 Next, I'd like to welcome to the stage Mike Nickenschuk, he's an innovation lab senior researcher who spent five years in the Middle East designing neuroscience informed programs for violence reduction and psychosocial support. He works at Beyond Conflict, where Mike leads several initiatives in the US, Germany, Jordan, Lebanon, and it's focused on two major themes. The link between neuroscience and participation in group violence, gangs, extremist groups and other types of organized group violence, and the mind-body effects of conflict and violence on youth and adults. Mike has degrees from Tufts University and University College in London. Please welcome to the stage Mike Nickenschuk. So that's the second time I have to clean up after Jesse and it's never easy. It's a tough act to follow. So just want to do a quick audience poll before I start. In the room, how many of you would say you have a brain? I see the slight majority raising their hands. The rest of you seem to need some more coffee before I ask that question. So the advantage of all of you, or most of you saying yes, is that that means that pretty much all of you are potential extremists, which makes this talk pretty easy because everything I'm gonna say applies to you, just as it applies to Jesse, just as much as it applies to a young person sitting in Nigeria and Cameroon and Burkina Faso, the Philippines, whatever region of the world that your work is focused on. What is the button for advancing the slide? No, all right. My journey into this whole field was an unhappy accident. You could say I come from a background, mostly of working in mental health programs with young refugees and with refugees in conflict with the law. I worked for four years in Muqem-e-Zatri-Lalajian for a Zatri refugee camp in the border of Jordan and Syria. And it was not a place where there was a lot of extremists that I'm not trying to suggest that, but it is a place where there's a lot of pain. And it is a place where a certain number of individuals were either previously involved in extremist groups or were contemplating that decision of taking that bold step. Not because it was something that they ideologically aspired to, but because it was at least something that felt like a sacrifice for a home and for a place that they were losing. And I remember one young man, one of my closest friends now, his name's Muhammad, he said to me at the time, Mike, I think that heroes and terrorists seem to be formed in the same context. And sometimes it's really hard to know which one you're choosing. He said this about a week after his cousin had joined ISIS. His cousin had talked to me for a long time about not that decision per se, but about the decision of going back home. And he said very frankly, no one can try to convince me that sitting in a camp here is any sort of sacrifice for my family. I can't go back to my home in 10 years and have people ask me, what did you do? What did you do while your people were dying? Were you sitting and taking aid from foreigners? He couldn't deal with that perspective shame that was eating away at his sense of self, at his sense of pride. And so he made a decision that affected the rest of his life, that affected countless other people's lives, a decision towards violence. When in reality that same psychological ecosystem, that same psychological ecosystem of grievance, of trauma, of pain, of wounds, of social brokenness could have facilitated his rise to be a great leader in his community. So that same ecosystem that pushed one cousin in a certain direction pushed his other cousin to now be graduating with a university degree after working his butt off to make everything he could out of himself in a legal system that tries to keep him stateless and down. The same context led to both of those individuals. So what is the psychological scaffolding that we're talking about that facilitates someone's growth in one direction or the other? In studying neuroscience, we're in a pretty pivotal time. We're in a place in technological history and advancement when we have unprecedented ways of getting access and insight into some of the unconscious or subconscious facets of human cognition, of helping people and helping ourselves get a better picture of why do we do the things that we do? The truth is we really don't know anywhere from 95 to 98% of the activity of your brain is unconscious. Not that you don't see the results of it or you can't access it, but that it's really happening below a level of your conscious awareness. And the me that I know, the you that you know when you look in the mirror mostly exists in the realm of two to 5% of your brain's conscious and logical and rational activity. So we have many new methods and metrics for understanding what goes on in the human brain to promote decisions towards violence, towards affiliation, towards peace, including hooking people up to funny EEG machines. Imagine walking around wearing a helmet like that all day. Walk around Boston long enough and you'll see a few. The middle one up there is a Fitbit. Lots of you have that on to make sure you get your 10,000 steps in for today, I'm sure. What you can also do with a Fitbit is track someone's heart rate over time. And we know that people who have post-traumatic stress symptoms often have a difference in how their heartbeat functions when they get excitatory stimuli. So when you excite someone who has PTSD, their heart rate will often stay flat. Instead of like a non-PTSD individual, you see great fluctuations, what we call heart rate variability. So you can monitor trauma symptomology over time in a large swath of the population simply by giving a $100 Fitbit. You also can hook someone up