Dr. Mark Williams On The Neuroscience Linking Doing Good With Living A Happier And Healthier Life

Mark is an internationally recognised neuroscience professor who has worked with thousands of students, teachers, health professionals, and company directors keen to understand how their brain works.

He has taught the fundamentals of neuroscience to a wide range of students, as well as publishing more than 70 scientific articles and worked at MIT in the USA and multiple universities in Australia. He is co-director of Brain Camp, a neuroscience holiday program for kids and his new book The Connected Species: How the evolution of the human brain can save the world is a #1 best seller.

Dr. Williams discusses how discoveries in the field of neuroscience disprove that people’s potential is static, and why connection was necessary to human evolution and will remain crucial for the development of future generations.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, could you please share about your background and what led you to the field of neuroscience?

[Dr. Mark Williams] - I hated school when I was younger. My mother had mental health issues and I lived in a small country town with lots of unemployment, so I was truant for most of my younger years. My principal told me when I was 15 that I'd be dead or in prison by the time I was 25, so I should go get a job at the local abattoir. I didn't think I would end up as a neuroscientist at all, that was probably the last thing I had in mind. When I was 25, I went back to school (after several things happened in my life) to get my HSC, and a physics teacher convinced me to do science and told me I was more intelligent than I thought I was. When I got to university, I realised there was a whole other world out there I could be part of and that there were some cool people interested in helping the world understand this crazy brain that we have.

I fell in love with science (especially neuroscience) and ended up at MIT in the U.S. with the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. I was researching the brain, and it's an amazing organ. I was lucky I got in early on, because up until around 30 years ago we were mainly studying animals rather than humans. Then we started studying humans, or at lease awake humans because we had things like FMRI available and eventually EEG became a lot better. That experience was cool because I was there at the start of using all this technology; huge advances were made to our understanding. Unfortunately, most of it's not known by the world out there and we're still using old paradigms which is crazy.

We still have this idea people are born with a certain intellect. IQ testing is based on this paradigm that people are born with certain abilities, and we can pigeonhole them very early on and stick them in classes based on that. If I had been stuck like that, I would've been working in the abattoir rather than going to MIT, so we know that that's not true!

While [Jean] Piaget was a brilliant man, he was wrong; there are no critical periods we go through exclusively during our childhood, we continually change, and our brains continually change throughout our lives. We need to be using them positively, because when we do use them positively, they get stronger and our IQ changes by huge amount during our lifetime, even just during primary school years it changes. To be pigeonholing kids and teenagers wherever they are is inappropriate. It's not where they might be today, all you've done is tested what they were like on that day, and then there's a whole bunch of other issues with this. When testing students, there are certain students who do well because they don't have anxiety, there's a whole bunch of kids who have just as much knowledge as the others, but they get anxious when they're doing the test, so therefore they don't perform as well. Then we treat those two groups differently, but there's really no difference in their brains and what they know.

This is a sad part of our education system; you tell a kid he's in the lowest group and everyone knows what grade level they're at. If you tell a kid that they're no good at maths from a young age, they'll believe they're no good at maths for the rest of their lives when they could have been very good at maths. They could have been the next Einstein for all we know, and we miss those opportunities because we decided early on that they're going to be one way inclined. I go to a lot of schools and do a lot of pro bono when they can't afford to have me come along, but working with the kids who are struggling is the best fun. They're the ones who have a lot of potential, the kids who haven't had all the opportunities before becoming suddenly aware of the opportunities that are out there. I work in several schools where there are gangs, and the gang leaders in those schools should be the CEOs and Prime Ministers of Australia! To be the head of a gang and control all the other members simply via your ability to lead is quite astounding. We should be realising these kids have potential to lead this country, in a way that is to be honest a lot better than it has been lately.

How does your work in schools introduce new ideas to young people and educators around new ways of livng, being, and relating?

It all depends on where the schools are. Every community is different, so you've got to be careful of the community and its expectations. I usually spend a lot of time trying to work these out first, so I'll speak to the kids because I find they're the most honest, and you can get a good feel for how things are by doing that. Most of the time when I go into schools, it's the Year Nines who they want me to talk to first, because the Year Nines are usually having the most struggles. This still depends on the school, there are some schools where they have a lot of issues. I'll usually just work with a subgroup rather than a whole year level, it's a lot easier to do it that way.

