Appendix A Virtual Distance and Neuroscience: A Different Perspective

Since we started working on the Virtual Distance Model our work has come to the attention of a number of prominent researchers and thinkers. In some cases, this has led to dialogues, and in other cases, collaborations.

One of the closest collaborations we have is with Dr. Martin Westwell. Martin is the chief executive of the South Australian Certificate of Education, which sets educational standards and provides support for teachers and students who seek to attain those standards. Professor Westwell received his PhD from Churchill College, Cambridge University, in biological chemistry and led the Institute for the Future of the Mind at Oxford University. At Flinders University he led a multidisciplinary team of psychologists, cognitive scientists, education researchers, and teachers focused on improving innovation, teaching, and learning. In 2018, Professor Westwell was awarded the Gold Medal for “the most outstanding contribution to the study and practice of educational leadership in Australia” by the Australian Council for Educational Leaders, which noted that his work “has influenced the way students in this century can and will learn.” From his perspective as a cognitive neuroscientist, researcher, and educational leader we wanted to get Professor Westwell's perspective on how Virtual Distance is influencing how we work and learn together. Karen spoke with Professor Westwell and we have included the interview transcript.

Lojeski:	Hi Martin. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us about your thoughts around neuroscience, Virtual Distance, education, and the workforce. To begin, I thought the readers might like to know a bit more about how you got interested in Virtual Distance and its links to neuroscience almost fifteen years ago, before we even wrote the first edition of this book.
Westwell:	So I remember at that time I was working at Oxford University. The university had just gotten over one hundred million dollars from one alumnus to add to what the university was doing around tackling some big problems, big challenges, things we could see coming over the horizon. We wanted to look even further outwards and see if we could have an impact in the community. And you know, looking back now, that's been fantastic and really shaped my career as an academic who could work with others to have an impact. And so from this new funding, one of the schools that was developed was the Institute for the Future of the Mind where I led. We were charged to look at how technology was changing our minds. And at the time, we started off looking at the very young and the very old (because during those years we see some of the most interesting things going on in the brain). And we wanted to find out what kinds of positive impacts or negative impacts it could have and how it might be changing things. And so it was just a fantastic opportunity to take our thinking into the future; take the research that had already been going on and connect that to think about what sort of impact we could make in the community in terms of the future. And so when we look at cognitive neuroscience we can see that there were some really interesting things about the way that people work – the way that people respond to each other. But what we could also see at that time was that the rules of human interaction were changing. When you put technology in place, that changes many of the assumptions that we were making about the way that people interact; it all starts to change when you use technology. Some of the modern ways in which we work starts to impact the way that people think. So that was of interest to us. One of the areas we were working on was around multitasking because with the use of technology we see lots of people “double screening” or trying to do one task but then they got a phone call or the phone was getting messages about one thing or another. So that was some research that we were really interested in: work driven by the availability of technology, changing the way that people think. So really that's what got us into thinking about Virtual Distance and lead to the article we wrote with the organization you were leading at the time as research director. That was back in 2007, in the New York Times. As we were thinking from a neuroscience point of view about how these rules of interaction were changing, we thought that you'd already been thinking about how these rules of interaction were changing, but from a business point of view, and so we came from completely different places. But we landed at the same spot. And so we just had this great natural complementarity in the way that we were thinking about problems we were grappling with and some of the kinds of things you were thinking about.
Lojeski:	Yes – it's amazing that from those humble beginnings, we've been working together closely on a number of things since then. At this point it might be interesting for the reader to know that we have never met Martin in person even though we have done lots of research together, written articles together, and collaborated closely. It's a great example of how Virtual Distance can be quite low between people who have never met when Operational and Affinity Distance are low. So you mentioned that technology changes the rules of human interaction. We've written a paper together on this, have done a podcast the readers can go to, but can you say a bit more about that here?
