Dr. Emily Falk
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And there's so much to say about that. And one thing related to Hal's work is that the kind of self that's here in the moment is treated differently than the future self. And so he's done lots of really fantastic work in that domain.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
The other thing is that there's been a lot of behavioral science work that I'm sure you're familiar with and that folks watching might also be familiar with related to the ways that self-relevance and value are integrated in our brains. And so our self-relevance system helps us understand what's me and not me, make judgments about whether things are self-relevant or not.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And that substantially overlaps with the brain's value system. And so when we're making value calculations, self-relevance is a key input. Whether I think that this is me or not me, whether this is identity congruent or not is going to weigh into whether I think it's good or bad, whether I think that an option is a good option for me or not.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And on the other hand, when I think that things are self-relevant, then I tend to evaluate them more positively. Behavioral scientists looked at this a long time ago and termed the idea that we tend to value things that are mine more highly than things that are not mine, the endowment effect. And so the endowment effect has been demonstrated in lots of different areas. For example,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
when college students in a classroom are randomly assigned to either be gifted a mug, so now the mug is mine, or the person sitting next to me wasn't gifted that mug. Now I'm asked, how much would I price the mug to sell it? How much would I be willing to accept in monetary terms in order to give the mug to the person sitting next to me?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
The person sitting next to me has asked how much would they be willing to pay for it. And there's a gap between those two numbers on average. So people who think of things as theirs value them more highly than people who are looking at it maybe more objectively.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Sarah Holt, The Capacity Collective, This would all be well and good if it were limited to silly objects in behavioral science studies but there's just such a wide range of things, where what we think of as mine. Sarah Holt, The Capacity Collective, objects, but also ideas behaviors we hold on to those things tightly and we have a hard time sometimes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
With the idea that the thing that I was doing in the past might not be optimal. So we get defensive. We come up with reasons why, well, maybe it would be good for other people to get more physical activity, or maybe it would be good for other people to take this feedback from their supervisor. When I'm in my own mind and body. Like I know all the reasons why I did the thing, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And there are a number of different kinds of techniques that we can use to let go of some of that kind of defensiveness. And one of them is to zoom out and really get in touch with our bigger picture goals and values, the things that we really care the most about. So values affirmation is a really simple technique that psychologists use to help reduce some of that defensiveness.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
So if you let somebody first identify values that matter a lot to them, Which for many of us is stuff like friends and family, or for some people it's their spirituality or their creativity.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Really what are their core values, passions, and let them write about that for five minutes, like these very brief interventions, then allow people to zoom out enough to see that the particular thing that you're asking them to change, or that we want to potentially change about ourselves. Isn't what defines us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
It's not, it doesn't make me a bad person because I haven't been getting enough physical activity or following my blood pressure medication regimen. Or because I have thought about some political question in a way that now that I have new information, I might think about differently. Right.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And so after people have that chance to zoom out and really reflect on their core values, they're more open to new information that could be helpful for them to coaching, to behavior change interventions. And in the brain, what we see is that when we do this kind of values affirmation exercise first,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
So half of the participants in this kind of study would be randomly assigned to reflect on values that matter the most to them. The other half are randomly assigned to reflect on values that don't matter that much to them. And then they all get the same exact coaching.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And what I like about this paradigm is that it's literally the same words and pictures, like exactly the same coaching materials that everybody's seeing. And so you might expect that their brains should all respond similarly.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And instead, what we see is that mindset that they're coming in with, whether they've been affirmed or not had that chance to affirm their values, changes the receptivity in the value and self-relevance system. So we see more activation in those systems when people come in primed with these values affirmations. So that's one tool. I don't know if you want to talk about more.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
I know there's a lot of things that we have as, as mutual interests to talk about.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Is anti-mattering a concept that is internally generated or it's something that we perceive that other people don't think we matter?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
So many things are like that, right? Like the self-relevance and social relevance systems in our brains overlap in some ways. And as we develop in childhood through adolescence, we often use what we think other people think about us to shape our sense of self. And our social connections are some of the most powerful and important things that happen in our lives, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
