Organizational Neuroscience: Enhancing Cognitive Ability and Revolutionizing I-O Psychology
M.K. Ward and William Becker
Organizational Neuroscience: Enhancing Cognitive Ability and Revolutionizing I-O Psychology:
A TIPInterview With Dr. Vivienne Ming, Part 2
In this special issue we present the second part of our interview with Dr. Vivienne Ming, an accomplished scientist and entrepreneur with ties to several organizations including the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, Socos, Gild, ShiftGig, Bay Area Rainbow Day Camp,and StartOut. In the first part of our conversation, we discussed her work that leverages the power of algorithms, technology, and psychology. From these domains, Vivienne Ming and her colleagues have been able to measure how students think about course topics and precisely predict student grades. She has used a similar approach to predict job performance for someone without previous experience. Excitingly, she has developed a product that provides individualized intervention recommendationsto parents for their children, which arrives via SMS messaging. This product can easily be extended to the work context to help managers get the most out of their employees.
We present the second part of our conversation in this issue, where we shift focus toward theoretical neuroscience. In this issue, we discuss the topic of cognitive neuroprosthetics and tiptoe up to the beginning of the massive task of considering its implications for society and the workplace. We invite you to consider this conversation, imagine the possibilities, and begin your discussions about future policy needs.
In our conversation, you mentioned a distinction between a machine that’s designed to hear versus one that learns to hear. Is that where theoretical neuroscience comes into play?
Absolutely! You can think of theoretical neuroscience as a strong analog to theoretical physics. If we pretend we knew nothing about the brain, we would start from first principles. When I built a machine that learned how to hear, I started from information theory (which is about quantifying uncertainty, such as a coin toss, and the "bits" of information gained)and functional channel capacity. What if I forget everything about biology? What would be the most effective hearing system one could build given the statistics of the natural world? I literally just walked around in the forest in Pittsburgh with a microphone and a computer; and that system learned how to hear in the natural world based purely on these very abstract ideas. We published a paper in Naturebecause what it ended up learning how to do was shockingly similar to what the mammalian cochlea does; individual code words in our system looked exactly like individual cells in the cochlea.
The idea of the “theoretical” of theoretical neuroscience is where we are really experimenting with the “whys” because we pretend we don’t know anything about what actually happens. If you want to understand hearing, you need to understand the “whys” of hearing. My answer covers a lot of sensory neuroscience, but there is similar work in motor prosthetics and now even problem solving and learning. So it’s really freeing us from being concerned with whether we got every ion channel right or whether we know about every neurocognitive piece of data collected. Another way to think of theoretical neuroscience is that it’s artificial intelligence meets natural intelligence. At one point, it was my job to design machine-learning algorithms to study the brain and to study the brain to come up with better machine-learning algorithms.
We saw neuroprosthetics specifically mentioned on your website. In I-O psychology, there has been some initial investigation into the utility of neurofeedbackfor leadership development. How are neuroprosthetics different from neurofeedback?
Starting on the prosthetics side, the only widely used prosthetic today is the cochlear implant. A neuroprosthetic is a technology device that’s literally wired directly into the brain, typically by implanting a device. Cochlear and retinal implants are sensory prosthetics, although the latter hasn’t yet been approved for widespread use yet. Implanting these devices provides the ability to see and hear to people living with profound deafness and blindness. Motor neuroprosthetics have recently been more high profile. For example, at the 2014 men’s World Cup in Brazil, there was a guy who kicked a soccer ball. Clearly, this wouldn’t normally be news at the World Cup. What makes it astoundingly newsworthy is that the man who kicked the ball was paralyzed from his neck down. Yet he walked up to a ball and kicked it, thanks to Miguel Nicolelis. Andy Schwartzat University of Pittsburgh and John Donahueat Brown University have also done foundational, but distinct, work in neuromotorprosthetics. This man at the World Cup was wearing an exoskeleton that plugged into his brain. So he thought about walking, and he walked; then he thought about kicking the ball, and he kicked it. There’s a number of people working in this area where instead of feeding sensory data into the brain, these neuroprosthetics read out motor patterns to drive robotic limbs.
People developing cognitive neuroprosthetics ask if we can literally make people smarter. There isn’t yet any human research on this; the closest thing would be treatments for PTSD, depression, or Parkinson’s disease that originated with stimulating the vagus nerve and then moved up to what's now known as "deep brain stimulation.” My particular interests are in working memory span, metacognition, problem solving, and attention tasks. Imagine having an app that allowed you to dial up and down your attention or your working memory span. Regarding attention, imagine being able to dial up or down attention specific to senses like vision or hearing. I’ve had this question on my website for many years: What if it was 20 plus or minus 2? This is in reference to the famous paper that established that people’s working memory span is 7 plus or minus 2. There’s a growing body of animal research that demonstrates the ability to literally move and replace memories as well as task-related skills, particularly in rats and macaque monkeys. Most people’s working memory spans are a huge predictor of their life outcomes. When we can fundamentally change it to three times higher, twice as smart as the smartest person you’ll ever meet, I think you will have redefined what it means to be a human.