Usually, I work with the kids who are having the most issues, because again, it's much easier to shift the rest if you can shift those few. Most of the schools I work with I will go and present to the whole year level to get a real feel for what's going on and then we can work out how to go forward from there and motivate the kids to be more on task. They've got the potential; we just must work out a way of motivating them most of the time.

A lot of the teachers love it, the teachers don't get any training on how to teach when they're at university. They get taught about the curriculum, how to fill in forms and how to go through the processes, but they don't get taught how to connect with the students. They don't get taught how to communicate with students, but they do get taught a lot of paradigms we know aren't true anymore. I see several sticker charts and rankings in classrooms, but we know these don't work and that they're detrimental to learning. A lot of the teachers enjoy it and get a real buzz out of having the opportunity to learn these things based on what we now know works, and a lot of them are good teachers. They'll usually turn around and tell me that some of this is stuff they've been doing for a while now, because they knew intuitively it worked. Now they understand the science behind it.

As author of The Connected Species: How the Evolution of the Human Brain Can Save the World, what were some of your key learnings or ideas you could share with our audience?

The book is based on my last 25 years of research looking at the social brain. Our brain has evolved into a social brain, we have a large brain because we socialise and because we're amazing at socialising.

For the last couple of thousand years, we've been told that we’re evil and competitive, so all these institutions have been set up to be competitive. This works against our very nature, our brains are set up to cooperate, empathise and collaborate, and that's what releases endorphins in our brain to make us feel good.

We have oxytocin and serotonin in our brain, and these are all related to us collaborating, helping, and communicating with other people face to face. Yet, a lot of institutions are set up for us to fight against each other, which isn't what we want to be doing. There are so many mental health issues in society, but why we're getting this huge divide between the 1 percent and everybody else is because it's set up so that very few people can be successful. The rest of the people actually suffer, and so we need to change the way we do that and understand how the brain's evolved. We have the same squishy brain we had 5,000 years ago. It hasn't changed in the last 5,000 years, and that's when we were hunter gatherers, sitting around, talking to each other, and collaborating. We need to realise that's the brain we're using, so how can we use that optimally so everyone can thrive.

What innovations are we going to be seeing next in the field of neuroscience?

There's lots of research now looking at how we perceive the world. We used to think that we perceive the world as it is, and now we know that we don’t, we predict what's out there and generate this illusion that’s not based on what's there. When I speak, what I'm doing is creating waves in the air that move your eardrum and the little bones in your ear and cochlear, which then causes activity in your brain. Your brain creates an illusion that you're hearing a noise, but there isn't any noise. There's no noise out in the world, all that we hear is a complete illusion our brain is creating, and it’s the same with colour, smells, and all these things.

We're getting inputs different to what our brain creates, and how we do that is still a big unknown. We sort of know, but we don't really know. How we know the difference between say a dream and the real world I think is going to be a big area of research. In the next few years, we’re working out how we perceive the world, because we would like to get to a point where we can create neuro prosthetics and give blind people back their vision or the hearing impaired back their hearing. We can do this now, but it's a degraded version of the reality we see. We can't do it fully until we understand how our normal brain creates those perceptions.

On a more general note, I think understanding health is going to be huge, because I don't think we've gotten a handle on the interaction between what we eat and our brain. We know that food changes and can improve mental health if you're eating the right things, but how that works and why there is such a big interaction between our gut and our brain (because we have a lot of neurons in our gut as well) will be a huge area of research. There will be big discoveries in the next few years, and there's a lot of people working on that. With neurons, they're all over the place. We think about them all being in the brain, but there's lots all throughout our gut, our stomach and in our heart detecting what's going on and adjusting.

What practical suggestions do you have for people who haven't heard this information but want to take it to another level?

I was asked many years ago to do a keynote at a psychiatry conference. The whole afternoon was just based on how diet is impacting mental health and how they could turn people around who had had depression for years and years just by changing their diet over a few weeks. This was quite astounding at the time, but it's now much better understood that we need a lot of healthy food. Processed food is really not good for us, and so if you look at what they call the blue areas of the world, people live very long lives (often past a hundred), so long they say that they forget to die! They don't have anywhere near the same mental health issues that we do in Western countries, and if you look at those countries, they have a varied diet.

