Adam Torres and Dr. Marty Trevino discuss Marty’s new book.
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Show Notes:
New book alert! In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Dr. Marty Trevino, Cognitive Neuroscientist & Technologist. Explore Marty’s new book that he will be launching with Mission Matters and his most recent article in Pipeline Magazine.
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About Dr. Marty Trevino
As a Scientist/Technologist and Contract Executive, Dr. Marty leads efforts to design novel models of Human/Tech/AI Augmentation and advanced Visual Analytics. They work to transcend the organization from the CSuite to working teams, creating Human/AI UX/UI and achieving higher levels of resonance through a human factors lens, grounded in Cognitive Neuroscience.
Fundamentally, Dr. Marty is a theoretical scientist, whose expertise lies not in creating models to prove a truth or falsehood, but in asking, “What is possible?” Passionate about exploring the “art of the possible,” they aim to reimagine next-generation visual analytics and innovative models of humans and AI collaborating to solve complex problems.
Dr. Marty believes that AI integration, especially in the context of digital transformation (DX) or the establishment of new firms, should be human-centric, with a central focus on how the human brain processes data, makes data-informed decisions, and builds trust in technology. Dr. Marty asserts that only through novel models of Human/AI Augmentation can we begin to solve today’s seemingly unsolvable problems.
A published author, requested speaker, and part-time professor, Dr. Marty is dedicated to helping organizational leaders design the future.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of mission matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters. com and click on, be our guest to apply. All right. So today is a special episode. I’m bringing back onto the show. Dr. Marty Trevino.
He’s a cognitive neuroscientist and technologist, and we’ve been working with each other now for a couple of years, Dr. Marty. Good to have you back for everybody that’s watching this into the future. We’re in December 26 is when we’re live streaming this. And man, it’s good to see your face, Dr.
Marty. Oh, no, thank you, Adam. It’s always a pleasure to be here and to, to talk about talk about cool new concepts and, and and spread, spread the word of science into, into all the innovation and good things that are happening out in the world. Awesome. And so you already, you already know the drill as do our long term listeners.
So Dr. Marty we’ll start with our mission matters minutes. So at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s our mission. Dr. Marni, what mission matters to you? No, my, my, my mission is, is to alter the sensory experience with, with, with data and analytics.
So that decision makers can make better data informed, data driven decisions and designers can in fact build those systems in the next generation in the most awesome way that we further all of those. Thanks for the goodness of humanity. Awesome. Great. Great having you back on. And for everybody watching or listening to this, just so you know Dr.
Marty and mission matters, we have a book that’s going to be coming out early in January. And you’re going to hear more and more about this. We’re going to bring Dr. Marty back onto the show. And once the book’s out and do a deep dive on that as well. But on this particular episode, man, Dr. Marty, I just want to catch up, man.
First thing first, I I’m I’ve been following you and I see. See when things are in the news. I see other things. I see you got an article published in pipeline magazine. Like, like talk to me, man. What have you been up to? Yeah, so that’s the, that’s the second second article I’ve had published, and then it seems that December is, is my month, and they are, they are a, an absolutely wonderful scientific and technical international magazine with a, a very large readership, you know, at, at all different levels, so they’re, they’re just a, they’re just a great bunch of great bunch of people trying to push trying to push you know, new good messages that can help people.
Last year, I published on human and artificial intelligence complementarity you know, from a neuroscience perspective, right? We tend to approach you know, all, you know, in, in digital transformation from a data science perspective, you know, data, everybody talks about data, data, data, and then you AI, AI, AI, and, you know, and, you know, And how many features does it have and how much data is it trained on?
And, and, you know, and, and yeah, but, but we rarely approach it from a human factors lens or, or as I like to say the lens of complementarity and, and, and approaching not just artificial intelligence, it was really big in the news last year, you know, Chad, GPT and Gemini and many, many others coming online and doing seemingly.
It’s just amazing things, right? I mean, we’re returning, returning results that were not always accurate and not always as precise as, as we would have liked and, you know, and sometimes they, they, sometimes they glitched a little bit, but, but fundamentally you know, an absolutely new generation you know, of robust tools and, and, and we’ve entered a renaissance of, of artificial intelligence.
