The Flourish Feed Podcast
A series of curiosity driven deep dives into the nature of flourishing through wealth.
The Flourish Feed Podcast
#38 - The Biology of Synchrony
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What if the secret to better decisions, deeper relationships, stronger teams, and even greater learning isn't found inside a single brain? What if it's found between brains?
In this fascinating conversation, neuroscientist, AI strategist, and Flow Research Collective Chief Science Officer Dr. Michael Mannino joins Gillian to explore one of the most exciting frontiers in performance science: interpersonal synchrony.
From classrooms and corporate boardrooms to elite esports teams and therapeutic relationships, Michael explains how our brains, bodies, and behaviors literally synchronize when we're connected - and why those moments of alignment predict trust, cooperation, learning, creativity, and performance. Together they explore the neuroscience of team flow, embodied cognition, intuition, dopamine, decision-making, and the surprising role of the vagus nerve in helping us navigate an increasingly complex world.
The conversation also tackles a pressing question of our time: As AI becomes more capable, what uniquely human capacities become even more valuable?
Michael argues that the future belongs not simply to intelligence, but to our ability to connect, coordinate, and create meaning together.
Because in a world obsessed with individual optimization, the next breakthrough may come from learning how to synchronize.
Key Takeaways:
• Synchrony predicts performance: Teams whose brains, behaviors, and physiology align consistently outperform those that don't. Trust, communication, cooperation, and creativity all improve when synchrony emerges.
• The body influences the quality of our decisions: Interoception - the ability to sense what's happening inside your body - is strongly connected to better judgment, emotional regulation, and cognitive performance.
• Team flow is real: Research now suggests that team flow is not simply multiple individuals experiencing flow simultaneously. It is a unique emergent state that exists at the level of the group itself.
• Human connection is measurable: Brain waves, heart rates, language patterns, movement, and even physiological signals can synchronize between people - and those patterns reliably predict outcomes.
• AI should strengthen human connection - not replace it: The future of human flourishing may depend on designing technologies that enhance cooperation, trust, and synchrony rather than erode them.
Quotes:
• “The body and the brain are not separate performance systems.”
• “People who are more sensitive to what’s happening inside their bodies make better decisions.”
• “Synchrony is a predictor of trust, communication, cooperation, empathy, and better performance.”
• “Team flow is a unique brain state that doesn’t exist in any one brain.”
• “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”
• “The brain is a prediction engine.”
• “What can be measured can be managed - but you also have to teach people the behaviors.”
• “Loneliness is an epidemic. The opposite of that is human connection.”
• “AI fails spectacularly at the things humans do naturally: intuition, theory of mind, and social understanding.”
Chapters:
00:00 The Power of Alignment in Performance
03:14 Discovering Neuromarkers of Human Synchrony
06:18 The Evolution of Hyperscanning Research
10:32 Interconnectedness of Physical, Cognitive, and Relational Performance
14:47 The Balance of Synchrony and Diversity in Teams
20:23 The Role of Context in Dopamine Activation
23:55 The Brain as a Prediction Engine
26:35 The Vagus Nerve: Connecting Body and Brain
28:49 The Connection Between Gut Health and Synchrony
29:41 Understanding Team Flow and Collective Ambition
31:15 The Role of Synchrony in Team Dynamics
32:57 The Satisfaction of Synchrony in Team Settings
34:31 The Unique Brain State of Team Flow
36:50 Competition vs. Collaboration: Finding Balance
39:29 The Importance of Synchrony in Team Performance
40:50 Introducing Synergy: AI in Team Synchrony
43:13 The Impact of COVID on Team Dynamics
46:41 Fostering Human Connection in a Digital World
48:39 Signs of Synchrony in Relationships
51:44 AI and Human Synchrony: Opportunities and Risks
Check out Dr. Mannino’s work & more resources:
@Neuro_fit on Instagram
Michael’s 2025 Ted Talk on Synchrony
The Body Does Not Keep Score, Front. Syst. Neurosci., 29 April 2026 – S. Kotler, M. Mannino, G. Foxx, K. Friston
Syneurgy: The Neuroscience of Collaboration
Flow Research Collective
Super Communicators by Charles Duhigg
4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself
Connect with Gillian:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers-ma-cfp%C2%AE-cea-997094124/?originalSubdomain=ca
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstov...
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/
The Flourish Feed Podcast, a series of curiosity-driven deep dives into the nature of flourishing through wealth. I'm your host, Gillian Stoville Rivers, M A C F P C E A, Senior Wealth Advisor at CIA Zante Wealth Management.
SPEAKER_00Very recent, a couple of years ago, showed that for the first time, there's only like a handful of studies, but this was the first one, that team flow is a unique brain state. For example, we've now shown that flow is a brain state. We can look at flow at the level of the brain and match that with people's lived experience, the subjective felt phenomenological experience of flow. Same thing now with team flow. He put people in the teams and he matched their talents and their goals and these kinds of things in the experimental protocol and found that team flow is a unique brain state that doesn't exist in any one brain. So it's not just the additions of everybody's in flow in your team. Hey, let's no, it's more than it's the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So we're just a state where it um it's a it's a higher level emergent state, it's a property of the system, not of individuals.
