How the New Science of Self Awareness Gives Us the Edge

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I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Steve Fleming, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, on the HR Leaders Podcast. Steve illuminated the critical role of self-awareness and how developing this ability can enhance performance.

Self-awareness is our capacity to reflect on our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviours and evaluate whether they are on track or off track. As Steve explained, it serves as the "conductor of the orchestra" guiding optimal functioning.

With strong self-awareness, we can catch ourselves when going off course, shift strategies, and communicate needed changes. Research shows some people innately possess greater self-awareness, linked to brain structure and function in the prefrontal cortex.

Self-awareness starts to emerge around ages 3-4, likely learned through experience and interactions teaching children they may be wrong. To build this skill, Steve suggests recognizing our tendency to lose self-awareness under stress or when lacking practice. Seeking outside perspectives complements our self-monitoring.

Looking ahead, Steve acknowledged AI systems like chatbots show some metacognition but lack the essence of human self-awareness - seeing ourselves as others do. Future AI may develop its own form of self-reflection changing how we view our minds.

Boosting self-knowledge through practices like meditation can strengthen metacognitive abilities. Other intriguing frontiers include using affirmations during sleep to prime greater self-awareness upon waking.

Overall, Steve offers science-backed insights on how cultivating self-awareness empowers us to direct the symphony of our lives and organizations. A little more self-understanding goes a long way!

Episode Highlights

How utilizing insights from Steve’s multidisciplinary research can help individuals adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing world
The importance of self-awareness in human performance and the role of metacognition
The potential impact of artificial metacognition on human self-awareness and decision-making

Recommended Resources

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Grab a copy of the book his book - How the New Science of Self Awareness Gives Us the Edge

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🎙️ Automatically generated Podcast Transcript

Steve 0:00

We have these capacities in our brains that allow us to have this extra voice that have this extra view of how you're doing in at any one moment. There's lots of then benefits that flow from that. If you are able to realise when things might be going off track you can intervene and prevent errors happening you can change strategies you can communicate to others when you think that the group needs to change course the company needs to change course.

Chris Rainey 0:36

Five one Welcome back to the HR leaders podcast and today's episode, I'm joined by Steve Fleming, who's a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, and author of the book Know thyself, the science of self awareness. During episode Steve shares why self awareness is human's greatest superpower, and guides our mind memory, creativity, intelligence and skill to perform at our best. As always, before we jump into the video, make sure hit the subscribe button, turn on notification bell and follow on your favourite podcast platform. With that being said, let's jump in. See, welcome to the show. How are you?

Steve 1:14

Excellent pleasure to be here,

Speaker 2 1:15

you've got a smile and energy of someone who's just coming back from holiday.

Steve 1:18

It's been a few weeks back in the office, but you know, still, you know, trying to build off that energy.

Speaker 2 1:24

We came across each other for our shared friend, John Gomez, and he told me a little bit about your work and it just immediately, I'm sort of fascinated. But tell everyone a bit more about your background and the journey to where we are now.

Steve 1:36

Sure. Yeah, so I'm a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist based at UCL at University College London. So I originally trained in psychology, and then I did a PhD in neuroscience in brain imaging. And since then, I've had a real interest in understanding how meta cognition works. So this is the part of the human mind that allows us to think about our own thoughts and feelings, reflect on our behaviours, think about whether things are on track, off track, and so on. So it's really a component, a major component of what we think of as self awareness. What we're interested in doing. And what I've been doing since I started my lab at UCL is using brain imaging tools to study how self awareness works in the brain,

Speaker 2 2:22

maybe just start breaking it down for everyone, because I've also been on a journey of discovery since we last spoke, what is the role of self awareness?

Steve 2:30

Yeah, so I mean, self awareness, shapes, always everything we do, we often don't think about it like that. We often think of it as something specific, in a way, it's like the conductor of an orchestra is kind of in the background, but it's critical to high performance. So if I'm carrying out some task at work, then I might stop and think to myself, is this the right way of going about it. And that is me being self aware of how I am performing the task. So you can immediately see that if someone has good self awareness, you are able to just intervene at just the right moment on yourself on your own performance, and stop yourself going off track. And that's what we think metacognition and self awareness gives us is this, essentially a superpower, it gives us this ability to see ourselves, like other spheres. So it's really hard to do, we often do rely on other people to get that third person perspective to get that advice on whether things are going well or badly. But if you have good self awareness, you can almost do that for yourself.

