The Mindset Economy

Finding the Human Advantage with Mithu Storoni

• Mithu Storoni • Episode 1

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In this episode, Mithu Storoni joins Jean Gomes and Scott Allender to explore how the way we work has been shaped by industrial-era assumptions about efficiency, productivity, and the brain – and why those assumptions no longer serve us in an age of AI.

Mithu explains how, for more than a century, humans have tried to mimic machines, first with our bodies and then with our minds, and how this has restricted human potential. As AI increasingly takes over quantitative work, she argues that this moment presents an extraordinary opportunity to shift focus towards human qualities such as creativity, judgment, problem solving, and deep thinking.

The conversation examines why modern workplaces still treat the brain as if it were muscle, applying assembly-line templates to knowledge work, despite clear evidence that the brain works in rhythms, states, and cycles. Mithu explains how sustained attention depletes brain efficiency, why mind wandering is an important signal rather than a failure, and how breaks, movement, and changes in mental state are essential for high-quality thinking.

Jean and Scott explore with Mithu how leaders can rethink productivity, move beyond the quantification of quality, and design environments that allow brains to operate at their best. Topics include ultradian rhythms, the importance of timing different types of work, the relationship between creativity and time of day, and why walking and physical movement can unlock better ideas.

The episode also looks at individual differences in how people respond to pressure, uncertainty, and deadlines, and why future organizations will need to tailor ways of working to different “gear states” rather than imposing a single template on everyone.

This is a practical and neuroscience-informed discussion about how humans can stop racing alongside machines, rise above purely quantitative work, and build workplaces that enable better thinking in the Mindset Economy.


Reading from Mithu Storoni:
WINNER OF THE BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2025
Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work (2024, Yellow Kite)

Reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, Wiley, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, Baker Books, 2023)


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The Mindset Economy Podcast is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside Consulting Ltd production.

Mithu Storoni:

AI sets the pace of workflows by doing all the jobs which are quantitative, better, faster, in much larger volumes than we can do. We have quantified quality. And as many people said, that as soon as you start looking at what you can measure, that measurable thing becomes the objective.

Scott Allender:

Mithu Storoni is such a great guest to kick off the mindset economy, because her thinking so aligns with the big question driving our show, namely, how will we work, live and belong in a more uncertain world where machines can think so? Why listen to this episode, Mitu nails a coming reality that many of us are still coming to terms with, teetering between fear and excitement as we face AI, the quantitative work that so dominates much of our lives today is fast disappearing. Everything that's straightforward to measure will be automated over time.

Jean Gomes:

That leaves the qualitative work, which today we rarely get to focus on for more than a few hours every week, rich situational understanding, creative problem solving, imagination, building empathy and deep connection in relationships. These things are the future of human work, and the quantitative workplace ill equips us for these things. So this listener is why you should give this show your time, because Mitu drills into how to optimise how we use our brains to be fully ready for the new world of work, super practical and just what we need right now to prepare for the mindset economy. Mitu, before we dive into some of the fascinating ideas and insights that you've gained in your career, can we just kind of zoom out and think about what's the big opportunity for people listening to the show in the coming decades ahead, terms of more interesting work, more interesting lives, because we talk, there's a lot of doom and gloom around AI and climate and so on, but you have a very optimistic tone in all of this. So can you kind of paint a big picture for us?

Mithu Storoni:

Certainly? So we have spent the last 100 years or more since around about the time of the Industrial Revolution, possibly a little bit sooner, trying to mimic machines. It started off in the 18th century. You could argue it started off sooner, but it really kicked off then and then during the assembly line period, during the industrial revolution period, we worked in competition with as a substitute for machines, first with our bodies and then with our brains, and that actually restricted and limited our human potential and our brain potential in ways that we are only Just realising now. So this moment with the AI revolution, presents an extraordinary opportunity, an almost equalising opportunity for all of us to have access to opportunities to express our own individual creativity, our own individual ideas for change, for growth, which don't have to fit into an existing template so it's accessible for everyone. And in order to do that, we do need to work a little bit differently. But I see that as an extraordinary opportunity.

Scott Allender:

What was your motivation to get into this work and to talk about this publicly.

Mithu Storoni:

So I've always been interested in the brain

Jean Gomes:

So what's interesting, you know, in what through my work, and I took a step back when I started writing, and looked at the whole world of the brain. And then I you're talking about from a metaphor point of view, that looked at the whole world of just business, of the finance sector, and so on. And then, of course, 2020 happened. And when since the Industrial Revolution, organisations, the metaphor has 2020 started, I we were all forced to take a step back. And it gave you a sort of picture of what happens when the existing template disappears, be it temporarily, and then to been the machine, and you know, human beings are servicing the reimagine how it could be recast, and to look at the areas that seem to really thrive when that template disappeared, and then just think, Okay, put two and two together, and then machine, and then become like the machine, and they lose a lot really go back to seeing how the brain actually works and how restrictive the template we currently work within really is. And then I moved on from there. I explored the rhythmic nature of their human qualities, and things like creativity aren't of brain work. I looked at the neuroscience between different kinds of brain work, and then I also looked at many of the limitations of workplaces that have been sort of swept under generally encouraged, you know, people, when you ask people, you the carpet and have habits which have just been maintained because they already exist. And when you start really looking at the world with a slightly dissolved template, you realise know, when was the last time you had new idea? Well, I'm not paid just how obsolete and useless and often counterproductive many of these templates are. to be creative. How might we fall into the same trap with AI and just sort of, you know, replicating ourselves in that mirror?

Mithu Storoni:

So AI has just taken the competition with machines to a whole new level. We could just about keep up with machines. We could no longer, we can no longer keep up with the supercomputers. AI sets the pace of workflows by doing all the jobs which are quantitative, better, faster in much larger volumes than we can do. So we have two options. We can either keep trying to run alongside AI and it's a bit like a crazy person, increasing the treadmill faster and faster and then just falling off. Or we can say, Okay, this is your axis. I'm going to go on the y axis, which is the axis of quality. And if we make that mental shift and start from the leadership downwards, and start really re examining the templates of pretty much every kind of workplace that currently exists, then we no longer have to race alongside AI, like humans raced alongside machines, we can actually literally rise above and really focus on the qualities that that make us different and make us special, that have been hidden, muffled and restricted by the kind of work we've been doing for the last 100 years.

