[00:00:15] Ghazenfer: 

Hello and welcome to Lessons from the Leap. I am your host Ghazenfer Mansoor. On this show, I get to sit with entrepreneurs, founders, and business leaders to talk about bold decisions, pivotal moments and innovative ideas that shape their journeys. 

This episode is brought to you by Technology Rivers. At Technology Rivers, we bring innovation, technology, and AI. Today’s guest is Dr. Bethany Ranes, a cognitive neuroscientist and founder of Interocept Labs. Bethany, welcome to the show. 

[00:00:45]  Bethany: Thank you. 

[00:00:46] Ghazenfer: 

So to start us off, can you share a bit about your journey, how you went from neuroscience research to translating real science into tools for individuals, organizations, and communities?

[00:00:58] Bethany: 

Yes, when I was a student, I got very interested in cognitive neuroscience. I always really loved that it was sort of a quantification of psychology and all of these fascinating, but sort of soft and fuzzy ideas and that there was a whole science about understanding them more physically and so I knew I wanted to be a cognitive neuroscientist.

Pretty early on, but as I kept training and I was getting my PhD, I kept running into this issue that I didn’t love how everything that we were doing in my training was always in a lab. And it was always our best effort to make something feel real or look real and, honestly in a lab, as some folks may know or may not know, real is not exactly how it feels. 

So I think the real turning point for me came when I was actually studying in my FMRI fellowship and everything that we did in an FMRI had to be done inside of the machine. And it was really tough because it was like I just don’t see this translating as easily.

It’s fascinating. It’s important work, it needs to be done, but I really kind of fell in love with the step. That might take that and put it out into the world, what might this look like in the next iteration? And that’s exactly what I ended up doing. So I found this world of applied science and at the time there really weren’t a lot of people who were using cognitive neuroscience in that way.

It was certainly around, but still sort of specialized. So I did my postdoc with the army. And they were really interested in using cognitive neuroscience to help pilots. So I was working with helicopter pilots to kind of understand what we could do to apply every, you know, the science to their work.

And so it was, you know, traumatic brain injury and performance, fatigue, all kinds of things and I really just, I loved that it was still pretty lab-based, but we were able to take it in steps too. From a lab to a full sized, full motion simulator to an actual helicopter that we could use for research.

And so that was really what got me completely in love with the concept. And I’ve just sort of been pushing the envelope ever since, trying to think like, now how do I make it even more real and even more real? So, my career from that point on was just always about how I could get things more and more embedded into people’s actual lives.

[00:03:40] Ghazenfer: 

Very interesting, very interesting. So now you’re on that. So, you work with United Healthcare, You work with the US Army. You, you talk about how you got to this and then you started your own company Interocept Labs. What was the tipping point that made you leap from research roles into building your own company?

They’re pretty different. Usually scientists are usually just scientists. They’re not making companies many times. 

[00:04:10] Bethany: 

Yes and I will say right away, I’m a much better scientist than I am a business woman. But I actually really kind of learned about the startup world and the business world while I was at United Health Group.

So we came in right as I came in as part of a company that was acquired and became United Health Group Research and Development, UHGRD and then later became what was called Optum Labs. And my job with that group was to go out into the world and sort of either. Find and vet interesting technologies that could be brought in to help members, for UHC, the insurance company, or to develop things from scratch based on what we were seeing out in the lab science.

And so working with my colleagues who were working in the labs and doing more of the basic science, really enjoyed that. But I worked alongside business people in that role and realized that there’s a real interest and a real need. In things like product development and healthcare and all of these different places that were really kind of.

Up until that point, I’d still really worked in places. Even though my work was applied, it was places that were pretty commonly associated with research. You know, the Army Research labs. I was at Hazel and Betty Ford Foundation for a while at their research center. This was like the first time I worked for a business of RND and I really enjoyed it and I, I really enjoyed learning about how to be more agile.

And so, I learned how to really kind of do more iterative, rapid feedback cycles. And my work started to look a lot more like industry RND as opposed to a lab protocol. And I was creating these products that I thought were really higher quality and again, felt more real. Like they could just, I could get in and give somebody something that helped them right away.

So learning all of that, learning from really excellent business people that I was, you know, paired up with and got to partner with,  I realized I just, that was what I wanted to do. I just wanted to work with companies and businesses and all kinds of different people to vet or create new technologies and just keep doing this.

So when things changed as things inevitably do, at a company as big as UHG. , they decided to change how they were doing their RND, and close down our department. I thought, well, what can I do to just keep this going? And I thought, well, I’ll just do it myself. So that was what kind of got me to jump in and free interocept labs.

