The Reality Check with Dr Nadine Dijkstra (FROM THE INNER CANVAS SERIES)

The Evolving Leader

We’re excited to launch this new Evolving Leader mini-series, ‘The Inner Canvas’ co-hosted by our research colleagues psychologist Emma Sinclair and Neuroscientist Dr Emily Clements. In each episode, Emma and Emily talk to pioneering scientists about new breakthroughs in our understanding as to how we make sense of ourselves, painting a picture of the internal canvas that our mind creates. As a result we’ll learn more about our mindset and why it matters, and continue on our journey as evolving leaders.
In this first episode, Emma and Emily are joined by Dr Nadine Dijkstra, Senior Research Fellow at the Department for Imaging Neuroscience, University College London. Nadine’s research on the reality threshold was featured as one of the top three scientific breakthroughs of 2023 and leads us to question whether a lot of what we see in the world is actually constructed in our brains, at which point we might give ourselves that reality check and ask ourselves if our interpretation is really correct. In other words, are your experiences the same as everyone else’s or is the way you think, feel and see unique to you?
We’ll be releasing the next conversation in this series later in 2024.
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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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1. Introduction (00:00:00)

2. Mental imagery, imagination and the reality threshold (00:03:49)

3. How did you find the reality threshold? (00:05:48)

4. Could you bring to life your published experiment that was focussed on what we talk about when faced with the reality threshold? (00:07:48)

5. When working with people who have different mental imagery abilities, what would you expect to see in those people if you asked them to imagine a particular scene? (00:09:36)

6. What’s the research question that underpins your work? (00:12:33)

7. And where is this helping people, what’s the applied element further down the line? (00:13:30)

8. Do you think the ability to look at what the brain is doing when something is real or something is imagined could be translated to other areas in our lives? (00:14:39)

9. What research studies are you currently running? (00:18:28)

10. If you could zap people’s reality threshold, what could the potential benefits be? (00:20:34)

11. Where is your research taking you next? (00:21:07)

12. Studies have shown that it is possible for some people to see different things to other people. (00:21:57)

13. Do you use the findings from your research when you’re interacting with people? (00:23:17)

14. Why can we imagine as human beings? (00:24:12)

15. If we acknowledge that some people or groups are not able to imagine a scenario, then is that possibly the wrong place to start in a conversation? (00:24:36)

16. How could understanding the reality threshold benefit a person individually? (00:26:12)

17. How does our mind play tricks on us in that respect? (00:27:58)

18. When could this become a ‘superpower’? (00:28:56)

19. Are most people’s brains set up to have the negative construction, to see the threat as a survival mechanism? (00:30:09)

20. Is there an element of constructed reality that comes in if you are in a certain mood and you’re seeing certain emotions on people’s faces that aren’t actually there? (00:31:32)

21. Moving onto the crossover between reality and imagination. In a world where AI and deepfake are presented to us, how can we trust what we see, and how is this effecting the work that you’re doing? (00:32:35)

22. Can you briefly define metacognition? (00:37:12)

23. How does this metacognitive ability interact with our reality threshold? So when we’re trying to decide whether something is real or imagined, what is our metacognition able to do for us? (00:37:59)

24. So what happens when we do have something that definitely feels real but we know it isn’t real? For example when we wear a VR headset. (00:39:09)

25. As advances in AI blur the lines between what is real and what isn’t real, what is that doing for us as humans? (00:41:04)

26. Do you think there is potential benefits so using something like VR? In some circumstances, could tricking our reality threshold be a good thing? (00:42:41)