Instant Genius - How to harness your brain’s underused superpowers

Episode Date: August 9, 2026

For a large proportion of our lives, our brains seemingly work on autopilot – the many processes the brain controls hum away behind the scenes, helping us to carry out our daily tasks. But in certain scenarios, our attention takes over, giving more conscious control of our actions. These processes, such as memory, planning and our emotional responses to the situations we find ourselves in, are known as executive functions. But how exactly do they work and is there anything we can do to train them to perform more effectively? In this episode we’re joined by the neuroscientist and author Dr Adrian Owen, to talk about his latest book, Think Before You Think – Understanding Your Brain’s Mission Control. He shares his insights into how our brains operate when we’re confronted by different situations, points out some of the pitfalls built into the way we observe and respond to the world, and explains how we can all benefit from paying more attention to why we think and act in the way we do. Take your curiosity further with a subscription to BBC Science Focus magazine. Every issue is packed with fascinating insights into the science behind everyday life, the latest breakthroughs and expert analysis, delivered straight to your door. Plus, save an extra £5 when you subscribe using the code SF5OFF, (minimum spend £20, see full terms and conditions on our website). https://www.ourmediashop.com/bbc-science-focus-magazine-pod30 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most.

Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. hear that it's your money calling it wants a promotion elevate your savings with the scotia high interest savings account always earn high regular interest rates that grow the more you save and invest conditions apply visit scotia bank dot com slash h iSA to learn more scotia bank you're richer than you think hello and welcome to instant genius a bite-size mask class in podcast form every monday and friday you'll here world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning an editor of BBC Science Focus. For a large proportion of our lives, our brains seemingly work on autopilot. The many processes

the brain controls hum away behind the scenes, helping us to carry out our daily tasks. But in certain scenarios, our attention takes over, giving us more conscious control of our actions. These processes, such as memory, planning, and our emotional responses to the situations we find ourselves in are known as executive functions. But how exactly do they work? And is there anything we can do to train them to perform more effectively? In this episode, we're joined by the neuroscientist and author Dr. Adrian Owen to talk about his latest book, Think Before You Think, Understanding Your Brain's mission control. He shares his insights into how our brains operate when we're confronted by different situations, points out some of the pitfalls built into the way we observe and respond to

the world, and explains how we can all benefit from paying more attention to why we think and act in the way we do. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me on. Oh, you're more than welcome. So today we're talking about your latest book, think before you think, understanding your brain's mission control. So the book's centered around explaining our brains' executive functions. So first off, a lot of people won't have heard of this. So what exactly do we mean by that? Yes, that's a great initial question.

So our executive functions are the sort of high-level brain processes that allow us to make decisions, to consciously formulate plans, to decide what to remember and what not to remember. For the most part, our brain works on autopilot. You know, when you are served by somebody in the supermarket, you just remember their face. You don't have to make an effort to do that the next day you'll remember them again.

When I come to work every day, I just get in my car and I drive. I don't plan the route. It's all down on autopilot because I've done it a thousand times before. But what if I want to take control of that? What if, you know, today, yeah, I want to drive to work, but I want to go by the post office and drop off a parcel

and pick up some flowers en route. There, I need to sort of interfere consciously with my autopilot, if you like, and take a bit of control. Same, imagine going to a party where you meet a whole bunch of your wife's relatives for the first time. Some of those people are more important

to remember than others, and you might want to make a special effort to remember your mother-in-law to be, or whatever. So these are what our executive functions do. allow us to take control of the more automatic functions of the brain. Yeah, so we'll get into some of the details about these experiences that we can have in a moment. But sort of key to this idea is an area of the brain called the frontal lobe.