I’d always had this vision and it’s still growing certainly, but I’m really happy to be here ’cause I’m essentially doing exactly what I wanted to do. Working with all these different kinds of groups and people to figure out, okay, how can I take this neuroscience that I can understand and see and follow and love and help turn it into something that helps you know, your customers, your people, your population base.

[00:07:18] Ghazenfer: 

Absolutely. And there’s nothing better than doing what you love. So, yes. And if that’s part of, that’s also helping customers, helping somebody improving their life,  that’s a double benefit. So looking, so looking back, what was the biggest mental hurdle in making that transition from scientists to an entrepreneur?

And what were the challenges, some of the challenges that you faced moving from that control lab? Environment into this, I would say messy, real world,  application. 

[00:07:56] Bethany: 

Yes, messy is the exact word I regularly use to describe what I do, very messy. I’m a very messy scientist. A mad scientist for sure, the biggest mental hurdle for me was the fact that I really had no business experience at all, you know

I was really nervous about that because I came from an entirely stem background, all science all the way through,  you know, my degrees were in psychology, but all of my work, everything I did, the only reason psychology was on that piece of paper is ’cause it’s who owned the cognitive neuroscience labs I worked in.

So I always was a scientist and really didn’t have a lot of understanding of how business worked and what I needed to do. And it was very intimidating for me ’cause it kind of felt like, okay, I’m gonna go from being a scientist to something completely different, you know, like an ice cream man or something, you know, like I just, it felt like I was going in a totally different direction.

However, I would say that my colleagues at United Health Group, I had some really truly amazing friends and mentors, in that role. And so the way that our system was set up, the scientists at RND were always partnered with what we called a venture partner, and these were business people. 

They were very bright, very talented business people. All different kinds from many different backgrounds. Just like there were many different scientists. And,  I got to work with several of them and I learned so much from each of them. And I would sometimes tell them about what I wanted to do and, and kind of share my vision for this with my more business savvy colleagues and friends.

And they were always very encouraging. Just, you should just do it. Go for it, you’ll figure it out. I took a little baby step. I worked for a little bit for a startup. It didn’t last very long and when that startup ended up having to do, you know, letting people go and, and doing layoffs, I thought, this is it.

This is the time. I have nothing to lose. I’m doing it. So, I jumped right in and haven’t stopped yet. I just kind of thought I’ll do it until it doesn’t work anymore and I’m still doing it. So I guess it’s going okay. 

[00:10:07] Ghazenfer:

Cool, I mean, the good news is we have so many examples. In fact, most of the top one, top successful companies have tech founders.

So having tech no entrepreneurship experience is not the criteria. So you learn along the way. Your every failed project, every failed exercise, is a teaching, it’s a lesson. So, and the key part is staying persistent, following the steps of the other people that have done it successfully. So I think you’re on the right track.

And you have the great network that’s pushing you, encouraging you. So glad to hear that. So, building products. That’s one of the main things. Obviously you love that, designing those. And I see that you are a chief science officer at Healing Track as well, which is using neuroscience to guide digital health platforms for chronic pain recovery.

So, do you wanna share some more in terms of like. How we’re using gamification, how you’re changing, or anything you can share about the healing track. Like what is this product? 

[00:11:35] Bethany: 

Absolutely, one of the things that’s been a really popular way to do what I wanna do with Interocept is working more or less as a fractional chief Scientific officer,  and helping with, you know, I’m most certainly not an engineer.

Learning how to build apps has been a skill, if been picking up along the way, but helping to design things that are neuroscientific in their background is one of the things that’s great about cognitive neuroscience. Is that it’s one of those things where it’s not, you know, just the science for itself.

So what I mean by that is like when I was at United. I think there were about 10 scientists. Each of us had a portfolio. My portfolio was mental health. However, there was always very strong encouragement for us to collaborate, work together, see what we could come up with together. And what came out really quickly from working with my friends there was that cognitive neuroscience is really handy for engagement 

Creating an app that people enjoy that’s kind of sticky. And, I have a sense of that because it’s, it’s all about how the mind works. If you can design something in line with how we know that the mind works, that’s a pretty great way to make sure your engagement’s pretty good and that your user response will be pretty good.

So I was able to really hone that as sort of an additional skillset set on top of things that are more, you know, directly related to my experience and with Healing Track. What I really like about it is both. There’s a neuroscience component directly about how to treat chronic pain just because it is obviously a nervous system condition.

