back to indexHow to Learn Skills Faster | Huberman Lab Podcast #20
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Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,
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where we discuss science and science-based tools
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for everyday life.
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I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology
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and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
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This podcast is separate from my teaching
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and research roles at Stanford.
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It is, however, part of my desire and effort
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to bring zero cost to consumer information
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about science and science-related tools
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to the general public.
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In keeping with that theme,
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I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
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Our first sponsor is Belcampo Meat Company.
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Belcampo Meat Company is a regenerative farm
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in Northern California that raises organic, grass-fed,
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and grass-finished certified humane meats.
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I eat meat about once a day.
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I'm neither pure carnivore nor am I a vegetarian,
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obviously, I eat meat.
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The way I eat is I tend to fast until about noon,
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and then I have my first meal,
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which generally consists of a piece of beef,
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you know, it's either ground beef or a steak.
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I like ribeyes, I like flat irons, these kinds of things,
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and a small salad, sometimes a large salad.
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And then throughout the day,
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I generally am low carb until the evening
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when I eat pasta and rice and things of that sort.
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Eating that way is what optimizes my levels of alertness
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and optimizes my sleep.
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I've talked about this on previous podcast episodes.
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Now, because I eat meat essentially every day,
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the source of that meat is extremely important to me.
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I want it to be healthy for me,
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and I want the animals that it comes from to be healthy
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and to have lived a good life.
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Conventionally raised animals are confined to feedlots
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and they eat a diet of inflammatory grains,
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which is terrible for them,
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and it's terrible for us when we eat those meats.
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Belcampo's animals graze on open pastures
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and seasonal grasses, which results in meat
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that is higher in nutrients and healthy fats.
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They actually have very high levels of omega-3s,
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which I've also talked about on this podcast
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are important for mental and physical health
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for a variety of reasons.
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The way Belcampo raises its animals
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is also good for the environment.
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They practice regenerative agriculture,
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which means it's climate positive and carbon negative,
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which translates to good for us and good for the planet.
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You can order Belcampo sustainably raised meats
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to be delivered straight to your door using my code Huberman
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by going to belcampo.com slash Huberman,
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and you'll get 20% off your first time order.
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That's belcampo.com slash Huberman for 20% off.
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Today's podcast is also brought to us by Inside Tracker.
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Inside Tracker is a personalized nutrition platform
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that analyzes data from your blood and DNA
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to help you better understand your body
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and reach your health goals.
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I've long been a believer in getting blood work done
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for the simple reason that many,
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if not most of the factors that impact
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our immediate and long-term health
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can only be assessed from a blood test.
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And now with the advent of modern DNA tests,
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we can get additional information
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about our current health status and our health trajectory.
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One of the major problems with blood tests and DNA tests
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available for most sources is that you get the numbers back
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and you can easily see whether or not those numbers
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are within the standard range or outside the range,
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but it's very hard to know what to do with that information.
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Also, what the various factors are that are being measured
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is often very cryptic.
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With Inside Tracker, they clarify everything.
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They make it very clear and simple
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as to what each of those factors relates to.
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So they give you some understanding of what those are
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and they give you ideas and suggestions
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about things that you can do with your lifestyle,
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changes to your diet, changes to your supplementation,
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changes to your sleep schedule or exercise patterns
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that can serve to optimize the levels
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of those various factors and your DNA.
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In addition, they have something called the Inner Age Test,
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which compares your chronological age,
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which you already know, with your biological age,
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which gives you a sense of your lifespan
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or predicted lifespan.
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So that's crucially important.
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And you can imagine why many people, including me,
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would want that information.
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If you'd like to try Inside Tracker,
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you can visit insidetracker.com slash Huberman
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and you'll get 25% off any of Inside Tracker's plans.
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Use the code Huberman at checkout.
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That's insidetracker.com slash Huberman
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to get 25% off any of Inside Tracker's plans
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and use the code Huberman at checkout.
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Today's episode is also brought to us by Athletic Greens.
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Athletic Greens is an all-in-one
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vitamin mineral probiotic drink.
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I've been using Athletic Greens for well over a decade now.
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I started using Athletic Greens
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and I still use Athletic Greens
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because I find it rather dizzying
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to know which vitamins and minerals to take.
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And with Athletic Greens,
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I cover all my bases of vitamins and minerals.
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In addition, it has probiotics.
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And we now know from an enormous number
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of quality peer-reviewed studies
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that the gut microbiome is critically important
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for our immune system function,
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for the gut brain axis and for our mental functions.
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And probiotics are one way to support the gut brain axis
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and the gut health generally.
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With Athletic Greens, I basically just add water,
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put in a little bit of lemon juice
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because that's the way I like it,
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mix it up, it tastes delicious.
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I'll do that once or twice a day.
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It's compatible with fasting, at least for me.
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It doesn't take me out of a fasting mode,
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which I do early in the day.
