Dr. Emily Balcetis: Tools for Setting & Achieving Goals

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.280 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.880 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.280 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.340 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.240 | Today, my guest is Dr. Emily Balchetes.

00:00:18.040 | Dr. Balchetes is a professor of psychology

00:00:20.240 | at New York University.

00:00:21.880 | Her laboratory studies motivation, goal setting,

00:00:24.920 | and tools for successful goal completion.

00:00:28.240 | I learned about Dr. Balchetes' work

00:00:29.840 | some years ago because I'm a vision scientist.

00:00:33.060 | That is, I study the visual system.

00:00:34.880 | And I heard about this incredible psychologist

00:00:37.100 | at New York University who was studying how vision,

00:00:40.880 | that is how we visualize problems,

00:00:42.800 | can predict whether or not we will successfully

00:00:45.120 | overcome challenges and how we strategize

00:00:48.640 | in order to set and meet goals.

00:00:51.120 | And in 2020, I learned of Dr. Balchetes' book,

00:00:54.240 | which was written for the general public,

00:00:56.000 | entitled "Clearer, Closer, Better,

00:00:58.100 | How Successful People See the World."

00:01:00.320 | And I read both the hard copy of the book

00:01:02.600 | and listened to the audio book.

00:01:04.560 | And I absolutely loved the material.

00:01:06.900 | As you'll learn directly from Dr. Balchetes today,

00:01:10.040 | how people visualize a problem,

00:01:12.260 | that is whether or not they think of a goal or a problem

00:01:15.280 | as residing at the top of a very steep hill

00:01:17.980 | or on the top of a shallower hill,

00:01:21.560 | or whether or not they visualize a goal or a problem

00:01:24.540 | as far off in the distance

00:01:26.000 | or closer to them in the distance,

00:01:28.500 | visually in their mind,

00:01:30.680 | strongly dictates whether or not they will arrive

00:01:33.420 | at the challenge of meeting a goal

00:01:35.360 | or overcoming a problem with more energy or less energy.

00:01:38.620 | Indeed, it dictates whether or not

00:01:40.180 | they can push to immediate milestones

00:01:42.920 | or whether or not they will think they have to overcome

00:01:44.900 | the entire task all at once.

00:01:46.800 | Basically, Dr. Balchetes' work has discovered

00:01:50.920 | that how we visualize a problem or a goal in our mind

00:01:55.320 | has everything to do with how we lean into that goal,

00:01:58.200 | whether or not we think of it as overwhelming or tractable,

00:02:01.440 | whether or not we think that we can overcome that goal

00:02:03.740 | and then it will lead to yet more possible rewards and goals

00:02:07.080 | or whether or not we feel that we're going to arrive

00:02:09.520 | at the finish line and then just be overwhelmed with fatigue.

00:02:12.580 | In other words, how you visualize things in your mind,

00:02:16.160 | and when I say visualize, I mean, literally,

00:02:18.080 | how you visualize them as a visual problem or a visual goal

00:02:22.480 | has everything to do with whether or not

00:02:24.720 | you will be able to meet those goals

00:02:26.480 | and whether or not they will lead to still greater goals

00:02:29.080 | that you will be able to achieve.

00:02:31.000 | Today's episode is an especially important one, I believe,

00:02:33.400 | because you're going to learn about

00:02:35.280 | quality peer-reviewed science from the expert in this field

00:02:39.160 | of goal setting, motivation, and pursuit.

00:02:41.040 | And you're also going to learn an immense number

00:02:43.440 | of practical tools that you can apply

00:02:45.600 | toward your educational goals, your career goals,

00:02:47.940 | relationship goals, goals of any sort.

00:02:50.800 | By the end of today's episode,

00:02:52.200 | you will be better equipped to set and achieve your goals.

00:02:56.480 | Dr. Balchetes also shares with us her own experiences

00:02:59.840 | of how to set, visualize, and achieve goals.

00:03:03.640 | And she does that within the context of her role as a parent,

00:03:07.520 | as somebody navigating relationships of various kinds

00:03:10.080 | and a demanding career.

00:03:11.520 | So again, I think that you'll find the information today

00:03:14.160 | to be both extremely academically grounded

00:03:17.840 | in terms of research, extremely practical, and realistic

00:03:22.320 | in terms of how you might apply it in your own life.

00:03:24.780 | I'm pleased to announce that the Huberman Lab Podcast

00:03:26.680 | is now partnered with Momentus Supplements.

00:03:29.000 | We partnered with Momentus for several important reasons.

00:03:31.220 | First of all, they ship internationally

00:03:32.920 | because we know that many of you are located

00:03:34.840 | outside of the United States, that's valuable.

00:03:37.680 | Second of all, and perhaps most important,

00:03:39.720 | the quality of their supplements is second to none,

00:03:42.240 | both in terms of purity and precision

00:03:43.920 | of the amounts of the ingredients.

00:03:45.880 | Third, we've really emphasized supplements

00:03:48.500 | that are single ingredient supplements

00:03:50.680 | and that are supplied in dosages

00:03:52.760 | that allow you to build a supplementation protocol

00:03:55.720 | that's optimized for cost,

00:03:57.560 | that's optimized for effectiveness,

00:03:59.440 | and that you can add things and remove things

00:04:01.600 | from your protocol in a way

00:04:02.920 | that's really systematic and scientific.

00:04:04.620 | This is really hard to do

00:04:05.960 | if you're taking blends of different supplements

00:04:07.840 | or if the dosages are such that you can't titrate,

00:04:10.580 | or that is adjust the dosages of a given supplement.

00:04:13.960 | So by using single ingredient supplements,

00:04:16.600 | you can really build out the supplement kit

00:04:18.280 | that's ideal for you and your specific needs.

00:04:21.400 | If you'd like to see the supplements

00:04:22.560 | that we partner with Momentus on,

00:04:23.880 | you can go to livemomentus.com/huberman.

00:04:27.000 | There you'll see those supplements,

00:04:28.120 | and just keep in mind that we are constantly expanding

00:04:30.600 | the library of supplements available through Momentus

00:04:33.280 | on a regular basis.

00:04:34.240 | Again, that's livemomentus.com/huberman.

00:04:36.920 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:04:39.560 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:04:42.420 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:04:44.440 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:04:46.940 | and science-related tools to the general public.

00:04:49.740 | In keeping with that theme,

00:04:50.800 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

00:04:53.640 | Our first sponsor is Thesus.

00:04:55.680 | Thesus makes custom nootropics.

00:04:57.960 | And as some of you have probably heard me say before,

00:04:59.920 | I'm not a fan of the word nootropics

00:05:01.700 | because nootropics means smart drugs.

00:05:04.720 | And frankly, as a neuroscientist,

00:05:06.120 | the notion of a smart drug is somewhat ridiculous.

00:05:08.940 | Why?

00:05:09.780 | Well, it turns out that we have neural circuits in our brain

00:05:12.180 | that get engaged for creativity,

00:05:14.320 | and yet other neural circuits that are engaged for focus,

00:05:17.960 | and still other neural circuits

00:05:19.180 | that are engaged for task switching.

00:05:20.540 | So the notion of a smart drug,

00:05:23.000 | or a drug that can induce smartness, if you will,

00:05:26.000 | is simply not grounded in science.

00:05:28.320 | Well, Thesus understands this

00:05:30.040 | and has developed custom nootropics

00:05:32.380 | that are tailored to the specific types of cognitive demands

00:05:35.720 | or physical demands that you might be facing.

00:05:38.340 | If you go to Thesus's website,

00:05:39.880 | you can take a quiz, and from that,

00:05:42.300 | they'll give you a sample of different nootropics

00:05:44.400 | that you can try so that you can create

00:05:46.300 | a customized kit of nootropics for your specific needs.

00:05:49.420 | To get your own personalized nootropic starter kit,

00:05:51.700 | just go online to takethesis.com/huberman,

00:05:54.700 | take that three-minute quiz,

00:05:55.740 | and Thesus will send you four different formulas

00:05:57.780 | to try in your first month.

00:05:59.120 | That's takethesis.com/huberman,

00:06:01.320 | and use the code HUBERMAN at checkout

00:06:03.220 | to get 10% off your first box.

00:06:05.520 | Today's episode is also brought to us by Levels.

00:06:07.740 | Levels is what's called a continuous glucose monitor.

00:06:10.300 | Some of you may have heard of these before,

00:06:12.080 | others of you perhaps have not.

00:06:14.140 | Basically, it's a small device

00:06:15.120 | that you wear on the back of your arm.

00:06:16.220 | It's an app that you install on your phone,

00:06:17.980 | and whether or not you are fasting or you just ate

00:06:20.980 | or you ate several hours ago,

00:06:22.700 | you can get a real-time measurement of your blood glucose,

00:06:25.340 | which turns out to be extremely informative.

00:06:27.860 | I first started using the Levels continuous glucose monitor

00:06:30.560 | about a year ago, and it's taught me so much

00:06:33.020 | about how I respond to specific foods

00:06:34.980 | in terms of blood sugar spikes,

00:06:36.740 | how I respond to exercise.

00:06:38.220 | Even the sauna, it turns out,

00:06:39.420 | can modulate my blood glucose levels

00:06:41.740 | and your blood glucose levels in very interesting ways.

00:06:44.740 | So all of that is translated into a huge number

00:06:47.220 | of very directed changes that I've made

00:06:49.220 | in terms of what I eat, when I eat,

00:06:51.020 | and how I schedule exercise relative

00:06:52.860 | to eating and sleep, et cetera.

00:06:55.260 | If you're interested in trying

00:06:56.380 | the Levels continuous glucose monitor yourself,

00:06:58.580 | you can simply go to levels.link/huberman.

00:07:01.620 | That's levels.link/huberman.

00:07:04.060 | Today's episode is also brought to us by Roca.

00:07:06.260 | Roca makes eyeglasses and sunglasses

00:07:08.540 | that are of the absolute highest quality,

00:07:10.360 | and they also have some unique characteristics.

00:07:12.820 | The company was founded by two All-American swimmers

00:07:14.980 | from Stanford, and everything about Roca eyeglasses

00:07:17.400 | and sunglasses were designed with performance in mind.

00:07:20.520 | Roca eyeglasses and sunglasses can be worn

00:07:22.620 | while running or cycling.

00:07:24.260 | If you get sweaty, they won't fall off your face,

00:07:26.540 | and they're extremely lightweight.

00:07:27.860 | In fact, most of the time I can't even remember

00:07:29.300 | that I'm wearing them.

00:07:30.340 | I wear Roca eyeglasses when I read at night,

00:07:32.620 | so I wear their readers, and I wear sunglasses

00:07:34.940 | at various times throughout the day.

00:07:36.520 | The great thing about Roca eyeglasses and sunglasses

00:07:38.560 | is that even though they were designed

00:07:39.920 | for athletic performance, they have a terrific aesthetic.

00:07:42.860 | So unlike a lot of so-called performance glasses

00:07:45.420 | that make people look like cyborgs, in my opinion,

00:07:48.260 | Roca eyeglasses and sunglasses are the sort

00:07:50.020 | that you could wear out to dinner,

00:07:51.080 | that you could wear to work.

00:07:52.260 | They have a terrific aesthetic.

00:07:53.700 | If you'd like to try Roca eyeglasses or sunglasses,

00:07:55.880 | you can go to Roca, that's R-O-K-A dot com,

00:07:58.280 | and enter the code Huberman to save 20% off

00:08:00.740 | your first order.

00:08:01.580 | Again, that's Roca, R-O-K-A dot com, and enter the code

00:08:04.660 | Huberman at checkout.

00:08:06.080 | And now for my discussion with Dr. Emily Belchettis.

00:08:09.580 | - Well, thanks for being here.

00:08:10.740 | - That's my pleasure.

00:08:11.700 | - Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for a long time

00:08:14.880 | because as a vision scientist who is also very interested

00:08:18.900 | in real life tools and goal setting and motivation,

00:08:22.020 | your work lands squarely in the middle of those interests.

00:08:25.560 | So just to kick things off, you could tell us

00:08:29.100 | just a little bit about the relationship between perception

00:08:33.780 | and in particular, how we see the world,

00:08:35.820 | and goal setting and goal retrieval.

00:08:39.540 | It's a vast landscape, but you're the expert.

00:08:42.340 | So I'll turn that over to you.

00:08:44.060 | And then as time goes on, I may have some additional

00:08:47.600 | questions as it relates to different kinds of vision,

00:08:49.540 | but what's the deal with vision and motivation?

00:08:51.980 | How do those two things link up?

00:08:53.340 | - Totally, I mean, when psychologists ask people,

00:08:57.020 | what are you doing to help make progress on your goals?

00:08:59.540 | They say all kinds of things.

00:09:00.580 | A couple of things always pop to the top,

00:09:02.380 | which is try to shock myself in encouraging ways,

00:09:05.140 | self pep talks, or I remind myself of how important it is

00:09:09.160 | to do this job, or I'll put up post-it notes around

00:09:13.680 | to constantly be nagging me about what I need to do.

00:09:16.560 | So those are common tactics that people use.

00:09:18.360 | And what we'll notice is that those are really effortful,

00:09:20.660 | having to constantly remind yourself,

00:09:22.180 | having to constantly talk to yourself,

00:09:23.620 | having to create those post-it notes,

00:09:25.060 | remember to look at them.

00:09:25.980 | All of that takes a lot of time and effort and commitment.

00:09:29.260 | And so what a surprise that people burn out, right?

00:09:32.140 | It's exciting to work on a goal when you first set it,

00:09:35.100 | you might make some initial progress,

00:09:36.620 | but then eventually we get, you know,

00:09:38.820 | not even to the halfway point, but before things get real,

00:09:42.900 | things are challenging and we fall by the wayside.

00:09:45.380 | And that's, I think, because those tactics

00:09:47.580 | that are our go-to strategies

00:09:49.980 | are themselves a goal to maintain.

00:09:52.000 | So it's like, you know, double-sided,

00:09:54.140 | we're putting so much on ourselves to try to advance

00:09:56.920 | the thing that we originally set out to accomplish.

00:09:59.780 | So then I, you know, with my team,

00:10:01.200 | I was trying to think of like, well,

00:10:02.280 | what are strategies that don't require as much effort

00:10:04.340 | that we can automate, that we can take advantage

00:10:06.200 | of what's already happening within ourselves,

00:10:08.160 | within our body, within our mind,

00:10:10.120 | that might overcome one of those challenges

00:10:13.100 | that'll be easier, more automated.

00:10:15.180 | And that's when we started to land on the idea of vision.

00:10:17.860 | We look at the world without even thinking of it

00:10:20.580 | for those of us that are excited.

00:10:22.740 | And we thought, you know what?

00:10:24.260 | There are strategies that we can use

00:10:27.060 | to look at the world in a different way

00:10:29.080 | and that we can automate that might help us

00:10:32.480 | to overcome some obstacles, to make progress on our goals,

00:10:35.700 | to maybe literally see opportunities

00:10:38.100 | that we hadn't been able to see before.

00:10:40.260 | So we started playing around with the idea

00:10:41.980 | of visual illusions to see, like, do people even know

00:10:44.820 | that there's other ways of seeing things around them?

00:10:47.060 | Can we tweak that, or is there room for intervention?

00:10:49.660 | Can we encourage people to take a new way

00:10:52.500 | of looking to see things that they hadn't seen before?

00:10:55.460 | And that's what really opened us up to trying to look

00:10:57.460 | at that intersection between vision science

00:11:00.260 | and motivation science.

00:11:02.860 | - It's great.

00:11:03.700 | And I always say, and here I'm strongly biased

00:11:06.860 | as a vision scientist, that vision is the dominant sense

00:11:09.540 | by which we navigate the world and survive.

00:11:11.660 | I love this idea of real-world, real-time access to vision.

00:11:16.160 | And I'm certainly familiar with how goal setting

00:11:19.500 | or post-its and magnets on refrigerators

00:11:22.640 | can have an immediate impact, but then over time,

00:11:24.700 | they become so part of the visual landscape

00:11:26.880 | that you overlook them.

00:11:27.720 | And we know as vision scientists,

00:11:28.980 | if something is stably in your environment,

00:11:31.340 | eventually you're blind to it.

00:11:33.260 | So that makes good sense.

00:11:34.780 | So you've published a number of studies in this area,

00:11:38.020 | but maybe you could highlight some of the more,

00:11:40.800 | what you would consider important findings

00:11:44.460 | in the area of how people can adjust their vision

00:11:48.340 | in order to meet goals more quickly and more efficiently.

00:11:51.700 | And perhaps also how we all arrive at goals

00:11:56.460 | with different visual perceptions.

00:11:58.580 | And that in some way may divide us into highly motivated

00:12:03.060 | and less motivated people.

00:12:04.100 | In other words, what's the link between vision and motivation

00:12:07.240 | and how can we leverage that

00:12:08.380 | in order to better reach our goals?

00:12:09.500 | - Totally.

00:12:10.340 | So, we started thinking about what are the goals

00:12:13.320 | that are most important to people

00:12:14.580 | that they struggle with the most?

