One of the great conversation points I keep returning to with Brian and Szczepan is the importance of using the right measuring sticks during decision making and innovation.
What happens when we optimize for the wrong measures?
What can we do when the incentives based on these measures are misaligned or even opposing?
What about when external actors- whether silicon or carbon - from our daily life are “optimizing” our own behaviors with measures that are detrimental to both health AND happiness??
Let’s pause for a moment on that note and think first about our own inherited biology and how it can be used for and against us!
This train of thought all started with a simple discussion of the social glue that food plays in our societies.
Actually it started with my aunt complaining about how much my 20 year old cousin eats, and why couldn’t she just feed him a really huge meal once a month - you know – like a snake.
His older sister, “Hermione Granger”, pointed out how sad that would be, due to the social interactions, cultural importance, sense of home, around sharing meals and food prep. We even discussed the differences between the U.S. and Europe, such as Europeans being more likely to have friends over and cook together rather than meet at a restaurant. And what a lucky coincidence that we happen to have to eat everyday!
But the family physicist, “Dr. Einstein von Brainstorm” - to quote Sheldon Cooper! - had to point out that it’s no coincidence! Needing to eat high calorie food every day seems like an incredible evolutionary risk. Powering a highly intelligent brain is what made that risk worthwhile. But how so? We see in nature that social strategies correlate with intelligence. And by and large, the high level purpose of this social behavior can be distilled down to the ability to cooperate & coordinate to obtain food.
For humans, the importance of finding and storing seasonal food longer term, cooking it to unleash additional nutrition, community sharing to de-risk feast or famine, one can see how social interactions and dynamics around food both required and greatly benefitted from a more powerful brain, and one that was capable of passing all of this information on!
As a result of this, study after study has shown how these brains actually NEED social interactions and connections to function properly and stay healthy. And yes, historically that has also helped to keep us well fed.
So: Brains and food. Food has actually been around longer than brains. And over time homo sapiens have had time to evolve this innovative concept called “full”. We stand up, and we go do something else. Perhaps standing up a bit earlier would be advisable in the modern world, but it still happens.
We have, however, not evolved alongside smart phones and social media, nor anything like it. We are literally defenseless. And from our own devising. Our calorie-burning social brains are so brilliant, they have devised ways to feel like being in social interactions, without being so. Initially it was more passive. From fireside stories to radio to movies to cable TV and now streaming. But the lack of a feeling of interactivity and the lack of hyper-personalized optimization of content has enabled us to more easily stand up and walk away.
Both of those things have now changed. We have the ability to get into raging arguments with our fellow citizens – anonymously! - and receive meaningless self-validation through social media posts and likes. In effect, this is an addictive “digital” drug, stimulating dopamine release. But without the holistic social experience, creating problematic regulatory effects with other neurotransmitters like Serotonin and Oxytocin, and detrimental mental health effects. And this rewiring can even create a predisposition towards other chemical addictions as well.
And we’ve all seen the coverage of how this has manifested itself into a loneliness epidemic and modern mental health crisis.
So why have we optimized our daily lives to make us feel worse?
And who really cares? Tech companies are working round the clock – or at least their algorithms are – focused on maximizing that one very important measure: engagement. Should we blame them for giving us exactly what we want? Rather than what we need? That’s actually an entirely different discussion – but they are incentivized to do exactly this. Which brings us back full circle to our previous topic of aligning incentives. As an alternative to fighting the tech juggernauts over our mental health – in between binge watching our favorite shows of course - who out there in the world might have the correct incentives?
Virtually everyone wants themselves to be happier and healthier. And can’t we start offering ourselves the tools to offset and hedge against the adverse effects in our new world of digital addictions? We have discussed how the growing consumer health trends have people willing to invest and take more ownership of their health. But how do we measure the return for them – for you – on this “investment”?
We’ve discussed earlier the alignment and optimal positioning of incentives for preventative health initiatives and healthcare payers. Now that we CAN measure – we can actually demonstrate that what’s good for the patient is usually good for the bottom line when it comes to prevention, and make the case for investment.
I’ve personally heard health systems communicate key priorities around earlier interventions, for example, keeping at-risk demographics sub-clinical in mental health and an appetite to learn more about potential digital solutions that could align with their goals,
And if this type of measuring and tracking becomes standard, this could potentially translate into a new status quo of digital endpoints and digital biomarkers that better reflect our continuous, daily mental health for the big pharma decision making as well. Steering capital into digital assets (molecular or digital) optimized for the right “phenotypic” effect on our bodies and minds and quality of life.
In effect, having the right measures, can optimize the positive effect that AI and devices can have on our well being, instead of acting against it. Technology fighting technology. Or perhaps just containing it, putting up boundaries, helping our brain feel “full”.
Sounds great right? But what does it look like?
Next month I’m going to talk about my own journey and favorite examples.
But in reality, this is an open call for innovation! And so I wanted to pause here – ask us all to think about our most promising measures and ideas on how to start digging ourselves out of this situation!