They have a healthy diet as if they don't eat much processed food, but also, they spend a lot of time sitting around and chatting while they eat. They don't just eat to get it over and done with so they can go and do something, they sit down and eat lunch and dinner with their families which gives them time to digest. This is a part of a whole process they've been doing for thousands of years. That's something we're missing out on in society these days, and we know it is the food because there's been great studies showing this, but there's this extra benefit of sitting with the people you love and talking to them.

Just sitting with someone you trust on a regular basis and chatting with them face to face we know can increase your lifespan by 10-15 years and decrease the likelihood of having mental health issues.

If you combine these two practices, you can live past 100, be healthy and not have all these extra neurodegenerative diseases which is fantastic. It's all about healthy food and eating a lot of nuts, grains and vegetables, not overly processed foods. It’s also about avoiding certain fats, but then there are other fats which are good for you. Olive oil and coconut oil are quite good for us, whereas those manufactured ones aren't good at all.

It is simple, and I don't think we realise how simple it is. I work a lot with the Kokoda Foundation, and they do a digital detox program with teenagers. Some of these haven't left their bedrooms for multiple years let alone gone to school or anything like that because they're so addicted to their devices. Kokoda Foundation is changing these kids when they get them off their devices and spending time with people. We're talking a lot about mental health issues in society today, and we know that the devices, sedentary life and eating bad food causes significant mental and physical health issues. Why don’t we do something about those things rather than throwing more psychologists at these kids or changing them to a different school? Get the devices out of the schools and get the kids to move around and we might solve some of these issues.

We have some of the worst behavioural problems in schools in our country now, out of all the OECD countries we're performing badly when it comes to outcomes for science, maths, and literature. We have teachers walking out of the profession and more devices in Australian schools than any other country in the world. We know that they cause all these issues, so why aren't we doing something about it? I find it frustrating that there's this elephant in the room people won't do anything about, and the excuse is often that kids need to learn how to use these devices for later in life. I don’t know an eight-year-old who can't use an iPad, they're designed to be easy to use! There's no reason for us to be getting kids to spend 13-14 years on a device so they can learn how to use it.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive change?

I can think of two different programs which have been set up by two different amazing women. There's the b kinder [foundation] project here on the East coast of Australia, which is going into schools and teaching kids (especially in primary schools) to be kinder. Then there's the Compassion Project (a part of The Kindness Challenge) being done over here in Perth, which is also an amazing project. She works mainly in teaching high school students about compassion and kindness, and through me they've just joined forces to do stuff together because they are synergistic with each other. Those are two amazing projects happening within schools based on what we know about our brains, how our brains have evolved and how we get the most benefit out of helping each other.

Then there's the UpSchools program by Gavin McCormack and his team which is also amazing. That's all online and most of its free. They have a whole bunch of projects for kids to do where they can benefit other people by raising funds to build schools over Asia. They can write a book and then all the proceeds from the book go to different charities. They do amazing stuff, and they have a whole bunch of courses that are free for teachers to use so they have more time to spend with their students. Finally, there's values-based education over in the UK. It’s been around for a while now, and it’s teaching kids about the values that are important for them to have when they leave school. Those are some of the projects that I think are cool and need more support.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

How We Learn is awesome if you want the hardcore science behind teaching. How We Learn by Stanislas Dahain (a French researcher) is an excellent book that goes through all the neuroscience from the last 15-20 years, and I think that's a good resource for teachers which hasn't been noticed anywhere near as much as it should be. He’s an amazing scientist who has done cool stuff, especially around how we read but also how we learn.

Any parting thoughts before we conclude our interview?

I would like to share that there is a huge amount of research showing that being empathetic and helping someone else is better for you than it is for the other person!

By helping people, you release endorphins, oxytocin and serotonin in your brain which is beneficial for both your mental health and cardiovascular system. You live longer if you help or just spend time with other people face to face in real life.

What I would say is volunteer, do something where you're giving time to someone else for no reason other than the fact it's good for you long term. Volunteering has gone down in this country dramatically over the last 15 years, and I think that's sad and something we should do more often, because it's better for you than it is for the people who are supposedly benefiting from it.