to a GSR machine, a galvanic skin response machine. And they did a fascinating study in the Netherlands where they took, frankly, a bunch of old racist Dutch people who were mostly white and they gave them those funny augmented reality or virtual reality goggles, the big headset which they weren't used to, and they had their fingers hooked up to this GSR machine. The GSR machine measures the opening of sweat glands in your pores. And they had them interact in this VR chamber with Muslim-looking youth. And you can see when they interact with white youth versus Muslim-looking youth, their pores open up much faster. So you can even track what we call racism or racist responses to the level of physiology in the skin. And lastly on the bottom here, looks like a guy getting a haircut, but this is my specialty in social neuroendocrinology, which is how we understand how hormones affect social behavior. And you can get a map of the stress hormones in someone's life through their hair, through 25 milligrams of hair. Each centimeter marks about one month concentration of stress hormone levels in the blood. So there's unprecedented ways to gain access to how people think. And beyond conflicts, we have a pretty simple mission. It's to generate and utilize these types of insights from social neuroscience and psychology to better understand the building blocks of cooperation on one hand and conflict on the other. And funny enough, those are the same building blocks, which makes our jobs a little bit easier. We do that by three primary strategies, one through conducting research, right? Through designing studies, through working with partners who have these advanced technologies to do studies in dynamic field settings. The second is through what we call science-informed design, which is basically us taking these insights that we're generating or that other people have generated in the field and investing those within initiatives and organizations who are designing field programs. So as Jesse was saying, how do you design a program that takes these issues of trauma and pain and tweaks the design of what you do? How does it help you ask better questions from the populations that you're claiming to serve and then actually serve the needs that they have psychologically as opposed to just resting on assumptions? And the last thing that we do is knowledge and education. We do talks. We have curricula. We have different training programs for people that are working in the P and CVE fields. A very simple way to put it is like this. We do science-informed conflict resolution programming by working with various partners and we try to push the scientific community and the research agendas in the direction of being more conflict-informed because science, frankly, should be your right. It should be your right for people who don't have access to it yet can tremendously benefit from it. And the way that academia is structured, it doesn't really incentivize doing science in favor of conflict-affected populations. So we're trying to push that agenda a little bit. The four main themes we work in in the lab are as follows. We study these building blocks, as I called them before, four building blocks of either cooperation or conflict. The first is social trust. That's trust in individuals. It's also trust in institutions. And we've observed how the breakdown of trust between people and between people and institutions can facilitate conflict. The second is empathy and dehumanization, words that are thrown around a lot but that have very, very little definitional meaning attached to them in common parlance. The third, and Jesse talked about this, is trauma and victimhood. How does that correlate to or facilitate or even in some cases serve as a buffer against violent behavior? And the last is belonging and identity. Now, all of these themes are just as relevant for 2018 United States of America as they are for studying violent extremism. So these are building blocks of cooperation and conflict transcontextually that we've distilled over doing conflict resolution work for 25 years. All of these four themes come back to one fundamental issue and that's how the human brain works. Your brain has one job and it's not thinking, it's not doing math problems, it's not helping you understand yourself. Sure, it does all of those things, but it's one job is to keep you alive. To help you navigate this world successfully so that you have enough resources to stay alive and to stay alive better than everybody else because it's a competition sometimes. In order to stay alive, it means many things. It's not just having enough food and water, it also means social belonging. It also means having the ability to detect threats that you sense around you. It means mate selection, it means social status and hierarchy. It means a lot of different things in modern society. And at the end of the day, every prediction that your brain is making about what's happening next is in service of that one goal of staying alive. And sometimes we don't have enough information, especially young people in the critical periods of brain development don't have enough information about what will keep me alive in this moment. So the easiest thing to do is to make the worst case scenario prediction. If you err on the side of caution, if you make a mistake in guessing what'll keep you alive, guess what happens, you're dead, right? So you always err on the side of caution from a cognitive perspective. That's a laser pointer, sorry, Jesse. When your brain doesn't have enough information, it fills in gaps. You all see a bunch of faces in there? Those are just bell peppers. We see stuff that's not there all the time because we have so many