Uploaded September 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
How and why did human’s develop self-awareness of what we know and don’t know? How does it develop in relation to how we evaluate what other people know? What are the risks of cognitive bias tainting our ability to learn and self correct?
In this episode, we have the interesting question of our own self-awareness, or Meta-cognition, to understand. For centuries philosophers have called on us to “know thyself”, but only now with the tools of modern neuroscience have we been able to scientifically quantify the way we consciously track our behaviour, performance, thoughts and knowledge. So today we’ll be getting into why this is important for learning and error correction; we’re going to talk about meta-cognition’s use for “mind reading” I.e. tracking our confidence in others in their own knowledge, both friends and foes, fundamental for the evolution of our collaborative groups; the implications of cognitive bias blind spots in metacognition for updating our collective beliefs over time; also whether metacognition is proportionally correlated to intelligence; and how technology and AI has and will influence the future of our self-awareness, and whether it’s convenient to try programming AI to be metacognitive too, or if that would invite disaster.
For these matters there can be no better guest than University College London Cognitive neuroscience Professor, Stephen Fleming. He’s the author of the 2021 book “Know Thyself, the science of self awareness”, and founder of the Meta Cognition Group at UCL, and the group leader of the Max Plank, UCL Centre for Computational Neuroscience.
What we discuss:
00:00 Intro
05:15 Striking aspects of experience draw you into thinking about the classic mind body problem.
08:00 ‘Know thyself’ - a moral, social and spiritual responsibility
10:00 Lao Tsu - to think you know when you do not is a disease.
11:00 Tracking the quality of our performance, error correction and learning.
14:00 Cognitive offloading - compensating for our limitations.
14:30 Metacognition and intelligence are similar but different.
16:30 IQ doesn’t capture smartness, adaptive & strategically aware.
17:40 Inside-out modelling of the world influences your cognition.
20:45 The brain has confidence in colour - Subjective inflation in the periphery.
22:00 UCL metacognition lab experiments - confidence in performance.
25:20 Metacogntiive efficiency - skill in evaluating your success.
26:20 MRI scans of the processes of self-aware brain activity.
28:50 Sam Harris - Self-awareness in the brain vs Ego-self.
30:45 Meditation may bring improvements in self-awareness.
33:20 Mind reading/Theory of mind: Evaluation of others VS evaluation of myself.
38:50 Children’s learning: Evaluating safety in a child’s group.
43:40 Chris Frith - metacognition for collaboration: Balancing our own VS group evaluations.
44:30 Supremacy of collective knowledge - Weighting your confidence about what you’ve seen/know personally against collectively.
46:45 Why did self-awareness evolve?
51:30 The fight or flight mental state trumps self-reflective evaluation.
54:00 Stress blunts frontal cortex activity.
54:20 Modern life stress is not the same as the stress we evolved for.
57:20 We need self-reflection in stressful arguments but it’s not available.
58:20 Education: re-presenting your ideas - an antidote to over confidence.
01:04:00 Left Brain Interpreter - lack of self-awareness of our cognitive bias.
01:10:00 Exacerbated confidence judgements in internet/social media information ecosystems.
01:14:40 Awareness of the inside out way we construct our view of the world could be positive for compassion.
01:17:10 Balancing long-term societal self awareness, with traditional short term one.
01:21:00 The influence of Ai and technology on our self awareness.
01:26:30 ‘Offloading’ aids for cognition VS replacements for our cognition?
01:28:30 Is it unwise to program AI to track confidence in its own performance?
References:
Stephen Fleming, “Know thyself - the science of self-awareness”
https://g.co/kgs/LerbRKu
Steve Fleming’s Lab - The Meta Lab, UCL
metacoglab.org
Gilbert Riles, “Concept of Mind” - self awareness in us and others
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concept_of_Mind
Peter Carruthers - “Knowledge of our own thoughts is just as interpretive as knowledge of the thoughts of others” paper
nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-the-human/2011/10/knowledge-of-our-own-thoughts
Chris D. Frith - ‘The role of metacognition in human social interactions’ paper
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3385688
Metacognition in babies paper -
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27773566
Golfer performance paper -
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12009178/
Stress paper -
journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0132320
Quotes:
“To know that you do not know is the best. To think you know when you do not is a disease.Recognising this disease as a disease is to be free of it. ”Lao Tzu
How and why did human’s develop self-awareness of what we know and don’t know? How does it develop in relation to how we evaluate what other people know? What are the risks of cognitive bias tainting our ability to learn and self correct?
