The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Improve Focus And Attention

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

How To Improve Focus And Attention | This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens Preserving, supporting, and strengthening brain function is crucial to aging optimally. While we once thought that declining brain function was a given as you get older, we now know that our brains have the ability to change structure and function all throughout our lives. Our diets and quality of sleep are crucial for a well-functioning brain but so is our ability to harness focus and attention. In this mini-episode Dr. Hyman speaks to Dr. Andrew Huberman about enhancing neuroplasticity to support learning, memory, alertness, and attention. He also speaks with Jim Kwik about the science of learning how to learn. Dr. Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and tenured Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has made numerous important contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function, and neural plasticity, which is the ability of our nervous system to rewire and learn new behaviors, skills, and cognitive functioning. Dr. Huberman is a McKnight Foundation and Pew Foundation Fellow and was awarded the Cogan Award in 2017, which is given to the scientist making the largest discoveries in the study of vision. His lab’s most recent work focuses on the influence of vision and respiration on human performance and brain states such as fear and courage. Work from the Huberman Laboratory at Stanford University School of Medicine has been published in top journals including Nature, Science, and Cell and has been featured in TIME, BBC, Scientific American, Discover, and other top media outlets. Jim Kwik is the founder of Kwik Learning and a widely recognized world expert in speed-reading, memory improvement, brain performance, and accelerated learning. For over two decades he has served as the brain coach to many of the world’s leading C-suite executives and celebrities. After a childhood brain injury left him learning-challenged, Jim created strategies to dramatically enhance his mental performance. He has since dedicated his life to helping others unleash their true brainpower to learn faster and perform smarter. His recent book, Limitless, provides the keys to accelerated learning and endless potential.  This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is offering Doctor’s Farmacy listeners a full-year supply of their Vitamin D3/K2 Liquid Formula free with your first purchase, plus 5 free travel packs. Just go to athleticgreens.com/hyman to take advantage of this great offer.  Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dr. Andrew Huberman, “How to Rewire Your Brain For Sleep” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DrAndrewHuberman Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Jim Kwik, “How To Upgrade Your Brain And Learn Faster” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/JimKwik

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. I think from a very practical, low or no cost perspective, one of the things that one can do is ask, okay, if attention and focus are required for neuroplasticity throughout the lifespan, what can I do to increase my levels of attention and focus? Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. My main goal with diet is to use food as medicine, but even when we eat super well, most of us are missing out on certain essential nutrients.

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Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, I'm Kea Perot at one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Our brains have the ability to change structure and function all throughout our lives. This is called neuroplasticity. And there are multiple ways to encourage the plasticity of the brain at any age to enhance everything from sleep to learning.

Dr. Hyman spoke about this with neuroscientist, Dr. Andrew Huberman. So if we wanna improve our brain function, improve our learning, our memory, alertness, attention, that's what people care about. And we want to enhance the neuroplasticity. What are the top things that we should be doing? Okay, so get the foundational stuff right. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Sleep, get your nutrition right. And there are many things, and you speak to this in much more um detail and and sophistication than i ever could but i think that you said i think the omega the what what do you

follow the pegan diet i jokingly not vegan i'm not pegan yeah um yeah so follow you know get get sleep right get your nutrition right get your relationship to stress right we can talk about that maybe at the end. You have to engage in those focused learning bouts. You have to decide what it is that you want to learn, what you want to change and do that. Now, for some people, they'd say, well, I don't want to learn another language. I just want to feel happier. But that's actually, as we know, a process as well.

That's going to be a process of leaning into some gratitude practice or some maybe if what makes you happy is a physical activity, it's going to be bringing the greatest amount of attention and alertness to that practice as you possibly can. And then there's a second step. And the second step is the one that in recent years we've learned the most about, which is that just having this heightened level of focus and attention to what you're trying to learn or change

is just the first step. The second thing is to actually turn off focus and put the brain into a state where it can rewire more rapidly. When you start looking at your life, whatever that life happens to be from an, what's going to optimize my performance, which includes relationships, of course, as well, then the whole game changes because it really becomes an issue of how good are any one of us are each of us at regulating the seesaw. And if you are spending too much time at one end of the seesaw, you're headed for trouble. That's just the way, that's just the way it is now sleep. Most of us probably don't get enough sleep, but I think that can be overdone too i think that many people feel exhausted because the systems for engagement of the mind and engagement of the body are also a bit atrophied yeah and that's the thing

we don't we don't learn those skills and tools and so so how do people start to begin to learn those tools to enhance their neuroplasticity, to do the things? We talked a few of the practical suggestions about sleep, but is there a way? Because one of the things that terrifies me is the effect of technology on the brain. Yeah. And I just came back from a week vacation in Mexico, and we were off-grid, like phone, cell phone, computer, nothing works. And we were in nature. Didn't even know what time it was.