So loneliness is terrible for our health For our wellbeing, that sense that other people that were connected to other people in meaningful ways is so crucial for our wellbeing. And one of the things that my lab has been interested in and studied some of the work led by Unicom is a sense of purpose. We know that sense of purpose. varies between people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
So people who have a stronger sense of purpose tend to live longer, they have healthier lives, their mental and emotional function is sharper than people who have lower sense of purpose. But I think the thing that's really hopeful there is that Wherever our kind of baseline is as individuals, we fluctuate around it. So we all have days where we feel more purposeful or less purposeful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And in neuroimaging studies that we've run, we've seen that sort of people who tend to feel more purposeful as they're being exposed to those coaching messages, for example, Celeste activation in brain regions that track conflict. So maybe they're having an easier time making certain kinds of decisions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
We don't have the data to fill out this full causal chain, but I think it's possible that could be part of why they're making more of these kind of healthier choices to adhere to their medications and to take care of their bodies in particular ways. And when you're bringing up an idea about the kind of pernicious feeling of not mattering,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
it strikes me as being really related to those days when we feel less purposeful. And I think there are a lot of inroads that we can consider there. There are techniques like I was mentioning around reflecting on our core values, like taking a step back, writing, journaling, that sort of thing. But I know that's not for everybody.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And so one thing that I also think is useful that we've seen on our team and other people have found is that since that sense of purpose, that sense of mattering, that sense of self-clarity, is related to taking care of our physical bodies as well.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
we can approach it from other angles, like getting a good night's sleep helps us feel more connected to other people and more purposeful or like getting better physical activity boosts our mood and helps us with these sorts of things. And I really think about it in terms of kind of a web of wellness where there are all of these different potential inroads.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
So if you're somebody who isn't looking to do a couch to 5k, but it does feel possible to you to start leaving your phone in another room and like, Doing a bedtime wind down routine where instead of doom scrolling, you're like reading a novel. Do the thing that works for you and is going to be rewarding in the short term, rather than something that feels really effortful and painful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And it's going to be hard to convert from that decision into a habit.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
So we're sensitive to signals of potential rejection or actual rejection because it then motivates a bunch of useful behaviors to help us reconnect either with the person if we've done something that causes harm or with other people if we've been excluded or rejected.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Yeah. One of the things that I loved about that story is on the podcast where I originally heard it, Darknet Diaries, which is a really fun podcast. Jenny talked about the way that she doesn't necessarily need to be an incredible computer hacker in order to get into a system that there's always a person who she can get access to.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And then once she has access to the human, that there are so many sort of ways that she can do her job of testing a bank's security system. And so in this particular story, she did a really planful job of getting ready to make herself somebody who a guard might let in. So she bandaged up one of her hands and she brought a big box full of papers as a prop.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And she's in Germany where people value order very highly. And she goes up to the guard in order to be able to penetrate the bank, to get into the bank where she's got to find a particular computer and she's supposed to insert a USB drive. And the guard, of course, doesn't let her in right away.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And so she puts her finger on the fingerprint scanner and she's posing as a bank employee and acting as if she is entitled to be let in. And the guard was saying, well, try again. And she drops the box of papers and she starts swearing really loudly and making a scene.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And in chapter one, I talk a little bit about, we might be tempted to judge the guard who decided to wave her through and let her in. Cause we know as a reader that she's a penetration tester, who's testing the bank security system. But of course, in reality, the past experience that the guard probably had is most people who are asking to be led into the bank in that situation are employees.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And most of the time that would be a helpful thing to do. And when we're weighing being a helpful, kind person versus having a scene go down in the lobby where everybody else is in an orderly fashion, it actually makes a lot of sense that as a human, you might make that choice. And so we can take a step back and ask, well, what are the things that the bank might do in order to
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
help put future security guards in a different position. Like maybe the bank could create a situation where the guards know the employees in a little bit more personal way and get that kind of social reward of a little bit of interaction from knowing one another or lots of other things that could be helpful in that kind of situation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
But you were asking me about what does this tell us about the speed of our decisions? And what I think Jenny really highlighted when she told the story was about the ways that the people trying to be helpful can be exploited for these other kinds of means. And as we think about our own experiences as individuals, like think about interacting on the internet, most people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
in the world are kind and good. And often when you read news, it's by journalists who are very dedicated to hunting down the truth, but our tendencies, our natural tendencies can also be exploited to sell us false information or to have us fall prey to bots or other folks who don't have our best interests at heart. Right.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
