Dan Richardson, UCL
@eyethinkdcr
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Full Transcript:
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
So, what I want to talk about today is just tell you about some of the research that we’ve been doing, looking at neuroscience in the real world. This is work that we do in conjunction with Joe Devlin, that’s his Twitter handle there, and John Hogan, and we’re part of a consultancy group that’s called ACN Labs, but we’re just about to change the name. But you can read about us there.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
Basically, what we do is people from industry come and approach us with questions, and just as a career observation thing about academia is as you go into your career, you become more and more expert, but in a tiny and tinier area, so you end up being the world leader and one tiny bit of the brain or one type of stimuli. It’s been professionally, very rewarding just to step away from our specialties and just throw our tools open to the world and see if we can use these techniques that we’ve developed to answer questions and people come to us with all sorts of questions like, “What happens to the brain when you eat a really good pie?” That was one of them. “Can I tell the difference between different types of whiskeys in an fMRI machine?” Mostly the answer is no to these.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
We were approached by a lady who was a professional cuddler, who will give a cuddle to your sales team to make them feel better, and wanted scientific evidence that her cuddles work. She probably doesn’t do that anymore. But it’s been really interesting to interact with these questions, and today I’m going to tell you about two of those approaches and how we use the tools of psychology to try and find answers.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
Just very broadly, when you think about the interaction between psychology, neuroscience, and the business world, it ends up being in two different areas, or three really. The first bit of our work is just in education, just talking to people about psychology and neuroscience. So we were in a series of workshops, these are them in real life from a few years ago, obviously, where we talk about the tools of modern neuroscience, what it can really achieve and more importantly, what it can’t because we find that all the people who come to us, not from a scientific background, from business, they’ve been reading these books that can be quite dreadful, that will tell them things like, “The average person uses 10% of your brain. You make decisions in one hemisphere, not the other hemisphere. That your lizard brain makes purchasing decisions.” There’s a lot of really bad neuroscience out there, and a lot of our time is spent saying, “No, that’s not actually true. This is what we can tell an fMRI. This is what we cannot.” So we do these workshops. We now, of course do them online. There’s one in September if anyone is interested.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
So there’s an education wing to it. There’s also what we call neuroscience as marketing. So what this means is we’re using the tools of neuroscience, but the end output isn’t really evidence or data that we’re proving a theory, we’re illustrating ideas. So for example, this is Joe talking to… I’ve forgotten her name. She’s apparently an insanely famous YouTube makeup person. Emma Ford. There we go. And what he’s doing is they’re doing a brain imaging study with face perception, looking at faces that have been made up and not, seeing the differences. The idea is not to collect evidence really, it’s to start a conversation about neuroscience, it’s to talk about face perception and how they might interact with the things about makeup that she studies. So this has ended up as a video on her YouTube feature, it has millions of followers.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
So here, this is more like public engagement. We’re just showing this is the sort of things that we can talk about. That’s a garden event where they gave it, did a brain scan of the guest speaker, and then the tagline was, “Come see what’s on his mind,” and that’s actually his mind there. So again, you’re not trying to prove anything there, you’re just engaging with the public, with your tools.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
That’s as marketing. The other way to look at it is for marketing. Here, you might have a question about your product or about the experience that people have and you have a hypothesis about it, and you want data for that, so that you can then say to people, “We have proved that this is what the product does, that this is what the experience you have is.”
