 Thank you, Kajsa. Thank you Media Evolution for inviting me here. And thank you everyone for listening in. Do we have my slides? So I think all of you have heard about Pavlov's experiments that he did with his dogs. When Pavlov brought his dog's food, they started drooling. When he rang a bell, they did not drool. So then Pavlov started combining ringing a bell every time he brought food to the dogs. And what is happening here is that the dog starts to form, or the brain of the dog starts to form associations between the sound of the bell and getting food. So new neuronal connections are formed in the brain between the representation of a ringing bell and the representation of getting food. As a result, when Pavlov rang the bell, the dogs started drooling. So here we have made a connection between two separate independent items. And now they have a connection. The brain has learned to anticipate getting food from hearing the bell. And this ability of the brain to anticipate, to form associations and anticipate, is absolutely vital for learning. And if you think about it carefully, this is something you do all the time every day. And an obvious example is advertisement, for example. You are exposed to advertisement and a product in a rewarding environment. And when you go to the store, you see the product and you associate that to this rewarding feeling in the advertisement. Here is a little movie of how associations are formed by nerve cells connecting to one another. And the more often there are signals through this network, the stronger the connections between the neurons. So the stronger the association. I don't want you to think now that there is one nerve cell for a ringing bell and one neuron for food. The brain is much more complex. It combines information about visual, auditory, semantic, emotional information from different parts of the brain. But the more often you associate to two items, the stronger that association becomes and the more easily it is evoked in your brain and will influence your behavior. One can just illustrate concepts and associations with nodes of items. And the closer the nodes are, the stronger they are associated to one another. And that is reflected in that we are quicker to respond to two items that are closely associated and slower to respond to nodes that are further away in our association, in our minds. I'm going to talk about the same thing again, but from a slightly deeper angle, if you wish. The yellow triangle here represents neurons in the brain that are coding for reward, the feeling of reward. And these are neurons that are found near the striatum of the brain. When the dog gets the food, these neurons fire. It's rewarding to get the food. However, when the dog has learned that the bell means getting food, these neurons fire in anticipation to the food instead. So when the bell rings, this neuron fire. And if the bell rings and there is no food coming, these neurons will deactivate. It will be a negative outcome. And what you have here on the right side is the comparison is a signal that reflects the comparison between anticipation and the actual outcome. And that is something that we call surprise. And the surprise signal is actually the signal that influences how much reward we will feel, for example, or how much we will alter our actions. So the comparison between anticipation and outcome is what the brain computes, and that will determine your behavior. Just the same thing again, but more focused on the learning aspect or the motivational aspect. Here, again, the reward without having any anticipation. When you have performed an action a few times and you get reward from doing your action, you start to understand that, well, if I do this kind of behavior, that will be a reward. You start to form an anticipation. And the more sure you become that it actually will give an outcome, a reward, the stronger the signal during the anticipation and the weaker the signal when you actually get the reward. And if you are 100 percent sure that if I do A, B will happen, then all the activation is during the anticipation and not so much when you actually get your food or present. And this can be a fit into to explain motivation and it can be illustrated in a curve like this. Here in this end, you have this anticipation that you are 100 percent sure of what will happen. And if you expose yourself to that too much, you will become bored. There's no reward. You know exactly what will happen. On the other end is this idea where you make an action, but you have no idea what will happen. And the brain is clever and the brain figures out that it will cost you too much. It will cost you a lot in order. I mean, the brain balance what you put in and what you get back, right? So the cost of the action. And if you know very little about what reward you will get, you get stressed because it will cost you too much. So the best for motivation is to end up somewhere here in the middle where you put in effort, but you have some anticipation, some expectation that you actually will get some reward back. You might not really know exactly what it is or how often it occurs, but you know it will occurs. And an easy example is computer games. The reason why it's so motivating is because step by step, you increase your level and you are excited to see what happens on level two. But it's different from level one, but not too different, right? So you explore, but you still know how to deal with the task. So if there is something I would like you to take home from this talk, if you want to understand how the brain works, it's a surprise, because that's how the brain computes the world. The comparison between what you anticipate and what actually happens. Now in the same way as you form associations about objects in your surroundings, you also form associations about yourself. So for example, we all have an idea of what it means to be stupid. Some of us might associate that to being uncertain, having poor memory. But it might be further away to think about being unhappy. You can be happy, but stupid, or stupid, but happy. We all form these associations, but they are based on experience. So they differ, I mean, the distance between these nodes and what they represent slightly differs between individuals. But the principles for everyone is the same. Yes, so these associations are stored in your memory. And when they become active, they will influence your performance. And one can think about associations to being stupid or being clever as anticipations to one's own behavior, or anticipation to one's own task performance. So for example, if I think I'm clever, I probably expect that I will do well on the task about it. Or if I think about myself as being stupid, I might think about myself as not doing so well. So just in the same way as I set up this schema on my previous slides, in my research, I'm trying to see if these self-associations fit with the same logic as the dog with the food and the bell. But we don't really know how the self-associations influence performance. I will show you some of our data from our