, there's always, every time we make technological advances, there's always pros and there's always cons. I mean, the automobile, it was great. We could get around to places that we weren't able to do before. There were more car accidents and people died because of it. And then it ultimately leads to people being able to work outside of the village and do other things.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
There's always these good and the bad that can be part of that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
that but but I think that to me is where neurotheology hopefully can come back into play here where we can say well what are what is going on in our brains what's going on in our brains when we feel that sense of connection what's going on when we don't can we part of what neurotheology to me is also about is to take a systematic approach to things and what I mean by that is is that maybe we need to do more research to try to explore this what are the ways in which we can try to help people
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
prepare for this better? What are the ways that we can help people try to engage the sense of meaning and purpose more effectively? Obviously, a lot of people can still turn back towards more traditional religions that are there that maybe they came from that they can feel a connection to. And then there's other people who can't.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
So being able to understand that, being able to help people make those decisions, and then making sure that if they are not able to return to an existing tradition, what are the other options for them that can still help them to feel that sense of connection that's still very important for them?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Well, I think you talk about myths and just to take one quick step back, I think, and maybe your audience has heard this term before.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
One thing I always like to emphasize is that when we talk about myth, we are, we're not talking about things that are inherently false, which is pejorative concept that we talk about myths today, the myths of dieting or whatever, but really are about profound stories that have a great deal of importance in helping us to understand ourselves and helping us to understand our world. And I think that,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
To your point, it is challenging when we have stories that originate 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, to be able to completely keep up with modern times. And I think there's a lot of elements that certainly do, but there become challenges.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And especially moral questions is when you look at like the medical sciences and what we're able to do and what we're at, which we weren't able to do 1,000 years ago. So we now have the ability to think about, well, how do we keep people alive? Or should we do transplants? Or like, these are questions that just weren't part of the ability to even ask those kinds of questions before.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
We can extrapolate, we can think about those things, but and sometimes they weren't able to find that path that helps us to make that kind of connection. And it can work for people very well.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
But there are certainly a lot of people who struggle with that and who really have difficulty trying to understand the ideas and the stories that they were brought up with that they are now using to try to understand the world as it is. And some people are able to figure out how to make those connections very well and very clearly. Other people are not.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And again, that's where it could be very interesting to be. My guess is it's going to be a pretty complicated and multifactorial issue for people. But I think that there could be some very interesting abilities to look at that. And for people who figured out how to make it work, what's going on in their brain? Do they look at things more nuanced, more complex, less complex?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Do they bring a different kind of emotionality to it? Are they more emotional, less emotional? So there's a lot of interesting aspects to that. But again, part of the interesting, and I don't know if this is another answer to your question, but part of what I find fascinating about some of the discussions about the research, looking at things like religiosity itself, is that we all have different
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
blended, connected, again, unified different words that people use, but a sense of oneness with the individuals, with the other individuals that are part of this process.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
cognitive and emotional domains that we bring to our view of the world. And there isn't really a right or a wrong one. If somebody looks at the world more emotionally or less emotionally than somebody else, is it right to be more emotional? Well, sometimes it is. It can be good to be more emotional. Maybe it helps you to make a connection. Maybe it helps you to be a doctor.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Maybe it helps you to be a better better doctor because you make an emotional connection with your patients. On the other hand, maybe for some people it's worse because now you're emotionally connected. Now you can't look at them in as an objective way as possible. So maybe for some people, being emotional makes you a better doctor. And for some people, being emotional makes you a worse doctor.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
It's always this adaptability piece, which I think is quite challenging and quite interesting that there isn't an inherently right or wrong way to be and whether again, more emotional, less emotional, more cognitive, less cognitive, but it's what works for each person and then whether or not they are able to find a way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
to be able to make that more adaptive make that connection so that they understand themselves it goes back to what we're talking at the beginning how they understand themselves how they understand the world and are they able to do that with whatever perspective that they decide to take and if they are then that's great and they can be very adaptive and productive on the other hand if their sense of the world if their sense of meaning and purpose is not
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
going well, then how do they revise that? How do they come to a different way of looking at things? And history is full of people who thought they were going to do one thing in life and then wound up doing another. And history is also full of people who thought they were going to do one thing in life, and that's exactly what they did.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
There isn't a right or wrong, which is, I think, maybe the most important thing to realize.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
I don't think the research that I've done has specifically looked at a question such as moral beauty. It's a fascinating concept. When we look at experiences of transcendence, the core elements that we came to in some of our research was that there was a sense of clarity, a sense of unity, a sense of intensity. and a sense of surrender, that it was something that kind of took over the person.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
So in those contexts, I can see where a sense of sort of moral beauty might be part of that process. When you have a sense of moral beauty, you certainly are getting, first of all, it is probably a very intense kind of experience. And so it fits that category. I think in many ways, when you're talking about that, there is a sense of connectedness, a sense of unity, a sense of oneness,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
whether it's with humanity, whether it's with the universe, whether it's with God. And so I think there certainly are those aspects to it. And I think a sense of clarity is also an interesting one, too, because what we're talking about there is that's where people understand the world. They can understand it from a moral perspective, but they can also understand it from a meaning perspective.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