SPEAKER_01We spend so much of our lives trying to optimize performance, how we think, how we work, how we build wealth. But what if the real driver of performance isn't just individual capability, it's alignment. Alignment within ourselves and with the people around us. Today I'm joined by neuroscientist Dr. Michael Menino to explore the biology of synchrony, how our brains, bodies, and behaviors actually sync in real time. From dopamine and discipline to intuition and human connection, this conversation sits at the intersection of muscle, money, and mindset, and what it really takes to flourish in a world of increasing complexity and AI. But before we get to that, however, let's get to know Dr. Menino a little bit. Michael Menino is a neuroscientist, AI strategist, entrepreneur, and human performance expert who sits at the intersection of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and peak performance. Sounds like my kind of guy. He holds a PhD in neuroscience and a master's degree in philosophy, and his research has explored consciousness, embodied cognition, intuition, decision making, and flow states. Michael is the co-founder and co-CEO of Synergy, an AI company using the science of interpersonal synchrony to improve team performance, collaboration, and trust. He also serves as chief science officer at the Flow Research Collective, where he translates performance neuroscience into practical tools for leaders, teams, and high-stakes performers. He currently holds a position as Distinguished Research Fellow at the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University. Previously, he held leadership roles including director of the AI Center at Miami Dade College and Director of Programs at the University of Miami's Institute for Data Science and Computing. Today, his speaking, advisory, and research work focuses on responsible AI, human flourishing, performance neuroscience, and how intelligent technologies are reshaping human cognition, collaboration, and decision making. He's also very passionate about the science of communication, transhumanism, and exponential technologies, AI and space science. He is currently serving on the Singularity University Miami chapter leadership team, and he used to work at NASA many years ago and even recently applied to be an astronaut. Michael's secret to lifelong happiness is learning. And some of his hobbies include playing chess, reading lots of books, playing guitar and piano for now over 30 years, traveling, studying, enjoying whiskey, and anything Star Trek. Boy, I think everybody wants to meet you. Dr. Manino, thank you so much, and welcome to the Flourish Feed Podcast.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much for having me. I'm really uh happy to be here. So thank you for that long intro. I appreciate it. Awesome.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, you're totally worthy of the long intro. You've done so much, you do so much, you're very, very engaged and clearly a charged-up superhuman. So let's talk a little bit about the origin story of Dr. Michael Manino. Before we get to the science, you've done work stemming from the discovery of the first neuromarker of human synchrony, which is pretty extraordinary. Who were you working with when it was discovered that humans can actually synchronize at a neurological level? Tell us a little bit about that.
SPEAKER_00The history goes back even farther than that in the 80s, or maybe even before that, they started understanding how that certain parts of our biology can synchronize. But it wasn't until 2007 that, and I started my PhD a little while after that, about 2013. So my advisor, one of my advisors, his name's Scott Kelso. He's at the Center for Company, he founded the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at FAU and was the really one of the godfathers of coordination dynamics and social neuroscience, the field of social neuroscience, what happens in our brains in social situations. And he discovered really the first neuromarker for when people are cooperating, doing some they were doing a manual task, a physical task with their bodies, uh, versus competing. And so there's a there's a specific neuromarker that he found. So he put EEG caps on two people and had them do a task together, and they were trying to cooperate in that task, and then in another experiment, they were trying to compete at that task, and he found um one of the first people to scan multiple brains at one time, which is now has is you know, all these years later, uh, is a whole field of research called hyperscanning, and discovered the first neuromarker for synchrony when brains are getting in sync and doing this task together. He called it the phi complex.
SPEAKER_01How do you spell phi?
SPEAKER_00What is the word what is the word phi? PHI. Yeah, phi complex uh from a Greek letter. So the idea is that there's as maybe the folks know, there's different brain waves and different brainwave patterns, right? There's alpha, gamma, beta, theta, these different brain waves, mu, there's even other Greek letters that people aren't aware of that are just located in specific parts of the brain. And so he did find that. He found one uh neuromarker that is in the the back of the brain over here that he called the phi complex. And there's a phi complex one for when people are doing the task and cooperating, trying to cooperate, and then there's another phi complex two when people are actually trying to uh compete. That was the first neuromarker of synchrony discovered, pretty much.
SPEAKER_01That is fascinating. And since then, that was a while back, the evolution of the study of that neuromarker must have expanded considerably. Because I mean, I think about I remember watching your TED talk about synchrony from I think it was last year. We see this in nature a lot. We see synchrony in nature a lot, but the idea of a completely detectable neuromarker or brainwave that shows when you're competing versus collaborating, what's happened since then with that work? Because that sounds groundbreaking.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it it exploded. It exploded in uh now we're scanning multiple brains, not only two, but entire, for example, classrooms of kids learning together. And we found that there's a joint neuromarker for attention when uh kids are learning together, and that's actually a predictor of better grades, better test taking abilities, better scores. These are there's all kinds of neuroscientists all over the world now in this whole field of hyperscanning that are studying all kinds of things. So, and not only with EEG, but we can put people in all kinds of scanners, and and it's not only with brainwaves, it's with heart rates, heart rate variability synchrony, movements, galvanic skin response. So the electrical activity on our skin can also synchronize, and that's actually a predictor of better cooperation. So it's emotional synchrony, cognitive synchrony, behavioral, linguistic synchrony as well. And we've done it on there's so many examples, teams, all kinds of different teams, classrooms.
SPEAKER_01I want to talk a little bit more about the classroom because that sounds like an incredibly, I mean, all of them are very powerful applications, but if you can prove that learning is taking place at a higher level because of a certain stimulus, that has to be an incredible tool for maybe remodeling a system that's in need of remodeling because the traditional education system of sitting at a desk and being told something, tell me a little bit more about what that's done to modernize or maybe change perspectives on how education might work better.
