The Social Brain and The Workplace
Presenter:
Matthew Lieberman
Time:
1:02:54
Summary
Dr. Lieberman discusses the evolution of the human brain and how it makes us undeniably social creatures. Indeed, we are so programmed to be social that ignoring this can come at a considerable cost to one’s happiness, health, and productivity. Dr. Lieberman also discusses how new portable forms of neuroscience may transform its application in the workplace.
Transcript
Well, thank you, it is great to be with all of you today, Luke, thanks for introducing me. And also just inviting me here to be with all of you. To those of you I've heard there are people streaming right now. That's what I look like. But I can't give a talk for 45 minutes with myself behind me the whole time. So apparently, when this goes up on YouTube, they'll integrate it, and people there can watch me and not just the slides, but if you're streaming, you're just gonna get the slides and my voice from here on out. So. So I'm a social neuroscientist, I have been looking at people's brains, mostly using MRI scanners for about 20 years now a little longer than 20 years. And at some point, around 1012 years ago, I started getting introduced, invited to come speak to different sort of business related groups.
And actually, a bunch of the talks were at Oracle early on and other leadership organizations. And so it got me thinking about, you know, what on earth does my work have to say that's relevant to business to thinking about how the social brain is sort of doing its thing at work. And so part of what I think about is sort of how do we kind of promote well being productivity, happiness, all these things that you sort of want to see more of at work. And to do this, you basically need a good model, a good theory of what sort of motivates and drives human beings. And so I think that the sort of inherited wisdom we've had for hundreds of years, you can't really do much better than Thomas Hobbes, who summed it up in a single sentence.