00:12:16.400 | So we asked hundreds, thousands of people

00:12:19.400 | what their new year's resolutions are.

00:12:20.800 | We looked to all the other polls

00:12:22.280 | that do the same kind of work.

00:12:24.300 | And regardless of where you look or who you ask

00:12:26.420 | or when you ask it, people's number one goal

00:12:28.400 | is something related to their health, right?

00:12:30.480 | To lose weight, to exercise more,

00:12:32.660 | to get out, get more steps for mental wellbeing,

00:12:35.700 | physical wellbeing.

00:12:37.200 | And that's like the number one goal every January 1st.

00:12:42.060 | So if we were able to accomplish that goal,

00:12:44.600 | you'd think it would drop a little bit in the rankings,

00:12:46.720 | but it doesn't because it's really hard.

00:12:49.040 | So we thought, I wonder if there's a way for us

00:12:51.020 | to make some progress on that,

00:12:52.600 | on helping people to exercise better, more often,

00:12:55.100 | stick to it longer and make some progress there.

00:12:58.380 | We know diets don't work.

00:12:59.980 | Why don't diets work?

00:13:01.160 | For the same reason that that self-talk doesn't work

00:13:03.940 | is that we go in it full bore, hardcore,

00:13:08.220 | and it requires a major commitment

00:13:09.780 | and effort to a lifestyle change.

00:13:11.800 | So again, we were looking for something

00:13:13.260 | that might be easier than that,

00:13:15.060 | that could produce big, big payoff, right?

00:13:17.520 | That's the golden ticket,

00:13:19.300 | something that requires less effort for a bigger payoff.

00:13:22.740 | So one of the first things that I did

00:13:24.340 | was go over to Brooklyn to this old armory building.

00:13:28.140 | It used to be a military armory space.

00:13:31.100 | - Yeah, I think I know that building.

00:13:32.140 | - Yeah. - It's a beautiful building

00:13:33.580 | now that houses a lot of businesses, right?

00:13:35.320 | With plants on the walls, is that the one?

00:13:36.420 | - Yeah, there's businesses.

00:13:37.300 | There's a couple of armories all around the boroughs here,

00:13:40.500 | around New York City.

00:13:41.760 | And the one in Brooklyn in particular is now YMCA, right?

00:13:45.680 | So it's a family YMCA that's within

00:13:47.960 | this beautiful old red brick building

00:13:49.800 | that used to be a military establishment long, long ago.

00:13:53.160 | And what's really cool is that one winter after afternoon,

00:13:57.400 | somebody had invited me, a physical therapist,

00:14:00.140 | said, "Hey, you should come out

00:14:00.980 | "and check out what's happening here

00:14:02.060 | "with your interest in exercise

00:14:03.460 | "and trying to find new ways of helping people,

00:14:05.740 | "new tactics that they can add to their tool belt.

00:14:08.360 | "I think you're gonna find some interesting people

00:14:09.820 | "that are working out there."

00:14:11.140 | So I showed up, I look around,

00:14:12.860 | there's families, there's new moms,

00:14:14.780 | there's kids that are,

00:14:16.020 | moms trying to get kids to burn off

00:14:17.620 | some winter energy that they have.

00:14:20.340 | There's people that look like

00:14:21.180 | they're just there for their,

00:14:22.860 | every couple of days going out for a run.

00:14:24.580 | There's some people that look like

00:14:25.460 | they're training with a team.

00:14:26.860 | And that's who this physical therapist introduced me to,

00:14:29.900 | is the coach of this team.

00:14:32.100 | There's a bunch of people that were sitting down

00:14:33.340 | on the ground, and I would be hard pressed to know

00:14:36.000 | who's the high school student that's in this group,

00:14:37.980 | and then who, as it turns out,

00:14:39.740 | are some of the fastest runners in the world.

00:14:41.820 | Like, one of the people that was in the last Olympics

00:14:45.020 | before I showed up won the gold medal for the 400 meter.

00:14:48.460 | And from the looks of them, I mean, of course,

00:14:51.460 | their bodies are in better shape than mine,

00:14:53.920 | but there's nothing so pretentious,

00:14:56.220 | of course they're not wearing their medals.

00:14:57.380 | There's nothing pretentious about how they're walking around

00:14:59.420 | or anything like that that would lead me to know,

00:15:00.780 | like, this person's amazing.

00:15:02.100 | And they probably have some insight that I don't have.

00:15:04.740 | So once I got introduced to them

00:15:06.220 | and knew who are these people that were part of this

00:15:09.560 | pretty elite training team that happened to work out

00:15:12.460 | at this family gym, I had the chance to talk with them

00:15:16.780 | about what strategies do you use?

00:15:18.900 | Now, I am not an elite runner,

00:15:20.940 | and having recently had a baby,

00:15:22.980 | I'm not really a runner right now at all.

00:15:24.740 | But I thought, when these people are running,

00:15:27.420 | I bet they are, like, hyper aware

00:15:29.220 | of everything that's going on in their surroundings.

00:15:31.340 | Where are they relative to the competition?

00:15:33.780 | What's happening in their peripheral vision?

00:15:35.740 | What's going on on the side?

00:15:36.880 | Who's behind them?

00:15:37.720 | Who's in front of them?

00:15:39.100 | They probably have this, like, master sense,

00:15:41.060 | this master visual plan at any point in time,

00:15:43.680 | and that's what probably makes them elite.

00:15:46.160 | So when I started asking them, is that the case?

00:15:48.860 | Do you really pay attention to what's in your surroundings?

00:15:51.520 | What's behind you?

00:15:52.360 | What's on the side?

00:15:53.180 | They said no.

00:15:54.020 | Like, all of them said no.

00:15:55.740 | And sometimes when I do do that, it's a mistake.

00:15:57.820 | It doesn't work for me.

00:15:59.100 | So that was surprising.

00:15:59.940 | I totally went against my intuition about what they do

00:16:03.200 | that likely contributes to their success.

00:16:05.860 | What they said instead was that they are hyper focused.

00:16:08.740 | They assume this narrowed focus of attention,

00:16:11.020 | almost like a spotlight is shining on a target.

00:16:14.860 | Now, when they're running a short distance,

00:16:16.140 | that target might literally be the finish line,

00:16:18.020 | the line that they're trying to cross.

00:16:19.540 | If it's a longer distance, they set sub goals,

00:16:21.780 | like, you know, the person, the shorts on the person

00:16:24.100 | up ahead that they're trying to beat,

00:16:25.420 | or they choose some sort of stable landmark,

00:16:28.060 | like a sign that they would pass by.

00:16:30.980 | And, like, a spotlight is shining just on that,

00:16:33.140 | or, like, they have blinders on the sides of their face.

00:16:35.260 | That's all they're paying attention to.

00:16:37.540 | It's really narrowed scope of attention.

00:16:40.220 | And that was a strategy that all of these elite athletes

00:16:44.260 | said that they used, and those that were better

00:16:46.060 | rather than slower were ones that used it more.

00:16:50.340 | And I thought, oh, that's something we can play with, right?

00:16:52.620 | Like, they are elite and they are accomplished,

00:16:55.300 | but that visual strategy isn't necessarily something

00:16:57.780 | that you have to be in the perfect physical condition

00:16:59.980 | to be able to adopt.

00:17:01.240 | And so I wonder, can that help the rest of us

00:17:03.460 | who aren't competing for an Olympic gold

00:17:05.740 | and who have no chance of ever getting one,

00:17:07.220 | who want to exercise better,

00:17:09.220 | have a better time doing it and maintain a commitment

00:17:12.860 | to that exercise goal that they might have

00:17:14.360 | that they might otherwise, by February or March,

00:17:17.180 | be giving up on if they had set it

00:17:19.620 | at the beginning of January.

00:17:21.620 | So that's really where the work started,

00:17:23.420 | was what you might call focus groups

00:17:26.260 | or case studies of these incredible athletes.

00:17:29.100 | And then we did other studies looking at people

00:17:32.700 | who aren't Olympic athletes but who are competitive

00:17:35.460 | and New York Road runners,

00:17:38.260 | and how are they running in races.

00:17:40.100 | And what we found is that those people

00:17:41.180 | who have better pace, faster pace, better time,

00:17:44.340 | they use that narrowed strategy more often

00:17:46.740 | than this more expansive or open scope of attention.

00:17:51.420 | And there seemed to be a correlation

00:17:52.700 | between that better performance among a wider swath

00:17:55.800 | of hundreds of runners who are doing it competitively

00:17:59.340 | but still could be like the person

00:18:01.140 | that you're sitting next to in the office or yourself, right?

00:18:04.860 | And the more often that they did it

00:18:07.100 | and the more consistently they had adopted that,

00:18:10.220 | that technique of the narrowed focus of attention,

00:18:12.300 | it seemed that they were doing better in their runs.

00:18:14.860 | So then we started thinking like, okay,

00:18:18.220 | what about people who aren't competitive runners?

00:18:21.180 | What about like my mom, can she do that?

00:18:24.260 | Or me when I'm trying to get back

00:18:25.900 | on the bandwagon and exercise more.

00:18:28.180 | Is this a tactic we can teach people?

00:18:30.100 | The answer is yes.

00:18:31.660 | You can tell people about

00:18:32.940 | what these Olympic athletes are doing.

00:18:34.500 | You can tell them about

00:18:35.340 | what the New York Road Runners are doing.

00:18:38.580 | And just using the same language

00:18:39.780 | that I just used with you, right?

00:18:40.940 | Imagine that there's a spotlight shining just on a target.

00:18:43.500 | Choose something up ahead,

00:18:45.240 | the stop sign two blocks up that you can just see.

00:18:49.180 | And imagine that you have blinders on

00:18:51.800 | so that you're not really paying attention

00:18:53.180 | to the people that are passing by

00:18:54.360 | or the buildings or the garbage cans

00:18:55.980 | or the trucks that are on the road.

00:18:58.740 | Tune those out and focus in on that target

00:19:01.940 | until you hit it and then choose another one, right?

00:19:04.040 | Sort of recalibrate, choose the next goal.

00:19:06.140 | And so we would test like, can people do that?

00:19:09.480 | I mean, if you're listening right now,

00:19:10.740 | you probably are imagining that experience too.

00:19:12.940 | And the answer is yes.

00:19:13.820 | Like I can imagine that.

00:19:14.840 | I know what those words mean and I can do that.

00:19:17.120 | And our work found that too, if people can do that,

00:19:19.260 | we have them say out loud,

00:19:20.400 | what is it that's captured your attention?

00:19:22.600 | And of course, sometimes something in the periphery,

00:19:24.420 | like movement captures our gaze

00:19:26.180 | and we're pulled there for an instant,

00:19:28.580 | but then we can refocus up again

00:19:30.540 | and adopt that narrowed attention.

00:19:32.820 | One of the first studies that we did

00:19:34.440 | was teach that strategy and juxtapose or compare it

00:19:38.280 | against a group that we said, just look around naturally.

00:19:41.460 | You might see that finish line up ahead

00:19:43.440 | and there's things on the periphery,

00:19:44.760 | whatever your eyes want to do,

00:19:46.040 | whatever you think is gonna work best,

00:19:47.300 | feel free to do that and tell us what you're looking at.

00:19:49.940 | Then we gave them a finish line.

00:19:51.060 | We created sort of an exercise

00:19:53.340 | that's moderately challenging, but possible.

00:19:56.100 | We put ankle weights on that accounted

00:19:58.260 | for about 15% of their body weight,

00:19:59.940 | told them to lift their knees up,

00:20:01.220 | sort of high stepping to a finish line.

00:20:03.580 | So this would be challenging for them to do,

00:20:07.020 | but we said it's an indicator of overall health and fitness.

00:20:10.340 | Some of these people had narrowed their focus of attention

00:20:13.360 | and some were just looking more expansively or naturally.

00:20:17.740 | And what we found is that those people that we trained,

00:20:19.580 | just everyday normal people

00:20:21.260 | doing this moderately challenging exercise,

00:20:24.300 | they were able to move 27% faster.

00:20:26.600 | They could do the exercise more quickly

00:20:28.260 | and they said it hurt 17% less.

00:20:31.700 | The exercise was exactly the same for all the people.

00:20:33.760 | We set the weight and we set the distance.

00:20:36.780 | It was in our lab space,

00:20:38.420 | so it was a constrained environment.

00:20:40.620 | Everybody was in the same sort of circumstance,

00:20:43.380 | but yet their experience was really different.

00:20:45.580 | We helped them to move faster,

00:20:47.380 | burn calories at a higher rate, exercise more efficiently.

00:20:50.620 | The amount of time they put in

00:20:51.700 | is gonna produce a better physical outcome.

00:20:55.760 | And also it didn't hurt them.

00:20:57.340 | They're saying it doesn't hurt as much.

00:20:59.380 | So we were really excited about that, right?

00:21:01.540 | Because it meant that this strategy,

00:21:02.860 | we could use it on people who are not elite athletes.

00:21:05.940 | It could be easily adopted.

00:21:07.460 | A quick training session can teach people

00:21:09.980 | to look at the world in a different way.

00:21:12.060 | Again, this narrowed attention was different

00:21:14.360 | than whatever they do naturally, the comparison group,

00:21:17.920 | but it had a big outcome.

00:21:19.340 | It had a big difference on the way

00:21:20.860 | that they were engaged in the exercise.

00:21:23.140 | It was like some of the first work that we did

00:21:24.900 | and then since then we've done dozens more studies

00:21:27.860 | to look at, well, what happens with that

00:21:29.340 | and what else can we do with playing around with this?

00:21:32.380 | - Yeah, those are impressive differences

00:21:34.700 | as a consequence of narrowing visual attention.

00:21:37.340 | A couple of questions about the actual practice

00:21:39.060 | of narrowing attention.

00:21:40.420 | Is there any indication of whether or not subjects

00:21:44.220 | are constantly updating their visual attention?

00:21:47.400 | So for instance, if let's say the goal line is in view,

00:21:52.020 | literally from the beginning,

00:21:53.420 | I could imagine just holding visual attention

00:21:55.220 | on the goal line, but if it's a oval track

00:22:00.220 | or it's a trajectory along a trail or through a city,

00:22:03.940 | how often do you think they are updating

00:22:06.200 | their visual aperture and setting a visual goal?

00:22:11.140 | And I could imagine that there's some energetic expense

00:22:15.500 | to that, meaning you wouldn't want to do every crack

00:22:20.300 | on the sidewalk unless those cracks on the sidewalk

00:22:22.320 | were very far apart, because I think at some point

00:22:24.680 | that itself would be exhausting.

00:22:27.660 | So is there an optimal strategy or a semi-optimal strategy?

00:22:32.660 | - Yeah, so those Olympic athletes

00:22:35.400 | that we started by interviewing, they tended to be sprinters.

00:22:38.180 | They were more often sprinters, short distance sprinters.

00:22:40.640 | So when they said like, yes, I narrow in

00:22:42.700 | more than I assume an expansive focus,

00:22:45.440 | that's because they're not going that far, right?

00:22:47.740 | They have to do it as fast as humanly possible,

00:22:49.800 | but they're not going that far.

00:22:51.420 | And so we started asking that question too about like,

00:22:53.580 | well, wouldn't that be tiring?

00:22:55.160 | And the answer is yes.

00:22:56.420 | So when we start to look at, well, people who aren't

00:22:58.120 | sprinters, who are accomplished, but who are more

00:22:59.940 | long distance runners, that's what we find that they do,

00:23:03.140 | is that they're using that narrowed attention strategy

00:23:07.240 | strategically and it increases in use.

00:23:10.800 | They use it more often as the race progresses.

00:23:13.360 | And they really start to do this major switch

00:23:16.060 | about the halfway point of say like a 10 kilometer run.

00:23:20.780 | So people who are seasoned runners,

00:23:22.260 | they really start making a switch

00:23:23.980 | with what they're looking at about halfway through.

00:23:26.700 | And that's where they more often, more frequently,

00:23:29.100 | and are more intentionally adopting a narrowed focus

00:23:31.200 | of attention when they're in the last couple miles of a run.

00:23:35.220 | When maybe their resources are starting to get more thin,

00:23:38.140 | maybe their motivation is starting to fade.

00:23:40.620 | That tipping point in the middle is with any kind of goal

00:23:43.180 | where people struggle the most.

00:23:45.420 | And that's when they're like doubling down on a strategy

00:23:47.860 | that they know to be effective.

00:23:49.840 | So, you know, at first, longer distance runners

00:23:52.520 | are not using that narrowed strategy.

00:23:54.860 | They're looking more expansively because I think that,

00:23:59.620 | well, first of all, distraction is a thing.

00:24:01.740 | It's useful.

00:24:02.580 | Not necessarily that they're distracting themselves

00:24:04.480 | because people are still trying to hold pace

00:24:06.580 | and jostle among probably a more concentrated

00:24:09.260 | group of runners, but it is a strategy that they use

00:24:12.660 | and then sort of wean off of as the race goes through.

00:24:16.680 | And it's particularly effective when we're looking

00:24:19.540 | for that last push, right?