SPEAKER_00That is an excellent question. Not much. That's a question in the field of educational neuroscience. So there's a whole field of research and called educational neuroscience. And it's part of that field tries to debunk some of the neuromyths that are out there when it comes to learning. Like, for example, people are being people are uh ascribe being more left-brained or more right-brained, that there are different modalities of learning, like visual, auditory, kinesthetic. That's actually called the VAC VAC paradigm or VAC method V A K. And those educational neuroscience tries to find out what's the real science behind that and debunks a lot of those myths, but also from the other direction, it tries to use what it learns from neuroscience and apply that to pedagogical educational contexts. And one of these is learning together. And the research is very young, I should say. Like we started talking about in the beginning of the conversation in 2007. Yes. And it's being applied synchrony, this idea of interpersonal synchrony is being found in many different kinds of contexts, and we'll get into that, but still it's still pretty young.
SPEAKER_01And I I would think this is a natural moment when we're questioning everything because of a new force coming at it called AI, that all of these different institutions and and older models are probably ripe for rediscussion and renegotiation. Yeah. That's very exciting. That's very exciting. Yeah. Because I mean, just even the paradigm of boys learn different than girls, or girls learn different things at a different age or different speed or what have you, all of that also seems rather anecdotal as opposed to purely based on a brainwave, you know, like evidence that shows that something is either happening or not happening. That's cool. So from a neuroscience perspective, because I think a classroom is a pretty interesting example of that, as is the corporate environment. But physical performance, cognitive performance, and relational performance, are they actually separate systems or are they or are they all governed by the same underlying biology? Because that's a perfect example of three different things that are happening to a kid in a classroom or happening to a person in a in a meeting, in a boardroom. So tell me a little bit about that.
SPEAKER_00I would say they're distinct domains, um, especially when they're being researched, but they rely on a lot of overlapping systems. Attention, arousal regulation, prediction, feedback, right, uh, motivation, all of these things. I would say they're those are overlapping systems that govern the brain and the body. So physical versus cognitive, and then we'll get into relational. But the body and the brain are not separate systems, they're not separate performance systems. This is the whole field of embodied cognition. How you move, how you breathe, how you focus, how you regulate stress, all feed into and how you interact with the environment, all feed into the brain and feed into cognitive systems. One great example is interoception. So interoception is the ability to be aware of what's going on inside your body, to be sensitive to your heartbeat, for example, or uh how your muscles are tense or where there's heat in your body, or temperature, yeah, for sure. It's been shown, for example, that people who are more sensitive and the their higher levels of sensitivity and accuracy in terms of their heartbeat, so that they can count their heart, they can feel their heartbeating, just like sitting in the chair, and counting that, that improves decision making. And so one of the biggest cognitive processes, making fewer errors, problem solving better. So one of the biggest studies that came out showed that London stock traders on the trading floor, uh, those who are more sensitive and have higher interoceptive accuracy and sensitivity, make better trading decisions. Uh yes. So there's a very rich connection between the body and the brain and cognitive processes and physicality. When it comes to relational, relational performance, we rarely think about training, for example, the nervous system in terms of how we coordinate and cooperate with others and adjust our behaviors in real time to be able to make better decisions and as a group, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Is that historically referred to as empathy? Like what or where does the what's the origins of of that kind of interoception superpower?
SPEAKER_00Uh yes, definitely empathy is part of it. And that's like the empathy is the social aspect, the social of the other person as opposed to the you.
SPEAKER_01Yes, okay, the relational, yes.
SPEAKER_00Empathy is very interesting. There's different kinds of empathy. There's cognitive empathy, taking another's perspective, which shows up in one area of the brain, and then there is affective or emotional empathy, which is literally feeling how somebody else feels, which shows up in another part of the brain. And empathy is very, very connected to interpersonal synchrony. So um inner people who can get into sync with others more easily, I guess I would say if that's correct, it's a predictor of being able to take another's perspective better.
SPEAKER_01Is there ever a moment? I mentioned this, it's a bit off script from what I I said I would talk about with you, but I I had some feedback when I was after doing an interview last week, that the way that the person asking me the questions, the interviewer asked me the questions, I began to imitate his cadence. I began to imitate his physicality, I began and I realized, oh my gosh, I I was mirroring somebody out almost as a reflex to fit in, a reflex to make sure that we jived, that we had synchrony. Is there ever a case where you shouldn't do that? Is there ever a use case for non-synchrony? It's off topic, but I think it's fascinating.
SPEAKER_00Directly on topic. So yes, the too much synchrony too often can lead is not a good thing. So too much synchrony too often can lead to groupthink, everybody following the other, uh, not enough diversity of thought and cognitive friction. You need those things for optimal team performance, better conflict resolution, coming to agreement and alignment and all these things. So you really want to be able to, this is actually what Scott Kelso found in his original research. So this is a technical term in neuroscience or in social neuroscience called metastability. And Stephen Cotler, the He likes that word too. And founder of the Flow Research Collective, and my research partner, we're looking at metastability in a bunch of different things. So metastability is the ability to go in and out of synchrony optimally in the right context and in the right way. So coordination, you don't want to be too coordinated, you don't you don't want to be too uncoordinated. There's a Goldilocks zone, and that's this idea of metastability. So there are times when you don't want to be in sync.
SPEAKER_01Fascinating. Wow. Okay, so many different applications of both of those ideas. Before I go on to further explore synchrony with you, I do want to have a little bit of a geek out moment about neurochemistry and neurotransmitters and specifically dopamine. That's one that we talk about a lot. I think a lot of people, now that it's been used frequently in common parlance for years, are starting to become more aware that it's a thing and that we make it automatically based on certain responses to things. But what role does it actually play in motivation? And is it tied to pursuit as opposed to satisfaction? A lot of people, you know, think of themselves as dopamine junkies. They're people that need to jump out of planes. Or, but I think that might be a misnomer. Tell me the actual scientific definition of the role that dopamine plays.