heuristics and biases that have been built up in us from the time that we're born. You see two holes on top and a hole on the bottom, it's a face. Nope, it's a bell pepper. Next thing you know, someone's selling a grilled cheese with a Virgin Mary in it for $10,000 on eBay. We make things up all the time because our brain is constantly predicting what's coming next for us. And it's always done in service of what's the best way for me to understand this situation, what's gonna keep me the most safe. And that's why we're really good at reading faces and tracing the movements in the zygomaticis major muscle because we need to know, does someone look happy? Do they look angry? Do they look sad? Are they threatening me? Are they in love with me? I know it's the latter. In the context of CVE, it's really important to think about this concept and these two in particular, these issues of belonging and threat detection because a lot of what we see in the CVE space is some sort of manipulation of these two fundamental motivators in the brain, either promoting violence or trying to engage people in another direction. What ISIS, Boko Haram and other groups are really good at is stimulating those two things. We have a place for you, we have a role for you and there's a bunch of people out to get you. And they're out to get you because of who you are. That is a deeply potent cocktail for young people. And we're really bad at designing things that counteract that because we think we just have to throw the opposite message. But as Jesse said very articulately, reacting to someone tapping into a cognitive mechanism is not just throwing the opposite mechanism at them. Doing effective counterme- countering a message is not as simply as counter messaging. Those are very distinct things. So from a CVE perspective, when we think about what neuroscience can contribute, we know that there's three core issues that we have to look at. The first is groups, how and why people form groups. The second is how and why people form and understand threats. And the third one is what are people's wounds? Because if you don't understand those wounds, you're not gonna understand the person. If you don't understand those wounds, you are not gonna be able to shine light into those spaces as a practitioner. And very briefly, I just wanna touch on those three phenomena. And Leigh Ann, you just kicked me off stage when you want me to. In terms of group affiliation, I cannot overemphasize how strong group affiliation influences human cognition. To the level that really is hard to grasp, who you belong to and the extent to which you feel like you belong to that group affects how you see faces. And I can cite study after study about this. We're more adept at reading the emotions of people's faces if they're a member of our in-group. We have quicker reaction time to understanding what's going on in facial muscles when we're looking at faces of in-group members. I put a chemical symbol down here, that's always nerdy. Almost got it tattooed once. This is the chemical symbol for oxytocin, which is a trust and affiliate of neuropeptide that runs through your bloodstream that's produced in your brainstem. Oxytocin facilitates trust. It was first studied in the context of lactating mothers and building bonding with infants. Yet we also see it happen with basketball teams. If you look at studies of NBA teams through a season, teams who have more off-court affectionate touch have higher blood oxytocin levels and score more points in games. If you inject oxytocin nasally to a group and give another group a placebo, the group that was administered oxytocin will share more information with other group members in a game paradigm. It's a tremendously affiliative and stimulatory hormone for making better group decisions, more efficacious decisions in service of your group. So how and why people bond will affect the quality of communications and decisions within that group. Another one is on dehumanization. I'll go to that really quickly in a second. What's important to know here is that when you combine group affiliation with a sense of threat, it is an incredibly potent cocktail in the mind because the body and the brain respond the same exact way to physical safety threats as it does to identity and status threats. Your central nervous system does not have a good way of distinguishing between those two types of threats because you react the exact same way. They both represent a threat to your survival as it's constructed in modern society because without identity, without group, you might die. Like a gazelle at the watering hole, the second that a threat comes by, he's got to run back to his herd. Same thing with humans. When we feel threatened, we have to run back to our herd. And if something threatens that, we clam up, we tighten, we consolidate our norms. We consolidate our identities even further. And we see this manifested not just in behavior but also in neural patterns. So when you threaten a group or threaten an individual who feels a member of a certain group, there's certain parts of the brain that go on and offline in different ways. There's specific networks in the mind that work with what's called theory of mind of guessing what's in someone else's head. So theory of mind was first understood in the context of research of individuals on the autism spectrum because there was some sense that there's a lack of, they don't know how to ascribe intentions or understand emotional inferences and others behaviors. And then that same paradigm that was first applied to autism spectrum was then looked at in intergroup paradigms. Do we have the same ability to guess how much someone is thinking or what