Jean Gomes:

I think that's so helpful, because it gives us a permission to think about things differently. Because Neil Lawrence, who heads up about AI at Cambridge, was talking to us about the fact that AI compared to a human in terms of this quantitative work, is like walking versus light speed. So there's no comparison. There's no way in which we're going to be able to do that. So to actually just accept that and figure out what humans are for in that kind of world is super important. Yeah.

Scott Allender:

I'd like to get into more of your work, specifically around how the brain does work and what it does require, compared to kind of when we work using our bodies, as you were referencing earlier, sort of optimising for industrial revolution and productivity. I'd like to, I'd like to go deeper, if we could, because I'm thinking about my own day of back to back to back to back meetings that have no room built into them whatsoever, for any kind of like brain rest, to then be able to come back online and have more creative thinking. And I know so many people obviously feel that pain, and it doesn't feel like the workplace is changing and sort of, you know, adapting in any kind of meaningful way. So can we understand a little bit deeper about some of the brain science and how we really need to think about evolving our workplaces.

Mithu Storoni:

Yes, so it's absolutely true that workplaces are having difficulty in adapting, and that is because we assume so let's again, take a step back and go back to the time of the Industrial Revolution, and even a little bit before then, some great scientists across the world, Helmholtz, being the principal one, discovered the concept of energy. And once the concept of energy started being really closely looked at, we discovered the idea of inefficiency. Okay, efficiency. And hence, followed by that inefficiency, and when a whole range of experiments were done, looking at, first of all, looking at the idea, the concept of efficiency, of efficiency by itself, and then looking at the concept of efficiency in terms of the brain, we started edging towards replicating or thinking of the brain in terms of a machine. So this all actually happened in the 19th century, and then in parallel with that, we started the industrial revolution. And when the industrial revolution happened again, the concept of efficiency seeped through, and we started working on assembly lines. So the assembly lines formed on the basis of improving efficiency. And of course, they were brilliant. They massively increased productivity in quantitative terms tangible products, and it was such a great model that when we then shifted to knowledge work in the 1950s we changed what we produced, but we didn't change how we did it. So we simply assumed that the brain worked just like muscle, and in a typical sort of factory assembly line setting, what would happen is you'd start the day, you would then continue at a constant pace, at constant volume, at constant speed, until maybe around lunchtime, and then have a short break, and then do the same again until around five or six in the evening, you'd clock off. And then when we started working in offices, we followed exactly the same template. But of course, the brain, it's obvious to anyone, is very different from muscle. It doesn't perspire, it doesn't complain, it doesn't go red, it doesn't ache. But what it does do is, if you actually look inside the brain, which we're only now able to do, and do a kind of graph theory analysis, which I know two teams in Singapore and Australia doing really well. Then you notice that actually, if you take if you look at the functional connectivity within the brain, and we know that the functional connectivity has certain patterns which suggest maximal efficiency of data transfer within the brain. If you then take someone who does a typical kind of work that we do in the office, something that requires sustained attention, and you watch them for, let's say, 20 minutes, then 30 minutes, and then longer, you can visibly see the pathways, the functional connectivity within the brain, change, and the pathways become less efficient. In other words, as the human starts feeling a little bored, or perhaps even further than that, slightly tired, but, you know, it's 11 in the morning, they can't be tired carry on. But in fact, it's very likely that the they feel they feel this way because their brain is becoming less efficient, and the brain naturally has the the desire, or the tendency or the need to then change state. So we know that the brain works in different states. These different states can be measured and recognised by looking at certain patterns of brain waves in addition to the functional connectivity. And we know that as soon as the a person's brain or a person grows slightly tired or bored, they kind of lapse into mind wandering. And when mind wandering happens, one of the things that we notice is an increase in alpha waves as an example. And we are now understanding that, for instance, that alpha wave the purpose, one of the purposes of alpha waves, is almost to act like a windscreen wiper so it clears away an overcluttered chalkboard. And if you're if you look at a person from the outside, you can't see any of these things. They might just look slightly bored or just slightly tired, slightly sluggish. They might just grab a coffee and carry on, but actually what's happening inside the brain is now the brain is in a less optimal position to be able to do its optimal kind of work. And we know that the brain has this extraordinary repertoire. It can do very simple things, and it can do really complex things. Problem solving is very complex. Making a decision between A and B based on very little is very simple. But in order to do those complex things that AI cannot do, the brain must not be in a sub optimal position. And so looking at the way the brain changes within really very short timeframes of doing hard work. Tells us that if you have an office filled with AI, lots of llms, and then you have a few humans doing the work that those llms can't do, namely, one plus one, or very simple quantitative work, you need those brains to be absolutely optimally positioned to be able to justify their place in the office, to take the organisation forward, to create change, to use the AI as tools. But if you force the brain to work like Emma. Machine you're for, you're limiting the brain to only behaving like a very basic level. Ai, so this is a really important distinction.

Scott Allender:

Okay, John, let's pause here for just a moment, because this is such a rich conversation, and there's been a long tradition of writers and philosophers bemoaning that work has dehumanised us from the number of hours we work to the fact that we've adapted to see ourselves largely as machines. The essential point here that Mitu is making, I think, is that we have a moment where things could be different, and we could work well. We could design work that optimises for the brain and our social needs.

Jean Gomes:

Yeah, and I agree totally with that. And I suppose the big question that's driving this show is, will we do that? Because there was a lot of optimism that the Internet would unite us and spread liberal values, bringing around the end of history, and in quite work out like that. So I agree that there's a moment where new possibilities are opening up, but it won't come from technologies, and it won't come from technologists who largely see things in kind of this mathematical logic of the optimization of systems and machines, not of humans. So I think it'll come from people outside of tech working together to envisage a world where humans can thrive so that allows us to evolve, not just to adapt to a new human version of the cog in the AI machine.

Scott Allender:

Yeah, and you can see that with the AI slop that many workers are producing, and the research MIT and Harvard are showing how it's degrading our brains, which is just as me too said, if we force the brain to work like a machine, we are limiting it to only behaving like a very basic AI. And that's not what humans are for. Maximising AI's capabilities requires co intelligence, which requires us to understand and cooperate with how our brains and our bodies optimally work, and this is where our greatest value is found. Okay, let's get back to the conversation.

