Brainthrough Lazy Sunday #32

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the newsletter you learn the most from this week. Welcome back to Brainthrough!

We will go slightly off the beaten path of culture, and neuroscience. Just slightly, though.

Last year, McKinsey released a report on mental health comparing

…🥁…

countries.

Today we will look into the findings of the McKinsey report, compare it to Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, neuroscience, and identify some learnings.

A link selection for the new readers of the cultural dimensions we have looked at in the past:

• Brainthrough #26 - Culture and Neuroscience

• Brainthrough #27 - Individualism vs. Collectivism

• Brainthrough #28 - Power Distance

• Brainthrough #30 - Uncertainty avoidance

I linked all other studies and articles in the “Find my research” section. Head there if you want more context.

Topic of the week: McKinsey Health report x Hofstedes cultural dimensions

As Hofstede surveyed employees at IBM, 40 years later did McKinsey survey employees at McKinsey.

The goal?

To find out geographical differences of perspectives within a similar group of people. One could assume that working within the same organization, provides a slightly more homogenous group.

McKinsey wanted to understand the factors that impact holistic health at the workplace, and how to best approach mounting health issues, especially around mental health.

What are the driving factors of burnout, and what helps to reduce it?

McKinsey report setup

The survey was led by the McKinsey Health Institute (MIH), and reviewed different dimensions impacting health of individuals:

• physical health: “extent to which individuals can perform physical tasks (…) without discomfort”

• mental health: “individual’s behavioural, cognitive, and emotional state (…)”

• social health: “individual’s ability to build healthy, nurturing, genuine, and supporting relationships”

• spiritual health: “extent to which individuals integrate meaning into their life”

Holistic health is the average of all the above factors.

Questions were asked around:

• depression / burnout / distress / anxiety symptoms

• sleep hours and satisfaction

• job engagement / happiness / satisfaction

• work-life balances and financial (in)stability

They also reviewed the workplace situation, such as:

• role clarity

• work / time pressure

• work hours and load

• manager relationships

• team setup and dynamics

There were many more, I won’t list them all. I hope you get the gist.

In total, the study surveyed 30,392 people in 30 countries.

This is a pretty big number, but we need to consider that McKinsey might have larger and smaller offices and hence the statistical significance and comparability of countries might be a bit off.

What did they find out?

McK - main findings

1. Around 60% of employees are in self-reported good mental health

While it is the majority, it is a minor majority. This shows how common health issues are.

4 out of 10 people reported mental or physical discomfort.

The utopian goal would be to have 100% reporting good health. This is unrealistic, I understand. Nevertheless, the number of people reporting to be in good health is lower than I expected.

2. Gen Z, age 18-24, are most impacted

Young people struggle with the demands and expectations of growing into a professional life.

We can assume many within the Gen Z cohort still study, do internships and are very early in their career. This often creates uncertainty about the long-term career path, induces stress of novelty around people, processes, and engaging with more senior colleagues or customers.

Interestingly, the cohort of managers reported the highest holistic-health score.

Financially these individuals are more stable, they have experience to build their career further. One could even assume that family life is more stable, kids are older and all of that contributes to a more relaxed life.

3. Workplace is the biggest contributor to mental health issues

Global level of burnout sits around 20%, meaning 1 out of 5 employees report some sort of burnout symptoms. The Top 5 contributors:

Another interesting finding is the hierarchy of burnout-driving factors:

1. Team

2. Job

3. Individual

If you take these numbers at face-value, then 97% of the time, the job is driving burnout - not your personal life.

We could say, any improvements you make in your personal life are useless if the work culture you are in is toxic, demotivating and resulting in burnout.

It also means, companies really need to invest in training to empower and enable managers and employees to increase job satisfaction for everyone.

4. Burnout and holistic health can exist together

Meaningful work, physical health and social happiness can counterbalance the perception of burnout.

Energy-draining factors at work or at home can not be fully removed, but we can make sure there are enough recharging elements to help us through hard times.

Some of them are getting good sleep, nutritious food, a healthy social environment and hobbies outside work. But that alone won’t do it.

When the job is 🤬, your colleagues a bunch of 💩, your manager is a 👿, than eating all your veggies before a 9h sleep won’t make you a happy 👼.

McK x Hofstede

(please note, all images are screenshots from the report.)

Let’s compare some countries from the McKinsey report versus the Hofstede report. This is only a subset of countries of both studies.