I will also say in terms of your past experience that you were describing, I'm married to a cryptographer.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Privacy and data security are salient in my mind as well.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
I think so much evidence that what we think other people's preferences and behaviors are shape ours. So our social relevance system helps us understand what other people are thinking and feeling. And what other people are thinking and feeling influences our value calculation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
So there've been a number of brain imaging studies that have looked at, for example, when people look at photographs of other people's faces, we might think that we have our own unique tastes and preferences.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Like for example, that when we fall in love, it's really unique, but scientists have shown that when people are given information about who other people think are more or less attractive, that shapes
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Anna Voelker, The value calculations of the people looking at the photographs, so our judgments of beauty are shaped by other people's preferences, even when those preferences are secretly randomly assigned by a computer and have nothing to do with. any objective traits that might infer attractiveness.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Likewise, our judgments of foods, like how tasty different foods are, how much we want to eat them, are shaped by norms like that, other people's preferences. Our judgments about how much electricity is reasonable to use. In California, some researchers did this incredible research where they looked at people's energy use at their houses and what people thought was influencing that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
So people reported to the researchers what they thought was actually influencing their energy use. And they did not say anything about norms or about what their neighbors were doing. But in reality, their neighbors' energy use was relevant. And when the researchers gave different houses, different persuasive messages, one of the most effective ones was highlighting the efficiency of neighbors.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
So they're just a really wide range of situations. I could go on and on because there are so many of these studies.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
The importance of social connection to us as humans is baked into our biology. And so it makes sense that we have an alarm system that helps us tell when we're at risk of losing those connections, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
There's a lot in what you're asking, John.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Great. Love it. So why is it so sticky? I think part of that is probably because we need other people for our survival. So our social relevance systems help us understand what other people are thinking and feeling, which is very useful if we want to predict what they're going to do next. So my friend and colleague Diana Tamir has done a
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
ton of beautiful work about the ways that people's thoughts and feelings predict their actions and how well our brains can make those links. If I know that you're feeling hungry right now, I might predict that you might next feel grumpy if we don't get you a snack and that you might do things to try to find some food if you're feeling hungry.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Or if you're feeling happy that you might behave in a totally different way right. Understanding how other people are thinking and feeling is really useful for coordinating and collaborating like those sort of positive generative things it's also useful for trying to compete.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
With other people and connecting with other people is totally essential for the survival of human babies and children and then. As we grow really fundamental to our wellbeing as well. So I think that's probably one of the most common explanations for why we care so much is that evolutionarily speaking, and also in terms of our model, modern world are. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Thanks for having me, John.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Yeah, I feel excited. I feel like it's been a long, uh, journey and really excited for people to get to read it and to get to have conversations about what resonates, where people have questions, where people disagree. So yeah, especially looking forward to conversation with you today.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Neuroscientists have looked at what happens in the brains of monks who meditate extensively for many years and found that they showed different patterns of activity within the brain's self-relevance and value systems than people who aren't those serious meditation practitioners. And some related work that I really love is from another friend and colleague, Molly Crockett, who has studied
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
these kinds of transformative experiences that people have. So Molly and their team have gone to festivals like Burning Man and places where people often have these transformative experiences that sometimes involve drugs, sometimes involve other ways of letting go of that bounded notion of who we could be and connecting with other people or the rest of humanity in these deeper ways.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
What you were just saying, Molly is a serious meditator and student of Buddhism and really brings together those parts in a really wonderful, fruitful way, scientifically and spiritually, I think. So I really admire that a lot.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Great question. So there are a lot of things like when people move together with the same physical movements, like a drum circle or some of those sorts of things can elicit that type of brain synchrony. When people watch the same media, then our brains synchronize.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