So first off, what is that and why is it so important when we're considering these phenomena? Yeah, well, there's a number of reasons why your frontal lobes are very important. One is that they're very big. I mean, there are about a third of the whole of the part of the brain that people are familiar with when they see a brain, the cortex. About a third of that is frontal lobes. So it's a lot of brain estate, if you like, in there. Secondly, it's also an area that's very well developed in humans. So this is something that we see as being proportionately bigger, if you like, more complex in humans. And third, particularly in the last 20 years or so, we've discovered that most of our executive functions are, at least under the control or orchestrated by the frontal lobes. So they're really important for when you need to step in and do something consciously. Yeah, so in the book, there's an awful number of different case studies that you've worked on. And, you know, early on, you talk about people who have suffered damage to this area of their brain.

And one overriding theme that you talk about is that they become unable to develop and stick to strategies. So, you know, what do you mean by that? And why is that so important? Yeah, this is something that I actually learned many years ago when I was working as a PhD student back in the UK. Then I was seeing patients who had had neurosurgery, sometimes to remove a tumour, for example, or to deal with some brain abnormality.

So there were patients who had had bits of their frontal lobe removed. And what I found that these people all had in common was exactly what you've said, is that when they applied themselves to a particular task, it wasn't that they couldn't plan or they couldn't remember or they couldn't decide how to act. It was that they didn't use the same sort of strategies that the rest of us use to sort of take the load off.

So, I mean, if I give you an example, I mean, most taxi firms use numbers that are very easy to remember. 666-60- Right? Now, there's a reason for that is because implicitly we're using a strategy there. There's tons of sixes and a couple. couple of zeros and I just got to remember the order. A typical frontal plate, a patient who'd have damaged their frontal lobes, may not see that pattern

at all and may just try to remember the seven digits, which is actually, of course, much harder to do. And this seemed to be the case in many of the tasks we try. But I ask people to remember, I mean, a really good example for people listening to this is to try and name as many animals as you can. This is a test that we often use for people who've had frontal damage, try and name as many different animals as you can. And people typically go off with, you know, dog, cat, elephant, giraffe, and quite quickly they sort of dry up.

Well, people that are good at this, they use a very simple strategy. They think, okay, pets, dog, cat, hamster, mouse. And as soon as they run dry, they switch to farmyard animals, goat, cow, sheep, and then they switch to jungle animals. So this is a strategy that we're using to sort of bootstrap our memory. and the front lobe seems to be absolutely crucial for our ability to see those patterns and to use those strategies. So, yeah, that's a great segue to make then, to talk about memory. And what you talk about in the book is specifically something called working memory. So this is a very specific form of the way that our memory works.

So could you first of all unpack that for us, please? Right. Working memory is extremely important. I mean, in the old days, certainly when I started my career, we used to think of memory as being sort of long-term memories and short-term memories, being, you know, things you remember forever for your lifetime and things you just remember for a short period of time. We now know that memory doesn't work like that at all. And working memory is memory for things that you need to hold on to for a certain amount of time. So an obvious example would be if I tell you, you know, my phone number is 679, 4, 2, 6, 6, 8. and you have to remember it for a few seconds in order to dial it into your phone or put it into your contact list. That's you with your working memory. And I can guarantee that five minutes from now, you'll have no recollection of that number whatsoever

because your brain knows you don't need it anymore. But if I were to say to you, I'm going to ask you in 20 minutes to recall that number, you'll hold it in working memory because you know you're going to need it. And it's not time-dependent. I mean, the example I use in the book is of parking your car in an airport, car park. I'm sure we've all done this. You know you're going away for a week and you've got to try and remember where the car is. And miraculously, most of us managed to do it. A week goes by and we come back and we know of the 10,000 cars that he throw, we find our car. How do we do that?

Well, it's because you retain this in working memory. But wait two more days. You'll have no idea where you parked your car because you send it off into the ether. So that's working memory. So you sort of touched on that there. In the book, you talk about things. called encoding and retrieval. So can we dig a little bit deeper into that? What do we mean by that? How does that work? Sure.

Well, most of the time, and again, this is a very good example of the autopilot situation I was describing earlier, which is that, you know, most of the time we don't actually effortly remember things. You know, it's not like a memory test life. You just, you know, you get cut off at the lights by that blue Lamborghini and you just remember a blue Lamborghini. You don't have to think, I'm going to remember, it was a blue Lamborghini. And most of life is like that, but sometimes you need to make a specific, intentional decision to remember something.

