Luan Williams
FOUNDER & CHIEF VISION OFFICER
NEUROLENS: LIVING SYSTEMS
LEVEL OF SCALE: HUMANITY
AUSTRALIA
Psychological scientist (BPsychSc) and systems thinker with a focus on neuroethical mental models, schemas, and reference frames, and the roles they play in cognition, reasoning and decision-making.
I worked for the Dalai Lama for three years helping mobilise knowledge through events about wisdom and compassion with a focus on security, accreditation and national security, where I also helped to manage over 500+ values-aligned volunteers. My fields of interest are neuroethics, sociotechnical systems, life improvement science, collective intelligence, connectivism, play therapy, evolutionary parenting, holographic theory, and medical benefits of psilocybin. I am passionate about barter networks, fair tokenisation of energy, and reciprocal trade. My interest in new monetary models extends as far as their different impacts on the stress circuits of the human brain, and also, into ways to disrupt the human bias towards ‘growth without limits’ with its persisting mental models of shortage versus the sustainable mental models of Earth-based cultures.
Before discovering my love of psychology and science, I spent years in national media communications exploring ethical ways of disseminating information to large audiences, and then worked as a state project administrator building the technological infrastructure that supports massive data networks. My exposure to communications rollouts on a nationwide level is what infused me with respect for businesses that operate to a balanced triple bottom line of personal development, ecosystem health and economical benefit, weighing motives for social, ecological and profit-based gains equally.
I’m a member of ForHumanity, dedicated to the advancement of independent audits of A.I. and autonomous systems to mitigate risk in areas of ethics, bias, privacy, trust, and cybersecurity. I have studied relational maps capturing real-world social networks based on metrics analyses. This has helped me develop a special interest area in the fractal similarities between healthy connective networks across multiple levels of scale, from neuroplasticity and neural networks through to the global worldwide web. My recognition of patterns within healthy systems has emerged into a daily passion for finding the collective hacks and leverage points that can bring social balance to the multiple systems we are each and all part of – so that the families, communities, businesses and lands we belong to can work in unison with us and our cognitions in our everyday lives.
As a strategist, I run a psychological consultancy from the green forests of the Northern Rivers region of Australia, mentoring medical professionals and presenting lectures about emotional intelligence, verbal reasoning, decision-making, situational judgement, and communication skills, with a focus on neuropsychology and reference frames that enable change and understanding. In my psychological work, I help complex people find simple mental models that work best to meet their cognitive goals in performing high pressure tasks or encoding large amounts of detailed information. I am co-author of the textbook Interview Techniques that encourages the use of authentic schemas to prepare for tertiary medical entry, and have worked alongside my colleagues in neuroscience and neuroethics to produce the Neuro position paper, ‘Can neuroethicists save the internet?’ In my spare time, I have been co-creating a training program called How to Be a Doctor that uses neurobiological knowledge across multiple levels of scale to elicit empowerment, empathy and achievement in aspiring doctors.
I am Singaporean-Australian and learnt much from my Taoist mother. As a mother of two myself, I think one of the most beautiful mysteries of life is how something can seemingly emerge out of nothing: babies from humans; minds from brains, communities from values; holograms from interference patterns; social technologies from social businesses… The same ways that birds flocking together in complex adaptive systems each follow simple, evolutionary rules to emerge as one murmuration, we as digital citizens – tapping on our keypads and projecting our mental models out into cyberspace – emerge into the world as something that is bigger and more powerful than any one person or group. With my team at Neuro, I am excited to explore diverse, accessible, universal and humanistic models of thought to help resolve wicked problems and bring stability and integration to the living systems we are all part of.
