Takin A Walk/Episode Twenty-Eight with Health Care Entrepreneur and Author Dr. Carl Marci

Buzz Knight:

On this episode of the Takin A Walk series, I’m heading to the Back Bay in Boston, and I’m going to be taking a walk with my old friend, Dr. Carl Marci. I first met Carl some years ago when I was part of the Council for Research Excellence, which was a Nielsen-funded think tank with a bunch of great researchers. Carl was working for Nielsen then with a neuroscience division that he had founded some years ago. It was really cool getting to meet him and understand neuroscience from a guy who could speak English so a guy like me could understand it. Carl has a brand new book. It’s called Rewired: Protecting Your Brain in the Digital Age. I can’t wait to take a walk with Carl Marci.

Speaker 2:

Taking a walk with Buzz Knight.

Buzz Knight:

Well, Carl, it’s so good to be taking a walk with you in person in lovely Boston. We’re right now on Boylston Street in the Back Bay. How are you, Carl?

Dr. Carl Marci:

I’m good. I’m particularly good because it’s nice to walk without a mask on for the first time in a long time.

Buzz Knight:

Isn’t it nice?

Dr. Carl Marci:

Yeah, it’s refreshing.

Buzz Knight:

It’s nice to see people’s faces to see smiles, right?

Dr. Carl Marci:

I hope it lasts as a physician. I’m slightly nervous that it’s a little premature, but let’s enjoy the spring while we can.

Buzz Knight:

Exactly. We have a lot to talk about. We want to talk about your new book, which is something really exciting that you’ve worked on, but let’s figure out, first of all, your journey and we could kind of intersperse how you and I first connected, but how did you get to be this person that wanted to study the brain?

Dr. Carl Marci:

I was a psychology undergraduate and at the time, I won’t date myself, but let’s just say neuroimaging and the ability to take pictures of a healthy human brain was relatively new and very exciting. When I got to medical school and started literally studying the brain in detail, I fell in love. You have three options in medical school if you fall in love the brain. You could be a neurologist, a neurosurgeon, or a psychiatrist. Neurosurgeons just do surgery. They don’t really talk to people. I like talking to people, so eliminated that one. Neurologists only take care of things they can see and I was pretty sure there were things going on in the brain that we couldn’t see, so I became a psychiatrist. And that started me off on the journey of brain science.

Buzz Knight:

And then your company was ultimately rolled up into Nielsen. Is that correct?

Dr. Carl Marci:

That’s right. Along the way, I started off as an academic psychiatrist studying the neurobiology of empathy, how one brain understands another brain. Along the way, someone recommended I go to the MIT Media Lab and we were making the first generation of what we now call wearable devices. They were taking handheld computers and doing what MIT engineers do, taking them apart and plugging sensors in, and then literally sewing it into a vest and walking around. I said, “Oh my goodness, you have a multi-sensing wearable computerized platform. This is amazing.” They said, “Yeah, we don’t know what to do with it.” I said, “Well, I have some ideas.” We started collaborating on various projects and along came an MIT business student named Brian Levine. And when he graduated, he asked if I wanted to start a company, instead of measuring empathy, measuring audiences’ responses to media marketing stimuli. That’s how Innerscope Research was founded.

Buzz Knight:

That’s where I met you because at that time I was working in the radio business and I had a corporate programming role, but also as part of that, I was fortunate to be the company’s interface with Nielsen. Ultimately I got to be part of this really cool thing called The Council for Research Excellence. And boy, that was an amazing group of people who were part of that. Some legendary research people, whether it be Howard Shimmel or Dave Poltrack or Stacy Shulman, kind of a who’s who of people who were part of this. You came into the picture when Nielsen and you connected, and you were really the first person in my mind from someone who wasn’t an academic, who allowed me to understand neuroscience in a way that was human. If that makes sense and I thank you for that.

Dr. Carl Marci:

I appreciate that. When we started Innerscope, which was ultimately bought by Nielsen, which is what you’re referring to, I started to give talks about what we were doing. There would be 20, 30, 40, sometimes 50 people there. I knew they were listening and I could tell they were engaged just by looking at them. But at the end there was never any questions. My business partner said, I asked him, I said, “Why do you think no one’s asking questions?” He paused and he looked at me and he said, “I don’t think they understand a word you’re saying.” I went on a journey to make neuroscience accessible because I was talking to experts in media and market research who knew nothing about the brain. I had to make it intelligible. I had to make it accessible. That took a while.

