The next idea to understand if you want to understand human behavior is to understand that there are chemicals, there are hormones, that and chemicals that can be released either in the brain or in other parts of the body that affect how the brain responds. For example, one of the important chemicals to understand for human behavior is the chemical dopamine. And some people think of dopamine as the reward chemical but actually, dopamine is released when you are anticipating it's released when you in order to get you to seek more to seek more information. So it is not just a matter of getting neurons to fire, but it's also understanding what makes certain brain chemicals get released at certain times, and the effect of that. So a really specific exam outcome of that is that if you want people to keep, if you want to keep them involved, and keep them looking for more, and keep them wanting more, it is anticipation that causes dopamine to be released.

And then because of the dopamine release, they want a little bit more, and then they anticipate the next piece and they want a little bit more. So there's all kinds of things that we can do. If we want to increase that and keep that dopamine I call the dopamine loop going. We may want you know, if you Want to keep the loop going, then you give a little bit of information in short, little bursts. And that will keep them going to the next little bit of information in the next little bit. So that's an example of, of why you might want to keep jumping and going.

On the other hand, we know that people can become kind of addicted and distracted, for instance, to their cell phones because there's always a little bit of information, a little bit of information. And because information is unpredictable, I don't know what I'm going to get a text. I don't know what I'm going to get a message that keeps dopamine going, but it also distracts people. So you may want to design your product or service or communication in little unpredictable bursts. To keep the Open Meeting going and keep people interested in grab them and bring them in and pull them in. But if you know that you don't want them to get distracted You want them to be focused, then you don't want to do that you don't want to get the dopamine release going.

So that's an example of how you can actually have some control over brain chemicals. We know that when a story has a certain structure and flow, it causes the release of certain brain chemicals like dopamine. If there's resolution at the end, dopamine will be released. We know that if there's tension at the beginning, cortisol is released. And then cortisol because of the tension, keeps it holds attention, keeps them attending. We know that oxytocin is a chemical that Bond's people together socially, and that there are things you can do to get people to bond together.

For example, have them do something synchronously together, causes a release of oxytocin. If the oxytocin is released, they tend to feel empathetic and close to the people around. So understanding what some of these different brain chemicals are and what they do and what causes them to be released, can be really powerful if you're trying to bond a group, keep someone interested in your product. And the last concept is the concept of neuroplasticity. In the 20th century, a lot of the brain models of how the brain work the assumption was that the brain developed and it developed certain structures, certain areas of the brain that did do certain things, and that we were born with that brain structure for some things and that for other things, the brain structure Developed really early, like, you know, by the age of three, and that once those brain structures were set, they were not going to change.

And so after you know, the age of three, it was kind of all downhill from there. And if you had damage to the brain or injury to the brain, you know, it was never going to recover. We now know that that's not an accurate view that the brain is actually quite neural plastic is neural plasticity is the term that's used. So, there are certain areas of the brain that tend to do some things more than others. But this is not hard and fast, and the brain actually can use resources from other areas, if it needs it, or if it wants it. Reading is a very good example of this.

We are not born knowing how to read. And in order to learn to read, the brain has to actually make use of different parts, pattern recognition And so on in order to learn how to read, so it develops a certain part, it takes a certain part of the brain and says, I'm going to use this part of the brain to do this task called reading, or learning to play the violin. And, and even something as simple as, you know, seeing, we actually now know that, that you can take visual information and turn it into pulses that people feel on their tongue. And that goes into the brain and they do a form of seeing that's not detailed vision, like we know of. Most of us know normally but they still can see shapes from pulses on the tongue from a camera. So the brain is much more flexible and malleable than we are previously thought.

And it means that people are capable of making new connections of learning new things that the brain does not necessarily, you know, decline. As we get older, that and in the future, some of the new products that we're coming up with as we start to extend what the brain can do, and what the relationship is between our senses and our brains. So things like virtual reality and other technologies are going to start to to use our brain in different ways and our brain is capable of doing that. If you understand some of the basics of brain and behavioral science, then you can start to understand why people do some of the things they do. And I'd like to take a few minutes and talk about how we would apply this fundamental information about the brain and behavior to certain aspects of human behavior. So I want to talk for a minute about decisions.

I would like to talk about motivation, what gets people to take action, about social relationships and social communication, about vision and our other perceptions, and then also about thinking and memory. So let's take a few minutes to talk about each of those. And we're going to start with decisions. So there's been an enormous amount of research and the recent years about how do people make decisions and what is our progress That's like, and what are the errors that we tend to make when we're making a decision. And the fact that most of our decisions are made unconsciously, really has a profound effect on the decisions we make. So here's some information, just a few tidbits about what we know about decision making.

So one thing we know is that people have to feel in order to decide, we tend to think sometimes that you know, decisions, that's the logical brain and feelings is something different. But people who, for instance, have had damage to the brain and can't feel any emotions. Also, turns out can't make any decisions. So apparently, feelings and emotions are really integral to our ability to make decisions. It's not just all about logic. And going along with this idea, is the research that shows us that when People are faced with a complicated decision having to weigh a lot of different factors and compare a lot of different alternatives.