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So most often I'll have my Athletic Greens early in the day
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and then sometimes I'll also have another one
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late in the evening or sometimes even before bed.
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I'm able to sleep after drinking it without a problem.
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If you'd like to try Athletic Greens,
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you can go to athleticgreens.com slash Huberman.
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And if you do that, you can claim a special offer.
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They'll give you five free travel packs,
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which are these little packs that make it very easy
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to mix up Athletic Greens while you're on the road
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or in the car or on a plane,
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makes all of that very simple.
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And in addition, they will give you a year supply
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There are also a lot of data supporting the fact
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that vitamin D3 is critical for a variety of health metrics.
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We all know that we can get vitamin D3 from the sun,
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but many people, including me,
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we're not getting enough sunlight or D3.
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Even if I was getting a lot of sunlight,
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I know that because I had my blood levels measured of D3.
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So I use vitamin D3 every day
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in addition to the other things I take,
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including Athletic Greens.
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If you go to athleticgreens.com slash Huberman,
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you'll get the Athletic Greens, the five free travel packs,
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and a year supply of the vitamin D3 and K2.
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That's athleticgreens.com slash Huberman
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to claim the special offer.
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This month on the Huberman Lab Podcast,
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we're talking all about physical performance.
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So that means athletic performance, recreational exercise,
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weightlifting, running, swimming, yoga,
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skills and skill learning.
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Today, we're going to talk about and focus on skill learning.
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We are going to focus on how to learn skills more quickly,
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in particular motor skills.
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This will also translate to things like musical skills
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and playing instruments,
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but we're mainly going to focus on physical movements
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of the body that extend beyond the hands,
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like just playing the piano
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or the fingers like playing the guitar.
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But everything we're going to talk about
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will also serve the formation and the consolidation
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and the performance of other types of skills.
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So if you're interested in how to perform better,
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whether or not it's dance or yoga
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or even something that's just very repetitive
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like running or swimming, this podcast episode is for you.
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We're going to go deep into the science of skill learning
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and we are going to talk about very specific protocols
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that the science points to and has verified
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allow you to learn more quickly,
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to embed that learning so that you remember it
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and to be able to build up skills more quickly
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than you would otherwise.
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We are also going to touch on a few things
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that I get asked about a lot,
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but fortunately recently I've had the time
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to go deep into the literature, extract the data for you
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and that's mental visualization.
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How does visualizing a particular skill or practice
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serve the learning and or the consolidation
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Turns out there are some absolutely striking protocols
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that one can use, striking meaning they allow you
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to learn faster and they allow you to remember
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how to do things more quickly and better
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than if you were not doing this mental rehearsal,
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but the pattern of mental rehearsal
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and when you do that mental rehearsal
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turns out to be vitally important.
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So I'm excited for today's episode.
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We're going to share a lot of information with you
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and there are going to be a lot of very simple takeaways.
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So let's get started.
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Before we get into the topic of skill learning
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and tools for accelerating skill learning,
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I want to briefly revisit the topic of temperature,
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which was covered in the last episode
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and just highlight a few things
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and clear up some misunderstandings.
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So last episode talked about these incredible data
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from my colleague Craig Heller's lab at Stanford.
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He's in the department of biology
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showing that cooling the palms in particular ways
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and at particular times can allow athletes
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or just recreational exercisers
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to do more pull-ups, dips, bench presses per unit time
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to run further, to cycle further
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and to feel better doing it.
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There really are incredible data
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that are anchored in the biology of the vascular system,
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the blood supply and how it's involved in cooling us.
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Many of you, dozens of you in fact, said, wait a second,
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you gave us a protocol in this episode
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which says that we should cool our palms periodically
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throughout exercise in order to be able to do more work.
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But on the episode before that
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on growth hormone and thyroid hormone,
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you said that heating up the body
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is good for release of growth hormone.
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And I just want to clarify that both things are true.
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These are two separate protocols.
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You should always warm up before you exercise.
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That warm up will not increase your body temperature
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or the muscle temperature to the point
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where it's going to diminish your work capacity,
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that it's going to harm your performance.
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The cooling of the palms,
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which is really just a route to cool your core
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in an efficient way, the most efficient way in fact,
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is about improving performance.
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Heating up the body with exercise
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and focusing on heat increases
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or using sauna for heat increases
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is geared toward growth hormone release
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which is a separate matter.
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So you can do both of these protocols,
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but you would want to do them at separate times.
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So just to make this very concrete
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before I move on to today's topic,
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if you're interested in doing more work,
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being able to do more sets and reps per unit time
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and feel better doing it or to run further
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or to cycle further,
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then cooling the palms periodically
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as I described in the previous episode
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is going to be the way to go.
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If you're interested in getting growth hormone release,
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well then hot sauna and I offered some other tools
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if you don't have a sauna
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in the episode on growth hormone and thyroid hormone
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is going to be the way to go.