So I use a lot of my neuroscience background to understand and explain pain for people. And I’m very, it was very clear to me when I first met these guys, whether the mechanism was, and it all very much made sense on the basis of my training and background, but the other side is the creation of a digital version of a therapy and understanding the challenges inherent to that.

So it’s been a really fun ride because I get to kind of use my skillset in two totally different ways. I would say when it comes to the engagement side, it all really just kind of depends on the nature and the vibe of, you know, the team that you’re working with and what they wanna create.There’s so many different ways to make something engaging. There’s lots of different faces and lots of different colors of engagement. 

One thing that’s been a really, a great part of working with the Healing Track team is that the founder of Healing Track is a guy named Alan Gordon, and he’s naturally incredibly engaging. So he has a great personality for it. And so being able to leverage that and kind of be able to work with the things he’s already done a really good job of putting together has made my job really easy on helping them. But, when it comes to things like gamification or some of those things, I will say one of my favorite resources, I’ll just kind of throw this out there for folks listening, a little free tip.

One of my absolute favorite people in this space is Yu-kai chou.  Yu-kai chou has put together a book called Actionable Gamification, which is extremely neuroscience informed, and I’ve actually had a few conversations with him. We’ve chatted about how he put it together. He has a framework he calls Octalysis, and I’m very happy with it. 

I think it’s a really cool thing. It took, I studied gamification and neuroscience for a long time, and it was. Again, kind of messy and disjointed. There were lots of different pieces. It was really up to you as the scientist to figure out how it all fit together, and  Yu-kai did a really great job of doing that for people.

And so he put it together in a framework. He calls it Octalysis and it really, I felt it encompassed everything that I had studied for years on the topic in a very clean and easy to use package. So a lot of what I do for clients. Not just with Healing Track, but across the board. When people bring me on to help with product development, which is a common thing we do with Interocept Labs,  I usually go to actionable Gamification as my playbook and I love to start there.

So I strongly recommend it for anybody. Building an app, you guys work is really cool. It’s very user friendly, and I can definitely say that the neuroscience on it is top notch. So shout out to Yu-kai.

[00:16:12] Ghazenfer: 

So, then talking about the app development experience. Yeah. How do you see that? 

[00:16:20] Bethany: 

I am most certainly not an app developer. I know enough about app development to be horrifyingly dangerous. I think I know enough to know how little I know. So I have been extremely grateful. We got to work with Tech Rivers,  Technology Rivers, and,  that’s the thing I’ve found for me as, you know, the role that I have where I’m more of the subject matter expert for the users.

Interactions and minds and perception. I love working with the tech team. I do enjoy that and I’ve enjoyed learning sort of the translation of what I am trying to say into the technical sort of engineering developer language. So that’s something that’s been a skillset that I’ve definitely been trying to build over the last 5 or 10 years of my career.

And,  something I do really enjoy is working with that team,  you know, fairly closely. Not to micromanage by any means, but I’m always really fascinated, that’s the process by which the thing in my mind that’s like coming from all of this great research from all these different amazing labs and books and journal articles is now literally becoming like a concrete, tangible thing. 

That to me is like the real magic moment. So I think I really enjoy just being able to witness that and understand how it works. And so, yes, I am. I have wanted to learn more about app development. I find the process fascinating, but I’m really bad at it, so I tend to leave it to the professionals.

But I, I do really enjoy that aspect of, I think they’re one of my favorite groups to do translational work with because again the people that are making it real. And that’s, that’s a pretty magical thing. 

[00:18:05] Ghazenfer:

Cool. And now with the Ai, how is it making it? I would say good or bad, difficult or easy for your business? For the area of neuroscience, where you work. So can you talk? 

[00:18:25] Bethany:

I can. Yeah, so when I remember when there were first whispers of AI, I was, you know, working in healthcare and, and it was really limited. It was pre-open AI days and it was pretty bad. It was like writing a bunch of, if then right, and like praying for the best.

So I was pretty skeptical about what was referred to as AI early on, just because of the limitations of the technology, but then when OpenAI released chat GPT and we started seeing Entropic with Claude and I understood what an LLM large language model was, I was like, oh, that’s pretty brilliant actually.

It’s like a pretty elegant way to do an amazing and awe-inspiring amount of work. I can only fathom these servers must be massive. But the idea is interesting and clever. However,  what I see a lot in from my perspective, I find it generally to be an incredibly helpful tool. Language prediction is incredibly helpful and largely reliable, right?

You could have a conversation with all these things people do all the time and they tend to be very conversational. People don’t really understand what they are though, and people don’t quite understand what they can do or, or the limitations of that. And I think that’s probably their biggest weakness, which is not a weakness of the technology per se, but a weakness of the education about the product and what it is and, and how it can be used.