In this episode, we have the interesting question of our own self-awareness, or Meta-cognition, to understand. For centuries philosophers have called on us to “know thyself”, but only now with the tools of modern neuroscience have we been able to scientifically quantify the way we consciously track our behaviour, performance, thoughts and knowledge. So today we’ll be getting into why this is important for learning and error correction; we’re going to talk about meta-cognition’s use for “mind reading” I.e. tracking our confidence in others in their own knowledge, both friends and foes, fundamental for the evolution of our collaborative groups; the implications of cognitive bias blind spots in metacognition for updating our collective beliefs over time; also whether metacognition is proportionally correlated to intelligence; and how technology and AI has and will influence the future of our self-awareness, and whether it’s convenient to try programming AI to be metacognitive too, or if that would invite disaster.
For these matters there can be no better guest than University College London Cognitive neuroscience Professor, Stephen Fleming. He’s the author of the 2021 book “Know Thyself, the science of self awareness”, and founder of the Meta Cognition Group at UCL, and the group leader of the Max Plank, UCL Centre for Computational Neuroscience.
What we discuss:
00:00 Intro
05:15 Striking aspects of experience draw you into thinking about the classic mind body problem.
08:00 ‘Know thyself’ - a moral, social and spiritual responsibility
10:00 Lao Tsu - to think you know when you do not is a disease.
11:00 Tracking the quality of our performance, error correction and learning.
14:00 Cognitive offloading - compensating for our limitations.
14:30 Metacognition and intelligence are similar but different.
16:30 IQ doesn’t capture smartness, adaptive & strategically aware.
17:40 Inside-out modelling of the world influences your cognition.
20:45 The brain has confidence in colour - Subjective inflation in the periphery.
22:00 UCL metacognition lab experiments - confidence in performance.
25:20 Metacogntiive efficiency - skill in evaluating your success.
26:20 MRI scans of the processes of self-aware brain activity.
28:50 Sam Harris - Self-awareness in the brain vs Ego-self.
30:45 Meditation may bring improvements in self-awareness.
33:20 Mind reading/Theory of mind: Evaluation of others VS evaluation of myself.
38:50 Children’s learning: Evaluating safety in a child’s group.
43:40 Chris Frith - metacognition for collaboration: Balancing our own VS group evaluations.
44:30 Supremacy of collective knowledge - Weighting your confidence about what you’ve seen/know personally against collectively.
46:45 Why did self-awareness evolve?
51:30 The fight or flight mental state trumps self-reflective evaluation.
54:00 Stress blunts frontal cortex activity.
54:20 Modern life stress is not the same as the stress we evolved for.
57:20 We need self-reflection in stressful arguments but it’s not available.
58:20 Education: re-presenting your ideas - an antidote to over confidence.
01:04:00 Left Brain Interpreter - lack of self-awareness of our cognitive bias.
01:10:00 Exacerbated confidence judgements in internet/social media information ecosystems.
01:14:40 Awareness of the inside out way we construct our view of the world could be positive for compassion.
01:17:10 Balancing long-term societal self awareness, with traditional short term one.
01:21:00 The influence of Ai and technology on our self awareness.
01:26:30 ‘Offloading’ aids for cognition VS replacements for our cognition?
01:28:30 Is it unwise to program AI to track confidence in its own performance?
References:
Stephen Fleming, “Know thyself - the science of self-awareness”
https://g.co/kgs/LerbRKu
Steve Fleming’s Lab - The Meta Lab, UCL
metacoglab.org
Gilbert Riles, “Concept of Mind” - self awareness in us and others
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concept_of_Mind
Peter Carruthers - “Knowledge of our own thoughts is just as interpretive as knowledge of the thoughts of others” paper
nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-the-human/2011/10/knowledge-of-our-own-thoughts
Chris D. Frith - ‘The role of metacognition in human social interactions’ paper
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3385688
Metacognition in babies paper -
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27773566
Golfer performance paper -
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12009178/
Stress paper -
journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0132320
Quotes:
“To know that you do not know is the best. To think you know when you do not is a disease.Recognising this disease as a disease is to be free of it. ”Lao Tzu