So I would think that while that is certainly a notion of moral beauty is certainly one way of getting towards those transcendent experiences. My guess is that it's probably grander than that. There are probably other ways that it can happen. And some of my favorite descriptions that we looked at in our survey were people who had these experiences where it just came out of nowhere.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Really, they weren't even looking for it. It just happened to them. And they suddenly saw the world in a different way. They understood the world differently. And I certainly think a sense of ethics and morals comes along with that process. How do we begin to think of what's right, what's wrong? based on this new understanding of things. So I'm sure it can cut both ways.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
But I think, at least from my perspective, there seems to be so many different ways in which people can engage these kinds of experiences. And that's also a part of how I think about neurotheology as being a kind of jigsaw puzzle, if you will, that there are many different pieces to this puzzle. And so for some people, these experiences come through practices like meditation and prayer.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
For others, it's through rituals. For others, it's psychedelics. through others it's near death experiences, some it's through disorders like seizures and things like that. So there, and the list goes on and on. And so there are many different ways that people can engage these kinds of experiences.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
To me, part of what I've talked about in my own work is that there's this kind of large network of brain structures that become part of this process. So it's not just one part of our brain that turns on when we have a spiritual experience, but there's these many different parts. that all can become active in different kinds of ways.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And when you look at the richness and diversity of these kinds of experiences, I think it makes sense because going back to what we were saying a little while ago, for some people, these experiences are incredibly emotional and for some, it's all cognitive. For some, it's a God experience. For some, It's it is a moral experience.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
So there are so many different ways in which these experiences can be engaged that it takes they can activate this system in a lot of different ways. And of course, the brain is connected to the body. So as I often like to say, if there's a spiritual part of ourselves. It's really the whole person. It's all the different parts of our brain that enable us to have these different experiences.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
It's how that is connected to the body. And that's why whether one does meditation, prayer, rituals, there are so many different pathways to these kinds of experiences.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Right, exactly. And I think that is a wonderful pathway and that can see all of humanity and the goodness in all of humanity and help them feel connected that way. For some people it's meditation and for some people it's prayer. And so, and of course there's thousands of different practices of meditation and prayer.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And as someone who lives in this world of integrative medicine as a doctor, there's, to me, it's never a one size fits all. It's finding the right combination to the lock for each person. And again, that's a little bit of where I think neurotheology can help because we can find general approaches that seem to work. People can say, well, here are broad categories that generally can work for people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And so maybe through those kinds of general categories, we can help these people who are really having a problem and feeling that sense of disconnect and that sense of loneliness. We can say, well, maybe you can try this pathway or have you tried this pathway and see what kind of resonates with them and then help them to try to
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
figure out the ways of engaging those pathways and hopefully a way that will work for them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Best place is my website, which is just andrewnewberg, N-E-W-B-E-R-G.com. And I have a description of the books and articles and a lot of that conversation there. They can also follow me in my explorations on Instagram, which is just dr.andrewnewberg. And hopefully we can all follow these investigations together.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Thanks. Thanks for having me on the program.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
I think it's just kind of part of the fabric of who I am. I have been interested from day one, always trying to understand who we are, how we work. I often in reflecting back on my childhood, I think it's sometimes funny.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
I, when I was in, I think first or second grade, they had in the library, they had a book of the body systems and I would just go and there were like nine of them and I would take them out one at a time and then I'd take it, go back. And from very early on, I was fascinated by science. I was fascinated by who we are as human beings. And I think I was always very inquisitive.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
I always had a lot of questions about the nature of the world. I don't know if there was like a specific moment, but I just always reflected on science. How come people believe different things? If we're all looking at the same world, how come there's different political parties, different religious ideas, different moral ideas about the world? Shouldn't we all just agree with one answer?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And obviously we don't. And that was concerning to me, but I guess I felt like I needed to try to understand where are those differences coming from? What is the nature of reality and how ultimately do we perceive that reality as human beings? So just something I've always been fascinated by. I've been fortunate that from my parents to my friends to teachers always got a lot of encouragement.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Another little cute, funny story was that when I first started publishing some of this and some of the work really got out there in prominence and in some of the big Time magazine and things like that. At one point, I got an email from a very old friend I hadn't talked to in a long time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
who we went to summer camp with and he said i can't believe that all those discussions about god and the universe and everything we used to have around the campfire you were really taking that seriously so i said yep i do so anyway so yeah it's just been something that i just feel like it's part of what life is all about really which is asking questions and trying to learn about the world
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Well, I think that neurotheology for me, the basic definition of neurotheology is that it is the field of study that helps us to try to understand the relationship between the brain and our religious and spiritual selves. So that's the elevator answer. But to me, for it to work as a term, for it to work as a field, there's a couple of important things that people need to understand about it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
One of them is that for me, neurotheology is a two way street, I like to say, which is that it's not just science looking at religion. It's not just religion looking at science, but it's really the two of them looking at each other and ultimately looking at ourselves as human beings and trying to help us understand who we are and how we engage the world around us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And with that in mind, so the neuro side and the theology side to me also need to be defined very broadly. And the neuro side is not just neuroscience, but it's neuroimaging, it is psychology, it's anthropology. It's all the ways that we really get at our mind, our consciousness, and how we are and how we think as human beings.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