They actually make the best decisions when they go with their gut as they say, rather than just doing it as a logical process, which is interesting. I think it'd be the other way around. But thinking about it, we know that most mental processing is unconscious. And so therefore, when we do decide from the gut, basically what we're doing is letting our unconscious do the processing for us. And one more interesting idea, I want to throw in the mix of the fact that people tend to make important life decisions when they are at in these particular points in the calendar. So at the beginning of the new year, at the beginning of the month, and also at the end of the year, that for them ends with a nine so when you're 1929 39 that's when people tend to take action and make decisions about things that are important.

Take a look at a few things we know about motivation. So we know that people are more motivated by the fear of loss than the anticipation of gain. So we have a part of our brain called the old brain of the reptilian brain. And it is very concerned with fear, and very concerned about losing. And so we will often take action if we're afraid of losing something. So if we know that there's only two shoes left in stock, or the sale is one day only.

This provides a sense of urgency because our old brain does not want to lose out. We know that rewards can be effective when motivating people but there's all kinds of conditions under which rewards work and Don't work. For example, we know that if you give a reward, every time someone does a particular behavior that actually discourages them from doing the behavior rather than encourages them, once they've learned the behavior, you can't reward them every time, or they will eventually back off doing it. So that's called a continuous reward. And it's not the best way to give rewards. We also know that rewards are an extrinsic motivator, extrinsic outside, and that intrinsic motivators.

Things like the desire for mastery to learn and grow new skills. intrinsic motivators are usually more powerful motivators than extrinsic. And we also know that if you give an extrinsic reward or motivator like a reward, it can sometimes dampen the effect of the intrinsic. So that's something you don't want to do. If someone is intrinsically motivated, you actually don't want to reward them for the behavior, because the intrinsic motivation will be pretty much ruined by the reward. And we know that people are very motivated to do something if they're doing it with other people, which leads us actually to the next thing that I want to talk about, which is social relationships and social communication.

And we are really social animals. We love being part of a group. We love being part of a tribe. In fact, it is so important to us to be part of a group and part of a tribe, that if we don't have enough social interaction in our life, it can actually cause us to get chronic diseases like diabetes and heart problems, and cause us to die, even though something called the failure to thrive. syndrome where people literally die if they don't have enough social connection. So we know how important social relationships are for people.

We know that if we do something synchronous together with other people, so at the same time, especially rhythmically, like drumming or singing or dancing, if we do something synchronous with other people, it releases oxytocin in our brain and through our bodies. And when oxytocin is present in our bloodstream and in our brains, we then feel closer and empathetic with the people around us. So oxytocin is a bonding chemical. And you can use that to bond a team together. If you have them do something synchronous together. Research tells us that there is an optimal group size to keep a group together, the maximum size for a group where you know everybody and you know, everyone related is actually 148 or we round up and talk about 140.

That's based on Robin Dunbar's what's called strong tie group size. And we know that there are mirror neurons in our brain there are neurons that fire that give us the tendency to imitate what other people are doing. So whenever someone else is doing, we have a tendency to do also. So we've talked about decisions we've talked about motivation, we talked talked about social relationships and communication. Two more topics I want to briefly touch on. One has to do with vision and and our perceptions not only visual, but auditory and touch and so on.

So we are very visual beings. We've talked about that before about how our brain mediates our vision. So some really interesting things about vision that you may not realize, for example, our peripheral vision, the part of our vision that sees not straight ahead, but on the outskirts, we now know drives our behavior much more than we thought. So we may not be consciously aware of what's going on in our peripheral vision. But it definitely, we're taking things in in our peripheral vision, and we're definitely reacting to it. We know that our sense of smell, or our olfactory system, is the only sense of our five senses that bypasses the cortex that goes right into our old brain.

This is why we can really react strongly to smells. And we know we have a special part of the brain just for recognizing and processing faces. So something that looks like a human face really grabs our attention. Lastly, thinking and memory, some amazing research, new research done on thinking in memory. We talked about some of this when we talked about system one and system two thinking, here's a few other ideas you may not know about. Our memories are actually not stored in our brain, but are recreated every time we remember something.

We're recreating a neuron Chase. And because of that, they're very susceptible to change. This is why we can have memories that seem really real to us and very vivid, but actually are quite false. We know that if something is repeated enough, if we hear something enough, we actually come to believe that it's true, even though it might not be true. And this is one reason why, you know, fake news and false news and, and rumors that aren't true, can really circulate all around in our communities and online. The more we hear something The more we believe it's true.

And we know we have many cognitive biases. One of them is the confirmation bias, which means that we filter out any information that doesn't fit with what we already believe to be true. I've been talking about some of the ways to apply what we know about the brain and behavioral science to human behavior. In particular, I just went through some examples of what we know about decision making, what we know about motivation, social relationships, and communication, of vision and perception, and thinking and memory. And these are actually the titles of five courses we have. So if you have enjoyed this, this fundamental short course and you're interested in learning more, you might want to check out some of these other courses that we have.

So we have a full course six lessons in each course. On each of these different topics, we go into a lot of depth, we give you the examples we tell you about the exact research gives you research citations. So if there's any of these topics that you're interested in learning more about, and you may want to check out the particular course on the topic. And if you like everything we've been talking about here, then you might want to check out our brain and behavioral science certificate. So if you take all six courses, which includes this course, you just now finishing up the fundamentals course, the short course and then you take the other five courses, you will then be ready to take the certificate exam. We have an online exam, once you've taken all the courses, and then you take the exam, and then you can earn a brain and behavioral science certificate.

So I hope you've enjoyed this course. I hope it has gotten you interested in learning more. Thank you for joining us.