So So I thought I, I, I see it as a, as an imperative of science, especially hard science to, to educate the world you know, from, from that lens, there’s so much that can be, that can be done, you know, you know that, that, that we can dispel myths, we can alter The, you know, the, the, the selection of technology, alter the way it’s, it’s deployed, you know, and because the human factor is central to everything, you can have the best artificial intelligence program in the world sitting out there, you know, somewhere in cyberspace, and if people don’t trust it, if people don’t, if people Can’t understand it or or it fundamentally does not align from a complementarity perspective You’re not going to see the maximum benefit, right?
So it’s not enough to just say we’re we’re running out and we’re including a large language model into our business And we’re going to see all kinds of fantastic things We have to we have to go deeper and this this this month as a matter of fact in In Pipeline Magazine I, I published I, I spent about the last year really in deep thought and, and, and, and trying, trying to, you know, novel approaches applying cognitive neuroscience to, to data informed decision making.
And one, one, one night in a sleepless night with my notepad next to me as, as, as people like me have occasionally, right. Something dawned on me. And, and the article is, is re imagining human, human technology and system you know, embodied complementarity, but it is, it is where I’ll say from from a pretty unique lens, and that’s the lens of learning and and so the the human brain learns in fundamentally very intractable ways.
Okay, so the whole concept I’m turning is is called movement through data. And that that is that is the the premises is that dashboards and you, you know, and you eyes today are an are an often. The, just the pinnacle of abstract is, yeah, they’re abstract to the human brain. We have not seen, the human brain had not seen a dashboard until what?
Yeah. 20, 25 years ago. Okay. Mm-hmm . Well, in the span of human development, especially, you know the development of the brain, that, that, that’s nothing, right? So 25 years is, is nothing. And, and we’ve struggled, right? Because if you talk to wonderful you know very senior executives and say, you know, is data-driven decision making a goal?
Everybody’s going to say yes. Right. And they probably have done that. Like they have to, right? Like, who’s going to be like, no, we don’t want to make data driven decisions. That makes no sense for our business. Right? Like how can they even answer? Right. Nobody. I’ve never had anybody say, I know that’s just crazy talk.
You know, we’re really, we’re, we’re, we’re moving, we’re moving back to carbon paper and yeah. Yeah. You know, that’s not going to happen. So, so, but, but, but, but. Yeah. One of the fundamental questions is, you know, how does the human brain learn and how, and, and, and are we enabling that or disabling that with our, our UI design?
And so the concept of movement through data, it comes right out of, right out of neuroscience and learning. Okay. And, and basically the human brain learns best, the most natural way that the human brain learns. It’s movement through, it’s movement through through the universe and in accordance with objects.
So, so if, you know, your brain predicts what, what your coffee mug is going to feel like, right? Because it’s picked it up a bunch of times. So your brain makes a prediction of what that coffee mug is going to feel like, and then it has an auto correcting mechanism as you do pick it up. If anything’s wrong or anything’s different you know, it, it, it wakes up the brain in it initially, and it corrects its mental model or reference frames in the brain.
And so you have this beautiful auto correcting mechanism that enables you, enables us all to go out into the world. Well, so it also applies to abstract concepts, right? In the article, I say, you know, political structure, right? So, so what is what is democracy? What is socialism? What is communism, right?
What, what are those? Well, they’re purely They’re purely theoretical constructs, okay? There is no, you know, there’s no, no, no, no socialism in the term of the coffee cup. You can, you can see it, you know, but it’s the human brain we find out from research learns theoretical concepts every bit as well as it does its interaction with physical things.
And what comes out in the last few years you know, proven now in hardcore research is that The brain will learn moving through its environment, even if it’s virtual. So, so we thought years ago that you had to move through the environment physically, right? I go through my house, I touch the coffee mug, I go to the office, I drive there, and it’s, and the brain does.
It picks up all, millions and millions of details, and then it, and then it greys them, you know, so that, so that The deal, you can walk out of your Starbucks with your coffee mug and you don’t really notice things around you. But if somebody puts a nine foot big bird right next to you, you’ll probably get all the way up there.
You’ll stop and you’ll take a look at that big bird and say, yeah, okay, strange, but it’ll update his model. But we, so the human brain learns through movement, interaction with objects and, and, and things. And it, but it can do it through movement. Okay. So if we apply that theory into net development of next generation, right?
Next generation, AI presumes that presentation of data and the UI design for a wholly new user experience. So, so it’s very exciting. Because this has an absolute hard science background in the article. You know, maybe we can post a link to it out there. What does that look like as opposed to like what we’re currently experiencing?