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Okay, so those are separate protocols.
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You can include them in your fitness regime
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and your training regime,
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but you do want to do them at separate times.
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And as a last point about this,
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I also mentioned that caffeine
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can either help or hinder performance
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depending on whether or not you're caffeine adapted
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because of the ways that caffeine impacts body temperature
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and all sorts of things like vasodilation and constriction.
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If you enjoy caffeine before your workouts
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and you're accustomed to caffeine,
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meaning you drink it three or five times or more a week,
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100 to 300 milligrams is a typical daily dose of caffeine.
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Some of you are ingesting more, some less.
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If you do that regularly,
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well then it's going to be just fine
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to ingest caffeine before you train.
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It's not going to impact your body temperature
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and your vasodilation or constriction
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in ways that will hinder you.
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However, if you're not a regular caffeine user
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and you're thinking, oh, I'm going to drink a cup of coffee
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and get this huge performance enhancing effect.
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Well, that's not going to happen.
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Chances are it's going to lead to
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increases in body temperature
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and changes in the way that blood flow
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is happening in your body
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and in particular on these palmer surfaces and in your face
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that is going to likely diminish performance.
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So if you enjoy caffeine and you're accustomed to it,
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so-called caffeine adapted, enjoy it before your training.
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If you regularly, excuse me, if you do not
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regularly use caffeine,
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then you probably do not want to view caffeine
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as a performance enhancing tool.
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And while we're on the topic of tools
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and because this is a month on athletic performance
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and exercise and physical skill learning,
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I want to offer an additional tool
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that I've certainly found useful,
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which is how to relieve the so-called side stitch
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or side cramp when running or swimming.
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This actually relates to respiration
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and to the nervous system.
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And it is not a cramp.
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If you've ever been out running
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and you felt like you had a pain on your side,
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that pain could be any number of things,
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but that what feels like cramping of your side
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is actually due to what's called collateralization
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of the phrenic nerve,
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which is a lot harder to say than a side cramp
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But here's the situation.
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You have a set of nerves,
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which is called the phrenic nerve, P-H-R-E-N-I-C,
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the phrenic nerve, which extends down
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from your brainstem essentially, this region,
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to your diaphragm to control your breathing.
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It has a collateral, meaning it has a branch,
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just like the branch on a tree that innervates your liver.
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And if you are not breathing deeply enough,
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what can happen is you can get
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what's called sometimes a referenced pain.
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Reference pain is probably going to be familiar
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to any of you who have ever read
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about how to recognize heart attack.
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People who have heart attacks will sometimes have pain
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on one side of their body, the left arm.
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Sometimes people that have pain in a part of their back
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will suddenly also get pain in their shoulder
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or part of their face.
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This has to do with the fact
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that many of our nerves branch
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and are meaning they're collateralized
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to different organs and areas of the body.
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And the way those nerves are woven together,
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it's often the case that if we disrupt the pattern of firing
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of electrical activity in one of those nerve branches,
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that the other ones are affected too.
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The side stitch, the pain in your side,
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is often because of the contractions of the diaphragm
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because of the way you're breathing while you're exercising,
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running or swimming or biking.
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And as a consequence, you feel pain in your side,
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but that's not a cramp.
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The way to relieve it is very simple.
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You do the physiological side that I've talked about
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in previous episodes of the podcast and elsewhere,
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which is a double inhale through the nose, very deep,
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and then a long exhale.
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And you might want to repeat that two or three times.
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Typically, that will relieve the side stitch
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because of the way that it changes the firing patterns
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of the phrenic nerve.
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So the side stitch is annoying, it's painful.
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Sometimes when you think we're dehydrated
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and you might be dehydrated,
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but oftentimes it's just that we're breathing in a way
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that causes some referenced pain of the liver.
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We call it a side stitch or a side cramp,
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and you can relieve it very easily
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through the double inhale, long exhale.
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That pattern, done two or three times.
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Often you can continue to engage in the exercise
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while you do the double inhale, exhale,
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and it will just relieve itself that way.
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So give it a try if you experience the side stitch.
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Some people I know are also doing the double inhale,
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long exhale during long continuous bouts of exercise.
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I actually do this when I run.
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We have decent data,
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although these are still unpublished data
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that can engage a kind of regular cadence
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of heart rate variability.
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So there are a number of reasons
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why this physiological side can be useful,
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but it certainly can be useful for relieving the side stitch
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or so-called side cramp.
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Let's talk about the acquisition of new skills.
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These could be skills such as a golf swing or a tennis swing,
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or you're shooting free throws,
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or you're learning to dance,
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or you're learning an instrument.
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I'm mainly going to focus on athletic performance.
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There are basically two types of skills,
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open loop and closed loop.
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Open loop skills are skills
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where you perform some sort of motor action
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and then you wait and you get immediate feedback
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as to whether or not it was done correctly or not.
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A good example will be throwing darts at a dartboard.
