This episode features an interview with Tan Le, Founder and CEO of EMOTIV. Tan is an innovator, entrepreneur, speaker, and award-winning industry leader. Founded in 2011, EMOTIV is a bioinformatics company that uses electroencephalography (EEG) to better understand the human brain and accelerate brain research globally. EMOTIV’s braintech is cited by more than 19,000 research papers, representing breakthroughs in research for a range of diseases, brain impairments, and educational modalities. In this episode, Amanda and Tan discuss using science to improve employee experience, personalizing wellbeing, and the cost of task switching.
This episode features an interview with Tan Le, Founder and CEO of EMOTIV. Tan is an innovator, entrepreneur, speaker, and award-winning industry leader. Founded in 2011, EMOTIV is a bioinformatics company that uses electroencephalography (EEG) to better understand the human brain and accelerate brain research globally. EMOTIV’s braintech is cited by more than 19,000 research papers, representing breakthroughs in research for a range of diseases, brain impairments, and educational modalities.
In this episode, Amanda and Tan discuss using science to improve employee experience, personalizing wellbeing, and the cost of task switching.
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“The nice thing about technology like this is that you don't have that single moment bias that's skewed towards the moment in which you were surveyed. You actually get to see the ebb and flow of a person's emotion, their cognitive state throughout an entirety of a week or whenever you are actually using the technology. This takes away that bias that intrinsically happens with surveys and you really start to understand different types of work, different types of environments, different types of tasks, and its effect on your brain.” – Tan Le
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:44): Tan explains EMOTIV
*(11:52): Segment: Story Time
*(15:11): Tan’s background
*(17:51): Segment: Getting Tactical
*(18:18): What data and science can tell us that employee surveys can’t
*(31:06): The cost of task switching
*(34:42): Segment: Asking For a Friend
*(37:48): Tan’s advice for implementing EEGs
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Links:
Alzheimer’s and Dementia Study
Watch @brainpaintbyjohn paint while wearing EMOTIV’s EPOC headset
Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn
Amanda Berry: Tan, how are you today?
Tan Le: Very well, Amanda. So good to be here. So
Amanda Berry: Great to have you here.
Amanda Berry: When I heard about you and your company EMOTIV, I was just captivated by the idea, so I'm very grateful that you're here cuz it's such an interesting concept, right? Because I know in my line of work, which is internal comms, we talk a lot about health and wellness at work and how, how do we achieve that?
Amanda Berry: But EMOTIV uses science on a. At an actual individual level to measure brain activity, that'll help employees and employers better assess how to actually improve employee health and wellbeing. So I dunno if I'm explaining that correctly. Would you help us with that? Help us understand that and tell us about EMOTIV and what it is.
Tan Le: Yeah, absolutely. And you did a great job, Amanda. Don't Thank you. I wouldn't downplay that introduction. That was very well put. Essentially what EMOTIV does is we seek to decode understanding of the human brain. What we do is we measure electrical signals that, uh, result from neurons.
Tan Le: Firing. So when the neurons in your brain fire, there's a chemical reaction that takes place and that emits an electrical impulse. This is what we're essentially measuring. It's just changes in voltage fluctuations that we can observe from the surface of the scalp is not an invasive technology. It's completely noninvasive.
Tan Le: And what we're trying to decode.
Tan Le: Your different cognitive states, your behavioral characteristics associated with that, your emotional states, and from that understanding, we can help create feedback for an individual that can help them essentially take care of their neurological wellbeing. Because one of the biggest challenges we have facing all of us in this 21st century is workplace stress.
Tan Le: And one of the reasons why we wanted to look at the workplace is we spend a lot of time at work and workplace stress has been identified as the health epidemic of the 21st century. And if you look at the stats, the economic impact in the US alone is 300 billion. Dollars a year, right? So that is a staggering number.
Tan Le: And what does that cost from? It's from stress, right? Stress and stress related issues, whether it's absenteeism, whether it's having burnout, mental breakdown, things like that's associated with workplace stress. It's a staggering number, and that's just the economic cost. But when you think about the human cost of that, right?
Tan Le: You have an employee group that you work with, you care about, it's friends, your people that you're spending eight plus hours a day with. You wanna make sure that these people are healthy and are able to look after themselves. And so I'm really excited by the fact that we have a technology now. We have tools today that make it really easy for anybody to be able to.
