The Brain That Had to Build Its Own Map with Yasmina Haryono

Productivity Is Not Learning What fast AI adoption is quietly costing your brain In 2016, the best-known brain-training app settled with the US Federal Trade Commission over claims it couldn’t back up. At the same time, a neuroscientist in San Francisco was twelve years into the slow, rigorous work that produced the first video game ever cleared by the FDA as a treatment. Same category on the surface. A completely different standard of evidence underneath. Dr. Adam Gazzaley has spent two decades studying attention, and how technology can either fragment it or repair it. In this conversation, Virginia and Adam explore the difference between a product “based on science” and one actually tested, what really happens in your brain when you “multitask” in a meeting, and why his closed-loop approach to training the brain could one day work for a whole team, not just one person. Then they turn to AI: the costs of adopting it at speed that no productivity dashboard shows yet, and what it would take to build AI that makes people think better, not just faster. This isn’t a “screens are bad for you” conversation. Adam uses AI every day. His question is whether a tool leaves us more capable or less, and that is a choice leaders get to make. You’ll learn: How to tell real cognitive science from a well-marketed app Why multitasking is really switching, and what every switch costs What “closed-loop” means, and why it is the ultimate cognitive trainer Three hidden costs of fast AI adoption: verification debt, shrinking cognitive reserve and the loss of cognitive agency Why productivity is not the same as learning, and what every CEO should understand before pushing harder on AI

The Pressure Paradox: Why Planning Season Kills the Ideas It’s Asking For Why the pressure to come up with something new is exactly what keeps new ideas away, in your own brain and in the teams you lead It’s the end of the year, and someone has booked the 2027 planning session. There’s a whiteboard, there are sticky notes, and the request is simple: bring your best thinking. Something new. Something better than this year. And what comes out is next year’s plan. Which looks remarkably like this year’s plan, with bigger numbers. In this episode, Virginia looks at why that happens, and why it isn’t a failure of imagination. Drawing on brain research into the “aha” moment and a study of more than 9,000 diary entries from real project teams, she shows how the pressure of planning season shuts down the very thinking it demands. She then sets out an audit to run before your next planning session, for yourself and for your team. In this episode: What happens in your brain in the second and a half before a new idea arrives Why the obvious answer shouts and the new idea only whispers, and how stress decides which one you hear The surprising finding about how creative people feel under deadline pressure, and what their diaries actually showed Mission, treadmill, expedition or autopilot: the four states of a team under time pressure Why most planning seasons are designed, without anyone intending it, as treadmills A pre-planning audit for you and your team, before the offsite rather than after it

Performance Is a Cognitive Sport. So Where's Your Coach? Why the brain you lead with deserves the training, recovery and coaching athletes take for granted An elite athlete walks into competition with a coach on the sideline, a planned recovery and months of mental preparation behind her. A senior leader walks into a Tuesday of high-stakes decisions with a calendar, a coffee and the expectation that she should simply be able to handle it. Both are performing at the edge of their capacity. Only one of them works in a world that treats performance as something to be trained. In this episode, Virginia Palm looks at what sports psychology figured out decades ago about how high performance actually works, and why most workplaces still haven't caught up. Drawing on research showing that mental practice measurably changes the brain, and works best for tasks that depend on thinking and decision-making, she makes the case that leadership is a cognitive sport. She then sets out the signals that coaching yourself is no longer enough, for individuals and for organisations. In this episode: - Four lessons from sports psychology that most workplaces are still missing - Why recovery is part of the training, not a break from it - Why most leaders are learning their hardest skills mid-competition - What a classic piano study revealed about how rehearsal changes the brain, and what it doesn't prove - Why your brain is being trained every day, whether anyone is deciding what for - Four signals you've outgrown self-coaching, and four signals your organisation needs to rethink its training ground Research referenced:Pascual-Leone et al. - Modulation of muscle responses evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation during the acquisition of new fine motor skills (Journal of Neurophysiology, 1995)Driskell, Copper & Moran - Does mental practice enhance performance? (Journal of Applied Psychology, 1994)Toth et al. - Does mental practice still enhance performance? A 24-year follow-up (Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 2020)

Coffee instead of breakfast. Lunch at the desk, or at four, or not at all. A late dinner, one last look at the inbox, and sleep that clocks the hours but never quite restores. Nothing on paper looks wrong. You're performing. And underneath it, a system that runs on timing is quietly falling out of sync. This episode is about the 24-hour biological clock that governs far more of your performance than most people realise. It controls when cortisol should rise and fall, when your body handles fuel well, and what the overnight window is meant to repair before you wake up. It's also about why the people who look most fine from the outside are so often the ones whose biology tells a different story. In this episode: What your body clock actually governs, beyond jet lag and feeling sleepy What a healthy cortisol rhythm looks like across a day, and what sustained pressure does to it Why when you eat matters as much as what you eat What the overnight window is doing hormonally and at the cellular level, and how high performers quietly cut it short Why generic advice like "eat better, sleep more, stress less" has limits, and what it looks like to actually know your own system

Why the people who know the least often sound the surest - and what that costs you as a leader Picture a meeting. Someone speaks with total certainty, no hedging, no "I think," just a flat statement delivered like fact. In that same room, someone else (usually the person who's actually spent years on this exact subject) speaks far more carefully. "It depends." A pause before answering something that looks simple. Most rooms trust the confident one. In the moment, certainty reads as competence. But how sure someone sounds and how much they actually know are not the same thing. That's not a personality quirk. It's a well-documented pattern in how the brain judges its own competence, and once you see it, you can't unsee it in your next meeting, your next hire, your next promotion decision. In this episode, Virginia Palm unpacks the real finding behind David Dunning and Justin Kruger's famous 1999 study — a result that's been badly flattened by internet culture into a joke about incompetent people, when the actual mechanism is far more useful. She traces it into the neuroscience of metacognition, drawing on research from Stephen Fleming and colleagues at UCL showing that judging your own competence and actually being competent run on separate systems in the brain. Then she turns it toward leadership: what happens when confidence gets used as a shortcut for competence in the rooms where you decide who to trust, who to promote, and whose plan to back. You'll learn: What the Dunning-Kruger effect actually shows, and what the popular version gets wrong Why real expertise often sounds like more doubt, not less The specific brain mechanism behind judging your own competence, and why it's separate from being competent How confidence quietly distorts hiring, promotion, and who gets heard in meetings A practical way to start reading confidence and competence as two different signals, starting with your next meeting