NEUROSCIENTIST: How To Rewire your brain (neuroscience explained)

When you're on your phone and scrolling, and I think scrolling itself is the major issue. When you're scrolling, you're essentially putting yourself into — new context after new context, and the brain has to adjust to all of that. The circuits in the brain that are required for setting and maintaining focus are inhibited by the process of deliberately shifting one's focus over and over throughout the day. If one is constantly moving their attention from one thing to the next, it undermines the — stability of all the circuitry in the brain that's responsible for prolonged focus. Now, I partake in social media, so do you, but the scroll function is a practice of shifting focus. The human brain is an incredible organ because it's a map of our experience. It has certain parts that are hardwired that govern our heart rate and control of our heart rate or control of our breathing, certain immune functions, and on and on, but then a vast percentage of our human brain is open real estate that is designated as one function or another depending on what happens to you during development. But it's so important that we understand this because you think, what is the ability to think? Well, the ability to think is constrained by the number of different senses I'm trying to place on a bunch of different things. The challenge is that we've brought an infinite number of sensory experiences into the thing that you're looking at through the device that you're holding. — So, the narrowing of your perspective hasn't helped you to narrow the distractions. — That's right. Cognitive space is still infinite even though your spatial the spatial limitation of where you're placing your attention is very restricted. So, the fact that you have so many competing thoughts has everything to do with that. Plasticity of the brain, — mapping of the brain for one particular sensory experience or function, say swiping or the ability switch back and forth between multiple screens, is always at the expense of some other potential function. You can't do everything. The reason I'm so bullish about people understanding a little bit of mechanism behind the checklist of things to do is that I do think that when people understand mechanism, it gives them flexibility over the so-called protocols, and I think it also allows them to customize those things for themselves. Let's face it. If you want to go online now and just say, what are the top 10 things I can do to improve my sleep, and you get a list and put those on your refrigerator, put them next to your bed. Why doesn't everyone just do that? It's because the way that people go about learning information strongly drives whether or not they apply that information. The thoughts and by extension the emotions, but really the thoughts that you have right now, your ability to focus right now is strongly driven by the inputs you received in the preceding hours and even days. — So, one of the things that's really interesting about focus and attention, and a lot of habits have to do with I don't want to procrastinate, I want to do this. We talk about exercise, but let's talk about cognitive stuff. It's very, very clear that if you have — a hard time getting into a bout of work or even um staying focused, there's a very good chance, I believe, that the your breaks between work and what you were doing before work was too stimulating. I'm a big advocator for boring breaks. And silence before and after bouts of work for a couple of reasons. Let's think about it on the back end. Let's say you're trying to learn something or read a book or — just do something that you you're not reflexively doing. You want to create this habit. It's very clear that neuroplasticity, yes, it requires alertness, requires focus, you need sleep later that night. I've been beating that drum for a number of years. It's also clear that reflection on what you were doing at some later time, just kind of like post-learning reflection, walking to your car, sitting on the plane for a second, thinking about a podcast you did earlier or something you heard or a discussion, strongly reinforces the memories and the ability to work with the memories of new information. And this is something that we've given up largely because of our smartphones. You're constantly bringing in new sensory information. All the data, I did an episode on how to best study and learn. I went to the data to find out because I have my methods, but that doesn't mean they're the best methods. — Reading, rereading, note-taking, highlighting, it's all fine, but it turns out the biggest lever is to self-test — at some point away from the material. So, testing is not just something for evaluation of others, it's a way that we should think, you know, yeah, how much can I remember about that conversation? What was tricky? Okay, I don't remember

that piece. I'm going to go back and look it up. All learning is, and this will sound like a giant duh, but all learning is anti-forgetting. How do we know this? Because if you have people read a passage one, two, three, four, five times versus one time and they self-test, one time and self-testing significantly better. Learning is repeated recall, not repeated exposure. Yes. Beautiful. — Right. Exactly. Guys like him, guys like James Clear, they have a real when I say unconscious genius, coming clearly they put thought into structure into what they teach, but the neuroscience supports everything you just said, which is what he just said. And reflecting on what you were trying to do or learn or solve, even if you don't remember, even if you're still puzzled by it, is so vitally important to the anti-forgetting process. Okay. Now, in terms of actually being able to focus, do work, it's so clear that thoughts, and this is the beautiful statements and work of a woman named Jenny Grow, who's at Duke University, who's a neuroscientist been studying sensory integration for a long time. You know, I I've long thought about, and I think we now understand as a field what sensations are. So, sensations are