What could that new design look like? Yeah, so that new, so that, that is really cool. And we’re figuring that out now. And that’s what that you talked about. So some, some deep thought to, to, to bang your head, bang your head against the wall. What does that look like now? So if you start with here’s my dashboard, right?
My Self-service bi or built by somebody or, you know, you just, that’s what we’re used to have. The dashboard, there’s Right, you’re used to, and, and if you can say, and we can accurately say these are the, these, these, these, these represent abstract is, and that’s kind of a Marty word, right? Yeah. But, but, but they’re abstracted.
The human brain. I’ll buy abstract is I’ll buy it. Dr. Marty. Go ahead. . So, so, so they’re abstract. Okay. So how can we make. Movement through data or that concept. What is it different? And we have to reconceptualize the space by which data is presented, how it is presented, and how the user can interact with it.
And so I gave it the name multidimensional object space. Okay. And 3D, And combine it uniquely with 2D because there’s, right, let’s not diminish the value of dashboards, right? I mean, you can still look at graphs and interact with them, etc. But can we combine the two things in a new representative environment that will allow us literally to move through the data, interact with it, Drill down.
You can, you can see hierarchy. You can see relationships in degrees of separation. You can explore those, but, but come back through. And, and we have an iron man feeling of being immersed. That’s what I’m, that’s what it, that’s the kind of vibes you’re giving me right now. Dr. Iron man dashboard that’s in the air.
You’re me. We’re in the data. Like what, what are we going to do? Well, and I’ll tell you who did a really good job of representing what these. Could eventually look like is the Moody’s avatar the movie’s avatar. They have a hired data Futurists designers and they said what do you think? Analytics and data will look like and we’ll interact with it 50 years from now They actually did a phenomenal job.
I like money. There wasn’t, there wasn’t a neuroscientist among them, but they were absolutely brilliant people. And if you go watch avatar, you see them scrolling through the, you know, the, the, the, the landscape. So they’re using typography and three dimensional landscape, but the whole time there are other visual analytics, displaying data, time, distance, density of things, right.
And the users are gathered around this three dimensional table. with two dimensional data, okay, ranging from, from graphs to tabular. And they’re interacting with that. And the first movie he, you know, he says, you know, we’re looking at, we have to move to this site and these people occupy the site. So we have to, we have to move the natives and here’s why.
And he displays the, the mineral that they’re looking for and the density and cluster of, and he says, look at all this cheese. And, and the numbers are there, right? The distance is there. So that type of representation is actually spot on. So we, you know, we have some conceptual ideas from some, even from Hollywood, go, go figure.
We have to now bring in the hard science. Okay. Because some of that was just meant for good looks. Okay. Yeah. Everything we built. Oh, Ah, you know, I, I, I tell you, I, I would have, I would have given given a lot to have been sitting in the room with those designers and, and, and taking notes, because what we’ve done now is we’ve gone back and found the scientific basis of those things.
So, you know, we’re not going to just build them so they look cool and people will ask you, well, what does three dimensional. What does three dimensional give you? Right? Yeah. So I, I’ve got my two dimensional dashboard. Why would we build in three dimensions? And again, one, because the human brain learns through movement of three dimensions in the best.
We have a few million years of, you know, developing the human brain to do that. It understands that you can mix in abstract and concrete concepts. Okay. But, but, If we then begin to really apply science to it and and and call it, call it design tenants. Okay. Such as we’ll pick one object memorability.
Okay. Well, if you want somebody to look at a dashboard tests today, they’ll say, they’ll say 50 executives and they’ll have them look at a financial dashboard or whatever their, their domain of expertise is, right? Operations, finance, marketing, and they’ll say, you’ve got Whatever. 30 seconds. Look at this dashboard.
And you pull them away from that. You give them about 2 minutes. And then you say, okay, let’s go specifics over What you saw. Yeah. And then what they saw is going to be so low. Isn’t it? Yeah. It’s so astronomically low. And so you see, they left that meeting, they forgot, and then they thought they remembered or saw something else, but I get it.
And they’ll come away and often remember only one or two things, right? And sometimes their numbers, when it’s relevant to you, right, to the brain and decision making, you know, where operations are down 32%, expenses are up, you know, 40%, then we’ll remember those. But generally, generally, the human brain is not geared to remember up to a number of precise facts.