For example, that Lamborghini, you might wrench to the number plate and think, I need to look this up, remember that number plate. And there, you are encoding something. You're putting it, this is the word that we use encoding, you're putting it into your working memory, where it can be sort of, until you get to the police station or wherever you're going and you need to retrieve that information. So it's more like the physical, conscious act of putting something into memory knowing that you're going to need it again and you're going to retrieve it or take it out later. Yeah, and so how do we get those memories back then? How do we retrieve them? Again, this is the responsibility of the frontal lobes of the brain. So the frontal lobes

are very good at organizing how we remember information and how we retrieve. that remembered information. So, and again, I don't want to simplify things too much, but you can think about it as there being two different memory systems in the brain. There's a sort of the automatic one that you're just going through life and you just see stuff and you remember it and you may or may not recall it later. If somebody specifically says to you, tell me something about the person who served you petrol in the petrol station this afternoon.

You may or may not remember that person, okay? But where working memory comes in, and this is a different type of memory, is when you intentionally think, you know, I am going to remember the face of that person that served me petrol at petrol station. And when you do that, it'll sort of tag it in a way. It'll give it a special significance to your brain,

which files it somewhere, and that, where it gets filed, gets registered, and the frontal lobes can reverse that process and bring it back into conscious memory whenever you need it. So sort of whatever it comes to things like neuroscience and psychology, we often use a lot of analogies, you know, like you said, a filing system there, etc. But, you know, this has actually been studied using FRMI scanners.

Yeah, of course. I mean, this is how we know much of this information is from using fMRI, and before that it was PET or positron emission tomography. And a lot of those early studies that all really kicked off around about 1992. since then it's become very much easier to pull these different processes apart. And for somebody like me, it's been an absolute boon because the thing about the frontal lobes, think about it, so a third of the brain, a third of the volume of the cortex of the brain, that's a lot of brain, right? It's not just one big blob.

It's not just one thing that, you know, helps your plan, helps you make decisions, helps you regulate your emotions. It's actually divided up into different areas. And this is something I'd go into in the book in some detail and talk about, well, this part of the frontal lobe is the bit that keeps you on track when you're needing to pay attention to something. This part of the frontal lobe is going to help you make plans. And correspondingly, the reason why some of us are good at some things and bad at other things is probably because we have strengths that are related to the anatomy of the frontal lobes of our brain. Okay, let's have a look at that. Like, say if we think, oh, you know, maybe we're listening to this, maybe we've read something else.

and we think, well, I'd like to improve my working memory. How do we do? Because you talk about things like, what you wouldn't necessarily expect, like physical exercise. Yeah. So we've done many studies, in fact, some in collaboration with the BBC, with many thousands of people looking at these executive functions

and sort of what can make them better and what can not make them better. And, you know, there's a lot of surprises, I think. The first is there is no magic pill. You know, yeah, there's evidence that eating blueberries, might, you know, improve this aspect of your working memory or drinking grape juice might improve that. But typically you've got to eat a lot of blueberries

and drink a lot of grape juice to make any difference. And these things make really minuscule changes. What we've found is that when people make small lifestyle choices, over a long period of time, it does make a difference. So it's not really about one thing. It's about, as everybody listening to this will know, you know, you've got to sleep well, you've got to eat healthily,

exercises regularly as you can, and really, really importantly, remaining social, keeping social well into your later years, really preserves these sort of higher cognitive functions of the brain. That said, I guess the central theme of the book is that I think there is something fundamental that we can do to improve this, and that's just to think about it. Think about what you want to attend to. Think about what you want to remember. Think about the plan you want to make for today. Don't just let today unfold and see what happens.

Plan what you want to do and enact that plan using your frontal lobes. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most.

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Like an AI solution that works for you, not against you. SAP Grow is built with AI embedded at its core, working across every system. And it's ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow. AI Cloud ERP for any size business. So you also talk about in the book these memory champions, which I bet most people have heard of. They remember an entire deck of cards after seeing it once or something.