the physical stimuli in the environment, photons of light, mechanical pressure, odor and volatile odorants in the environment that lead to, you know, sight, touch, smell, etc. How that gets converted into chemical and electrical signals in the brain, we understand as a field. We understand sensation. We understand perception. Perception is which of those sensations you happen to be paying attention to. Okay? We understand emotions now more as a subset of something that we think of more broadly as states — that are set by your autonomic nervous system, how alert you are, how not alert you are, and then emotions are kind of layered on top of that. We know what they are neurobiologically and psychologically. And behaviors, we know what they are. And then there's the don't go behaviors, the suppression of behavior. And then there are memories, right? But for the longest time it's been unclear what are thoughts. Like what are they? Are they just like spontaneous geysering up of of memories or like what's going on there? And Jenny Grow, I think, has the absolute best description of these. If And this is based on experimentation. — If we seed some idea, so let's say I say to you, think about a dog. Okay? Um what kind of dog [clears throat] is it? Golden retriever. Okay. So, as you think about the golden retriever, like what other things come to mind about the golden retriever? It's got a little neckerchief on. Okay. — Red neckerchief. — Great. Red neckerchief. Uh like what else about golden retriever? Fluffy. Okay. So, there's a tactile thing. Okay. Um Jenny Grow's and others' data point to the fact that thoughts basically start with some seed element, some noun, some pronoun, some thing, some event, — and then what the brain does is it is essentially starts to call on more and more sensations and starts layering those in. More and more prior sensory events. It's red handkerchief. Okay, brain, it's fluffy, there's a tactile. And that thoughts really are the layering on of more and more sensory memories, and thoughts are really a layering of the senses in in abstract thought space. Now, this is not meant to, you know, make something from nothing, but it's so important that we understand this because you think, what is the ability to think? Well, the ability to think is constrained by the number of different senses I'm trying to place on a bunch of different things. — And so, that's what that's how we navigate through environments, which is what Jenny Grow's main work is about, how you find yourself in space. I can't look at everything in this garage. I have to focus on certain things, find the Phillips head screwdriver, go over there. And you're discarding all the other information. Now, when you think about sitting down to do work or to learn something, prepare a podcast, it is so important that you limit the number of sensory inputs coming in, not just during that event, but before. Because the sensory — um stimulus that kind of sets off this cascade of layering in more and more — sensory memories and understanding is begun before you sit down to read your book. This is why you read a portion of a book and then like, oh wait, I I wasn't even paying attention. You your brain is still working with the sensory inputs from before. It's not thinking about them consciously. So, this is vitally important. If you go back and you look at the history of attention and thinking, and I have, you can find these incredible pictures that they would give kids who had trouble probably had ADHD or just kind of rambunctious boys in most cases, and they literally gave them helmets with two eye holes so they couldn't look at anything else like hear anyone else, right? Used to be, you know, kid with the hoodie on and the cap and you and you'd write. Now, in China they're doing some very interesting experiments of having kids stare literally at a focal point on the wall for a number of minutes before beginning their work. Sounds a little extreme, a little military, but one thing that I've been doing before I prepare to do any writing, any podcasting, any work is I try and make

myself as bored as possible. I try and remove as much sensory input as possible. I might think about my breathing cuz it's hard to not think about anything, but I really have started to limit the amount of sensory information coming into my space. I have an entire floor of where I live now. I live in a have an odd structure now, but the entire bottom floor is a no phone zone. Once or twice I brought my phone down there, but it's a no phone zone. I'm going down the stairs are no phones in there. I'm trying to figure out how I can have no internet there. Doesn't matter if you're in an empty box if you are not good at clearing the slate before you try and focus. You're going to have a very hard time for understandable reasons. In fact, I'm amazed that anyone can think at all. focus at all. I don't believe everyone has ADHD. I think we've just not understood what thoughts are built up from. And once you understand you go, "Oh, yeah, it makes perfect sense. Am I supposed to walk around with my eyes closed and not taking any sensory input? " No, but am I supposed to take in an infinite number of novel items through this device? In fact, Mike Easter, the author of The Comfort Crisis, told me something super scary. The people who developed the algorithms for social media borrowed heavily from the casinos. And I didn't realize that some years ago slot machines were like a small fraction of the total casino income, maybe like 10-20%. Now it's 80% and it was one guy who watched his kid playing video games who realized that the kids would play video games for hours and hours and what they were playing for was novelty. — And so they switched the slot machines in casinos on his suggestion to instead of just spooling numbers and fruit or whatever it was, because they're now electronic, you can get a near infinite number of combinations of novel items and people will play while losing for novelty and think they're winning. The brain is tricked into thinking that it's winning. And so at some level, like