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
We’ve done some work here that I’ll tell you about a little bit later with Audible, for example. We looked at what happens to your brain when you listen to an audiobook, rather than watch a video of something. How is that brain process different? They always pick Joe for the videos and I’m not sure why. Well, I do know why. There’s another example from The Sun, where we looked at work with audience experiences, and that’s what I’ll tell you about next.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
So here you are, trying to find out something, this is more like a traditional research question. It’s framed by the questions of the client, what they want to find out, but you turn that into a scientific question. I’m going to tell you about two of those cases today in the time I have. So both of these involve understanding collective experience, things that people experience as part of a marketing experience, they call it, or things that they experience as part of the product. Here, the product is going to the live theater. We’ve been trying to use the tools of psychology and neuroscience to study these things.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
But of course, the problem is lab equipment doesn’t travel very well. That’s an enormously expensive scanner, you can’t just bring that into an Ikea store or bring that into a theater and start using it. So instead, we have to use our behavioral methods and a little bit of new technology, and you can still discover various things. Now, I’m going to tell you about these two bits of research that are clearly not studies that are online, because these are done in real audiences, and we don’t have those right now. But all of the methods can, and we have indeed ported, some of them online. So I’m going to get back to online methods right at the end.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
So here are my two case studies where we tried to take these weird questions that people had and use the tools that we have in our academic ivory tower, leave the ivory tower and try and discover something. Here’s one intuition that people had. Desperados there is a beer. Not a very nice beer. It’s beer and tequila, which is exactly as horrible as it sounds. The people who do Desperados, they do what’s called experiential marketing. So they do things like, one year they got that plane that NASA uses to train astronauts, and it goes up into the air and it drops, and for two minutes people are weightless inside. They packed it full of party goers and young people, and they had a DJ there, and they set it up so that when the gravity went, the beat drops, which is a young person time for the baseline starting. So you had this feeling of the music swelled, and at that moment you lost gravity. Somewhere, in ways I never understood, this is attached to the Desperados experience, like drink Desperados and you have these other-worldly things.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
They do one of these crazy things each year. The intuition that they wanted evidence for was that after having these crazy weird experiences… Going up in a hot air balloon with Amy Winehouse was another one, it changes you a little bit and you become more creative. Something about that crazy experience changes you and you think outside the box a little bit more because you have this weird experience. It’s a reasonably valid intuition, but can we get evidence for it? Well, that’s where they brought us in, and we used our behavioral science tools to try and get data for this.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
So this is the experience that they had this year. So to do this, I ended up going to Venice with 100 of Europe’s top social media influencers who are incredibly famous, although I’d never heard of them. So I spent the weekend with people dressed like this, and we went to the world’s deepest swimming pool, which is outside of Venice. As you can see in this footage here, people had these diving helmets where there’s an air bubble inside, so you’re like an astronaut walking along the bottom of the world’s deepest swimming pool. And there was music being pumped through. There was a big glass tunnel and an incredibly famous, apparently, DJ Peggy Gou was playing music, and then you were listening to it with a laser light display, and it was absolutely crazy. And I was there, collecting data on whether or not this changed your creativity.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
Yeah, it was quite a bizarre experience. I don’t know if you know, there was a scene in the Game of Thrones, where there’s a big battle scene, and then in the corner, you can see a Starbucks coffee cup that looks completely out of place. Well, if you look in this footage, you can see an old man with a beard sat in the corner, analyzing data on R while all this is going on, and I felt as out of place as that coffee cup. It was an absolutely bizarre experience.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
But what do we do? Well, we just used iPads. Of course, there was wifi connectivity throughout this place because they’re all social media influences. They were tweeting about themselves constantly, and we just loaded Gorilla onto these iPads and we ran simple behavioral experiments, because with these iPads, they are amazing devices, they’re very portable, it’s a beautiful screen and you can collect proper behavioral data. When I was a graduate school, you could do that only in the lab cubicle. Now you can stick on an iPad and you can go to a swimming pool in Venice and still collect data.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
So what did we do? We set up really quite old fashioned classic tests of creativity. So they were three of them. This was about a 10-minute experiment. Things like the alternate uses tasks, so you say, “How many uses for an empty bowl of Desperados can you think of?” And you have about a minute to generate all these things. You can smash someone over the head with it, you can blow over the top of it to make a whistle. Then there’s the remote associates task. What word goes with all of these? And the answer, stop me figuring out, is ice. Then there’s a drawing task where you just give people a squiggle and you say, “Complete that figure.” So people drew something like that.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
These are standard measures of creativity that have been used for some time. They tap different elements of creativity. We implemented these on an iPad, then we used all the classic things from your methods class. We use random assignment. Half of those social media influences did these tests before they went in the pool, half of them did it after they went to the pool, and we just look for these group differences.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