For example, when people watch little silly videos of an astronaut in space or a comedic video, Carolyn Parkinson's research has shown that Friends tend to show more of that similarity than strangers.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And Yuri Hassan's lab has shown that even strangers tend to show relatively synchronized responses when directors and artists capture our minds and our imaginations in these common ways through film, let's say. But I think it's also important to recognize that we're not always in sync, right? A long time ago, like early in this research program,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Ralph Schmeltz, I had a paper where strong political speeches tended to capture people's imaginations in common ways and bring their brains into sync with one another. And I think in the current moment, you might think, well, what counts as a strong political speech? Like for one person, what counts as a strong political speech might be abhorrent to somebody else. Right. And.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
That media environment segregation that we experience now where people tend to watch Fox News or CNN, let's say, brings our brains into sync with people who share our prior assumptions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And so just taking it out of the political sphere for a minute, there's a really great study where they brought people into the lab and they randomly assigned half the people to hear one backstory for a fictional story, a J.D. Salinger story. and the other half to hear a different backstory.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
So people have different assumptions going in to the brain scan, and then they all hear the exact same narrative. So they're hearing the same words and sentences and paragraphs, but they're making different meaning of it. And so the people who were given the same backstory as one another, their brains are in sync, and they're out of sync with the people who heard the other backstory.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
For sure. It's been a whole career of thinking about how we can use neuroscience to help people be happier and healthier and more purposeful in their decision making. And so it's really fun to get to this point where I get to talk to so many people about it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Now bringing it back to our current political moment, like when we look at the brains of American Democrats and Republicans watching the exact same news clip, there's often more synchrony with people's in-groups than with their out-groups. And you might think, well, okay, we're doomed.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
If we are watching the same news and our brains are out of sync with one another, how can we possibly get on the same page? And I think that There's hope in the idea that like surfacing some of those background assumptions. There's a lot of behavioral science that shows that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
at least right now in the US, people's assumptions about what the other side thinks of me are more negative than what the other side actually thinks. So we probably have more in common and dislike and dehumanize each other less than people tend to assume.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And in other research where people actually get in the room and have cross-party conversations, they enjoy them more than they think they're going to. And starting with these small things of like,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
things that help us build common ground, like boring small talk about the weather and about our kids' soccer game and about the things that are immediately in common can help us build up the synchrony that then can make it maybe more possible for us to explore. And also just an openness and curiosity to why do you think what you're thinking?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
What are the assumptions that are behind that idea rather than that immediate defensiveness or judgment?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Yeah, I miss Emil so much, man. I miss Emil so much. He came to Penn and I was so thrilled when we were able to hire him here. And then, as you maybe know, he set up his own lab after He was technically a postdoc in my lab, but he always had a vision for what he wanted to do in terms of bringing science and putting science to work for peace.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And he really was fantastic at bringing other people together. And maybe you also read Jamil Zaki's beautiful recent book, Hope for Cynics, that really does a beautiful job paying tribute to Emil, but
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Emile had such a, an openness and a curiosity about other humans and about why we think the way that we think and what our brains are doing that makes it easier for us to connect or harder for us to connect. And then how we could scale that in interventions. And two of Emile's students, postdocs, Samantha Moorberg and Boaz Mary,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
are now both faculty running their own labs, like the Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab. And I actually just got a message from Samantha earlier today that she's going to be doing a big public talk at the University of Utah, honoring a bunch of that work on metaperceptions and dehumanization. And yeah, thank you for honoring Emil in that way. He was such a special person.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Emily Coyle- john you really do go for those big questions and that question makes me think about some work that my Grad student torian Butler has been doing with Dartmouth business Professor Adam kleinbaum and with me. Emily Coyle- And in it torian is trying to systematically think about in our organizations like our workplaces, for example. What are the things that give us a sense of belonging?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
What are the things that make us feel like we're part of that whole, that we're included? And he has really broken it down into three ingredients that I think are really useful and that I think about a lot in my day-to-day leadership roles. One is value, like the sense that we are valued by the people that we work with, by the organization.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