00:24:20.940 | The last push to get over the finish line

00:24:22.560 | when like you might be literally neck and neck with somebody

00:24:25.240 | that you're trying to just beat out.

00:24:28.180 | Or when you're most tired, but you know,

00:24:30.520 | like that last push, you don't want to drop off.

00:24:33.420 | And you want to push through hard through that finish line.

00:24:37.200 | That's when people are using it

00:24:38.540 | at its peak level of intensity.

00:24:41.080 | - I see.

00:24:41.920 | Yeah, to me, this makes total sense why it would work

00:24:47.120 | without going down the rabbit hole of visual neuroscience

00:24:50.400 | of something for another time.

00:24:52.040 | When we do these vergence eye movements,

00:24:54.120 | when we bring our eyes to a visual target,

00:24:55.980 | it's clear that some of the brainstem circuitry

00:24:57.960 | for alertness gets engaged to a greater degree.

00:25:02.960 | The other thing is that we know that when we focus

00:25:05.960 | on an object that the optics of the eye change

00:25:09.720 | and narrow the visual field.

00:25:11.680 | So that brings about, this is a very detailed question,

00:25:14.440 | but I'm sure the audience is wondering.

00:25:16.760 | Let's say I'm focused on a goal line

00:25:18.480 | or an intermediate goal.

00:25:21.040 | Are they focusing on a specific point

00:25:22.980 | or is it kind of the entire horizon of that goal?

00:25:25.540 | Because the finish line is indeed a line.

00:25:28.400 | So, and of course this is, it's impossible to know

00:25:30.800 | what someone is actually doing in their mind's eye,

00:25:33.480 | but how do people report this?

00:25:34.740 | Do they see it literally as a spotlight?

00:25:37.200 | And if so, how broad is that spot?

00:25:39.440 | - Yeah, so, you know, what is the length of their aperture

00:25:44.120 | rather than maybe the diameter or the sphere size of it?

00:25:49.120 | You know, in our interviews with people,

00:25:51.600 | our sort of focus group studies,

00:25:53.640 | it seems like it's more like a circular point.

00:25:57.640 | And that's in fact what we're teaching people,

00:26:00.080 | what we're training them to do.

00:26:01.400 | So rather than going broadly looking across a line

00:26:04.680 | from left to right, we are encouraging them

00:26:07.360 | to like imagine a circle of light

00:26:09.880 | that's shining on some target.

00:26:11.400 | Now, of course the finish line is a line,

00:26:13.240 | but if they're staying in their lane,

00:26:14.440 | if they're on a track, right,

00:26:15.480 | you can imagine that there is a circle shining just on

00:26:19.100 | where in their lane they'll cross that finish line.

00:26:21.020 | Or if it's a stop sign,

00:26:22.200 | you could imagine a circle of light illuminating that.

00:26:24.960 | So that's what we're teaching people to use.

00:26:26.600 | And that's what seems to be effective

00:26:28.440 | to maintain that focus rather than sort of being pulled

00:26:32.300 | to engage with peripheral vision.

00:26:34.960 | And there's some amazing people,

00:26:36.920 | some runners in history, like Joan Benoit Samuelson.

00:26:39.440 | She's one of the first female marathon competitors

00:26:43.320 | who has won multiple marathons.

00:26:46.000 | She's Canadian.

00:26:46.840 | I think she's won, feel free to correct me,

00:26:49.320 | like 10 marathons in her life.

00:26:52.340 | And she talks about sort of not assuming this wide,

00:26:56.320 | but narrow, wide but not deep or tall attentional focus.

00:27:01.320 | She talks about like finding the shorts

00:27:05.240 | on somebody ahead of me and focusing on those shorts

00:27:08.180 | until she passes them and then resetting that goal.

00:27:10.680 | So in her interviews that she's done with runners magazines,

00:27:14.240 | she talks about it in terms of this circle of attention.

00:27:18.340 | - I think I've experienced this a little bit

00:27:21.320 | because we're visiting New York now to do this interview

00:27:24.000 | and runners here seem more competitive.

00:27:27.200 | The recreational runners here seem more competitive.

00:27:30.020 | People walking on the street seem competitive.

00:27:31.880 | You're walking at near pace to somebody,

00:27:33.760 | they'll quickly speed up.

00:27:34.880 | If you speed up, they'll speed up.

00:27:36.560 | I think there've been some studies about walking speed

00:27:38.600 | in different cities and New York ranks

00:27:40.680 | among the fastest walkers around.

00:27:43.220 | I won't mention the slowest walking cities

00:27:45.160 | 'cause we don't want to cast any judgements.

00:27:47.420 | But fascinating.

00:27:50.420 | And again, makes total sense based on the way

00:27:52.680 | the visual system measures both space and time,

00:27:55.700 | something maybe we'll get into a little bit later.

00:27:57.940 | But I'm curious whether or not this,

00:28:01.800 | the whole thing works in reverse as well.

00:28:04.000 | Meaning do people who are very motivated to exercise,

00:28:09.000 | do they think this way naturally?

00:28:14.920 | People who are averse to exercise

00:28:16.940 | or who find it hard to get motivated to exercise,

00:28:20.720 | do they view the world differently, literally?

00:28:24.920 | - Yeah, I have so much that I can say about this.

00:28:27.600 | So if you'll humor me,

00:28:29.200 | I'll give you a couple of different stories

00:28:31.320 | about how we can answer that.

00:28:32.800 | So you don't have to do a deep dive into vision science,

00:28:34.760 | which of course you are capable of doing.

00:28:37.440 | But what I can share with you is some animal studies

00:28:40.960 | where this work kind of first started.

00:28:43.480 | This is in the 1940s, 1950s, rat labs, mice labs.

00:28:47.880 | And they were looking,

00:28:49.060 | those were the first models of human behavior

00:28:53.300 | that people were trying to understand motivation,

00:28:55.560 | motivation science within.

00:28:57.620 | So they would deprive these poor rats and mice

00:29:02.120 | of food or water so that they were motivated to get it.

00:29:06.280 | They were hungry and they were thirsty

00:29:08.360 | and they had practice running a maze

00:29:10.200 | so they knew where they could find that food or water

00:29:12.120 | or whatever that they were looking for.

00:29:14.020 | And what these researchers were studying

00:29:15.520 | was the pace of movement through the maze.

00:29:19.440 | So as the rats were going through the maze,

00:29:24.160 | they found that even though these rats were hungry

00:29:27.280 | and they're having to expend limited caloric energy

00:29:32.280 | to make it to the finish line,

00:29:33.880 | they actually ran faster the closer they got

00:29:36.020 | to that finish line.

00:29:37.240 | So once that finish line became nearer to them,

00:29:41.320 | they actually use their resources probably sub-optimally

00:29:45.400 | to make sure that they crossed the finish line

00:29:46.800 | and got their reward.

00:29:48.320 | So that was like some of the first early work

00:29:50.200 | that was showing that proximity to a goal

00:29:54.280 | increases the investment in resources

00:29:57.040 | that animals use to meet that goal,

00:30:00.880 | even when they don't have that much to spare.

00:30:02.800 | And with the mice, the same kind of thing,

00:30:05.280 | they actually had these little harnesses on them.

00:30:07.200 | They were looking at how hard did the mice pull

00:30:10.080 | to try to make it to the food or the water

00:30:11.980 | that they were trying to get.

00:30:13.400 | And same deal, the closer they got to getting their reward,

00:30:16.800 | the harder they were pulling,

00:30:18.560 | even though they didn't have that much energy to spare

00:30:21.840 | and they had already used some up

00:30:23.560 | getting to that finish line.

00:30:25.720 | So that early animal research from the 1940s, 1950s

00:30:30.720 | then spurred a whole wave of work in humans.

00:30:34.200 | Do humans do the same thing?

00:30:35.600 | Even when they're tired, but they can see

00:30:38.120 | or they can feel that their goal is close,

00:30:40.500 | do they double down and work even harder

00:30:41.920 | to cross that finish line?

00:30:43.280 | Either like a literal finish line

00:30:44.760 | if we're talking about exercise

00:30:45.860 | or a metaphorical finish line

00:30:47.120 | if we're talking about any other kind of goal

00:30:48.680 | that people might have.

00:30:49.800 | And the answer is yes.

00:30:51.040 | They called that the goal gradient hypothesis.

00:30:53.520 | The closer you get to the goal,

00:30:55.440 | generally the harder people and animals work

00:30:57.800 | to finish that goal.

00:30:59.340 | That's what led us then to think, okay,

00:31:03.320 | those rats, those mice, those people

00:31:05.000 | are seeing a finish line, right?

00:31:07.120 | And it's when they're maybe seeing that finish line,

00:31:09.280 | seeing that reward,

00:31:10.280 | seeing the goal they're hoping to accomplish,

00:31:12.360 | that is what's leading them to try harder,

00:31:15.200 | to invest more so that they can finish it off.

00:31:18.720 | What if we induce that illusion of proximity?

00:31:22.080 | What if we can induce a visual illusion,

00:31:23.720 | a visual experience that approximates

00:31:26.920 | what the real rats and mice were actually experiencing

00:31:31.240 | as they got closer?

00:31:32.980 | So that is what is happening.

00:31:35.280 | That's what's happening visually

00:31:36.480 | when we create that narrowed focus of attention.

00:31:38.780 | When we tell people, imagine there's a spotlight

00:31:40.560 | on the shorts of the person up ahead

00:31:42.040 | or the stop sign that you're seeing,

00:31:43.880 | it induces an illusion of proximity

00:31:46.840 | that then is responsible for people trying harder,

00:31:50.600 | walking faster, feeling that it defied their expectations

00:31:53.680 | and that it wasn't as bad as they thought it would be.

00:31:55.880 | So we do things like measure,

00:31:57.460 | like measure their visual experience.

00:32:00.280 | How far away is that finish line?

00:32:02.320 | Of course, we can ask them to report in feet.

00:32:04.120 | How many feet is it?

00:32:05.760 | Oh, but that's challenging, right?

00:32:06.800 | Like nobody really knows what three feet

00:32:08.960 | versus four feet really looks like, but they do.

00:32:11.200 | So we can ask them how many feet it is.

00:32:12.600 | We also use these other measures

00:32:13.960 | of visual matching measures to know

00:32:17.060 | that distance of the finish line looks about as far away

00:32:19.440 | as this other target.

00:32:21.320 | They're matching up their visual experiences.

00:32:23.560 | So what we know is that inducing that narrowed focus

00:32:27.040 | of attention is creating an illusion of proximity.

00:32:30.120 | That goal looks closer to them.

00:32:32.320 | And then there's all kinds of downstream motivational

00:32:35.120 | and psychological effects that happen

00:32:36.660 | from feeling like you're closer.

00:32:38.820 | By visually misperceiving that space,

00:32:43.220 | it can have a really positive consequence.

00:32:45.680 | So your first question was, you know, which way does it go?

00:32:48.960 | Does it go both ways that people who are better runners

00:32:50.840 | like happen to do this thing?

00:32:52.600 | Yes, some of our research shows that,

00:32:54.920 | that if they, you know, for whatever reason happened

00:32:57.960 | upon this strategy and continued to practice it,

00:33:01.200 | they tended to be the better runners.

00:33:04.180 | But we also know from our experiments in the lab,

00:33:07.800 | where we take people who don't know about these strategies

00:33:10.480 | and buy a flip of the coin,

00:33:11.960 | we randomly assign them to either learn the strategy

00:33:15.040 | and use it or do whatever comes naturally to them,

00:33:18.600 | we can create that illusion of proximity

00:33:20.560 | that has a direct and causal impact

00:33:23.520 | on improving the performance when they're exercising.

00:33:26.820 | So yes, it goes both ways,

00:33:29.280 | but you can also teach yourself

00:33:31.000 | that you don't have to just rely on luck,

00:33:33.200 | luck of the draw for being a person

00:33:34.840 | who happens to be better at exercising

00:33:36.740 | or whose eyes happen to do this on their own.

00:33:39.420 | - Before we continue with today's discussion,

00:33:41.160 | we're going to take a brief pause

00:33:42.760 | to acknowledge our sponsor, Athletic Greens,

00:33:45.280 | also called AG1.

00:33:47.040 | I started taking Athletic Greens way back in 2012.

00:33:50.320 | So I'm delighted that they've been a sponsor of this podcast.

00:33:53.760 | Athletic Greens contains vitamins, minerals, probiotics,

00:33:56.560 | digestive enzymes, and adaptogens.

00:33:59.280 | So it's got a lot of things in there.

00:34:00.600 | That's actually the reason I started taking it

00:34:02.240 | and the reason I still take it once or twice a day.

00:34:04.920 | It essentially covers all of my nutritional bases

00:34:07.040 | and the probiotics in particular are important to me

00:34:09.280 | because of the critical importance

00:34:10.600 | of what's called the gut brain axis,

00:34:12.200 | that is neurons and other cell types in the gut,

00:34:15.440 | in the digestive tract that communicate with the brain

00:34:18.000 | and the brain back to the digestive tract

00:34:20.240 | in order to control things like mood, immune function,

00:34:23.640 | hormone function, and on and on.

00:34:25.600 | Whenever somebody has asked me

00:34:27.040 | what's the one supplement they should take,

00:34:29.220 | I always answer Athletic Greens.

00:34:30.860 | I gave that answer long before I ever had this podcast

00:34:33.240 | and it's the answer I still give now

00:34:35.020 | for all the reasons that I detailed just a moment ago.

00:34:37.800 | If you'd like to try Athletic Greens,

00:34:39.180 | you can go to athleticgreens.com/huberman

00:34:42.040 | to claim a special offer.

00:34:43.160 | They'll give you five free travel packs

00:34:44.560 | that make it really easy to mix up Athletic Greens

00:34:46.320 | while you're on the road,

00:34:47.340 | plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2,

00:34:50.160 | which are also very important for a huge number

00:34:52.360 | of bodily factors and brain factors

00:34:54.480 | that impact your immediate and long-term health.

00:34:56.360 | Again, that's athleticgreens.com/huberman

00:34:59.000 | to claim that special offer.

00:35:00.660 | The most pressing question I have in my mind is,

00:35:03.320 | can we, I, all of us use this strategy

00:35:08.320 | to make the starting line a goal point?

00:35:12.120 | Because for a lot of people,

00:35:13.460 | it's not about going from start to finish,

00:35:15.520 | it's about getting to start.

00:35:17.920 | And I would say here I'm estimating,

00:35:22.400 | but 15% of the content on social media is about motivation

00:35:27.400 | and how to get motivated to do things.

00:35:30.240 | Neurochemicals like dopamine, of course,

00:35:34.120 | being at the heart of motivation,

00:35:35.920 | in my mind, I'm making strong links

00:35:37.680 | between some of these visual aperture effects

00:35:39.520 | and goal lines and dopamine that we could also dive into.

00:35:43.640 | But the simple question is,

00:35:46.320 | can I use this finish line strategy

00:35:49.600 | to make the start line a goal

00:35:52.660 | and get my system more engaged or motivated?

00:35:56.220 | And is there any physiology or physiological changes

00:36:00.160 | I should say to reflect the idea

00:36:02.180 | that maybe just visually focusing on the start line

00:36:05.160 | would actually get me more excited

00:36:07.640 | as opposed to make me less excited to engage in effort?

00:36:11.280 | - There's certainly vision science that's tied up

00:36:13.320 | in that very first stage of goal setting,

00:36:16.840 | like identifying what that goal is in the first place

00:36:19.080 | and taking those first steps.

00:36:21.320 | A lot of people's go-to strategies that involve vision

00:36:24.100 | are vision boards or dream boards or post-it notes, right?

00:36:28.640 | They're creating some sort of visual representation

00:36:31.580 | of what it is that they want to accomplish.

00:36:33.800 | Where is it that I want to be in five years, 10 days,

00:36:36.460 | 10 years, whatever that timeline is

00:36:38.800 | that they're working under.

00:36:40.440 | The idea of vision boards or dream boards

00:36:42.280 | is that you almost like a scrapbook collect visual icons

00:36:46.760 | that reflect where you want to be to motivate yourself.

00:36:49.120 | It's a really common tactic that people use.

00:36:52.720 | And it's not bad to do that, right?

00:36:54.500 | For some people, just even knowing what they want in life

00:36:57.080 | is a major accomplishment.

00:36:58.320 | And defining the goal can be really challenging for people.

00:37:01.360 | And that's a strategy that works

00:37:02.980 | and involves our visual experience, right?

00:37:05.560 | It's not just, people aren't saying like,

00:37:07.040 | why don't you just sit around and imagine

00:37:09.080 | what you want your life to be like in 10 years?

00:37:11.320 | The strategy that people are suggesting is like,

00:37:13.720 | no, cut out the pictures, put it on a board

00:37:16.400 | and stick it by your bathroom mirror

00:37:18.240 | so you see it every day, right?

00:37:19.560 | - Or make a list.

00:37:20.400 | - Or make a list, yeah.

00:37:21.240 | - People are big on these lists.

00:37:22.640 | I have a lot of friends who are like,

00:37:23.480 | have you made your list, right?