The theology side, theology itself is a specific discipline where you're analyzing a religious tradition, the sacred text and so forth, and trying to break it out and really try to understand it, which is certainly something that we can look at, which is how do we think about these very big questions about the nature of free will, the nature of our relationship with some higher being or with the universe in some way, all these really deep philosophical questions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
But it goes beyond that too, which is that it's not just theology proper, but it is the evaluation of different practices, meditation, prayer, and so forth, different experiences, spiritual experiences, mystical experiences, and so forth. So it's all the ways in which a person is religious or spiritual that makes up the theology side.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And so if you define those two aspects of neurotheology very broadly, I think you have a very rich, exciting and expansive field of work that can utilize many different approaches. There can be philosophical debates. There can be brain imaging studies. There can be health-related studies. There can be moral arguments. There are all these different kinds of questions that we can look at.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
So there's really a tremendous amount of things for us to try to evaluate through this lens of neurotheology. And I do hope that, going back to what we were just talking about, I hope that it recognizes the importance of these two fundamental
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
sides of humanity, the religious and spiritual side, which has been with us since the dawn of human history and the technology science side of us, which has also been there since the dawn of history. I think to me, it makes sense to bring those two sides of us together to try to help us figure out who we are.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Well, I think it ultimately comes down to how we understand ourselves and our place within the world. And so the idea of when we look out at the world, it probably stems from a kind of a fundamental challenge that we all face. And I talk about this a lot. I wrote a book on why we believe what we believe, where we discuss this.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
If you think about what we have the ability to work with, we have access to 0.000 and fill in another thousand zeros, 1% of everything that's going on in this universe. And yet somehow we have to figure out what is going on so that we can live our lives and figure out what we need to do in order to survive. So we get access to this tiny percentage of the universe.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
We are mortal, we are flawed, our brains make all kinds of mistakes. And yet somehow we have to try to figure out what the world is and what we need to do on a very basic level. If you go back in evolutionary time, we need to figure out how to get food. We need to figure out how to avoid being food. And we have to have some very basic ideas about the world around us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And anytime we don't have a good sense of what the world is or how we are supposed to be in that world, our very existence is threatened. And so in our brain, in our body, autonomic nervous system, our emotional systems are telling us, we've got to figure this out. It's going to make us very anxious until we have some sense of what we need to do.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And so when we can create a sense of order, a sense of control, a sense of understanding, a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose in the world that helps to calm those kinds of ontological anxieties down. so that we can go about our world and try to survive, to try to figure out what we need to do. And that becomes really fundamental for who we are as human beings.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
And the downside of that is that sometimes then people take that sense of meaning and purpose to such an intense level that sometimes when they come across somebody who doesn't hold that same They have a different religion or a different political ideology. Then that can become very challenging because now again, our anxiety, well, wait a minute. I thought I had it figured out.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Now they're telling me I'm wrong. How am I supposed to think about this? And of course, our brain has one of two options. One is that I'm right and you're wrong.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
the other is that you're right and i'm wrong well which one do you think your brain is going to choose it's usually going to think that i'm right and the other person's wrong and of course this does then can often lead to a lot of hatred and animosity because it's kind of if i know i'm right and they're wrong why do they keep telling me i'm wrong maybe there's something
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
wrong with them maybe they're a bad person maybe they're an evil person and so it can you can see how it while on one hand it's so important to develop this sense of meaning and ideas about how the world works it's fundamental to our survival but it really can create a lot of of strife and angst against other people who don't see the world the same way and that to me is also where i hope neurotheology can help us
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
to see that we are all looking at the world differently. And maybe that's okay. Maybe we can learn from each other and support each other instead of always fighting with each other.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Yeah, absolutely. Because if you now view them as evil, as wrong, Part of what I think ultimately can happen is you have, not you, but one has their perspective of reality and what kind of exists within that reality. So if you have this person who's out there who is not seeming to fit into that reality,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
it's almost as if they are not real and they are not human they are not real they're the embodiment of evil and so it is something where you might ultimately feel that you really do dehumanize them and so i agree part of what i to your point what i hope that neurotheology kind of helps us to say is to people well look all of us are in the same boat all of us have a brain that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
more or less functions the same way but each of our brains are affected by our genetics by our upbringing by the the good things that happen to us the traumas that happen to us the people our parents our friends our teachers and then here we are at this moment looking at the world it's no wonder that we see the world a little bit differently every one of us is going to see the world differently and even if you line up 100 people who are all
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
Catholic or all Muslim, Jewish, whatever, and ask them about their traditions, you're still going to get different answers. I always argue that if there's whatever, seven or eight billion people on the planet, there's seven or eight billion religions on the planet. There's seven, eight billion political ideas about the world.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
So obviously they tend to group around certain, they coalesce around certain ideas that seem to make sense to people and that people can find universal qualities in. But yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is the recognition
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Newberg on What Makes Us Feel Like We Matter | EP 607
of the humanity of the fact that well we are all part of this process of trying to learn and understand and so maybe you're not evil if you've come to a different conclusion you're just a different another human being who's come to a different conclusion
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
That's the idea that we send a whole lot of different cues over virtual communication that we don't realize because it's different than in person. So for instance, over text-based communication, like instant message, Slack, email, there are things like emojis. There's also things like typos and how they send emotion or how the time of day you send a message transmits information.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And even on video, there's looking at your lighting, how you look, your background, all these different things send different pieces of emotion that can potentially help you or undermine what you're trying to relay. And lastly is G for goals. I wish I could just say that there was one best mode of communication.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