Westwell:	Sure. So usually when we're face-to-face, we have to take some cognitive and psychological shortcuts to understand other people. We've got these ways of making things easy and to think about what other people are saying. And our emotions help us with that as well. But when we put technology in place it changes the rules of human interaction. In the field of cognitive neuroscience, we can see that the role of human interaction is so powerful and often in ways that don't make sense. It's not about the “rational” interactions. Your rational thought and consciousness is a kind of bubble. It's supported by a thin layer of cells in your brain. It's a pretty thin veneer that's actually just a really fragile crust and really almost everything else is going on underneath. It's all this other stuff that goes on behind it, like body language, the tone of someone's voice in which we speak to each other, the facial expressions. All of these things are really important in terms of making connections, really important in terms of communication. And we lose those if we've not got face-to-face interaction, if we're not in the same room with the person and having that kind of face-to-face interaction. I think there is a whole host of things that happen face-to-face that just can't happen electronically. We recognize that in lots of ways. The subtle unconscious ways we influence each other's behavior when we're together are often much more profoundly impactful than just having information that comes through electronically. All of those things shape the way we think, the way we behave in all kinds of subtle and unconscious ways. And those face-to-face interactions give us the cues we use to take those natural cognitive shortcuts in the brain along with the help of our emotions.
Lojeski:	So when we're mediated it sounds like we don't have the raw materials like facial expressions or body language that allow our natural cognitive processes to work properly. So what do we do instead?
Westwell:	So when we're face-to-face we've got some of these psychological shortcuts, some ways of making things easy for us to understand each other when we communicate and our emotions help us with that. Daniel Kahneman, in his bestselling book about thinking fast and thinking slow, makes this distinction between our automatic impulses, the easy ways of doing things, compared to thinking slow which might be a bit more of controlled thinking. To get some perspective, when we think about how those different ways of thinking are processed in the brain, that thinking slow is processed in the frontal parts of the brain, the parts of the brain that are more different in humans than they are in any other animals, even the closest animals and the smartest animals like chimpanzees and dolphins. They don't have these well-developed frontal parts of the brain that humans have that allow us to escape from the moment. Animals are kind of trapped in the moment and responding to what's going on. But humans can escape from that and through “stop-and-think” skills we can use these frontal parts of the brain that allow us to say, well, hang on a minute – something's not right. I want to do things differently. So we get to do planning that other animals don't get to do. So the first part of it is the stop part. This inhibits the impulse to do something, to just react, and tells us instead, to just take a moment to reflect. The second part of it is “bearing things in mind” – holding an idea in your head while you build on it, so you can think of other ideas and alternatives. And then the third part is what's called cognitive flexibility, or being able to think of a different thing or making a different decision based on the stop-and-think parts, not just responding in a reactive way that we may be trained to do but instead, respond in a different way, a more flexible way. So you put those three things together and what it allows us to do is to stop and think, bear in mind all the things that are going on and the goals that we want to achieve and those kinds of things, and then be flexible enough to find a route to respond to that. And these three skills together are called executive functions: the brain's executive taking control of the thoughts and actions. And what we're seeing is that when we're using things like technology to mediate our relationships and to mediate our communications, what we're doing is we're using some of the shortcuts that we would naturally use in a face-to-face or some other traditional environment. And we're trying to use them in an environment where communication and relationships are being mediated by this technology. We're isolated, but we're communicating. So to fill in the gaps, our brains are almost kind of making up a story about the people that we're communicating with because they're not there with us. And so we get that kind of “talking to ourselves” as you've pointed out, or a “hall of mirrors” effect because we're looking for the cues and we're looking for the responses we would normally get face-to-face but all we're getting is our own cues and our own response being fed back to us. And so we've got these two systems; the first and quickest is our fast thinking. I think it's fast thinking we're using when we use technology because it overrides everything, because the old rules of interaction, as we said earlier, just don't work for us anymore. There's some new rules that apply to our interactions and our own relationship to that communication when we're using technology as a mediator. “So I think what you've done in the Virtual Distance work is identified, in detail, how the rules of interaction change.” But if we don't know what those rules are we get trapped in the old way of working. But we're in a new system so that starts to break down for us. So I think