The Neuroscience of Learning and the Future of Work with Friederike Fabritius

Aidan McCullen: It’s great to finally have you on. And I’m going to share a bit of both of your books today because I met you through your first book. And indeed, you were over in Ireland and you gave presentations over here for the IMI, I believe, and also in Google, you gave one of the Google talks there.

And I really wanted to start with the learning side. So we’ll talk about the future of work. We’ll talk about optimizing yourself in the future of work, but let’s start with learning and how the brain learns.

Frederica Fabritius: Yeah. So it’s interesting because people often think learning has to be boring somewhere. It’s you sitting over a dusty book, kind of putting in those hours, learning something you don’t care about. And we have to understand that learning is an emotional process, first and foremost.

If you look at how the brain is anatomically built, you can see that the hippocampus, which is responsible, simply speaking, for filtering incoming information and transferring into long-term memory, is located in the limbic system.

So it’s in between the amygdala where we can say, frankly speaking, you know, some emotional negative emotions are processed, for example, and the nucleus accumbens where the reward system, you know, where some dopamine is released etc so it’s located physically between negative and positive emotions and if you want to learn I would say the number one rule is you have to create emotional relevance.

So, what do I mean by this if you sit there for four hours studying a book and you don’t care about it it’s wasted your brain is going to remember it maybe until the next exam because then that is the emotionally emotionally relevant event for your brain.

And after the exam, boof, you know, all of that is gone. So if you really want to learn, you need to find an emotional connection because your. Hippocampus is taking the information and then kind of filtering it through the lens of, does this really matter to me?

Is this relevant on an emotional level? And if it’s not, boom, you may remember it until the next exam, but then it’s over.

And so I do think that if we look at learning in organizations and in schools and on an individual level, we have to start thinking about how can we engage emotionally with the content.

Aidan McCullen: That’s such an important thing in the future of work, because even in this context of AI sneaking into the workplace and making people more productive, it frees them up then to do new things, but they have to be willing to do new things. And I was thinking about what you were saying in the context of a leader and your book, The Leader Leading Brain.

There’s a lot of unlearning that needs to happen in order to learn. And you talk about in the leading brain, oxytocin and unlearning. I’d love you to share a little bit about this.

Frederica Fabritius: Yeah, it’s so funny. If you think about it, one of the moments when people are most mentally flexible and adopt a lot of new habits, even strange habits, are when they fall in love. So let’s say you meet a new partner and then you suddenly share an interest in cars or in, you know, barbecues or whatever the other person is involved with.

You suddenly feel open to exploring those themes. And that’s because the oxytocin helps you to unlearn old behaviours and to create new pathways in your brain.

And so we become quite emotionally flexible in our habits when we fall in love, because that’s when oxytocin is really high and influencing our brains.

And of course, we cannot always fall in love in a corporate setting or in school.

But I do think we can fall in love with a topic. We can, you know, we can just be like a little kid, a bit curious and open-minded. So kind of recreate that situation where we step out of old behaviours. And in the brain, old pathways and habits just have the stronger neuronal network.

So unlearning is often harder than learning something new. And I think one practical example for people who want to learn better is. You know, if you start something new, get the best tutor or teacher or coach in the very beginning, because let’s say you start to learn playing golf or something like that, and you learn it with a mediocre teacher in the beginning, and you have just the wrong positioning somehow, it’s going to take you many, many hours later to correct that.

So I do think excellence matters, especially in the beginning, because once something has created a robust pathway in your brain, it’s so hard to get rid of it. So pay very much attention to any kinds of new beginnings, a new hobby, a new language, a new skill, get the very best advice in the beginning, because once it’s in your brain, it’s so hard to erase.

Aidan McCullen: Oh, I was just thinking about our children’s generation. And I have now, he’s just about going on 11, my younger guy, and he had a teacher in school and the teacher had them in such fear. And this is a segue for our next little segment here.

One day he came home and he was doing colouring. This is when he was only, you know, six or seven has just started school. And I was saying to him, let’s colour together. And he kept pushing his paper over to me and go, you do it.

And I was like, I’m only doing it to be with you to do it with you. And he said, I don’t want to leave any white dots. And I was like, what? And he’s like, Like the teacher gave out to them for leaving white dots. And then it unraveled that she was ruling with this iron fist in the classroom and having so much fear around these kids.

And I felt so sorry for them. I was thinking about what you’re saying that she had stamped a pattern of learning equates to fear into these young minds. And it’s so hard to unravel that. And luckily he only had her for one year.

Maybe you’ll say a little bit about that. And then as a segue to a really important aspect that fear is okay, but fear has to be accompanied by fun and focus.

Frederica Fabritius: Huh. So let me start by saying that this is a heartbreaking story. I can really relate to this because I have five kids and I have seen my fair share of this kind of teachers and it’s, yeah, fear is not a good way to learn.