Didn't watch. And my sense of well-being, my happiness, my focus was so different. And you talk about this phenomena of a digital concussion from phones, computers, social media. And I felt that. Like, literally, your brain hurts. ADD. Like, the incidence of diagnosable 8 add adhc is going up in adults and in kids i think well there's ideal and then there's there's reasonable and practical right i mean i do think vacations and resets are great i think just like going camping can reset your your circadian clocks and melatonin and cortisol.

I think from a very practical, low or no cost perspective, one of the things that one can do is ask, okay, if attention and focus are required for neuroplasticity throughout the lifespan, what can I do to increase my levels of attention and focus? And there's some interesting data on this. First of all, learn to read one chapter of a book without your phone in the room. Just a physical book, not an audio book necessarily. Learn to read one chapter of a book per day. and handwriting and reading are baked into our DNA. It's just, there's no question. I mean, sure, we were drawing on cave walls a long time ago, but we were drawing on cave walls. And when we evolved language, there are areas of the brain responsible

for speech and language and for digesting speech and language and producing speech and language, of course. So this is something I struggle with and as much as anybody, but if you're not a reader still do it learning to read one chapter of a book and your mind will drift people will go wait this isn't engaging or my mind drifted or something and that's revealing to you your powers of

attention of deliberate attention it's revealing your ability to engage nucleus basalis so if you want to take a test of how well or poorly you can pay attention well you know try read one chapter of a book per day so that's a a wonderful practice that will improve the circuits for attention so this is one of the cool things about neuroplasticity is it's not just about learning the information it's about learning and teaching the circuits for attention to get better at attention so attention to get better at attention. So you can get better at attention as an action step. And that will allow you to learn more things.

So if you want to lift weights, you have to start a little bit and keep going. So you want to read one chapter, then you can read a book. That's right. And pretty soon, what's really interesting about the relationship between acetylcholine and epinephrine is pretty soon it starts to recruit the dopamine system. It starts feeling good to move through that agitation you start realizing okay i'm doing this i'm doing this and then your mind will flip off and you'll go back to reading and this sort of thing it really works for me is when i have a deadline deadline so deadlines are great like i can write a book in three weeks

right and the reason deadlines are so effective is because they deploy epinephrine when you when they're it's baked into your psyche that there are some social pressures of being you want to perform well you want to know the material you don't you don't want to make mistakes etc so adrenaline is released and once adrenaline is released then acetylcholine naturally will follow you tighten your focus so reading one chapter of a book whatever that happens to be per day is absolutely critical to maintaining one's ability to focus and therefore one's ability to engage neuroplasticity you'll also read a chapter read a chapter we talked about all the foundational

stuff of sleep and microbiome and all that early life yeah The other one is to really respect these 90 minute learning cycles. Don't try and throw yourself into a deep immersion of four hours of learning of something. Ratchet up to being able to do 90 minutes of focused work. So right. An ideal goal would be two 90 minute blocks of learning per day, but that's a lot. So if you're somebody who wants to keep your brain sharp, read a chapter a day and then decide what it is that you want to learn. Curiosity, what's that old saying? I think it was, is it Dorothy Parker? You know that the anecdote for boredom is curiosity. There's no anecdote for curiosity or something like that.

Right, right. You know, the best way to engage the mind is to actually be curious about some things. Dr. Hyman also spoke to world expert in speed reading, memory improvement, brain performance, and accelerated learning, Jim Quick. I started studying adult learning theory. I wanted to study what intelligence is, multiple intelligence theory. How does my brain work so I can work my brain? I started studying ancient mnemonics. I wanted to know what did ancient cultures do before there were printing presses

and where we have external storage devices for our memory before there were smart devices. And I used to remember so many telephone numbers. Yeah, and we talk about this in this book, where technology is driving amazing innovation, amazing evolution and progress, communication. And also, it's also amplifying some of the challenges that we've always had, like information overload.