Japan

Germany

Australia

India

Singapore

US

Top 3 - Happy champs:

The countries with the highest holistic health scores (Turkiye, India and US) score high on social and spiritual health as well.

Further on the cultural scale, both India and Turkiye score high on power distance and low on individualism - which means they are collectivistic, group-focused cultures. There seems to be some correlation between positive holistic health and collectivistic cultures.

US is an outlier but: the United States scores low on “Uncertainty Avoidance”, hence coping with ambiguity creates overall less stress, apparently supporting mental and spiritual health. Singapore follows a similar trajectory.

Bottom 3 - mental low:

The bottom countries on holistic health score low on spiritual health, high on individualism, and typically lower on power distance. Both France and Japan score extremely high on uncertainty avoidance, which seemingly impacts the holistic health scores significantly.

If you look at the graph below, when uncertainty avoidance goes up, holistic health comes down. Only Turkiye is an outlier to that rule, but we know that Turkiye scores towards the collectivistic side, which seems to offset the impact of uncertainty avoidance within the cultural setup.

When looking at other countries in both studies, the trends across the various health and culture dimensions remain similar.

It appears that social groups that are less focused on the individual but rather on the wellbeing of the group, and show are higher flexibility dealing with ambiguity, tend to create a better environment for holistic health for the population.

These assumptions are discussed in many studies of culture and neuroscience, such as our deep dive into the cultural dimension “individualism vs. collectivism” . These neuroscience studies found collectivistic cultures to suffer less from mental health issues, such as depression, although many are less developed than their “individualistic” Western counterparts.

Last one: Burnout levels in India

I was slightly surprised to find India with the highest scores of “burnout” levels of all countries within the McKinsey report, especially given they rated well on holistic health.

Many Indians working for large corporations do work shifts, often during the nights, to cater for the US time zone. I can imagine that McKinsey employees in India work mostly in delivery teams, it is less strategic consulting, but rather providing services, such as creating slide decks, crunching numbers and building software applications for the McKinsey offices around the world.

I have many friends from India who live abroad now, and are not eager to go back: “If I were to go back, and work a normal job, I’d spend 10h in the office and 4h in traffic. How much personal life will I have?”

Factors, like family and friends, and even religion, can offset a large part of the negative impact of a stressful professional life. India is a good example. But if these fall through, then health, and mental health in specific, can take a very quick turn down.

Disclaimer:

Similarly to Hofstede’s research, one can not throw all individuals within a country in a bucket and make them all equal. But the large data set provides a perspective, given individuals within a country are exposed to similar language, geography, culture (music, art, food, religion) and political or economic factors (laws, taxes, voting systems etc.)

Find my research: McKinsey holistic health

McKinsey holistic health report

The report can be found here.

Hofstede cultural research - summary

This website provides a good overview of the cultural dimensions we discussed as well, including some interviews with Hofstede himself

Increasing mental health issues in Gen Z

47% of Gen Z surveyed in a large-scale Gallup survey reported they felt often or always depressed or anxious. Overall, Gen Z reported 4x more depression and anxiety than for example Baby Boomer generation. This is data from the “Voices of Gen Z Study 2024” by Gallup.

And social media is not helping the case. More data reports that social media is a factor influencing mental health, especially for the younger generations.

Find my research: neuroscience

A movie can say more about your thousand neurons

What movie you watch can say something about your brain’s reaction to emotions, such as humor, fun, fear and anger.

As individuals process fear or anger differently on a neuronal level, it seems to be possible to map genres to neural modes of your brain. The study looked into the activities of the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens (NAc) for different movie genres.

Before we go into genre details, a small educational paragraph on the amygdala and NAc. Both are involved in more processes than outlined below, out covering it all might require a whole month of Brainthrough episodes.

The amygdala plays a major role in:

1. responding to emotional stimuli, both positive and negative, with a greater focus on negative stimuli (fear and anxiety) and initiating required bodily processes.

2. contributes to decision-making processes, especially when emotions are involved

A higher activity of the amygdala might result in more risk-averse behavior, more severe “flight responses to adversity and increased emotional reactivity.

The NAc plays a major role in:

1. responding to rewards and pleasure, both processing and initiating activation to respond

2. creating the necessary goal-directed behaviour through initiating and regulating the dopaminergic system.

A higher activity of the NAc might result in more goal-oriented behavior, increased reactivity to pleasure, which in some can increase the likelihood of addictive tendencies.