Speaker 2 3:31

Some people are naturally more self aware. Yeah, we

Steve 3:35

think so. So one of the challenges in the lab has been to develop a rigorous scientific way of quantifying self awareness, the way we study it is by giving people tasks to do cognitive tasks. And then we ask them every so often to reflect on how well they think they're doing on those tasks. And so we can then define a measure of self awareness, which is whether your performance lines up with your judgments of how well you think you're doing. And we find that some people have good awareness of how that they're doing. And other people have really poor awareness of how they're doing. And that generally, that tends to generalise across lots of different tasks that we give people. So there seems to be some kind of common resource that we use to reflect on ourselves. And some people are better at it than others. And we've we've linked that in our studies, we've linked that to features of the anatomy and the function of the brain, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, the prefrontal cortex towards the front of the brain seems to be really important for supporting good self awareness.

Speaker 2 4:39

I'm interested in like how our upbringing and environment affect our ability to be self aware.

Steve 4:46

Great question. It's something that we don't know a huge amount about. It's, it does seem to take a while to develop in kids. So when you take these measures that I just described, and you give them to your developers Have the self awareness tests for young kids, then you find that it's not until the age of around three or four, that kids start to essentially be able to realise that they might be wrong about something. So that's the hallmark of good self awareness, you know, they can still do things, right. So like, I mean, I see this my own kids, I've got a one year old and a four year old, my one year old can start to talk a bit, and so on. But like, it's not until they're a bit older that they can realise that they might have used the wrong word or written down the wrong answer. And that will take a while to come online. And so one hypothesis, but it really is just a idea at the moment. And we wrote a paper on this a couple of years ago with some colleagues in Oxford is the idea that the reason it takes a while to develop is not an accident. It's because you need to, in a sense, learn to be self aware through the experience by through experiences. And by listening to your parents to your teachers. In a sense, they're, they're teaching you how to realise that you might be wrong about things. That's the that's the idea.

Speaker 2 6:03

Yeah. You don't know what you don't know. Right? Exactly. Exactly. So you know, another way is, is metacognition, the same self awareness?

Steve 6:11

No, we don't think it's the same. We think it's one important building block. Many animal species, for instance, have forms of metacognition, but we think that fully fledged human self awareness requires something additional, which is the ability to gain this third person perspective. So you can have metacognition in the sense that you can have a sense of confidence that you might be right or wrong. But you might that might not be gaining this fully fledged view of yourself. And we think that that extra component of self awareness that the ability to in a sense, see yourself like other people see you relies on a social ability. So when when kids gain the ability to realise that other people have a different view of the situation to them, that's what psychologists call theory of mind or mentalizing, thinking about other people, then the idea is that you get, you can then start to apply that to yourself as well. And that's what we think creates human level self awareness. So metacognition is an important building block of self awareness. But it's not the it's not the only thing that you need.

Chris Rainey 7:17

Because when when I first spoke to John Gomez, and I explained it to you after he said, Hey, you should chat is, for years, I was always trying to explain to friends, family members and colleagues that I always felt like I had his voice. And I use an example, whenever I was selling to a client, I had to separate Chris, I always describe what's sitting on my shoulder, whilst I'm talking, observing the conversation. And I would ask myself questions like, how's this cool going? Where should you go with this? You know, what is his need? And when I would explain that, to me, whenever I was crazy, that What are you talking about? I was like, I can't explain it any clearer than that. Like, when I'm in a conversation, there's this other version of me that's kind of guiding me. And And for years, I could never put a name on it. And so until I've talked to you, and he was like, That's metacognition? Finally, it made sense.