Mithu Storoni:

We one of the problems we have unknowingly adopted in our in our way of thinking, is we have quantified quality. And as many people said, There's a famous seat saying during the Vietnam War, general McNamara pointed out that as soon as you start looking at what you can measure, that measurable thing becomes the objective. And because we have and because in organisations which work on predictive funding or predictive salaries or predictive bonuses, even well, bonuses are not predictive, but predictive way of operating. Let's just say predictive investments. We want to be able to predict the future. We need to lower uncertainty. We can't lower qualitative uncertainty, but we can take a track that's been laid before and extrapolated, we can extrapolate lines of data. And so anything that's quantitative, we feel really comfortable with. And so organisations have really understandably adopted a quantitative template for measuring productivity, measuring performance. But the mistake we make is, for instance, I know that many organisations have head counts, and they have or head counts as a measure, and they allocate funds to different departments depending on head counts. But of course, we assume that the same head produces an output like an assembly line, so simply having two people working on something does not mean you're going to get double the output in terms of quality, especially in terms of exceptional quality. So this quantity, this quant, quantification of quality and turning measurable aspects of life of work, which we've been forced to adopt because of our attempt to reduce uncertainty, has completely, almost turned our appreciation of human output into one of a machine's output, and that is an error We have to correct.

Scott Allender:

How do we start to correct it? Because everything you're saying is so important, and I guess I'm thinking about it from a leadership perspective. What do leaders need to start thinking about to shift their mindset around these. Realities that that have been so true in organisations for so many decades that it's, it's sort of hard to sort of step out of that way of quantification, right? How do we start to really understand and measure quality better? How do we start to optimise people's brain, brains and way, the way that they're meant to function? What are, what are some, like tangible thoughts and ideas for creating those sort of mindset shifts.

Mithu Storoni:

So before I answer that, I think it's, it's important to appreciate that the change in in the way we work, or the change in this, this revolution, is going to force us to do it anyway, because if you imagine extrapolating decades into the future, you're going to have organisations with really advanced, sophisticated llms and other kinds of AI, and then you're going to have Some humans there. Everyone will have the same kinds of AI, so competition will almost level out. So your edge will depend on what the AI that everyone else has cannot do. So it will depend on your brain's capital, and that ultimately in in an era where AI is so so ubiquitous, will depend on your creative ideas, your innovative ideas, your ability to solve problems in a way no one else can. So you will be forced, or we will all be forced, to adopt practices that promote quality rather than quantity. So I'd say that even if we did nothing, this is an inevitable future that we're walking into. But then we can walk we can take a step back and look at what we can do now to change things. So I think the first thing is to really appreciate that this is something that that is happening. It is going to happen. And if organisations, if leaders want an edge in their team, in their organisation, they must. We must all create an environment, first of all, within the organisation, that enables the human brain to perform to its fullest potential. So first, it's an attitude change. So when we take a human being, a human worker, we don't think, Okay, how many boxes can we tick at the end of this week or this month? We must think that, okay, in five years from now, how is my organisation going to be driven forward, and how do I create the best environment for my brains? Because we're all going to be walking heads really, to to be able to do that. So that's a question we have to all ask, and once we embrace that question, we can look at, come back to neuroscience, and look at the practices that really enable optimal brain performance. So I'm going to ignore the basics, which people appreciate, although perhaps not as well as you know, as as as one would think so the basics include sleep, nutrition, exercise, lifestyle. One of the things, for instance, that we might have to embrace is the way different countries, when you look at multi multinational companies having zoom meetings or having meetings, there are inevitably teams in places around the world which suffer because they are they are performing at the wrong time of day and night. So take that as a as one little thing that organisations can change. So for instance, I used to live in Hong Kong. I was very aware of this problem. When you had large companies with headquarters in New York, you would have Hong Kongers very comfortably without a question, attending zoom meetings at two in the morning or three in the morning simply because that's the most convenient time. But if you reframe that and say, okay, convenient for a team, that's great. But is this really creating optimal decisions for the whole organisation as we see it? No, it isn't. So looking at the way multinational corporations work across time zones is a great way to start. It's very simple adjustment that can be made. You could do something as simple as giving team scoring on the hour of the day that they are working at, the hour that they are having to make decisions at, and kind of creating an app using AI even to create a way to equalise the load on the brain for that. So that's one way of doing it, and it's very basic first step. And then within the organisation, we are now learning about how important breaks are, and also about how the brain likes to do different kinds of work at different hours of the day. And so if you are part of a team that's working on innovation. Conversation or create something creative. You're trying to solve a problem. You're trying to design a new product. That team, or members of that team, should not be expected to work in the same way that another team, where the members are just finishing off a plan that's in existence, they are focusing. They don't need to create, but they do need to really focus and go through the minutiae. The brains in that team will thrive at a different time of day and in a different way of working. So looking at exactly what your team as a leader, what your team members are doing, making allowances and really optimising when they're doing it, appreciating the importance of breaks. And also, this looks like a very soft factor, but actually it turns out to be a really important factor, which is in the industry, during the Industrial Revolution, we separated the heads from the bodies, so the bodies worked while the heads slept. Then during knowledge work, we flipped that round, we decapitated ourselves the other way around. The heads worked while the body slept. And then we discover exercise is magical. It's not magical. We've simply taken it out. We need to put it back in. So what we are now discovering is the brain works extremely well if the body and the brain move together, or they are both active, not if one is passive, the other, you know, one works, the other sleeps, so another really, you know, simple intervention that I know, the people I've worked with have actually reported a disproportionate benefit from is introducing things like walks, walking meetings, walking phone calls and just including opportunities to clear the head in between intense meetings and decisions, go for a walk, no judgement, fresh air, and when they return, they arrive at ideas at a faster rate than people who have just stayed at their desk and worked away. So these are some simple interventions.