what you've done in the Virtual Distance work is identified, in detail, how the rules of interaction change when you use technology; all the many different ways in which the rules of interaction change. And now that you know how the rules have changed the thing about being human is you've got your executive functions that we just talked about. So now that you know, you can think in a different way, you can take control of your thoughts and actions. So recognizing that I'm going to think in a particular way, for example, that when I'm using technology to mediate my relationship it's easier to do things I normally wouldn't do. Now that I know that, I can start to control my behavior; I can control my interactions and I can stop to at least ameliorate the effects, if not overcome the effects, by finding some other way of doing the communication or mediating the relationship.
Lojeski:	Thanks Martin. I think it's very helpful to understand how our brain works in that way. I want to pick up on this idea you've just mentioned, of being isolated, and trying to apply old rules to this new situation. As you've said, being isolated changes the rules of interaction and the way we respond using our executive function. But you are also looking at something else that's being impacted – the notion of belonging – or a lack of feeling like we “belong” in many ways that's created by technology-mediated communication. Can you tell us a bit more about that and why it's so important for human well-being?
Westwell:	So we see that when we put technology in place we see this changes the rules and the nature of our interactions. And so that's been a kind of broad theme that we've seen in the workplace and in education. Technology has been used more and more in education and we can see that coming through. But I think this idea of belonging has been perhaps one of the most undercooked concepts that we've been grappling with for a period of time. In education for example, there's been some great work done by Andrew Meltzoff at the University of Washington showing that we spend all this money trying to get girls engaged with science, technology, engineering, and math, known together as STEM subjects, and computer science, and really, what we've been trying to do is aspirational work with them. We've been trying to somehow feminize computer science that's been contrived, you know, a bit weak. And yet what's been shown is you can have incredible impact by instead working on the sense of belonging. In his research, he set up a situation where girls were given the opportunity to take a senior class in computer science to see if they might have an interest in wanting to go on with that kind of study. In one case the classroom was set up in what you could say was a “standard” way. It had standard desks, there were cans of soda on the table, science fiction posters on the walls, and other things. And they took the class and then asked them (50% boys and 50% girls), if they wanted to carry on with computer science after the course was over. And the boys pretty much said they did and the girls pretty much said they didn't. And then they selected another cohort using exactly the same teachers and content and ratio of boys to girls but they changed the room setting. So they put some soft furnishings in place, got rid of the soda cans and instead put in water bottles and also put more artistically attractive pictures on the walls, had the class and at the end asked who wants to carry on doing computer science. For the boys, the setting had no impact and they still wanted to study computer science. But when it came to the girls, now many of them wanted to also go into computer science. So it was a really interesting point that he was making that you can just tweak things a little bit to really change the sense of belonging and that then changes a lot of things. And he asked the girls about their experiences and the difference between the two situations. And they found that the girls in the second setting felt they could be in this field, see themselves in computer science, that they could be a part of it just by making a small change and help a particular cohort in this case, help young women to feel like they belong to this, that they could be part of this. There's a caution here though. You can do it the other way, too, and you can make a pretty small change that excludes people to make them feel that they don't belong. But of course this is just one part of it but an important part when trying to shape educational programs for young people. And of course as a leader now it's quite difficult to be a group champion and work with that group and bring them forward if they don't have a sense of belonging. Another aspect of belonging is whether groups have a shared sense of identity and a shared sense of purpose. When that's not in place than it's pretty hard to be led. And so we see this all the time. There's another great piece of research where the researcher wants to understand how to help kids work together through a tricky task. The task was to have two children hit a touch pad on the desk in front of them at the exact same time. When they started, one child would hit it, then the other, and it didn't work out so much because they couldn't coordinate very well. Then the researcher took some of the kids and had them swing together on a set of swings outside. They had them match their swing rhythms and phase with each other exactly. And then for some of the kids the researcher instructed them to swing out of sync with each other, having one child swing say every four seconds and the other every six seconds. And then the researcher