SPEAKER_00Well, that's complicated because it changes all the time. I'm reading new studies about dopamine all the time. It's one of the most well-studied neurotransmitters. And um, yeah, but that that's exactly that's exactly right. Traditionally, dopamine is involved in movement. Think about Parkinson's disease, the degeneration of dopamine neurons in the substantia nigra, in the deep part of the brain, in the basal ganglia. So it's involved in movement, which if thinks about it, if you think about it, that's you want to move toward the thing that you're motivated to do. And so it's involved in motivation. It's it's less about reward, what we found, and pleasure, and more about, as you're saying, wanting, pursuit, putting in the right amount of effort, learning what's worth going after. So that's that's um it's more about assigning value, I would say, to the thing that you're motivated to do, and it it creates a feedback loop to get you to do that thing. It can be hijacked, of course, by like a lot of different things, novelty, extrinsic motivators, right? Because that's the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. And we talk about that in terms of performance and human performance, but so it can be high, your brain can't tell the difference. So it can be from a dopamine, from a psychological point of view, yes, this is an extrinsic motivator, this is an intrinsic motivator, but the from a dopaminergic point of view, it's difficult to tell that difference. So, yeah, it's it's dopamine we see spikes in things like anticipation, uncertainty, pursuit of certain things, less about you know satisfaction and or the the uh less less about the reward and more about the satisfaction. Although that involves other systems too. But there's a lot of talk about dopamine fasting and dopamine detoxing. And from a neurobiological perspective, there's not that's not really that's a misnomer. That's there's no such thing. You can't get rid of dopamine in your brain. You can change the way it activates, you can change the context that it activates. So context is everything in the brain. Think about going to a horror movie, right? We love going to horror movies, right? We love being afraid in the right. Some of us do. Okay, most most well, look at the movie industry.
SPEAKER_01The empathy people out here aren't loving it so much because we feel everything that's going on. But yes, go ahead.
SPEAKER_00And that might be so that that might be trainable in terms of in terms of taking out the affective part, the emotional synchrony, right? And putting in the the perspective taking cognitive aspects. But yes, so like you know, the if if if things are done in the right context, you know you're in a safe environment, then you can experience the amygdala still activates the threat detection, but the response of fear is is a higher top-down cognitive whole brain thing that creates a narrative and a story because the brain is a prediction engine. So to get back to the point of dopamine and context, that's the point here is that you need the dopamine to activate in your brain in the right kind of context. People want to like remove these things that dopamine, and that's the wrong way of thinking. My point here is that we need dopamine to activate in the right way so we can be motivated, so we can accomplish goals, so we can be happier, right? And ultimately.
SPEAKER_01I remember when I did uh some of the programs with Flow Research Collective, and they did use terms like dopamine detoxing. It was that our exposure to screens and to constant stimulus and to m social media and all that was causing us to become numb to it so much so that dopamine detox became a valid idea. And it wasn't so much that we were detoxing from dopamine, we were detoxing from the things that cause us to have that physical or cognitive response. Is that still fair to say? Yes, it's still fair to say. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Dopamine desensitization.
SPEAKER_01Yes, sense of that's a better way of saying it. Yes, agreed. Okay. So the question I want to come back to is I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about what would have to be true about the human brain. You know, I come from wealth management, which has a little arm of it self-called investment management. What would have to be true about the human brain for us to be legitimately good at timing the markets? And so that I think back to you mentioned a few minutes ago, the people on the floor of the London Stock Exchange who have strong interoception, they have a very, you know, solid connection with themselves and their own heart rate. They're more sensitive to probably information. They're probably more sensitive to outward and inward information. So my question really is about the metastability of those guys on the floor of the London Stock Exchange and their relationship with their dopamine. Can you tell us the story of that as it relates to making great because those guys would be making great stock market decisions, right? And they are they obviously have something solid going on biologically that's allowing them to do that. Can you tell it through the lens of the metastability and the dopamine as well?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, it's all about decision making. And in this case, um, the markets are their own thing. They're mind-independent, they're objective. They're, it's been said, my partner of my my company, Urban Valencia, used to do a lot of trading, and he likes to say that the market is a heuristic for people's sentiment. So there is an objective complexity about the way the market works. What I'm what you're asking here is what's going on in the brains that allows those brains to time those decisions in the right way along with the market. So, yeah, the the it goes back to decision making, and I would say it goes back to this idea of the brain being a prediction engine. So I mentioned that just a few minutes ago. That's what the brain is. It's a it's a Bayesian updating thing, right? It makes its best guess. That's what the word Bayesian means here, about what the world is going to, what kinds of information is going to come into the brain. It makes it a prediction engine and it has certain priors, models, assumptions that you have in your brain and in your mindset and in the way you frame things and biases, right? Steven talks about this and Peter Diamondis talk about this quite a bit in their new book. I'm going to plug it right here. I see it on your shelf. Yeah, there it is. This idea of these priors and models and assumptions that the brain interprets incoming sensory information. So it can do one of two things, by the way, to mini-so, anyway, it makes those predictions. Let me back up here. It makes those predictions, and then sometimes it predicts right, and then sometimes there's an error, a discrepancy. So what the brain wants to do is minimize that uncertainty, minimize the surprise, minimize the error. And it can do those in two ways. One way it can change those assumptions and priors and models, and it can also then change the world. Well, in the markets, and I'm sort of just thinking aloud here, right? As a trying to bring all my neuroscience to bear on this idea, the in one sense, you're not going to change the markets and how they work. That's a higher level upward, the different causal mechanisms that are large scale at play there. But what you can do is you can change the way your brain makes those predictions. And it's been shown very eloquently and carefully that the brain can make better predictions and decisions if it's attuned to what's going on in the body. So this is where embodied cognition and interoception come into play. As I mentioned, people who are more have higher levels of interoceptive sensitivity and accuracy not only have higher levels of mental health, lower depression, lower anxiety, better well-being, better quality of life. That's been shown. Higher, and I'll get to this in a second, but higher activity of the vagus nerve.