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So if you throw the dart,
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you get feedback about whether or not you hit the bull's eye
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and you're off the dartboard
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or you're some other location on the dartboard.
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Closed loop would be something that's more continuous.
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So let's say you're a runner
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and you're starting to do some speed work and some sprints
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and you're running and you can kind of feel
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whether or not you're running correctly
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or maybe even have a coach
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and they're correcting your stride
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or you're trying to do some sort of skill
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like a hopscotch skill,
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which maybe you're doing the ladder work
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where you're stepping between designated spaces
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That's closed loop because as you go,
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you can adjust your behavior
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and you can adjust the distance of your steps
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or you can adjust your speed
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or you can adjust your posture
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and you are able to essentially do more practice
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but you're getting feedback on a moment to moment basis.
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Okay, so you have open loop and closed loop.
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And just to make this very, very clear,
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open loop would be practicing your tennis serve.
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So let's say that you set a target
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on the other side of the net,
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you throw the ball up and you hit the ball,
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it goes over, that's open loop.
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You'll know whether or not you were in the court,
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you were on the location you wanted to hit
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or close to it or not.
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Closed loop would be if you're in a regular case.
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So maybe you're learning a swim stroke
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or maybe you're trying to learn a particular rhythm
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So maybe you're trying to learn a particular beat.
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I'm not very musical,
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so I'm not going to embarrass myself
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by giving an example of this,
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although later I will,
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where you're trying to get a particular rhythm down
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and if you're not getting it,
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you can adjust in real time and try and catch up
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or slow down or speed up, et cetera.
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Okay, so hopefully you'll understand open loop
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You should always know before you try and learn a skill,
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whether or not it's open loop or closed loop.
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And I'll return to why that's important shortly.
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But if you want to learn something,
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ask is it open loop or closed loop?
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There are essentially three components of any skill
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that involves motor movement.
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And those are sensory perception,
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actually perceiving what you are doing
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and what's happening around you.
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So what you see, what you hear,
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sometimes you're paying attention
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to what you're doing specifically,
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like the trajectory of your arm
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or how you're moving your feet if you're learning to dance.
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Sometimes you're more focused on something
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that's happening outside of you,
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like you're listening for something in music
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or you're paying attention
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to the way your partner is moving, et cetera.
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So there's sensory input.
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Then there are the actual movements, okay?
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So there are the movements of your limbs and body.
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And then there's something called proprioception.
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And proprioception is often discussed
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as kind of a sixth sense of knowing where your limbs are
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in relation to your body.
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So proprioception is vitally important.
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If I reach down and pick up this pen and pick it up,
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I'm not thinking about where the pen in my hand is
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relative to my body,
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but proprioceptively I'm aware of it
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at kind of a sixth cent deeper subconscious level.
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I can also make myself aware of where my limbs are.
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And typically when we learn,
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we are placing more focus on proprioception
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than we do ordinarily.
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So if I get up from this chair
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and I happen to walk out of the room,
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I don't think about where my feet are landing
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relative to one another.
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But if my leg had fallen asleep
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because I had been leaning on one of the nerves of my leg
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or something like that,
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and my leg feels all tingly or numb,
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I and you, if this were to happen,
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you would immediately notice a shift in gait.
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It would feel strange.
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I'd have to pay attention to how I'm stepping.
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I'm not getting any proprioceptive feedback.
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Now, skill learning has a lot of other dimensions too,
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but those are the main ones that we're going to focus on.
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So just to remind you,
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you need to know open loop or closed loop,
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and you need to know whether or not, excuse me,
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you need to know that there's sensory perception,
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what you're paying attention to,
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movements themselves and proprioception.
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And there's one other important thing that you need to know,
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which is that movement of any kind
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is generated from one, two, or three sources
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within your nervous system, within your brain and body.
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These are central pattern generators,
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which are sometimes called CSPGs.
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CSPGs are something entirely different in biology.
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CPGSs, this just goes to show that I have a module.
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CSPGs are chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans.
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They have nothing to do with this topic.
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CPGSs are central pattern generators,
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or CPGs they're sometimes called.
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These CPGs are in your spinal cord,
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mine and yours, different ones,
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and they generate repetitive movements.
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So if you're walking, if you're running,
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if you're cycling, if you're breathing,
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which presumably you are,
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and you're doing that in a regular rhythmic cadence,
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central pattern generators are controlling that movement.
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After you learn how to walk, run, swim, cycle,
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do anything really, much of the work is handed off
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to the central pattern generators.
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And there were experiments that were done
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in the 60s, 70s, and 80s
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that actually looked at the cerebrate animals
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and even the cerebrate humans.
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These are humans and animals that lack a cerebral cortex.
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They lack much of the brain,
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and yet they can engage in what's called a fictive movement.
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So it sounds like a kind of barbaric experiment.