00:37:25.480 | The list of things that you insist on having

00:37:27.560 | in the context of fitness, relationship, job,

00:37:31.260 | et cetera, et cetera.

00:37:32.100 | This seems more and more common.

00:37:33.440 | - Yeah, totally.

00:37:34.280 | And the idea, like write it down, right?

00:37:35.340 | They're telling you write it down

00:37:36.840 | or create a visual manifestation of it.

00:37:41.520 | And so, yeah, that's effective

00:37:44.600 | for identifying what you want,

00:37:46.760 | but it may not actually be effective

00:37:48.640 | for helping you to meet the goal, to get the job done.

00:37:51.860 | So colleagues of mine at New York University

00:37:54.360 | have probed why, why is that?

00:37:56.520 | Why is just thinking about what you want in your life

00:37:59.900 | and sort of putting yourself vicariously into those shoes,

00:38:04.440 | imagining what my life will be like

00:38:05.980 | if I can accomplish everything on this list.

00:38:09.240 | Why doesn't that work?

00:38:10.320 | Well, first of all, does it work?

00:38:11.340 | The answer is no.

00:38:12.180 | And why does it not work?

00:38:15.020 | Because what happens, these colleagues,

00:38:17.280 | Gabrielle Otenjin and her research team have found,

00:38:21.080 | is that going through and dreaming about

00:38:24.320 | or visualizing how great my life will be

00:38:27.320 | when I get X, Y, and Z done,

00:38:29.280 | that is like a goal satisfied.

00:38:34.180 | I have identified what it is that I want.

00:38:36.080 | I have experienced it, even if just in an imaginary way,

00:38:40.360 | I've had that positive experience of thinking about

00:38:44.400 | how great my life is gonna be when I get this thing done.

00:38:47.440 | And they start to sort of rest on their laurels.

00:38:49.900 | She's actually measured systolic blood pressure

00:38:51.800 | and heart rate.

00:38:52.880 | And they found that people who do that,

00:38:55.240 | who go through that experience of visualizing

00:38:57.280 | how great my life will be when I get X, Y, and Z done,

00:39:00.120 | their systolic blood pressure,

00:39:02.400 | bottom number on your blood pressure reading, decreases.

00:39:06.680 | Okay, now I'm all about finding ways to relax,

00:39:09.360 | especially in New York, right?

00:39:10.520 | You're constantly living at a high level of stimulation.

00:39:13.160 | And so like, cool, great.

00:39:14.300 | So maybe I should just like think about

00:39:15.560 | how awesome my life will be

00:39:16.560 | when I get my bucket list done.

00:39:19.440 | But motivation scientists know that systolic blood pressure

00:39:22.680 | is actually an indicator of our body's readiness

00:39:25.040 | to get up and act, to do something.

00:39:27.660 | Now that can be the going out for a walk,

00:39:29.400 | going out for a run, hitting the gym.

00:39:31.640 | It can also be things like doing math problems, right?

00:39:34.840 | Even if it's something that's just mental systolic,

00:39:37.160 | blood pressure actually goes up in anticipation

00:39:40.920 | of your body or your mind needing to do something,

00:39:43.840 | taking the first steps on a goal.

00:39:46.280 | So then it helps us to understand of like,

00:39:50.520 | okay, if I've just created this dream board,

00:39:52.700 | this vision board, and put myself psychologically

00:39:54.860 | in that space of a goal satisfied,

00:39:57.080 | why is it bad that blood pressure goes down?

00:39:58.840 | Because it means your body is chilling out.

00:40:00.960 | It's like, all right, cool.

00:40:02.360 | I just accomplished something pretty major.

00:40:04.600 | I'd actually now don't have the physiological resources

00:40:07.800 | at the ready to take the first step right now

00:40:10.240 | to do something about that.

00:40:12.080 | So that was a pretty monumental finding

00:40:16.200 | for motivation scientists to understand

00:40:18.000 | that like creating these dream boards,

00:40:19.280 | these vision boards or to-do lists might actually backfire

00:40:22.440 | because it in and of itself is the creation of a goal

00:40:26.640 | and the satisfaction of the goal.

00:40:28.280 | And then people understandably give themselves some time

00:40:31.000 | to just enjoy that positive experience.

00:40:33.960 | - So much for the secret.

00:40:35.680 | - Yeah, exactly, exactly.

00:40:37.560 | - I guess now the secret folks will come after me

00:40:39.600 | with pitchforks, but-

00:40:40.440 | - I try to never say the name, right?

00:40:42.560 | - Well, I'm not afraid to say the name.

00:40:43.600 | I mean, I imagine that certain strategies

00:40:45.920 | might work for other people,

00:40:46.820 | but everything you're saying, again,

00:40:49.140 | is consistent with what we know about the physiology

00:40:51.580 | of dopamine circuits for motivation.

00:40:53.360 | I have a good friend who perhaps incidentally,

00:40:56.880 | perhaps not, is a cardiologist at a major university,

00:41:00.740 | said that one of the major errors that people make

00:41:04.640 | with book writing and completion is they will tell people

00:41:08.040 | they're going to write a book and people will say,

00:41:10.400 | "Oh, you definitely should write a book.

00:41:11.920 | Everyone's going to love your book."

00:41:13.120 | And they never end up writing it.

00:41:14.460 | And his theory is that they get so much dopamine reward

00:41:18.320 | from that immediate feedback with all the protection

00:41:20.840 | of never having the book criticized,

00:41:22.720 | that they never write the book.

00:41:24.120 | I'm sure there are exceptions to this,

00:41:25.580 | but I guess it raises the question,

00:41:28.120 | what's the better strategy?

00:41:29.460 | - Yeah, so I'm not saying that people who enjoy

00:41:32.720 | a dream board creation should stop what they're doing.

00:41:35.380 | That's not the take-home message here.

00:41:36.720 | - Nightmare board?

00:41:38.040 | - Oh, definitely not that, no.

00:41:39.440 | There's enough anxiety and fear in the world.

00:41:41.300 | We don't need to encourage more of it.

00:41:43.440 | But the process of goal setting shouldn't stop

00:41:45.200 | with articulating what the goal is.

00:41:47.100 | So at that same point that we're trying to figure out

00:41:50.700 | what do we want to do?

00:41:51.540 | What is my vision for the future?

00:41:53.940 | In those planning sessions,

00:41:55.800 | we need to simultaneously think about a couple other things.

00:41:59.360 | One is how are we going to get there?

00:42:02.800 | So take it out of the abstract,

00:42:04.520 | take it out of this idyllic visual iconography,

00:42:08.200 | and start thinking about the practical day-to-day.

00:42:10.160 | We need to break it down into more manageable goals,

00:42:11.920 | not just my 10-year plan for myself, but my two-week plan.

00:42:15.480 | What can I accomplish in the next two weeks

00:42:17.500 | and the two weeks after?

00:42:18.760 | That's going to set me on the right trajectory.

00:42:21.200 | That's probably not surprising to anybody

00:42:22.720 | who's been thinking about how do I set goals better?

00:42:26.080 | Plan big picture, think big picture abstractly,

00:42:29.240 | but then also break it down more concretely.

00:42:31.680 | That's probably not surprising,

00:42:32.780 | but it's an important aspect of the goal setting process.

00:42:36.960 | Then again, Gabrielle Otenjen in my department

00:42:38.980 | has identified a third often overlooked

00:42:41.620 | or underappreciated stage that has to happen

00:42:45.320 | at that goal in the goal setting process.

00:42:47.520 | And that's thinking about the obstacles

00:42:49.220 | that stand in your way of success.

00:42:52.080 | And that will actually help improve motivation

00:42:54.920 | in the long run.

00:42:56.200 | And sometimes people think that that is counterintuitive.

00:42:58.980 | You're saying like, if I want to increase my motivation,

00:43:01.600 | have more motivation,

00:43:02.440 | then I need to think about how hard it's going to be,

00:43:04.200 | all the ways that I'm going to fail.

00:43:05.920 | How is that going to like jazz me up?

00:43:07.880 | How's that going to help me get through

00:43:09.240 | when I actually, you know, when things get hard?

00:43:13.520 | But it does, because it's like coming up with a plan B,

00:43:17.500 | a plan C, plan D, in advance of actually experiencing that.

00:43:21.660 | If you were on a boat and the boat started to sink,

00:43:24.020 | that's not the time you want to start looking

00:43:25.700 | for life jackets.

00:43:27.020 | You already want to know where one is

00:43:28.140 | so you can go to it right away.

00:43:30.140 | And it's the same thing with goal setting,

00:43:32.340 | is that you want to know, what am I working towards?

00:43:34.260 | How am I going to get there?

00:43:35.140 | And if I experience this obstacle,

00:43:37.480 | here's what I'm going to do about it.

00:43:39.060 | You may never experience that obstacle,

00:43:41.060 | but if you do, you're probably going to be shy on time,

00:43:43.700 | thin on resources, maybe experiencing an anxiety

00:43:46.720 | that hijacks your brain so you're not functioning

00:43:48.980 | at that optimal level of judgment and decision-making,

00:43:52.620 | you want to already have like the snap next step in place

00:43:55.820 | so you can just hop to it, right?

00:43:58.020 | We're not going to do our best thinking

00:43:59.220 | when we're in crisis mode, but we don't have to

00:44:02.560 | if we have used, if we have already used our resources

00:44:05.640 | in advance to come up with that plan B or that plan C.

00:44:08.640 | Michael Phelps, like incredible athlete, right?

00:44:11.160 | This is something that he and his coach

00:44:12.620 | have routinely incorporated into their training.

00:44:16.560 | So I love this story that like back in 2008,

00:44:19.520 | he was, you know, hot for the first time

00:44:21.640 | on the international stage, it was the Beijing Olympics.

00:44:24.360 | Michael Phelps was on the brink of doing something

00:44:26.120 | that no one else in the history of the Olympic games

00:44:28.600 | has ever done, which is win eight gold medals

00:44:30.720 | in a single Olympiad.

00:44:32.800 | At the time of this story, he had already won seven

00:44:35.640 | and he had just the 200 fly in front of him

00:44:37.800 | before he could do what no one else has ever done,

00:44:40.080 | win the eighth gold medal.

00:44:41.960 | And like the fly is his thing, right?

00:44:44.000 | This should have been, this should have been easy,

00:44:45.620 | like a no brainer, he's gonna win this,

00:44:47.160 | he's gonna break Olympic history.

00:44:49.280 | As soon as he dove into the pool,

00:44:51.480 | his goggles started to leak.

00:44:53.280 | And by the time he had done three lengths of the pool,

00:44:56.360 | he just had to flip around and come back

00:44:58.320 | to the starting line slash finish line, back to the edge.

00:45:01.840 | By the time that happened, his goggles were completely

00:45:05.020 | filled with water and he was swimming blind.

00:45:07.240 | I would have panicked, I would have sunk

00:45:08.440 | to the bottom of the pool.

00:45:09.720 | I wouldn't have even been in the pool, to be honest.

00:45:11.400 | Like I'm not a swimmer, definitely not gonna be

00:45:12.840 | in the Olympics, but for him, he didn't.

00:45:15.400 | It wasn't a moment of panic, like it probably

00:45:17.220 | would have been for nearly every other person

00:45:18.900 | in that situation because he had foreshadowed

00:45:22.340 | that kind of possible failure.

00:45:24.060 | He had imagined that obstacle hitting him in advance

00:45:26.860 | and not even just imagined it, but practiced it.

00:45:28.960 | What will we do?

00:45:30.080 | He routinely practiced swimming with his goggles

00:45:32.480 | not fully secured on his face.

00:45:34.100 | His coach notoriously would rip the goggles off of his head,

00:45:37.960 | smash them on the ground for maybe dramatic effect

00:45:40.020 | or something so that he didn't even have any goggles

00:45:41.880 | possible to grab as he's in practice.

00:45:45.060 | So because he had foreshadowed that possibility

00:45:47.500 | and the solution, if my goggles start to leak,

00:45:50.580 | then I will do, in his case, start counting my strokes,

00:45:54.840 | then I'll make it through.

00:45:55.780 | He knew exactly how many strokes it would take

00:45:57.540 | for him to get from one end of the pool to the other.

00:45:59.540 | He started counting his strokes, he won that race,

00:46:02.920 | the 200 fly, he won his eighth gold medal

00:46:04.540 | and he'd go on to win 15 more in his career.

00:46:07.240 | So we might not all be swimmers, we might not all aspire

00:46:10.120 | to Olympic level performance, but I love that example

00:46:13.040 | because I think it helps sort of demystify

00:46:16.280 | or give us an alternative perspective on the importance

00:46:19.700 | and the motivational reasons why.

00:46:22.200 | Thinking about obstacles in advance,

00:46:23.980 | thinking about the ways, the two, three, four ways

00:46:26.740 | that your plan might go awry is actually effective

00:46:29.880 | at helping us to overcome the obstacle

00:46:31.440 | that might otherwise lead us to throw in the towel.

00:46:34.360 | - That's a beautiful example.

00:46:36.960 | I'm going to springboard off that example

00:46:39.340 | to ask a question that has also been on my mind,

00:46:42.800 | which is, is there really anything special about vision?

00:46:46.080 | Because in the example you just gave,

00:46:47.720 | it was indeed vision that Michael Phelps was deprived of

00:46:50.980 | and it was counting strokes.

00:46:53.960 | Counting is another form of incremental measurement

00:46:56.960 | in the nervous system, obviously.

00:46:58.860 | There are others that could be the sensation

00:47:02.520 | of the hands smacking the water

00:47:04.680 | or breaking the surface of the water.

00:47:05.960 | So there are any number of different variables

00:47:08.860 | or metrics that one could use.

00:47:11.280 | I could imagine that setting out on a,

00:47:15.040 | let's say a three mile run,

00:47:16.720 | which for me is a decent distance run.

00:47:18.760 | It's one I do a few times a week.

00:47:20.060 | I'm also not a runner, but I try and complete some runs

00:47:22.360 | a few times a week at very slow pace just for my health.

00:47:25.520 | I could count every step.

00:47:28.760 | That would be kind of exhausting.

00:47:30.360 | But if I knew that three miles was,

00:47:34.000 | I'm going to estimate here, I don't know,

00:47:35.260 | a couple thousand steps, I could count backward.

00:47:38.680 | I could count forward.

00:47:39.660 | I count every 10, I confess I spend every morning

00:47:43.740 | trying to find sunlight to get sun in my eyes

00:47:45.460 | to set my circadian rhythm and I do a hundred jumping jacks.

00:47:48.400 | So I'm the guy that people are looking at strange

00:47:51.040 | on the street, but sometimes I count every 10,

00:47:53.200 | sometimes I count backwards, sometimes I count forward.

00:47:55.940 | Is there any indication that it matters

00:47:57.640 | or is it simply that we attach some sort of meaning

00:48:01.420 | to that increment and the mode of reaching that increment?

00:48:06.420 | Because it does seem like there's something special

00:48:09.060 | about vision and we could maybe dive into a little bit more

00:48:11.620 | of why that is, but at a very basic level,

00:48:14.200 | how broadly or finally should one set the increments

00:48:18.960 | and does it matter if you're counting steps

00:48:21.100 | or counting strokes, if you're,

00:48:23.080 | maybe it's every other song,

00:48:25.100 | you're going to listen to an entire album.

00:48:27.260 | That's something that I don't know if people do anymore,

00:48:29.240 | or you're going to listen to a whole playlist

00:48:30.880 | and then listen to it again and you're going to run

00:48:32.920 | as long as the playlist is completed twice.

00:48:37.060 | You can obviously see what I'm getting at,

00:48:38.780 | but I know people are going to want to implement these tools

00:48:41.080 | and I have to guess that the nervous system

00:48:42.740 | is somewhat indiscriminate when it comes to these things,

00:48:46.300 | but that there might also be some specificity.

00:48:49.020 | - I think vision is special and I think you do too.

00:48:52.300 | So, and for a variety of reasons.

00:48:54.940 | When you start, you can really nerd out

00:48:56.480 | on how cool the brain is and how cool vision is

00:48:59.120 | within the brain and when you do,

00:49:00.820 | then you start to find some things

00:49:01.860 | that make vision unique, right?

00:49:03.640 | More real estate, more neurological cortex,

00:49:07.460 | real estate is taken up by the visual sense

00:49:09.780 | than any other sense, more than taste, touch, smell, right?

00:49:14.580 | Vision gets more real estate,

00:49:16.360 | gets more neurological processing space

00:49:18.620 | than any other sense.

00:49:19.720 | Why is that?

00:49:20.560 | Well, because evolution has led us to prioritize

00:49:22.760 | that visual, the visual experience.

00:49:25.780 | There's some cool illusions where like maybe somebody's mouth

00:49:28.660 | is doing something different than what you're hearing

00:49:31.000 | when people start to create these like, you know,

00:49:33.620 | weird tricks that might go on YouTube and go viral.

00:49:37.460 | And people are trying to figure out, what did I hear?

00:49:39.460 | What did I see his mouth doing?

00:49:41.540 | And what comes up is that people prioritize what they see

00:49:44.780 | over what they're hearing when the two are incompatible

00:49:47.340 | or kind of like out of sync.