And well, let me start by saying that fear is actually the strongest form of learning. Many people don’t know this. Aversive learning, so learning with negative context, is actually the strongest form of learning in the brain.

Why? Because it helps with survival. So there have been experiments on the amygdala and learning, and they could see that people learn from others.

So just from observation. So, for example, in one setup, they had people hooked up to electroshocks. And whenever a blue square came on, people were shocked. And then they had other people just watching what happening.

And these people also had sweating and stress just by seeing the blue square, even though they never received the electroshocks. So fear is something that is contagious and that is strong in our brains and leaves a very deep mark in our neuronal networks.

We can just experience something negative once and we remember it forever. And we can just observe somebody else being punished or being scared. And we also remember that forever and change our behaviour based on that.

So fear needs to be handled with massive care and not only for ethical reasons, but also from a learning perspective, when people are scared. They learn what not to do. So your son learned not to leave any white dots, but did he learn to be imaginative, to be innovative, to, you know, colour in a certain way?  No, it was just focused on what not to do.

And that is often a problem. When we just give people massive fear and some rules, they learn what not to do. But innovation, learning, new ideas, they all get stifled completely. And so, yes, you can learn a lot with negative fear.

You can see it in cultures where people really drill their kids with a lot of fear and discipline. But then they just learn this one thing and they can never transfer it to other situation.

And of course, mentally, in terms of mental health, it’s just not worth it.

Aidan McCullen: Then that translates into the workplace and people tend to attract that type of leader that tells them what not to do, narcissists, et cetera, et cetera. We won’t go down there, Frederica. You talk a lot about that in The Leading Brain in particular.

And I highly recommend, it’s a brilliant book, The Neuroscience of Leadership, including a sensitive topic about how many female brains have to adapt to be more male in order to work in the male world, which is totally backward.

Frederica Fabritius: Yeah, of course. And I do think it’s such wasted energy. Whenever you have to change yourself to fit in, it’s wasted energy.

You should rather seek an environment where you can be yourself. But to circle back to fear, you know, my first message would be fear is a very strong form of learning.

So it’s very powerful, but it only teaches you what not to do. But a little bit of fear in a positive sense is a good thing. So what we need is to be slightly over-challenged because if you have zero stress and just no no pressure at all, that’s also not optimal for learning because we do need a little bit of that healthy challenge.

In my fun, fear, and focus model, I have fear there as a positive thing. So we need to be slightly over-challenged. That’s when we get into flow. That’s when we can learn up to five times more.

So you could just learn in one day what you would usually learn in five days. So a little bit of healthy fear, a little bit of a challenge, a little bit of competition, a little bit of, you know…

Healthy dose of challenge is good as long as it’s not peer pressure or a negative fear. So a little bit of positive fear, I would say actually facilitates learning.

So let’s bring that topic of the three Fs into the workplace and learning in the workplace, which go hand in hand. So I have a model that’s called Fun, Fear, and Focus, and it’s basically about dopamine, noradrenaline, and acetylcholine, but that’s a handful, and so I just call it Fun, Fear, and Focus.

And it’s about the fact that when those three neurotransmitters come together in your brain, you become five times more productive, you learn five times faster, you get into flow.

And basically, we need all three of them. So you need the right level of fun, the right level of fear, and the right level of focus in order to perform at your best. And in the workplace, this means, for example, fun is not just nice to have. It’s essential.

If people hate their jobs and their co-workers and their tasks, they may perform okay, but never at their best. We need to stimulate the dopamine system. So it’s not just about after work fun. It’s about fun while you do what you do.

And there are many ways in which you could achieve that, but it’s important to see it not as just some silly, nice-to-have thing. If people hate their jobs, they can’t perform at their best, period.

As far as fear is concerned, it’s about triggering noradrenaline in the brain.

We shouldn’t be bored at work, and we should not be stressed out. And in between, there is that magic zone where you get into flow. So it’s about pushing yourself, do something you love, and then just get better and better and better at this.

That’s what I mean by the right level of fear. And even people have different neuro signatures. So some people crave a lot of fear and other require less stress to perform at their best. So it’s highly individual how much fear someone needs to get into that situation.

And then finally, focus. It’s all about stimulating your acetylcholine system. I don’t think it comes as a surprise that in today’s world, people are massively overstimulated, distracted, and overwhelmed.

So we need to find our focus. It’s impossible to get into flow when we’re distracted. So we need to find ways to not just tune out distractions, but to eliminate them in the workplace. Allow people some silence and solitude. Do some meetings just by yourself, what I call a meeting of one.

Reduce your interaction with technology, break the addiction and then also focus on what matters. A lot of people work many hours but they focus on the things that don’t really have an impact so whatever you do think about the Pareto rule you know like is what I’m doing really adding value is it really necessary or can I drop it.