Jean Gomes:

I'm, you know, Scott and I are very great fans of harnessing the ultradian rhythm and trying to work in 90 minute sprints. Can you talk to us a little bit about the science and practice

Mithu Storoni:

around that? So ultradian rhythms are again, they've existed. They've been recognised for a while, but we have chosen to think our minds are more like factory hands, so we've ignored it. So ultradian rhythms are very interesting. The history of ultradian rhythms begins really around the time of understanding sleep. So when we sleep, we sleep in cycles. And then it was noticed that actually, first it was questioned, do these cycles persist during the daytime? Because there isn't really a reason why they should not. And then it was discovered that, in fact, they do persist during the daytime. We do have a 90 minute attention. I say 90 minute, but actually it's between 60 and 100 minutes. So 90 100 minutes. So 90 is a good average. Our attention waxes and wanes in 60 to 100 minute cycles. And what's interesting is that this cycle, you know, the brain, is so extraordinary that it can override itself. So this cycle can actually be over. You can override it if you have ample energy and if you use assistance such as caffeine and bright light. But if you take people who are sleep deprived, you suddenly unmask this 90 minute rhythmic cycle of attention, waxing and waning, which means that, why don't we focus on it far more? Why don't we set that as a template? And you know, intuitively, we often do things intuitively and then only later discover, oh, that actually had a role. So intuitively we know that football matches, films, even coffee breaks, tea breaks, that we kind of do, even though they're not always allowed, they tend to happen in 90 minutes bouts. And there's a reason for that. You know, long films have had to be cut because the audience could not stay attentive for more than 90 minutes. Now, why the 90 minutes? This is the reason so this ultradian cycle of 60 to 100 so averaging 90 minutes is a great template to aim for in the workplace, because what it allows you to do is it allows you to just replenish your reserves as you go along. So going back to the picture of the brain becoming inefficient. Just taking a break after doing something that is mentally exhausting resets the functional connectivity in the brain. So respecting this 90 minute rhythm is a very effective way to harness the brain's potential, and we can also bring in a couple of nuances there. So we know that certain kinds of work are especially energy guzzling for the mind. So sustained attention is extraordinary energy expensive, to the extent that it's been shown in studies actually decades ago, which we didn't perhaps appreciate as well as we should have done if you're sitting there doing an exam, a math exam, and you're really you need concentration, and of course, you need your mathematical skills. There's a great study that shows that introducing a Five second break every two minutes. So when you've done one side of the question paper, you pause for five seconds, you close your eyes, and then you continue. Actually significantly improves the score, which shows that

Jean Gomes:

explains why you keep on doing that all the time. Yeah, that's coming. Yeah.

Mithu Storoni:

Okay, so it shows that even five minutes can be taxing if your mind is doing something that intensive. And then there's a wealth of data showing that doing standard, more standard, non exam, really intense work for 20 minutes results in significant mental inefficiency afterwards. So as a leader, again, look at the kind of work that your team members are doing. So we've already classified it between focused and creative we've already classified the time of day. Now look at the intensity. So if you have someone in your team working on something that really, really requires attention and you need that job to get done, give them extra leeway. Encourage more breaks. And you can even split your break differently across different members of your team. And if you have a neuroscientific basis for that, you can justify it to your team, and it makes a lot of sense. So this 60 to 90 minute rhythm, there are different ways in which you can adopt it. So you can sort of say, Okay, if you're doing this kind of work, we will keep doing it every 20 minutes. Another way to adopt it is to go a little bit deeper and really titrate it to so if you look at the entire bulk of work it within a project that a team member is doing, one of the ways you can play with a 90 minute cycle. It's not treated as an assembly line. So within that 90 minute cycle, you can encourage your team members to do the most intense work for the first 15 to 20 minutes, immediately after a break, and then switch to lower intensity work. And if you do that, then you can actually sustain attention and performance throughout the entire day. And another great experiment on this was done on Danish school children. So when the school children were given exams to do, and they were tested on when they performed the best the later in the day that they set their exam, the worse they performed, because they're fresher in the morning, later in the day, then they did something different. They introduced breaks every hour, if they now did the exam later in the day, they actually performed better than they did first thing or earlier on in the day, which shows you how the brain needs oxygen in speaking metaphorically, it needs a break, needs to come up for air at regular intervals. Another thing we know, for instance, which also links back into this, is doing really intense work, sustained attention work, or really difficult work, even exam work, for over four hours on any particular day, regardless of what else you're doing. So you could be doing lighter work for the rest of the day. It doesn't matter, but that intense, sustaining four hours of intense work, even if it is with breaks, with lots of breaks, actually prevents the brain from returning to its normal baseline, healthy baseline, the following day. So limiting really intense work to four hours a day over a period of days is actually far more efficient for quality for the brain than pushing the brain to do five hours one day and then suffering for three days thereafter.

Scott Allender:

Okay, well, I need to interrupt our conversation again because the point that Mitu just made here is a critical one. Optimising our performance necessitates limiting really intense work to no more than four hours in a day. And when she said that, it it hit me, because I know that I'm not good at doing that, and if we're not good at doing that, not only will the quality of our thinking, and therefore the quality of our output, diminish, it will. It will actually cause our brains to suffer for a few. Few days later, and when I look around, I don't see that many of us are doing this. I don't see that organisations are doing this. There's an expectation, and maybe even where there's not an expectation, perhaps there's almost this adapted badge of honour that we think that if we keep pushing and pushing and pushing, that we will create more value, we'll be more innovative, and we'll deliver higher value outcomes without any adverse impact. And that's just not the case. John, I'm curious what you're seeing here, and I want to know what you think in terms of how will attempting to sustain high intensity work beyond our brain's natural limits impact us in the mindset economy?

Jean Gomes:

Well, it's a really important question. Because, I mean, I've been talking to organisations about this specific question for about 20 years, and I don't see very many organisations even beginning to think about optimising work practices for cognitive performance or sustainability. They might talk about it. They might be interested in the in the topic, they might train people around it, but they don't actually act upon it in terms of work practices. I think they leave it to individuals to figure out whether they can make it work. And then those individuals largely fall into the status quo of the culture, which is the opposite, which is the sacrifice mindset, which is, in order to be successful, you have to be all in you have to work as long and as continuously as you can to meet the rising demands, rather than you know what Mitty is talking about. So what I see is a belief that you have to, you know, have enough smart people to set the strategy, motivate them to drive performance in teams, and you get the results. Of course, that's part of the answer, but the challenges are now too overwhelming to rely upon this narrow way of thinking about winning.

Scott Allender:

What has to shift John in your estimation, because it just feels like such a perennial issue. I'm curious.

