Beau Lotto
Neuro-Scientist and Founder and CEO of Lab of Misfits Studio
- Author •
- Futurist •
- Scientist •
- TED Speaker
Captivating Conference Keynote Opener – Dr. Beau Lotto, Neuroscientist and 3-time main stage TED speaker and CEO/Founder of multiple startups, shows your audience how to see differently. Beau’s talk will equip them with the proper tools needed to leverage their time invested in your event.
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Beau Lotto's 2025 biography
About Beau Lotto
Your challenge at the very first moments of your next event is to get your audience instantly connected, warmed up and plugged in. Your event’s success is decided from the start. By getting your audience members open and wanting to change, collaborate, and create, you will avoid any skepticism. Leverage your investment with Beau Lotto as your opening keynote speaker.
World-famous neuroscientist, Dr. Beau Lotto, will prepare and super-motivate your audience by using the principles of neuroscience (yes, you read that right). When you step back and consider the Big Picture, the strategy makes sense. We all know the world is changing fast — that’s a given. The challenge is to adapt…or die. What you need is a speaker who will show your audience how to thrive in the face of change. Beau gives your attendees, in practical plain talk, the neuroscience behind personal evolution. He provides the detailed steps to achieve a successful culture where your audience can empower evolvability and thrive as a result.
Beau’s megamix is more than just science, however; he weaves in ideas from technology, art, fashion, music, and performance. It’s the kind of subject matter, delivered in a friendly, entertaining style, that turns heads.
The result for you: usable ideas that create a more invigorating, inventive, and evocable company culture. As well, this could be your first step in creating more meaningful, post-transactional customer relationships. Think of his gift to your audience as insight backed by science.
Beau’s keynote visit is more than just another indistinguishable inspirational speaker yelling, “You can do it!” Much more. Here, you get a fact-based return on investment. Don’t let Beau’s science background give you pause – his talks are always common-sense, and peppered with humor, audience participation and actionable principles that audiences can apply in their professional lives.
Beau, a renowned audience arouser, is a leading expert in perception, neuroscience, and complex adaptive systems. He’s helped navigate brands like Cirque du Soleil, Microsoft and L’oreal to even greater successes. In corporate circles as well as in the scientific community, Beau is well known and well respected; he’s earned a world-class reputation as a speaker, masterclass leader and big-league corporate consultant.
He’s been electrifying crowds for over 30 years, including a three-time gig as a mainstage TED-talk speaker. How? By challenging his audiences’ perceptions about change, getting them to look past their biases, and sparking ideas about how to create a more evolved, can-do organization.
The ultimate strategy: to apply scientific truths about perception to get your staff achieving solid bottom-line results.
Audiences love him because his unique style enables him to:
- Connect with every audience member
- Get his point across using humor, interaction and evidence rather than high-tech speak
- Engage the audience in a way that will cause immediate improvements and evolution in your organization
- Give your audience the tools they need to more be successful, courageous and collaborative in wildly uncertain, changing times
- Stay positive, inspirational, and aspirational (which is contagious and nourishing)
- Step up the possibilities as to what your people will consider do-able and achievable
- Share with the group how to create a culture (both at the conference, in oneself and across the organisation) grounded in 10Cs: Evolutionary, Neuroscientific principles that empower individuals and systems to thrive in a constantly changing world.
If you want to build your team more effectively and have them face and conquer their problems, fears and challenges, let Beau show the way. Neuroscience – as entertainingly explained by Beau – holds the key to adaption, creativity, innovation, and perception.
Beau Lotto's 2025 talks & topics
Risk/Uncertainty
One of the most dangerous things one can experience in life is doubt. During evolution, if your ancestors weren’t sure whether that ‘thing over there’ was a predator, well … it was too late for them. Thus, we hate doubt … and that’s usually a good idea (throughout evolutionary history).
We are genetically programmed to do so: Sea-sickness, and indeed most of our mental health problems being direct manifestations of our fear. The deep irony, however, is that nothing interesting begins without it. So taking the risk to step into uncertainty is an essential aspect of adaptation, which we know is at the root of success in all natural systems. What’s more, nature also tells us when it’s best to risk uncertainty. So how to deal with uncertainty is the fundamental problem that your brain evolved to solve. Here we discuss in a highly experiential way how and why everything is uncertain, and nature’s solution to it.
Adapt or Die
The future is unknown. It always has been and always will be. Whether technological innovation, wars, climate change, voting … or a pandemic, every decision an organisation and leader makes is, in one way or another, directly related to uncertainty.
In nature, the most successful systems do not just adapt, they are adaptable. Indeed, adaptability is the ‘skill’ most sought by leaders and organisations. To adapt requires stepping into uncertainty. Adapting to uncertainty is born out of a way of being … a practice … that one engages in every day at work, at home with one’s children, with one’s partner, friends, with the cashier in the grocery store.
Only by understanding how and why you see what you do can you adapt to and lead others into uncertainty. Becoming perceptually intelligent in conflict enables leaders and their teams and organisations to succeed when others fail.
Change
There is no inherent value in change. Whether change is good or bad is – like everything else in life – context-dependent. Here, using principles in behavioral and perceptual neuroscience, we’ll explore what lives at the heart of change: why it’s often essential for success but equally the most feared of human activities. Indeed, to ask ‘why?’ is historically the most dangerous thing you can do. Hence, organization, businesses, religions and even our education systems are designed to reduce question-asking. And yet all revolutions (and revelations) begin with a joke (“you mean it could be different from this?”).
See how and why questions and metaphor are mediators of change; what makes a good question; and how change – when properly pursued – has no direction or goal. Which means change is personal and – when properly considered – inevitable.
Leadership
What makes a good leader? When asked this question of a diverse audience, I’ll receive many different possible qualities that are ‘essential’. And yet, there are only three such descriptions that correlate with the success of a company. What are they and why do they matter?
Here we will address these questions from the perspective of behavioral neuroscience, and consider a new answer: the quality of a leader is defined by how he/she leads others into uncertainty.
How To See New Meaning In Data
There is no inherent value in any piece of information! Data is meaningless. Why? This is because the brain deals with meaning and not information since information doesn’t tell you what to do. In fact, THE fundamental challenge that the brain evolved to solve is to take meaningless data and make it meaningful. This is true even at the most basic level of our senses: seeing light. Which is why we never see the world in any direct sense. Instead what we see is the meaning of information grounded in our personal, cultural and evolutionary histories. And it’s the historical meaning of stuff that we literally see, experience and know (not the stuff itself).
Here we’ll explore – and experience – how to see new meaning in data that has always been there, but remains hidden. The result will be an understanding of the principles by which the brain makes the meaningless meaningful.
Innovation
There are two aspect to innovation: efficiency and creativity. I.e. the ability to create novel solutions to a meaningful problem and ability to realise that solution. Indeed, innovation is itself inherent in both of these processes. In recent decades we focused – at times almost exclusively – to efficiency.
Education
Success in most educational systems is measured by the ability to memorise and reiterate facts. This is because education is in the service of society and businesses, which emphasizes efficiency over creativity. Schools – like business, then, focus on answers not questions through a competitive – not collaborative – environment. Getting the right answer and prosecuting it efficiently through competition is in fact a good strategy in a stable world. The problem is that our world is different … it’s complex, uncertain and evolving. Which is why to succeed in nature requires being adaptable to change (creativity). A necessary corollary of this view is the we need to teach not what to see, but why to look?
Here using the neuroscience of perception, we will explore this new way of thinking about education through concrete examples in the world of science education where children became the youngest published scientists in history. Born out of our research on perception, we will discuss a framework for a learning that is based on an openness to uncertainty and discovery that influences not just the way schools educate, but even the very architecture and design of schools.
Conceptual framework
Our framework is called ‘Seeing Myself See’, which recognises the importance of perception, of experience and imagination in shaping who we are as an individual – and also has the capacity to foster a different kind of learning: ‘this is how you see it now, but with a bit of courage it is possible for you to see it differently’. In this way children are guided away from the admittedly more comfortable black and white view of the world, to the more challenging, but a more enlightening realisation of the greys in between.
The 5 ‘C’s
We have distilled the idea of ‘Seeing Myself See’ in the context of education into five principles, which we call the 5 C’s: Compassion, Community, Choice, Creativity and Courage. These principles provide the intertwined threads of a tapestry, the actual colours and textures of which must be woven by the individual school. We argue that these principles can be achieved only if they become what we call the actual ‘ecology of education’. They are as much about teaching as learning, since teaching compassionately teaches compassion; teaching creatively teaches creativity; by guiding children rather than instructing them, they learn freedom and responsibility to choose; and situating one’s students in the context of a community enables the learner to become a unique part of a whole.
Branding
Imagine having a relationship with someone and treating them as the average man or woman. Not surprisingly, it’s not going to work for very long. The value of any relationship is defined by how well you ‘know’ someone: the more nuanced, creative and personal the narrative, the more essential it becomes.
Branding is about creating a narrative and way of being that enables a brand to have a relationship with their audience. But brands treat people as averages, hence their stories do not foster what the brain truly needs to feel valued, meaningful and loyal. Understanding the mechanisms and principles of behavioural neuroscience that enable relationships to start, as well as what is need to maintain them (which are not the same thing) is essential to any brand. And key to this is authenticity.
So how can brands be authentic? How can they understand themselves and communicate that to their audience? Who is your audience … at the human level? Are there general principles we can use? These are the questions with which we will engage in a highly experiential way through the neuroscience of perception.