Do you believe in optimal levels of arousal for different aspects of practice or game? Autonomic arousal is something I've worked on for many years and one of the most impressive features I think of our brains as humans. First would be our ability to think into the past, present, or future or combination of those two.

If other animals do that, they don't do it nearly as well and they certainly don't create technologies to bridge those different time scales. That's number one. But the other one is our visual and temporal aperture of focus. So when we are in a state of elevated arousal, our visual aperture shrinks, I'm sure you're familiar with this, and we slice time more finely, much, you know, it's like a higher frame rate.

Right. Which is why people who, for instance, see a devastating traumatic car crash report experiencing things in slow motion, right, because their frame rate is high, like a slow motion video. Whereas when we are relaxed, our frame rate is larger bins of time. And I feel like so much of the discussion around things like flow and optimal states for learning have to do with assuming that there's one optimal state of arousal.

But I feel like in every endeavor I've ever been involved in, it's about learning the transitions between the arousal states that allows us to, you know, pull back a little bit as things, as you said, like get tense, just relax just a little bit to be able to maybe see a different perspective or ratchet up our level of tension or AKA arousal in order to be able to fine slice the, you know, the micro expressions of a competitor.

I mean, these two cameras on the fronts of our skull and the rest of our brain are really devoted to this process of, you know, shrinking or expanding the aperture of our consciousness. And it can be talked about in terms of space, just vision, like tunnel vision versus panoramic vision.

It can be talked about at space time, you know, tunnel vision, fine slice, panoramic vision, broader slice. But then when you start getting into like the, then you map that onto the past, present and future mapping, and that's where I feel like we're into the game of skill learning and chess and strategy.

So forgive me for the kind of, you know, top contour neuroscience description, but that's how I see the human primate as so different than all the other creatures in the world. That's how we're different because we can learn chess or ballet, foil, you know, Gibbons are pretty amazing at what Gibbons do.

But if they're trying to learn other stuff that they've been failing so far. I spent a lot of time playing with frame rates. And I had this experience that I wrote about in that slowing down time chapter of The Art of Learning where I, when I had these experiences both in chess and in fighting, one time I was fighting against a super heavyweight dude in a competition and my hand shattered.

And like I broke my hand right here. And it was interesting because the fight was very intense, reasonably hard, and my hand broke and instantly time slowed down. And he was moving in slow motion. And I was able to just so easily play with someone with like a broken hand compared to what had been a war before.

- We know what that is. - Right, we do know what that is. - That's adrenaline. - Adrenaline. - Yeah. - Adrenaline and that tunnel vision, and then the frames are fat. - I mean, if I inject you with just a little bit of adrenaline, it stays in your periphery, but it activates systems in your brain in parallel to that.

And you're gonna experience an immediate dilation of your pupils. You'll have more tunnel vision. I mean, every process is sped up in the direction of higher frame rate. - So then the question then became for me, and this would be fun to talk, I've never spoken to a scientist about this process.

Like how do I learn to do that at will, right? And then how can I train, 'cause I can't just pump myself with adrenaline all the time, although maybe I can learn to have that physiological response. - You can deploy it. - Right, so then how can I deploy it, right?

What are triggers for having that chemical change? And then also, how can I train so that I have the experience of more frames than my opponent? And so Marcelo Garcia, he's known as the king of the scramble, he spends his whole time in transition. So if you're training jujitsu with most people, they're always finding a position and holding it.

And so Marcelo, one of the unique things about his training life for most of his life was that he never held positions. He was always moving. He was always in the in between. And it's true in most arts is that people think that the art is the positions that they see, but the real high level art is the space in between the positions.

So if we have this position leads to this position, that's gonna be like, there's gonna be no frames in between for most people. For some people, there might be four frames. But if I have 100 frames, then I can play in pockets that you don't see. And so if you're living your life in the training process in the in between, in the transition, if you're always, the way that manifests in actual, like, for example, jujitsu training or submission grappling training is if you're not holding positions, you're always moving and you're spending all of your time in the in between, while people who are holding position are always static.

So if you go to a jujitsu school and you sit and watch, it's interesting to look for this one thing. Notice the amount of time static versus in motion. Marcelo was always in motion. There's a beautiful clip of him that you got people can look up. It's an art de suave.

It was an old documentary back in the day, like 25 years ago, I think it was. It's on YouTube. It's like an eight minute clip of him training as an, I think, an 18 year old. And you watch him just like in the early days of him learning this transitional approach, and he's just never stopping.

He's always allowing the person, but you have to get past the egoic dynamics. Because you can't, you're giving up on dominating people all the time. Because when you're in a dominant position in jujitsu, you want to hold it because you've won. You don't want this bullshit passing between men who are fighting, or women who are fighting each other.

We want to dominate. But if you release that, and you're thinking about the learning process, and you stop holding, then you're moving. And you're getting nonstop exposure to the in between. So if you spend your life training in the in between, then you have more frames than other people do.

That's a lot of what illusionists are doing. They spend all of their time training in the spaces that other people don't look at. And so it's not magic. It's brilliant training. It's the art of illusion at the in between. And a lot of the things that you can do, a high-level martial artist can do to a lower-level martial artist, or someone who doesn't train, that feels mystical.