Jean Gomes:

Well, I think where the real opportunity lies here, and this isn't a kind of rose tinted spectacles is that when we look at AI what what's happening is that we're automating the things that can be automated, the activities where which don't really need us in the loop. And that means that it calls into question the value of human beings, not in, not in the, you know, five people, but in the opportunity to create businesses where human ingenuity, empathy, creative problem solving and so on, they can kind of like the work that we can do can become, you know, better, because, you know, I was looking at the study the other week, which said that 60% of What we do all day is we work on work. And what that means is the stuff that we don't want to do, the stuff that we didn't sign up to when we when we got a job, you know, like sorting out political problems, chasing up information that that people don't send to us because they can't remember working on, you know, things that you know, frankly, AI will be able to solve. So if, if that 60% of you know, the kind of reduction in productivity is improved, think about what we can, we can do with that, that dividend. So I think it's more than just automating activities. I think it's actually fundamentally changing the very fabric of what work is. So that means that, you know, we we need to move past the kind of pure productivity conversation into reimagining what human work looks like exactly.

Scott Allender:

Okay, dear listener. Before we get back to the conversation with me too, I'm going to give you a bit of playful homework, something to experiment with tomorrow, perhaps set a timer for 90 minutes, focus deeply on your important work, and then just walk away for 10 minutes and pay attention to how you feel and the quality of your thinking and the quality of your attention, compared to the days when you've just kept pushing without any purposeful pauses. So how can you build in some purposeful pauses? Okay, let's get back to the conversation. John jumping back in with an important question you asked me to about the best time of the day to be creative.

Jean Gomes:

Come back to the question you had just a moment ago about when's the best time to be creative. Can you talk to us about that? When is the best time to be creative in the day?

Mithu Storoni:

Yes. So now, anecdotally, many writers, many, many thinkers, many scientists, will have written in their own diaries and biographies how their best ideas came first thing in the morning, and many writers say their best ideas come late at night, when it's very quiet. Now we assume it's because it's quiet definitely that does play a role, but it turns out that actually the brain is most primed to think creative thoughts and solve problems in the very first few hours. First couple of hours after waking up early in the morning, and in the very last few hours, the last couple of hours in the evening. Now the evening is sometimes slightly less optimal if you're very tired, but assuming you're not overly tired and you haven't created a different mental state by having too much caffeine, that also shifts your state, then these are the two optimal time windows for creative ideas. Why is that? What's going on? So if you look at the way we exist, the way we sleep, the way we we awaken, the way we work, our brains go through a cycle. They go through a cycle of sleep. There are lots of phases within it, but let's look at the broader picture sleep. And then we wake up very gently, first thing in the morning, and then around about mid the middle of the morning, later in the morning, depending on where you live, you reach peak alertness. And that corresponds with the arc of the sun in the sky. And that's not just a very poetic analogy. There are reasons why, because we're now learning that the types of light prevalent within sunlight during a day can actually shift the way you're thinking and the way you're moving. So we know, for instance, that warm red light in any at any time of day actually enhances creative thinking, and we've evolved with warm red light during sunrise, first thing in the morning, and hence it explains why we just revert to thinking creatively at our best during Those early hours, the other thing that happens during that time is we are we are crossing the threshold from the world of sleep to the world of bright alertness, and that in between corridor is neither here nor there, and that actually encourages a brain state where you are able to look around to explore. So you are you can focus enough to look around, to be awake to ideas, but you don't have that intensity of attention that you will attach and latch on to a single idea and not let it go, because that state of mind is actually counterintuitive, is actually very bad for creativity. So creatives famously, actually have leaky attention. So So, so hence we can put all of these together and say, actually, the first hours of the day and the last hours of the day are optimal for creativity. So if you're a leader and you're managing different kinds of teams. Why not? Why impose the same timetable on everyone across the board, you would get more out of your team qualitatively, and your team would feel well and feel better if your creative team were to work earlier in the day, perhaps take a very long break or do something very light for the rest of the day, and kind of compromise on extra hours for those early hours, and then again, put in the hours later in the day as a leader, if you're working on something creative, also do not have any meetings during the first Few hours of the day if you're starting early. So that's one way to harness this wonderful thank you.

Michelle Beagley:

You're listening to the mindset economy where your beliefs, resilience and adaptability aren't just innate qualities we should take for granted. They're your new currency. In an automated world, how you feel, think and see the world will largely define your success and satisfaction. Make sure you subscribe so we can explore this new world together.

Scott Allender:

Everything you're speaking about me too, is getting right at the heart of the mission of the mindset economy, and I love the suggestions and the templates and the brain science. I'm curious about how we build greater self awareness, about what's actually going on in our brains from moment to moment. So I'm thinking, as you were talking, I was up with a sick child a couple of nights ago, and the next day, that certainly depleted my normal rhythms and my sort of cycles of when I'm most creative, I found myself obviously more tired in the morning, running on less sleep. I imagine when we're done with this. I know you had contended with some unusual traffic to get to the studio today, and now we've put you in the hot seat for, you know, the last 45 minutes. And I'm sure that's energy depleting. How do we build that level of conscious awareness about what's happening so we know when we need to take maybe an additional break, sooner than the 90 minutes we might normally create a pause. Is there anything in your research that you found or practices that you've put in place for yourself that has built that level of awareness?

Mithu Storoni:

