INTERVIEW
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Hardwired for humanity Neuroscientist and meta-learning expert Dr Vivienne Ming says personal sacrifice holds the secret to humans winning the future
WRITING
Michael Chavez PHOTOGRAPHY
Niall David
So many people learn in deep and inescapable ways that it is not worth trying in life. I would like to change that Dialogue Q2 2018
Dr Vivienne Ming will probably never read this article. “I have a hard rule. I never read any interviews, don’t look at photographs, don’t listen to radio shows or watch videos about myself, ever,” the neuroscientist entrepreneur says. “That is its own trap. When you do it, it leads you down the wrong path. Your life starts to become all about you. And it is so hard to walk away from that – because it feels good.” Ming’s reluctance to indulge her ego is born of a greater belief: that humans should find their purpose in life and focus relentlessly on that rather than personal glory, which might be a pleasant by-product. “Your aim can very quickly start to move away from serving your purpose to serving your outcomes,” she says. “And as soon as you do that, your outcomes start to move further and further away from you.” I suggest that this is the classic ‘authenticity trap’ – the minute you start to try to be authentic because you know that it increases your influence, people start to detect a façade. Ming completes my sentence: “…and the whole thing falls apart.” Joined by Michele Taipale, Duke Corporate Education’s San Francisco-based client director, I meet Ming at her office in downtown Berkeley, California. Mathematical equations, scratched in chalk on Ming’s old-fashioned blackboard, evoke my own days studying downcoast at UCLA, where I’d often test my welcome in my economics professors’ offices. Ming’s view of the campanile at UC Berkeley, the prime Bay Area real estate, reflect Ming’s superstar neuroscientist status – the product of a brilliant mind and an inherent belief that hard work pays off. Yet brains, Ming implies, are much more common than the belief. “So many people learn in deep and inescapable ways that it is not worth trying in life,” she says. “If there was one dynamic in the world that I would like to change, it’s that.” She cites research done at MIT, where a range of students were asked to solve
mathematics problems while being filmed: “If a student supplied an answer and it was wrong, and then they frowned, that was a big predictor that they would give up – that they wouldn’t continue to work hard, not just on that problem, they’ll just give up.” Yet one group responded differently: MIT’s own students. “If they got it wrong and frowned, that predicted that they would try harder. Now perhaps that’s just an unusual experience for MIT students – ‘hey, look at that, I got something wrong!’ – but another factor is that their whole life has trained them not just to believe – but to know – that if they put in more work they are going to be rewarded. They frown because they are surprised they got it wrong, but their reassessment isn’t: ‘I’m not good enough.’ Their reassessment is: ‘This takes more work.’”
Equality of choice
This divergence in approach has clear consequences for social mobility. Much socioeconomic analysis centres on the West’s poor record in equalizing opportunities so a black child from Harlem might have the same life chances as a prepschool kid from the Upper East Side. Ming’s analysis is deeper and more radical. “It’s not just about opportunities,” she says. “Choice itself is fundamentally inequitably distributed. We think we can choose our way into a different life, and we certainly think that other people should. But the reality is that you need to build a community, an organization, a civilization in which those choices will pay off. Because, if they did, people would make them.” She accepts that privilege creates advantage: “We know scientifically that it’s a powerful thing.” But she challenges the notion that privilege is universally helpful. “Many of the formalisms in our privileged lives work against our selfactualization,” she argues. “My research mirrors a lot of other research – incentive systems undermine us and the paths to our long-term selves. Reflect