Tan Le: Measure their brain and then make better choices based on the feedback to help take care of their own neurological wellbeing. How is this
Amanda Berry: driven? Cause I'm, what I'm thinking of is like company calls, EMOTIV gets these devices handsome to their employees. Is this employee driven? Is this company driven?
Amanda Berry: What does that look like? Meaning, can anyone get one or do you have to have a company sponsored? Anyone
Tan Le: can get one. At the end of the day, I think even if an employee sponsors this sort of program, it needs to be employee led in many ways because employees. Ultimately need to be comfortable with learning about themselves, discovering this organ, right, their own brain, getting to know it, learning how it functions, learning more about themselves, and then learning how to use their brain in a more optimal way, whether it's at home, at work.
Tan Le: Getting entertained, whatever it is that you might be doing, but getting to know your own brain so that you can make better choices to preserve your cognitive resilience and brain health. And so this is how we think about it. It's wonderful if an employee is able to support the employee in purchasing the equipment, but typically we do a combination of both.
Tan Le: So what does it
Amanda Berry: look like? I know for people who are just listening, they won't be able to see it, so I'll try to describe it after you're, you're showing it
Tan Le: here. Essentially, it's a headphones. It has audio, it has a mic because it looks like a pair of headphones. It behaves like a pair of headphones.
Tan Le: These tips, which basically go into the ear, they are actually conductive, and we use that as a sensor for measuring the brain, and so as in addition to it being headphones, they also measure and observe what's going on in your brain.
Amanda Berry: You know what those remind me of? I used to run a lot and so like almost they were running headphones cuz they clip around your ears so that they stay on a little better.
Amanda Berry: Yes. And not fall off. That's what those look like to me. Yes. And we are
Tan Le: exploring new form factors as well. So I think that over time they will just think of them as. Headphones that will basically incorporate technology that will allow us to get to know our brains better. Do you wear those regularly? I wear every day.
Tan Le: I am pretty curious about my brain and I been curious about my brain well before I started EMOTIV and so. Now that the form factor is so easy to use, I use mine all the time and I learn so much about my brain. I know that I have really great memory, which just, which is something really, really amazing.
Tan Le: I have really, really good memory. I'm like in the 90 percentile in my age group with memory, but I care a lot about memory, but then I have impulse control. Terrible at it.
Amanda Berry: What does that mean exactly? So
Tan Le: essentially, when it comes to no go, no-go decisions. Let's say you were playing a computer game where you had to only kill the enemies but not kill your friendlies.
Tan Le: I get very excited and I'll end up just. It's going too fast and so I will inevitably kill some friendlier as well. On accident. Yeah. Not by accident. So the, so that's what I, by impulse control the go no go response is that Responsiveness is not very good.
Amanda Berry: It's really awesome to think about being able to know yourself on that level.
Amanda Berry: Like I'm sure maybe on some level you knew that, but to actually see the data, see the science, you
Tan Le: have no idea. Because I always thought my memory was is real, really bad. Ok. But what I learned about my memory is that it's bad because I'm not paying attention. Yeah. So if I'm not paying attention, there's no way that I can direct my memory.
Tan Le: But if I am paying attention and I'm doing a memory specific exercise, my memory.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, I can imagine how that information you can use at work. Speaking of that, that, that just brought up an idea, I wanna talk about resistance to, you know, if an employer sponsored employee resistance. Yes. Ethical and privacy concerns.
Amanda Berry: I can imagine if I'm, if I'm wearing one of these and then my boss can see the data behind it while I get in trouble. I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit about sort of ethical and privacy. Concerns
Tan Le: I, this is something that we care so much about. Cause when you create a technology like this, one of the things that you care most about is building trust with your community.
Tan Le: Right? And so I care a lot about that. And as an organization pioneering in this space, we've done a lot of work in Neuroethics. And one of the things.
Tan Le: Any brain data that you generate belongs to you and you also have full control over what, when, and how you share that data. So at any point in time, you will not be sharing information that you do not want shared with anybody else, any third party. So if, even if an employer was to sponsor program, your data will not be shared with the employer now may choose.
Tan Le: To share an anonymous de-identified part of the data with your employer. But even if you choose and consent to sharing the aggregated data and the dashboards, it'll not be shared unless it reaches an anonymity threshold. So we have two LE levels of control. The first level of control is at the individual layer where the user says, yeah, you know what?