00:49:48.660 | - Every time.

00:49:49.500 | - Yeah, every time, right?

00:49:50.660 | If you had to bet on it, bet on what it is

00:49:53.000 | that you're looking at rather than what you're seeing.

00:49:55.380 | Why is that?

00:49:56.740 | Well, I guess a couple other things too, right?

00:49:58.460 | Like we can see super far.

00:49:59.700 | You can see like a flickering candle on our horizon

00:50:02.540 | if it was a totally, you know, clear sky.

00:50:05.980 | Several miles away you can see

00:50:07.300 | the International Space Station floating up

00:50:09.240 | in the night sky, right?

00:50:11.100 | Like hundreds of miles away.

00:50:12.920 | Our eyes are amazing.

00:50:14.860 | And we prioritize what we see that,

00:50:19.420 | and I think that's because we never,

00:50:21.440 | we rarely get the experience

00:50:23.260 | of having our visual experience second guessed.

00:50:26.260 | You know, oftentimes we're having conversation

00:50:28.240 | maybe in a loud restaurant

00:50:29.420 | and we know that we didn't hear the person right.

00:50:30.980 | And so we say like, oh, did you say that?

00:50:32.340 | Or like, oh, I thought you said this.

00:50:33.820 | And they're like, no, I didn't say that, right?

00:50:34.980 | So people will correct us when our ears get it wrong

00:50:39.420 | or we're tasting something amazing

00:50:41.620 | and we can't quite figure out what spices were in here.

00:50:43.980 | And so we know that our tongue

00:50:45.580 | isn't quite picking up the taste the right way.

00:50:48.820 | And that's why we read the menu

00:50:49.900 | to see what are the ingredients.

00:50:51.060 | Or we ask the chef, like, what did you put in this?

00:50:52.740 | It tastes amazing.

00:50:54.620 | So we know that our tongue is getting it wrong.

00:50:56.260 | Or you might be touching something

00:50:57.940 | and you look at the tag to see what sort of textile

00:51:00.180 | was used in this really amazing piece of clothing

00:51:02.260 | that you're looking to buy.

00:51:03.460 | So we know that our sense of touch

00:51:05.420 | isn't quite getting it right.

00:51:06.740 | But rarely do we have that experience

00:51:08.380 | of having our eyes get updated.

00:51:11.340 | Where we're looking at something,

00:51:12.460 | oh, I think I'm looking at my mom.

00:51:13.620 | Oh, no, actually it was actually my husband.

00:51:15.900 | Okay, like that never happens, right?

00:51:17.940 | That we have gotten vision as wrong

00:51:19.620 | as we might get any other thing

00:51:21.620 | that we're experiencing through any other sense.

00:51:24.800 | We trust our visual experience.

00:51:26.900 | We have sort of a naive realism

00:51:28.900 | that what we see reflects the world the way it actually is.

00:51:32.860 | Because it's never really fully tested.

00:51:35.280 | We never get the input or the feedback

00:51:37.940 | that you've seen something wrong.

00:51:40.080 | Until a visual illusion pops up on social media, right?

00:51:42.700 | Like the dress example or the last week or so

00:51:46.140 | there's been that horse seal line drawing

00:51:48.740 | that's been all over social media too.

00:51:50.320 | What do you see?

00:51:51.160 | I see a horse.

00:51:51.980 | Someone says, I see a seal.

00:51:52.820 | And then like, you know, chaos erupts.

00:51:54.160 | Or I thought the dress was blue

00:51:56.100 | and I thought it was gold.

00:51:57.860 | I don't remember the options 'cause I see it as blue.

00:51:59.740 | So, right?

00:52:01.660 | And it's like dividing up families and friendships

00:52:04.180 | because you've like seen something

00:52:05.580 | that the other person just literally cannot see.

00:52:08.100 | And that's why we love those examples

00:52:10.340 | when they pop up in social media when they do.

00:52:13.140 | Is because it defies all of our previous expectations.

00:52:16.740 | There's a really amazing, if this interests you,

00:52:19.820 | there's a really amazing visual artist, Anish Kapoor,

00:52:22.120 | who plays with these ideas too.

00:52:23.640 | And his installations are just fascinating.

00:52:26.940 | I saw one at a museum once

00:52:29.220 | where I walked down this long hall

00:52:31.380 | and it's just a big black rectangle

00:52:33.220 | that's painted on the wall.

00:52:34.620 | And I was like, this guy's super famous.

00:52:36.300 | What the hell?

00:52:37.140 | It's just a big black rectangle painted on the wall.

00:52:40.220 | What is this about?

00:52:41.180 | Like, what a hoax.

00:52:42.500 | You know, this museum paid how much?

00:52:44.040 | What, whatever.

00:52:45.500 | But then as you get closer,

00:52:46.400 | you get closer and your eyes start to settle in

00:52:48.540 | and they adapt to the different visual lighting.

00:52:50.300 | You realize it's not a black square painted on the wall.

00:52:52.260 | It's a huge hole he's carved into the wall.

00:52:54.500 | And there is a whole other world that's back behind there

00:52:57.300 | that you can't see right away

00:52:59.220 | until your eyes adapt to the different lighting conditions.

00:53:02.180 | - Beautiful.

00:53:03.000 | - It's amazing.

00:53:03.840 | - As a vision scientist, I have to see,

00:53:05.580 | where is this exhibit?

00:53:06.760 | - It's not up right now.

00:53:07.900 | I've seen, there was a retrospective several years ago

00:53:11.020 | that was done in Sydney,

00:53:13.380 | but his work is all over the place.

00:53:14.840 | So Anish Kapoor, definitely worth looking up

00:53:17.620 | because like the dress example

00:53:20.380 | or the horse seal line drawing

00:53:21.780 | or artists like Anish Kapoor's work,

00:53:24.240 | that is a moment that gives us a different,

00:53:27.340 | unexpected insight about the world,

00:53:30.180 | that it challenges us to see something

00:53:32.520 | that we hadn't seen before

00:53:33.660 | or it induces or tricks us into seeing something

00:53:35.960 | that we wouldn't have otherwise have seen.

00:53:38.220 | And so it's those rare moments

00:53:39.880 | that I think are actually really important

00:53:41.800 | for understanding what do our eyes normally do

00:53:44.860 | because we wouldn't find these examples so surprising,

00:53:47.540 | so engaging, so shocking

00:53:49.100 | if we had routinely gotten the experience

00:53:50.960 | of realizing we're not seeing the world the way that it is.

00:53:53.580 | So that is why I think vision is special

00:53:57.740 | and why it can be thought of as a tool

00:54:00.320 | that we can add to our toolkit

00:54:02.600 | for how to better accomplish our goals.

00:54:04.980 | I'm not saying that we should just only focus

00:54:06.880 | on imagining the world through an attentional spotlight,

00:54:10.860 | but maybe that's something that we can employ strategically

00:54:14.060 | on occasion when we think it's gonna best help us,

00:54:16.820 | when we need an extra little push

00:54:18.140 | to cross the literal or metaphorical finish line,

00:54:21.700 | but it doesn't have to be the only tactic that we use.

00:54:24.620 | Just like it's not bad to use vision boards,

00:54:26.460 | but let's use something else also.

00:54:28.300 | It's not bad to talk to ourselves in encouraging ways,

00:54:31.460 | but let's try adding another tool to our tool belt

00:54:35.380 | in case that's not enough to get the job done.

00:54:38.660 | So I do think that there's great power

00:54:40.420 | in thinking about our visual experience

00:54:42.360 | alongside other tactics that we might use

00:54:44.980 | for meeting our goals.

00:54:46.500 | And another one of those tactics might be like

00:54:48.100 | the numerics that you're talking about.

00:54:50.100 | How do I think about my jumping jacks

00:54:52.540 | in terms of groups of 10 or as a set of 100?

00:54:56.020 | You do it routinely.

00:54:57.140 | So you might be able to set a goal of 100

00:54:59.120 | and have that sustain you through number 60, number 70,

00:55:03.100 | when maybe it's starting to get harder.

00:55:04.900 | But for somebody who's just starting out

00:55:06.420 | and wants to be able to make it to 100,

00:55:08.180 | that's probably not gonna work.

00:55:09.220 | That's gonna be maybe really,

00:55:10.620 | that could be quite challenging for them

00:55:12.040 | if it's the first time that they're trying it.

00:55:13.960 | And so instead, setting those micro goals of groups of 10

00:55:17.740 | is gonna be useful because as we start to get to number eight

00:55:20.640 | or nine or number 88 or 89 and it's really getting hard,

00:55:25.180 | we need that extra little hedonic hit of pleasure,

00:55:28.340 | of accomplishment, the micro dopamine rush

00:55:31.220 | that you might get by hitting another decade milestone,

00:55:36.220 | another group of 10 milestone.

00:55:39.020 | And once we get that little hit of pleasure,

00:55:40.700 | excitement or self-congratulations,

00:55:43.220 | that might be enough to sustain us

00:55:44.620 | through the next challenging physical obstacle,

00:55:47.160 | the next group of 10 that we might experience.

00:55:49.820 | So there isn't any prescription that I would give

00:55:52.500 | and say every person should decide

00:55:54.300 | that 25 jumping jacks is the goal.

00:55:56.920 | No, we have to be idiosyncratic and introspect

00:56:00.140 | about where are we at with this goal,

00:56:01.620 | this thing that I'm trying to accomplish,

00:56:03.500 | and set those goals realistically

00:56:06.540 | but inspirationally as well.

00:56:08.460 | We wanna set a goal that will challenge us

00:56:10.780 | but isn't impossible.

00:56:12.600 | We don't wanna set goals that are too easy

00:56:14.580 | because we're not gonna trick ourselves

00:56:16.340 | into like feeling so great about doing one jumping jack.

00:56:20.340 | Okay, great, like pretty sure most people,

00:56:23.260 | if that's a goal, they can do one.

00:56:25.220 | So are you gonna feel so great when you hit that goal?

00:56:27.480 | No, because it was too easy.

00:56:29.080 | You didn't have any doubt that you could do that one.

00:56:32.200 | But what about 25?

00:56:33.720 | Okay, yeah, I might feel pretty good about that.

00:56:37.320 | Well, what about the next group of 25 and now I'm at 50?

00:56:40.080 | Those are goals that might seem just beyond the brink

00:56:42.120 | of what's possible but I will feel good when I hit that

00:56:44.860 | and that's gonna give me the next sort of boost of energy

00:56:47.260 | that I'm gonna need to go a little bit further,

00:56:48.940 | either that time or the next time.

00:56:51.260 | - Yeah, I think vision is special.

00:56:53.180 | Again, I'm strongly biased here.

00:56:55.860 | The reason I initially learned about your work was,

00:57:00.780 | well, now you have this amazing book,

00:57:02.220 | but at the time there wasn't the book,

00:57:04.060 | there were just the scientific papers

00:57:06.060 | and of course upon which the book rests

00:57:08.780 | and those papers are really important.

00:57:12.580 | But the relationship between vision

00:57:15.220 | and obviously is our sense of space,

00:57:16.980 | but how the sense of space and time are related.

00:57:19.340 | And to make the idea quite simple for those listening,

00:57:23.420 | you know, when you narrow your visual window,

00:57:26.100 | you're measuring the time bin also gets smaller, right?

00:57:29.740 | Which makes sense when you hear it.

00:57:31.180 | Whereas if you take on a huge visual landscape,

00:57:33.900 | you're actually carving up time differently.

00:57:35.480 | It's sort of like moving from a slow frame rate

00:57:38.780 | to a fine frame rate.

00:57:40.140 | You know, slow motion camera is actually taking

00:57:42.860 | a lot more snapshots, right?

00:57:44.460 | So you're measuring distance over time more finely.

00:57:47.060 | And so where a strobe would be the other example,

00:57:49.580 | which is strobe is very low frequency.

00:57:51.820 | So you're going here, here, here,

00:57:53.300 | as opposed to, you know, slow motion, right?

00:57:55.180 | Strobe gives a course view into the time domain

00:58:00.180 | and high speed photography gives a fine view

00:58:02.420 | in the time domain.

00:58:03.500 | So I'm almost certain without any knowledge

00:58:05.720 | of underlying data,

00:58:09.180 | but knowledge of the mechanism then I am almost certain,

00:58:13.060 | if not certain that by placing a narrow visual aperture,

00:58:17.240 | we change the way we perceive time.

00:58:19.680 | Now I have a question and to be honest,

00:58:22.140 | I know the answer in advance,

00:58:23.280 | but I'd love for you to tell us a bit about

00:58:26.640 | how some of this works still further in reverse,

00:58:31.060 | meaning how unfit people view the world

00:58:34.540 | versus how fit people view the world

00:58:36.540 | or how unmotivated people visually see the world

00:58:40.220 | as opposed to highly motivated people.

00:58:43.180 | You talked about these elite runners,

00:58:45.280 | you give them Michael Phelps example,

00:58:46.800 | but maybe you could describe that study.

00:58:49.320 | I think it's a particularly important one,

00:58:51.420 | mostly because yes, it identifies perhaps a physiological

00:58:56.020 | or psychological differences between motivated

00:58:57.980 | and unmotivated or fit and unfit people,

00:59:01.080 | but it also provides a path to remedy that.

00:59:05.840 | - Yeah, so out of my lab,

00:59:08.700 | but also out of several other labs,

00:59:10.500 | there's been work looking at that relation

00:59:12.740 | between states of the body and visual experiences.

00:59:16.200 | They haven't necessarily tried

00:59:17.520 | to integrate the motivation science element to it,

00:59:21.780 | but they were looking to see the visual experiences change

00:59:25.100 | as a function of different states of our body.

00:59:27.140 | So they've looked at people who experienced chronic fatigue,

00:59:30.300 | the elderly, people who are overweight,

00:59:33.260 | those that are wearing heavy backpacks

00:59:36.860 | and so who are sort of put into that experience

00:59:39.040 | of being overweight,

00:59:40.140 | what happens to their perceptions of the environment?

00:59:42.560 | Well, what they find is that distances look further

00:59:45.400 | to those that are overweight, chronically tired,

00:59:47.240 | older rather than younger, weighted down with extra baggage,

00:59:50.600 | distances look farther and hills look steeper.

00:59:54.800 | We've done some of those studies too,

00:59:56.920 | where we try to like give people more energy

00:59:59.400 | or deprive them of energy

01:00:01.960 | and see does that change their perception of space.

01:00:04.980 | And we did that by sort of a classic technique

01:00:09.260 | of a double blind study

01:00:10.920 | where the participant doesn't really know

01:00:12.420 | what they're experiencing.

01:00:13.780 | - I thought you were gonna say a double espresso.

01:00:15.660 | (laughing)

01:00:16.900 | - That is also a good psychological experience

01:00:19.840 | to give people.

01:00:21.020 | Yeah, so a double blind experiment

01:00:24.500 | where the participant doesn't really know

01:00:26.180 | the full extent of what they're doing

01:00:28.320 | or what they're experiencing

01:00:29.360 | and the researcher who's interacting with them

01:00:31.240 | also doesn't.

01:00:32.440 | They do this a lot in medical studies.

01:00:34.300 | You give somebody a drug

01:00:35.840 | and you give somebody a placebo, a sugar pill,

01:00:38.620 | and then importantly, nobody really knows who's got what

01:00:42.080 | until you've analyzed all the data

01:00:43.720 | and the results are revealed

01:00:44.720 | that these are the people that had the drug,

01:00:46.960 | the active agent.

01:00:48.260 | Same idea in the psychological research.

01:00:50.340 | In this case, what we did was give people Kool-Aid to drink.

01:00:53.200 | And for some people that Kool-Aid was sweetened with sugar,

01:00:56.480 | an actual caloric entity.

01:00:58.680 | It could give them energy.

01:01:00.760 | Other people drank Kool-Aid sweetened with Splenda.

01:01:04.120 | So yeah, it's sweet

01:01:05.280 | but it actually doesn't have any caloric value.

01:01:06.940 | You're not giving people energy.

01:01:08.400 | You're just giving them that experience of sweetness.

01:01:12.600 | Now, some people of course are really good

01:01:14.040 | at identifying what's real sugar and what's Splenda

01:01:17.080 | but when you put it in a Kool-Aid,

01:01:18.560 | a pretty noxious powder,

01:01:20.360 | it actually masked it for everybody

01:01:22.040 | and nobody had any idea.

01:01:23.400 | - 'Cause it tastes like garbage to everybody.

01:01:24.800 | - It tastes like garbage.

01:01:25.640 | - Sorry, Kool-Aid.

01:01:26.760 | I mean, I'm sure there are many people that love Kool-Aid.

01:01:29.000 | I guess the sales of Kool-Aid will reveal the data.

01:01:32.080 | - Yeah, I grew up in Nebraska actually

01:01:33.760 | where Kool-Aid is from.

01:01:35.040 | It originated in Nebraska.

01:01:36.380 | So I do feel like I'm betraying my roots slightly

01:01:38.340 | by casting some shade on Kool-Aid

01:01:40.880 | but that's how it worked

01:01:43.680 | is that we asked them to guess what they got.