But they employ certain methods, like you say method of loci or something called chunking. Yeah. So, you know, how does that work? And is that something we can all employ? Yeah. So not only can you all employ it, people who have certain challenges of memory, for example, patients with Alzheimer's disease, we've shown can actually benefit from these things. So the idea, going back to what you asked me about strategies, the idea really is that you've got the memory that you've got. There's probably not much you can do to really improve your actual memory capacity, right? But what you can do is you can improve how well the contents of memory are organized in a way that can. can allow you to remember more.

There's a subtle but important difference there. And the method of loci, for example, involves, and many people would have heard about this in different contexts, it's a technique that's used by many sort of memory maestro's. You basically assign the new thing that you want to remember to something that you're very familiar with. So for example, you might imagine walking through the rooms of your house, you know where all the furniture is and where all the rooms are, and if you were trying to remember a list of words, you imagine each word placed in a different area along the route.

You know, there might be this word sitting on the sofa. There might be that word sitting in the kitchen. And then when you retrace that familiar route in your mind, those words will tend to come to mind more than they will if you just try to remember them. Chunking is perhaps an even better example. And here, again, it's a taxi firm example. It's a very good one. But we like to find patterns in sequences.

and we can use those patterns to improve our memory. So, for example, 24, 6, 8. Now, why is that easier to remember than 7396? The reason is that the first one has a mathematical pattern that you immediately recognized. It just goes up in twos. And you can code the whole thing by thinking, okay, it's a sequence that starts with a two

and it goes up in twos, 2468. There you go, I've got it. Even I can't remember. the other sequence I told you to remember. Yeah, me neither. It's gone, right? Because there's no obvious strategy that you can use. And yes, some of the work we've done with colleagues in the UK, actually, is trying to teach

patients with Alzheimer's disease to use these sorts of strategies to improve their memory with some success. In fact, I would say it's as successful as any of the current drugs that are on the market, as far as improving somebody's memory and their ability to get back to some of their activities of daily living. Yeah, so let's move on to it to another one of these executive functions that you discuss in the book that's, you know, often talked about these days. And that's attention. Yes. So apparently people are saying that, you know, our attention's being degraded due to various lifestyle factors and technologies, etc. But, you know, what exactly can we say, like, as a

neuroscientist about attention? You know, first off, what actually do we even mean? So attention is a really big sort of catch-all term. It's a bit like memory in the sense that it can mean, you know, many different things and there are many different types of attention. But, I mean, just some examples. There's sort of everyday attention, which is, what am I attending to right now? Well, it's you and it's this conversation. And I barely have any conscious knowledge of what's going on around me or if the dog is walking into the room or whatever. That's my sort of everyday focused attention. But then there's another type of attention called sustained attention, which is basically what you have to do if you're doing a long, arduous task. How do you keep

driving for three hours down a boring road while you sustain your attention on the task at hand? Then there's intentional flexibility, switching attention, ability to switch between two different things. And that becomes tremendously important, for example, if you are in a busy environment, if you're a party or something and you want to tune into a conversation that's going on over your shoulder, that you're more interested in than the one you're in, you can switch attention to do that. So attention, many different types of attention. The reason I make that point is that different types of damage to the frontal lobes can affect these things differently.

So your ability to sustain attention, to stay on task for a long period of time, might be impaired, but you're still able to switch between two different ideas and these sorts of things. So, yeah, attention is a big, a big field, but obviously a very important one as far as executive function is concerned. So, sort of going a bit further into that, you talk about something that you refer to as the attentional spotlight. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Yeah, and again, there's a really good analogy.

It's very similar to what happens with memory, and that is that most of the time, our attention is driven by what's going on around us. We're not deciding most of the time to attend to something or something else. It just happens. You go through life, and big dog comes down the around. you look at the big, you look at the big dog. You know, then a car honks its horn behind you, you turn and look at the car. Your attention is very much being sort of grabbed by things going on in the environment.