Tan Le: I'm fine with that. I'm comfortable with sharing my aggregated data. However, if we feel that based on statistics, if the threshold in your group is too small and we haven't reached an anonymity threshold, then we will not share that data. So let's say for example, you a team of two people. Even though you consented, that's just not enough to be able to preserve your anonymity.
Tan Le: And in that case, the data would not be shared at all. And so I think with the duality in the two-step process, it provides a lot of comfort to an individual that their data, one, they have full control over it. And even if they were sharing, it'll only be shared if it's in an aggregated de-identified form.
Amanda Berry: Okay. And, and doesn't record any, like biometric data
Tan Le: or, or anything like that? No. So the brain itself, the time series data that we can get from your brain isn't personally identifiable. So I can't look at your brain data and say, that's Amanda, that's tan's brain. Unfortunately, it's not that high resolution in terms of the data, so it's just an electrical readout.
Tan Le: And so unfortunately right now, There's just no way to be able to identify an individual, specific individual from your brain data. We're gonna
Amanda Berry: move into our story time segment. Welcome
Tan Le: to story time, story
Producer 2: time, story
Tan Le: time. Lemme give you a story.
Amanda Berry: You're the founder and c e o of EMOTIV. I think it's just such a very, it's a very fascinating concept. Can you talk about what your inspiration was to creating this
Tan Le: company? Yes. So I
Tan Le: was intrinsically motivated to. Find ways to understand the human brain. And the human brain is a system that defines who we are, right? It's the seed of the self. It's the center of our own personal universe. Our entire experience of the world is defined by the mental model that our brain creates the world.
Tan Le: And so when you think about. How important this organ is to our experience of our world, and yet at the same time, we know so little it. And so when I first started and I started, modalities do typically research or study the brain. It was very limited. We only study our brains when there's something wrong with it.
Tan Le: That's. Basically how science worked at that time. And yet our brain is system that is designed to evolve and adapt based on our life experience, right? So if it's evolving and adapting, and I only have a snapshot, my brain, when something. Is wrong. How on earth do you even calibrate for that? How do you even know what's going on?
Tan Le: And the burden of neurological impairments is really staggering. There's so many people. So one in three is gonna be impacted by neurological impairments at one point in their life. And so when you think about that number, it's really terrifying that we only study brains when there's something wrong.
Tan Le: And so, given that I. I wanted to invest my life and spend my life's work on studying this organ, and it's been a really fascinating journey because we focus on studying the brain in context. So we study the brain when you might be tracking up a mountain, when you might be a NASA team that's looking humans, Mars and deterioration in.
Tan Le: Mental performance when you're exposed to very extreme environments. You could be someone looking to understand neuro synchrony in a classroom, or you might be somebody who is interested in studying cerebral palsy in children. And so there's so many different reasons why people would wanna study the brain, and we created the tools that make it possible to study the brain in context all around the world.
Tan Le: Been my life's mission for a long time. And once we started to study the brain, the natural extension of that is how do you actually decode the information that we can start to collect from the equipment that we, we were making a lot more accessible and democratize out in the neuroscientific research community.
Tan Le: And what we started to find was a lot of really interesting information about the brain.
Amanda Berry: Well, you said you've always been interested in the brand. I'm wondering if you just back us up a little bit and help us understand how you got to where you are and a little bit more about who you are. A
Tan Le: little bit about my background.
Tan Le: I was a boat refugee from Vietnam, so my family left after the Vietnam War and we settled in Australia. We're very lucky. We were rescued after five days a night at sea. Can I ask how old you were? I was only four at the time. I was quite young, but I do remember the journey. Quite vividly because that was when I was separated from my father.
Tan Le: We didn't get to reunite with him until many, many, many years later. So it was a very important moment in my mind at least. Um, cuz I was quite close to my, and very fond of my dad when we left. It was a pivotal moment in our lives when we landed in Australia. It gave us a chance to start our lives. All over again, and one of the things that I became really fascinated by was the fact the brain is so resilient depending on.
Tan Le: How people perceive their environment and their relationship to the people around them and the experience and the mental model that, that we build off what's happening to us. We can apply ourselves very differently and your life's trajectory kinda changes so much. So for someone like my family where we had to leave everything behind, starting over in Australia was such an important opportunity.