It remembers bigger pictures and it remembers outcomes of things. Okay. You know, it doesn’t want to get eaten by the tiger. It wants to find, you know, a pot of gold. So, so remember we were, we remember, remember causality events, you know, et cetera, but there’s where complementarity comes in. And from the new UI design, we can, we can make human memory.
Okay, which is which is which is invariant invariant does not remember, you know up to levels of precise details We can timeline those things you can interact with them in three dimensions and then you can have all the all the things so Cyber security right when how many instances of ransomware do we have you you could you can now scroll through a three dimensional timeline Okay, and be able to click that And say, what did, what was, you know, our, our Chicago plant compromised by ransomware last year and click that and it’ll then bring you back to the, to the Chicago plan.
You can see the plant in 3d where exactly the compromises were, the type of systems that were compromised. So you’re right back up into that. It offers an infinite possibility. To alter the sensory experience with analytics from a hard science basis. And so some objects, I said memorability, some objects are more memorable than others.
Okay, well, all right. Today, hey, if you go talk to a UX, a UI designer, or even a data scientist, and you say, we want to present this data. What are the factors? And they’ll list the factors of accuracy, precision color, flow, hierarchy, relations, right? Gestalt you know, you know, principles and they’re great.
They’re great. But at no point does somebody say, okay, let’s design. Memorability as one of the factors and you get into really, really cool things, right? So you know, semantic dimensions, semantic dimensions are among the most powerful where, where people would be, is this just because it’s, it’s just finally evolving to that point to where you, to where you’re so in the beginning, it was just, how do we get the information out there?
Right, right, make it digestible so it could be recognized. And now it’s finally evolving to this next level. Am I understanding that right? Yes, you’re right. I mean, 25 years ago it was okay. We have all this data. You know, we have, we have a bunch of data. How do we begin to visualize it? And somebody came up with the concept of dashboards and that’s advanced significantly.
We remember we had single panes of glass for a while, which were by the way, the, the, the. pinnacle of, of, of, of disaster and abstractism because they, they, they, they shove so much data onto onto one screen, right? And, and what it, what it did is promoted, it promoted what, what we’ll call left hemisphere thinking, because you’re right and left hemispheres, they function very well together, but they fundamentally look for very different things.
One looks for immediate answers it wants to confirm its, its bias and see what it believes to be true, the left, and the right wants. Tremendous rich context of the world where the left does not want that rich context of the world. We we can again We can balance those two things out with that understanding and it goes well We’re gonna have an hour long conversation of this But if you fundamentally understand the functions of the left and the right hemisphere and we bring in other dimensions, okay you know, semantic dimensions memorability and you know, and and others what if we could fundamentally Fundamentally alter the trajectory of digital transformation and the presentation of data in next generation, you know, technology and analytics to dramatically improve how we make decisions, how we perceive data, everything.
And I, and I wanna switch it up a bit here for a moment. And I don’t know if I’m supposed to bring this up, but you told me so, you know, I got a big mouth. You’re working on another book as well, other than the one that we’re doing. Can you talk about that at all today? Like, that’s interesting.
Yeah, right. I, I like when you’re working. I like when you’re creating, man, it makes me feel good. I just let you know that Well, tha well, thank you. If we could just get me working on a beach in the Cayman Islands and, you know, somehow doing that, that, that would be great. Hey.
So yeah, so so we’re working, working on a two part book set. But the part one right now, and obviously these are, these are no small efforts, but, but we’re putting together about an 80 page call it executive field guide to digital transformation from from a human technology, AI complementarity lens.
And, and, and that, and this this framing of it is supremely important and they sound like big words, you know, sound like big words. So, so people, people say, oh yeah, of course we want the systems to, we want people in them to work together. No, no, no, no. This is, this is absolutely a foundational element.
For us moving moving, problem solving and innovation and productivity in, into the future. Okay. For, for all of humankind, if we get this right, we solve problems that we’ve never been able to solve before. Okay. And, and so I wanted to put together a very easy to read you know, with great illustrations and, and, and, and, and, you know, high level, simple Simple wording that, that, that, that, that, that you know, a, a, a chief technology officer, a CEO, you know, a senior, a vice president or you know, or senior manager can get mm-hmm.
And, and, and give it, you know, quick reads. And it’s just, you know, each chapter’s only gonna be about five, six pages and they’re gonna be at a, you know, at a non non dribble in d rural scientific level. There’ll be a level where, you know, where, where you can say, oh my gosh, that’s correct. Right? And, and, and of course then we, we, we’ll, we’ll put some of the deeper studies to it.