brought them back to their desks for the same task of hitting a touch pad at the same time. The kids who were all mixed up when they were on the swings, took a while to hit the button together but the kids who were swinging in the same timing were much faster to get to the point where they could hit the buttons together. In fact, the group of kids that synchronized their pattern on the swings even raised their hands at the same time before they hit the touch pad on the desk – a kind of signaling behavior that was completely in sync after the swings part of the experiment. In other words, they were much better at coordinating their signaling to one another. And that seems crazy, right? That just by being in it together by swinging together, they were much better at working and signaling each other in that tricky task. That's why these good experiments are important because it just seems crazy but it really brings home the point that if you feel like you're in this thing together, if you've got this coordination of emotions, if you've got this coordination of purpose, you are way more effective than if you have not got it. And so again the sense of belonging, the sense of creating a shared purpose, we're seeing from the cognitive science point of view becomes really important. Of course, we've kind of known that from all kinds of aspects of life for some time. If you've got the shared sense of purpose you can be very effective, like some of our ancient religious institutions, which have been doing this for ages by things like singing together, and actively going through this ritual together really creates a strong sense of purpose. Then you have to look at all the downstream effects. And what we see is that society is starting to fragment and lose a shared sense of purpose when we use technology as a mediator in our relationships. It's great to share information but that doesn't translate into a shared purpose when you use technology as a mediator in relationships. And so now what we're seeing is this really powerful concept of belonging can unravel pretty quickly. It used to be that we'd feel like we'd be in it together, we'd be there together, we'd have all the body language, all these things like lifting your hand at the same time to indicate hitting the touchpad, all these signals, to indicate we should do these things together. And we would do it naturally. Now I think the challenge for us is to think about how we make that part of our processes when we're not together, when we don't have these natural signals going back and forth, when we don't naturally develop a shared sense of purpose. How do we do that intentionally? How do we build that? Because of course the use of things like technology and some of the ways in which we're working actually take that away. This is especially a challenge in today's universities where so many students are enrolled in online learning. It's great for information transmission. But what we're finding is that a lot is lost, students are becoming depressed and disengaged. Because even if they show up for a workshop or a practical class or something like that, because they're not regularly together, they don't know the people that are there. There's no sense of a cohort, no sense of being in this thing together. So even when you are face-to-face, the danger is that you are still feeling isolated because you've not had these shared experiences to develop purpose or a shared understanding. So what happens is the isolation creates all kinds of strange things now.
Lojeski:	Wow. That's really powerful. So what kinds of things start to happen as a result?
Westwell:	This feeling of isolation then creates conflict and competition a bit more because “the other” is everyone else! This is an important point and a serious issue. So it's me and everyone else. It naturally creates that kind of unhealthy competition. And then again there's all kinds of downstream effects of that when you turn what should be a shared purpose into a competition. What happens then when we unpack this a little bit more and see other things when there's this lack of shared purpose? You can see that we've got competition but that works against collaboration. We can do tasks together but we don't necessarily get true cooperation. The other thing I worry about is that we're seeing lots of anxiety in young people. And one of the ways in which that expresses itself is they might have knowledge, know-how and skills, but they're not having experiences of true collaboration in terms of “we invest our time and are in it for each other.”
Lojeski:	So what happens to them as a result?
Westwell:	Well, they're not very good at backing themselves with that knowledge and know-how. So for example, if they see a problem in an exam that's similar to the way they learned it, they think they're “good.” But if you ask them to take their knowledge and use it in a complex and unfamiliar or non-routine situation, what we're finding is that people often don't necessarily think they can do that. And I think that's partly a consequence of this lack of a sense of belonging and that we're in this thing together. Because if you add it together with others, that changes whether you feel like you can have a go at this problem because you're in it together. Failure is something you can learn from when you're in something together. But if you step out and you're isolated, the idea of failure is just crushing. So then you wonder if you should even try and grapple with a complex and unfamiliar situation. So I think that these downstream effects from an unraveling of belonging means that we have to intentionally put in the concept of belonging back into our educational and work processes because if not, it has all kinds of impacts.