I wish I could say video is always best because it's closest to in-person, but that's not the case. Depending on your goal, a different mode may be better than another. For instance, let's talk about cameras on versus cameras off video calls. There's this big debate going on in many organizations and amongst friends even, should we have our cameras on or should we have our cameras off?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And the answer from research is it depends on your goal. So for instance, If you're meeting someone new and you want to build a really positive impression or you want to show you're engaged, video is really good because it lets them feel more familiar with you and they can see you're paying attention or at least they can think they're seeing you paying attention by staring at them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
Alternatively, there's research on Zoom fatigue or video conferencing fatigue that shows that being on video and video calls, it's exhausting. We're staring at ourself, we're analyzing our nonverbal behaviors. It's just depleting. So turning your camera off can actually save energy, decrease stress and burnout.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So the takeaway with this goals example is if you're having a new interaction, someone who doesn't have a strong impression of you, probably better to have those videos on. But if you're an existing team or relationship or friendship,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
and you know each other really well, and your goal is to not lose energy by seeing yourself on camera, then maybe having cameras off would be better in that situation. So that brings together the whole framework there of perspective taking, initiative, nonverbal, and goals.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So this gets to the point of that different communications are better than others in certain situations. There's a lot of times where in-person interaction is really not the best choice. And if you've got hours and hours of wasted meetings at work each week, that's something you probably agree with.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
But the example of Wikipedia I gave was the idea that one of the biggest resources that most of us use, whether you're a student in school or even in the workforce, all happen virtually. And it wouldn't have been possible for the most part if people were all co-located because you can't get that many experts in so many different areas from all over the world to be in an office.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
The reason they were able to have such a great resource is that location was not a restriction. But let me give another example. Let's think about brainstorming. Many people think it's the best way to do brainstorming, do it in person. We got the whiteboard, we can all bounce ideas of each other, but research would indicate that's actually the wrong approach.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
For the early stages of brainstorming, when you're generating ideas, it's better to do it separately and virtually generally. So there's a few reasons for this. The first, let's just say you want each person to come up with 20 ideas and you've got 10 people in a group. We're talking now about 200 ideas here in this situation. Are people going to be able to say 200 ideas in a meeting? Probably not.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
That would be a very long meeting. But if each person is just writing their 20 ideas or typing it out over text, you can all communicate simultaneously over text-based communication. So there's not that limitation of only one person can talk at a time over text-based communication. Secondarily, when we're all sitting together in person, we're nervous about other people's opinions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
We're a little nervous to do something that's too diverging from others' ideas because we might be judged negatively. But when you're sitting from behind a computer screen and you don't have that person sitting five feet away from you, you feel a lot more comfortable doing something much more different.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And lastly, when we're all brainstorming together out loud, when someone says an idea, our mind gets stuck on that idea. And our ideas are related to that idea as opposed to being really divergent and creative. So as a result, in those early stages of brainstorming, you get that benefit by being able to communicate via text by doing it separately.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
That said, in the latter stages of brainstorming, when you're trying to agree on an idea as a group, and you're trying to tweak that idea, that's better to do synchronously, whether that's via video, audio, in person. So it really depends what stage of the process you're at. But that's just a good example of where text-based communication really has a lot of advantages.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So it sounds like we're in agreement. Early stages, it's better to keep dudes separate via text so we're not talking over each other and you're not just having one person dominating the entire conversation. And that matches my understanding of the research. Now, the question is about deciding as a group.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
That's a little bit messier of an answer on that one because there's multiple components of this. There's the getting the right idea, the best idea, and there's also getting everyone on board. So the way you get everyone on board is to give everyone a voice. Getting the best idea, it's possible you may be biased by one person or another who's pushing their own idea there.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So ideally, you're setting norms in a meeting to make it such that everyone's voice is heard, everyone's vote is being considered equally in those situations. And you have a structure such that you don't have one person just talking.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
Which is good advice I recommend in the book otherwise about structuring meetings is to do it strategically so that you don't have a video call that drags on for two hours for what should have been a 15 minute decision in the process.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So it's about not just choosing the right mode, but making sure once you're in that mode, taking a strategic approach to make sure that you achieve your goals actually that you're aiming for in those situations.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
You made a lot of great points about attention. One of the ones I'd like to add about virtual communication is it's not just also about focus and losing focus. There's some research to suggest that for each email you send, it can take you about a minute to get back in the zone of work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And now I know it doesn't sound like much to say, well, it just takes you a minute to get back from email to work. But if you're like many people and you've got hundreds of emails and instant messages or Slack messages each week, that means you have potentially hours you're spending just going from, okay, I sent an email. Now let me refocus on my task.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
Those 60 seconds each time add up pretty quickly. So the recommendation that I have from my book is that you should engage in communication chunking. So there's two extremes that people often talk about when it comes to communication. It's the, I do email an instant message once at the beginning of the day, and then I don't look at it anymore. And then the other approach is,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
People who basically check their smartphones all day long to see what's coming in. And both those extremes have problems. Those who are constantly checking tend to have worse focus, which can be really important for a lot of work. And they're spending more time just going back and forth between things and recovering.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
But those who just do communication once a day are also missing out on other opportunities. And these are a few of them. So one is sometimes you get a message in the middle of your day that is actually useful for your task that can make you more productive. And so what chunking is that you basically choose three-ish times of the day to engage in your communication.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