SPEAKER_01Yes, we should talk about that.
SPEAKER_00We'll talk about that, but also better cognitive systems. So better, you know, better mood, better decision making, better creativity.
SPEAKER_01Is that through the fascia? Like how does that happen? Is it is it uh is the whole body? Because I understand the fascia to be a almost like a really elaborate brain neural network of of covering of the muscle. And I'm fascinated by this idea that the more in touch you are with your muscle or your your corpus, your body, as you say, the better decision-making discipline you have. Yeah, keep going. I'm just fascinated by this.
SPEAKER_00Yes, that's it is it is partially I wouldn't say it's directly dependent on the muscle tissue, the fascia, the ligaments. In fact, Steven and I recently argued, which got a lot of controversy, uh, a paper on this as well, which we could get into. Uh the body does not keep the score. Right. We argued that it's more about metastability in the brain. It's really through the the connection between the body and the brain, and mostly through the vagus nerve. So the vagus nerve is the tenth cranial nerve, and 80% fibers of the vagus nerve go from the body to the brain. 20% go the other way or down. So most of the information is coming, you know, up from up from the body, and it's interpreting those signals. And if those the vagus nerve is the nerve that regulates the parasympathetic nervous system. So and digests, calm. We can make better decisions when we're calm, and we can uh or in a better mood, and so on. So the the idea that the vag, and I just had another thought too, the the vagus nerve translates all of those signals coming from the body. One of the biggest signals that it translates is the the enteric nervous system, which is the gut nervous system. And so that literally people say it's your second brain. It kind of is because there's millions, hundreds of millions of neurons in the gut. 90% of the serotonin in your body is made in the gut, and then signals to the brain. Yeah, so it's not it's most of the serotonin, most of the serotonin in your in your system is is in your gut, not in your brain.
SPEAKER_01I had no idea. That's and that's just to remind everybody, the serotonin is the it is a calming, it is one that allows you to feel relaxed mood, like better mood.
SPEAKER_00Better mood, yeah. Uh which train and so it's taking those signals from your gut and interpreting those signals.
SPEAKER_01So I didn't know about the 80-20 blend of how the vagus nerve interacts with the body. I mean, I knew it was a an important member of the passageway of information, but that 80-20 part and then also the 90% of serotonin in the body produced by the gut, those are pretty powerful numbers about how being connected to the rest of your body will generate better decision making. Like there's so much, so much there.
SPEAKER_00Yes, absolutely. There's the very rich literature, uh scientific literature about this idea of embodied cognition, which we've done research on as well. There's a study, uh, also just to drive home the point here, there was a study done showing that they could predict whether you had schizophrenia with like 99% accuracy by just looking at the bacteria in your fecal matter.
SPEAKER_01Really? Because that's a that's a direct relation to what's happening in your gut.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So schizophrenia is a uh pathology of the brain and brain networks and network dynamics, but it can be predicted so well by looking at you know what's happening in your gut. Yeah, there's a very rich connection there. Fascinating.
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SPEAKER_00No, that's exactly right. So let's take it from a higher level model and cognitive and psychological model from motivation. Yes, motivations it's called shared goal commitment or collective ambition. So one of the biggest researchers in team flow or group flow, but let's say team flow, which is the collective state of flow when you're actually performing, I would say. His name is JJ Vandenhout. We've done some research with him, and he is uh wrote a textbook on team flow, and he has a model of team flow, and in the center of the model is this idea of collective ambition, so shared goal commitment. Uh, we're looking at this at the level of the neuroscience, the level of the brain and psychophysiology, which I'll explain in a second. But yeah, there absolutely are alignment of psychologies and motivations and higher level cognitive thinking. That's so people on the same page, they have familiarity of each other, they have the equal knowledge, there's open communication. These are all these factors that come into play that share prerequisites, you might say, uh, for team flow. And um that that is uh very it's a prerequisite, it's very important for team flow. And it we've now shown, and other researchers, that it you can also look at that what causes that from like physiological and like neurobiological mechanisms.
SPEAKER_01What happens first though? The shared goal or the I guess it depends how often you work together, maybe.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's also part of it. So lots of studies have shown that so this idea of interpersonal synchrony, brainwaves synchronizing, heart rate synchronizing, galvanic skin response, movements, all these things that we mentioned, pupils and things like that, all of those things are when they synchronize, they're a predictor. There's a very strong predictor of things like psychological safety, trust, better communication, cooperation, empathy, pro-sociality, generosity. So when those things, you know, and synchrony causes those things to happen. So and it's been shown that people like teams, for example, who can get into sync, you know, perform better, literally their brainwaves, everything, they perform better, they make fewer errors, they have better feedback systems. So all of these things manifest. And so really one, you know, so the synchrony causes those other things. But if teams can learn those other things, totally think better.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, my relationship with this originally before I even studied flow, before I even read Stephen's books or anything to do with team flow, I was a competitive CrossFit athlete and I used to compete on team. And when you do team CrossFit or any kind of team, but but certainly something that's short, intense, bursts, you know, where everything has to be done wicked fast with high precision, you figure out how to sync, right? And it was not only satisfying, sorry, not only helpful, not only did it do the job, but it was also incredibly satisfying to be in that state of synchrony. So tell me a little bit about the satisfaction part of synchrony. Because I mean, it sounds like as mammals or animals or whatever, this is what we're built to do. Maybe it's just been that we've been overthinking it for too long or or we went off the road for a little bit because of technology and whatever, and now we're coming back together towards learning that synchrony is helpful. But talk to me about the satisfaction layer and yeah, uh the fact that maybe we're just built to do this.