Tan Le: And cherished every moment. And so we wanted to make it count. And when you wanna make it count, you're willing to sacrifice and work so, so hard. And I think that kind allows you create a certain trajectory, opportunity space that maybe someone who. Was born in a much more comfortable setting, wouldn't feel that same drive and motivation as it certainly was of beginning started, and I, that experience has shaped.
Tan Le: My sense of values and also shaped how I wanna create this technology in many ways because we care a lot about making sure that our technology is universally available, accessible, and inclusive to a hundred percent of the world's population. And so, um, for that reason, we chose EEG as a modality because it's technology ubiquitously throughout the
Amanda Berry: world.
Amanda Berry: We have amazing concept here and an amazing story. I'm just sort of blown away. That's, that's just a really incredible story. Yeah. Let's move into our next segment. Getting tactical.
Tan Le: I'm trying to figure out tactics and be perfectly honest, and I didn't have to worry about tactics too much. Here I am in charge and trying to say, why did you sLep through tactics, tactics, tactics, tactics.
Amanda Berry: I feel like you're leading this charge of creating a better employee experience with a science first approach. What kinds of data can science tell us that like things that like surveys and employee QA feedback cannot
Tan Le: So unfortunately, When we are surveyed, we have a tendency to focus on the here and now.
Tan Le: So if you have a really, really good day, that moment in time, and that survey lands, at that moment, you're gonna poll very, very well. You're gonna have a very enthusiastic response. We have a very difficult time really identifying the ebb and flow of our emotions. The nice thing about technology like this is that you don't have that single moment bias that skewed towards the moment in which you were surveyed.
Tan Le: You actually get to see the ebb and flow of a person's emotion, their cognitive state throughout. Entirety of a week or actually using technology takes away that bias that intrinsic happens with survey. Understand different types of work. Different types of environments, different types of tasks, and its effect on your brain.
Tan Le: And so as an individual that's been using this technology now for a long time, I'm starting to learn a lot about myself, about what happens to my brain. If I'm having a series of back-to-back meetings, what brain state I would expect my brain to stay in for that period of time and what it would take to get my brain in into an optimal state, and how do I create the best conditions to get my brain into the optimal state and stay there for a particular period of time?
Tan Le: The other thing that I've learned is, And we've found this in organizations. One things important humans is machine take breaks working. We'll definitely see a measurable dip in performance. However, if you take a break and that break is not optimal for you, you'll come back and you'll still see a dip in performance, but it won't be as deep of a dip when compared with not taking a break at all.
Tan Le: Now, on the other hand, if you actually took breaks that we've identified.
Tan Le: With an improved performance of generally about 7% improved performance. Now, when you think about 7%, it sounds like a really, really small number, but if you translate that into a work week for an individual that's giving you back three hours a week, Of time that can be in an optimal state. Now, if we translate that into a team of 30 people, that's for every week.
Tan Le: You're giving your organization two weeks of optimal productive time. And if we are talking about projecting that onto a, an organization of a thousand people, then we're basically giving our organizations back. A year over a year of productive time every single week. So that tiny, what sounds like a very small improvement, which is just a 7% improvement in optimal productive time translates into a world of difference in terms of the bottom line for an organization terms productive time.
Tan Le: But then when you look at the human value, right, the benefit need. Right. You're not gonna get burnt out individuals. You're gonna get people who feel super engaged and they feel like, Hey, I'm empowered to take a break, and my organization understands the importance of a break for me. And I think that's really important in driving motivation and in driving engagement as well.
Amanda Berry: I'm trying to visualize in my head if I'm participating and I have those like earbud things in, and I would be able to see in my data, is it how long until my productivity starts to drop or how do I know it's break time. When I look at that data,
Tan Le: you'll get a nudge. You'll get a nudge that will say, you know, It's a good time for you to take a break and then you can choose to skip it or you can choose to take break.
Tan Le: You can set focus times throughout the day. You'll also be able
Tan Le: introduce. Prompts to encourage you to take breaks, and we'll also suggest specific types of breaks that we think is gonna be best to help you get back into that optimal brain state, because not everyone responds in the same way. So meditation, actually, generally speaking, has a very strong restorative power for a lot of people.
Tan Le: However, it doesn't work in all cases because not everybody loves. Meditation. And so for the individuals that don't take to meditation, we could recommend other breaks that is gonna have the similar effect for them, right? And so the idea is to be able to recognize that one, we're all unique. Every single person is unique in terms of.