Once at the beginning of the day, once maybe after lunch and once towards the end of the day. And beyond being able to get information that's useful potentially to your task, there's a couple other benefits. And that includes communication can be a really nice break from much more thought intensive work. So mindless tasks and mindless activities can be useful as a recovery of sorts.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So if you're really thinking really hard about this project for a client and you're spending two, three hours really focused on it, being able to take a break for 30 minutes to knock out some emails can be a really good way to give your mind a rest. And beyond that, communicating somewhat more regularly, especially when you're in remote or virtual contexts, is really good for showing engagement.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
If you were a manager and you had two employees and one of the employees sends you every Friday, their only communication is they send you a five-paragraph long email talking about what they did for the week. And the other employee is one who, at the end of each day, sends you a few sentence updates, say, hey, boss, I did this for the day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And just a few sentences, but they send a message each day. Which employee do you think would be more productive? The one that is communicating only on Friday with a five paragraph email or the one that communicates each day?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And here's the thing about this is that they're actually both sending the identical amount of communication because they're both sending effectively five paragraphs of the word. By the second person spreading it out, it seems like they're more engaged because they're communicating each day. It seems like they're working each day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So by increasing your communication frequency, it makes you seem more present and more engaged that you're actually there. So this chunking of communication into about three blocks a day serves that sweet spot where it doesn't cause as much interruption, multitasking, loss of focus, but it allows you to gather any information you need. It can serve as breaks.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And it helps to show that, hey, I'm present, I'm here for any communication that might be somewhat more urgent.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And I think that's one of the best things you can do. There's some research from one of my colleagues here at UT that shows even when your smartphone is out, but you're not looking at it, it draws some of your attention away and can hurt your performance on whatever you're doing. So just even having it near you makes us think about it a little bit, and that draws away some of our attention.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
When it comes to standing out, there's a few things. So one is making sure your nonverbal behavior is on point. So an example of this is when it comes to video calls, eye contact matters, which sounds obvious because it matters in person. But the difference is that when you're in person and you're looking someone else in the eyes, which is natural, you're engaging eye contact.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
When you're interacting via video call, for most people, their webcam is not the same place on their screen they're looking. Usually your webcam's the top of your laptop or maybe you've got dual monitors and it's to the side.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So what ends up happening in effect is even if you're looking at the other person while you're talking to them on a video call, to them it looks like you're staring off screen. And to them, it may seem like you're checking your email, you're not paying attention. Maybe you're just looking for a recipe for dinner. They don't know because they can't see what you're doing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So those nonverbal behaviors when the other person can't see you are even more important. If you're looking down to take some notes, it's good to tell the other person that on video, because in person they could see you're taking notes and that's good. But on video, they can't, they might just think you're checking your smartphone.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
You should pause and question your communication assumptions and decisions. We lose so much time just going with the flow. We always do a meeting for this, so we'll keep doing a meeting. The conversation is already in email, so we're not going to switch to phone. The problem with that approach is that you often end up in the suboptimal choice of communication medium.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So being overly explicit in situations that are ambiguous is really key. And then there's this idea of communication frequency is really useful. So if you're debating between one two-hour video call or a series of shorter 15-minute ones, having those shorter ones are better. And this relates to this idea of showing that you're engaged.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
Someone who sends a short email or instant message or Slack message each day as opposed to someone who sends a long one on Fridays to their boss is going to seem like someone who's working each day, even though the amount of communication is the same. And when it relates to friendships, sending just a text every so often can be a lot more valuable than having one long video call every few months.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
Because you're maintaining that relationship. You're showing you're frequently thinking about them. You're showing you frequently care. So in many cases, it's more about the frequency as opposed to the length or the absolute richness when it comes to really creating and maintaining strong relationships.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So from the perspective of leaders, it's important to model these things top down, to model the behaviors you want to see and show that you trust other people, that you care about them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
and for this advice i like to think about the question that i'm always asked and that is should you use emojis to use exclamation marks what's the right kind of communication style to use in workplace interactions and the answer that i generally recommend based on this research is that emojis can be good or bad exclamation marks can be good or bad but there's two things you should do one
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
Text-based communication seems more negative than it is in many cases. There's this negativity amplification that happens over email, especially when we're talking about from people high in power to low in power. I remember there was a research study I did where I was interviewing both managers and their subordinates about communication.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And there was this one pair where I actually, they both brought up the same email that had happened recently, but from two very different perspectives. The manager said, I wanted to soften the blow of this communication. So I said, great job on this, but I think we can continue to improve it. And then they had a little emoticon. And they thought they did a great job on it.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
The subordinate, on the other hand, gave me this email and said, this is really condescending. They said we when they meant you. And the emoticon felt sarcastic in this situation.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So what I generally recommend is be clear, be explicit, make sure to use your words, say, I'm really excited about this, or I'd like to talk to you about this so we can have a conversation on how I can help you make this even better. As opposed to just making assumptions because sarcasm or these emotions are sometimes lost in those situations.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