Steve 8:12

Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's a couple of I think you described it beautifully there, this idea that essentially, we have these capacities in our brains that allow us to have this extra voice that have this extra view of how you're doing in at any one moment we found in well, not just us, but many labs around the world have found that the same brain systems that are engaged by metacognition by thinking about yourself, are also engaged by thinking about other people. So essentially, imagine if you're watching someone else do the job. And you're thinking, yeah, are they doing that? Okay, or not? Right? So it's essentially the same system, what you described there is the ability to use that system on yourself. So there's a huge amount of positive benefit that flows from this relatively minimal capacity to take a third person perspective on yourself,

Speaker 2 9:05

what are some practical things that we can do to improve our self awareness?

Steve 9:09

One is on the more practical side, just recognising failure modes of metacognition, we know that, for instance, self awareness is quite fragile. as I just described, if you have too much stress, if you have poor mental health, if you are in a situation where you're doing a task for the first time, for instance, like it's not very well practised, then your your confidence might be completely off. You might think you know it when you actually don't, there's plenty of situations where metacognition can essentially decouple from reality, it's in those situations where I think two things really help. One is just having a conversation like this learning a bit more about how metacognition works. That's partly why I wrote the book, which was to essentially put some of the science out there so that people can understand a bit more how how this system works, and if they know The failure modes, they can avoid those failure modes. And another one is just to recognise that like, because metacognition like any mental faculty has limits, we want to rely not just on metacognition, but also rely on other people. So other people are the best third person perspective, in a sense, like we, we do have this ability to call on the advice of others, and essentially put in place of wider network of, of, of that external perspective. So that's more the practical side, like just learning a bit more about those failure modes. And when those failure modes might occur, make sure we attend a bit more to other people and less to our metacognition. So I mean, one example I have from my own life is that sometimes when I get very stressed with work, if I'm writing grants or things are stressful in the lab, then I can be maybe not very pleasant to live with at home. And I'm not necessarily I don't necessarily have the self awareness of that, right. So but after the fact, my wife might say to me, like, you know, you realise you're a bit stressed the past few days, it hasn't been that fun, and like, paying attention to that, and realising that she was probably right, and I was probably wrong about that is, is helpful. And then another route is more experimental. I think we're at early stages on this in terms of the research, but there's some empirical evidence to suggest that some form of regular training of metacognition can be helpful. So one route that we're pursuing in the lab is by giving people little games to play where they can essentially get feedback on whether their confidence whether their self assessments are accurate or not. And that seems to have some benefit. And another route that might be much more widely applicable is engaging in regular meditation, regular self reflection, and there's been some evidence from studies of people who have gone into a meditation retreat, for instance, that after that retreat, they have better metacognition, when we measure it in the lab, essentially trying to build up this muscle, it's obviously not a muscle. But the analogy would be that trying to build up this, this capacity for medical vision might benefit from some form of dedicated training,

Chris Rainey 12:11

I suppose the first part you mentioned, the more you learn, even since we first spoke, you sort of catch yourself in the moment and go, Ah, he's now you can recognise the signs and the patterns were good, because the more you learn about it, you mentioned animals earlier.

Speaker 2 12:28

What's the difference between the self awareness of animals versus human beings? Yeah, I

Steve 12:35

mean, animals share many of the same algorithms, if you like in the brain for self monitoring, so they can track how confident they are about certain actions, they can realise when they might have made an error and switch away from from doing that. So this has been studied a lot in rodents in other animals, even especially in neuroscience, as, as I mentioned before, that kind of metacognition, that low level ability to track your errors is only one small component or is important one, but it's only one component of seeing yourself as a self as as, as a mind as having particular goals, intentions, thoughts, behaviours, and so on. And we think building up that picture of yourself is something that might be uniquely human. Now, I put mike there, because there are some really interesting studies of chimpanzees of other great apes that they also might be able to essentially see themselves in that way. There's, there's ongoing experimental work trying to try to study that in, in chimpanzees and other great apes. But what is clear is that there seems to be a transition around the age of three or four as as children as human children, were you gain that? Oh, yeah, I'm a you know, I'm, I'm a person, I'm, I have a mind, I might see things this way, you might see things that way. And we gain that model of ourselves. And we carry that around with us for the rest of our lives. It changes, it evolves, it is shaped by different experiences, but there does seem to be something important about that developmental stage in kids. So then the question is, yeah, like, is that shared with other animals? And we think probably not, to a very large degree, there might be other animals that have parts of it, like being able to recognise yourself in the mirror or being able to track your own errors and so on. But in terms of the whole package, we think that that might be unique to humans.