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I'm glad I wasn't the one to have to do them,
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but this is the stuff of neuroscience textbooks
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that cats or dogs or mice
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that have their neocortex removed,
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put them on a treadmill, they'll walk just fine.
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And they will adjust their speed of walking just fine,
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even though they basically lack
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all their thinking decision-making brain.
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And it turns out humans that have,
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unfortunately, massive strokes to their cortex
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and lack any neocortex,
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but preserve the central pattern generators,
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will also walk just fine,
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even though they lack any of the other stuff in the brain.
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So these CPGs or CPGSs are amazing,
link |
and they control a lot of our already learned behavior.
link |
When you're really good at something,
link |
CPGs are controlling a lot of that behavior.
link |
And that's true also for a golf swing,
link |
even if it's not really repetitive.
link |
Somebody who's really good at golf is going to,
link |
I guess you call it a tee.
link |
You put the ball on the tee.
link |
I show my knowledge of golf.
link |
I've only done mini golf, frankly,
link |
but someday maybe I'll learn how to golf,
link |
but you set the golf ball down and swing.
link |
Set the golf ball down, swing.
link |
Central pattern generators are going to handle a lot of that.
link |
If I were to go to the golf course,
link |
Stanford has a beautiful golf course,
link |
if I were to go out there and put a ball on the tee,
link |
my central pattern generators
link |
would not be involved in that at all.
link |
The moment I get, you know, bring the club back to swing,
link |
it's going to engage other things.
link |
And the other things it's going to engage,
link |
because I don't know that behavior now or then,
link |
is upper motor neurons.
link |
We have motor neurons in our cortex,
link |
in our neocortex that control deliberate action.
link |
And those are the ones that you're engaging
link |
when you are learning.
link |
Those are the ones that you have to pay attention
link |
in order to engage.
link |
And that's what's happening, for instance,
link |
if I decide I'm going to reach down and pick up my pen,
link |
which I rarely think about,
link |
but now I'm thinking about it
link |
and I'm going to do this in a very deliberate way,
link |
I'm going to grab with these two fingers and lift,
link |
my upper motor neurons are now involved, okay?
link |
So upper motor neurons are very important
link |
because a little bit later in the episode,
link |
when we talk about how to use visualization
link |
in order to accelerate skill learning,
link |
it's going to leverage these upper motor neurons
link |
in very particular ways, okay?
link |
So we have CPGs for rhythmic movement,
link |
upper motor neurons for deliberate unlearned movements
link |
or movements that we are in the process of learning.
link |
And then we have what are called lower motor neurons.
link |
Lower motor neurons are the ones in our spinal cord
link |
that send little wires out to our muscles,
link |
which actually cause the firing of those muscle fibers, okay?
link |
So the way to think about this
link |
is you've got upper motor neurons,
link |
which talk to CPGs and to lower motor neurons.
link |
So it's really simple.
link |
And now you know most everything there is to know
link |
about the neural pathways controlling movement,
link |
at least for sake of this discussion.
link |
So anytime we learn something,
link |
we have to decide what to place our sensory perception on,
link |
meaning what are we going to focus on?
link |
If you're listening to this
link |
and you're the type of person who likes taking notes,
link |
this should be the second question you ask.
link |
Remember the first question is,
link |
is it open loop or closed loop?
link |
The second question should be,
link |
what should I focus my attention on?
link |
Auditory attention, visual attention, or proprioception.
link |
Should I focus on where my limbs are relative to my body
link |
or should I focus on the outcome?
link |
Okay, this is a critical distinction.
link |
You can decide to learn how to do a golf swing
link |
or learn how to shoot free throws
link |
or learn how to dance tango
link |
and decide that you are going to focus
link |
on the movements of your partner
link |
or the positions of your feet.
link |
Maybe you're going to look at them.
link |
Maybe you're going to sense them.
link |
You're going to actually feel where they are.
link |
Or maybe you're going to sense
link |
the position and posture of your body,
link |
which is more proprioceptive, okay?
link |
So you have to allocate your attention.
link |
And I'm going to tell you how to allocate your attention best
link |
in order to learn faster.
link |
So these are the sorts of decisions that you have to make.
link |
Fortunately for you, you don't have to think about
link |
whether or not you're going to use your upper motor neurons
link |
and your lower motor neurons or not,
link |
because if you don't know how to do something,
link |
you're automatically going to engage
link |
your upper motor neurons.
link |
And if you do, you are all right,
link |
then you're not going to use your upper motor neurons.
link |
You're mainly going to rely on central pattern generators.
link |
You are always using your lower motor neurons
link |
So we can really simplify things now.
link |
I've given you a lot of information, but we can simplify it.
link |
Basically open loop or closed loop, that's one question.
link |
And what am I going to focus on?
link |
And then your neurology will take care of the rest.
link |
So now I want to talk about realistic expectations.
