Is AI Making Us Dumber? The Neuroscience of High Performance with Dr Kim Hazendonk

Actually, I use kind of people's frustrations to work actually.

What I do in organisations, what I've been doing the last few years is focusing on the neuropsychology of high performance.

Neuro leadership is my thing.

But also in the last 18 months, there's been a real uptake in optimism.

So I've been doing a lot of training around optimistic mindsets.

And I think that's because, you know, people are finding themselves focusing on the challenges that they face.

negative parts of you know what we're seeing both within the workplace but then more broadly nationally and even worldwide some people are getting a bit quite disheartened if you look at politics and wars and so forth so the optimism pieces has been something that people have really enjoyed and really lent into

do you how much of that plays a part when it comes to the like you you hear around the traps of playing the victim and the victim mindset to the survivor mindset or you know woe is me and it happened to me to those going, well, how can I change it and make it better? So how much is it a factor of their external to maybe something that they were born with, brought up with, and now it's just their psyche?

Yeah, that's a good question.

So we do have what's called a negativity bias.

And if I explain where that's come from, you know, we were born with a bad weather brain.

And what I mean by that is that our ancestors, the ones who said, oh, it's a beautiful day today and it's going to be beautiful tomorrow as well, they weren't prepared for the floods and, you know...

the crops dying and so they didn't survive but the ones who said oh it's nice weather today but tomorrow you know we need to look out because there could be you know challenges coming they're the ones who they're they're the ancestors who survived and so we have inherited that brain where we're constantly looking out for threats and so we do have the capacity to rewire the brain and that's one of the programs that I run called rewire the brain It's also the idea around how we can kind of build a more optimistic mindset but you need to understand I think you know what's happening in the brain and what techniques and habits you can build into your daily habits but also your daily lifestyle but also what you can do if you're leading teams to help kind of.

counteract the natural tendency to see the negative and see the threats.

I want to double down a little bit on that because generally in psychology you hear fight or flight.

We're going back to the caveman days when we are trying to protect ourselves from the saber-toothed tiger or the ice age.

And so you're talking millions of years ago that we're still referencing our human behaviour.

How ready and prepared are humans in your mind with the AI revolution if we're still referencing that we're trying to protect ourselves from millions of years ago with the technology and the way we're trying to live in the modern world today?

Yeah, I think...

It is to do, AI is a part of it, but I think AI is more broadly, it's around change and uncertainty.

So our brains are designed to keep us alive.

At the end of the day, that's what they're trying to do, is keep us.

on the planet.

So our brains like certainty because then if I know the people I'm going into and I'm going to be working with every day, then there's some predictability around that and some comfort in that.

But when we're thrown into uncertainty, and I suppose COVID was a great example, we don't like that because our brain is saying, I don't know what's coming next and I can't protect you as well as I'd like to.