Yes, so we. One of the problems that we have another, yet, another problem we've created for ourselves through this quantification of quality is we have started ignoring the signals that have come, that are coming from within us, and instead going by external signals and external crutches and external aids to carry on. One of the one of the simplest and really widest, widely available clues that the brain or the mind is getting tired is if your mind starts wandering. Now, most of us, and I included, for most of my life, when my mind starts wandering, I think, Oh, I'm just not paying enough attention. So get some coffee or do something and force myself on my work. But actually, if you have focused so what to really feel this at play, if you imagine yourself first thing in the morning, you've come to work, you you've, you're sitting in front of your screen, and you've, you're in the right state of mind to be able to focus on your screen. So you sit there, you really dig into that work, but you expect it to carry on for about 45 minutes or an hour, but really 15 minutes or 20 minutes down the line, suddenly your mind starts just shifting, drifting. Really, it's not that you have a pressing problem. If you have a pressing problem, a different thing is happening. But you don't have a pressing problem, apart from all the problems we always carry around with us. But you know, in looking at that in perspective, so there isn't an urgent reason why you know your child isn't sick, that's not why you're thinking back. You're just sitting at your desk, looking to your screen. Your mind is just wondering. Now, that's a signal, and that's a signal, because what we know is, if you, if you think of the brain as an engine, and if you imagine that it works at different gear settings. And this idea of gear settings really comes from, or really is based on, it's a metaphor, and it's based on the fact that our arousal systems, so our physiological arousal, our awakening, alertness systems, are based on this little network of neurons called the locus coeruleus norepinephrine network. I've called it the blue dot network, which is, of course, its English name, locus coeruleus is the Latin term for it. And this network, you can actually play with this network in animals and put the animals in using optogenetic and other studies, into distinct states that mimic a human being focusing, or that mimic a human being being stressed or wired, or that mimic a human being being daydreamy and relaxed and creative, although with mice, We don't quite have a measure of creativity. So this so coming back to this network, you can think of the brain operated by this network as working in different gears, and the gear two the setting that I call in my metaphor, gear metaphor. Gear two is the state of the brain, or the state of the mind, where you can focus your focusing ability peaks, and you can focus really, really well. And this correlates with a the neural network, the locus coeruleus network, a city a certain pattern of activity in that network. Now, when you sit down to focus, or sit down to work. If you take no caffeine, you're really well rested. You naturally reach this state of mind sort of middle of the morning. If you're looking at a screen and you're sitting down to focus and you're working, and you're using your sustained attention to work, you're in gear two. You're doing really well. At some point when the work gets quite intense, quite difficult, and your mind starts getting tired, your brain starts literally down shifting so you shift down to gear one. Your brain tries to shift down to gear one. Another way of looking at it is at gear two. Your brain is working faster and more powerfully than it is at gear one. So you shift down to gear one. And one of the signs that you're shifting down to gear one is your mind starts to wander. You start just walking around lazily, instead of really walking, marching forward. And one of, and there are many reasons for this, one of the reasons, and again, this is a this is a matter that hasn't quite been resolved. What we know is that when neurons are firing, so the brain is very energy intensive, and when brain cells are firing, there has to be some kind of a housekeeping system. Yeah, because you're firing a neurotransmitter, that transmitter has to be wiped away. Otherwise, the following cell keeps firing. You keep pushing on the buttons. It has to be cleaned away. Every time a brain cell acts, it produces garbage, waste byproducts that has to be cleaned away. And what happens is when you're working in a really healthy environment and your resources are not over exhausted, then you can keep working, and the housekeeping process can continue uninterrupted. So your brain can, your brain cells keep firing. All the waste products get cleaned away, and the neurotransmitter doesn't get built up. But what we think happens when you're doing really intense, difficult work is you're producing you're either producing more waste products than can be cleaned away within that time, or the neurotransmitter is there's too much of that that can be cleared away, or the resources you're using for that whole metabolic process are running out too quickly. And so when your brain downshifts by a gear, it gives it a time. It gives your brain a time to catch up. And so the subtlest sign of that could just be your mind just drifting. But of course, what we tend to do then is we tend to reach for a cup of coffee. And when we reach your cup of coffee, what that does is it forces the gear to stay up. So instead of going to one, it stays on two. But often what happens is it kicks it to overdrive, so it goes into gear three. So if we keep doing that across an entire day, then every time the brain has tried to downshift, you've given it a kick. So it goes to gear two goes to gear three. A few things happen. First, in gear three, the brain cannot create. It can only do. It can only defend. It, cannot create. So you're completely eliminating your human brain potential for creativity and problem solving by overriding that signal to want to rest repeatedly throughout the day. That's the first thing that happens. The second thing that happens is at the end of the day, your brain is exhausted. Any scan, any peering in, will show you that, however, you have forced its gear to be stuck on gear three by constantly feeding it caffeine. So at the end of that day, you're going to find it more difficult to wind down and fall asleep and rest is where the whole gear system, the whole brain's environment, the brain's homeostasis is reset, so you're missing out on all of that. So the following day, you start off tired and you need even more coffee, and even if you don't, your ability to create is even further compromise. So it creates this vicious cycle.

Jean Gomes:

So Scott asked you the question about, How do you know when you go into gear one? How do you know when you've crossed from two to three or one to three?

Mithu Storoni:

So let's come back to how do we feel? So this is a very broad generalisation. If you're in a gear one state, the state that your mind, your brain, wants to draw into when you're working very hard. The way you can tell you're in that state is you're awake, you're alert, but your thoughts are sort of floaty. It's a kind of mental state you're in when you are sitting somewhere. You're not really falling asleep, but you're kind of just floating through things. You're not really very stressed, you're not feeling very sort of tightly wound. Your mind is just playing with things. You could get into this state when you are going for a walk or when you are doing something that doesn't really require you to think. So that's the gear one brain state, very floaty. You're not focusing on anything, but you're just touching everything as you as you walk around it. When you know you're in a gear, you will know you're in a gear two state. When you sit down, you look at the longest, most boring PDF you've ever opened on a screen in front of you, and you can read it straight away. So that's where you're in, peak gear two state in gear three state, the Department of your brain that's responsible for doing differential equations, solving chess moves, solving that very complex problem you have shuts down. It goes offline. So when you're in gear three, it's the kind of mental state you would have if you are if you're a let's say you are typing a report and you know the contents. You have a 3pm deadline. It's 245 so you don't think you. Just type and you do it quickly. That's a gear three mental state within these three gear states, there is a fluctuation of states, but very broadly, these are three very obvious signs that are in these three gears.

Scott Allender:

Okay, my last interruption, I promise. Because I really, really love this three gears metaphor as a way for us to think about our internal states. And I want to pick your brain a bit more. John on these. So gear one being reflection, gear two being focus, and gear three being overdrive. So my two part question for you, my friend, is in the mindset economy, how important will it be to pay attention to and understand which gear you are in moment to moment, and being that you're particularly well versed in interoception, which if listener, if you don't know what interception is, it's our ability to understand the signals our bodies are sending to our brains moment by moment. So what is the interplay do you estimate between interoceptive sensitivity and understanding what gear that our brain is in?