The second thing is for leaders, it's better to, if you're going to err on the side of over or under communication, it's better to err on the side of over communication. So while it's ideal, if you could get the exact right amount of communication, it's hard to tell that in any situation.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And what a number of studies have shown is that leaders who under communicate are rated as significantly worse than leaders who over communicate. And you can think about this from the perspective of someone who's waiting on an email. But just say you send your boss a message saying, updating them on something, and you don't have any questions. in the message, so it doesn't need a response.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
The problem if a manager doesn't respond to that is that you're left wondering, did they read this? Are they ignoring me? Are they unhappy? Whereas just sending a quick, thanks, this looks great, I appreciate it, removes all of that ambiguity. You want to do two things. Be really explicit in your communication.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And then if you're going to err on one side of under over-communicate, it's better to lean on the side of over-communicating because it shows you're present. It shows you're listening. It shows you're engaged as opposed to just assuming that, well, the other person knows they got the email, so they must know I read it.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And when you actually stop and take a strategic approach to communication, Not only can you improve your productivity, you can improve your relationships, and you can improve your overall well-being because you can make yourself happier, you can disconnect more, and you can find ways to thrive in a world of communication overload.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
You'd want to remove that ambiguity really in those contexts to avoid those kinds of misinterpretations.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
One of the examples I love to use when I'm training executives or students is to have one person tap out a song on a desk. And then you ask them, okay, tapping that song, what do you think the odds are that someone else will be able to correctly guess that song? And there's actually a research study on this.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
When you tap out a song, most of us think, oh, yeah, there's a really good chance someone else will guess this. But in reality, only a miniscule percentage of people correctly guess those songs. The reason is that when we're tapping out a song, we hear the music in our head as we're tapping it, but the other person doesn't hear that music. And that's the same thing when it comes to email.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
When we're writing an email, we hear the motion in our head, so it's clear. Whereas the person on the other side is coming from a different set of information and assumptions, and they hear a different emotion when they're reading it. So what these researchers found was a good solution is when you write a text-based communication,
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
Take that message and read it in the exact opposite tone as you intend. So if it's a sarcastic message, read it as serious. If it's a serious message, read it as sarcastic. And when people do that, they suddenly are much less overconfident about how clear their message is. When they do that, they're like, oh, wait, that sounds reasonable too when I read it in a different tone.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So taking that little step can really help you to engage in the kind of perspective taking that can prevent those misinterpretations in the first place by realizing our message may not be as clear to others as it is to us.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So the example with Uber in the book, I talk about how Uber was running into a whole bunch of problems because their culture was known as, at the time, misogynistic. There were claims from female employees about harassment and being mistreated. And at the same time, Uber Twitter account, or shortly thereafter, Uber Twitter account from India actually tweeted
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To celebrate Wives' Day, why don't you give your wife a break and order in food? Here's a discount. It wasn't those exact words, but it was something along the lines of that, basically suggesting that you should give women a break from cooking, and here's a discount.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And the problem with something like that is locally in that particular region of India, it didn't actually cause any waves because it wasn't as against cultural norms in that particular region. But you can imagine the context of the controversy that was happening in the US that really made some big sound waves that really went viral and caused some major problems and some bad publicity.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So one of the things we often forget when we're interacting virtually is is that many people who are potentially not the intended recipients of your message may get that message. So you want to be really thoughtful about potential audiences beyond those that are just the ones you're immediately talking to. because emails can be forwarded and then video calls.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
We've seen so many of those viral ones go around of executives doing a really bad job potentially laying off employees or other bad behavior over video. So remembering that these things are more permanent and can be shared is really important. But let's bring this down to the individual level. Let's just say you're interacting with someone else.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
What are the best things you can do in that situation? And there are a number of them. But the one biggest one that I generally recommend is just asking the other person how they would prefer to interact. There's many preferences that people have when it comes to interactions. For instance, people who have difficulty hearing may really prefer video interactions because it can help them read lips.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
People from other cultures may prefer to have text-based interactions because it allows them to more perfect their language because English may not be their first language. So this allows them to better get their words across. And there's a whole lot of different reasons people may want cameras on or off or prefer text or whatever else.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And usually what we do is we just send an email, a video or a telephone invite and say, okay, video call 3 p.m. tomorrow. But we don't take that step to say, hey, what would you prefer? What's best for you? And by doing that, you do two things. One, you include a whole lot more people. Maybe it's a working parent who doesn't want to have their video on because their kid is home from daycare sick.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
Or maybe, as I noted, someone with a certain disability or someone from a different culture. So you're able to better include them in your interactions so they don't feel as if they're a secondary party in the interaction.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And beyond inclusion, this is just a good strategy generally to ask people what they prefer and how they feel about things because they're going to like to interact with you a lot more. Because we all have these preferences. Maybe I really hate having my camera on, or maybe I really love it. And if someone else asks me and says, I'd love to meet with you, what mode would be best for you?
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
I'm going to be much more likely to want to interact with that person going forward because they're abiding my preferences. So this is just a good strategy overall. When you ask people what they like, they're going to be much more likely to want to interact with you.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
When it comes to culture, I've seen a lot of weird things companies have been doing. So a big thing with return to the office, for instance, is we're going to bring everyone back to the office to improve culture. But if you were to ask me or as a consultant or professor researcher, what's the best way we can improve culture?
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My answer for let's put everyone in a room and lock them together is probably pretty far down the list. There's actually like an old 90s movie where they locked a bunch of parents together who are divorcing to try and get them back together. And in reality, if you want to improve culture, think about, well, what's direct here? Well, we want to improve trust. What are ways we can do that?