Tan Le: Their own preferences in when they need to take breaks, what type of breaks they need to take. And so there's no one size fits all. And the benefit of a system like this is that you can really personalize the experience to the individual. And I think that's the most important thing, is to try and think about mental wellness in a much more personalized, individualized way, rather than to try and create a one size fits all approach.
Tan Le: So I work
Amanda Berry: from home. I work at home, and when I take a break, it's like to lay down on the floor and play with my dogs, and I feel like that's such, such a joy in my life. Or I walk outside and there's Lake Michigan, so I'll walk along the lake with my husband and my dogs, and I can do that 20 minutes and then feel almost like I haven't even worked during the day.
Amanda Berry: Whereas if I'm in an office, To me break might be walking over and getting coffee, which I don't really want, but I need to just step away and think. Do you see a difference in work from home versus work in the office?
Tan Le: Yeah, so after Covid, a lot of organizations have started to embrace some sort of hybrid work environment where there's a combination of work from there.
Tan Le: Office, there's. Organizations that have approached us to say, you know what? We really wanna understand the neuroscience of the workplace. What happens to the brain in different context? And are people different when they're working at home versus working remotely? And so one of the things that we found is that, One, it's very task specific.
Tan Le: When it comes to specific tasks. People have very specific preferences related to the task. So for example, if we say, for these tasks, can you please indicate whether you would prefer to do this task remotely or in person? Now, when we actually took that into account and when the task mode matched their preference, The participants actually showed high mental effort.
Tan Le: So Amanda, in what you said, you actually really worked better and you had less boredom. You actually were really specifically more engaged in the task. But overall, there were also some general characteristics that we found as well. What was really surprising to me is, you know how we do a lot of seminars.
Tan Le: And now there's a lot of online seminars. What was really striking for me is that what we found was that people actually paid more attention when attending a remote seminar than when they attend in person, which for me was counterintuitive, but what we found was that location mattered for. Seminars. But when it came to brainstorming, oh my goodness, people were way more engaged working in person with their colleagues compared to working remotely with some sort of collaboration tool, right?
Tan Le: So for brainstorming, it does make sense to come together. But for seminars, I was really surprised cause I, I have been stuck at home for so long. I really love the idea of co coming back to a seminar. In person. But what we found was that people actually did pay attention when they were doing these online seminars.
Tan Le: That was a pretty big surprise for me.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. So do you have other insights, just sort of general insights that you see from the data, from seeing people's. Measurements, data of how this is playing out in the workplace, changes that companies are making, or ways that they're helping improve employee health and wellness?
Amanda Berry: Yeah, so
Tan Le: just generally speaking, what we found is that there are differences in time of day. So typically we would see higher attention, cognitive load, and interest in the morning
Tan Le: basis. Individual differences, but. As a whole on the aggregate, we did find that there was high attention, cognitive load and interest in the morning, which kinda works for me cuz I am definitely more of a moring person.
Amanda Berry: I, I am too. I'm telling you, I'm up like at 5:00 AM I like to sit down and my desk and I'm, I can just really work until about.
Amanda Berry: Two o'clock, I really start slowing down. Yeah, it's
Tan Le: really interesting and yeah, Ashley did find that folks did enjoy that, but I think the main thing is that when we're looking at remote work and office work, the type of work that people are doing and the individual preference is really important. When you actually take into account an individual's preference, then you can really enhance for their, you can really optimize and enhance for their wellbeing and performance.
Tan Le: Reasonable degree of spread when it comes to those preferences.
Amanda Berry: Let me just make sure I, I understand that. Cause I think that's super important. If someone prefers working, let's say at home. Yes. And that's their preference, that they're generally going to be. Noticeably more productive at home. If someone prefers working in the office, they are likely going to be more productive in the office.
Tan Le: Yes. So for specific tasks and specific preferences, what we find that if you match the task to the preferred mode of work, and in fact it, it's not one size fits all. So a lot of people, when you break down the task where you say for a collaboration task, team based task, Most people would indicate that they prefer working together in the office.
Tan Le: Observed their brain in that specific task. Definitely we saw an enhancement in higher mental effort, and so they were putting in more and they were less disengaged, less bored. Right. Versus a data task, for example. A lot of people said, Hey, I prefer to do that at home and. Correctly. So when we actually measured them doing that same task at home versus in the office, we found they were checking out in the office and they were completely engaged at home.