Dr. Carl Marci:

The best advice I got was someone who said, “Well, act like you’re talking to your best friend’s mom, because you’re going to speak a little slower. You’re going to talk with empathy and kindness and interest.” That’s how I imagined my audience when I would talk. I was like, I’m talking to my best friend’s mother.

Buzz Knight:

Now I’m taking that all the right way because I was the person who you should have been directing that at. Because once again, these people that I mentioned that were part of the CRE and Nielsen funded, the CRE, it was sort of this think tank, but these were these amazing analytic folks.

Dr. Carl Marci:

Oh, very smart people who knew their business well.

Buzz Knight:

I was just a programmer. I was not, I was out of my league, but that’s what I so loved about it because this was a group of people that I enjoyed collaborating with and getting to meet new people from that group. Janet Gallant was another one of these people, Richard Zackon ran the CRE. That was a tremendous experience. I’m grateful I got to meet you through that process for sure. Since we’re both Boston-based, we would then over time bump into each other between haircuts. Literally. I’m not kidding.

Buzz Knight:

Right now we’re walking in one of the most unbelievable places that every time I walk here, I pinch myself. This is the Boston Public Garden.

Dr. Carl Marci:

Beautiful place.

Buzz Knight:

It’s so beautiful. How do you use taking a walk, by the way, to sort of motivate yourself or re-energize yourself?

Dr. Carl Marci:

I think like a scientist because of training and there’s a lot of really good literature to support getting outside in nature, walking and thinking. That the movement of the body, the stimuli around you really kind of stimulates creativity. I think the most important thing we can do is do it without technology and really be with ourselves or a friend as in this case and have good conversation and see where it leads.

Buzz Knight:

This topic that the book is focused on is something that has come up in a couple of previous episodes of Takin a Walk. The one in particular it came up in was with the comedian Steve Sweeney. Steve worked for me years ago at WZLX. He’s an iconic Boston comedian, but as we were walking over and the fresh pond area, we had this very conversation about what’s really going on with the amount of screen time that people are facing and what it’s doing to people and how it makes us sad really, when you see those situations in restaurants where a husband and a wife aren’t even talking to each other. They’re each off on their own device or the kids are stuck on the device. Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the book and how you sort of got into the mindset of its importance.

Dr. Carl Marci:

We are more distracted, divided, and depressed than ever as a society. I think that it’s an open question, the causality because it’s always hard to get to the root causes of things. But as I began the journey of trying to understand the impact of mobile communications information and-

Dr. Carl Marci:

Sorry. Hold on a second.

Dr. Carl Marci:

As I began the journey, looking into the impact of mobile information, communication, and media technology, the literature was impressive and there were more studies than I thought there would be. And then Innerscope was doing some very leading-edge work at the time. Now when we founded Innerscope, it was 2006. It was before the iPhone. Our first big study was actually involved Janet Gallent, who you mentioned, and NBC Universal. It was on the impact of the DVR and fast-forwarding through commercials. And could people get a commercial impression even when things were fast-forwarded because they had data from recall and other measures that showed that even when they were skipping ads, people were actually getting something and what was going on.

Dr. Carl Marci:

A couple years later, nobody cared about the DVR anymore and it was all about what is this iPhone? What are these smartphones? How is Facebook going to impact our business? Now this is now 2007, 2008, 2009. We were working not directly with Facebook, but with the large media companies, Time Warner, NBC Fox, and others, to understand the impact on television, traditional television, that social media had. We were doing studies in the early days and I would go to conferences and listen to the Facebook researchers and present my own research. I knew they were lying back then because we had eye-tracking data and we had sophisticated neuroscience data that told us exactly how much people were engaging with their ads and then they would get up and tell a very different story. That made me concerned. I never joined Facebook as a result of that, but I became intrigued as time went on to learn more.

Buzz Knight:

Why didn’t you join Facebook? Was it as a result of those learnings or was there something before that? Cause you’re talking to another person who’s never joined Facebook either in me.

Dr. Carl Marci:

I think in the beginning I was just sort of on the fence to, did I need another social channel? I was more into face-to-face conversation and I think it was just an intuition. But then when I started doing the research and realized that this may be a company of, that I don’t trust fully or that maybe doesn’t have the best interest of people at versus profits that made me concerned. I stayed off it and I don’t really regret it other than how do I promote my book not being on Facebook, right?

Buzz Knight:

Exactly. How will you promote the book? You’ll do hopefully walks like this, talks like this. You’re recognized as an expert in your field, so people will come towards you to want to hear what you have to say as a result of that, right?