SPEAKER_00That's right. From an so and this gets back to this point about spontaneous synchrony versus intentional synchrony. So we know about like we we've we're built, evolutionarily speaking, this it's a mechanism to work together better, to cooperate more, to collaborate, right, and to communicate. Uh, but then from the top down, from the learned side of things, yes, we can learn habits, behaviors, and we can make it intentional so that we can synchronize, and then that has downstream effects into a better performance on all these other things. And yes, it does feel good, right? We love being in sync with each other. It's uh it's a very pleasurable response. Stephen uh and Peter in their book, Futures Faster Than You Think, I think their last one, they talk about like, and Steven talks about this all the time, right? Group flow is one of the happiest, most pleasurable things in the world, right? And that's because all of these chemists, these chemicals, these neurotransmitters, oxytocin, serotonin, anandamide, all of these things that you know you know manifest in the brain during flow, you know, get amplified in team flow. And the interesting thing about team flow, a recent study came out. We didn't do this, but Mohammed Shahada did this at Caltech very recently, a couple of years ago, showed that for the first time, there's only like a handful of studies, but this was the first one, that team flow is a unique brain state. For example, we've now shown that flow is a brain state. We can look at flow at the level of the brain and match that with people's lived experience, the subjective felt uh phenomenological experience of flow. Same thing now with team flow. He put people in the teams and he matched their talents and their goals and these kinds of things in the experimental protocol and found that team flow is a unique brain state that doesn't exist in any one brain. So it's not just the additions of everybody's in flow in your team. Hey, let's no, it's more than it's the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So, state where it um it's a it's a higher level emergent state, it's a property of the system, not of individuals, it's a property of the team. And so, and we've shown that at the brain, and parts of the brain that are involved in that were reward parts, just like in regular flow. Interesting. Um reward parts, you know, the the uh intrinsic motivation parts and these kinds of things. So it's a very pleasurable experience to get into sync with others.
SPEAKER_01I have to, this might be a side street visit uh on a philosophical level or it might be on a level of evolution. But at the very beginning, we talked about the difference in brain state between people who are cooperating versus people who are competing. I want to talk a little bit about what we just said as it relates to team flow and that being a state where the sum is greater or the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Where did we go wrong with becoming competitive? Like it seems to be a huge part of how the system operates as well, and yet so much more is possible if we are in sync and working with others. The competitive thing is that is that a me? Is that a is that an I and and the synchrony is a we?
SPEAKER_00Or you know where I'm trying to go with this? I think so. What I would say is, and I don't know if I'm answering the question here, but this is where my brain is going. Like competition is good.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Right? So collaboration is great, competition is good uh because it brings out the best in folks, and can argumentation, for example, is good because we can take others' perspectives, and but the I think again back to this idea of context. And I want to mention two things here. So, context, like back in the horror, uh seeing a horror movie, or if you're seeing a lion through a cage uh or a glass wall in a zoo versus in the wild god in the wild, right? So context matters, and I think competition could be good in the right context. Context is everything in the brain. So I think um getting out of sync, what Scott Kelso found was that there's this other phi complex that shows up when people are competing, and it's the metastability of going out in sync that is optimal for better collaboration and performance. But I would say that there are times when it calls for competition and disagreement in order to be able to build agreed, okay. And so on.
SPEAKER_01So that makes sense. That being being able to oscillate between both states, the meta stability or the meta. Yeah, the meta-stability to be able to oscillate between both states is what can allow for progress, because otherwise, we could be stuck in synchrony doing the same thing, but not necessarily advancing the cause or building a new idea or changing. Okay, I'll buy that. I totally buy that. There are two useful parts of the brain the competitive one, the cooperative one.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00That's right, that's right. I will say like all of these studies that are coming out like on a weekly basis on interpersonal synchrony are so important and they show they they they show that synchrony is a predictor of all of these positive things. Some of them look at going in and out of synchrony, that's uh this coordination. A recent study, very recent, uh came out uh about a month ago showing that e elite eSports teams were better at winning and had more wins that were able to get in sync. So they measured heart rate variability, their heart rate variability. So if the team was synchronizing their heart rate variability and they could all get calm together at the right moment to make a decision, they were much more likely to win.
SPEAKER_01A mega brain. One big mega brain.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, I mean, there's there's all this evidence.
SPEAKER_01Amazing. So now this is a perfect segue to talk about Synergy, which, in addition to being a neuroscience, you're a neuroscientist, you're also an innovator and an entrepreneur. Tell us about what Synergy does and how it's having an impact on the world of remote work and any other domains that you're doing some work in.
SPEAKER_00So Synergy is an AI-based, AI-driven platform that uses behavior design and applied neuroscience to measure and quantify when teams get in sync.
SPEAKER_01Okay, just like the esports athletes.
SPEAKER_00Just like the esports athletes, exactly. And then it also has a mechanism to provide behaviors and habits and activities and tactics that teams can do to move the needle and all those things. So we're using AI to measure just with the webcam and the microphone, we're just we're just using those two things. So it's completely like contactless and non-invasive. It's a platform that looks at remote teams right now, uh distributed teams, because we're into this remote world. But even, you know, teams that are like in the same building on campus of an educational institution are still part of teams and they meet during Zoom and Microsoft Teams. So we're using these platforms to actually capture data about our teams and the way they work. So we're using AI to look at those teams and improve team performance to fix the broken dynamics as we moved out of COVID and we moved into a remote/slash hybrid world that you lose some of these things: eye contact and subtle cues and embodied interactions that are so powerful and below conscious awareness to get us into sync, that spontaneous synchrony. So we're trying to deploy AI in this platform to be able to get teams, remote teams, to collaborate better, to solve problems quicker, to make better decisions, to have more creative output.
