In a left brained world, AI is a grave threat. In a whole brained world with embodied cognition & collective intelligence, AI is child’s play.
AI can process vast amounts of data to provide trends/analytics/insights, replacing what the left brain does, raising questions about the future of jobs, of humanity.
To keep up with a rapidly changing world, learning a skill/class is quickly obsolete and a fool’s errand of the conscious mind.
My experience has shown me that the secret to success in work and life is tapping into the body, the subconscious, a powerful supercomputer, clearing the distortions through self awareness to gain access to a field of information that increases your collective intelligence, an emergent field that will redefine the future of AI.
I had the opportunity to speak with the AI Club at USF to share my journey, discuss with students to deepen my learnings.
I started with a little history and context.
I was a classic type A kid, chasing the grade, checking boxes, winning trophies. My parents valued grades and I assumed their love was conditional on my achievements. So I got the As, I got to MIT for engineering and Harvard Business School for a MBA, and continued to work my butt off, always the top of my class or my organization, rockstar or cream of the crop everywhere I went,
I was slave to the drug of extrinsic validation. It didn’t matter how much I had achieved, it was never enough.
Then I came to Google. Where everyone is highly accomplished, highly ambitious. Everyone was a rockstar. I was a dime a dozen. Where was my self worth?
At Google, I fell flat on my face and hit rock bottom.
Which was the best thing that happened to me in hindsight. Because it got me to look in the mirror and realize I didn’t like what I saw. I was disconnected from myself and my family. I started to ask questions about why I was chasing the grade, why I needed that external validation. And it led me down a path of self discovery and self awareness, where I started to tune into my emotions and my sensations, emotional behavioral patterns.
In my interactions with leaders, I kept trying to push my agenda. I had the experience — I had what I believed to be the silver bullet on a silver platter. But there was no interest in that. Because we are so profitable from Ads, in many parts of the company, the usual levers I’ve used in other companies like top down hierarchy or bottom line profit work to move people and teams didn’t apply. So after exhausting my efforts to try to show my value, push my agenda and try to get them to move, I finally gave up. And I deepened work on self even more, healing fears & insecurities, traumas in my system.
As I cleared my system, what started to happen was that these Eng VPs and Directors started to say things like “I feel like you’re a fly on the wall”, or “that’s what I was thinking”, and some of them even started to cry. I’d never experienced this in my life.
As they opened, I would get to know more of what they needed and wanted, and where I was able to connect that to where we were going as an organization, they ran in that direction. The VPs started asking me how I was moving these Eng Directors.
I realized through self awareness I was able to drive individual and organizational behavioral shifts.
The VP started to refer to me as the Organizational Whisperer. They started throwing people at me even when I didn’t even ask for them. To give you a sense of the impact of this journey,
I crashed and burned for 6 years at Google and in 1 year of deepening self awareness, my team grew by 10x and I was promoted to Director.
I since discovered research that captures what I believe was happening. After reading a fascinating article in Wired magazine about 1.5 years ago called Listening to Your Heart Might Be the Key to Conquering Anxiety, I was so intrigued, I reached out to the researcher, Sarah Garfinkel, who is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of College London. What I was drawn to in the article was this — we’ve always assumed the way things work is that there’s a snake, you get scared, then your heart starts racing. It turns out thanks to a body of research called interoception,which is the ability to pick up inner signals like hunger, heartbeat, emotion, pain, the way it actually works is that you see the snake, your heart starts racing, and then you get scared.
The conscious mind is the last to know, and our bodies have millions of sensors in our hearts, guts, skin, etc that are picking up millions of bits of information all the time.
So the body is picking on the snake first, and then the mind becomes anxious.
Sarah Garfinkel has 2 studies that I found particularly interesting. She ran a clinical trial with 120 autistic individuals (who have a co-morbidity with anxiety) where she did a heartbeat count exercise, asking each person to estimate their heart rate without measuring anywhere on their body, and she measured the actual heart rate through a pulsoximeter, to calculation their interoceptive accuracy. Most people were not able to do it so they guessed. She then asked them to do some light exercise for a couple minutes and retry it, and since their heart was pounding they were able to do it more easily. They were able to pick up the heartbeat signal not necessarily in their chest but it in their temple, arm, or under their chin but the point is they could feel it because it was pounding. She found that over the course of 6 sessions, the interoceptive accuracy improved dramatically and their anxiety correspondingly dropped so much so that
⅓ of them fully recovered from their anxiety and a year later with no additional intervention were still recovered from their anxiety.
This is groundbreaking in the field of autism and mental health. She’s recently received a 4.5 million pound grant for this work alone.
She then did an even more interesting scientific study with a group of Investment Traders in the London Stock Exchange. These Traders have to make rapid buy-sell decisions with lots of information flying around (eg ticker tape, yelling, screens, etc ). She measured their interoceptive accuracy the same way, with the heartbeat count exercise, asking them to estimate their heartrate and compared it to the pulsox.
Those investment traders that had the highest interoceptive accuracy had the highest P&L —
In other words they were making the best buy-sell decisions, and people would describe those individuals as having good gut instincts.
She claims to have discovered the science of gut instinct or intuitive decision making and the way it works is the following:
the conscious mind can’t possibly process that much information in the time they have to make a decision, but the subconscious, through the body, is like a supercomputer, like AI, processing millions of bits/second, with an algorithm and the answer for those that can tune into it.
Intuition is not some voodoo thing — its just new science.
Given 90% of communications are non-verbal, ability to tune into these signals is paramount to good decision making (and many other things).