Dr. Carl Marci:

Yeah. I’m a healthcare entrepreneur in addition to an author and so I’m not immune to social media, I’m on LinkedIn and I’m on Twitter professionally and I’ll continue those channels to promote. But like you said, I think it’s really about having a good publicist and doing interviews and podcasts like this and others to get the word out.

Buzz Knight:

Mention your current job in terms of what is happening with that and tell me how excited you are about it.

Dr. Carl Marci:

After we sold Innerscope and I was the first Global Chief Neuroscientist at Nielsen for four years, I had a yearning to get back into healthcare. I had thought to myself, maybe I learned a little something about business and maybe I could contribute at the interface of healthcare technology and business. I’ve now been involved in four or five health technology companies, venture-backed. Currently, I just signed to be the Chief Psychiatrist and Managing Director of the Mental Health and Neuroscience Specialty Area for a company called OM1.

Dr. Carl Marci:

It’s a big company that does big data that you never heard of because it works quietly in the background. We take healthcare information from electronic health record and pharmacy and insurance claims and other data sources. We organize them, clean them, and link them together in the cloud and then mine them for insights that help life science companies bring medications to market sooner, help insurance companies, understand the costs and trade-offs of doing certain types of treatments. Ultimately the goal is personalized care. When I’m in my clinic, which I still see patients through Mass General, periodically Mrs. Jones comes in and I can put her profile into a computer and I will compare her profile against hundreds of thousands if not millions of other patients like her and tell me which medication or treatment she’ll respond to for her depression or her anxiety. That’s the big goal.

Buzz Knight:

Do you think the state of healthcare really is bad now?

Dr. Carl Marci:

It hasn’t been good for a while and I think the pandemic showed a lot of the inequities in the system and also just how difficult access is. The reality is we’ve been running our healthcare system and our hospitals like hotels, maximum occupancy. When we had this pandemic and there was a surge in demand and need, we weren’t really prepared for that. In this state, Massachusetts, as you know, the national guard was called out and they were putting popup hospitals and beds and tents in fields. That starts to feel a little like a third-world nation when we can’t get the medications we need and the tests we need and it really strained the system. Then as a psychiatrist, of course, there’s the second pandemic, which is the mental health crisis, which was already a significant situation before the pandemic. It’s only gotten worse.

Buzz Knight:

Because of your Mass General affiliation, I’m sure you’re aware of Home Base, the program with the Red Sox and Mass General, that is supporting of veterans’ healthcare issues. What can you speak about regarding the severity of veterans’ healthcare issues and obviously the impact their families and how important is this and is it being neglected as individuals maybe move on to other things that are more important?

Dr. Carl Marci:

I think the number one issue for the veterans in this country is really trauma. We’ve gotten so much better with technology to prevent deaths in the battlefield, but we haven’t really figured out how to prevent the trauma associated with battle and being apart from loved ones for long periods of time and the challenges with deployment. One of the areas, one of the startups I was involved in was looking at the predictors of suicide in vets. What we know is that the highest risk for suicide and veterans is not while they’re deployed in the field, because they have the structure and the meaning and purpose of being part of something, it’s actually, when they’re finished, the transition to the real world after being deployed for a long time. There are tremendous risks. We were working on an app that would treat and identify depression and PTSD and suicide risk factors to try to help the men and women as they made that transition.

Buzz Knight:

We salute what Mass General and the Red Sox and Home Base and General Hammond, who was a previous guest on Takin a Walk podcast, we salute what they do for our veterans. I come from a background of many different formats, many of them music formats, and from a standpoint of someone who understands the brain as you do, can you talk about the power of music and what music does for people and why it’s so special to mood and help people get through?

Dr. Carl Marci:

What’s interesting about music and the brain is that music does not just light up the auditory cortex, the part of the brain that we use for sound and hearing. It actually stimulates the emotion centers when it’s particularly moving. It can stimulate the reward centers. We often visualize when we’re listening to music. We get the visual cortex involved and it really lights up many different parts of the brain in a way that other stimuli just don’t. I think that’s probably something that we evolve to learn to love.

Dr. Carl Marci:

I think there are people smarter than me who have speculated that early forms of music were a form of communication. Because we can remember music better than we can dry words that are spoken. A lot of music tells a story. We learned in our Innerscope days that one of the most effective ways of communicating to people is through stories. What is a story? A story has a beginning, middle, and end. It has a protagonist often who is on a journey, typically overcoming odds and then learning a lesson and then taking that lesson back to a community and sharing it. I think that to the extent that music tells stories, we’re wired to hear those things.

