Live the­atre and Under­wa­ter night clubs: neu­ro­science in the real world

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.

 

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