Fundamentally, at your executive level, you have to understand you have, if you’re going to say, I want digital, I want, I want artificial intelligence to be a central part of our business. I want humans and AI and technology solving problems together. Right? And I want better data driven decision making for real, not, not just.
You know, because I, I said it five years ago. Okay. We can provide a scientific basis that will guide their thought and we can do it, I think, in 80, 85 simple pages and, and that’ll be coming out probably in just about three months and hopefully we’ll give them away at speaking events and, and, and other places and have it a free downloadable you just want you know, Marty’s handsome face on the back cover, you can order a hardcover, you know.
- And the second one to that, the second one to that is going to be a practitioner’s guide, which is going to go much deeper in, you know, into these things like I’ve talked about. Okay. So you say we want to design for memorability. Well, what does that really mean? Right? At a design level? At a design level, that gets very deep very quickly.
You know, when you say, you know, semantic properties, right? What are, okay, what, what are the, what are the, the, the, the two dimensions of semantic properties, right? So, so yeah, so hopefully hopefully in the next six months be able to really sit down and pound out two in addition to the awesome book that is coming out on Mission Matters that I got to give you credit, Adam.
The last several have hit the Amazon top 100, brother. And that is, that is, that is no small, no small compliment to you guys. Yeah. Well, game on. I’m excited about this next one. This will be our 11th edition and it’s been a long time coming. We have yourself, of course, and some other rockstar authors that we’ll be featuring.
But I just have to ask, okay, so we’re going into the new year. Now we’re, we’re doing this December 26th. What’s on the agenda for 2025? What does that look like? What’s next? Yeah, well, you know frame out this theory and, and really get, really get it out. Yeah, yeah, we got, we got, we got maybe two coming out.
Well, I know, I know Mission Matters is coming out in 2025. So we got two books. We got, you’re, you’re working through this theory. What, what else? Tell me some more, man. Oh you know, I’m gonna, gonna, gonna do a shift over a little bit to do more speaking type events, just on the professional level, do more speaking because what I find it, I find it very effective to be able to go into an organization and talk about these advanced concepts for, you know, for a long time.
Two days, right? You get up and you give a great presentation at the executive level. You have individual meetings you know, at the executive level and it gets people really thinking you leave, you leave with, you know, with some notes and then you go sit down and you talk to the technical teams and you do that for, you know, for several hours.
You do that over a couple of days. And then they leave with all kinds of, you know just places to go. And then you make yourself available. I make myself available, you know, you know, I’m, I’m one of these people that has a hard time sleeping sometimes. And so I, you can, you can call me at one in the morning and I, and I’m literally reading or writing or, you know, doing something and something on this stuff.
Right. You know, when, when I, when I, when I When I get to come out and stay on your future yacht you know, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll try and sleep more. But yeah, so more, more speaking or speaking or reaching out to you for speaking or otherwise, like how do people connect with you? Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn.
And you can look up you know, Dr. Marty Carino, you know, talk to the neuroscience. Obviously, this is, this is our third podcast together. Maybe this one, this one I guess I’ll ask you to, you know, have, have my LinkedIn on there. And you know, maybe we’ll forward a, a, a shorter paper, or if we could put a link to, you either one of these, you know you know, neuroscience in design that, that, that it’s it’s, it’s shocking how many people, you know, Love the study of the human brain.
They’ve just not had it presented in a way where it would actually impact the bottom line in business You know, so so but yeah, we’ll linkedin Maybe we could put a put a link out there and and and then to these articles and i’m fairly easy to find. So I’ll even ask you to put an email.
I, I talked to anybody. I know, I don’t, you know, money is not my, not my, my top priority. So if anybody has a question or anything they can just arrange and I will, I will hop on a Zoom call and and talk to her, talk to everyone else. Awesome. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll we’ll definitely put some links in the show notes for you.
So you can check out more of Dr. Marty’s work. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, new thought leaders, and hopefully new inspiration.
you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Dr. Marty, if I don’t talk to you before the new year, man, happy new year and appreciate you coming on and all you do and all the value you bring to our community. So thank you. No, Adam, I have, I have nobody without, without talking to great people like you, all the thanks to your organization.
You guys have a wonderful organization and may, may a wonderful and healthy and happy new year come and 25 be a, be a great year for all of us. Thank you, sir.