The other is a sense of reciprocity so that we get out of things what we put in, in our relationships, in the work that we're doing, and so on. And then the third thing is fit, that we belong, that we fit, and that there are other people who we can go to who might have shared experiences or similar roles with.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And what's really useful about the way that Torian conceptualizes this, I think, is that he distinguishes between inclusion as like the practices that an organization puts in place, the structures that are set up. that have everything to do with like from how we do our hiring and our onboarding to what happens day to day in our workplace environments.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And then that individual feeling or experience of belonging that results.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And so as individuals, as we gain more power in the organizations that we're part of, like that could be a workplace, it could also be within our communities, keeping those things in mind, like what are the systems that we are contributing to or putting in place that are going to make other people feel valued, that they're going to make
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
that they're going to make people feel like they're getting out of it what they put into it that are going to make them feel like they fit and like they really belong i think torian's framework is really powerful in that way and then more broadly remembering to take other people's perspectives and to gather information from people who are like us and as importantly or more importantly people who are not like us right so we know that diversity in our teams
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
leads to more innovation. Like when we have different perspectives, different ways of thinking about things, different experiences that people bring to the table, that makes better science.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
It makes, you know, more innovative products, like people who bridge different groups that don't know each other and their organizations get paid more and promoted faster because they're coming up with these ideas. And so how can we audit what's coming in to our own calculations, whose voices
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Do we have access to, and how can we approach a wider range of perspectives with curiosity to allow us to really serve our communities in the world in the ways that we want to? I think there are so many layers to what you're asking about.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And I'm really glad you're asking that question because I think just asking it and asking it of ourselves is so important in being deliberate about the choices that we're making related to it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
I think it would be to have a little bit more compassion for ourselves and others. Because I think once we understand the way that those value calculations are unfolding, It's wild, right? There's so much that's going into those calculations that can feel so seamless in the moment. And then later we look back and we have different information or maybe we would weigh things differently.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And so I hope that after people read the book after they read what we value, that it gives them an appreciation of the complexity and of the places where there might be more possibility to make choices that give ourselves a little bit more room or that makes a little bit more space for other people to do things in a different way. So I think that's what I would whisper.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Thank you so much for having me and back to you of thanks for doing the work of bringing this work to so many people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Yeah, Bev is one of my very favorite people. She's just a phenom. So right now she's a hundred years old, or if you ask her, she'll tell you she's a hundred and a half. She'll be 101 on July 4th. So there's always fireworks for her birthday. And so it's pretty special that I still get to have her in my life and that She lives in Philadelphia where I also live.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And so the story that I tell at the beginning of the book is about how great it is that she can come over and spend time at my house. And often my kids will be jumping on the couch and shoving Legos in her face and trying to play their latest musical tunes on the guitar or the piano for her. And it's lively, chaotic, depending on whose perspective you're taking.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And I often will try to get her outside for a little walk around the block, just to get a little bit of time. And on one of these occasions, when we were outside, she said, when I come over to your house, we're not really spending time together. And when she said that to me, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like, yes, we are like you're here and we're in the same space.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
We're in the same room. But what she was really saying was we're not really spending quality time together, right? Like when she's there and we're in the same room, but we're not actually telling each other stories or connecting about the things that matter most to us. That feels different than when I make the time to go to her house, which is across town. And.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
I was thinking about that in terms of why would I make that choice? I know that our time together is finite and I know that it's a really special thing that I have this person in my life who I love so much. But as I started to unpack that, I realized this is a special case of the kind of thing that my lab has been studying for a really long time. Like, how do we make decisions?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
How do we make decisions that are aligned with our bigger picture goals and values with who we really want to be? And so that allowed me to unpack it in a different way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Oh, I think that idea of what we know is good for us is an interesting choice of words because Although when we take a step back and we think about things in a more planful, deliberative way, we might have one set of goals. In the moment, the way that our brain calculates value prioritizes immediate rewards typically.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
So when we think about the different things that might go into our value calculations, we have this system in the brain that takes all of these different inputs from emotional processing systems and rational processing systems.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