For the first time that I’ve ever seen it, we have a connection between self awareness/wellbeing /mindfulness and business outcomes like P&L, with a metric, a methodology and clinical research to back it up. Pretty phenomenal.
As leaders take on more responsibility or rise in an organization, they have to process more information in less time to make decisions. Those managers that do this well may have high interoceptive accuracy, but now we can train everyone for it.
So using my conscious mind and lots of effort definitely allowed me to have impact. But tuning into my body, the subconscious and clearing my fears and trauma, 100x the impact.
AI can process vast amounts of data with analytics and trends that exceed what our left brains can do, but AI does not capture the 90% of communications that are non-verbal,
the emotions & sensations, the tones & queues in body language, what the right side of the brain is connected to through our bodies. AI also hallucinates so there can be a lot of misinformation if you just rely on AI. I believe
those that will thrive in the new world of AI are those that have high levels of self awareness,
and can capture far more data through their subconscious & their bodies to understand the bigger picture beyond just what the left brain captures, to identify the real problem, the accurate problem to solve, then as we know, leverage prompt engineering to know which question to ask the AI.
As I’ve moved along my journey and kept clearing, the clarity of my intuition and my voice became stronger. One of the main things
I learned was to honor all that comes up when a triggering or challenging situation arose whether its anger, sadness or fear. And I learned that the amount I leaned in was directly proportional to the amount of growth and light on the other side of every shadow or challenging experience.
And I honor whatever I need — whether its curling up in a ball in bed and eating hot chocolate or crying my heart out — and it allowed me to release the trauma or fear I was carrying, get a download of insights about what happened and how it was related to my fears, and then release from my system and
allow me to move to the next level of the mario brothers game waiting for the next challenge.
Life has become more of an adventure. I don’t know what’s around the corner — could be drama, could be trauma but I know it’s perfectly designed for my evolutionary growth.
I recently read a fascinating article in Scientific American called Brains Are Not Required When It Comes to Thinking and Solving Problems — Simple Cells Can Do It, that came out in Feb of this year (2024). I was again so blown away I reached out to one of the researchers Michael Levin, a professor at Tufts University. What the article talks about is intelligence in plants, insects, even worms that many of us may not know about. Intelligence of living things lies outside their brains to a surprising degree. Regular cells, not just highly specialized brain cells such as neurons, have the ability to store information.
There’s a new field called basal cognition with hallmarks of intelligence — learning, memory, problem-solving — outside brains as well as within them that means AI no longer has to just mimic the brain.
He found that he could trigger the creation of a working eye anywhere on a tadpole through a bioelectric pattern, or voltage in that spot. The reason that is so interesting is that he is using an API or subroutine call which in computer programming, is a piece of code that tells a machine to initiate a suite of lower-level mechanical actions, and doesn’t require him to know the details of how to build an eye.
If we can figure out the API or interface to a system, we can leverage its intelligence to solve problems or accomplish tasks, we don’t need to figure out the neural pathways and gene modifications.
We are all collective intelligences built out of smaller, highly competent problem-solving agents.
By understanding the different levels of intelligence and capabilities of creatures as well as how to interface with them to utilize their intelligence, we completely redefine what AI is all about.
Levin and others are designing robots using AI then building them with living cells like those of animals and humans (xenobots & anthrobots)
Levin then created “picasso” tadpoles, with multiple eyes, noses and mouths in all the wrong places, and amazingly they would all still become normal frogs. We’ve always assumed that the tadpole to frog transformation is pre-programmed algorithm, but what he was doing is nothing that is natural in nature. Nothing in the frog’s evolutionary past gave it genes for dealing with such a novel situation.
He is redefining intelligence as collective intelligence, the ability to reach a particular goal or solve a problem by undertaking new steps in the face of changing circumstances, even traumas.
With bioelectric patterns, he was able to create and remove tumor cells which basically are cells that disconnect from the whole and have its own goals that can conflict with the collective. If he was able to force the cells to stay connected, cancer or tumors didn’t occur. What if the culture of a community or company are making all of us act like tumor cells, with our own agendas that may not align with the collective. Unprocessed trauma fragments us physically, emotionally, mentally, and trauma healing connects more of the cells, increasing intelligence, and also creates resilience, the ability to deal with changing circumstances or more trauma.
And when Levin took the skin and heart cells of a frog, removed the instructional cells, and put them in a petri dish, their natural state was to bind to each other, start communicating through bioelectricity, and solving problems like closing wounds or turning corners.
Our natural state down to the cellular level is to connect with others to solve increasingly complex problems, to deal with greater trauma.
And this has been my experience as well. Intelligence is flexible response to new stimuli. In the book Extended Mind, Annie Murphy Paul, talks about embodied, situated and distributed cognition —
how connecting to our bodies, to our environment, and to others increases cognition or intelligence. As we heal trauma, connect to our bodies, we increase our collective intelligence.
Walking down a tree lined street results in higher cognition than walking down a traffic lined street and I believe thanks to Levin’s research findings, its because we are connecting to intelligence like trees. And my experience has shown me that as I clear this incredibly sophisticated instrument, the human body and the subconscious, the capabilities are vast, and the
definition of self is blurred, and it becomes the boundaries of goals one is capable of pursuing,
starts with the head, then the body and the whole self, and then can expand to others, and even larger scale things like climate, humanity and beyond. Thomas Hubl has shown me the incredible power of collective healing and collective intelligence that has allowed me access to a beautifully rich field of information that includes the past, the future, those living and those passed so that I can understand with increasingly clarity what is needed in this moment, the present, for our collective evolutionary growth.
I’ll end with my favorite quote from the Scientific American article.