Yeah. It was a bizarre experiment that we did about 2:00 AM. I analyzed all the data while sat in the corner, while a rave was going on around me, and these are the results. What we found is a significant increase in creativity for that alternate uses task on that drawing task, as a result of having this crazy experience of floating weightless underwater with laser lights going on around you.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
We did not find a difference in the remote associates tasks, and that was actually not a surprise. That’s what we predicted because these are two different elements of creativity. One is you’re trying to classically be creative and think of lots of different solutions. That’s all the alternate uses and the drawing test tap into. The other type of creativity is convergent, where you’re trying to work within constraints, solve a problem given that these are the constraints, and that’s tapped into by the remote associates. Our hypothesis was that that element of creativity, which is grabbing and recombining and thinking of new things would be measured, but not this sort of dealing with constraints aspect. We found an increase of something like 30%, if you can quantify of this type of creativity, because of that experience. This maps onto lots of work in the literature, showing that there are more patents that are released by people who have traveled around countries, who can relate holidays to the amount of creativity in lots of different ways. So we found evidence for this. The company was very happy. This was part of their campaign, and it was quite an experience.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
So that’s our first case study of taking this intuition people had, turning into hypothesis, using all those tools of behavioral science and ending up with an actual answer. The other example that I want to tell you about is a case of a live theater company coming to us and saying, “Why do people pay enormous amounts of money to go and see live theater?” This was, of course, before the pandemic. Now we’re acutely aware of what we’ve been missing for the past year with live concerts and live theater. But at the time, this was a less obvious question to people.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
This company sold tickets to theater and they wanted to know, “Lots of us have got 4K televisions at home and a very comfy couch. Why would you pay all this money to sit in a tiny Victorian seat with people who are that far away, and you have to put up with other people coughing and eating sweets? Why would you pay all this money to go to live theater?” We thought, well that’s quite a good question actually, and we can try and collect data for it using physiological sensors. There’ve been lots of survey work asking people about their experience, but often that’s conflated with, “Well, I’ve just paid 100 quid for this, of course I’m going to tell you it was a wonderful experience.” Can we get direct measure of physiological differences as a result of this live experience?
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
So just to give you a sense of what physiology can tap into, this is the experiment I mentioned at the start with Audible, where what we have here, this is data from about 100 people who are either listening to an audiobook of Game of Thrones or watching HBO’s adaptation of it. And we had about a dozen other ones where we, as much as we could matched the audio and the visual implementation of it. There’s always tiny differences, but as much as we can, the same length of time, the same things were happening, and we measured physiology.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
What we found is, first of all, people said they preferred the video version. If we said, “Which was more engaging? Which was more transporting, which was more exciting?” It’s always the video version. But when we measured their physiology, that’s the top line in this little squiggle, we found that when we’re listening to the Game of Thrones, their heart rate was higher and lower. There was more variance. Their EDA, their electrodermal activity was peaking, which is an indirect measure of arousal, and their body temperature was up as well. In lots of ways, physiologically, they were more engaged by the audiobook, as opposed to the video, even though they said the opposite.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
So what’s going on here? Well, we think it’s because if you’re look in that video, HBO have done the hard work. They’ve rented half of Croatia, they’ve hired all of these extras and they’ve filmed this incredible thing. But if you’re just listening to that audiobook, you’re doing that work. You’re generating that internal word, you’re simulating it mentally, and that activity we can read in the wristwatch. This sounds a bit pretentious, but we are measuring the active imagination and its reading off on the wrist, which is absolutely fantastic, we thought. We were very surprised that this worked so well.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
So those sensors, I just used that to show you that physiology doesn’t just measure exercise or heart health, it’s tapping into psychological processing too. So we took it to the theater. We measured heart rates. We found that your heart is in the heart healthy zone for certain amount of time during while you’re watching the theater. We tracked it and we saw the heart rate went up at certain times, and we compared going to a live theater, this is going to see our Dreamgirls the Musical, and we compared it to watching Dreamgirls the movie. What we found is that there are peaks and peaks at the same time.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
But why is there peak roughly halfway through and roughly three quarters of the way through? Well that’s narrative. That’s when the person, Effie leaves the band. That’s where she leaves her husband. That swoop at the end is when they all get back together again. This is narrative driving the heart rates of about 50 people experiencing that story together. That’s watching the movie alone. We get a lot less variation when you’re just experiencing it by yourself. We’ve done this in lots of ways. We measured our watching Aladdin in a movie theater, we get the same peaks of physiology. We have a big peak right at that moment, which is when Aladdin has its first kiss, and literally the audience’s heart rate as one increases.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