But you can't let your whole life be like that. Sometimes you want to ignore that honking sound behind you because maybe there's an oncoming car that you need to get out of the way of. Or sometimes you need to make choices about what you attend to. And that's what we call top-down influences affect this spotlight. So the spotlight is sort of what am I attending to right now? Right now my spotlight is on you and it's on this conversation at the expense of almost everything else going on around me.

But, you know, I can choose right now to switch to attend to what's going on outside the window beside me. And in doing so, I made a conscious decision to do that. And you've got left behind in a sense. I need to make a conscious decision to come back to you again. That's the spotlight moving around. So one thing that I had actually seen before that you talked about in the book was an example of inattentional blindness where they have this hilarious experiment.

I'll let you explain it, involving somebody in a gorilla costume. Yeah, it's a great, it's a classic experiment, and it's been replicated many times now. But the original idea is that you ask people to watch a sort of an amateur basketball, game where there are several balls and many players going backwards and forwards. Actually, there's one ball, and you have to count the number of times the ball is passed. And, you know, people can do this very easily, of course. And in the original experiment, about halfway through this scene, a person in a guerrilla costume walks onto the scene, beats their chest and walks off.

And it turns out that a lot of people don't notice this at all. And it's because their attentional spotlight is too busy counting the number of times the basketball is past. And, you know, this is one of the sort of amusing, I guess, sort of side effects of our attentional system, which is that if you are really attending to one thing, it can truly be at the expense of something else. And in this case, it's a, you know, a person dressed in a gorilla costume that you don't even notice. So one thing that really I sort of had to read over again is that, is that right? It's something you call change blindness.

This is something I've never heard of and would never expect. to happen to somebody. So, you know, what is that? So change blindness is, again, because of the way your attention system works, it's your failure to notice, a really obvious change in the environment that you should have noticed. Now, I can start by giving a much more concrete example that people will be familiar with before I tell you about the experiment described in the book.

And that is, I'm sure many people listening to this have had the experience of, for example, being served by somebody in a coffee shop, walking away, and, you know, And having absolutely no memory at all of who that person was, what they looked like, what they said, what they, you can have these experiences in life that are quite complex, like buying a cup of coffee from somebody. And somehow you completely fails to attend to something, because it's not that important what the person looks like who serves you coffee in a coffee. So why would you attend to it? You might be thinking more about, where's the sugar and, you know, how am I going to get the right amount of milk in my coffee? And change blindness is sort of the version of that idea that occurs when you set things up specifically to fool people. An example in the book is the experimenter stops a stranger in the street and asks for directions.

And the stranger is sort of giving the directions. And halfway through this, two people carrying a door passed between the sort of two workmen or whatever carrying a door. And while the door is between the stranger and the experimenter, they switch out the experimenter. It's a funny idea, but it works extremely well. And it turns out that people don't notice that, you know, sometimes the gender of the person has changed, the voice has changed, the race has changed, that you can change the person utterly. And it's because, you know, when somebody stops to ask you directions, the important thing, your brain immediately goes to, so how do I get to Tesco's? Your brain doesn't go to, this is an interesting-looking person. I wonder where he gets his hair done, right?

You don't actually start to think about the person. You think about the tasks at hand. And that's, again, your attentional spotlight is somewhere else to the extent that all sorts of things can swap outside of your attentional spotlight and you don't even notice it happening. That's really fascinating. I mean, I guess a lot of people listening would also like to as well.

I'd love to see that experiment performed live. Yes, and I'm sure it has been. I'm sure if you search for it in a search engine, you could probably find people doing this. And there are many other examples of it, actually, many even more sophisticated examples where things are made to disappear and appear from a visual scene, something people are looking at. And they barely notice at all because there's something much more interesting that they're actually focusing on. So let's move on to another big sort of element of this. It's emotions, or more specifically, emotional regulation.

So I find this really interesting because, I mean, not so much recently, but emotions have quite often been considered as being somewhat outside of the purview of scientific investigation. But, you know, as I say, that's changed. So within that, you know, we were talking about brain imaging. You talk about a part of the brain called the amygdala. So what is that? And how does it apply in the generation of our emotions? Yeah.