01:01:45.800 | We tested them afterwards and they were wrong.

01:01:47.860 | So nobody is able to guess with accuracy

01:01:50.960 | what was your drink sweetened with,

01:01:52.720 | which is important because they were blind.

01:01:55.800 | The way that scientists use it,

01:01:57.260 | they didn't know what it was that they were drinking.

01:02:00.060 | We give them about 10 to 15 minutes

01:02:03.520 | for that sugar to metabolize

01:02:05.040 | and we measured their circulating blood glucose levels

01:02:08.320 | to make sure that we had, in fact,

01:02:10.220 | to give in their body circulating glucose energy

01:02:14.700 | that they might use in the next activity.

01:02:17.540 | And the researcher, again, didn't know

01:02:20.140 | whether they had just served sugar or Splenda.

01:02:23.480 | Then we asked people to estimate distance.

01:02:25.660 | So we gave some people more energy

01:02:27.200 | or we kept others at whatever their normal level was.

01:02:30.900 | And what we found is that those people

01:02:32.160 | who didn't even know it but who had been given more energy

01:02:34.840 | by drinking Kool-Aid sweetened with sugar

01:02:37.640 | perceived their space as more constricted.

01:02:40.800 | That visual illusion of proximity was induced.

01:02:43.360 | They felt that their finish line,

01:02:44.840 | again, in the context of an exercise task,

01:02:47.320 | was closer to them.

01:02:48.980 | So in just the same way that these other physiology labs,

01:02:51.820 | vision science physiology labs,

01:02:53.360 | found that people who are chronically tired,

01:02:55.760 | who don't feel like they have as much energy,

01:02:58.440 | or those that are physically weighted down

01:03:00.120 | and for whom moving within an environment is more costly,

01:03:04.580 | we could create that experience for people.

01:03:06.460 | We did an experimental version of that,

01:03:08.500 | that if you have more energy, the world looks easier.

01:03:12.160 | The distances to a finish line don't look as far.

01:03:15.400 | So that was some of the experimental evidence that we had

01:03:19.280 | to show that people's states of their body

01:03:20.720 | do impact their visual experience.

01:03:22.720 | Now, I'm a motivation researcher.

01:03:24.680 | So for me, the big question is,

01:03:26.080 | well, what's the point of that study then,

01:03:28.080 | besides just showing this connection between the body

01:03:30.640 | and the eyes and the visual experience?

01:03:32.960 | We think that that's fundamental to one of the reasons

01:03:35.660 | that people experience difficulty when they're exercising.

01:03:38.400 | When it's really harder for your body

01:03:40.560 | because of its physical state to move within a space,

01:03:44.960 | why don't, you might say like,

01:03:47.040 | well, why don't they just go exercise?

01:03:48.460 | Because the world looks harder to them.

01:03:50.660 | Because that distance that they're supposed to walk

01:03:53.560 | because a doctor tells them to,

01:03:54.980 | or that a partner encourages them to,

01:03:56.940 | or a hill that they should hike up

01:03:58.940 | because someone told them

01:03:59.780 | that would be good for their health,

01:04:01.040 | it looks more challenging to them

01:04:03.620 | than it does to somebody who's in better physical health.

01:04:08.620 | Now, if it looks that way, if it looks harder,

01:04:11.640 | if it feels like it might be harder,

01:04:14.340 | then psychologically, we know that it is.

01:04:16.800 | When you have set yourself up psychologically, mentally,

01:04:19.640 | for that kind of failure experience,

01:04:21.760 | like I don't know that I have the resources

01:04:23.600 | to get this job done, this looks really hard,

01:04:26.720 | you're already motivationally in a place

01:04:29.140 | for this task to be closer to impossible for you.

01:04:32.840 | So to put it all together then,

01:04:33.960 | what we know is that people whose bodies

01:04:35.800 | might make it more challenging for them to exercise

01:04:39.000 | are seeing the world in a more challenging way,

01:04:41.340 | and that is having these downstream motivational

01:04:43.360 | and psychological effects that makes it less likely for them

01:04:46.940 | to try to take on the task in the first place

01:04:48.920 | or to experience it as harder than other people would or do.

01:04:53.320 | - Is the solution the same, however?

01:04:57.680 | Meaning if these people are taught

01:04:59.800 | to adjust their visual goal line

01:05:02.400 | or to set a visual spotlight on an intermediate goal,

01:05:05.600 | can they overcome some of this challenge

01:05:09.400 | that they face simply by virtue of their skewed perception?

01:05:12.640 | - Yes, so in all of the studies that we have done,

01:05:16.060 | looking at that connection

01:05:17.120 | between this narrowed focus of attention

01:05:18.960 | and improvements in exercise,

01:05:21.060 | we do not find that it only works

01:05:23.160 | for the people who are in shape

01:05:24.320 | or that it backfires for people who are out of shape.

01:05:26.640 | It works for everybody.

01:05:28.360 | This is a strategy that everybody can adopt

01:05:30.360 | because it's just simply about like,

01:05:32.000 | what do you allocate attentional resources to?

01:05:34.200 | What do you sort of ignore and what do you focus on?

01:05:37.240 | And that visually induces the same kind of illusion

01:05:40.500 | for everybody, regardless of whether you're overweight

01:05:42.880 | or you're at your target weight,

01:05:44.860 | or if you're struggling to get there

01:05:47.000 | or you've already accomplished where you want to be,

01:05:49.320 | that visual illusion can be induced for everybody

01:05:51.700 | and it has the same kinds of consequences.

01:05:54.340 | - Terrific.

01:05:55.840 | Earlier, I made a joke about double espresso,

01:05:57.920 | but now I'll make a serious statement about double espresso,

01:06:00.420 | which is that it contains caffeine

01:06:02.380 | and caffeine as a stimulant, like all other stimulants,

01:06:05.880 | cause a change in our visual world.

01:06:09.440 | The most salient one is the one

01:06:10.960 | that police officers look for,

01:06:12.380 | parents suspecting that their kids

01:06:14.280 | have ingested substances of any kind look for,

01:06:17.960 | which is if somebody's pupils are unusually large

01:06:20.740 | for a given visual environment,

01:06:23.260 | that is an indication of high levels of autonomic arousal.

01:06:27.480 | In the street drug translation of this,

01:06:29.320 | people who take amphetamine or cocaine

01:06:31.340 | will have very big pupils.

01:06:32.420 | People are very relaxed, have small pupils.

01:06:33.920 | However, everyone should know that pupil size

01:06:35.960 | also is dynamically regulated

01:06:37.360 | by how bright a visual environment.

01:06:38.820 | So there are multiple things controlling pupil size.

01:06:41.160 | However, we know that when we are very stressed

01:06:44.260 | or very aroused in any way, positive or negative,

01:06:47.400 | the pupils get big, but within the visual system,

01:06:50.280 | what that equates to is a narrowing of the visual aperture.

01:06:54.060 | So rather than ingesting sugar,

01:06:57.140 | which I'm guessing most of the world,

01:06:59.160 | certainly the US needs to ingest less sugar,

01:07:00.920 | at least that's what we're hearing.

01:07:02.020 | I'm sure there are a few sugar, you know,

01:07:04.240 | sucronistas out there, sucrosanistas,

01:07:07.080 | who will also come after me with pitchforks,

01:07:08.720 | but let's face it,

01:07:09.560 | most people will probably be better off ingesting

01:07:11.100 | less simple sugar, but caffeine is a great motivator

01:07:15.200 | because of the internal sense of arousal,

01:07:17.040 | but it also narrows our visual window.

01:07:18.920 | I could imagine using healthy amounts of caffeine

01:07:22.320 | combined with maybe even blinders of the sort

01:07:25.560 | that horses wear, maybe like a hoodie and a hat,

01:07:28.800 | maybe even blinders in order to get over

01:07:31.820 | some of those more challenging milestones.

01:07:33.800 | Is there any evidence that people are doing this without,

01:07:37.000 | well, obviously people are doing it

01:07:38.240 | without knowledge of how it works,

01:07:39.520 | but are there any studies looking at how adrenaline

01:07:43.200 | or epinephrine or any other stimulants impact motivation?

01:07:46.680 | - I don't know, honestly, yeah.

01:07:50.240 | - I mean, energy drinks are a big thing now.

01:07:51.920 | - Yeah, yeah, for sure they are.

01:07:54.960 | And you know, if you actually are more physiologically

01:07:58.760 | aroused or jazzed or whatever, you know, amped up,

01:08:02.040 | or you just think you are in our studies,

01:08:05.080 | we have found that they work in the same way,

01:08:06.780 | that it can produce the same kinds of consequences.

01:08:09.040 | So, and I like that because it tells us

01:08:11.160 | like you can actually change the state of your body

01:08:13.200 | to induce these kinds of experiences,

01:08:15.860 | or you can try to, you can just think that,

01:08:18.680 | you can trick yourself, you can placebo effect yourself out

01:08:21.920 | and produce the same kinds of effects.

01:08:23.780 | I had to give up coffee like 12 years ago,

01:08:25.400 | not because, not for any- - I'm so sorry.

01:08:27.520 | - I love the taste, and so decaf is my jam,

01:08:31.040 | but I can't drink the caffeine

01:08:32.240 | because it didn't actually do the thing

01:08:34.000 | that it does for so many other people,

01:08:35.720 | like make me feel more energized and more awake.

01:08:37.400 | I just got sweaty and jittery and anxious

01:08:38.960 | and I couldn't focus.

01:08:39.800 | - Yeah, some people who already have

01:08:41.920 | a fairly high baseline level of attention and motivation,

01:08:45.420 | they find that it puts the autonomic seesaw too far

01:08:47.940 | in the sympathetic tone.

01:08:49.400 | - Yeah. - Yeah.

01:08:50.240 | - And I happen to marry the same kind of person.

01:08:51.680 | He also can't drink caffeine, but loves the taste of coffee.

01:08:54.880 | The interesting thing is that we both have to have coffee

01:08:57.220 | in the morning to feel like we're ready to go for the day.

01:09:00.240 | So it's just part of our routine or whatever

01:09:02.760 | to have that taste and have that sensation

01:09:04.840 | to feel like I'm ready to take on the day,

01:09:06.340 | even though, I mean, yeah,

01:09:07.360 | decaf still has some caffeine in it,

01:09:09.960 | but we're not drinking that much of it

01:09:11.080 | to probably actually create a caffeinated experience

01:09:14.620 | in our body, but we're tricking ourselves psychologically

01:09:17.700 | into doing that thing that in years past

01:09:20.200 | used to work for us both.

01:09:22.240 | So I think that's something to keep in mind.

01:09:23.840 | Like, you might have a hoodie that you can wear

01:09:26.260 | to induce that visual illusion,

01:09:28.520 | or you can take advantage of the power of your mind.

01:09:30.380 | At the end of the day, I'm a psychologist

01:09:31.960 | and I believe that we have some non-zero power

01:09:35.440 | over what our mind is doing,

01:09:36.760 | what we're thinking about,

01:09:37.820 | what we allocate our attention to

01:09:41.320 | that can do the same kind of thing that a hoodie might do

01:09:43.760 | or that a cup of caffeine might do.

01:09:46.120 | - I completely agree.

01:09:47.320 | The visual aperture is under our conscious control.

01:09:49.800 | That's an amazing feature of our visual system.

01:09:51.700 | We can narrow or expand it.

01:09:53.040 | It takes a little bit of practice, I think,

01:09:54.360 | for people to learn how to do this

01:09:55.780 | without moving their head around

01:09:57.140 | to expand their visual aperture and how to narrow it.

01:10:00.080 | But what I always tell people is

01:10:01.840 | just imagine a really troubling text message

01:10:03.800 | or a really exciting text message coming in.

01:10:05.540 | All of a sudden, you forget about the world around you.

01:10:07.600 | So it can be triggered by these outside events

01:10:10.280 | and we can learn how to anchor our visual attention.

01:10:13.440 | I'd love to ask about other kinds of goals,

01:10:16.900 | meaning non-physical goals,

01:10:18.380 | because many people are trying to read more, I would hope,

01:10:23.380 | or learn music or a language

01:10:25.560 | or things that really involve cognitive goal lines

01:10:28.940 | or internal goal lines.

01:10:32.040 | You know, reading one chapter out of a book each night

01:10:35.020 | is a tangible goal.

01:10:37.060 | The other that I've often wondered about

01:10:39.220 | are these systems that allow you to highlight

01:10:42.000 | individual lines or even words on a page.

01:10:44.660 | That's very visual, obviously,

01:10:46.280 | and everything else is ruled out except that word.

01:10:48.260 | I've always wished for books

01:10:49.660 | that would naturally highlight each page.

01:10:51.700 | And as I say this, someone will put in the comments,

01:10:53.320 | this has probably existed for 10 years

01:10:54.740 | and I'm just showing how what a luddite I am.

01:10:57.100 | But is there any example or tactic that people could use

01:11:03.840 | to better approach cognitive goals of school, work,

01:11:07.880 | recreational too, but that don't exist

01:11:11.320 | in the kind of fitness and sports domain?

01:11:14.200 | - Totally.

01:11:15.040 | Yeah, so just to shout out to my brother-in-law

01:11:17.120 | who has done some of that research

01:11:19.340 | where it does highlight different parts of words

01:11:21.500 | in paragraphs and he's found it to be an effective way

01:11:23.600 | for English as a second language learners to pick it up,

01:11:26.840 | that that is, that tying that vision

01:11:28.500 | to the process of learning language is effective.

01:11:30.460 | And so there's a whole cool body of work

01:11:34.200 | and researchers looking at that.

01:11:35.680 | So you're right about that.

01:11:36.960 | - If you want to mention what he does,

01:11:39.060 | is there a place that people can learn more about that?

01:11:41.340 | We can provide links.

01:11:43.000 | - Yeah, let me.

01:11:43.840 | - Okay, we will provide links to those resources

01:11:46.320 | 'cause I want those resources.

01:11:47.400 | I've been trying to learn a second language for a long time.

01:11:50.140 | I speak Spanish pretty weekly,

01:11:51.800 | but I would love to get better at it.

01:11:53.480 | Okay, I'll approach you later.

01:11:54.740 | - My five-year-old son speaks Spanish

01:11:56.180 | better than I do at this point.

01:11:57.400 | - And clearly better than I do too, thank you.

01:11:59.860 | (laughing)

01:12:01.660 | Yeah, so I was thinking that too.

01:12:04.100 | We started this work within the context of exercise,

01:12:06.340 | but of course that's not people's only goal

01:12:08.060 | that they have in life.

01:12:09.460 | And it isn't mine either.

01:12:12.820 | I have interests outside of improving my exercise game.

01:12:16.560 | A couple years ago when I was writing the book,

01:12:20.460 | I also had a child.

01:12:22.420 | The same month that I had the opportunity

01:12:24.700 | to pull all this research together

01:12:26.880 | is the same month that my son came to be.

01:12:30.340 | And I started to realize I became a lot less interesting

01:12:34.420 | once he was around.

01:12:35.860 | He was fascinating, but I was changing diapers

01:12:38.820 | and feeding him and that was it.

01:12:40.240 | People would come over, like, "What's up?

01:12:41.880 | "Where have you been?

01:12:42.700 | "Tell me something that's going on in your life."

01:12:44.220 | And all I had to talk about was this, what was boring.

01:12:47.220 | And I just felt like I've lost myself.

01:12:48.860 | I used to pride myself on the crazy adventures

01:12:51.180 | and problems I would get myself in,

01:12:52.640 | and I was a great storyteller.

01:12:54.340 | And that all of a sudden disappeared

01:12:55.760 | as soon as he came into the world

01:12:56.980 | because he became my world.

01:12:59.320 | So then I started thinking,

01:13:00.160 | "I need to pull back some coolness

01:13:02.560 | "if I ever had it in the first place,

01:13:03.920 | "but I need to be a cooler person

01:13:05.340 | "than I'm coming across right now."

01:13:07.180 | So I decided I wanna learn to play drums.

01:13:09.780 | And I wanna be a one-hit wonder as a rockstar drummer.

01:13:14.580 | I only want one song

01:13:15.520 | 'cause I know I'm not gonna be able to do more than that.

01:13:17.180 | I'm not coordinated at all.

01:13:19.660 | From the beginning of time, in fifth grade,

01:13:22.740 | I have this really vivid flashbulb memory

01:13:25.060 | of playing basketball for the very first time.

01:13:27.020 | I lost my footing.

01:13:27.860 | I knocked into my own teammate,

01:13:29.220 | pushed her out of bounds where she had the ball.

01:13:30.800 | We lost the game,

01:13:31.640 | and I was not invited back on the team for the next season.

01:13:34.960 | And so that, you know,

01:13:36.020 | fermented my self-definition of uncoordinated.

01:13:39.860 | I am a musician, but I am not a drummer.

01:13:42.380 | And the idea of coordinating four limbs in real time

01:13:45.900 | was like, "If I could do that, I would be so proud."