Now we have access to the world's information. We have more information on tap than Clinton did when he was in office. We have so much information, but it feels like it's taking a sip of water out of a fire hose. So one of the supervillains is digital, you know, deluge. It's like we're drowning information, but we're starving for practical wisdom on how to keep up with it all. You know, besides that, technology also is creating this digital distraction. Think about all the app notifications, social media alerts, we're getting all these dopamine fixes that goes along the nervous, the learning motivation centers of our nervous system. And it's hard to have a conversation nowadays without us

being distracted. It's hard to, I'm sure a lot of people could identify, you read a page in a book, you get to the end, and then you forgot what you just read. We can't have the focus and the concentration. So that's digital distraction. And again, technology is not good or bad. And in a lot of ways, it serves us. It helps us to be able to connect. It helps us to be able to learn, to be able to inspire, to be able to educate ourselves. We're not born with ability to read. We learned it. But the last time we took a class called reading, yeah, exactly. You were seven years old. And so everything has changed since then, but we're still reading the same way, right?

So that's the challenge. So this is the education part. The second reason why is lack of focus. Some people will not read faster because they lack the focus. They'll read a page in a book, get to the end, and then just forget what they just read.

And then go back and reread it. But if when reading is done well, it doesn't take time, it actually makes you time. Because if I could double everyone's reading speed, I'll show you how right, right now, if I could double your reading speed, that means what takes an hour only takes 30 minutes. The average person has about four hours of reading a day. Like, like think about it. Like think about the text messages, the emails, the magazines, the journals, everything you need to keep to process information. When you're reading a word, your eyes fixate on the word and then the next word and the next word. And there are about 10 words per line in the average book. So it's making 10

stops. Now the equivalent would be for kids when they're reading, they're very slow readers, first learning how to read. They don't see words, they see letters. And they're looking at each individual letter, sounding them out. So they're making like 40 stops going through the line. That's why it takes them so long to read. Now, the equivalent of how kids read that make 40 stops to adults reading, you know, 10 stops, speed readers actually make three, maybe two, three or four stops, right? Because they see groups of words like adults, normal readers see groups of letters. So they're seeing three chunks at a time.

So their eyes only have to stop two or three times. And that's the equivalent of driving in traffic, having to make 10 stops instead of just two or three that other persons get there a lot faster. So the goal here to read faster, one of the ways of teaching yourself to reading groups and to sub vocalize less. Now this is the method part is by using a visual pacer. Now this is so simple. When people read using a visual pacer, it could be like a pointer, a pen, a highlighter,

a mouse on a computer, your finger, a pencil. When you underline the words, not skip anything, because I bet in your traditional speed reading class, you skip words or you go down the page or you make fancy S or Z forms, but you miss big gaps. That's why you get the gist of what you read. So traditional speed reading, people, it's not for comprehension, it's skimming. Yeah, yeah, that's what I learned.

Yeah, exactly. But you don't want your doctor to get the gist of what he's reading, right? That wouldn't make any sense. And so for me, what we've tested is if you just underline the words, don't skip anything and test yourself. Not with an actual pen, but just like...

Yeah, you don't actually ink it up or anything. If you're reading on a screen, you're not touching the screen or touching the paper. You're just underlining the words and then test yourself. Read for 60 touching the screen or touching the paper. You're just underlining the words. And then test yourself. Read for 60 seconds without using a visual pacer. Count the number of lines you just read.

Then set your timer to read 60 seconds using your finger while you read. And count the number of lines you just read. That second number will be a 25-50% lift across the board. We are able to more readily and effectively access all of the gifts life has to offer when we maximize our ability to learn. By harnessing the power of our brains, we can intentionally create a pathway to reach our goals and optimize our lives. If you'd like to learn more about any of the topics you heard in today's episode, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations with Dr. Andrew Huberman and Jim Quick. If you have people in your life who could benefit from this information, please consider sharing this episode with your community.

We need each other to create a healthier us. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey,

seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.