link |
Somewhere in Hollywood, presumably,
link |
it got embedded in somebody's mind
link |
that instant skill acquisition was possible,
link |
that you could take a particular pill
link |
or you could touch a particular object,
link |
or you could have a wand wave over you
link |
and you would suddenly have a skill.
link |
And so that is the result of Hollywood at all.
link |
It doesn't exist, at least not in reality.
link |
And I love movies, but it simply doesn't exist.
link |
Then the self-help literature created another rule
link |
called the 10,000 hours rule.
link |
And frankly, that doesn't really match the literature,
link |
at least the scientific literature either.
link |
I like it because it implies that learning takes time,
link |
which is more accurate than the Hollywood at all
link |
instant skill acquisition rule,
link |
which isn't really a rule, it's a myth.
link |
But the 10,000 hours rule overlooks something crucial,
link |
which is that it's not about hours, it's about repetitions.
link |
Now, of course, there's a relationship
link |
between time and repetitions,
link |
but there are some beautiful experiments
link |
that point to the fact that by simple adjustment
link |
of what you are focused on
link |
as you attempt to learn a new skill,
link |
you can adjust the number of repetitions that you do,
link |
you adjust your motivation for learning,
link |
and you can vastly accelerate learning.
link |
Some of you may recognize this by its internet name,
link |
which is not a scientific term,
link |
which is the Super Mario effect.
link |
There's actually a quite good video on YouTube
link |
describing the Super Mario effect.
link |
I think it was a YouTuber who has,
link |
I think, a background in science.
link |
And he did an interesting experiment,
link |
and I'll talk about his experiment first,
link |
and then I will talk about the neurobiology
link |
that supports the result that he got.
link |
The Super Mario effect relates
link |
to the game Super Mario Brothers,
link |
but you'll see why at the end.
link |
But basically what they did was they had 50,000 subjects,
link |
which is a enormous number of subjects.
link |
essentially taking words from a computer program
link |
or the commands for a computer program
link |
that were kind of clustered in a column on the right.
link |
So these are the sorts of things
link |
that computer programmers will be familiar with,
link |
but other people won't.
link |
And those commands are essentially,
link |
they essentially translate to things like go forward,
link |
and then if it's a right-hand turn in the maze,
link |
then go right and continue
link |
until you hit a choice point, et cetera.
link |
So it's a bunch of instructions,
link |
but the job of the subjects in these experiments
link |
were to organize those instructions in a particular way
link |
that would allow a little cursor
link |
to move through the maze successfully, okay?
link |
So basically the goal was,
link |
or at least what the subjects were told,
link |
is that anyone can learn to computer program,
link |
and if somebody can just organize the instructions
link |
then they can program this little cursor
link |
to move through a maze, very simple.
link |
And yet, if you don't have any background
link |
in computer programming, or even if you do,
link |
it takes some skill.
link |
You have to know what commands to give
link |
in what particular order, and they made that very easy.
link |
You could just assemble them in a list
link |
over onto the right.
link |
So people started doing this.
link |
Now, there were two groups,
link |
and one half of the subjects,
link |
if they got it wrong,
link |
meaning they entered a command and the cursor would move,
link |
and it was the wrong command
link |
for this little cursor to move through the maze,
link |
they saw a signal jump up on their screen
link |
that said, that did not work, please try again.
link |
If they put in the wrong command
link |
or it was in the wrong sequence,
link |
it would say, that did not work, please try again,
link |
and then the subjects would reorganize the instructions,
link |
and then the little cursor would continue,
link |
and if they got it wrong again,
link |
it would say, that did not work, please try again, okay?
link |
The other half of the subjects,
link |
if they got something wrong, were told,
link |
you just lost five points, please continue.
link |
So that's the only difference in the feedback that they got.
link |
Now, I have to confess, I would have predicted
link |
based on my knowledge of dopamine circuitry
link |
and reward contingency and epinephrine and stress
link |
and motivated learning,
link |
and this other thing that we've been told
link |
in many, many books on behavioral economics
link |
and in the self-help literature,
link |
which is that people will work much harder
link |
to prevent losing something
link |
than they will to gain something,
link |
that you hear all the time,
link |
and it turns out that that's not at all what happened.
link |
If they looked at the success rate of the subjects,
link |
what they found was that the subjects that were told,
link |
that did not work, please try again,
link |
had a 68% success rate.
link |
68% of them went on to successfully program
link |
this cursor moving through the maze.
link |
Whereas the ones that were told, you lost five points,
link |
had a 52% success rate, which is a significant difference.
link |
But the source of the success or the lack of success
link |
is really interesting.
link |
The subjects that were told, that did not work,
link |
tried many, many more times per unit time.
link |
In other words, they made more attempts
link |
at programming this thing
link |
to allow this cursor to move through the maze.
link |
Whereas the people that were told, you lost five points,
link |
gave up earlier or gave up entirely.
link |
Okay, so let's just step back from this
link |
because to me, this was very surprising.