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
Well, one, show you care about your employees. Show you care about their voice, about their preferences. That's a much more direct approach to that than just putting everyone in the same room. And if you put a bunch of people who don't like each other in the same room, it's not going to magically improve the culture.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
One of the other recommendations I give in the book is to have a conversation amongst your team about communication practices to make the implicit more explicit. There's some really interesting studies on the email urgency bias. And that is the idea that when someone sent you an email, you tend to think that it needs a quicker response than they actually do.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So, John, if you sent me an email, I'd say, okay, this is someone who has a really important podcast. They want a response from me ASAP. But in reality, on your end, you're probably like, I'm busy. I don't care if he gets back to me in the next three days. But the problem with that is because recipients think a response is needed much more quickly, that creates a whole lot of stress on their part.
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They feel this need to constantly check their messages. And that can really worsen culture because even when they're at home, they're checking their phones and everything else. So the way to get around this is to have conversations, explicit ones. Okay, how quickly should we respond to emails? How quickly do we expect a response? How quickly should we respond to instant messages or Slack messages?
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
Well, what if there's an emergency? What's the best way to get in touch with each other? Should it be text message? Should it be putting an urgent tag or something else?
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And by doing that, you allow people better ability to, A, focus during the day because they're not constantly checking their messages, and B, to disconnect more at night so they can come back to work recovered and happier in the process. So really making sure to not rely on assumptions and actually come together as a team and figure out, well, what works for us?
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
What's best for us is one of the best things you can do to improve your communication culture.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
In my view, there will always be value in the human component of communication. so we think about ai there's often ways that someone might be able to tell you're using ai whether that's because you're using it to write an email for you or you're reading off a script during a video call or whatever else so these examples may be the ai uses a word you don't normally use like proficient
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
Or maybe the AI just missed something. As an example, let's say you talk to your coworker the previous day and they mentioned that they had a stomach bug that week and it had been really bad and they finally got over it. And then the next day you use AI, you have it write an email to them, you copy and paste it. And it starts with, I hope you had a good week, exclamation mark.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And clearly you didn't write that message. And the problem is, maybe 98% of the time, the other person won't get it. They won't know that you used AI. But if they realize once that you've used AI to communicate with them, they may question every single interaction you've had with them previously. They may question, was that just AI every single time I've interacted with them?
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And then they're going to ask, well, why am I even interacting with this person at all if I'm just communicating with AI? So you want to be careful that in important communication, your words are your own. That's not to say there's not a use for AI. AI is great for editing, for brainstorming, for proofing your message.
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And it can be really good for low stakes repeated interactions where just copy and pasting can be good. But when it comes to those important interactions, there's a reason someone wants to talk to you. And they want to be talking to you.
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And if they feel like they're not talking to you, but rather talking to an AI, they're going to start questioning whether they need to even have you in their life or in their workplace at all in the first place.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
I see the most important takeaway as you should pause and question your communication assumptions and decisions. We lose so much time just going with the flow. We always do a meeting for this, so we'll keep doing a meeting. The conversation's already in email, so we're not gonna switch to phone.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
The problem with that approach is that you often end up in the suboptimal choice of communication medium. And when you actually stop and take a strategic approach to communication,
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
Not only can you improve your productivity, you can improve your relationships, and you can improve your overall well-being because you can make yourself happier, you can disconnect more, and you can find ways to thrive in a world of communication overload.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
My book, Ping, is coming out. You can find it wherever books are sold. So Ping, The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication. And if you want to follow me, I'm most active on LinkedIn and Twitter, or X as it's now called. You can find me there under Andrew Brodsky, and I'm sure I'll pop right up under that search.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
When I was 16 years old, my life took a unexpected twist. So pretty much out of the blue, I started feeling sick and then I got sicker and sicker. And within a couple of weeks, I found myself in the emergency room. And at that point, the doctors ran some blood tests and based on how high my white blood cell count was, it was abundantly clear that I had leukemia.
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And that proceeded a whole lot of treatments of chemotherapy, radiation, a bone marrow transplant. So from an early age, I got to have the experience of often having to interact with people from a distance because my immune system was really weakened.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
When I was in for a bone marrow transplant, I was in one of those isolation rooms for over a month where people could only come in if they were wearing full gowns and masks and gloves. And luckily I survived. The treatment was very successful for me, but I was left with a side effect, a lifelong immune deficiency that has resulted in me also having to be a little bit more careful in many cases.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And in many instances, having to interact with others from a distance, whether because I'm sick or I'm concerned about others getting sick. And this really led to my interest in studying how do we interact with each other through communication technology? What's the best way to do it? How can we improve that?