01:13:49.340 | So that's a goal that I set for myself

01:13:51.140 | at the same time that my son came into this world

01:13:53.640 | when I was also trying to think about goal setting

01:13:56.780 | and how to improve my ability and all of our ability

01:14:00.020 | to get a job done when you're faced

01:14:01.900 | with some pretty big obstacles.

01:14:04.540 | So I got to practice all these techniques

01:14:06.300 | that we're talking about on myself and see for myself.

01:14:08.740 | When I tell people, "Hey, try this thing,"

01:14:10.380 | like narrow focus of attention,

01:14:11.420 | "Does it help with something like becoming a better drummer?"

01:14:15.260 | And the answer is, "Yeah."

01:14:16.340 | These tactics at least work for me sometimes

01:14:18.580 | under some circumstances,

01:14:19.620 | and they do for other people who try them for other goals

01:14:21.520 | that aren't necessarily about exercise.

01:14:23.780 | One that I found particularly helpful

01:14:28.020 | was overcoming my bad memory.

01:14:31.420 | That everybody's memories are faulty, right?

01:14:34.420 | Everybody has sort of a warped perception of the past.

01:14:37.780 | It might be skewed more positively than maybe we deserve,

01:14:40.440 | or it might be skewed more negatively

01:14:42.300 | if you feel that what looms large in your mind

01:14:45.520 | as you reflect on something from the past,

01:14:47.500 | or the mistakes that you've made,

01:14:49.020 | or the things that the social faux pas that you had,

01:14:52.360 | or challenges that you faced at work

01:14:55.000 | when you got in trouble with a boss or with a colleague,

01:14:57.400 | if that's what really stands out in your mind,

01:15:00.440 | or the good side of all of those possibilities,

01:15:03.000 | we probably aren't getting the world right.

01:15:05.000 | And that is something that our brain has evolved,

01:15:08.120 | to give us a faulty memory, to level and sharpen,

01:15:11.400 | to not encode and remember and be able to recall

01:15:13.640 | everything that we've experienced

01:15:15.080 | with accuracy and precision.

01:15:17.560 | And that's a problem when it comes

01:15:19.580 | to assessing our own goal progress,

01:15:22.160 | when we wanna be our own accountant

01:15:24.380 | and try to determine how are we doing?

01:15:26.780 | If I wanna become a drummer,

01:15:28.600 | am I on track for getting there before X,

01:15:31.980 | before my time runs out?

01:15:34.320 | Am I gonna make it or not?

01:15:36.060 | And I think that's an experience,

01:15:37.280 | whether they wanna be a drummer or not,

01:15:38.320 | that a lot of people can resonate with,

01:15:39.780 | like trying to determine is this trajectory,

01:15:42.680 | is this rate of progress gonna get the job done

01:15:45.080 | by X amount of time?

01:15:46.280 | Will I have my swimsuit body by summer

01:15:48.240 | or will I save enough for retirement by the time I hit 65?

01:15:52.780 | For these goals where time is involved

01:15:54.720 | and there is a deadline,

01:15:56.400 | we do take moments to assess our trajectory.

01:16:01.120 | And if we just rely on our memory,

01:16:03.500 | we're probably gonna do a bad job

01:16:05.520 | of assessing that trajectory,

01:16:08.780 | of knowing whether we're on pace to meeting our deadline.

01:16:12.440 | And I found that to be the case as I was thinking about,

01:16:14.360 | am I actually gonna be able to learn this song?

01:16:16.360 | I mean, I know that it's going a lot slower

01:16:18.040 | than it probably would for anybody else,

01:16:20.200 | but to give myself a deadline and a commitment,

01:16:22.560 | I decided I was gonna put on a show.

01:16:24.040 | I was gonna invite everybody I knew

01:16:25.880 | and also people I didn't know,

01:16:27.440 | and I was gonna play my one song for them.

01:16:30.220 | - This is while writing a book

01:16:32.360 | and having just had a child.

01:16:33.680 | - Yeah, so when you read the book,

01:16:35.340 | you'll see my story and it's the real truth of it.

01:16:39.360 | I mean, I did play that show and it was fine.

01:16:43.960 | And then I've, because I wrote about it in the book,

01:16:46.160 | then some other opportunities to play it publicly

01:16:49.300 | have come up and it's like, all right,

01:16:51.300 | I told people I can play drums.

01:16:52.440 | I better show them that I actually still can play this song.

01:16:56.260 | Yeah, so that's been fun.

01:16:57.800 | I have become a one hit wonder

01:16:59.240 | if you ask me to play the song again.

01:17:00.600 | Like Encore, it's just gonna get that same song

01:17:03.320 | a second time, so literally one hit wonder.

01:17:06.240 | So in the process of figuring out,

01:17:08.080 | am I gonna be able to play this show,

01:17:09.600 | I sent out invitations.

01:17:10.840 | The date is committed.

01:17:12.040 | People are coming to listen to my one song.

01:17:14.960 | God bless them.

01:17:16.060 | How's it gonna go?

01:17:18.760 | And it felt awful.

01:17:20.360 | It just felt like I am not making progress here

01:17:22.760 | because there's a lot more things

01:17:24.360 | that actually are pressing, right?

01:17:25.760 | Like the kid does need to get fed.

01:17:28.080 | I do have to go to my day job.

01:17:29.920 | The editor is asking for the next draft of this book

01:17:33.080 | and that is gonna take precedence

01:17:34.640 | like it does for so many people,

01:17:36.160 | that things command your bandwidth

01:17:38.880 | even when you have this goal that you've committed to

01:17:41.000 | and that you've got on the books.

01:17:43.440 | And so I just felt this looming anxiety

01:17:45.400 | about this goal that would require,

01:17:48.360 | didn't have to be daily practice,

01:17:49.640 | but you can't cram that kind of a goal.

01:17:53.440 | It does take committed investment

01:17:56.280 | for a sustained period of time.

01:17:58.840 | And so I had this looming anxiety

01:18:00.280 | that I'm not making good enough progress.

01:18:02.680 | But that's because I was relying on my memory

01:18:04.440 | and my brain to recall like,

01:18:06.320 | how many times did you practice?

01:18:07.460 | What was it like the last time you practiced?

01:18:08.920 | What was it like when you tried to play this bit,

01:18:11.480 | or this riff like two weeks ago?

01:18:13.280 | Have you gotten any better since then?

01:18:15.240 | And it just felt like, no, I haven't practiced enough.

01:18:18.080 | I don't remember when the last time I played was,

01:18:19.680 | but it definitely doesn't feel like I'm getting any better.

01:18:22.200 | Then I thought, you know what?

01:18:23.640 | I should stop relying on my brain

01:18:25.200 | to tell me where am I at and am I on an upward slope here?

01:18:30.200 | I need to look at the data.

01:18:31.440 | I love data, scientists love data.

01:18:33.320 | So I started to collect data on myself.

01:18:35.680 | What I did was download this app

01:18:37.900 | that a friend had told me about called the Reporter app.

01:18:40.400 | There's lots of these kinds of things out there.

01:18:42.480 | Basically, it just like sets up your phone

01:18:44.400 | to randomly ping you with whatever questions

01:18:46.900 | you want your phone to ask.

01:18:48.320 | It records your answers.

01:18:49.400 | You can download the data.

01:18:50.380 | You can make pretty graphs to see what's my change

01:18:54.560 | and how I've answered these questions over time.

01:18:57.860 | So I did that for a month.

01:18:59.160 | For a month, I had my phone ask me a couple times a day,

01:19:03.480 | oh, maybe twice a day, really.

01:19:04.600 | Did you practice since last time I asked you?

01:19:07.120 | My phone says, did you practice?

01:19:09.180 | If mostly it was no.

01:19:10.760 | And if yes, then it would funnel a couple other questions.

01:19:13.600 | Like, how did you do?

01:19:14.660 | How do you feel?

01:19:15.880 | Check a couple of different emotion words now

01:19:17.800 | about your experience when you played.

01:19:20.700 | So when I, and I did that for a month.

01:19:22.660 | After a month, went into my office, downloaded the data,

01:19:25.480 | and first took stock before I looked at the numbers.

01:19:28.240 | Like, how do I think I did over the last month?

01:19:30.820 | And I thought, same as every other month,

01:19:33.320 | I didn't really get anywhere.

01:19:34.880 | Yeah, I practiced, but I still feel awful.

01:19:37.300 | And I cried.

01:19:38.240 | I cried having to practice.

01:19:39.560 | I like was upset with myself for setting this goal

01:19:41.940 | and feeling like so anxious about it.

01:19:43.600 | All I remember is that I cried.

01:19:44.960 | Cried too much about this personal conquest

01:19:47.780 | that wouldn't matter to anybody else.

01:19:49.200 | Honestly, it really doesn't matter

01:19:50.240 | in the scope of things anyway.

01:19:51.580 | I'm not gonna become a drummer professionally.

01:19:54.140 | So who cares if I embarrass myself publicly?

01:19:57.720 | But what I found from the data

01:19:59.480 | was my memory was totally wrong.

01:20:01.040 | I actually had practiced far more times than I remembered.

01:20:04.700 | And when I looked at like my emotion words that I used,

01:20:07.880 | it was a clear upward trajectory.

01:20:09.920 | Yeah, I did cry.

01:20:11.240 | That part I hadn't misremembered or made up.

01:20:13.840 | But by the end of that month,

01:20:14.940 | like I had gotten a compliment from my husband

01:20:16.800 | who actually is a drummer and said like,

01:20:18.600 | "Hey, that wasn't that bad."

01:20:20.280 | And then there was like one expletive,

01:20:21.480 | "You were effing amazing

01:20:23.280 | at that one thing you've been practicing at."

01:20:25.620 | But like, okay, fine, he's my husband, right?

01:20:27.520 | Is he just, you know?

01:20:28.360 | So at the moment, it didn't really feel that great.

01:20:30.720 | And I downplayed it.

01:20:31.560 | And as a result, it didn't stick in my brain, right?

01:20:33.820 | I remember how stupid it felt that I cried

01:20:35.920 | because I can't do this, I can't make progress.

01:20:38.680 | And I downplayed in my mind

01:20:40.040 | the thing that actually should have been

01:20:41.060 | a legitimate indicator that progress was being made.

01:20:44.400 | So all of which is to say,

01:20:46.640 | I needed to see, to collect that data on myself

01:20:49.820 | and to look at it objectively, accurately, and completely

01:20:53.480 | because my brain wasn't doing that for me.

01:20:56.580 | That visual experience of downloading that data

01:21:00.880 | and looking at like, what was my actual experience,

01:21:05.620 | gave me a better insight.

01:21:06.780 | As I was trying to assess the trajectory of my progress,

01:21:10.620 | I became a more accurate accountant of my own progress,

01:21:14.320 | which is important for, you know,

01:21:16.040 | setting goals or resetting them

01:21:17.620 | when you need to calibrate in light of what's left to do

01:21:20.500 | and how much time do you have to do it in.

01:21:22.880 | - I love it.

01:21:23.720 | So basically, if I understand correctly,

01:21:26.260 | when the intermediate goals of say daily practice

01:21:30.560 | or twice a day practice, or reading, or math, et cetera,

01:21:34.180 | are not a visual goal line,

01:21:36.680 | it really does help to visualize some aspect

01:21:39.680 | related to that non-visual goal line.

01:21:41.580 | In this case, the reporter app was a useful tool.

01:21:44.600 | I've never heard of it, I plan to use it.

01:21:46.680 | I'm sure a number of people will be interested in it.

01:21:48.440 | It sounds like there are others out there,

01:21:49.640 | but that's the one that you found most useful.

01:21:51.520 | - Yeah, yeah, there's another one too

01:21:54.160 | that is even more visual than that, than the reporter app,

01:21:57.280 | although that has visual components

01:21:58.580 | and is really effective if you like data

01:22:00.440 | and wanna collect numbers on yourself or your experience.

01:22:03.800 | There's another one called the One Second Every Day app.

01:22:06.780 | This is really awesome because the app is a mechanism

01:22:10.120 | to record one second of your life.

01:22:14.560 | The goal, there's such an awesome community of people

01:22:17.160 | that just live by this and love having these experiences.

01:22:20.460 | And the creator of it, I got a chance to talk with,

01:22:25.040 | and he has done this, he's taken a one second video

01:22:27.600 | of some aspect of his life every day for 12 years,

01:22:32.320 | 13 years or something. - One second?

01:22:33.840 | - Yeah, one second.

01:22:35.240 | And then what the app does is like smash them together

01:22:38.720 | and give you like a chronology of what your year

01:22:41.600 | or your month or your last decade of life has been like

01:22:45.060 | and presents it as like a streamlined video for you.

01:22:47.280 | So you just see these flashes of your life

01:22:50.000 | over however long you tell the app

01:22:51.680 | to create a montage for you.

01:22:54.700 | And so when you see these videos that people have made,

01:22:56.400 | especially those that have been doing it

01:22:57.380 | for a really long time, it's fascinating.

01:22:59.240 | I did that for myself too.

01:23:00.600 | I tried it, one second of today's drumming performance,

01:23:03.520 | another second, it's not enough to capture it.

01:23:05.840 | Am I actually doing a good job of drumming

01:23:07.360 | or what's my trajectory for drumming?

01:23:09.300 | But the guy who made it says one of the most like awesome

01:23:13.200 | one second videos that he ever made is of a brick wall.

01:23:16.480 | I was like, well, you don't need a video of that.

01:23:18.120 | Like what's the wall doing?

01:23:19.080 | It's not crumbling.

01:23:20.200 | It's not like in earthquake land or something like that.

01:23:22.280 | It's just like slightly jittery one second of a brick wall.

01:23:26.380 | And I was like, how is that motivating or exciting to you?

01:23:29.280 | Why is that?

01:23:30.120 | You've been doing this for 13 years every day, one second.

01:23:32.760 | Why is that the one second that matters to you most?

01:23:35.340 | And he says, because when it comes up in my montage,

01:23:38.400 | it reminds me of like a really horrific moment in my family.

01:23:42.000 | That was the first wall that I saw

01:23:43.760 | when I walked out of the room,

01:23:44.660 | having heard that my sister-in-law

01:23:46.560 | had this awful, awful experience.

01:23:50.440 | Her intestines started to twist up on themselves

01:23:52.560 | and not up and she was on the brink of death.

01:23:56.380 | And we had just found this out.

01:23:57.900 | She had just gotten into the hospital.

01:23:59.220 | They diagnosed this issue that required like immediate

01:24:01.620 | surgery and our family was there to hear about this.

01:24:04.080 | And we were all stunned that she might die.

01:24:07.140 | Like right now, she might die.

01:24:09.060 | And that's the first thing that I saw.

01:24:10.320 | And it reminds me of how precious life is,

01:24:13.260 | how important family is and how the rest of whatever

01:24:15.740 | we were doing that day didn't matter

01:24:17.580 | because we all needed to be here together right now.

01:24:19.840 | And that is like all of this emotion

01:24:22.220 | and like purpose in life is conjured up

01:24:25.140 | or reminded when he looks at one second of a brick wall

01:24:29.000 | as it pops into his video feed.

01:24:30.740 | So if you're visually oriented and you do want ways

01:24:33.360 | to like remember what was life like,

01:24:35.300 | what has my year in review, what does it look like?

01:24:38.500 | That's an awesome app, One Second Every Day

01:24:40.840 | that can help you do that.

01:24:42.940 | - These are great recommendations

01:24:44.360 | and a couple of reflections.

01:24:46.320 | First of all, the brick wall example is a beautiful way

01:24:51.240 | of highlighting this other feature of the visual system,

01:24:53.920 | which is that the brain largely thinks in symbols.

01:24:56.740 | It's very efficient.

01:24:57.900 | It batches entire experiences into symbols.

01:25:00.880 | In this case, the brick wall can be attached

01:25:02.460 | to a whole set of experiences that are very meaningful

01:25:04.900 | to this individual that brick walls don't mean that

01:25:08.000 | or didn't mean that to me until hearing this.

01:25:10.420 | So I think that it highlights the fact

01:25:12.620 | that the actual symbol is less relevant

01:25:15.060 | than what we attach to that symbol,

01:25:17.060 | but that symbols are so efficient

01:25:19.320 | that even in a one-second view of something,

01:25:21.580 | we can attach to it for better or for worse.

01:25:24.640 | The other is that I'm an absolute almost rabid proponent

01:25:29.100 | of people getting morning sunlight in their eyes

01:25:31.540 | as the fundamental layer of setting their circadian rhythms

01:25:34.500 | and sleep and health as a zero-cost practice

01:25:36.660 | that believe it or not,

01:25:37.500 | can be done anytime of year or anywhere.

01:25:40.020 | But it does take a little bit of effort.

01:25:41.820 | You know, you have to get outside.

01:25:42.780 | You can't do it through a window or windshield

01:25:44.620 | for it to be efficient,

01:25:45.440 | but it has huge outsized effects on human health.

01:25:47.860 | This has now been demonstrated again and again and again.

01:25:50.820 | And so I'm going to just do a sort of call to action

01:25:54.180 | if people aren't already doing this.