Jean Gomes:

I think it's great, great call out, because you and I have spent time talking to many experts on interoceptive awareness and how it helps us to to build our mindset. And bottom line for this is the more sensitive we are to our interoceptive feelings the state of our body, the better we are at anticipating our recovery needs before we move into gear three, when it's often too late. Because once we are there, we're stuck in that overdrive where we're producing adrenaline and cortisol and adrenaline, and it's very difficult to come out of that. And that's when our brains become defensive. That's when we're, you know, we're draining ourselves, our focus then can't be on recovery, but it's on doubling down, and it's also on justifying why we need to keep pushing ourselves or defending our position. So it's like that heightened sense of anxiety and nervous energy, which frankly, isn't where we do our best work, and we certainly didn't feel good about ourselves and and you know the sacrifices that we're making. But the problem is, and once we're in that state, it's very difficult to come out of it. It takes time to kind of detox yourselves from those stress hormones. So small bouts of recovery and so on don't tend to necessarily help you need a real reset. So I think the reason why interception is so valuable is that it helps you to anticipate before you get there. That's, I think, the real value of it,

Scott Allender:

and to then lean into practices that provide the real recovery. You know, I'm guilty, I'll admit of, you know, over caffeinating as a sort of substitute to kind of keep moving right and thinking that sort of will be sustainable if I just have another cup of coffee. And that limits my brain's ability to rest and reset over time, so I have set my intent you'll be proud to know to change this pattern this year. So yeah, well, it's about time.

Jean Gomes:

Scott, all joking aside, I think it's easy for all of us to fall into those patterns of being wired and tired. It feels good for a bit, until it doesn't, and then it's too late. But it's sub optimal, and it runs counter to the mindset that we need to develop for our more uncertain and automated world.

Scott Allender:

You've touched on this with acknowledging that we don't operate all the same, right? We have different sort of times and obviously schedules around the world, if our teams are spread out and things like this, and we might be in different gears at different times. I'm curious to know anything more about neuro diversity and how leaders should become mindful of anything that might be sort of atypical, outside the norm of some of these patterns that you're talking about. Did your research uncover much about that? Is there anything we need to be thinking about there?

Mithu Storoni:

Yes, this is a really important question now, especially because of this idea of brain capital. Now, there has always been a dissociation between potential and performance. It's been known on sporting fields where players, football, rugby, they perform really well during the practice rounds, but when it comes to the final match, something happens. It's been very well known with students in schools, in universities, and actually, I was one of them. I was always terrible during exams and brilliant doing the same thing in relaxed settings. Now that becomes a really important thing today, for two reasons. The first is that we are no longer going to be operating. In the future, in a purely objective, quantifiable, measurable scenario. So we're not simply going to be answering test results, getting a yes or no, or fulfilling targets and getting a yes or no, we will need to untap the potential within each of us coming back to why some people have this dissociation between performance and potential becomes a really important factor. So what we do know is that there is indeed a wide spectrum of the way our gears coming back to that metaphor, our brain resets itself into its different gears. So let me explain that if you're someone who you work in an office that is very high pressured, very competitive, let's just say you work on the trading floor of one of the big American investment banks, and you are watching red and green really, really quickly on the screen in front of you, and every single change in a digit has a million or even billion dollar application. But you look at that, and you feel really good, and you stay focused. You then leave your workplace at the end of the day, and you go home and you, let's say you read a book, or you sit in a meditation class, and you have never experienced this much stress in your life this type of of, let's say brain setting or phenotype, is what I like to refer to as a as a stiff gear phenomenon, because what's actually happening is, in every one of us, we, we all view the world differently, partly because of experiences, and partly, really because of the way we are, what we're all trying to do when we are operating, whether we are working, whether we're not working. And this has happened throughout our history, long before the concept of work emerged. Is we seem to try to get into this gear, to state. It's almost as if we are drawn towards it. So when we wake up in the morning, no matter what we are doing, we look for ways to help nudge ourselves into this gear to setting. What are the signals for that? Well, what the brain does is, at any point in your day, your ultimate aim is to be a perfect fit for the demands of the world around you. You're also aiming to be in the best state possible, to learn from that world, interact with that world and overcome uncertainty, learn your way out of uncertainty. These things are all made possible in gear two. So no matter who we are, what our makeup is, we're always striving to enter this gear two state. The Brain shifts us up first thing in the morning, from gear one up to gear two by calibrating us to the demands in the world around us. So uncertainty is a big signal. So if you are surrounded by uncertainty, your brain immediately pushes down on the pedal and your gear shifts up. If you're in gear two, this will take you to gear three. But what is uncertainty? That's also qualitative measure. So for that trader sitting at that bank, uncertainty does not mean a million lost in two seconds. For that trader, uncertainty means many, many millions lost across the whole day. Or put the possibility of that that is just enough uncertainty to put that trader's brain into gear too, and that's why that trader is feeling really good and comfortable and focused and energised doing that kind of work. Now another person and really on these trading floors until a few years ago, before AI, you just needed to go to the go to a different part of that same room and look at the quants, the quantitative analysts. They are mostly math. They used to be mostly mathematicians, and many of them like to be calm the tiniest micro digit perturbation would raise their gear from one to three. So for them, their makeup is such that a very low level of uncertainty rattles them up a gear. Now it's really important to realise that on that same floor both this. Mathematician and this trader are completely neck and neck in terms of potential, IQ, intellect, achievement, everything, but they need very distinct environments to let that potential out. So when we are looking at if we are imposing the same routine, the same structure, the same break times, the same levels of pressure, the same deadlines across an entire team. If they're doing low, low cognitive level quantitative work, that's fine, but that's now going to be done by AI if you want to tap the potential of every individual. In this way, you need to taper and tailor these constraints to fit your particular team members, gear personality, because only by doing that will you let them flourish. I mean, going back to the person I was, one of them who performs really well on a Friday afternoon in her math class, same exam, in fact, an easier test. In an exam, you do really badly. That's because the setting of an exam immediately cranks up the gear, and as soon as the gear is cranked up to gear three, you lose the ability to focus. You definitely lose the ability to create and solve and your performance goes down.

Jean Gomes:

This is fascinating in terms of the the future design of organisations and cultures and workplaces and so on. Are you seeing anywhere where people are getting this and actually implementing some, you know, acting on on the these insights.