When you bring those three F’s together the fun, the fear and the focus you have so much more joy at work you’re so much more productive you learn faster and you are less stressed and less annoyed and less frustrated because it really is a formula not only for productivity but also for happiness.

Aidan McCullen: I love that and it’s at the heart of all your work is this idea of helping people live a more fulfilled life because happier people are more productive and actually give back into the world then as well and the world becomes a more happier place.

I really truly believe that with the purpose of this work you mentioned a term there, neurosignature and we had a show a couple of weeks ago with Maureen Dunne on her book The Neurodiversity Edge and it coincided with world autism month and I learned this term from you.

You did a huge amount of work on this understanding that each brain is as unique as a snowflake because not only the biases, the heuristics, the background, the education, the upbringing, the teachers, the mentors that we’ve all had, but also the unique neurosignature that you call it, the neurochemical mix.

I thought this was a beautiful topic and I’d love you to share it with our audience.

Frederica Fabritius: Yeah, when I look at diversity, of course, this gender, race, all of that, but we never really think about how different brains think and operate. And I think there’s so much hidden potential there.

If you put together a team, you need to think about, are people introverts or extroverts? What kind of neural signature do they have? So let me explain what that means. Your neurosignature is your unique wiring and neurochemistry in your brain.

And to a certain part, we are born with it. So there’s some genetical component to it. But there’s also, of course, the impact of the experiences you had in your life and basically, there are four neurochemicals that mostly shape your neurosignature.

It’s dopamine, serotonin, estrogen, and testosterone. Testosterone and those four together make up your unique fingerprint and I find it so insane that companies don’t even waste a moment to think about deep diversity when you put together a team. You may need some high dopamine people and then you need to bring in some high serotonin people so basically if I may explain those four components in very simple terms.

Of course in reality it’s maybe a bit more complex, but dopamine makes you future-oriented, innovative, very curious, very interested in exploring. And so people who have a very active dopamine system usually enjoy variability in life.

They enjoy when there’s different things going on, when they don’t do the same things every day. They love to explore. They love to learn.

While people who have more of a high serotonin neuro signature they love consistency routine but not in a bad way because we also need people who go deeper into topics who become experts who are really meticulous with the details.

Let’s say you were to have heart surgery tomorrow would you take that you know the the high dopamine person who wants to experiment or would you take somebody who really has checklists in place and makes sure nothing bad happens to you.

So we do need both high dopamine and high serotonin, your signatures in the workplace, because they kind of counterbalance each other in their complementary to each other.

And I kind of miss that mindset in the workplace that we don’t hire just one type of person. We should have different people in place in different positions who add different things. and to just.

Also talk about testosterone and estrogen. Yes, these are sex hormones, but both men and women have both of these.

And testosterone will make you very ambitious, a bit like very simple logic brain, like one, two, three, executive summary. We see a lot of executives having this kind of neurosignature.

It helps you to cut through complexity and make quick decisions. And people with more of an estrogen neuro signature very good with people, very good with language often, often have kind of what is called what Helen Fisher calls web thinking so they recognize patterns that other people don’t see.

And if you look at this dopamine, serotonin, testosterone and estrogen we all have all four of them but some people have just a different mix than others and in the workplace it’s very good to have teams truly diverse teams that bring those different componentsntogether because even when you have clients if you have a diverse team there will be one for each of them who who they will click with right you will we’ll have different strengths that compensate each other.

And so I find it really important that we start thinking about your signature diversity in the workplace. We’re starting to think about neurodiversity which is very important but always very often limited just to certain diagnoses and certain conditions when I think neurodiversity should actually broaden to encompass all of us we are all different. We all have different brains.

Aidan McCullen: It’s so important and again, I want to highlight how much you cover this in both your books and they work so well together. They complement each other so well, but the brain-friendly workplace really goes deep into this. How do you create a workplace that enables everybody, that unleashes everybody’s potential, their unique neurosignatures?

And it’s beautifully written as always. And Frederica is working on another book now, again, maybe you’ll share a little bit about that and where people can find you.

Frederica Fabritius: Yeah. So, well, my new book is not out yet, but I’m focusing on how to declutter your brain. So how to do less and achieve more on all areas of your life.

But I’m not going to share much more about this just yet. You can find me on LinkedIn, for example, on my website, FriederikeFabritius.com.

I have a super complicated name that nobody can spell, but I think that’s the two places to go to. I have a newsletter, the Brain Friendly Newsletter.

So I think if you want to find me, you will.

Aidan McCullen: It’s always a pleasure to spend time with you. Thank you for joining us on the Inside Learning Podcast, Friederike Fabritius.

Frederica Fabritius: Thank you so much for having me and goodbye.