I used to think this was going to be 50 years in the future, but now I firmly believe that 20–30 years from now cognitive neuroprosthetics will be fully realized. Although this is my academic interest right now, we need to start having social policy discussions about cognitive neuroprosthetics today. There’s a very strong relationship between your parent’s wealth and your IQ, metacognition, and so on. If you think we have inequality now, just wait until that becomes orders of magnitude more embedded because now your parents will be able to buy you a better cognitive implant.
So, neuroprosthetics differ from neurofeedback in that these are embedded systems that are directly interfacing with the brain. By being plugged directly into the motor cortex you can have people guide a cursor on a screen or a limb the same way they would guide their own, that is to say, with minimal conscious control, which is different from neurofeedback using EEG or that sort of information that involves more conscious control. I’m not saying there isn’t value in the latter, but if you have to concentrate to be able to walk then you haven’t truly restored walking ability in someone. It’s amazing to see videos of people who are paralyzed being able to feed themselves and to walk just by thinking about it. It’s obviously what many of us can all do, but when someone who is paralyzed gets the ability to walk again, then it becomes a superpower.
Where could we find out more about the work and the people working on neuroprosthetics?
See technology review’s webpage by clicking here. You can get information at the website for the Nicolelis Lab, and you can view BrainGate videosfor more information about neuroprosthetics.
What milestones do you envision for your work at the intersection of neuroscience, technology, and entrepreneurship?
I sit on the board of a company called Emozia, and we do passive emotional state prediction using mobile phones. We were interested in predicting manic and depressive episodes in bipolar sufferers using their platform, which is part of the reason why I agreed to join. What is really crucial to know is that in a single week of running our system with all of their users, it is very likely that we rival the total number of data points ever collected in the lab setting about emotion and mood. Again, this is after just 1 week. Yes, it is not controlled, and I’m not saying this is the equivalent of a lab study. Be that as it may, it might be time to rethink a lot of things. The Big Five personality dimensions is a 60-item survey from 50 years ago. We can take the page from theoretical neuroscience that says, “Let’s pretend like we don’t know anything.” Let’s design these amazing integrated systems to be integrated into schools, into work, and even integrated into people’s everyday lives. Where we could, in a week, collect hundreds of millions of data points, and then come back and think hard. What does emotion actually mean in that context? I think there’s a chance for a big revolution in behavioral sciences where now we can actually see how behavioral phenomena in the world actually manifest. We can leverage some admittedly complicated and necessary statistical techniques that can deal with the fact that it will be nonlinear and it won’t be unbiased. But let me tell you, after working with data like these such as that dataset predicting people in their jobs, that data set had 122 million people and I’ve seen things there that no one else has ever seen. This is something that, broadly speaking, people in the world of behavioral science should really be thinking a lot more about and stepping into this whole new world. Don’t be constrained by what anyone else has said before. Know what’s been done before, and be an expert but let’s pretend like we’re starting fresh.
What final comments do you have for our TIPreaders?
My point about the potential for revolution and reinventing I-O psychology would probably be the best piece of advice I could give. I would also keep a broad and open mind. It’s a highly integrated world. I found companies. I run nonprofits. I do academic research. My skill sets run from product development, design, research, marketing, and probably the thing I do most at this point in my career is give keynote talks. In this sense, I think it is a highly distributed world, and you should be prepared to face challenges outside of your domain. There isn’t one skill set. There isn’t one single thing you’ll be good at; in education we talk about this by asking, “How do we make kids robot proof?” How do we make certain that humans can still adapt better than anything else? With that goal in mind, teaching people to be adaptive becomes the core of the education system. I think I can broaden that from adapt to the whole meta-learning paradigm. Just recognize that your goal shouldn’t be to learn a skill and then find a job where you can do it. Your goal should be to learn how to think about the world, to focus on the “whys”of things. Then find opportunities to create the kind of world in which you want to live. That’s the approach I have taken.
Conclusions
A huge thank you to Vivienne Ming for describing the current and future states of cognitive neuroprosthetics and the value of theoretical neuroscience. We are hopeful that her work at the intersection of neuroscience, technology, and entrepreneurship will bring us closer to a more complete understanding of people in the context of work. More importantly, our conversation with Vivienne Ming shows the innovative power of setting aside expertise to explore some of the truly tough and meaningful questions as if we know nothing about them.