Mithu Storoni:

So I have I interact with individuals and teams in corporations, and many of them have the problem is that at this stage, it's there are no mechanisms in place to measure quality. However, if you look at microcosms, such as I have been looking at individual teams or sections of corporations, they do report that if they do make these changes, for instance, splitting up creativity with focused attention, looking at individual demands at this all the you know, At the same time, you have to maintain fairness. You have to maintain a degree of not making one team member feel that their demands are greater or they require more breaks, etc. So you have to be very fair. You have to very transparent. But if you then do a qualitative assessment, which you can do within a team, you don't have to, you don't have, you don't have structures in place across a corporation, but you can do very well within a team. I am getting plenty of positive feedback, but I would say that one of the most interesting feedbacks I've received is actually when this book first came out, three journalists whom I didn't know from newspapers. I won't name, but they have, they're quite well known newspapers told told me they were just going to try the book. And I was absolutely terrified, because I didn't know what, how they usually worked, and whether they would, whether they would find it successful. And all three found that their productivity was massively enhanced, and they wrote about it. And this is without any interaction from me and within their organisations. They are competing so, so any form of broadcaster, any form of news media organisation, now has a large part of their work being done by AI, but what these journalists reported is that they could actually spend far less time working and producing far better quality of work by working in these rhythmic cycles, by scheduling their work in the way that I've described, and By compartmentalising their work depending on how they are, depending on the intensity of the work, and suiting deadlines and other things to their gear personalities. So I

Scott Allender:

just want to come back to continually building self awareness around all of these things that you're talking about, and as you were talking I'm also mindful in addition to uncertainty and some other things we've been discussing. People are bringing in to the workplace, a lot of stress with them these days, it seems right. We're in a more polarised time than I have ever experienced in my lifetime. People are stressed. They're angry. You know, maybe I've just received another very aggressive email from John where he's just berated me again and insulted my mother and made fun of my dog, as he does, and now I'm offline. How do I how do I sort of process my negative emotions? How do I get back to the gear I need to be in to deal with what's before me and not be overwhelmed by a world that can be cool? Quite overwhelming these days.

Jean Gomes:

None of that's true, by the way.

Mithu Storoni:

Well, even if that were true, here are some of the things you could do. So what you have to do is you have to use the tools that nature has given you, namely your physiology. So we have so going into the way that the network works once again. So you have this gear network, this blue dot network, and that links in with a nerve network inside our bodies, which we are only again recently starting to appreciate. It's called the autonomic nervous system, and it is a direct reflection of the locus coeruleus network in the brain. So the locus the blue dot network is, in fact, the sympathetic headquarters of the autonomic nervous system in the brain. So you see how all of this works. Now, many people will be familiar, or may be familiar with the term autonomic nervous system in the context of there is a lot of talk now about things like yoga, helping, breathing exercises, helping, and various other Vagus Nerve Stimulation devices, helping, all of those things. The bottom line is there are certain things we can do as we are to return the autonomic nervous system into balance. So when we are talking about being in gear three, what we're saying is the autonomic nervous system, which, if you imagine, is a seesaw or a set of scales. But most people don't use scales like that, so better use seesaw. The seesaw is tipped in the direction of too much action, too much being wired. When the seesaw tips in that way, you're in gear. Three, it's possible to tip the seesaw back by using some physiological resets. So a great physiological reset, for instance, is a breathing exercise. So we know that there is a certain frequency of breathing which returns you to normal. But really the bottom line is the things that most of us know intuitively. So doing a 15 minute breathing exercise of six breaths per minute, really long exhale six to eight breaths per minute, really long exhales immediately sets your your gear down within the workplace, removing your eye gaze, removing your attention from what is around you, and just leaving your workplace and taking A walk that will immediately detach you from the trigger that's causing your seesaw to be shifted, so you can wander, so you can reach your brain can reset, creating distance and creating time in this way from the trigger. So breathing exercises are one. Another thing that is actually very, very helpful is the idea of distraction in the workplace. Now we think of distraction in a very negative way, but it actually has an incredibly positive power, and the power involves that when we're suffering from any kind of psychosocial, stressful trigger, such as your emails, at that point, what happens is our mind takes what it has just perceived and continues replaying it, even though you've left the situation you might have had that read that email, closed off that window, moved on to different work, but you're still at that desk. That email is still playing on your mind, and you're not doing anything else that's sufficient to really grab at your attention and say, Look at me. So in that sort of setting, we know there's plenty of data that shows that using distraction as a tool in the workplace can really help you detract and detach from stress triggers and smoothly move into something else. And opportunities for that include things like having a game in your phone, playing Tetris at the highest possible setting for about five to 10 minutes, or playing some other kind of game, or just leaving the situation and reading something, listening to a podcast that really absorbs you, enough to make you completely forget what has just happened. So that's another tool that can be used as

Jean Gomes:

we come to the close of this wonderful conversation. What's the one thing that we haven't talked about that we really should just leave our listeners with in terms of a strategy to help them on the road ahead?

Mithu Storoni:

I would say actually we have talked about a little bit, but do not underestimate the power of walking, if you have so I work with some clients who report to well, who have had, who have reported to me in the past that they really need to come up with innovative ideas. And I have a 10 Minute Rule with one of them that have now extended to others, which is that if you're sitting at your screen and you can't solve a problem or you're looking for inspiration, it just won't come after 10 sec, after 10 minutes of doing that, leave your seat and take a walk, and in pretty much all of the cases. Yes, it takes them closer to the solution. In a few cases, it brings them that solution. So never underestimate the power of walking while you're at work.

Jean Gomes:

That's wonderful. MIT, thank you so much for coming on to our show. We really appreciate it. It's been a wonderful conversation. Thank you.

Mithu Storoni:

Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

Jean Gomes:

Scott, this was the right conversation for us to have to launch the mindset economy where creativity, resilience and adaptability aren't just innate qualities that we should be taking for granted, or worse, still consider as luxuries that we don't have time for. They're our new currency in an automated world, how we feel, think and see the world will largely define our success and satisfaction. Mitu has given us some really important insights to better understand how we begin to optimise our creativity, resilience and adaptability from a neuroscience perspective,

Scott Allender:

yeah, so much of what we discussed here today comes down to a simple truth, which is that our brain and our body are one system. And one of my greatest, biggest takeaways was the reminder that things like walking aren't just movement, but they are a thinking technology. It's an opportunity for us to reconnect to ourselves. So as we wrap up, I'm going to go have a walk right now, and I might see what new idea walks back with me. Excellent.

Jean Gomes:

Same here. Well, thanks for listening, friends and be sure to join us next time on The Mindset Economy podcast.