We often talk about collective intelligence as if it's some magical elixir that appears automatically when smart people get together. Just mix talent with opportunity and—poof—innovation and progress! The reality, as my own dive into the messy world of human systems keeps reinforcing, is far less straightforward and significantly more…expensive. It turns out that our social brain we run on has some pretty significant bugs, and fixing them requires paying a price not just in dollars but in invaluable cognitive and emotional effort.

Every moment a brilliant mind is busy navigating an awkward hierarchical dance in a mentorship relationship that suddenly feels fraught or expending cognitive energy to regulate the simmering anger from a dismissive comment or simply struggling to build basic trust and rapport in a diverse team because the social "glue" has come unstuck—that is cognitive capacity lost. No hard problem is solved. No beautiful art created or life-saving medicine invented. All of that cognitive effort simply becomes heat loss in our socioeconomic engine.

While other thinkers might focus on the policy implications or individual psychological biases, I explore models of system-level drain on our collective potential. We are an astonishing supercomputer that's constantly bogged down running clunky firewall software and arguing with its peripherals instead of doing actual computation—distributed computing without trust.

The invisible cost of our social inefficiencies is a broken market where valuable human capacity is diverted and squandered because the systems designed to connect and amplify us are instead creating friction and consuming our most precious resource: focused cognitive labor exploring the unknown. My mad science aims squarely at this problem: understanding these hidden costs, measuring the impact of these social dynamics on how we learn, trust, and collaborate, and ultimately, building better systems (often with the help of clever AI) that unleash human potential rather than constantly debugging the social fabric around us.

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Research Roundup

Team Building, Team Breaking

Emotional synchrony is usually the social glue of high performing teams, where psychological safety powers collective intelligence and innovation. What about in teams without psychological safety—does emotional synchrony still power performance?.

A very cool experiment measured “emotional synchrony [as] temporally coordinated emotional facial expressions between individuals”. It found the under control conditions, synchrony correlated with team performance.

But in a “sexism condition”, involving insults, “facial expressive synchrony” increased but all of its “positive effects on team performance vanished”.

The very brain power that could fuel innovation is consumed by managing the emotional burden of a hostile environment. Cognitive capacity that could be devoted to innovation is instead being devoted instead to effortful emotion regulation.

Autistic Rapport

Are non-neurotypical people less effective communicators? New research suggests that it may be subjective listener judgements, not objective communication measures, that may be the culprit.

In a fancy version of the telephone game, where information is diffused through a group, “no difference in information transfer between” groups with and without autistic members. Instead, mixed groups had lower subjective "rapport", creating a perception of worse communication that wasn’t supported by the literal facts

Fortunately, there is a way to overcome this “neurotype mismatch” effect: “disclosing diagnosis improved rapport”.

In keeping with my research on collective intelligence and the neuroscience of trust, neurodiversity within groups boosts innovation but challenges trust building. However, the "diagnosis disclosure” finding points to new ways forward: my study of interbrain synchrony might help diverse but low-trust teams distinguish real disagreement from simple “rapport” friction.

If Boys Can’t Be Boys, Girls Can’t Be Economists?

Collaboration is crucial for innovation and talent development, shaping both career trajectories and the flow of new ideas. But successful collaboration is a tension between trust and diversity. What happens when trust is broken?

In the post-MeToo world, collaboration patterns have shifted in complex but worrying ways. An analysis of co-authorship in economics over 16 years found that while cross-gender coauthorships within seniority levels increased by 12.3%, senior economists' coauthorship with new junior women plummeted by a staggering 48%.

Is it When Harry Met Sally or nothing?

Actually, it’s worse:beyond cross-gender collaboration, “new coauthorships declined by 5.4%” overall, and 18% across seniority levels. These new collaborations are the source of the highest impact, most innovative work.

So, while established relationships may be navigating new dynamics, our response to uncertainty is breaking talent markets and creating bottlenecks for the crucial early-career talent mentorship, for junior women and men. This isn't just an academic problem; it directly impacts the development pipeline and diversity of expertise.

Actively audit your mentorship and sponsorship programs. Are senior leaders engaging with junior talent, especially across genders and others divides? A rational need for human dignity should never be perverted into an excuse to erode future talent pipelines.

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SciFi, Fantasy, & Me

I've been a fan of science fiction and fantasy for as long as I can remember, but by near continuous escape and the literary fantasy began with the Belgariad series in the late '80s. And so with some trepidatious curiosity, I recently decided to re-listen to Pawn of Prophecy to see if it holds up as the archetypal classic that I had in my memory.

Frankly, I'm surprised how much I've enjoyed the re-listening. So much so that I've gone on to Queen of Sorcery and The Magician's Gambit. I admire David Eddings’s willingness to let his hero spend an entire novel being a terrified little boy and then petulant teenager before truly emerging as an active hero. 

While I've enjoyed oodles comfy fantasy, grim dark misery, and at least some of the various death trap wizarding schools that have been put down in books of late, a classic tale of self-discovery and heroism—orphans, prophecies, and all—was a simple pleasure. 

Yes, there are parts of the book, like older ideas of gender roles, that don’t age as well, but I'm glad I decided to give it another listen.

I will forward one highly opinionated truth: Polgara is an asshole. Making a terrified little boy do all of the emotional labor in your relationship does not speak well of a 3,000-year-old sorceress.

Stage & Screen

• June 27, Berkeley: I'm talking of the neurotechnology, aging, and cognitive health.
• September 18, Oakland: Reactive Conference
• Sep 28-Oct 3, South Africa: Finally I can return. Are you in SA? Book me!
• October 6, UK: More med school education
• October 29, Baltimore: The amazing future of libraries!
• November 4, Warsaw: More fun with Singularity University
• November 21, Warsaw: The Human Tech Summit
• December 8, San Francisco: Fortune Brainstorm AI SF talking about build a foundation model for human development

If your company, university, or conference just happen to be in one of the above locations and want the "best keynote I've ever heard" (shockingly spoken by multiple audiences last year)?

Vivienne L'Ecuyer Ming