from our self-relevance system that helps us understand what's me or not me, our social relevance system that helps us understand what other people are thinking and feeling.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And it integrates all of that information to come up with this common currency so that we can compare apples and oranges, or would I rather go for a walk around the block with my grandmother right now, or be a little bit more prompt in responding to work emails or get dinner on the table for my kids.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And as we think about these different kinds of choices, often they're not inherently comparable and yet we can still make those choices relatively seamlessly. And in the moment, as we're doing that a lot of the time, we don't have the attention. We don't have the resources to necessarily weigh those things as carefully as we might want.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And so then the things that are shouting the loudest or most salient in the calculation, get more weight. And going back to that example with my grandmother, the next day after she brought up that idea of maybe I could come to her house more often, I started thinking about what was getting in the way for me there.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And there were a lot of things, like one of the things is that getting to her house is pain. There's no good transit that goes there. And there's often a lot of traffic and it's hard to park. And on the other hand, I'm directing Penn's Communication Neuroscience Lab and I'm directing the Climate Communication Division of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. I'm the vice dean of the school here.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And so there are a lot of people who I want to serve here at work and who give me immediate positive feedback when I respond to them quickly and when we're exploring new and exciting ideas. And that's really important for my identity, right? To be the kind of mentor and boss and scientist that serves other people in those ways.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And when she said that one little thing to me, it threatened all kinds of, like, defenses about the kind of family member, the kind of granddaughter I want to be. And so the next day when I finally got to think about it a little bit more and take a step back and think like, why am I being so defensive about this? What is it that I actually care about?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
I realized like, I need to figure out a way to make spending time with Bev feel good and feel like the right decision. Because when I really take a minute to think about my sort of big V values, like certainly she would be high on that list.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And so one of the things that kind of tipped the scales for me was this episode of a podcast that I was listening to called how to save a planet where they try to unpack different kinds of ways that everyday citizens can make traction in the climate mitigation arena.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And there was this delightful episode about people biking and what I loved about the episode was that they really didn't focus on moralizing or about like how it's going to stave off cancer 20 years in the future, but really about the joy that people were feeling biking in the moment. And that just clicked for me that there's this other option that I hadn't considered.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
So when we think about how the value system works, there are these phases where first we identify what are the options that we're choosing from in the first place. And initially, I didn't think of myself as somebody who was like biking in the crazy Philly traffic. I'll tell you, I did that last night to... go to Center City and it's wild.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
But it just hadn't even occurred to me until this podcast put that on my radar. And then the next thing the podcast did was it said, you know what, that could be joyful in the short term. Like you could get a benefit right away if you did it. Like you could be having fun like the people on this podcast. And the more I thought about it, the more I was like, yeah, I could try this out.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And I tried biking to Bev's and it was great. And so sometimes it's these little things that can tip that calculation from Something that feels hard and effortful. And I never regret it once I do it, but just the getting there, it felt like so much. And then the second part of that value calculation is like putting a weight on to all the different options. Should I go visit Bev right now?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Should I spend time with my kids? Should I do work and so on? Then we choose. So in that situation, choosing to go visit Bev and biking over there, there's what's called reward prediction error, which is basically, was this better than I thought it would be or worse than I thought it would be?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And when things are better than our brains anticipate that they're going to be, we get a positive prediction error, which makes it more likely that our value system will upweight those choices in the future. On the other hand, if something is worse than I thought it would be, like, I don't know if you've ever gotten really excited about, say, like
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
a cake that you saw at the supermarket and you bought it. And like, you have all these positive associations from childhood going to birthday parties. Oh, that cake is going to be so fun and delicious and joyful. And then like you eat that supermarket sheet cake and like, sometimes it's just gross. Right.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And so you might get a negative prediction error of, oh man, I thought that cake was going to be great because of my childhood memories. And it turns out this particular one is like, not that great. Maybe it's dry and mealy or whatever.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
And so then the next time you're at the supermarket, that negative prediction error has updated your value calculation so that maybe you're a little less likely to make that impulse purchase. Yeah. In terms of the value calculation, I think it's really incredible and amazing that we have this system in our brain.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
which can take all of this complicated information about the world around us and take into account our past experiences, our current context, what's going on around us, who's there, and what are the potential pros and cons, and then our future goals. And it can help us bridge where we are and where we want to be.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Yeah, I love Michigania. Yeah.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Emily Falk on How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Choices | EP 596
Yeah.