link |
It violates a lot of things that I had heard
link |
in the kind of popular culture or the self-help literature
link |
that people will work much harder
link |
to avoid losing something than they will to gain something.
link |
And it didn't really fit with what I understood
link |
about reward contingencies and dopamine.
link |
But it did fit well with another set of experiments
link |
that I'm very familiar with from the neuroscience literature
link |
and I'll give you the punchline first.
link |
And then we're going to take what these data mean
link |
and we're going to talk about a learning protocol
link |
that you can use that will allow you to learn skills faster
link |
by willingly participating in more repetitions
link |
of the skill learning.
link |
Meaning you will want to do more repetitions
link |
even if you're getting it wrong some or most of the time.
link |
So the experiment that I want to tell you about
link |
is called the tube test.
link |
And this is generally done in mice
link |
although it's sometimes been done in rats
link |
and it has a lot of parallels to some things
link |
that you've probably seen and experienced
link |
even in human life, in regular life, maybe even in your life.
link |
So here's the experiment.
link |
You take two rats, you put them in a tube
link |
or two mice, you put them in a tube.
link |
And mice and rats, they don't like to share the same tube.
link |
So what they'll do is they'll start pushing each other
link |
back and forth, back and forth.
link |
Sooner or later, one of the rats or mice
link |
pushes the other one out.
link |
The one that got pushed out is the loser.
link |
The one that gets the tube is the winner.
link |
Okay, now you take the winner, you give it a new competitor
link |
and what you find is that the mouse or rat
link |
that won previously has a much higher than chance
link |
probability of winning the second time.
link |
In other words, winning before leads to winning again.
link |
And the reverse is also true.
link |
If you take the loser and you put that loser in
link |
with another mouse, fresh mouse, new mouse,
link |
the loser typically will lose
link |
at much greater probability than chance.
link |
And this is not related to differences in strength
link |
or size or testosterone or any other of the things
link |
that might leap to mind as explanations for this
link |
because those were all controlled for.
link |
Now, that result had been known about for decades
link |
but three years ago, there was a paper published
link |
in the journal Science, Phenomenal Journal,
link |
it's one of the three apex journals,
link |
that examined the brain area that's involved in this.
link |
Turns out it's a particular area of the frontal cortex
link |
for those of you that want to know.
link |
And they did a simple experiment where they,
link |
the experimenters increased or decreased the activity
link |
of this brain area in the prefrontal cortex,
link |
little sub-region of the prefrontal cortex.
link |
And what they found is if they stimulated this brain area,
link |
a mouse or rat, regardless of whether or not
link |
it had been a winner or loser before,
link |
became a winner every single time.
link |
And they showed that if they blocked the activity
link |
of this brain area, regardless of whether or not
link |
the mouse or rat had been a winner or a loser,
link |
it became a loser every single time.
link |
And this translated to other scenarios,
link |
other competitive scenarios,
link |
where they'd put a bunch of mice or rats
link |
in a kind of cool chamber,
link |
they'd have a little heat lamp in the corner
link |
and mice like heat,
link |
and there was only enough space for one mouse
link |
to get the, be under the heat.
link |
And the one that had won in the tube test
link |
or that had the brain area stimulated
link |
always got the nice warm spot, okay?
link |
So what is this magic brain area?
link |
Well, the reason I'm bringing this up today,
link |
and the reason I'm bringing it up
link |
on the heels of the Super Mario effect
link |
is that stimulation of this brain area
link |
had a very simple and very important effect,
link |
which was it led to more forward steps,
link |
more repetitions, more effort,
link |
but not in terms of sheer might and will,
link |
not digging deeper, just more repetitions per unit time.
link |
And the losers had fewer repetitions per unit time.
link |
So the Super Mario effect, this online experiment,
link |
and the tube test, which has been done by various labs
link |
and repeated again and again,
link |
point to a simple but very important rule,
link |
which is neither the 10,000 hours rule
link |
nor the magic wand Hollywood version of learning,
link |
but rather the neurobiological explanation
link |
for learning a skill is you want to perform
link |
as many repetitions per unit time as you possibly can,
link |
at least when you're first trying to learn a skill.
link |
I want to repeat that.
link |
You want to perform as many repetitions as you possibly can,
link |
at least when you're first trying to learn a skill.
link |
Now that might sound like a duh, it's just more reps,
link |
but it's not so obvious.
link |
There's no reason why more repetitions
link |
should necessarily lead to faster learning
link |
because you could also say, well, more repetitions,
link |
you can make more errors,
link |
and those errors would lead to poor performance,
link |
like misstepping a number of times.
link |
And in these cases, there's very little feedback, right?
link |
It's not like every time the rat pushes forward
link |
or moves back that it is sensing, oh, I'm winning,
link |
I'm losing, I'm winning, I'm losing on a micro level.
link |
It probably does that as it starts to push the other one out
link |
the rat or mouse probably thinks I'm winning.