So:

• If you like action and comedy, you might have an increased amygdala activity

• If you like crime/thriller and documentary, then you might have an decreased amygdala and nucleus accumbens activity

• If you like mostly comedy, you might have an increased nucleus accumbens activity

Who are you?

(Frontiers Behaviourial Neuroscience)

One step at a time: new insights in dopamine modulation

We don’t know much about many mental diseases: where does ADHD come from? What triggers Autism? Why do people develop Parkinson’s? How do we reduce the growing number of Alzheimer’s patients?

Not knowing the source of these conditions makes it almost impossible to properly treat them. Consider this: Parkinson’s has been known to be connected with the dopaminergic system. Dopamine acts as a messenger between neurons and when this system breaks down, some pathways send signals to the motor cortex resulting in unwanted movements - that is a basic explanation, for now it shall suffice. Two receptors were known to play a role: d1 receptors activating specific neurons, and d2 receptors inhibiting dopamine.

For more than a decade, it was speculated that there is a 3rd receptor to play a balancing role. Only now, were research teams in the US and Belgium able to pinpoint the receptors in it’s part in the dopamine system.

Firstly, the more we understand, the better we can treat, invasively or non-invasively.

Secondly, it continues to amaze me how long people have been working on problem statements and only with the onset of new technologies, like AI, have these studies shown significant and new results.

(McGill)

Increased interest in brain modulation through tACS

Transcranial alternating current stimulation, or tACS, is a method to apply low-intensity electric currents through electrodes placed on the scalp. The applied currents modulate the brain-internal electric flows, or in more medical terms, oscillation of brain waves.

This can increase activity in brain regions, influencing neural pathways, working memory and memory recall.

It is not entirely clear whether e.g. working memory or recall adjacent pathways that trigger working memory activities or directly impact working memory foundations.

On top of that, there is an alternative stimulation technique called tDCS that uses a constant, direct current. Instead of synchronizing brain oscillation, tDCS enhances the excitability of neurons and therefore enhance or inhibits parts of the brain.

(Dr. Peter Attia)

What is the source of creativity?

We all know the “idea under the shower” moment. Creativity has always been an area of curiosity. What makes us creative? Where do all the ideas come from? Why are some people more creative than others?

Studies have found connections to the so called default-mode-network, or DMN. These are neural pathways in various parts of the brain that are constantly “on”, especially active during day-dreaming, mental simulation and meditation.

Apparently, creativity originates from the DMN, and then spreads into more cognitive regions of the brain. We are talking milliseconds. This could be the reason we have ideas “coming out of no-where”.

Could we be able to actively train the DMN? Why not?

Neuromodulation of these specific regions could also help to prevent depressions, as an overactive DMN can also create more harmful thoughts. Creativity then turns negative. Psilocybin reduces the DMN activity and connectivity across brain regions, which apparently helps depression treatments in clinical settings.

(University of Utah)

On top of tech

Piramidal: First Large Language Model for EEG analysis

Electroencephalography is a way to measure brainwaves, electric currents that the brain continuously produces. If you are keen to learn a little bit more about brainwaves, go here.

Piramidal, a W24 YCombinator company, raised a US$6 million seed round to further develop a large language model (foundational model) to analyse brainwave patterns.

EEG’s are used in every hospital during operations to assess the stability of the patient. It is similar to tracking heart rate, which is also always done during operations. The problem with EEG data, is that it is very hard to identify patterns that require attention, yet it is so critical.

Piramidal hopes to automate the analysis of the data in real time, allowing for better identification of potential emergencies in hospitals.

But it could be used for any EEG related technology.

(Techcrunch)

How research looks at the brain to solve AI’s soaring energy bills

Data shows that data centers alone are responsible for around 1% of the world-wide energy consumption. AI and the evolution of Large Language Models like ChatGPT is not helping.

Researchers of the University of Sydney Net Zero Institute hope to find ways to improve the algorithms by learning from the way the brain processes information across the more than 100 billion neurons we carry around.

The idea is to bypass nodes and computations that are not required to do a specific task. If the query is easy, why use all the power available?

Yet another interesting research area Australian universities are leading.

(University of Sydney)

Misc but not least…

Ever wondered what Berlin in the 1920s looked like? Well, here you go.

Why do I come up with this?

Because I reread the books by Volker Kutscher, which are the base for the TV Show Babylon. Both the German TV show, as well as the books are amazing.

Thank you for reading.

Please share the link on social media or by forwarding this episode of Lazy Sunday to your friends and colleagues.

Maybe they can learn something as well? ;-)

Have a great rest of the weekend.

Alex