And I sympathize because it’s, it could be used. I mean, almost anything you can think of. It is very ubiquitous. It will be, I think, always ubiquitous. It’s kinda like saying, how do you use Google for work? You know, it’s however you want. Right, but I find it interesting. 

My favorite thing about it, I find it really promising as a neuroscientist. So when you look at therapies that are what we would call talk therapy, right, like psychotherapy, a behavioral modification program, things where you would traditionally do it with like a therapist or a counselor or even a coach, right?

There’s always been research that the most important thing is not actually the curriculum you’re using. Whenever you’re doing these talk therapies, it’s the rapport that you build with the person you’re doing it with. That’s very, very critical. 

And my problem with AI for years was that the delivery method didn’t have a personality. It had, you could not build rapport. It was just a cold-hearted computer robot. What I find fascinating with an LLM is you can start to give them little personalities, and we saw that actually, I think come to fruition with open AI’s. The last big change was when they went from chat GPT, four oh to five, and there was such an uproar because the personality of the engine changed

And that’s such a crazy thing to think, right, like people were upset about this software update not ’cause of a loss of functionality, not because of a change in features. They didn’t like it ’cause the personality of what they considered to be like their friend changed. That was a huge chunk of users and it opens up a really fascinating avenue of the ability to use rapport with digital products now and the idea that you can start to train a personality so that people can interact more warmly, more organically with the digital product. I find that interesting. 

I think there’s a lot of ethical responsibility that goes behind it. We have to be really careful with what we’re doing very transparent about how we’re using it. But yeah, as a neuroscientist, some of those more complex, difficult to predict and difficult to prescribe elements of interaction, I think that we’re getting closer to being able to replicate those in a digital product, which completely changes a lot of people’s perspective on the potential for success in like a digital therapy environment.

[00:22:34] Ghazenfer: 

Cool. Very insightful. Thanks for sharing that. So, you’re right about having a different personality. Suddenly,  start giving you a response and you feel like, well, is that the same person? It’s like an assistant change or somebody you’re working with. Like people can recognize, oh, it’s not the same thing that I was getting.

So, from your perspective. What can entrepreneurs and innovators learn from translational neuroscience when it comes to product design, iteration and adaption? I know you touched somewhere, but I wanted like, if you have some advice as we are getting closer, so 

[00:23:18] Bethany: 

yeah. Well, I think that what people might not realize is that there are patterns to how our minds work but they’re just, there’s a lot of them. If you try to, you know, reverse engineer things too much from what you want somebody to do as far as a behavior. ’cause at the end of the day, that’s what we’re doing here, is trying to shape behavior with a digital product, a digital app, you know, you, you, you will overwhelm yourself.

It looks random if you do it that way. The way that’s important when you’re thinking about the human mind and figuring out how you can use neuroscience to your advantage with behavior change is always thinking about adaptation. Why? Why is this adaptive? I am a big nerd for something called evolutionary psychology or sometimes evolutionary neuroscience.

People are looking at it almost like anthropology and thinking about the evolution of why certain common human behaviors exist, why patterns exist. And  you know, it really follows a lot of the same other theories about evolution and, and the idea that they’re adaptive and there’s different scales of that.

There’s the anthropological one of all, humans sort of do this thing. Because we’ve evolved to do it as a survival method. , but there’s individual ones too, just like there are with anything. And so, you know, you adapt uniquely to your environment and your life. So thinking about it that way. I think it’s simpler and easier.

Well, no, there’s nothing, but it’s simple. But it’s easier. If you want somebody to engage with an app and you want somebody to behave in a certain way, you need to think about where they’re coming from, not what you want them to do. 

Don’t start at the end point. Start at where they are and think about what they are doing right now and why, and make that sort of, your North Star and think about what’s going on around that. One of the biggest and most important things that we’ve learned about the mind in the last decade as neuroscientists is that it’s not what’s called, it’s not brain bound which is a common phrase. And,  one of my favorite books on this topic is the Extended Mind by an author named Annie Murphy Paul, who’s a health journalist.

But this idea that we actually think with our bodies, we think with our environments, we think with the people around us. So when you are developing something. Like a product and you want it to appeal to somebody, you need to be thinking of those things ’cause a pers a user is not only experiencing your app with their brain, you know,  they’re experiencing it with this whole system of things.

So you need to think about your product in an ecosystem. It can be very complex. You can’t get too in the weeds. So it’s finding that balance, but understanding that every user is coming to it there and understanding those patterns will really. It will really help you a lot. So yeah, that would be kind of my, if I had to give one piece of advice, it would be that.