01:25:55.220 | I'm going to start using the one-second app

01:25:57.060 | to record my morning sunlight viewing

01:25:59.580 | and prove that even through cloud cover,

01:26:01.240 | you're getting more photons than you are indoors

01:26:03.860 | and that it's worthwhile.

01:26:04.940 | I also would love to do this for my next dog

01:26:07.180 | to go from puppy to full-sized dog

01:26:09.940 | and maybe even to the end, who knows?

01:26:12.020 | Great, these are wonderful tools.

01:26:15.380 | You've given us a huge number of practical tools,

01:26:18.340 | which frankly isn't always the case on these podcasts.

01:26:21.600 | We always strive to do science and science-based tools

01:26:23.740 | is our kind of mantra,

01:26:24.740 | but you've given a rich set of tools here to apply.

01:26:27.960 | I just want to briefly backtrack to something

01:26:31.460 | and then a final question.

01:26:33.580 | Earlier, we were talking about how unfit people

01:26:36.100 | see the world as more challenging,

01:26:37.480 | maybe even hills as steeper, distances as further,

01:26:40.020 | and how shifting people into a state of energy

01:26:42.740 | either cognitively or through the ingestion

01:26:45.000 | of real glucose to get an energetic lift

01:26:47.620 | or maybe through caffeine, if that's within their practice

01:26:49.820 | and span of healthy behaviors, they could do that.

01:26:53.120 | There are so many people who are suffering from depression,

01:26:57.960 | which one of the key features of depression

01:27:01.540 | is a lack of energy,

01:27:02.500 | even though there can be anxiety associated with depression.

01:27:05.500 | I have to wonder whether or not some of these tools

01:27:09.640 | are being deployed or will be deployed

01:27:11.820 | in the context of mental health,

01:27:13.280 | because depression is this vicious loop, right?

01:27:16.260 | People feel a lack of energy and hopelessness

01:27:19.740 | and then things just look harder.

01:27:21.460 | And so then it just verifies their negative worldview

01:27:24.700 | and it's a downward spiral.

01:27:26.140 | That's why medication in some cases

01:27:28.540 | and social support, et cetera, can be helpful

01:27:30.220 | because they feel more energized.

01:27:31.860 | The side effects are a problem, however.

01:27:34.740 | Have there been any efforts to implement

01:27:37.380 | some of these visual tools

01:27:39.620 | to create this increase in systolic blood pressure

01:27:42.700 | and a kind of readiness and willingness

01:27:44.140 | to lean into what people perceive as immense challenge?

01:27:46.920 | And if not, for anyone listening,

01:27:48.580 | I know we have a lot of listeners

01:27:49.780 | in the mental health space

01:27:50.860 | and in the helping space, so to speak.

01:27:53.760 | I can imagine these are zero cost, right?

01:27:57.140 | They, we all provide, people are cited,

01:28:00.100 | have the apparati to do it.

01:28:02.880 | Are you aware of any studies like this

01:28:04.280 | or is your laboratory involved in any studies?

01:28:06.060 | 'Cause I just see an immense value

01:28:08.360 | of implementing the sorts of tools that you've developed.

01:28:11.460 | - Yeah, we haven't explored that, those ideas directly.

01:28:14.860 | So call to all the scientists that are out there,

01:28:16.780 | this is, there's a great opportunity

01:28:18.340 | to start looking at these tools

01:28:20.020 | within the mental health space, you're right.

01:28:22.340 | Other researchers though have not this use of narrowed,

01:28:27.340 | like inducing a narrow attentional focus

01:28:29.560 | and can they now feel more energized to go for a run?

01:28:32.700 | But they have looked at the relationship

01:28:34.180 | between anxiety, depression, and visual experience

01:28:37.400 | and found over decades evidence

01:28:40.780 | that people with depression or with anxiety,

01:28:42.940 | what their attention is captured by

01:28:45.480 | within the bigger global surrounding world

01:28:48.260 | are those things that are negative

01:28:49.780 | or reinforcing of their worldview.

01:28:51.600 | Now that happens for everybody,

01:28:52.660 | the things that are on our mind tend to like pop out

01:28:55.660 | that if whatever we're thinking about,

01:28:56.980 | we might start seeing some version of it

01:28:59.400 | showing up in the world around us

01:29:00.780 | that captures our attention.

01:29:02.700 | That's an idea called priming.

01:29:04.440 | What we're thinking about might then lead us

01:29:06.680 | to attend to the world, to see things in a way

01:29:10.300 | that aligns with what we're already thinking about.

01:29:12.180 | It's just that when what we're thinking about

01:29:13.780 | are those depressive, ruminative, anxiety, fearful thoughts.

01:29:18.780 | When that is what is cognitively accessible,

01:29:20.740 | when that's what's going through our mind,

01:29:22.280 | then that's also what captures our visual gaze.

01:29:24.920 | So when we think like the world is hard,

01:29:27.180 | the world is full of sadness,

01:29:29.380 | and that's the thought in our mind,

01:29:30.720 | and then we start seeing the people

01:29:32.460 | with frowns on their faces or who are experiencing anxiety

01:29:35.100 | and that's what captures our attention

01:29:37.540 | even when there's other people around

01:29:39.140 | that might not be seeing the world

01:29:40.560 | or experiencing the world that way, it becomes reinforcing.

01:29:44.140 | When I think that the world is threatening

01:29:46.140 | and then I notice the threats that are around me

01:29:48.340 | that confirms what I'm thinking,

01:29:49.420 | which heightens my anxiety or my fear,

01:29:52.020 | and then it further leads me to narrowly focus

01:29:54.920 | on those elements of the environment

01:29:56.340 | that are aligned with that worldview,

01:29:58.300 | it's really hard to get out of that.

01:29:59.940 | Like that's where the vicious cycle can come from.

01:30:02.660 | So that has been really well established

01:30:05.340 | within the medical community, this selective attention

01:30:09.360 | relating to states of mental unwellness,

01:30:14.260 | that's been pretty well established.

01:30:16.140 | And so there's been some interventions done

01:30:19.740 | with people that have depression or anxiety trying,

01:30:22.340 | saying like, here's an array,

01:30:24.580 | a photograph of a bunch of different faces.

01:30:26.500 | Yes, it's artificial.

01:30:27.340 | It kind of looks like a page from a yearbook,

01:30:28.940 | a high school yearbook,

01:30:30.420 | but look for the faces that are smiling.

01:30:32.300 | Look at the faces that are smiling.

01:30:34.260 | Try right now, spend 10 minutes having your eyes

01:30:38.200 | focus on those and look at those people,

01:30:41.040 | that it is an effective intervention

01:30:44.380 | at improving people's sense of self-efficacy

01:30:47.500 | of what can I accomplish next?

01:30:48.820 | They feel a little bit more energized.

01:30:50.140 | It doesn't cure depression.

01:30:51.300 | It doesn't cure anxiety.

01:30:52.820 | And these are literal, physical afflictions that we have.

01:30:57.420 | So that's not a quick fix,

01:30:59.320 | but it can produce a temporary change

01:31:01.460 | that might be a way to start getting out of that rut.

01:31:05.580 | - Yeah, and I think nowadays there's an increasing attention

01:31:08.520 | on tools that will help people orient

01:31:11.200 | as they start to veer towards suicidal depression

01:31:14.400 | or veer back into a depressive episode or anxiety episode.

01:31:17.440 | I mean, trying to reverse an entire syndrome

01:31:21.040 | or set of syndromes is far more complicated.

01:31:23.220 | Likewise in the health space,

01:31:24.380 | just trying to get people to deploy real-time tools

01:31:26.560 | to adjust their anxiety or to exercise more often and so on.

01:31:31.600 | As a kind of a final, but also kind of high-level question,

01:31:34.940 | I'm imagining that,

01:31:36.900 | and I plan to use this visual goal setting of spotlighting.

01:31:40.780 | I've been using it actually for some time on runs.

01:31:42.840 | It works really well.

01:31:43.680 | Yesterday I took a run near the waterfront here

01:31:45.540 | and the entire, I think I did it somewhat incorrectly,

01:31:48.720 | the entire run I was thinking about getting back

01:31:50.180 | to the statue, which I started,

01:31:52.580 | but I did find that I ran fastest in the final 20 meters,

01:31:56.100 | which admittedly wasn't fast at all,

01:31:58.500 | but it was faster than what preceded it.

01:32:00.740 | So it works and it makes perfect sense as to how it works.

01:32:05.300 | You've done other studies exploring

01:32:08.440 | some of the other features of vision,

01:32:10.220 | like the luminosity, how bright something is

01:32:12.540 | and how people perceive it.

01:32:13.500 | That was in a completely different context,

01:32:15.520 | but is there a kind of a higher level,

01:32:18.340 | a kind of a black belt version

01:32:19.660 | of what we're talking about here,

01:32:20.840 | where not only am I focusing on a specific visual location

01:32:24.020 | as an intermediate or a long-term goal,

01:32:27.140 | or I'm using an app to ask me a question

01:32:29.740 | and tap into how I'm feeling,

01:32:30.980 | create a visual representation of my motivational state,

01:32:33.640 | but then I'm also making my phone as bright as possible.

01:32:37.220 | I'm also trying to take that visual window

01:32:39.320 | and actually pay attention to more of the details

01:32:42.140 | at that location.

01:32:43.540 | Or is it simply a matter of kind of in geek speak,

01:32:47.460 | visual neuroscience, we would just call this

01:32:49.180 | like low spatial frequency,

01:32:50.420 | just sort of grabbing a black and white snapshot

01:32:52.300 | of something here or there in my mind.

01:32:54.860 | If I attach more detail and effort

01:32:57.340 | to the specific thing that I'm focused on,

01:32:59.580 | is there any evidence that that's more effective?

01:33:02.380 | - It certainly changes what our brains are doing.

01:33:05.820 | So how do we define effectiveness?

01:33:07.680 | That's a question for philosophers

01:33:09.340 | and that scientists will always-

01:33:10.180 | - Will it keep me running?

01:33:11.100 | - Yeah. (laughs)

01:33:12.620 | It will when you use it towards the end of your run,

01:33:14.520 | just like you've picked up on.

01:33:16.020 | Yeah, so there's cool studies that neuroscientists,

01:33:21.220 | not I, not coming from my lab,

01:33:23.160 | that neuroscientists have done looking at

01:33:24.620 | what is it doing to your brain

01:33:26.180 | when you've decided that you're gonna focus your attention

01:33:28.880 | on this element of the world

01:33:31.540 | and not pay attention to something else?

01:33:34.180 | Is that just sort of like tricking your thoughts

01:33:36.420 | or is it doing something different

01:33:37.740 | to something more basic, more low level?

01:33:39.660 | And the answer is yes.

01:33:41.460 | So there's an area of the brain, the fusiform face area,

01:33:44.940 | it's part of our brain that's really specialized

01:33:46.900 | for making sense of faces.

01:33:49.180 | It's important as a social species

01:33:50.700 | to pay attention to other people,

01:33:52.980 | pay attention to their faces

01:33:53.980 | while they're trying to communicate through their face.

01:33:55.580 | And so our brain has developed

01:33:57.140 | a really specialized central area for doing that.

01:34:01.060 | So these neuroscientists will present a face to somebody,

01:34:06.860 | but superimposed over that is a house or something else

01:34:11.720 | that is less special to us as a social human species.

01:34:16.600 | And so both of those things,

01:34:18.620 | because it's sort of like both images

01:34:20.180 | are sort of transparent, overlaid over one another,

01:34:23.660 | our eyes are getting both of those images in

01:34:28.660 | and our brain is getting both of those images in,

01:34:31.500 | but we can will ourselves to focus on the house.

01:34:35.940 | Just really pay attention to the features of the house,

01:34:37.820 | even though everything about that face is still there too.

01:34:40.220 | Or pay attention to the face and just tell me like,

01:34:42.940 | what is it that you are deciding that you wanna hold on to,

01:34:46.180 | that you wanna look at right now?

01:34:47.820 | And you can see that the brain is responding to that.

01:34:49.820 | So when people are saying like,

01:34:51.100 | I'm really seeing that face,

01:34:52.700 | the details of the face, I'm paying attention to the face,

01:34:55.380 | even though we know their eyes are also looking at

01:34:58.180 | and engaged with the contents of the house,

01:35:00.620 | that's right there, smacked on top,

01:35:03.000 | the fusiform face area lights up.

01:35:05.340 | And when they're saying like,

01:35:06.460 | no, I'm really focused on the house now,

01:35:07.900 | we see activation in the fusiform face area decline

01:35:10.780 | and other areas of the brain's neurological real estate

01:35:15.740 | start to engage.

01:35:17.160 | So yeah, I think there's something to it

01:35:20.980 | that we can, at a high level,

01:35:23.460 | our brains are responding to our psychology as well.

01:35:28.060 | And we have that great power to really,

01:35:30.260 | with intention, with practice,

01:35:34.040 | decide how do I wanna engage with the world?

01:35:36.620 | And can it produce real change in our bodies

01:35:40.440 | and in the way that we experience the world?

01:35:42.220 | The answer is yes.

01:35:44.020 | - Fantastic.

01:35:45.220 | Well, you've given us a ton of mechanistic

01:35:49.160 | and conceptual and practical information.

01:35:53.020 | So I'm speaking for a lot of people when I say,

01:35:56.020 | thank you for taking the time out of your schedule

01:35:58.220 | amidst kids and running a lab

01:36:00.000 | and teaching at the university and your book,

01:36:02.300 | which we will point people to and provide a link to,

01:36:05.820 | is a wonderful resource.

01:36:08.180 | And we hope to have you back again.

01:36:10.020 | - Thank you so much, it was a great conversation.

01:36:11.860 | - Thank you. - Thanks.

01:36:13.280 | - Thank you for joining me today for our discussion

01:36:14.980 | about motivation, goal-seeking and research-supported tools

01:36:18.380 | for achieving your goals with Dr. Emily Balchetes.

01:36:21.780 | If you're learning from and are enjoying this podcast,

01:36:24.020 | please subscribe to our YouTube channel.

01:36:25.780 | That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.

01:36:28.160 | In addition, please subscribe to the podcast

01:36:30.220 | on Apple and Spotify.

01:36:31.720 | And on both Apple and Spotify,

01:36:33.240 | you can leave us up to a five-star review.

01:36:36.140 | Please leave us any comments or suggestions

01:36:38.080 | or ideas for future guests

01:36:39.660 | or questions about particulars of any podcast episode

01:36:42.840 | in the comment section on YouTube.

01:36:44.760 | We do read all the comments.

01:36:46.500 | Please also check out the sponsors

01:36:47.860 | mentioned at the beginning of today's episode

01:36:49.500 | and check out Athletic Greens.

01:36:51.100 | That's the best way to support this podcast.

01:36:53.760 | In addition, please check out our neural network newsletter.

01:36:56.740 | That is a zero cost newsletter available to anyone.

01:36:59.900 | You just provide an email

01:37:00.980 | and we do not share your email with anybody.

01:37:03.060 | You simply go to Hubermanlab.com.

01:37:05.300 | You go to the menu,

01:37:06.380 | you look for the neural network newsletter,

01:37:08.060 | and by signing up for the newsletter,

01:37:09.860 | you can get summaries of podcast episodes,

01:37:12.260 | detailed lists of protocols related to podcast episodes.

01:37:15.540 | Again, all zero cost.

01:37:17.300 | We don't share your information.

01:37:18.700 | And if you'd like to see examples of previous newsletters,

01:37:21.680 | they're also available on our website, Hubermanlab.com.

01:37:24.700 | If you're not already following us on social media,

01:37:26.820 | we are Huberman Lab on both Twitter and Instagram.

01:37:29.620 | There I cover science and science-related tools,

01:37:32.220 | some of which overlap with the contents

01:37:33.820 | of the Huberman Lab podcast,

01:37:34.980 | but much of which is distinct from the information

01:37:37.100 | on the Huberman Lab podcast.

01:37:38.360 | Again, it's Huberman Lab on Instagram

01:37:40.220 | and Huberman Lab on Twitter.

01:37:42.060 | And as mentioned at the beginning of today's episode,

01:37:44.220 | we are now partnered with Momentus Supplements

01:37:46.560 | because they make single ingredient formulations

01:37:48.540 | that are of the absolute highest quality

01:37:50.140 | and they ship international.

01:37:52.180 | If you go to livemomentus.com/huberman,

01:37:54.820 | you will find many of the supplements

01:37:56.180 | that have been discussed on various episodes

01:37:57.760 | of the Huberman Lab podcast,

01:37:59.340 | and you will find various protocols

01:38:01.020 | related to those supplements.

01:38:02.380 | So thank you once again for joining us today

01:38:04.180 | for our discussion about the science

01:38:06.020 | and science-related tools of motivation,

01:38:07.860 | goal-seeking, and pursuit.

01:38:09.140 | And last, but certainly not least,

01:38:11.500 | thank you for your interest in science.

01:38:13.280 | [upbeat music]

01:38:15.860 | (upbeat music)

Dr. Emily Balcetis: Tools for Setting & Achieving Goals | Huberman Lab Podcast #83

Chapters