It's all about that principle manifest in interesting ways. And in general, for me, and this goes back to the question you asked two or three brilliant expansive questions ago around intense moments. A lot of what my training has been is having some serendipitous intense moment, and then learning, and then it becomes a beacon.

So for example, there was a moment I was playing in a world chess championship in Calicut, India. And I was deep into a calculation, couldn't find the solution, and there was an earthquake. And everything started, like, in the actual world, everything started shaking, right? But I experienced the earthquake from the inside of the chess position.

And I knew there was an earthquake, but I also was lost. My brain was lost in the labyrinth. And I found the solution. And then I got up and left, vacated, because we had to leave the playing hall. Then we came back, and I made my move and went on to win.

And it was so interesting, because it was like, and then the earthquake, like, and a lot of what happens in chess is that you're reaching so deep into the complexity, like, into the cupboard, but the solution is right here at the front, and all you have to do is come back out and surface.

One of the best ways, by the way, to prevent, to minimize chess blunders with, like, talented young players or players of any level, any age, is to shift the order of decide, make the move, and then write it down, because you notate your chess games, to decide, write it down, and then make the move.

Write it down is a resurfacing, and you have common sense, look at the position. Almost all chess blunders, you realize you blundered instantly. You can think for 20 minutes, make your move, you know instantly you blundered, because there's not that surfacing, right? But then you can learn to just do the surfacing before making the actual move.

It's true with human decision making in general. Right, we realize that the screw up right as we complete it. Yeah, because, like, we're caught up in all of our bullshit, we make the move, and then we've left our thought process, and like, oh, that was just absurd, right? And we see it.

I mean, you think about, I mean, you think about the heartbreaking literature, you know, studies in how people who have jumped off a bridge relate to at the moment after they've jumped off the bridge, those who have survived, right, the interviews afterwards. Yeah, they report wishing they hadn't jumped.

Right. Immediately. Like, they jump, and then they wish they hadn't jumped. Such an important message. You know, we hear all this stuff about suicide prevention, and, you know, but just that knowledge. I mean, I don't know how conscious of that sort of thing people are as they're headed down the trench.

I mean, what, of suicidal depression, but these apertures that we're talking about, these time-space apertures where frame rate is set and visual aperture is set, I think for most people, we experience them as sort of notches. So it's like, you know, you're in a high state of arousal, and you have high frame rate, you know, and then, and just like being like a ball bearing down in a trench, you can't really see out the other side.

You're literally in there at a certain frame rate of, let's say, an argument, an intense argument with somebody where you want to win, and you're frustrated with them, and the whole situation, and you're in the trench. Whereas when you're relaxed, it's more, you know, a broad concave or a flat table where the ball bearing can move around at will.

It sounds like Marcello and people that train these different transition states is you're really learning to access the different frame rates, but from a place of like, kind of like a little dimple in a table, and then being able to move to the next one as a dimple and kind of moving from dimple to dimple as opposed to like these trenches of brain states.

And I think that, I think about this a lot, a lot, because I feel like most bad decisions are made from a high frame rate, high arousal state. Most of the terrible things that humans have done to one another, you know, I suppose their sociopathy and like, you know, preplanned things, but they tend to be associated with high arousal states where people regret what they did, all second degree murder, for instance.

In any event, I think the ability to move through these different arousal states at will is possible. You asked earlier, like, how would one do that? Well, the beautiful thing about the visual system in these different frame rates and states of arousal is that it works in both directions.

So when you're in a higher state of arousal, your visual aperture shrinks, you go to a higher frame rate. But it's also true that if you shrink your visual aperture, you go to a higher frame rate. The converse is also true. If you deliberately, for instance, as we're looking across one another right now, if I start to take in the fullness of the picture here, the walls, et cetera, there's a natural relaxation of the autonomic arousal systems or parasympathetic activity goes up.

And what's incredible is that any time we view a horizon, that naturally happens because you're not setting to a single fixation point. So anytime you see a horizon, you relax and it's not a coincidence. So the visual system can drive it inward and your autonomic arousal can drive it toward your visual system.

The other thing is there's a really beautiful paper that came out about two years ago which showed that people who do a biofeedback game where they're watching a little, you know, it's like a more kind of like a sine wave and they're deliberately trying to increase their level of arousal as the curve goes up for those that are just listening.

Within a few days, they can learn to control their pupil size, which sets their arousal and their aperture for a segmenting time. So you can learn this through biofeedback. And I think that the script for that is available online. I haven't tried it yet, but if you ever heard of these yogis that could control their pupil sizes even independently of one another, that's amazing because it's not supposed to be able to occur, but you can.

So you can learn to, you know, I guess the poor man's version of this would be look in the mirror, stare at yourself and try and ramp up your level of autonomic arousal, watch your pupils get bigger, and then try and relax yourself and make them smaller. That practice it seems in biofeedback allows people to do it without staring into the mirror, so to speak.

So it can be done. It's just that it hasn't been parsed by science that finely until recently.