Tan Le: Right? So really interesting that people are very specific in how they like to approach different types of tasks. And if you actually. Take into consideration their own personal preferences, they'll actually perform better for you.
Amanda Berry: That's worth shouting from the rooftops. I know that, that the work from home work in the office has been a struggle over the past couple years, and I think that the theme here, the takeaway, is that if they prefer it, Then they're generally more productive.
Amanda Berry: How does this work when you're not in the office? So if I had those headphone looking things and I'm not at the office, is there a way that that's still helpful for me?
Tan Le: Yeah, absolutely. Because the feedback is on your laptop or on your phone, and so you can, basically, the idea is that here's a tool that you can use while you're listening to music.
Tan Le: While you're listening to an Audible or a podcast and you can see how your brain is responding while you're doing different tasks. So I could be wearing the headphones while I'm doing a call. I actually wear it over the weekends when I'm wondering about. The garden and listening to an audible cause.
Tan Le: I'm curious to see, you know, does my brain go into an optimal state when I'm listening to other people's information versus when I'm actually working at a task? What happens when I hang out with my daughter? Like, like you with your dogs? I love spending time with my little girl, and I find that yes, for that moment when she's playing with me, I'm super distracted.
Tan Le: But then when I get back to work, I kind of get back into this optimal state, and I stay in an optimal state for a longer period of time. So it's really interesting that being able to look at yourself and your own performance and how different types of activities change your own performance and how it changes your attention, your cognitive load has been very instructive for me as well.
Amanda Berry: One of the things that just struck me, cuz I, I, I was driving home yesterday from an appointment, not yesterday evening. And if I wasn't paying attention and I got off on the wrong exit, it's an exit I take all the time, but it wasn't the one that I needed at that moment. And I thought, wow, I sometimes just drive really on autopilot.
Amanda Berry: I don't know if you have that in your data, like be able to tell. How people are driving. Cause I feel as if that's one time when we're distracted with our cell phones. We're eating, we're talking on the phone. We've taken this route a million times, and so we're just on autopilot. Anything from that?
Tan Le: Absolutely. We actually did a study in Western Australia where we have very, very, very long, super long, boring highways and in fact, driver inattention is one of the biggest cause of driver fatality. In Western Australia and imagine this state that's just endless long, long, long roads that they call it the belts.
Tan Le: And so what we found is that we can actually, we did an education campaign that informed drivers of how frequently. They were losing attention or the cost of distraction, right? It could be changing the radio. It could be talking to a backseat driver. It could be social media, it could be eating in the car.
Tan Le: The worst culprit for distraction was social media. That was the finding that was the worst. But there was so many things that can distract you in the car, and it just raised awareness of. The cost of task switching, because the thing is, when your attentional network is focused on the first task, there is a cost to switch from that primary task to that secondary task, and again, to switch back to the primary task.
Tan Le: So it's not as if you've lost attention. You've basically task switch from one attention task to another attention based task and then back again. And that. Switching actually can be a cause of very serious accidents. And so it's a really important educational campaign, but it's also something that allowed us to learn a lot about driver attention and inattention on the road.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, I'm trying to think of how that even relates to work, right? Just the way we context switch constantly. You get a slacked, it's a constant change for knowledge
Tan Le: workers. There's definitely a tax to that sort. Task switching, which is a massive cost to productivity, but industrial workers operating with heavy machinery or anything that's that dimension safety.
Tan Le: Distraction and fatigue are really powerful predictors of accidents. A lot of the time when people working with heavy machinery, we think about repetitive strain, injury and injury from just wearing machinery. But in fact, if you think about the accidents, the really fatal and really high stakes accidents typically happen when people.
Tan Le: Their attention so they're distracted or if they're fatigued and so they're not paying attention to the primary task. And so that, in that industrial setting can have really high impact stakes. Right. So being able to understand that's very valuable. But even for knowledge workers, right? For me, I, I know some of the, my colleagues have.
Tan Le: Very significant things on their computer all the time. I like it very clean. I like to be able to focus on one task a time. I'm very singularly focused, whereas others like to task which, but for me it's just not productive.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. Yeah. I totally, I understand that. Yeah. I usually have. Tons of windows open all the time, min, multiple tabs, and it's, it's probably makes me a little less productive.
Amanda Berry: Absolutely. Let's move into our last segment, asking for a friend who's asking for a friend.
Tan Le: Hey. Asking for a friend.