Now, you're absolutely right. And there's lots of nuances here. I mean, you're right that many emotions have evaded neuroscientific investigation. And I think in part that's because no one can really agree on exactly how many emotions there are. We all agree, you know, happiness, sadness, fear. There's a few sort of key ones. But then when you get into the areas of, you know, trust and, you know, things that are feelings, for sure, but it's not obvious that that's an emotion, you know, on its own,

it becomes much more difficult to investigate, so as the brain is concerned. I mean, the other thing is that not everybody that works on executive function would call emotional regulation executive function. I decided to, and I actually think it's one of the best examples, because, again, it's mostly on autopilot, but we can take control of that. And by that, I mean, you know, if somebody cuts you off at the lights, you can't decide not to get upset about it. It just happens to you.

That's your basic emotion. If your partner splits up with you, you can't decide not to be sad about it. But you can, in both of those cases, make various decisions to minimize or maximize the effects. You can decide whether you hit back at the person that cuts you off at the lights, or you can decide whether you drive away, or you can decide to shift your focus of attention somewhere else and think about something else. So emotional regulation is a very good example of this. you know, you've got the autopilot version that most of us are on most of the time.

We're just going through life, having emotional responses. But actually, if we think about it a little bit more, and we think about why it is we feel the way we feel, and interfere with that, if you like, take control. We can do that. So the amygdala is basically a key emotional part of the brain, but it's not the decision-making emotional part. It's the bit that just sort of detects, okay, I'm scared now.

or this is a time to be scared. There's a big, you know, snake in front of me or whatever. So your amygdala is basically setting the scene for whatever emotion you're having at any particular time. But it's actually parts of your frontal lobe, the bottom part of your frontal lobe, that is making decisions about how to handle that information. What am I going to do about this?

And there, this is why we have this sort of condition of emotional dysregulation or people that have trouble regulating their emotions. The problem is not at the level of having emotions, it's at the level of deciding what to do about those emotions once you've got them. And that can happen in hugely extreme cases when people have suffered brain injuries, right? Yeah, exactly. And a lot of this we found out from studying patients who've had different types of brain injuries. So, you know, for example, if you had damage to your amygdala, you may not really feel the same emotions that the rest of us

feel in certain situations. But if you had damage to your frontal lobe, or at least one part of your frontal lobe, you'll still experience those same emotions, but you may respond to that inappropriately, you know, not according to social conventions or according to the way you've learned to behave. So, yeah, you're absolutely right. The patients with damage to the different parts of the brain have taught us an enormous amount about how these different parts of the brain interact with one another to kind of get us through life. So sort of we've kind of an awful lot there, and obviously there's much more in the book

for anyone who's listening who's interested in reading that, I very much invite them to check that out. But for anyone listening, and they're thinking they probably weren't aware of the concept of executive functions, is there any sort of top tips or sort of pieces of advice that could do you to sort of harness them and sort of make them work more effectively in any way? Yeah, I think the answer, and this is what I try to, flesh out towards the end of the book where I talk about free will and consciousness and its relationship to executive function. I think the most important thing that we can do is to think about them. I mean, I think once you understand that this feeling you have is a product of your brain

and you can decide what to do about it, it's actually quite empowering. Once you decide that, yeah, you can either get up this morning and just free flow the day and see what happens, that's fine, but I guarantee you're going to achieve less than if you say, okay, what do I actually want to accomplish today? And how can I set a series of actions in motion that will allow me to accomplish that? With memory. You know, there are catastrophic failures of memory.

Anybody listening to this will have had one. I've certainly had many in my life, you know, where you forget the face of your mother-in-law to be or you mix up your aunt with, you know, whatever. And just a little bit of thought about what is it that I want to attend to, what is it that will be important for me to remember right now, really can go a long way to maximising the possibility that your day will turn out the way you want it to turn out rather than leaving it to chance.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Vincent Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Fakers. That was Dr Adrian Owen. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book. Think before you think. Understanding your brain's mission control. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius

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