Chris Rainey 14:28

Lots of buzz right now around AI, you know, chat G Ricci, and we can't get away from it at the moment. Every time you turn on social media or the TV, what are you seeing how AI is going to shape self awareness? And metacognition?

Steve 14:42

Yeah, I mean, these are great questions. And as you say, I think these things are evolving so quickly, that it's hard to say that things won't have this or will have this but what we can say is that at the moment, at least, it seems that the architectures that drive a lot of generative AI at the moment like chat GPT are in credibly powerful and resourceful, they've been trained on huge amounts of data. But what they don't seem to have it, at least in terms of they don't have that, because they can pass a lot of the tests. The irony is they can pass a lot of tests that have been developed to test human metacognition. So they're able to generate statements have confidence in their knowledge, and so on. So at the moment, it's kind of like a scientific intuition, that they don't have this capacity for metacognition, but I wouldn't rule out the fact that it couldn't be, it couldn't emerge in future iterations of the model. So it might be that they do develop metacognition in some form or another in a way that could help us interact with AI of the future. So if you imagine, say, a self driving car, engineered with a minimal form of metacognition, it could then signal whether it knows that it has the right view of the scene, it could realise that it's out of its comfort zone, and can hand back control to the driver, and so on. So there could be a lot of benefit, actually, from building an artificial medical mission. And we've got our projects ongoing with a group of roboticists in Oxford, where we're trying to explore some of these questions. The other side of the coin is like, how does the potential emergence of artificial intelligence artificial metacognition, how might that impact our own self awareness, our own way of thinking about ourselves? And this is, again, a big open question, you might imagine that if we outsource more and more to AI, then we have less need to essentially reflect on whether what we're doing is the right thing, because we'll essentially have like, handed over to the AI, the responsibility for making decisions about what movies to watch, or what restaurants to go to, then we have less need to perhaps introspect about whether we're making the right decision. So there's something quite interesting about how this kind of like, future cultural evolution of interactions between machines and humans might affect our own cultural evolution of metacognition and self awareness. It's very hard to know which way to go. But it is a fascinating subject.

Speaker 2 17:05

I'm already seeing that where I'm using open AI to create a lot of content. And in the past, I was forced to really think and internally and reflect on how I'm writing, what am I writing about? Is it coming off the right? Is it delivering value? Is it delivering the right message? Is it inclusive? All of these questions I'm asking myself, now when I'm asking that to Geneva, and it gives me this amazing response. I'm asking maybe one or one or two of those questions now. And just trusting the you know, the reply way more than I should be? Because it's quicker, it's easy. And I've got other work to do.

Steve 17:40

I've actually got a postdoc in my group who's studying there. She's She's running experiments where we asked people, How confident do you think the AI is? We asked that question both of whether you think the AI is confident, but also whether you think a human making a very similar decision, a very similar choice is confident or not. And what we find is that even though we show people exactly the same data, if we label that data is coming from an AI, they will trust it a bit more, they will also think the AI is more confident that it knows how to produce this response than the human even though it's identical in both cases. So there's essentially just as you described as a kind of, like implicit level of which we just offload, we just we just hand over responsibility. We think, yeah, I'm confident that you know what you're doing. And we'll, I'll trust that response. And that, that might be fine in domains where it really has more data and more knowledge than others. But it might be also dangerous. What about

Chris Rainey 18:41

sort of dreaming self and self awareness? Because, you know, we all we all kind of like had these moments where like, I feel like I've had a dream about something, and then it's kind of come to life in reality. And I'm like, I'm sure I dreamed about that. A few weeks ago, and now it's happened. But what's going on here? What's the science around that? Yeah, I mean,