[00:26:21] Ghazenfer:

Okay. Thanks.so one last question. So you’ve said that your work is about seeing mechanisms and patterns beneath the surface. Can you share an example of how this approach has helped you solve a complex problem? 

[00:26:36] Bethany: 

Ooh, that’s a really great question. Yes, I think I can, so understanding the mechanisms. That’s a good example that won’t take three days to explain. I think let’s, we talked a little bit about chronic pain. I think that’s a good one because that was a big one, so whenever I was at UHG. They asked me to work on chronic pain. I thought it was really unusual that they asked the mental health portfolio person to take on pain and not like bringing on a neurologist or musculoskeletal person.

And when we looked into it, there was a lot of confusion around chronic pain. A lot of people have chronic pain, they have no structural problems in their body whatsoever. So what’s that? What’s that all about? And so I just did a deep dive with everything I could find. I worked with a scientist at the time I was coming into the group, so I was working under a senior scientist, named Gene Baker, and he suggested we just.

Sample everything and see what looks, what’s working, what isn’t working, and start to understand the pattern. And we started to kind of see a lot of stress reduction. Things were really effective, things that didn’t really have anything to do with the body. So we started to kind of understand that. Then we came across this idea of predictive cognition.

The idea that the brain predicts more than it reacts. And we realized that you could get yourself in a place where if you’ve had pain and you’ve had injuries or any kind of a, sometimes your brain just needs one time. It’s called a one trial learning, where it will start to associate the outcomes of something really traumatic every time afterwards. 

And pain is something that your body can make predictably, it can make in an anticipatory way. When we clicked into that, we started to understand the mechanisms of why these mental therapies were working with chronic pain. They were changing that association in the brain and I got really excited actually.

That’s how I got in touch with the Healing Track team. They were working on their therapy, pain reprocessing therapy and I remember I sat down and had dinner. With a doctor who was a big advocate for PRT, I smiled and I said, you’re the first people I’ve seen who, your mechanism of action matches what we understand about the mind.

And he laughed and he goes, okay, I’m gonna need you to explain that to us. ’cause we know this therapy works, but we don’t know why. So we had a whole conversation, but understanding that pattern and it took. Sometimes, you know, we had to get into the data, we had to look for those patterns, understand it.

But once you kind of unlock a mechanism, it’s really, really helpful. So,  with human behavior in particular, just because there’s a lot of potential mechanisms and you really need to lock down the most likely one. 

[00:29:32] Ghazenfer: 

Absolutely. And one more time, data is everything. Yes. So data is everything. Yes. So we’ve been talking to Bethany Ranes who has shared such valuable insights with us today.

So Bethany, where can people learn more about you and your work? And feel free to share some more about your business that probably I didn’t cover initially. So feel free to share some more that you wanna talk about. And then where can people find you? 

[00:30:02] Bethany: 

So my firm is called Interocept Labs, there’s an O in there.I named it after my favorite scent in the body, interoception so it’s not intercept, it’s interocept.

And you can find more about us at interceptlabs.com where we kind of explain what the heck even is applied neuroscience. And why is it helpful for us,  explaining kind of how we do work with improving individuals, health and performance organizations and also whole communities.

I have a partnership with a group called Mission Quest, where we actually apply this to whole communities, and build out ecosystems that help with health and outcomes and, and quality of life by using a lot of these same principles. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Bethany Ranes. I always joke that I’m a neuroscientist whose name is Dr. Brains but all of it kinda links together. So usually if you find somebody with blue and rainbow hair, you’re on the right track. 

[00:31:03] Ghazenfer: 

Your parents knew that you’re gonna be brain Doctor, that’s why they named you and you waited,

[00:31:13] Ghazenfer: 

Thanks a lot Bethany. So this episode is brought to you by Technology Rivers.

At Technology Rivers. We bring innovation through AI and technology to solve real world industry problems. We do this in two ways. First, by helping businesses streamline and automate their operations, and second, by partnering with startup founders, entrepreneurs, and product owners to create innovative software products from SaaS platforms to web and mobile apps.

A big part of our focus is healthcare, where we help health tech companies build stickier or HIPAA compliant. Products. If you wanna learn more about us, head over to technology rivers.com, R-I-V-E-R s.com, and tell us more about your project. Alright, Bethany, thanks a lot. Thank you very much.

Thanks for listening to Lessons from the leap. If you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe and share it with someone who finds it valuable. Thanks everyone.