they're thinking or guess their emotional state if they're not from our group? Can we guess what's going on in their heads? And we do see differential data on that. We've spent quite a few years trying to find ways to measure that outside of a scanner because you really can't bring a brain scanner to a bunch of extremist groups. It's not practical for a lot of reasons. So through rinsing and trying many different psychometric tools we found that this tool that most specifically correlates with neural activity on empathy and dehumanization is simply by giving someone this assent of man scale. Say, hey, based on this scale, right along the scale, how evolved do you think the following groups are? And truly, people will give you different answers. You think that everyone would say that everybody's really human, almost no one says that. And the data that people have on this lines up almost exactly with what we see in empathy and theory of mind networks in the prefrontal cortex and a brain scan. And interestingly, the two groups who we found dehumanize each other the most on this scale in the past five years are two groups and it'll surprise you. Answer number one, Israelis and Palestinians in 2014 during the height of the Gaza conflict and Republicans and Democrats in the US last year. So we know that dehumanization, as it is manifested in different brain networks, correlates with a couple of really interesting things. It's correlated with unique neural patterns and reactions. It's correlated with a willingness to see passive harm come to those groups whom you dehumanize. It's correlated with policy support. When we looked at Americans' dehumanizations of Muslim refugees, both the brain scan data and the self-report data along this scale correlated with their willingness to, for example, support Islamophobic policies, to support caps on numbers of refugees coming into the United States, et cetera, at a one, three, and six-month longitudinal period. And we also know that in the brain, networks that are responsible for dyslike or antipathy are unique from markers of dehumanization. So, relatively in conclusion, after doing multiple studies in field settings and lab settings, we're developing an emerging understanding of how this combination of group identification and pain, et cetera, leads to a very, very, very dire state as far as intergroup conflicts. We know that strong identification with a group, if you make that group perceive a threat in another group, so you invoke a threat. This group is in some way an existential threat to you and your group's identity. And you throw a little bit of dehumanization in there, you see a lot of other behavioral variables come out, and this is across multiple studies over many years. With those three things in place, with strong group identification, the perception of a threat, and the dehumanization of outgroups, you see intense consolidation of group norms. That means that someone is willing to abdicate their traditional ethical stance in favor of consolidated and more conservative norms for the group, because belonging matters more than your values in times of threat. Retaliative policy support, restriction of civil liberties on outgroups, increased conservatism, increased in-group love, in-group information sharing, and willingness to sacrifice for your in-group. So I do hope I've convinced you that belonging matters. And how we do this now, and just one example of how we're carrying this forward in the CVE space, is that right now we have, through our science informed design process, we're doing several different initiatives to try to bring a little bit of the science into how we do PVE program design. So we have three main areas of focus in the lab when it comes to CVE. The first is designing more evidence-based strat-coms interventions, targeting specific cognitive mechanisms. If group A is tapping into a sense of isolation, what do we do? How do we design a message that might or might not facilitate belonging or tap into whatever wound is driving that sense of isolation? We also have a program trying to understand potent groups, why are some groups so sticky? What are they providing for? What fundamental human motives are they catering to and what needs are they fulfilling? And how do we design youth empowerment programs that actually meet those same needs? So basically asking the question, what are they doing right that makes them so sticky and how do we design using those same design principles and cognitive building blocks? And the last is exploring relationships between things like chronic stress, early childhood trauma, and propensities towards violence. And we're doing this in Burkina Faso at the moment. Just some of the basic research questions that we're asking, one, is how do youth's perception of their own agency and social status affect how they respond to VEO narratives? The second part of that question is how do young people's experiences of belonging and agency affect their views towards those groups and their willingness to sacrifice for those groups? Because those are motivations and impulses that you can tap into and redirect for really beautiful outcomes if you can do it right. And in another example, potentially in the Philippines, we're looking at what would make someone switch from a violent group to a nonviolent one? What are the elements of group membership that would need to stay the same across both of those group types? And what are the evolutionary or psychological needs that those groups are speaking to? And how do we maintain those things in our design of our programs? So that's just a bit of an example of how we're doing what we do. And yeah, look forward to hearing from you. Thanks.