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[Music] if the process of seeing differently is the process of first and foremost having awareness of the fact that everything you do has an assumption
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figure out what those are and by the way the best person to reveal your own assumptions to you is not yourself it's usually someone else hence the power of diversity the importance of diversity
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because not only does that diversity reveal your own assumptions to you but it can also complexify your assumptions right because we know from complex systems theory that the best solution is most likely to
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exist within a complex search space not a simple search space simply because of statistics right so whereas a simple search space is more adaptable it's more easily to adapt it's
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less likely to contain the best solution so what we really want is a diversity of possibilities a diversity of assumptions which diverse groups for instance enable
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but also diverse experience so one of the best ways to diversify complexify your search space your assumptions is through experience and one of the great ways to
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do that is actually through technology so we think about technology and most of our technologies are good technologies but what defines a great technology what is a transformative technology
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the good technologies are the ones that enable us to do what we can already do faster easier more efficient and that's because so much of our society focuses on efficiency it's about maximizing performance right
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we're great engineers but we're crap philosophers right we're very good at making things more efficient but that's only one side of innovation we also need the other side of innovation which is creativity
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right and so the best technologies are the ones in my view that make the invisible visible they enable us to see things that we can never have seen before
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they create assumptions they expand our space of assumptions we typically think of course of digital technologies but we can also think of the telescope the microscope in fact we can even think
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of the sail so the sale was in one sense invented on the nile it's because the currents and the wind go in opposite directions so you could sail up current and then you could float back down
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but what the sale enabled to do was to travel which meant we could see different ecologies different cultures which when approached in an open way enabled us to
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not only challenge but expand our assumptions because we would have incorporated their biases into our own so you could view it in a different way the best transformative technologies enable us to travel
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right but not just travel physically travel in our minds so a book writing this also leads on to things like augmented reality and even virtual reality so in our case we've actually done experiments and
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created a whole platform in augmented reality to see if we can explore how the brain makes meaning by engaging with a new layer in the world not to replace the real world but to expand it
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another example is the free space belt so what this was was a belt that was in fact a belt right one around your waist and effectively what it did is it vibrated in the direction of north which effectively gave people the
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ability to see what they couldn't see before they made the invisible visible and what happened is that people would consciously use make reference well initially they just felt a vibration and then they started
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incorporating it into their movement into their navigation consciously but he eventually became unconscious to the point that when they actually removed the belt they felt insecure right so effectively they were almost
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turning people into birds right who were able to detect magnetic north in their migrations and the brain was able to adapt and redefine normality based on this new
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information that was getting but not just the data the meaning of the data by physically engaging with the world because only in that sense did it come to literally make sense
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