So we’ve been measuring lots of different things. We were also not looking just at the heart rate, but at the heart rate synchrony. So we have tools to put a number on the degree to which the heart is beating at the same time as each other, and that synchrony in the physiology, that shared trajectory through the space of possibilities, that really seems to be tapping into something of the specialness of live experience, this thing that we’ve all been missing.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
I’m going on a little too much, so I’m not going to talk about some of the background research to this, even though it’s really, really fascinating. But just to give you a sense that, if we put a number on this heart rate, synchrony, that is higher when people saw a movie together, saw Aladdin together, rather than just read a book together. Also, that correlates with the feeling of social connectedness. We asked people when they left the cinema, “How connected do you feel to people around you? These strangers you’ve never met?” That was greater when they just shared this experience of watching a movie together, but it also correlated with the degree to which their heart rates were synchronized.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
This is the last bit of data I’ll show you because it was collected seconds was before lockdown, literally the day before. We went one of the last performances at the ENO and again, measured the heart rate synchrony. We put a number on the degree to which these 20 people, their heart rate was coordinated with each other, and that correlated really surprisingly strongly with how captivated they are, how emotionally engaged they were, even how spiritually uplifted they felt was all being read out in the heart rate synchrony.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
Like I said, in the last minute I’ll just return to online things because we were able to leverage some of this technology even online as well. So this is a performance of a songwriter who’s performing a live YouTube stream to our participants, and our participants are sat at home with their thumbs over the camera on their mobile phone, and we used an app that was measuring their heart rate, just invisible changes beneath the skin. If you turn the flash on, the thumb glows and you can look at changes to get an idea of heart rate. So this is people tracking their heart rates all at home while watching this performance, and what you see on the right there… Oh, it’s stopped moving now. That is a live visualization of the degree to which the audience’s heart rates were coordinated.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
So I’m watching this live performance and I’m seeing right here, the degree to which everyone, sat remotely at home, is synchronized in their physiology. What we found is that this is very pilot data, but we found that there was an increase in enjoyment in that performance if you could see this readout of the audience’s synchronized physiology. So maybe it captures a little bit of that magic of being in a live performance, sensing how other people are responding. We tried to replicate that a little bit with a graphic and it appeared to impact people’s experience.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
It actually worked for the singer/songwriter, it didn’t work with the performance poet that we used. Maybe it was too distracting. Maybe there’s a different way we experienced spoken word and music. These are all hypotheses for the future. I’ve gone on too long for about one minute, and I apologize for that. But I shall finish there. Thank you so much for your time. There is how you can find out more.
Speaker 2:
Dan, that was absolutely extraordinary. If like me, you thought that was absolutely extraordinary, can you type, “Extraordinary,” in the chat? This is how Dan gets his feedback, that we are all here together, experiencing this thing together, which is exactly what he was talking about just now.
Speaker 2:
Dan, I have a question for you. There’ll be other questions, I’m sure, in the chat that people ask, so please do put them in if you’d like Dan to answer them. Dan, which do you enjoy more, your academic research or the research for industry? How do you compare and contrast them? Which is more enjoyable? Which is more creative?
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
That’s a very good question.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, how does that enrich your life?
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
I send you the really fun stuff. There are some quite boring things of people. We did one experiment, I won’t say what it was, but there was a company that had a car, and you turn your car on and it goes, “Bong.” The company had a budget, I’m not kidding, of three million to make that bong better. They sent an Oscar-winning sound designer to the Amazon rainforests to record background music and then create 10 different types of bong that we then put into Gorilla, measured your physiological response and asked you which bong you liked. You can very slightly hear a parrot squawk at the end of the bong. That’s the rainforest parrot. They spent an enormous amount of money and we found people slightly preferred one of the bongs over the other.
Speaker 2:
Okay. Wow.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
Absolutely no scientific interest whatsoever, but we answered their question and they went away happy. So there is the spectrum, and I showed you the really fun stuff, of course, where I got to go to Venice and be under water. But I think the most rewarding thing overall is just, it’s a little bit of a challenge and a puzzle. Here’s my crazy question, can I use my skills that I’ve vaguely accumulated and turn that into something interesting and scientific? It feels like you get more of that experience, which I don’t know if the other scientists agree, some of the most fun bit of science is that early stage in a project where you’re just spit balling and trying to think, “How on earth can we answer that?”
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Professor Daniel C. Richardson:
The first lab meetings when you suddenly go, “Oh, we can test it this way,” that’s the really exciting bit, and we have lots of those experiences through this.
Speaker 2:
Yes. I think a lot of us here get an awful lot of joy out of the experiment design part of the process, and it’s one of the bits that we’re never really taught, but those of us who fall in love with it, we fall in love with that idea of going, “Well, here’s a question. How could I possibly answer it?” I think that’s what some of the other speakers were talking about earlier today, in terms of, don’t just take your research online, do online research. Allow it to open the opportunities of asking and answering your questions differently. Thank you so much, Dan.