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So then when I began my PhD at Harvard Business School, I focused on that as my topic of study. And to me, it was just really interesting because it's such a dynamic topic because things are constantly changing, new technologies coming out.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And then when COVID hit, I happened to be very well positioned in terms of research topic because I was studying how can we improve our interactions in a situation now where everyone suddenly was in a situation that I had myself been fairly familiar with.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
When it comes to virtual communication, one of the big topics I focus on is how engaged we feel in our interactions. How engaged do we think other people are with us in those situations? And how do we feel like we can have that authentic human touch? And what a lot of this research finds is that in many cases, it's better to use richer modes of interaction.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So interaction that's more similar to face-to-face. So for instance, instead of sending email, you have a video meeting or a video call because you can actually see that authenticity shine through. But there's actually a twist on some of this research. So in some studies that I did with
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
managers, negotiators, parents and teachers from international schools in Vietnam, I found an interesting thing here. So I showed that if you are truly being authentic, it's best to use the richest mode available because that authenticity shines through. But there's a whole lot of situations where you want to seem authentic, but you aren't necessarily.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So for instance, something really good happened in your friend's life. Maybe they just got engaged or maybe they just got a promotion, but you're just not happy in that moment because something happened to you. Maybe you had been in a car accident. Maybe you lost your job. Maybe you've been in a fight with your significant other.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And in that moment, it's good for your relationship and it's good for the other person to show that you're happy for them, but maybe you aren't yourself. So those cases are what's referred to as service-acted. This trying to display authenticity potentially for the benefit of the other person, even though you aren't. And this also relates to service with a smile.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So for those of you in customer facing jobs or just really any time at work, you're constantly having to be happy, even though you might not be. And what I found in these research studies is that if you truly want to have a more authentic interaction, it's best to use audio interactions like telephone.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
Although email is best for hiding the fact that you're not truly authentic and it avoids any nonverbal behaviors sneaking through as in video calls, email itself is seen as really inauthentic. Why audio is so good is it hides all our facial expressions, many of our nonverbal behaviors that might leak through in person or video interactions, but it's seen as much, much more authentic than email.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So there's this sweet spot here in this type of interaction where you want it to be authentic, but maybe it's just not all there for you. And you can, this way you can hide anything that might leak through while still showing the other person, you put that effort into the interaction and you actually care.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
Things come to us much more naturally in person. Humans have had, by most estimates, over 100,000 years of experience interacting in person. When it comes to virtual interactions in the scale of human history, we're talking about a very small sliver. So a lot of it is not just about what's better, what's worse. It's just what we're not used to and what we're not good at.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
There are lots of great examples of people who've had very deep relationships solely through online interactions. Back in the early days of online gaming, Many people made friends or boyfriends or girlfriends across the country. They suddenly meet in person and then they get married soon thereafter. It's not that it can't happen virtually.
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It's just that often it's not as natural or it's not as easy. So part of what I recommend is trying to take a more strategic and thoughtful approach to these interactions to add back in what's missing. So as an example of a research study on this. This is our study on negotiators.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And they showed that when people negotiate over email or instant message, so text-based communication, they tend to have a lot less trust and they tend to have worse outcomes, often because they end up in these no deal or impasse situations where they can't get to an agreement.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And one of the things these researchers found is that there's a lot less small talk over text-based communication as opposed to in-person interactions or video interactions. And the thing is about small talk, many people hate it. And for good reason, it's a productivity sink. It feels like we're wasting our time when we need to get to the point.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
But small talk does serve a purpose where it helps us build trust because we trust what we feel like we know. And getting that window into people's lives is what allows us to trust them.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So what these researchers found is that before the text-based negotiation, when they had participants do a quick phone call to schmooze, which is the word they use, so basically just socialize for a few minutes over the phone before the text-based negotiation,
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that those negotiators ended up performing much better building more trust than those negotiators who hadn't taken the initiative to engage in that kind of small talk so when it comes to building stronger relationships virtually it's a lot about thinking about well what's missing here what do i need to add back in how can i make the most of this mode as opposed to just accepting that it's not good so i'm just going to give up here and it's not going to work
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So when I read a business book or an improvement book, I like to have a framework myself as a reader, because it helps me to remember tons of recommendations and it gives me a structure for thinking about them. So for the many strategies in the book, I fit it into this PING framework, which has four parts. P for perspective taking, I for initiative, N for nonverbal, and G for goals.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
So for P, perspective taking, the core idea behind this is that when we're interacting virtually, we tend to be more self-focused. Whether you're just looking at the text of an email or even just a small square of a video screen of someone else, it's not the same as having them standing right in front of you where you're much more focused on what they're thinking about, on their reactions.
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
And this self-focusedness can really cause a whole bunch of problems because we think, well, the message I wrote is really clear to me, so they'll get it. But the problem is we don't think about as much that there's another person here, that they have a different perspective, that they're coming from a different set of information and assumptions.
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And that leads to a lot of the misinterpretations that happen via virtual interactions. Next is I, initiative. And that's thinking about taking the initiative to add back in what might be missing over virtual interactions. So as an example, we discussed this idea that adding in small talk into virtual interactions can be really useful. Sometimes taking the initiative means
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Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
Okay, we're having this conversation over email and saying, hey, let's switch to phone for a second just to resolve this issue. Or maybe you're having a meeting and say, hey, let's switch to email because I think that ended up being more productive or instant message.
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And so taking the initiative to go beyond what you're just normally doing or what you're used to doing to adding in missing parts, whether that's part of the conversation or switching modes is one of the key things to making sure you get the most out of virtual interactions. Then N, nonverbal.
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If you are part of a religious group that is engaged in a ritual, it could be a ceremony, it could be a meditation practice, a prayer program, then you have a whole bunch of people whose parietal lobes are now quieting down. And as they engage this practice, that boundary between themselves and the other people that are with them begins to go away. They begin to feel
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Why Mental Health Is the Root of a Meaningful Life w/John R. Miles | EP 606
blended, connected, again, unified different words that people use, but a sense of oneness with the individuals, with the other individuals that are part of this process.