Buzz Knight:

What are some action steps that people can take to kind of rewire themselves as far as the digital age?

Dr. Carl Marci:

I think the most important takeaway, I think, from the book is that we’re all at risk because we’ve all changed our habits in meaningful and significant ways. There’s no one who is not, unless you’re one of the few people who don’t walk around with a supercomputer in your pocket, at some risk, because these things are so engaging and so powerful and filled with compulsion loops and super stimuli and are precisely designed to get you hooked and to change your habit. There’s a lot of people who know the same science that I’m trying to tell people to use, to help them, using that science to hook them.

Dr. Carl Marci:

We have to be prepared, number one. Number two, we have to think developmentally. Every age is unique. The brain at two months old and two years old and four and through adolescence and then early adulthood and adulthood is constantly changing and we go through different developmental steps and we need to apply the principles of developmental neurobiology and psychology to those steps. For example, there’s a, I talk a lot in the book about the video transfer deficit and the video transfer deficit is prior to age three years old, young children do not have the brain wiring to take information from a two-dimensional screen of video or television and apply it to the real world.

Dr. Carl Marci:

Do you remember Baby Einstein?

Buzz Knight:

Yep.

Dr. Carl Marci:

Very popular in its day. There was a point at which two thirds of American households with children had at least one Baby Einstein DVD. They would take six-month-olds and put them in front of videos and they would stare for hours and hours and hours and parents thought they were doing a great thing until few years later, a big study came out and showed not only were kids who were exposed to Baby Einstein, not learning, meaning they weren’t getting ahead. They were actually falling behind.They were falling behind because they weren’t learning anything. They were staring mesmerized by the objects and movement on the screen, but they weren’t getting face-to-face interactions. They weren’t getting the adjusted feedback of a live human being. They weren’t having touch and play. The displacement of normal developmental activities that these children were substituting screen time for was a bit of a disaster. That’s why hear about Baby Einstein anymore because it didn’t work. That’s just one example of how you have to think about where we are developmentally.

Dr. Carl Marci:

Let’s jump to adolescence. What is the most important thing in adolescence? Well, Eric Erickson said, “To find meaning and purpose.” That’s what adolescents really want to do. We have to think about what that means in the context of social media, in the context of having friends, in the context of breaking up, in the context of developing an identity.

Dr. Carl Marci:

That gets really complicated really quickly. We don’t allow children to get in an automobile and drive until they’re at least 16 and have had some testing and get a license, but we’re going to give them a supercomputer connected to the internet. And we’re going to put them on the information superhighway without any instruction. That’s a bad idea. I think we need to all start to think about digital literacy and I, for one, support taking a brain science approach to doing it and informing how we make a lot of these decisions.

Buzz Knight:

Last question. If Steve jobs were alive today, do you think he would look at the world and think, “Oh my God, look what I was maybe part of creating in terms of this problem”?

Dr. Carl Marci:

I think if he was honest with himself, I think he would see it as the mixed bag that it is. I’m not against technology. I have an iPhone and I love it. I love all the wonderful things that you can do with it. I think we need to be careful about what it’s displacing and what it’s creating. One of the things I talk about in the book is we have to really move towards human-centered design. Instead of technology taking things away from us, they should be empowering us, making us more efficient, helping us have better relationships, and more connected.

Dr. Carl Marci:

We know one thing and I talk about this in the book. A friend of mine, Bob Wallinger is now sitting on top of the longest continuous running study of human development in this country, goes back to the thirties. It was done here in Boston. It was a cohort of Harvard undergrads and a cohort of inner-city males. They followed them for 80 years. After 80 years of interviews with them and their family, the big takeaway of what gives people happiness at the end? The quality and number of relationships and this technology’s interrupting relationships. That’s what I worry the most about.

Buzz Knight:

Well, one of the things I’m grateful for with the Takin a Walk series is connecting with new people, but also reconnecting with old friends and as part of that learning. I can’t thank you enough for everything. Give the book one last push here.

Dr. Carl Marci:

The book is called Rewired: Protecting Your Brain in the Digital Age. It’s available on Amazon from Harvard University Press. Buy it soon.

Buzz Knight:

Dr. Carl Marci, thank you for taking a walk.

Dr. Carl Marci:

My pleasure.

Speaker 2:

Takin a Walk with Buzz Knight is available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Buzz Knight is an established media executive with a long history of content creation and multi-platform distribution.

After a successful career as a Radio Executive, he formed Buzz Knight Media which focuses on strategic guidance and the development of new original content.