lab. We know that self-associations do influence performance. It influences the way you deal with anxiety, anger, job satisfaction, and there is a link to obesity and self-esteem, for example. We just don't know the exact mechanisms. We also know that these associations to being stupid or being clever can be activated from memory, from what you hear, things you read on the internet or in the newspaper, and instructions that people give you. There are classic studies showing that if you tell a group of women, for example, before they perform a mass test, that men are generally better at mass than women. These women will perform worse than a group of women that are not given these instructions. The same, because what will happen is that these instructions will evoke an association in the first group of being inferior or being stupid and that influences behavior. The same thing can be done with African Americans telling them that white people are more intelligent and white men are suffering from this stereotypical bias when they are told that African Americans are better at sports than white men, for example. Then the white men will perform worse. So we are all influenced by these types of priming or exposure. Now, what I do in my lab is that I have people read sentences, and these sentences have synonyms to being clever. And then my participants perform a task. It's a neutral working memory task. And then they read sentences that are related, which have synonyms to being stupid, and then they perform a neutral working memory task. So they read words that are related to these associations that I want to evoke. Now, obviously, half of my participants start reading sentences with clever. Half of them start with sentences related to being stupid. So there is no order effect. But we find three things. We find that this priming, what you read, influences brain activation. So we see a dissociation in the brain, depending on what you have read. We are only looking now at brain activation during the working memory task. So we're looking at how this reading influence your second neutral task. We find that it influences performance, and we find that it influences attention. So here is the brain activation. We have an area in the Ontario media prefrontal cortex that when the participants make errors, this is on the working memory task. Activation in this Ontario medial area goes up. If you have previously read sentences related to being clever, so you have active associations of being clever, it goes down for stupid. This area is involved in controlling movements. Another area in the brain, the insula, goes up for stupid but not clever when they make errors on the working memory task. And these areas often seem active in pain, aversion, and when people lose something, if they lose money, for example. Another thing we see is that if you have active associations of being clever, you will slow down your response after you have made an error. You will become more careful and care about the fact that you have made an error. Whereas if you are primed stupid, there is no such effect. If you are primed stupid, you seem to be uncertain to whether you have made an error or not. And sometimes in some of our studies, we find that you actually score better on the task if you are primed clever, but that is not a consistent finding, and we are now trying to understand why that is. And I will give you one idea later. And the dissociation in attention. So if you look at early and late trials in a task, we see that if you look at this response after an error, the response time increases significantly. You become more and more careful about errors if you have associations to being clever but not stupid. And if you look at correct responses after a correct response, you see that for stupid, there is a significant increase in response time but not for clever. So it seems that if you are primed clever, you care more about errors, and if you are primed stupid, you care more about correct responses. And we can now fit this into the schema I have shown you in this talk, thinking about the concept of surprise. If you have an active association of being clever, you most likely think, I will do well on this task. Well, what then happens if you make an error, you get surprised. Whereas if you have an active association of being stupid, you are not that surprised when you make an error, maybe slightly more surprised when you make a correct response because that's not what you anticipated. So just briefly, the last thing I want to say is that so these processes are automatic. We are not really aware about the fact that we are primed by what people tell us, what we read and what we hear. And thoughts we have just by me telling you that you are influenced by these cues. And just the fact that you know that you are influenced by, for example, advertisement can help you to prevent this influence if you want to prevent it. You can stop yourself from buying the product because you know you were fooled on television when you saw this Hawaiian beach. So awareness that we are influenced can help us to stop this influence. And it's easier to stop this influence because you use the prefrontal cortex to stop it. It's easy to stop if you are rested, if you are awake, if you have a lot of energy. Another thing that we see, that we think is going on, is actually the best performance is actually obtained if you have task focus, if you focus on the task rather than on yourself. So don't think about yourself as either clever or stupid, just think about the task. And finally, what we have found is that if you are in this state of feeling stupid, being uncertain, it actually helps if you get external feedback on errors. If someone tells you you made an error, the participants perform much better because then they can actually deal with errors. So if you feel uncertain, ask for help to have other people guiding you that particular day. I mean, these are things that can fluctuate from day to day. If you have clever associations, people perform best if it's only peace and quiet, no external feedback. Because the brain knows when it makes mistakes and the brain can deal with it if you have the right resources. Okay, so just to summarize this talk, anticipations are formed through associations. And the more you are exposed to two items, like the bell and the food, the stronger these associations become and the more easily they are activated in your mind. And these associations are stored in your memory and they can become activated by cues in the environment. The brain is encoding surprise. That's how your behavior is regulated and the feeling of reward. So it's the comparison between what you anticipate and what you actually get. That's what I just said. It drives behavior. And the self-associations seems to play a biggest role when we make mistakes. So how we deal with mistakes is the most critical part. It's most dependent on what self-image you have at that particular moment. And as I said, awareness, task focus, and sometimes feedback can be good to boost your performance. Thank you very much.