Lojeski:	What you're pointing out here has very important implications for our young generations. One of the things we found in the data is that Millennials have the lowest levels of trust of any generation including the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y. Might this issue be impacting trust as well?
Westwell:	I would suspect that there is much more of a kind of sense of worry among Millennials like we're also seeing in younger children. They're isolated. It seems there's no shared purpose. They don't trust themselves to do things in the same way because they might fail and that would be devastating. And it's this worry that becomes the cultural architecture around them. So you expected to be working with others in this kind of honest, open, collaborative way and you're expecting that to be reciprocated. As we move through Gen Xs and Ys and then into the Millennials I think one of the things that we've seen in a report from the Children's Foundation in the UK, is that a lot has changed in childhood and it's gotten a lot more complicated and that it's probably not quite as good as it was. So when talking about the Millennials perhaps compared to Gen X we're seeing the results of all the challenges to childhood. Some challenges are around health. Some are around education and some are around cognitive development as a result. But what's emphasized in the foreword to the report is that it basically comes down to what they call “excessive individualism.”
Lojeski:	It sounds straightforward enough but can you say more about this?
Westwell:	So it's a real sense of not just fragmentation of society but fragmented down to such a granular level that we're excessively focused on the individual. Of course we work hard with our institutions, with schools to make kids feel like they belong. We also work hard with businesses or even industries to work to create a sense of belonging. We work hard on that, even with our national senses of belonging. You know what it is to belong to this country and this nation of people with a shared purpose, shared expectations. So we've got those things a little bit but it's become harder and harder to hold those things together, as you've got this separation. So when you've got that, I think that point of trust really becomes a big problem. And you can see that really coming forward because if you're not feeling the sense of belonging it is hard to trust other people. And where we see that in particular is when there are particular challenges like shared goals.
Lojeski:	So it seems like a domino effect. What then happens to shared goals?
Westwell:	For example, in one study they looked at a whole bunch of things that are related to shared goals in education and even things like group weight loss programs like Weight Watchers. So you know, if I go to Weight Watchers for example, the point is I'm going to be there with a whole bunch of other people. We've got, well, we've got a shared goal right? So we're going to all be kind of working on this together. That's incredibly powerful that we're all working on these things together. And I don't really feel like setting you up and I'll be letting the others down if I don't show up. But the point being made in the research is that when things get tough and the goal is getting closer, the feeling of being in it together starts to now turn into competition. Because when we start out together it's easy because we're miles away from the goal. So we can be comfortable in feeling like we're all in this together. C'mon let's go. Let's communicate with each other. Love and trust that we're in this together. But when you get close to the goal the danger is that that stops, becomes fragmented, and what you get is more competition. And what you find is that some of our highest performing students, employees, whoever they are, if they see anything in terms of the competition they start to post online, as if they see themselves as being better than everybody else. And we have to then ask, is that because the main shortcut we use now is competition, instead of collaboration, because of everything that's happening? And so now this could influence the emotional drivers and the psychological shortcut. You say, well, you're ahead of everybody else so that's all right. So you get this coasting with top performers instead of them having a personal goal and stretching towards that personal goal, because the default emotion and psychological shortcut is to be driven by the competition. And so again I think that's part of this lack of belonging, this lack of trust. And we've seen that, I think we've seen that change over time and the world's gotten more complex as well. And so we're driven, I think, more now than we've ever been in education by actually achieving a “thing” rather than going through the process of learning and education in terms of what it used to look like, as long as you go through the process that was OK and we could do that together. But now when you're looking for a particular goal, getting to that goal will yield these negative impacts of creating excessive individualism, more competition. And so we have this issue that impacts on trust, on collaboration, and on those signals like the kids were doing when they were in the swing sets – those signals that they were sending about a notion that “I'm in this with you.”
Lojeski:	So given all that we've talked about I want to take advantage of your unique vantage point around neuroscience, education, and work and ask about your thoughts on what's next.