Amanda Berry: Some people might be a little apprehensive about using this technology, so can you help calm some of those anxieties into using this technology?
Tan Le: So this technology is completely noninvasive. It's been around since the 1930s, so EEGs been around typically to study chronic conditions. So it's. Very safe.
Tan Le: People will wear it for a long time to study conditions like sLep disorders, epileptic seizures, and so people would wear very elaborate systems, not simplified, streamlined devices like this. So the fundamental technology itself is very safe, and as we've talked about before, you as the user have full control.
Tan Le: The data, what you do with the data, how you share the data, and that control, I think is very important. Not only do you own your data, but you need to also have controls over what you wanna share when you wanna share that data. And that's very important to us. I think some people may be afraid to learn a little bit about themselves and about how their brain works.
Tan Le: I think that this is a. Really important and exciting frontier that will give us the opportunity to really transform our relationship with our brain if we think about how much longer we're gonna live in terms of our life expectancy. It's quite plausible today to think about being able to live well into our nineties.
Tan Le: If we wanna live comfortably into nineties or hundreds, we will really need to rethink our relationship. To our brain because the biological brain was just not built to last a hundred years. And so when you look at the pathology of what happens later in life, dementia, Alzheimer's, and other neurodegenerative conditions that happen as a result of aging, there's a lot of things that we can do today.
Tan Le: While we're in our prime, while we're, our brain is still very active, that can stave off and build the cognitive resilience for tomorrow, and I think that's really important. We need to invest in the health and wellness of our brains today in the same way that we've invested in our cardiovascular health over the last three decades.
Tan Le: Right? I think we've done an incredible job enhancing and improving the wellbeing cardiovascular. What we're doing every day to look after our physical bodies. The next phase for us as a human population is to think about how can we safeguard and protect our brains?
Amanda Berry: I've been thinking about this as you've been telling different stories.
Amanda Berry: One of the things that I've always seen workplaces do is they might have yoga at noon, or I've been at, I worked at places. They did implement like a meditation, like a five week meditation opportunity for employees or, you know, maybe a, a room where you could go and just sort of relax or pray or whatever might help you.
Amanda Berry: So I'm thinking about if you had every chief. HR officer, maybe CEOs, you know, what might you say to them to get them to implement this just as much as they do yoga programs or meditation?
Tan Le: So think about this as a tool that can empower your employees to take control. Of their own neurological wellbeing.
Tan Le: Every program that employers implement are different ways that can restore an employee's wellbeing, neurological or physical wellbeing. But we don't have tools that can actually measure its impact on the individual. This is a tool that can actually quantify the benefits of that for the employee and can give them.
Tan Le: Ways to be empowered and to then make better choices as to how much time they spend taking a break, which types of breaks they take to really get to that optimal state. And I think that's really important because if you don't measure. You can't improve it and wellness is measurable. Brain wellness today is measurable.
Tan Le: And so if we can start to invest in the effort to actually measure it so that we can then quantify, okay, well this is what meditation does, this is what walking in nature does, this is what allowing people to have just a four hour at home, right? Or just some flexibility to be able to go and pick up their kids from school.
Tan Le: How much less taxing it's for. Their anxiety and their stress can go a long way because I think being able to understand that everyone's life's arc is very different and at different points in time, people need different interventions. I became a mother three years ago, and I have to say my life's changed.
Tan Le: I have learned so much more about what. Other women need in this situation. Now as a mom, and I thought I was very empathetic before, but I didn't have firsthand experience and now being able experience it for myself, I have revised view of how flexible. I do think that having tools like this, even if you don't actually have experience, it allows you to have definitive.
Tan Le: Scientific measurements that allow you to make better decisions for your employee cohort. And I think that's really important cause everyone wants to feel that level of empowerment to make choices for themselves,
Amanda Berry: be their best selves. This has been informative, amazing, and a lot of fun to learn as much as I can about EMOTIV on in this short period of time.
Amanda Berry: So thank you so much for being here. I, I've, I've just, like I said, I was looking forward to this, so thank you so much. Thank you, Amanda.
Tan Le: Thanks for having me.
Amanda Berry: Before I let you go, will you let our listeners know where they can find you or more information about EMOTIV?
Tan Le: Yes, so visit us at EMOTIV com, so it's emotiv.com.
Amanda Berry: Thank you so much, Tan. This has been great.
Tan Le: Thank you so much.