SPEAKER_01Feel more connected to their work, feel more satisfied with the outcomes. Yeah. Correct. Exactly.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, we're we're looking at um corporations and enterprise founders, founder teams of startups, and we're actually trying you know, we're not directly trying to measure team flow, but synchrony is such a predictor of team flow. We actually did this study in collaboration with FRC and Stephen Cutler to look at is team synchrony in remote teams correlated to team flow? And the results are early, but they're powerful. We actually found that yes, productivity increases, psychological safety and trust, shared goal commitment, all and synchrony rise and correlates, and there's a positive correlation between the team's ability to get into sync and their experience of team flow.
SPEAKER_01Which means you'll get the 500% more productive McKinsey study numbers from that kind of behavior, which you might not be able to get from remote work otherwise. And was it, yeah, was it COVID that caused this feeling that you needed to invent?
SPEAKER_00It was a big factor at play. So uh my PhD research was in this field, as I mentioned in the beginning of the podcast here, like we talked about uh Scott Kelso and so my research was in this in this uh synchrony uh research and how brain areas talk to one another and how different brains talk to one another. So you've heard the phrase by the way that neurons that fire together wire together. There's also a phrase that Michael Platt at University of Pennsylvania, he's another colleague of mine, neuroscientist, has the brains that fire together wire together. So my research was in that, and then I met my partner Urban Valencia, who is met him through Flow Research Collective and Stephen Cutler, and uh about five years ago now, and his expertise was also in more in collaboration, team coaching, team performance. Came out of Columbia, did the applied neuroscience stuff there. And so, yeah, we had this idea of like, oh, now we can maybe use AI to predict the and also get people in sync because of this remote world that we're living in now. So it was right out of COVID.
SPEAKER_01That is remarkable and such a powerful idea to take a state of work that, you know, whether we still need to be working remotely or not. I work in an office, but a lot of the people that are in this office will still prefer to work remotely on some days. They work hybrid, and it has fundamentally changed the way that you relate to other people. And I think part of the strategy that Synergy offers you is still retaining the importance of gathering, right? Even if you're even if it's remote gathering, gathering is essential to create that team flow. And then if it can be measured and it can be even prompted and coached. But a lot of a lot of the remote work that seems to have also spun out of COVID is is fewer gatherings, like fewer physical gatherings, but also fewer virtual gatherings. So I think it's really important that what you're doing is you're bringing back into corporate culture this necessity to gather.
SPEAKER_00Yes, exactly right. You hit the nail on the head. So we can also use the platform for coaching, for example, is another is another really good use case. Esports, we talked about that too, but there's a bunch of use cases. But the but coaching is is really powerful because now we have online coaching and you can actually capture some of the synchrony. And that's also been shown, by the way. I didn't even mention that, but in in psychotherapy, in the field of psychotherapy, clients that get into sync with their with their therapists, brainwaves, movement, language, heart rate, respiratory rate, all of these things synchronized, that's actually a predictor of better therapeutic alliance.
SPEAKER_01Patient outcomes. And patient outcomes.
SPEAKER_00So coaching can also be a great use case for we're finding that as well for like very good. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And more and more, that kind of therapy, I think, is become and not to say that it wasn't always normalized, but it it was often not talked about. And it is becoming much more acceptable for people to access those tools and those resources and those professionals to add that layer of, you know, here's how we can make sure, Dr. So and so, that you get the most ideal outcomes from your clients is to look for these things and have these tools and know what you're looking for. That's even better, especially in a relatively disconnected world. I mean, we still are relatively disconnected world. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. And even it's weird with all globalization and the social media, loneliness is an epidemic now. And also it's just as bad as you you hear like smoking and all these things, right? Um it's it's incredible. So the the exact opposite of that is human connection. And that's what we're really trying to do as Synergy is measure biologically human connection, engender it, foster it, promote it, enhance it. And um, what can be measured can be managed, everybody knows. But going beyond that, giving people the tools and the behaviors to practice and the habits, the things to do, the applied part of it is so important to move the needle on all these things. So and that, like you said earlier, can be trained.
SPEAKER_01This is gonna take me into my last question, which has which has to do with AI. But before I get to that, I wanted to ask if in your coaching work, when you're you're offering teams feedback on how it is that they can grow their synchrony and they can grow their or or recognize signs of it, if there are people out there that are listening to this who have maybe predominantly digital relationships, maybe their kids live somewhere else in the world and they miss feeling that synchrony with them, they miss feeling connected to them. What are some of the signs that you can look for in a relationship that might be digital or might be it might be physical, but it might be in person? But what are some of the signs of synchrony that present that say, all right, you've synced up with this person?
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah. So matching your tone to the person, asking open-ended questions, eye contact, understanding what kind of conversation you're having in the first place. So is it a decision-making conversation, an emotional conversation? You know, these are recognizing what kind of conversation you're having, a perspective-taking conversation, an agreement, uh, you know, maybe it's more about conflict resolution. So is it an open-ended, brainstorming kind of conversation and how that shifts over the conversation? I will mention that a book was recently written called Super Communicators, and it was written by Charles Dohig. And the first two chapters are all about the science of synchrony and interpersonal synchrony. So now, also 4,000 weeks is another wonderful book. Uh, Oliver Berkham, I forget the last name, but he also talks about synchrony. So you're finding this concept in all of these popular New York Times bestsellers and so on. And in that, in those books, they talk about these kinds of things, right? So listening to music together, the breathing together, actually, also can engender synchrony, um, feeling gratitude together, having vulnerable open conversations, which can engender emotional synchrony, uh physiological synchrony. So there are ways uh to intentionally train it and and um foster synchronous, you know, synchronous conversations. So excellent.