I love social media, I teach on social media, I I partake in it as a consumer and a creator there, but I think we need to really scruff ourselves and go, "Okay, I need to read this book. I need to write this chapter. I need to do this drawing. " And you'll notice once you drop into that trench, the brain has these attractor states. It's like a ball bearing on a flat surface. As you get more into a thought trench or activity trench, it's like that ball bearing drops into what's essentially a deep valley. And it's actually hard to leave. You'll notice you're walking out and unless you pick up your phone, you'll still be thinking about that. And this is how the brain works. The brain is not working in step functions. The brain you're none of us are supposed to do the same thing all day long and none of us are supposed to be able to think and focus easily. You just have to ride that sort of layering on of thoughts going from bored to sensory input to deeper and then work for bouts of, you know, 90 minutes or a couple of hours and then give yourself a little bit of time, pause, reflect. And it doesn't mean you can have a conversation, but people are like texting in between. It's unbelievable what we've done to hamstring ourselves against being able to think. — The good news is, as Goggins would say, nowadays it's very easy to be spectacularly good in pretty much any field. Bar is in heaven. — to do what no one else is doing. Now, he's an extreme case and I have immense admiration for David. I mean, he's just so David, you know, but if you want to be the best in your class at anything, or best in class at pretty much anything, it's become so much easier now. You just have to not constantly be projecting things out to the world or paying attention to what other people are doing. — I've got written on my whiteboard on my fridge at the moment, the five most common deathbed regrets. — And it's things like, I wish that I'd not worked as much. I wish I'd let myself be happy. I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends. — Um it will be unbelievably surprising to me if in 40 years time I wish I'd spent less time on my phone isn't on that. I would bet — pretty much everything that I have that that would probably appear on average on people's five top deathbed regrets. I wish I'd spent less time on my phone. And we can see this happening in front of us. And the best way that you can tell that this is going to continue to happen is that you can reflect on what you did over the last week. And one of the most common things that you wish that you'd done less of over the last week was shouldn't I got I got captured. I did a couple of YouTube holes or TikTok scrolls or Instagram whatevers. And you know that this is happening in the micro. Spread that across a lifetime. You know, I think that very much we're going to look back at this and hopefully there is some kind of solution. Maybe it's Neuralink. Maybe, you know, we have a way that we can kind of ethically engage with technology and get the communication and the stimulation and the exploration of different ideas and communities. Uh but yeah, right now kind of feels a little bit like maybe when cigarettes first came out like your doctor smokes Camels, you know, like we didn't nobody knew what the bad effects of this were. They didn't know long-term what it was going to cause and I was I think incorrectly categorizing people's phone use as an addiction.

addiction. And I think that you said it's much more like a compulsion. — Right. And that is a child that's asleep or nearly asleep protect like compulsively scrolling through their phone. An obsession is mental. This is the classic definition. A compulsion is a behavior, but the compulsion — in classic OCD doesn't relieve the obsession. It actually exacerbates it. The payoff. Right. So you're not it's sort of like an itch that you scratch and it just get it itches more. Right? And there is something like that with social I don't want to say social media, but with phone scrolling. Now that said, I mean, you know, of my waking hours, most of it is spent foraging for, organizing, or dispersing information and much of that is done on the phone or computer. But I do read books, you know, hard books. I uh meaning physical books. When you're foraging, you spend enough time on the internet and you do find something that gives you that, ah, wow, I never knew about that before. And it's that um sort of needle in a haystack that you're looking through. And that trigger of, wow, I found so I can talk about it on a podcast. This is really interesting to me. That is the carrot, I think, that gets dangled for very many people who want to feel better about their social media use and think, well, okay, yeah, I know I wasted 90 minutes, but I did get that thing out of it. I read that Substack post or I found this new person that I really care about. You know, the variable schedule reward, intellectual satisfaction is also in there, right? It's not just the shock. — Sure. cute Also in the library. I love libraries and I'd spend so much time when I was a student and graduate student and you'd find something. And it's like I'd look around. Like, did anyone like did you see that? But since I was a little kid, I was discovering stuff in books and then talking about it to everybody even if they didn't want to hear. And so I was professing from a young age in class on Mondays and things. So for me it's hardwired into my system by now. And I think that I do think that social media holds certain gems. I think we're thinking about talking about like mining for gems — of social interaction, too. You know, I've gotten to know some people through social media where it's really enriched my life. I've reconnected with some people. — Yep. It's really enriched my life. It's allowed me to connect the dots going backward in ways I hadn't anticipated. And I think going forward, if you're asking about the kids in the video that you showed me or you're talking about adults or anyone, it's the success is largely going to be determined by who has the most self-discipline.