Steve 19:04

I mean, dreamy, is fascinating and very poorly understood relative to other aspects of brain function. But what we do know is that there's a phenomenon known as lucid dreaming, where you essentially become self aware of the fact you're dreaming, I've only had one lucid dream that I can remember. I remember sleeping on a sailing boat moored up, and I was very tired. I've been very tired as a predictor of having a lucid dream. And I remember, essentially have dreaming that I was flying through the boat, but then realising I was dreaming, and then be able to control the fact I was flying through the boat, and it was kind of an amazing experience, like hallucinating. But in your dream, what's been found there's very little science on this because it's incredibly difficult to measure but it is possible to bring people into the lab, get them to fall asleep and then get into lucid Dream and monitor when they start lucid dreaming. And what's been found is that the mechanisms in the brain that support lucidity during dreams seem to be related to the mechanisms that support self awareness when you're awake. So there's kind of a nice symmetry there that essentially like being more self aware, when you're awake might be being a bit like becoming lucid in a dream, you start noticing things that you didn't notice before. And there's been a really clever study that was done just a few years ago, recently, where applying weak electrical stimulation to the prefrontal cortex to the regions of the brain that we think are important for metacognition was able to slightly increase the frequency of lucid dreaming. So essentially, like, pushing the brain to be aware of the fact that was dreaming, and that seemed to work in that in that particular study. So it's amazing area of research. And we don't know very much about it, but there does seem to be a really intriguing connection between lucidity during dreams and self awareness

Speaker 2 21:02

to what I started doing is creating a playlist of affirmations and, and I am statements, etc, that I would kind of play on a loop, listen to for eight hours straight while I'm asleep. And when I wake up in the morning, it just makes me feel amazing. Because the whole eight hours, I've been told how grateful I am, I'm going to success succeed, I'm gonna get this and it's all like as if I've already got it, you know, I am. And that was a big one. For me, it made me

Steve 21:28

think of two things. So one is there has been some really cool research done. It's colleagues of mine in Paris, showing that when you bring people into the lab and let them sleep, you can then play them things through the headphones while they're asleep. So they don't remember it at the time, but they can, you can decode the information going into the brain. And you can train them to respond to certain words that are being played during sleep. So essentially, just as you described, like, there is a real sense in which that information is being processed unconsciously, when you're playing through your headphones when you're asleep. The other thing to say about that is this now making me think of this promising theory of what it means to be conscious. So there's this open question in science, like big question, like, what distinguishes conscious versus unconscious processing in the brain. And we don't really have a good understanding of that. But one promising theory, this is a colleague of mine in Japan, a guy called hacker allow, his idea is that what it means to be conscious is essentially a system in the brain tagging something as being real, as opposed to being imagination or dreams or anything else. Right. So that implies, and I'm only just thinking about this. Now, this is really cool conversation to be having. So like, that implies that the unconscious doesn't have that reality monitoring system. So if you're playing in information, as you say, there could very well be a sense in which that information is just incorporated into how the brain is doing its thing. Without some higher systems saying, hang on, I need to ignore that because it's not real. It's been played through my headphones. It's, it's just me trying to trick myself. So if you associate yourself unconsciously, yeah, then it starts to be treated as real when you wake up. So it's a really cool phenomenon.

Speaker 2 23:16

Yeah, let's see buffalo, I could talk to you forever. And I'll gotta let you go. Thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate it. And for everyone listening, you know, make sure you grab a copy of know myself, there'll be a link in the description, as well. So where can everyone connect with you if they want to reach out as well, what other places

Steve 23:31

probably the best places on my lab website where we collect all our information about what we're working on. So that's meta code lab.org. So if you go there, there's links to the book, there's links to recent news of the lab papers, videos, podcasts, everything. So check that out. That's where we are.

Speaker 2 23:49

Well, I think you're gonna have a lot of people wanting to reach out to you as well. But listen, I wish you all the best until next week, and I look forward to the next book. Sounds like you've got a lot of things that haven't been tested. You got plenty of work to do ahead of you.

Steve 24:00

Absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks so much, guys. It's been great. Bye bye.