Summary

02:26 Moved into brain research

• Worked for ten years as a practising clinical psychologist

• There was a disconnect between the mind and brain

• Set up a research program at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge

04:28 What is the theory of ‘the Winner Effect’?

• Landau’s chicken hierarchy

• There was further proof from the green sunfish experiment (1967) and tennis players (2013)

• “It’s a primitive biological fact that winning gives you more of a chance of winning the next contest”

07:13 How does success breeding success happen in the brain?

• Winning brings a surge in testosterone, which increases dopamine in the brain’s reward network

• Dopamine lifts your mood, lowers anxiety, and increases motivation and aggression

• Depending on the level of dopamine, it can make you smarter

• Too much dopamine causes a lot of the problems that we see in dictators

08:32 The ‘Loser Effect’

• All mammals form dominance hierarchies

• The lower you are in a hierarchy, the lower your dopamine levels, which makes you less likely to take action

• This can be seen in positron emission tomography (PET) scanners

10:07 Advice to children and teenagers playing in competitive sports

• You should play to enjoy, not to win

• Training children to always win gives them a comparative mindset, which makes them more vulnerable to threats

• Make your own metric of success and focus on intrinsic motivation

• Teach children to learn from their mistakes

15:25 The potential consequences of power and behaviour

• Power is one of the greatest brain-changing agents

• Bertrand Russell likens power in human relations to energy in physics

• Power narrows your attention

• Too much power for too long can turn into a quasi-addictive cycle

• If a person has too much power, they lose empathy for others, become blind to risk, show misjudgements and become greedy and critical

18:50 Constraining power for the greater good

• One of the reasons why we succeed as a species is because we work in groups

• External governing constraints like democracy and freedom of press are designed to constrain power

• In the corporate world, there is a lot of focus on financial auditing but not power auditing

• Having clear values helps with an individual’s internal constraints

23:17 The need for more women in leadership positions

• Women have more S-power – i.e. more focused on goals for an institution, a group or a society – than N-power, which is focused on personal goals

• In the West, a woman’s self-concept is more embedded in their relations and a man’s self-concept is in themself

• Women are naturally better collaborators and team players than men

• Women help increase the IQs of small groups

• We need both men and women in leadership roles

26:50 The effect of being an introvert vs. extrovert when it comes to power

• Extroverts are more dominant in groups

• There is space for both personalities

28:19 The addictiveness of power

• Addiction to power is like being addicted to drugs

• Power makes you seek more power, e.g. money

• The ego is the biggest challenge to overcome the addiction to power

• A person’s ego swells when they are in power and become more hyper-sensitive to threats

• Through practising meditation and mindfulness, you learn that the ego is just an illusion

40:22 Managing our minds and emotions 

• “Confidence is the most valuable resource a human being can have”

• Confidence leads to action

• Anxiety is the opposite of confidence, and it makes you do less things