SPEAKER_01I it's interesting because uh I've been at a number of uh all exclusively women's events in the last six months since the beginning of the year. And never in my life have I, with such consistency, been in a room with 50 to 100 women where frequently throughout the day, someone says, let's all stand up and breathe together, or let's all stand up and you know, do the d follow this movement at the front, almost like a Jane Fonda Robux class, but circa 2026, right? And it's it's becoming normalized, it's becoming popularized to have that kind of group intervention, if you will, or that moment where everybody kind of syncs up and you re-find each other. And I think it's lovely. I think it's awesome. The the sort of darker side of this that that I think is interesting that I wanted to just talk about in closing is how when we talk to a chat or a Claude, specifically a chat, I think, for me anyway, and they're uh they seem to be syncing with you. They seem to be, you know, they understand your tone, maybe they're very flattering, maybe they're they're doing those things like you're maybe they're not breathing and having a heart rate per se, but they are trying to understand where this conversation is going. Tell me a little bit about the AI side of synchrony, in your opinion. And if that's too uncomfortable, you could just tell me how you're excited about the use of AI for what you do.
SPEAKER_00Oh gosh. Okay. So what I would say is the, and I may actually mention this in my TED talk, I believe, this this concept of human AI synchrony, and how you know that can be used to foster flow and the intersection between AI and flow, uh, which is very interesting. But I would say so this idea of AI being sycophantic or sycophancy, right? The which these flattering. The models are designed that way for sure, rightly so, because they want to keep people using the platform. Um, so it but it's also has a dark side as well. And it's actually been shown, studies have shown now that people lose their own voice, they lose their own if there's automation bias, which is just being more likely to accept AI as output, and it affects your decision making and other cognitive processes. So it's it's very real phenomenon. And in that way, that it you you're making me think like that kind of synchrony of agreement, which is not necessarily synchrony, but or alignment, I would say, of AI aligning with you can be dangerous, right? And there's all kinds of that cognitive offloading, automation bias, trusting it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. People who've actually lost their chats, and then the chat bot comes back and has a totally different tone, and they feel like the person on the other end is you know, right gone, like there's a loss.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Yeah, yeah. Something happens and and correct. So, in that sense, and this is more of like I would say a linguistic synchrony, which is, by the way, very indicative of cognitive alignment.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So that's a well-studied phenomenon. And so this is not like mimicking the behavior the brain waves and the heart rates, and the because AI doesn't really have that, not yet. Um, the eye contact, right? Not yet, these kinds of things. So it's more of like the the behavioral side of things and the linguistic side of things where AI can synchronize. And it's now recommended to ask AI to challenge your assumptions. You know, there's different prompting techniques to uh get more output and have more of a you know, a better creative output and have more agency. So that's directly not and you want AI to not align with you to be able to have that competitive fight to go back and say no, we need to do better.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. Competing you with you in the right way. Yeah, so there's a very real concern, I would say, there. Yeah, I would, however, say that if we can learn to and design and deploy AI systems, future AI systems, and current ones too, to understand. See, this is the thing. It's been actually been shown that AI right now, actually, one of the massive gaps in large language models is that they don't understand social interaction, human social interaction. There's a gap there. And that's why people are looking for all kinds of different data sets to be able to train future models, it it AI fails on other things too, spectacularly, right? This is the whole ARC AGI prize, like the in artificial general intelligence that it's humans and four-year-olds and five-year-olds can do things, they have intuition, theory of mind, and things like that that can perform really well. AI fails spectacularly, right? So I would say, in order to be able to design AI systems that can recognize and predict and truly understand human social interactions and the way we synchronize with each other, that will be great for not only AI alignment and getting AI to align with human values, but also for better cooperation and output in human AI symbiosis.
SPEAKER_01Yes. So when we have the episode all about communicating with your digital twin, I'll have you back and we can talk about it. We can talk about that. Because I imagine that the more we go down the road of virtualizing ourselves, of doubling ourselves and creating other versions of ourselves, the more that learning can take place, right? Because now we're we're creating actual models that are very driven by an actual human sample. And that would be a real turning point, I think, if we had that.
SPEAKER_00Back to social neuroscience, right? AI AI right now works in very similar ways, also distinct ways in terms of how the human brain works. Uh, you know, we all know that large language models predict the next token. It actually a study just came out last week showing, yeah, you know what, that's what brains do as well, in very real ways. So there are similarities. And I think to your point, is when we when we you know move over to virtual, digital, computational selves, aspects of ourselves that are that's my that's my AI avatar as part of the team. Exactly. Yeah. Uh right, right, which is people are already thinking about and working on having AI to be able to understand um how humans connect better uh will be so beneficial for future AI systems and how we collaborate with them.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely, and better for all of us because of it. This has been such an amazing conversation. Thank you for giving us such great, thorough, huge, concrete language and knowledge that we can use to try and sync up better with the people in our world, whether they be virtual or or with us in the room. Thank you so very much for chatting with me today, and I wish you the best day.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much, Gillian. It was a pleasure talking with you. Amazing conversation.
SPEAKER_01Join me next week on the Flourished Feed Podcast to keep exploring the infinite game. In the meantime, remember to stay curious, turn your passions into purpose, and play hard. I'm rooting for you. This program was prepared by Gillian Stovell Rivers, who was a senior wealth advisor with CI Asante Wealth Management. This is not an official program of CI Asante Wealth Management, and the statements and opinions expressed during this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of CI Asante Wealth Management. This show is intended for general information only and may not apply to all listeners or investors. Please obtain professional financial advice or contact Gillian to discuss your particular circumstances prior to acting on the information presented.