CREATING FIRST CLASS HUMANS INSTEAD OF SECOND CLASS ROBOTS

Westwell:

So one of the big narratives in education, one of the great challenges that lots of people are trying to grapple with, is the changing nature of technology.

So at first, we had this technology and that made a lot of information available. Right.

And then we had technology that was what we called kind of “social.” But that starts to get weird because it starts to interfere with some of the things that have changed the nature of our relationships.

It has a coercive impact that we started to see and now have to start to think about. And now with artificial intelligence that's going to change the nature of work and a host of other related issues, to the changing nature of education.

But what is it that will prepare young people for the world's continuous change, including the incursion of technology as artificial intelligence? What does that mean for education?

And so one of the obvious things is that now specific knowledge and expertise might not be so valuable because if the location of that data can be accessed using technology, what does that mean for people? What does that mean for education?

So Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, was talking about the idea that if we try and compete, if we leave education as it is and essentially keep people focused on the content and skills, the danger is that we'll be educating second class robots.

These humans will actually be second class robots because the technology can execute instructions to compute and find information much faster. So we would be competing in a game that we cannot win.

So let's stop focusing on developing second class robots and start focusing on developing first class humans.

That's where the social value is going to be.

That's where the economic value is going to be.

It's going to be in your humanity, not necessarily so much in the old industrial model of knowledge and skills.

So now we're starting to say, well, what does that look like? What is it that we need to be developing in young people?

I was at a business roundtable and we asked what is it that our young people are going to need to learn to work in your industry.

Well, you need to know which ports in your computer are open to the Internet for cybersecurity. You need to be able to know that. But after thinking through it they said, well, we can teach them that. That's not really what we want from our young people.

So what do you want?

The conversation in this case, and almost every case, comes around to what we want is a bit of critical thinking. To be able to finish stuff. But you know we can kind of do that as well.

Eventually the conversation then leads to what we really need in young people is creativity.

And we need intercultural understanding because we need to use our diversity where we have many different ways of thinking across cultures. And that might not just be ethnic cultures but different groups of people with different disciplines to be able to draw on all of that and think about how we're going to use that creatively.

So hopefully these things together create ethical understanding and that human part of us moves to the front.

I need all of that to come through my personal social capability. You want people to be influencers in my organization. I want them to be influencers for my organization outside of my organization.

It's not just about the technical skill, it's about those social skills as well. It's great to have the “nerds” who are in the technology and brilliant. But I also know these kids are going to be the social butterflies. You've got the technical expertise but I've got to be able to connect people who are going to be able to influence people to help people to understand how to use this technology to support decision-making.

That's what business is saying they will need.

So what we're seeing is that it's not about the technology in terms of what we need in education.

It's not the skills.

It's the humanity that we're looking for because we can teach all this other stuff later and in different ways.

So we're looking for that coming.

I think this is fascinating, that what we've had is this drive towards teaching our kids coding for example.

But we've completely flipped around.

What we know as scientists and now what business is starting to realize is that it's our humanity that's really important.

That's what we need to develop.

That's where our economic advantage is going to be.

So we now have math at the top of our ranking in terms of academic subjects and performing arts at the bottom for example.

Humanities are down at the bottom.

Now what I'm seeing is that at least there's a blossoming toward a different version of education where technical skills might still be important but the human skills are where most of the value resides.

But if you see that in the context of Virtual Distance what we're saying is that you're going to have to be able to navigate in a different way; to be a first-class human being in a technological environment.

We need to educate young people on how to understand the ways in which the technology is getting in the way of interactions, in the way of trust, in the way of an effective and efficient processes, and our own humanity in connection with people we work with in almost every aspect of business, education, and life more generally.

CREATING FIRST CLASS HUMANS INSTEAD OF SECOND CLASS ROBOTS

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS