Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Optimize Your Brain For Better Health, Performance And Fulfillment | Neuroscientist, Dr. David Eagleman

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

How can you train your brain to unlock more joy and success in your life?Diving deep into this exciting question is today's guest, Dr. David Eagleman, a revolutionary thinker and trailblazer in the world of neuroscience."One of the most important things you can do for your brain is to constantly challenge it."As an esteemed Stanford professor and intrepid explorer of the human brain, David's contributions to the field of neuroscience are significant. He has pioneered studies on the brain's plasticity, sensory substitution (the process of using a different sense to replace or make up for the lack of another), the function of dreams, time perception, and so much more.But David is not just a scientist and professor—he's the best-selling author of 8 books on neuroscience, the host of a PBS television series on the brain, and the host of his own podcast, 'Inner Cosmos,' which dives deeper into the intersection of brain science and technology.And if that wasn't enough, he's also the founder of two incredible companies (both of which we discuss in this episode).Remarkable. I really love the places David took us today.In our conversation, David shares how an optimized brain could be the gateway to anchoring ourselves in the present moment, unlocking our potential, and living a more vibrant life.So, whether you're someone in pursuit of optimizing your mind for peak performance or just wanting to think and feel more deeply, this is a thought-provoking conversation you won't want to miss. And I can't wait for you to dive in._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Finding Mastery is brought to you by Remarkable. In a world that's full of distractions, focused thinking is becoming a rare skill and a massive competitive advantage. That's why I've been using the Remarkable Paper Pro, a digital notebook designed to help you think clearly and work deliberately. It's not another device filled with notifications or apps.

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stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. To my mind, this is really one of the most powerful things that we can do is understand ourselves through time. In other words, your future self is different than who you are right now and will be tempted by things. So the question is, what can you do to set into place a contract so that you cannot screw that up? Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist.

And I am so stoked to welcome a revolutionary thinker, a true trailblazer in the world of neuroscience, the highly respected Dr. David Eagleman. Now, as an esteemed Stanford professor and intrepid explorer of the human brain, his contributions to the field of neuroscience are significant. He has pioneered studies on brain plasticity, sensory substitution, which is the process of using different senses to replace or make up for the lack of another. I mean, our brains are remarkable. The function of dreams, time perception, and so much more. In today's conversation,

David takes us on a fascinating journey, sharing how an optimized brain could be the gateway to anchoring ourselves in the present moment, to unlocking our potential and living a more vibrant life. So I can't wait for you to experience the passion and the rich knowledge that lives with inside him. David is not just a scientist and a professor. He's the bestselling author of eight books on neuroscience. He's host of a PBS television series on the brain. He's a founder of two incredible companies, both of which we discussed in this conversation. And he's also the host of his own podcast,

Inner Cosmos, which he dives deeper into the intersection of brain science and technology. I mean, he's remarkable. And I really love the places David took us in this conversation. We explore why novelty is so important when it comes to optimizing our brain's performance, how to shape our future behavior, which is really cool, intriguing ways to increase productivity for individuals and teams, and even practical tools to slow down our perception of time

and live more fully in the present moment. Okay, now I also want to encourage you to prepare yourself in this conversation, to really ground yourself. We delve into some intense topics, particularly regarding the recent events surrounding Hamas and Israel. David offers us insights through the lens of brain science, his studies on propaganda, and the dynamics of in-groups and out-groups. We discuss ways in which we can approach these devastating issues with self-care and engage in the conversations in meaningful ways. The energy, wisdom, the lightheartedness that David brings to this conversation make it

an absolute joy to be in it with him. So with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with the incredible Dr. David Eagleman. Dr. Eagleman, welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. Thank you. It's so nice to be here. Congratulations on a meaningful and significant body of work in the field of neuroscience. And I am so fired up to have this conversation. And neuroscientists, psychologists, this conversation sounds like a setup to a bad joke waiting to happen, like a neuroscientist and a psychologist walk into a bar.

But how would you finish that joke? Well, I don't know, because I don't drink, and maybe you don't either. So I'm not sure why we're walking in there. To judge all the people that are not drinking? No, let's make sure that's not part of the end of the joke. That's so funny. Okay, good. So you don't drink? No alcohol?

No. Nope. And what were the reasons for that? Oh, just because it disrupts my sleep a little bit and I'm just trying to stay healthy and stay strong and stay cognitively sharp. Was that a decision that you made once you understood the impacts on brain? Or was that something that was ingrained at a young age? Was it something that you had some trauma in the family?

You said, no, drinking is definitely not for me. No, actually, no one in my family? You said, no, drinking is definitely not for me. No, actually no one in my family drank either. So, um, so I didn't have that as a model, but, um, it wasn't actually from the neuroscience point of view. It was just observing, you know, when you get to college and so on, you drink with your friends, but I realized that it disrupted sleep and made me feel fuzzier the next day. So that's, I just stopped on those reasons. Wait a minute. You're 25 and you said, yeah, I'm feeling fuzzy after I drink. Yeah. Well, I've always – I mean, look, this is a podcast about performance and I've always been focused on that and trying to maximize everything.

I love it. Like when I first started really understanding kind of the potency of the performance psychology lens that I was, I was trying to get my arms around. All I wanted to do was work with people that were as obsessed about getting better as I was. And I realized that that obsession was actually not healthy. Um, so,, I think, are the same age and you've contributed now to the field. So I definitely want to dig into your applied insights. And so our community is a bit wild about getting better and they want to learn better. They want to know how to get the most of their brains, optimizing themselves in the modern world. So from a brain performance standpoint, let's go on performance before we do health. And let's talk about the self

before we talk about doing it at scale for inside of teams or groups. What, if we just use me as a, as a bit of a N of one, what are some things like do's and don'ts that you would say, make sure that these are part of your program to be, to give yourself a chance to perform well from a brain perspective? Yeah, I think I'd say two things. One is seeking novelty and probably people like us do that all the time anyway. Most of your listeners do that. But a lot of people in the world just try to settle into whatever they're doing. They like a job that is steady.

They know exactly what to expect when they roll in every morning. And same with their political views. They know how they feel about this or whatever. But, but the fact is that one of the most important things you can do for your brain is to constantly challenge it, to present it with situations with data that it doesn't, it's, it's internal model doesn't capture and it has to say, ah, this is uncomfortable. I don't know what's going on here or, you know, something that you can't yet do, but you want to. So a really key thing is to always keep yourself between the levels of frustrating but achievable

and push yourself on new things all the time. Probably, again, to listeners of your podcast, this probably seems obvious, but it's not obvious to most of the world. And it probably bears hearing even for those for whom it is obvious. So seeking novelty is one. And by the way, there are a million small ways to do it, and switch which side you sit on in your seat and drive a different route home from work and brush your teeth with your other hand and just do stuff that just changes things up so you're not an automatized zombie. So that's number one thing that I'd say, and I think it's really useful. And I, you know, I've always done that with my life, but all the people that I know who have done that with their lives, they all, they're all high performers.

They're not falling into ruts, but they're constantly skimming the surface of the water and able to stay up. So wait, before you go to, if you, before you go to number two, let's just, let's open this up a bit. You know, novelty is wonderful for some. Some people, they want routine. They like the idea of not having to task themselves with figuring out new. They want to limit the tax that it takes to be able to brush my teeth with my left hand.

And I'll use a very small example when I travel and I've got to find the new switch, like what turns off what light switch. And it's a bit, you know, it's, it's fine, but at some level there's a tax. And at another level, I hear you saying, yeah, just embrace it. Go with it. Your brain's going to be solving new things. And I say, yeah, but that's not where I want my brain to solve things. I want to slide into bed at whatever time in a hotel. And I'd be like, wait, which light? So can you just kind of talk a little bit

about novelty, novelty seeking, and the value of routines? Yeah. I mean, one thing, just giving your hotel light example, is that it just doesn't matter because you'll never be back in that hotel room and it's unlikely you're going to learn something new and something that shakes up your internal model in a meaningful way. So probably seeking novelty in that past weekend and so on. Seeking novelty there and trying to absorb different points of view and things that are hard for you to shake them up and think about things in a new way. That stuff is more meaningful because that can cash out in all kinds of ways in your life where you have a deeper understanding of people. And, you know, any kind of skill that you're taking on. Let's say you decide you're going to learn violin or whatever it is you're going to do, you'll actually get better at something. So there are things I think worth seeking that will build you as a person, as opposed to simply terrible tasks.

Like every year when I do my taxes, it's full of terrible, meaningless tasks that are just like the hotel light switches that just don't matter. I don't like that kind of novelty. Yes. I'm going to pause the conversation here for just a few minutes to talk about our sponsors. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true. Meaningful relationships are at the center of sustained success. And building those relationships, it takes more than effort. It takes a real caring about your people. It takes the right tools, the right information at the right time. And that's where LinkedIn Sales Navigator can come in.

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know that can help you open doors or make a warm introduction. In other words, it's not about more outreach. It's about smarter, more human outreach. And that's something here at Finding Mastery that our team lives and breathes by. If you're ready to start building stronger relationships that actually convert, try LinkedIn Sales Navigator for free for 60 days at linkedin.com slash deal. That's linkedin.com slash deal. For two full months for free, terms and conditions apply. Finding Mastery is brought to you by David Protein. I'm pretty intentional about what I eat,

and the majority of my nutrition comes from whole foods. And when I'm traveling or in between meals, on a demanding day certainly, I need something quick that will support the way that I feel and think and perform. And that's why I've been leaning on David Protein Bars. And so has the team here at Finding Mastery. In fact, our GM, Stuart, he loves them so much. I just want to kind of quickly put them on the spot. Stuart, I know you're listening. I think you might be the reason that we're running out of these bars so quickly. They're incredible, Mike. I love them. One a day,

one a day. What do you mean one a day? There's way more than that happening here. Don't tell. Okay. All right. Look, they're incredibly simple. They're effective. 28 grams of protein, just 150 calories and zero grams of sugar. It's rare to find something that fits so conveniently into a performance-based lifestyle and actually tastes good. Dr. Peter Attia, someone who's been on the show, it's a great episode by the way, is also their chief science officer. So I know they've done their due diligence in that category. My favorite flavor right now is the chocolate chip cookie dough. And a few of our teammates here at Finding Mastery have been loving the fudge brownie and peanut butter. I know, Stuart, you're still listening here. So getting enough protein matters.

And that can't be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus, recovery, for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Let's jump right back into the conversation. And then let me see if I could round something together. You eloquently put in there that zone between frustration and achievement. And one of the ways this is where the psychologists and neuroscientists might have some fun is that you can manipulate the floor and the ceiling of

frustration. And if just by the way you think, just by the habit of how you respond, just by like having some volitional control in your own psychology, that if you can manipulate your tolerance or your appreciation for being at the messy edge, you fundamentally change that zone. So, so, so if you, at one point in your life, you're quickly frustrated because you can't tie your shoelaces. And then over time, you know, take the shoelace example and turn it into landing a, landing an airplane with one engine turned off and you've got to figure out how to do, you know, land on just one engine. That if you can maintain your cool and not get frustrated with the conditions, that you end up lifting your achievement, your zone to learn because the frustration kind of, it creates that, oh, what would you call it?

That internal level of hostility where learning stops, where novelty is no longer cool. And so how do you think about manipulating the frustration bit to be able to be in a deeper learning zone? You know, that actually ties into the second point I was going to raise because so much of who we are has to do with our narratives that we tell ourselves, sort of the structure, the setup that we give ourselves. So if you tell yourself, if you set yourself up in a way such that, you know, you say, look, I'm going to accept this level of frustration and that's what I'm facing, then it's no problem. The, you know, this obviously helps to be surrounded by

friends or listening to podcasts of the right sort or whatever, where you feel like, okay, look, this is, there's no point in, in whining when I fall down on the ski slope or whatever, because I've actually, I've had this modeled to me by the people around me that I can be performing at a much higher level. So my level of frustration shouldn't be down here. It should be way up there. So these things are really helpful to set ourselves up that way. And as far as achievable goes, you know, that's the other, that's the ceiling part. You want to make sure things are achievable.

So you want to be realistic about that part of it, which is to say, you know, the, the puzzle you're taking on or something, you know, if you know that other people have done it, it's useful to remind yourself of that a lot. Hey, look, you know, if some other schmuck can do this, I know that I can do this too. Okay. So let's stay here for a minute. Cause this is fun. That, that idea that if somebody else can do it, I should be able to do it or I can do it can cut both ways, right? So it's like it can create space. Like, look, if Denzel can do it, I'm pretty sure that I can figure this thing out too.

Okay, so that's cool. But it can also create space. But it also goes, look, if Denzel can do it, why am I not getting it? And so it's just this subtle little judo in how you frame the reference point. And that's something I would love to open up for our communities. It's like the way you frame things influences the tone, not only just the words, but the tone of those words, which I'm not sure how that would square

with how you're thinking about it, but it just seems so apparent to me that if we're trying to get good at raising, lifting the frustration floor, that our reference points matter a lot in how we think about our reference points. Yeah. You know, obviously there's going to be some influence of personality here as well, because I guess I've never been the type to think, well, if Denzel can do it, why can't I do it? I just use that to push myself harder, because the answer is if somebody else can do it, and if I'm physically capable, I mean, if it's not something that you have, you know, like Michael Phelps has a much longer wingspan than I do. So I'm probably not going to ever be able to beat him in swimming. But, you know, if it's something that I should be able to do, then I just I use that as a lever to push myself.

Yeah, that's cool. But I don't. So you don't fall to the frustration. Yeah. You use it. Yes. You use it. Yeah. So you encourage yourself. You back yourself.

It's probably sounds you probably say things that I would resonate with, like as first principles. Do you agree that you can do hard things that you can figure shit out? Oh, yeah. That when setbacks happen, I how would you finish that? Oh, I just I just just need to try, try this harder. I, yeah, I mean, I guess the thing that has always, the thing that's always driven me is if I see somebody else doing something, I should be able to do that. I mean, it's not, there are obviously differences between humans, but generally if something is achievable by,

you know, especially a number of humans, not the thing that only one person can do, but if hundreds or thousands of people are doing something, I can get there. I just have to, you know, I just have to work at it. Ah, there you go. Okay. So that is a framing of autonomy and agency and like this idea that you, you've got. And okay, I just had on one of your colleagues. I don't know if you know where this is going. Dr. Sapolsky. And so his new research is about determinism. And he's like, there's no free will.

It's a myth. So like, I don't know if you want to think about it, you know, if you want to believe that and you have a happy life, that's okay. But I'm just telling you, there's no free will. And so do you go down the rabbit hole with him on determinism or do you stay pretty buoyant on where I'm at the agency level. Here's what I think. I think our science is a little too young to know for certain. So it is the case that most of neuroscience certainly directionally points towards the idea that we don't have free will.

Why? Because if you damage parts of your brain, you lose particular functions. You lose the ability to name animals or see colors or, you know, do the right kind of decision-making or understand music or a hundred other things that we see in the clinics every day. So we know that this is all tied to the function of your brain. And so the natural next step is, okay, well, look, maybe absolutely everything about what we perceive as our free will, maybe that's just all a brain illusion. And that certainly might be the case. I just don't think we know enough to know that

with certainty. What we can know with certainty, I think, is that almost everything you think and do and act and believe is generated by parts of your brain you don't have access to and any awareness of for that matter. So there are a million psychology papers and tricks, as you all know, showing that, you know, you can get people to believe a particular thing or believe that they thought of that or believe that they had always, you know, thought this instead of that, or there's just a million tricks you can do, all of which point in the direction of how we're not, you know, we're more automatized than we certainly thought we were. But, you know, to my mind, the issue of free will, we certainly feel like we have it, we certainly have that impression. And so if that's an illusion, it's one that I'll take. In the end, I think it doesn't matter that much, though, because if we don't have it at all, then everything I just said, I was sort of predetermined to say, and you're predetermined to give whatever. And so like, who cares? Fine. But let's just assume that we do have free will. that brains interact in a giant network nowadays more than ever with other brains and situations.

And so my brain is influenced by what you just said and yours by mine and so on, that everybody's by everything. And so there's a sense in which even if we had free will, it's not deterministic in a sense that we could ever figure it out. We could never know, oh, here's exactly what you're going to do next, because it's way too complex for that. Because it involves not only my hundred billion neurons, but their interaction with your hundred billion neurons. And that times all the hundred billion neurons of people listening to this conversation right now and what's going on in their lives and so on. So I want to hit consciousness with you because I think it's a bit of a rat's nest to go into, but I'd love to get your take on it. But let's stay with your first two points on what somebody can do to optimize their brain. Squared up, it's very clear novelty.

Second point? Second point has to do with the topic of actually my next book, which is it's called The Ulysses Contract. And the idea of Ulysses Contract is where you make a pact with your future self. So most people will remember that Ulysses, or Odysseus as he's also called, was coming home from the Trojan War. He realized he was going to pass the island of the Sirens, where the Sirens sang songs so beautiful that it beggared the minds of mortal men, and they would drive towards the island and crash into the rocks and die. And so Ulysses really wanted to hear the Siren song, but he knew that like any mortal man, he was going to be vulnerable as well. So he saw the island of the sirens way out in the distance, and he knew they had a pass

there. And so what he did is he had his men lash him to the mast and fill their ears with beeswax. And he said, no matter what, no matter if I'm screaming or yelling, just keep rowing. So what this was, was the Ulysses of sound mind making a contract with the future Ulysses who he knew would behave badly. So he was tying himself to the mast so that he couldn't misbehave in that scenario. And to my mind, this is really one of the most powerful things that we can do is understand ourselves through time. In other words, whatever, let's say you're on a diet or something, you think, oh, I won't, I won't eat that cake when it comes my way because, because I know that I shouldn't because I'm on a diet. Forget it. Your future self is different than who you are right now and will

be tempted by things. And everyone has different sorts of temptations that plague them. And so the question is, what can you do to set into place a contract so that you cannot screw that up, so that you are actually bound to that behavior? I'll just give you a couple examples if it helps. For example, in Alcoholics Anonymous, one of the first things they tell you is, get rid of all the alcohol in your house. Because you might think, okay, look, I'm not drinking anymore. But then on a fun Friday night or a lonely Sunday night or something, maybe there's the bottles there. You're going to end up drinking. So what you do is you get rid of it. For people battling drug addiction, one of the rules is don't carry more than $20 with you at any time because at some point you're going to run into someone who tries to sell you drugs. And if you have the cash, you'll buy the drugs.

So you just don't carry the cash with you. There are a million examples of this sort of thing. But, you know, I feel it's one of the most useful ways of navigating life is just setting up contracts. There are also, by the way, a million, you know, easy, simple ways to do this. For example, if I want to, you know, keep a consistent workout schedule or something, just getting a friend to meet me at the gym so that when the time comes, if I feel like, oh, I'm a little tired, I'm busy, I don't think I'm going to go today, I have to go because now I've set up a contract.

This guy's going to show up there. So doing things socially is massively important. I love this. I mean, leave it to you to be this clever, this grounded in research. Well done. I love this. And one of the reasons I like it is because I'm listening to an esteemed neuroscientist talk about psychology. And I go, yeah, look at that. Like, that's great. Like, I, you know, you're, I become, I became disenfranchised at some level with neuroscience and I'll tell you why. Okay. So I hope this is not some weird assault on your beloved, you know, science, but there's, there's this need, if you can't measure it, it doesn't

matter. And if we can't see it, it doesn't. There's this arrogance of tangibility that it makes me a little crazy because the world of psychology is so invisible and we get to see behavior. We get to see the artifact of how we think and feel, but we can't see our actual thoughts maybe yet. I don't know. And so what I love that you've done is you've said, look, there's the future self. You can't see our actual thoughts maybe yet. I don't know. And so what I love that you've done is you've said, look, there's the future self. You can't see that, but you're using your imagination to think what it could be, what some of the trap doors could be, what some of the

opportunities could become. And I'm going to make a contract, which again is a way of thinking about how you're going to behave. And then therein lies, and I think you'll probably take me home, that therein lies brain and body and behavior enhancements. But I don't know yet. I mean, I hope you'll take us home. But I just love where you're taking this. Great, great, great. Yeah, and by the way, I mean, neuroscience at its best

connects solidly to psychology, you know, where they link arms and they're off to the races. And vice versa. I would say the same for psychology. Sure. Sure. Exactly. And, you know, the thing about neuroscience is you look at the way that small, any kind of small changes to the brain will change the psychology, whether that's, you know, brain damage or a stroke or a tumor or things like that, and how that changes somebody's decision making or personality to, you know, things like alcohol or drugs, which are invisibly small molecules, but they bind to receptors and they completely change who you are in that moment and the decisions that you'll make in that moment. And so that's the sense in which it's

inescapable. And this is why a lot of neuroscientists will say, look, we definitely don't have free will. What they're pointing to is this issue that you just change the biology a little bit and you change. Who you are changes. So one of the things that's, you know, so great about the human brain is we've got this massive prefrontal cortex. That's the part behind the forehead. And that's what we have that's bigger than anyone else among our, you know, well, anywhere in the animal kingdom. It's certainly even, you know, among our nearest neighbors, the apes. We just have much more of this prefrontal cortex. And that is what allows us to simulate what ifs. That's what allows us to think about other possibilities,

what could have been, what will be, what will happen if I do this, that kind of thing, including who will I be when I'm faced with that temptation? Am I going to make the right decision or do I need to set shackles into place now to constrain that person? And so this is actually the part that I have found the most fascinating about neuroscience is how the self is not really one thing. We're not individuals in the sense of being, you know, not divisible, but instead you are many things. You're made up of all these rivaling neural networks and we can measure this in brain imaging. You know, you've got all these different neural networks and it's like a neural parliament going on under the hood. We've got all these different

votes screaming off all the time and they battle and, and different in different scenarios, the vote will go different ways, steering the ship of state down a different path. Okay. Quick pause here to share some of the sponsors of this conversation. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, What you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentus. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO,

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You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. And now back to the conversation. If we double click here for just a little bit and we talk about the process of setting up a contract with your future self, we have a higher likelihood of doing that activity or showing up in a particular way. So I think I know where you're going. And then when you talk about prefrontal cortex to do the what if scenario, yes. And then are we making this, if we wrestle this thing all the way down, are you saying, think about your future self and are you inviting? So we talk about like create a vision of the person you want to become. So I'm not going to goal setting materially here, but performance imagery is in essence

one of the best practices in sports psychology. So use your imagination to see a future self. And you're saying make a commitment, reduce the levers that you would have to be able to go against the temptations, or are you suggesting and or are you suggesting put in levers that you can use to help build that person that you're wanting to become? So is it a constriction model or is it an asset model? And talk to me about the brain mechanisms around imagination, if that is fitting. Yeah. What's really interesting here is that this is a constriction model. This is saying, putting aside any imagination I might have for my future self and all the things that I want to be and I want to envision, this is the opposite. This is saying, how is my future self a jerk and just going to do the wrong

thing? Like right now, in my moment of, you know, poised reflection, I can think about exactly what I want to do and how I want to get there and so on. But my future self might be, you know, poised reflection. I can think about exactly what I want to do and how I want to get there and so on. But my future self might be, you know, tired or have some other dumb thing it wants to do or look at some YouTube videos or whatever. And it's not doing the right thing. So the question is, how can I actually make it so that it can't do that? And by the way, the contract has to be, I mean, in some sense, it should be called like, you know, shackling or lashing to the mast or something more than a contract. Because it's not a two-way contract. It's a one-way contract where you are constraining the behavior of your future self. You're saying, I'm just not going to let you face that temptation.

I mean, I'll give you a dumb example. Whenever I'm at a restaurant, you know, sometimes you go to these dinners and it's a prefixed course. And so they come with the dessert. I don't usually order dessert, but they'll put plops of, you know, chocolate cake in front of me. What I'll do is I'll take a few bites and then I take the salt shaker and I cover the thing in salt. And I do that so that my future self, yeah, my future self in like, you know, two minutes won't say, oh, I'll just take one more bite. And then my future self two more minutes later. So I'll just take another pretty soon. I finished the whole damn cake. So it's just a way of saying, hey, I I think I'm being too simplistic really. And because I, the brilliance of what you're saying is know your temptations, just like a drug addict, change your playmates, change your play toys, change your play pen is one of the best practices that comes out of NA or AA.

And so you're, I think that's what you're suggesting is like, know your temptations, know your trap doors, know your pitfalls, and then get ahead of it. So you're not trying to make a highly emotionally charged decision, um, against the temptations of cravings and, um, whatever we might say. Exactly. Because yeah, that's exactly right. Cause you'll never win that if you're a, you know, an addict to cocaine or something, then somebody at a party says, hey, here's a line. You're never going to win in that moment. And so what was really interesting about your question earlier was it's not about using your prefrontal cortex to imagine your best self.

It's imagining your worst self, imagining, oh, yeah, I am going to act like a jerk in that situation. And so here's how I combat that. Here's how I'm going to make sure that cannot happen. Take me to, I've got a part one, part two, I'll say both of them and see where you go with it. I want to know the part of the brain that is responsible for imagery that you're most interested in. When I say part, I mean network. I mean kind of the centers that you're most interested when somebody uses their imagination to see a future self. And then the second part of it is one of the best practices in imagery is to not just see success, but to also see yourself in a compromised situation. So you become more familiar with solving that potential problem. And I know that that's not what we're talking about, but I wonder where you go as a tie-in

to that feature of quote-unquote mental performance imagery. Yeah, okay, so I'll do these in order. So the part one thing about what parts of the brain are involved. So as I said, your prefrontal cortex is involved in simulating possible futures, but there are actually, this comes back to this theme

that I'm always banging on about, that the brain's actually made up of lots of different networks, and even the prefrontal cortex has all these different parts to it. So just as an example, there are parts, for example, what's called the orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in gauging the emotional experience, the emotional response that you'll have to something. Oh, that's going to be good. That's going to be bad. It's going to be scary. It's going to be wonderful, that kind of thing. You have other parts that are simulating the more, let's say, rational parts of, okay, well, here's exactly what's going to happen. Anyway, when you're simulating possible futures, all these things come into play.

And by the way, I should just also mention that the other part of imagery, the only reason that the brain is able to simulate possible futures is because it writes down the past. So memory exists only so that we can simulate the future. So everything that you've experienced in your life is tracked and recorded, not with great fidelity, but it's recorded so that you can use those as building blocks to simulate possible futures. Isn't that cool? That's cool. And there's a bit of activation across the motor strip

that we think is likely involved in myelinization. And I don't know if you've come across any of this research, but I love it. There's not a lot here, but have you come across mental imagery in myelinization? Not in terms of myelinization, but certainly when you're doing mental imagery, you're activating the motor cortex. I mean, it's like you're simulating what it would feel to do that thing exactly the way that when you're doing visual imagery, you're activating the visual cortex. And I've published a lot of studies on this, looking at what happens when people are simulating possible futures and, you know, you can see the activity. Essentially, they're running their visual cortex as though they were seeing something. Just as a one-second side note, people have – across the population, you have a real spectrum of visualization abilities.

So some people, when they're picturing something, they see it like a movie. And other people have no particular visual at all. It's just it's conceptual for them. Both are perfectly able to do things and be effective. But it is interesting that you can measure it. This is what we showed is that you can measure by how much activity you have in visual cortex, whether you are seeing it like a movie or down at the other end of the spectrum, not really seeing anything.

So this is what we try. We try to move the conversation from visualization to imagery. And when you're in the imagery framing, as we're talking about it, you and I are talking about, you want to try to feel it. You want to try to smell it. You want to try to hear it. And of course, you want to try to see it if you can. And if that becomes, if you have a dearth in one of those areas, no problem. There is some

skill building to it. But you want to try to create as much of a lifelike image as you possibly can, and even slight movement. Like if I'm, folks that are watching on YouTube, you'd see this, but if you're just using your imagination right now of what we're talking about, if I were to drop into a wave, I do a slight move. My eyes are closed. I'm doing a slight movement like I'm paddling. And then I can just gently imagine my hand placement. I feel the pop up onto my surfboard, slide my back foot down and then feel the way it would feel to get to the bottom of the wave. And you do all of that in slow time and real time. And we ended up noticing that people are using lots of their brain when they do that. And so it's pretty cool, isn't it? I mean,

it's actually quite amazing. Sure. I mean, exactly. Because one of the things that has always blown my mind about this is that if you look in a neuroscience textbook, it says, look, this is the part of the brain that's used for seeing and for hearing and for feeling and moving and so on. But in fact, we spend most of our time not in the here and now. We spend our time imagining and reminiscing. And imagining can be what things will be like, what things could have been like, all these things. Even, you know, fictional worlds. Like, oh, what, you know, I only saw half that movie.

What would the other half be? You know, you're imagining, you're playing out plots and so on. I mean, this is almost all of our lives are not in the here and now. And, you know, we just got a new puppy here at home. And I think it's hard to know, but I think probably most of his entire life is in the here and now. He's not spending time thinking, oh, back when I was a really small puppy, this was happening. Maybe when I grow big, this will happen. He's not doing that. It's one of the, you know, human's best friend.

It's one of the great reminders, like, just be here now with acceptance and kindness and a playfulness, you know, and a little bit of stubbornness when you don't want to do something. And how would you help people on your research around how brain performance works? How would you help suggest? So we've got novelty. We've got contracts or shackling your future self. And how would you help people spend more time knowing all of what you know, spend just a little bit more time in the present moment? What are the best practices that you would work from?

I mean, the main thing is just attention, just really paying attention to what's around you. Look, the job of the brain is to make an internal model of the world out there so the brain is locked in silence and darkness inside your skull and it is the three pound control center for this huge meat robot of your body and it's just constantly trying to make a model for how does the world work not just motorically and sensorily, but like how people react and what you should say to your spouse and what you do at work. And, you know, like the whole job of the brain is to make a model of the outside world. The interesting thing is when it gets good or as it gets good at particular parts, it no longer pays attention to them. And that's why, you know,

if you're traveling around in a foreign country, you're looking at everything and looking at the signs and the people and the costumes and everything. But when you're at home walking around your neighborhood, you hardly are paying attention to anything because you know where it all is. You know where your couch is and your TV and you know where the store is down the street and so on. And so you're not really seeing it at all. Part of the reason this matters is because, as you may know, a giant chunk of what I've done in my career is study issues about time perception. And it turns out that paying attention to things is how you make it seem that time is lasting. In other words, the amount of time that something seemed to have taken has everything to do with how much memory you laid down about it.

So if I go on a totally new wacky trip this weekend, I've never been anything like it. It seems like, wow, that took a long time. But if I'm doing something totally routine, I think, wow, where did that weekend just go? It just disappeared. And it's because looking back, I have no anchors. There's no landmarks in the sand for me to say, oh, this happened, and this happened, and this happened. Instead, I didn't write down a thing because it was all running exactly as it was supposed to. And so my brain had to do no work to write anything down. And so I'm not saying how to live longer here. We're not talking about health. I'm talking about how to make it seem as though you lived longer. And that has to do with, you know, this comes back to this first point about seeking novelty.

So anyway, paying attention to the things around you always yields new things. I'll give you just one silly or interesting example. So my son and I, my son is 11. We just got these glasses from a friend that have different filters over each eye. So it looks kind of like sunglasses, but you're getting different wavelengths through one eye than the other. So your brain has never seen anything like this because through your right eye and your left eye, you're looking at the same object, but different colors are getting to your two eyes. And so your brain says, whoa, I don't know what to make of that.

And so it essentially produces what's almost like a new color. It's like a very glowy kind of shining color. It's very interesting. Anyway, my son and I have been wearing those around. And now we're just really attentive to the colors of everything. Even when we're not wearing the glasses, we're just looking at everything. And it's like we're seeing the world afresh. And at my age, it's so nice to have things like that, to have things where you just,

oh yeah. Look, if you pay attention to everything. Yeah. Literally putting on like the, the idea of rose colored glasses, but putting on glasses that are shaping the way your brain's working. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. That's what, yeah. To be a kid again. Yeah. Exactly. With adult. Yeah. It's so good. Do you, do you think you're living the good life? I do. I mean, yeah. Knock on wood. But yeah, I mean, yes, I, I, I, it's like, I feel it in, in your voice, in your, you know, the passion that you have around even talking about your son and your dog and, you know, the science and the novelty of learning something like it feels like you're learning the good life. Do you have, do you have any insights on how people can

work from the inside out to live a better life? It, um, this is a tough one because it seems like there are a hundred ways that, you know, for all of us, there are a hundred ways to slide down the hill where you are not living a good life, but for different reasons. Um, you know, like everybody I've had, uh, very painful things happen in my life. Um, so it's not, it's not for lack of those. Um, you know, and some of those took years to get over, but, um, uh, let's see. I mean, everyone has different reasons for, I guess maybe if I were going to make a generality, one thing that I see a lot is people not taking chances where they think, oh, I could never write a book. I could never stand on stage and do that thing. And so they don't do it. But none of it's that hard. I mean, you and I have done a lot of things and whatever. It takes a lot of work, but it's not that hard. What do you say to yourself right before you're about to take a risk,

call it going on stage or whatever? How do you work with yourself? How do you work with the your brain saying, hey, listen, maybe this is survival moment. Maybe this is the moment you get kicked out of the tribe. And you and I both know, 100000 years ago, 200000 years ago, 200,000 years ago plus, this ancient brain of ours was well-coded, thank you, ancestry, well-coded to pick out danger. And the danger of getting kicked out of the tribe was like a little bit of a death sentence. And that's why people's eyeballs and frowns and critique and judgment are so overwhelming to us. This is my new research, so I want to bender about it right now. But so how do you work with your brain as soon as you feel your sympathetic nervous system kick up a little bit? Good question. I feel like it's maybe the thing that we were talking about earlier, which is I always, when I'm doing something really hard, I just feel like, well, other people did it. Other people stood up

and did this thing or whatever or surfed or, you know. I mean, it's, lots of other people do it. So it can't be, you know, it might be challenging,

but it's not impossible. I think that's maybe the thing I'm always telling myself. So the way you, yeah, the way you frame it is maybe your big asset. Yeah, maybe that's right. And, you know, the way you, yeah, the way you frame it is maybe your big asset. Yeah, maybe that's right.

And you know, the other thing is, by the way, getting kicked out of the tribe is really scary. And I, you know, I think I'm pretty thin skinned. And so when people say mean things on social media,

it really hurts my feelings. And I know, you know, I know that developing thick skin is just the way around that. I don't know. What's interesting about tribes nowadays is that if you get kicked out of one tribe, there are lots of other tribes because of the internet, because you're connected to the entire world. So you can find other tribes. And I don't know if that would be comfort to anyone, or maybe just cold comfort, but

I've seen that happen. I've seen that happen with colleagues of mine who sort of ended up getting, you know, kicked out of one group, and then they just immediately find themselves sort of raised up by another group, who is polarized against the the first group and thinks, well, all right, if you kick them out, I want that person over here. And so the good news is that there's so many people to be in contact with now. You can always find the people that are your brethren or your new brethren. Unfortunately, there's always an in-group. It's unfortunate because we, for lots of reasons, we other others, which is problematic in a lot of ways. I don't know if you know this, I mean, maybe you do, but I've done a lot of research on in-groups and out-groups in my lab.

Yeah, I do know that. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it's weird how absolutely easy it is to – first of all, to measure how you feel differently about your in and out group. Should I take one second and tell this experiment that I did? Which one? Yeah, we love experiments. We love storytelling experiments. I'll mention this. Great, which is – so we stick people in the scanner, fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging, way of measuring people's brains, and we show them six hands on the screen.

And the computer goes around and picks one of the hands, and then you see that hand in the middle of the screen, and you see it either touched with a Q-tip or you see it stabbed with a syringe needle. And when you see it stabbed with a syringe needle, you have this automatic pain response. These areas in your brain light up that we summarize as the pain matrix. And the interesting part, of course, is it's not your hand getting stabbed. Nonetheless, you can't help but having this pain response. This is really the basis of empathy. You are feeling someone else's pain. But that's the interesting part of the experiment. The interesting part is we then label each of the hands with a one-word label, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Scientologist, Hindu, Atheist. And now the computer goes and picks one of these and you see that hand and you see it gets stabbed with a

syringe needle. And the question is, does your brain care more when it's your in-group, whatever your in-group is, versus any of the out-groups? And the answer, unfortunately, is yes. Your brain cares much more just based on a one-word label. All the hands look the same if it's your in-group. And of course, this is true across all groups. And by the way, this is true for the atheist group also. So it's not an indictment of religion. It's just a matter of in groups and out groups. And you, when your thing gets dead, your brain has this big pain response and it just has a smaller one for the other groups. Now, what's interesting is that we also found that this is very flexible. So we, in the next experiment, we put people in the scanner, the same people, and we say, okay, the year is 2025.

And these three groups are now teamed up in a war against these three groups. And the computer picks at random which of these religions is against whom. So it's just random division. But suddenly you, whatever group you're in, you have two allies. You have two groups that are now on your same side as told to you by this single sentence. And now when you see their hand get stabbed, your brain has a bigger response than it did a minute ago because now they're an ally. Now they're on your team. And so it's bizarre how immediate and flexible this is. And then we did an experiment where we brought in new participants

and we said, okay, toss this quarter. If it's heads, you're an Augustinian. If it's tails, you're a Justinian. So they toss the coin, they get on one team or the other, we give them a little wristband that says the name on it. And we put them in the scanner. We say, remember, you are a Augustinian or a Justinian. And then they see the same experiment that I just described, but now they're seeing Augustinian or Justinian hands getting stabbed. And they care more about the thing that they just got assigned to. And they know it was arbitrary because they were the ones who tossed the coin. So, but, but all you need is a one word label saying you are on this team and suddenly you're much more prone to have your brain at the most basic first level has this big response. And now one final word from our sponsors.

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Oh, yeah. Like, you know, and even if you're not like, you know, like whether you're the in-group or out-group, there's an energy there and it feels real. You know, like even though you don't maybe know anybody on the team, but you've identified with the brand or with the emblem or whatever. Exactly. How? Oh, please. I'm just going to say we see the absolute worst of it with, you know, with political issues and battle. You know, obviously there's a lot of polarizations of it, but I'm not sure when this podcast will air, but, you know, just this past weekend was Hamas's invasion of Israel, where they, you know, gunned down 260 young people at a music festival, as well as killing babies, mothers, grandmother. because I've done so much work on the issue of in-groups and out-groups and what's going on with the brain and psychology.

And what does it take to get to the point where you can feel like somebody is so sufficiently in your out-group that you're perfectly fine murdering them and driving around, stepping on their mangled body and chanting and pumping your gun in the air? What does it take to get to that point? How awful it is that people can ever be like that. You know, what I don't understand is the contortion that's happened for people to take those actions, the levels of justification to rationalize unless it's a group of sociopaths. And it just might be the case.

I kind of doubt it. No, I think. when the coercion or the manipulation of a story or narrative or in-group, out-group is so grotesque to them that they will go to these extraordinary means. I mean, right at Stanford, you guys ran one of the, not Milgram. Zimbardo's prison experiment. Prison study. So it's a kind of a great case example. But so there's two parts of this. I'm glad we're talking about it because

let's stay in the lane of brain science, if you will, before we start to, um, pontificate about, about the, you know, but I have our, our, um, our producer, Alex was just telling me that some of his friends who are Jewish have like, they're in knots. They're in knots because they're feeling what's happening to their brethren. You know, it's people that they haven't met, of course, to your study earlier. And also feeling for the families of Hamas. And so there's an interesting, like my wife was crying last night watching TV and she's like,

I feel bad for everybody here. There's no winning. And so where do you, from your research, if we can keep it down the lane of kind of what you've learned from your three decades, two and a half decades, I'm not sure, of research here, where would you point us to, to better understand what's happening? Yeah. Well, I've done a lot of research on the issue of propaganda because this is how you get somebody into your out group. You know, there are basic tricks of propaganda. One of them is you always equate them to something that is not human, whether that's viruses or insects or animal of any sort. And, you know, I've collected up propaganda posters, for example, through the different is, as a giant ape or a beast or as a rat, things like that.

And you see this, you know, like let's go to Rwanda where he had the Hutu massacring the Tutsi and they actually achieved a higher killing rate with machetes than the Nazis had achieved with the gas chambers. And but, you know, it was this it was the same thing, this propaganda about, oh, the Tutsi are insects. But you see this with every every war, every kind of thing, every genocide. It's just doing that sort of thing. So unfortunately in Gaza, the education that the kids are getting under Hamas is, you know, it's in Hamas's charter

to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel. Like that's their charter. That's what they teach their children. So it's really tough if you're growing up in that environment to be able to escape that in-group, out-group issue. It just requires meaningful education. This is, by the way, why I'm glad that the internet exists. There are lots of people who gripe about the internet and say social media is really terrible. I think it's actually probably helpful in some of these scenarios because at least it gives the option for somebody to see another point of view. And, you know, who knows how often that's taken. Maybe it's only 1% of the time that somebody says, God, that's interesting. I never knew. Here's a person who kind of seems like me in some way, and they're talking, and they're're talking reasonably and they have a different point of view. They're from this group that I thought I hated, but I see that they've got

a family and love and they care about things the same way I do. Anyway, that's why I'm a fan of the ability to have communication because historically, all through the last century, countries were cut off where the government controlled the media. For example, in the USSR, the media was completely controlled to the degree that they would even doctor the weather reports on the days of celebration for Stalin or Lenin or whoever. You know, people would get airbrushed out of photographs and then it was as though they just had never existed and so on. But now it's much harder to do that. Anyway, back to this thing about, you know, you raise kids from a young age. In a sense, it's not even the kid's fault. It's the parent's fault and the educator's fault. But what you get is a generation who has, it's not even so much hatred. It's just that they believe because of everything that we're told that this other group is not even human and that they don't feel the way that they do.

Right. Okay. So how do you help? Okay. Two part question. How do you help people process pain even when they've seen it from a distance? And I, and, and I'm not asking to become a psychotherapist here, but from a neuroscience standpoint, maybe there's some utility in just understanding how pain works and then how to process through that. And because there's physical pain and emotional pain, same network just about.

I think the overlap is quite remarkable. And maybe you can just illuminate some of when people are struggling to better understand how to work through pain. Yeah. Well, I don't know the answer to that. There are some really, there's a weird neuroscience result, which is that the pain that you feel socially can actually be helped by Tylenol. So there was a study on this that showed, okay, so here's the way they happened to set up this study is you're in the scanner and you are throwing a ball with two other characters on the screen. So you throw a ball to the first guy, he throws a ball to the second guy,

this guy throws the ball back to you, and you're throwing the ball around. But after a while, the two guys, number one and number two, start throwing the ball back and forth to each other, and you're no longer included. It's just a very basic childlike exclusion issue. And what happens is these pain networks come on board, where you feel physical pain or the same networks, I should say, when you're feeling social pain that you do when you feel physical. And this can be helped with Tylenol. It's a weird, wacky, but true thing. I wouldn't say that Tylenol is a solution for emotional and social pain. But the point is that it does something to the brain, and it's pointing to the overlap between physical and emotional.

Exactly. That's the point I want to draw, is that it's the same networks going on. And, you know, I don't know. Look, I've been watching all these videos this weekend of what's going on in Israel, and it's so painful. And I don't know how to, I don't know how to get over that or get through that. I mean, I think many of these images will haunt me for the rest of my life. And in part, it's because I, I mean, I have to admit, I think that I erroneously was thinking that the 21st century might be a little bit different.

Because I happen to be a real history buff. And so I've studied lots and lots about all the wars in the 20th century, just, you know, from the Chinese Communist Revolution to Nazism in Germany, and the Russian Communist Revolution. And I mentioned the Hutu and the Tutsi in Rwanda and Pol Pot in Cambodia, and it goes on and on. And so I thought, wow, you know, the 21st century, other than this bad start with 9-11 and then the wars that followed from that, it doesn't seem like it's been as bad. But watching what happened in Israel,

I thought, wow, it's like humans have learned nothing. The brutality, the rape and murder and torture of families, just, it feels like, wow, we've gotten absolutely nowhere. So I don't know how to process through that. Yeah. I wish there was, well, I mean, I'll just add the psychological bit here, which is put words to it. I think this is if if the question was reversed, I'd say put words to it, of yourself and, you know, kindness and love towards yourself if you're overwhelmed by the, you know, kind of the disruptive behaviors that you're observing. So can I ask you a question on that?

I'm curious, how do you, how do you, how does one take care of oneself and not feel guilt at doing that? Yeah, I think that that's a very smart, good question. And we were at a social event where one of our friends has family in Bethlehem and she says, this is absolutely insane that I'm here overlooking a sunset. And we're celebrating our, it was a school function, we're celebrating our kids and I've got family in Bethlehem that I don't know where they are. And so how do you do it? There is a forcing function to grieve and process words and movement in social settings and with somebody else and or writing things down.

And at the same time, if you happen to be eating breakfast, eat breakfast. You know, you've done your work, if you will. And when that grief and that sadness and that pain bleeds into the other parts of your life, when the task at hand at that moment is to eat or to write something for work or to be driving in a car, when it bleeds into the other functions, it becomes overwhelming. So I'm not saying compartmentalize. I'm saying do your work. And when it bleeds into another part of your life, remember that you've done the work and you've got time maybe later in the day to do more work around it. And so it is being where your feet are, focusing your mind at the task at hand, knowing that you've been to the emotional

gym in the morning, you're going to do emotional work maybe at midday with someone else. And then you've got some work that you maybe need to do at night. Same way we do it with physical training is that you don't have to, if you hit the gym in the morning, you don't have to obsess all day about, do I need to do more? It's like, no, I actually already did my intelligent work in the gym, you know, for 45, 75 minutes, whatever it is. So 15 minutes, it could be. So anyways, I don't want to make light of it in any way. Right, Right. So, so let me come back to your question though, about, about, you know, what kind of things can be done about this?

You know, I want, I've been thinking a lot about this at a societal level about how we can maybe try to get, you know, a higher level of education around this, around the world. But a big part of that actually involves neuroscience. It involves understanding that we each have this internal model of the world that's extremely limited. It's based on your thin trajectory through space and time and whatever neighborhood you grew up in or whatever culture you're a part of. That's what determines your internal model. And the thing that has been fascinating to me is that everybody believes their own truth. Whatever your political beliefs, for anyone listening to this, you feel like,

oh, well, obviously that's all true. And I can't understand how other people don't see it so clearly. And they must be a troll or misinformed or an enemy. But, you know, all you need to do is take a meta view on this to see, wow, there's a whole giant spectrum of political opinions along any axis that you measure, you find people spread along these political opinions. And each person believes that they have the clear view of the truth. So what we're dealing with is, you know, 8 billion people running around the planet, each believing their internal model represents everything.

And by the way, you know, right when, I guess it was right when 2020 hit with all its insanity, the NIH, National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, they started giving out all these grants to academic colleagues of mine about how do you get the truth into media? And so a bunch of people asked me if I'd be on their grants with them or these grant applications. And maybe I'm wrong about this, but I felt like all of these were really stupid because they all presumed that there was some truth to be had. And if and if everyone could just listen to your truth, then that would be the truth.

And I felt like there was a blindness to this larger issue that almost every situation does not have a single truth. There is no single answer to it. Yeah, there are some, there are a few factual pieces like, okay, the Gazans shot 4,000 rockets, you know, from these locations, these, okay, that, okay, you know, you can count the rocket, like there's some truth things like that. But, but why they shot the rockets and what the response was, what the response of the Israelis was and what, how the Gazans felt about it and so on. There's no single truth to any of that. It's a big spectral population on both sides. And by the way, let me, sorry, let me just return to one point that you said just in passing, but I wanted to pick up on it, which is the issue about is it sociopaths or psychopaths among, you know, let's say these Gazans who went in and did these things.

The answer is I actually think that part of it was, I have a strong suspicion. This is something that always gets overlooked or not talked about at all, but I feel like in any population, you have a real spectrum. And, you know, as we know, about 1% of people in the human population, they're psychopaths. That means they don't care about you. They don't care how you feel. They're willing to do awful, awful things. And, um, I think in, in places of conflict, those psychopaths actually have more of an opportunity to, to shine and be followed by young people. It's almost always young males who do the following on this sort of thing.

And they feel like, wow, that guy is so secure in his opinions and so strong minded and so not afraid to go in and draw blood. Um, he must be the kind of person that I should look up to. Um, there's something about population dynamics here that as far as I know, doesn't really get talked about, but, um, but I think psychopaths probably pay a, play a big role in, in situations like this. Yeah. I don't think we want the leader in, in a time of war. I'm not sure that we want the alpha aggressive, ridiculous testosterone, um, you testosterone, thumping of chest leader, that person will keep us in war

because they're trying to assert dominance. We probably want the diplomat. And the diplomats tend to be, and I use that word loosely because there's a political connotation, but the person who values collaboration understands that power is given, not taken, and can work well with others. But in moments of fear, people do like to hide behind the alpha aggressive sheepdog, or sometimes even the, I just call it a sheepdog for now, the one that's going to protect us from them over there. But I'm not sure those are the ones we want in power during wartime. So anyway, that's a... I just want to register my agreement with you on this, that somehow in politics, we just do not, we don't value the person who says, oh, you know what? I've looked at the data and I've changed my

mind from what I thought last month, which is by the way, the appropriate thing that any smart person does is say, okay, well, look, I've taken more data and I've rethought this and I've got a different strategy, but somehow the population never likes that kind of person and thinks that they're, you know, flip-floppers or whatever the thing is. And so they, uh, they always like the chest pounder. Yeah. Oh God. Finding Mastery is brought to you by iRestore. When it comes to my health, I try to approach things with a proactive mindset. It's not about avoiding poor health. This is about creating the conditions for growth. Now, hair health is one of those areas that often gets overlooked until your hair starts to change. That's when people pay attention. Now, that's why I've been loving iRestore Elite. It's

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quality sleep is just too important to leave to chance. Okay. So let, let's get, let's, let's slightly pivot here and get into, cause we're talking about large organizations. Let's talk about teams. Let's bring it down, you know, a little bit smaller and think through how, from a neuroscience brain perspective, how can we set the right conditions to help others learn well? And I want to get down to like your findings around do something with information every 15 minutes or stand up every 12 minutes or no longer than 45. Like I'd like to be radically tactical here because we are saturated with information, but not great learners.

Yeah. You know, unfortunately I don't have't have any bullet point tactical pieces like that. But, you know, generally, what I do know is that plasticity of the brain, in other words, you know, allowing the brain to reconfigure itself requires particular neurotransmitters to be present. And those happen to map onto emotional engagement. So if people on your team are engaged and inspired, then they'll learn, then they're doing things, then things are really happening. And so to my mind, that seems like the main bullet point to hit is how do you make sure that people feel connected to the work, they feel trust with each other, they feel empowered, they feel like they're being listened to, which is not the same as being pandered to, but you know, their opinions matter, they have opportunities for growth. You know, if you set these kinds of conditions,

they believe in the mission of the company, and they know, they're clear on what that is. If you set up those kind of conditions, then you've optimally set it up so that your team has, well, first of all, you know, resonance among the team, hopefully, but also, you know, they get the proper learning capabilities in it. Now, what I've seen a lot over the last three years is that a lot of companies are just, you know, especially here in Silicon Valley are going through economically tough times. And so it's, it's, that's the real challenge is how do you keep people engaged and inspired in times like that? Because when times are great, let's use Google as an example. When times are great, first of all, there's all the fun stuff and the, you know,

the ball pits and the slides and whatever. But that stuff helps a little bit. But the main thing is people can do things that are really creative and your company is fine with that. They say, look, take 20 percent of the time. Just try something wacky and do this stuff. happens is, you know, Google in its long history now, quarter century history, has come up with lots and lots of products and branches that don't live anymore. And sometimes people use this as a criticism of Google, like, oh, look at this thing that they did, and then they dropped it. But that's not a criticism. That's actually the sign of a really good company is to proliferate lots of ideas and try them out and see what's working. And that just,

that gives people a real, real passion for what they're doing. You know, unfortunately, as I said, when times tighten up, then everybody at all levels of an organization starts feeling like, oh, we better make sure we're hitting the bottom line here and don't do anything creative because we just need to get this product shipped. So that's just one of the challenges that I see happening around me here. If you were to design a workflow, you know, let's go Monday to Friday, are you cutting out a day? Are you adding length? Are you increasing play time? Even, you know, knowing, let's imagine the budget is lean.

Let's imagine you don't have unlimited resources like some of these multinationals. We're nearly unlimited. But let's imagine budget is lean. Cash flow is an issue. optimize the way that we can learn, process, and create on demand for deadlines with high standards. Let's imagine that kind of four legs to the stool. Here's my suspicion. I know you're asking for a specific thing, but my suspicion is that if the team is engaged and inspired, and there's trust among members of the team and with the boss of the team and so on, it probably doesn't matter. It probably doesn't

matter exactly what the work scenario is or how long or what, you know, just they've got to be on board with what's happening. They've got to be recognized for their successes and, you know, and empowered in all the ways that you want an employee to be empowered, that feels to me like the most important part. And, you know, let me just come back to actually coming back to something we discussed at the very beginning about novelty. I think this is really important. So for those people who have, you know, on campus presences as opposed to remote, you know, just switch up the thing and the furniture and whatever and who's sitting where. That stuff actually makes a difference.

There was, you may know this, there was this factory, this was like in the 1920s or something, and their productivity had been going down for a while. So they called in a consultant and the consultant looked around and said, hey, you know, there's these heavy curtains over the windows up there at the top. Remove the curtains. And so they removed the curtains. The productivity went up. You know the story.

And then eventually productivity started going down again and the consultant came back and said, hey, put the curtains back on and productivity went up again because it's the change that matters. It's the making people feel like, hey, there's something novel happening here. We're not just drowning in layers of dust where everything is running exactly the same way all the time. And there's another study by one of your colleagues at Harvard that rearranged furniture as well and brought people's furniture. So it was the population of 70 and 80-year-olds and then had them spend, I think it was three, four days, I can't remember exactly, in an environment that looked exactly like when they were 20 or 30 years old. And so they had the same music, the same type of record player, the same type of furniture. And sure enough, they

felt better. They responded differently. There was a sense of vibrance about them where four days earlier, they were just like moping about, you know, the complaints of being old. And then the environment shifted. And all of a sudden, it took them back to a feeling of being vibrant back when I was. And they, sure enough, on self-report measures and as well as physiological measures, reported feeling younger. So there's like lots of ways that we can manipulate our environment to create stimulation. And I don't know. A better way. As a one-second tangent, I've long suspected these things about with patients in dementia and so on that if you can put them back in their memories in a very specific way, that's very helpful. But I also wonder about nostalgia being sort of painful also. I don't know if, I don't know if you feel this way,

but when I look back at things from my childhood, I kind of feel like there's sort of a feeling that I get in my gut where I don't, I don't like being back in that time, even though it was a great time. It could cut both ways, right? Yeah. I think that part of it, back to your superpower about framing things, if it's a fun thought experiment or if it was presented a certain way, maybe. And for somebody that loves the way they felt during their 20s or 30s, actually, you know what? There's been a rise of people our age listening to 80s music. So you and I are, I think we're in our fifth decade here. And during the high stress of the last four years, they just want to return to some memory of simplicity and just let Madonna sing, please. It was a time when it was so simple,

you know, whatever the band was, U2 or whatever it was like, there's a return to simplicity and innocence that has been on the rise for people. And I can appreciate that too. So both of my grandparents suffered from dementia towards their upper ages. And so they're in their 80s. And one of the things that we would do is I would come with my phone loaded with a ton of pictures. Like we all have them on our phone anyway. And we just scroll back to times when.

And I would take pictures from the scrapbook. Instead of bringing the scrapbook in, I would just use my phone. And so times went, do you remember this? Oh my God. And so it was just awesome as a way to force us to be in the present moment, reminiscing about memories. And it reminded them that, you know, life was so good and, you know, when it was amazing. And maybe you could take us from imagination and memory into dreams. And I think you rang the bell now. I think you've

rang the bell on dreams, which the jury was out for a long time. What is happening? Is Carl Jung right? No, can't be. I love Carl Jung. But like, are the neuroscientists right? And so I just want to have this conversation with you about dreams and their function and what they're about.

So, okay. So, you know, I grew up and, you know, went to neuroscience grad school and read everything that I could about dreams. And there's not really a satisfying explanation. It's just, oh, maybe we're practicing programs that you don't get to do during the day, or maybe it has something to do with learning and memory or whatever. Everyone had their pet theory, but there was no sort of meaningful answer. And yeah, so two years ago or three years ago now, I think that I hit it. So here's how it started. So my last book was on plasticity of the brain and how flexible the

whole system is now, how fluidly it changes all the time. And a new piece of information that came out last decade, that was really surprising to me was that if you blindfold somebody and you put them into the brain scanner, you will start to see activity from hearing and from touch influencing their visual system after one hour. In other words, the back of your brain, that's the visual cortex, it only responds to sight. But if you blindfold someone, you start seeing this encroachment by hearing and by touch. And everyone knew that happened anyway, because, you know, if somebody goes blind, that part of their brain gets taken over by hearing and touch, but no one had any idea how fast that could happen.

So, you know, when I saw that data, I was talking with my student about this, and we realized, wow, that is really fast. And what we realized is, look, we live on a planet that rotates into darkness, and we spend half our time in the pitch dark. And obviously, during evolutionary time, it really was dark before electricity, which was in the last nanosecond of evolutionary time. So what that means is that for half the time, it really was dark there before electricity, which was in the last nanosecond of evolutionary time. So what that means is that for half the time, your visual system is really disadvantaged, but you can still hear and taste and touch and smell in the dark, but you can't see in the dark. And so what we realized is dreams, every 90 minutes, you've got this very ancient circuitry

in your midbrain that just blasts activity into your visual cortex.'ve got this very ancient circuitry in your midbrain that just blasts activity into your visual cortex. If you look up the circuitry of dreaming, what you see is that it's very specifically just blasting activity back here into the primary visual cortex, and that's it. And so it is defending that territory against takeover from hearing and touch.

It is essentially a screensaver. So I published this, and then we did a paper where we looked at 25 species of primates and how much they dream every night, which you can gather from looking at their rapid eye movement, their rapid eye movement sleep. And we looked at how plastic they are, how flexible their brains are based on other measures. And we found that this correlates perfectly, which is to say, if your brain is more, you know, plastic and changing all the time, then you have a lot more dream sleep. Whereas some primates, you know, like the one, you know, like a lemur will come out pretty much good to go. You know, he walks very fast, weans from his mother, hits, you know hits reproduction age very fast. His brain is sort of

already baked. He has very little dream sleep, but Homo sapien drops out half-baked, and we take a long time to absorb the world around us. And we have lots of dream sleep. And by the way, when you're an infant, you have tons of dream sleep, much more than you do as an adult. Yeah. So the dreams are a way to ward off being overrun by touch and sound. Is that right? Exactly. So just a way for the visual system to defend itself. Yeah. I mean, it sounds too simple.

It's clever. It's clever as all can get up. Like the fact that you found that is remarkable. And I want to stand up for Carl Jung. I think that is a real compliment to the theory that it sounds too simple. I mean, that is the whole mark of theories. I mean, when Crick and Watson realized, oh, you know what? This massive complexity inside the nucleus, it's just keeping the order of four base pairs and all the rest is housekeeping. I'm sure someone

could have said the same thing, like, hey, that sounds too simple, but sometimes. Yeah. I mean, so how do you answer the archetypes that Carl Jung had to say? Meaning that, and just to be clear, that he went across the world and gathered what is the nature of people's dreams, and he recognized that there's themes about dreams and there's like these people that would not have been able to ever communicate. Languages are different, cultural heritages are different, and they wouldn't have shared their themes with other cultures. And they were still the same. There's still an intense overlap between them. So here's what I would say. So a great question. The content of dreams is the issue of what is your brain doing? What's on your brain's mind? So the synapses, the connections that are hot from the day are the ones that'll

tend to get activated when you blast random activity in there. So that's why your dreams tend to be things involving your day, but the association is much looser. So it can go from this thing, you know, it's sort of loosely associates with this and this. And so it flows through the neural networks and we are natural storytellers. And so what happens is your brain puts a narrative to it. But by the way, it should just be noted that when you wake up and you turn to your spouse and you say, wow, I just had a dream and you try to explain the dream, then you're adding another layer of narrative to it. Dreams aren't actually all that structured and great as it is after you've told it a few times. Then it seems like a real story.

But anyway, the point is that that's the content of dreams. And it's no surprise that human brains are all the same. I mean, we just radiated out of Africa, you know, a very short time ago and some people turned left and some people turned right and we managed to populate the whole world. But human brains haven't changed. They're the exact same.

You can look at a brain anywhere in the world. It's got the same stuff, the same fears, the same hopes, the same dreams. I mean, literally the same dreams in terms of the content, things that we care about. So you've had your teeth fall out in a dream? I haven't. I don't know why some people do. I don't have a good explanation for that.

And have you ever fallen out of from a high place and landed? Because I've never landed. I felt that free falling feeling, but never landed, which was, it's an interesting thing for many people. Yeah. Yeah. I also have not had that. So, so much for the Jungian, everyone sharing dreams.

Yes. Everyone sharing. Yeah. So, okay. I mean, it's so novel. It's so clear. Nice job. Good old research kind of paying us forward.

And listen, I've really, I've loved meeting you. I've loved having this conversation. I love your approach, which is grounded in science, applied, not taking yourself so seriously, but thinking deeply about how to help others be better. And so before um, before we wrap, I I'd be remiss to just give us a high line about brain health and you know, how, what are some do's and don'ts for brain health? And I'd love for you to just square up on sleep, square up on alcohol, square up on, um, exercise and balance and coordination, square up on meditation, like hit us, hit us with it. Yeah. Most of what I'm going to say, I assume that the listeners of your podcast already know, but, you know, sleep's massively important and happily there've been a bunch of good books that

have come out about this recently. So it's sort of on the public tongue now in a way that I don't feel it was, you know, 10 years ago. So meaningfully getting that. Here's something new that I could add, I think, which is, so everyone talks about sleep and nutrition and so on, but I run a company, Neosensory, and we build things for hearing. And I have noticed that I have become really sensitive to noticing where there are loud sounds and the damage that does to people's ears. And, you know, I've got two kids, and I feel like I'm this annoying dad now where I'm always trying to get them to turn that down and not be around those loud sounds.

But what I'm realizing is, especially in a city environment, there are a lot of loud sounds, and I think it matters enormously to avoid that, to not be around loud sounds and to not crank your AirPods and listening to music like that. I think, I'm assuming you grew up the same way I did, where we would have parties and stand right next to the speaker. What did you say? Yeah, exactly. The problem is the biology of the inner ear is so miraculously delicate and fragile. And the fact that we can pick up on these extraordinarily tiny air compression waves that one person says and another person hears, you know, we all know people who are older than us who are losing their hearing and it sucks for them. And no one wants to seem old.

So a lot of people don't get hearing aids who really need them. And, you know, eventually what happens is they end up getting excluded from conversation because they just they can't really participate in a conversation anymore. And there's lots known, lots published on the association between hearing loss and dementia now, because once people lose their hearing, their lives tend to shrink. They're not doing social things anymore. And as a result, they're not getting the challenge that their brain needs. So all of this is to say, the new piece I would add beyond the, you know, getting sleep right, getting diet right, getting lots of exercise is just take care of your ears. All right. So neosensory walk,

walk through exactly how that works to take care of your ears. And before you dive into it, um, I'm, I'm really over ear pods. Like I know I have them in right now, but I'm not cool with them. And so the research, I'm not sure how to solve one of these technical issues I could do over the ear, you know, headphones, whatever, which I'm thinking I'm going to start doing. But can you, do you have, can you point to any research on earbuds, whether it's EMF and, or it's the sensory manipulation that's problematic? I don't know of any research that says anything against pods in the ear, but the key is just the volume at which you have them. So just as a side note, you know, when I'm,

whenever I wear headphones when I'm talking and I always just keep the volume as low as I'm able to hear someone, but I never turn it up higher than that. Yeah. Good, good, good measure. Okay, cool. Yeah. So neosensory. So neosensory, I gave a talk at TED in 2015, where I showed work that we were doing in the laboratory, where we built a vest with vibratory motors on it, and it would capture sound and turn that into patterns of vibration on the skin. And deaf people could come to hear the world that way through their skin. And that sounds totally wacky, sounds totally wacky, but what's happening is we're pushing the information into the skin and that goes up the spinal cord to the brain and the brain can figure it out because the brain doesn't care how the information gets there. As long as it gets there, it figures it out by correlations. You know, it says, oh, look, the person's mouth is moving and I'm feeling on my skin. It's doing

the same thing the inner ear is doing. We're just transferring the cochlea, the inner ear to the torso. So immediately after I gave that talk, a number of VCs said, hey, we want to help you make this new a company. And I was purely an academic at that point. And so it was a big left turn for me to start a company, but I did that. And that's been absolutely terrific because I've learned so much running a company. But we took that and we shrunk it down to a wristband. So the wristband is exactly the same idea. It's got vibratory motors built into the strap here and it captures sound, turns into patterns on the skin. And for example, people who are deaf can come to understand what's going on in the auditory world that way. So we're on wrists all over the world. But then we launched for people, instead of wearing hearing aids,

what it's doing is it's using very advanced machine learning just to listen for the high frequency parts of speech. So it just listens for K and T and V and so on. And it buzzes in different ways to tell you, oh, there was just a K, there was a V, there was a P and so on. And people can come to fuse what their ears are hearing with what their wristband is clarifying at the high frequencies. And so that's been enormously successful. And so for a lot of people who don't want hearing aids, this is what they're wearing instead. And the last thing I'll mention, this was sort of totally accidental and not what we were aiming at. But what we found is that this is massively useful for tinnitus, which is ringing in the ears.

I have that. Yeah. Do you have that? Oh, it's a bit of an internal nightmare. You know, it's really a bummer. Oh, gosh. I'm so sorry. Well, okay.

So you should try this because what it is is you're hearing tones, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, and you're feeling it on your skin. And in the literature, there are actually some very sophisticated arguments about why this works to drive down tinnitus. But I think the simple answer is, it's teaching your brain what is a real external sound because you're getting confirmation on your wrist. Every time you hear a sound, there's a buzz on your wrist versus the internal ringing in your ears, which is fake news. And the wristband doesn't respond to that. And your brain figures out, oh, okay, that's not a real sound. And so it drives the tinnitus down. So it's the single most successful strategy that exists in the literature. Nice. I'm all in. All right. Thank you. I've known of your work, but I didn't know that there was a solution here. So awesome. Do you have any use cases for people that are using it to enhance performance

in stressful environments or pressure-filled environments or sport or business in either fashion? Yeah. So we actually have 70 different things that we're doing with the wristband, and these aren't on the main clear market path for us. Everything from infrared to social media to feeling someone else's physiology. Like let's say you wear one of those smart watches that measures your heart rate and heart rate variability and galvanic skin response, and your wife wears the wristband and she can feel what your body is doing, even if you're on the other side of the nation. Now, that may be a terrible idea for marriages. I don't really know. But we're trying things out like this about,

you know, blurring the boundaries between self and other. As far as things for business, I mean, one of the things I demonstrated at TED is that we could feed in real-time stock market data. So instead of staring at graphs on a computer, you're actually feeling the stock market in real time. And then the idea is, can you develop a direct perceptual sense, what's known as a qualia, a private internal subjective experience of the stock market where you feel like, oh, yikes, I feel like oil's crashing. I don't know why I feel that, but, you know, that's how I feel. And the question is, could you come to incorporate this data in a way like that? We actually have not pursued that experiment because a bunch of people came up to us afterwards and said, hey, we want this for our company exclusively. It immediately got weird.

And I thought, OK, this went from the realm of vegan science experiment to something else. So we haven't pursued that one. But that's an example for business. There are lots of things that we're trying that have to do with balance or prosthetic legs or blindness. Yeah, maybe not so much for business though. That sounds great. I'm going to definitely talk to you offline about some capabilities that we might be able to offer you to play in really interesting environments as well. So I love what you're doing. I love how you're using grounded research, applying it, even using

technology in this case. So Doc, thank you. All right. Thank you. What a pleasure. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.com slash newsletter to sign up. The show wouldn't be possible without

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