link |
And as it's backing up, it probably thinks I'm losing.
link |
As you play the game, the Super Mario game,
link |
you are told, nope, that didn't work,
link |
nope, that didn't work, please try again.
link |
But the important thing is that the winners
link |
are always generating more repetitions per unit time.
link |
It's just a repeat of performance, repeat of performance,
link |
even if there are errors.
link |
And that points to something vitally important,
link |
which is reps are important,
link |
but making error reps is also important.
link |
In fact, it might be the most important factor.
link |
So let's talk about errors and why those solve the problem
link |
of what to focus on.
link |
Because as I said earlier, if you want to learn something,
link |
you need to know if it's open loop or closed loop,
link |
and you need to know what to focus on,
link |
where to place your perception.
link |
And that seems like a tough task,
link |
but errors will tell you exactly what to focus on.
link |
So let's talk about errors and why you can leverage errors
link |
to accelerate skill learning.
link |
Okay, so we've established that performing
link |
the maximum number of repetitions per training session
link |
is going to be advantageous.
link |
And that might seem obvious,
link |
but there's a shadowy side to that, which is,
link |
well, why would I want to just repeat the same thing
link |
over and over again if I'm getting it wrong 90% of the time?
link |
And the reason is that the errors
link |
actually cue your nervous system to two things,
link |
one, to error correction,
link |
and the other is it opens the door
link |
or the window for neuroplasticity.
link |
Neuroplasticity is the brain and nervous system's ability
link |
to change in response to experience,
link |
essentially to custom modify itself
link |
in order to perform anything better.
link |
We did an entire month on neuroplasticity,
link |
and I talked a little bit about errors
link |
and why they're important.
link |
Now we're going to make this very concrete
link |
and operationalize it, make it very actionable.
link |
There was a paper that was published in 2021
link |
from Norman et al.
link |
This is a very important paper.
link |
It was published in the journal Neuron,
link |
which is a cell press journal, excellent journal.
link |
The title of the paper gives it away essentially,
link |
which is Post-Error Recruitment
link |
of Frontal Sensory Cortical Projections Promotes Attention.
link |
Now, what that says is that when you make an error,
link |
it causes an activation of the brain areas
link |
that anchor your attention.
link |
Remember, we need perception, attention,
link |
which they're essentially the same thing.
link |
We need proprioception,
link |
and we need the upper and lower motor neurons
link |
to communicate in the proper ways.
link |
And this vital question is what to pay attention to.
link |
Errors tell your nervous system
link |
that something needs to change.
link |
So if you are performing a task or a skill,
link |
like you're learning how to dance
link |
and you're stepping on the other person's toes
link |
or you're fumbling or you're not getting it right,
link |
those errors are opening the possibility for plasticity.
link |
If you walk away at that point,
link |
you've made the exact wrong choice, okay?
link |
Unless the errors are somehow hazardous to your health
link |
or somebody else's wellbeing,
link |
you want to continue to engage at a high repetition rate.
link |
That's really where the learning is possible.
link |
Without errors, the brain is not in a position
link |
Errors actually cue the frontal cortex networks,
link |
what we call top-down processing,
link |
and the neuromodulators,
link |
things like dopamine and acetylcholine and epinephrine,
link |
that will allow for plasticity.
link |
So while the Super Mario experiment, the maze experiment,
link |
was only focused on generating errors,
link |
telling people that wasn't right, please try again,
link |
or that wasn't right, you lost five points,
link |
the key distinction is that the errors themselves
link |
cued people to the fact that they needed to change something.
link |
So if you're trying to learn a new skill
link |
and you're screwing up and you're making mistakes,
link |
the more mistakes you make,
link |
the more plastic your brain becomes,
link |
such that when you get it right,
link |
that correct pattern will be rewarded and consolidated.
link |
And you can trust that it will
link |
because the performance of something correctly
link |
is associated with the release
link |
of this neuromodulator dopamine.
link |
Dopamine is involved in craving and motivation,
link |
it's involved in a lot of things,
link |
but it's also involved in learning.
link |
We will do an entire episode on dopamine and learning,
link |
but because some of you are probably wondering,
link |
this does not mean that just increasing
link |
your dopamine levels before learning
link |
will allow you to learn faster.
link |
In fact, increasing your dopamine levels
link |
before learning using pharmacology
link |
will actually reduce what's called the signal to noise.
link |
It will make these increases in dopamine
link |
that pop up in your brain that suddenly make you realize,
link |
ah, I got that one right.
link |
It will make those smaller
link |
relative to the background levels of dopamine, okay?
link |
You want a big spike in dopamine
link |
when you perform a motor pattern correctly,
link |
and you want to make lots of errors,
link |
many, many repetitions of errors
link |
in order to get to that correct performance.
link |
Now, if you're like most people,
link |
you're going to do this in a way that's somewhat random,
link |
meaning, let's say it's a tennis serve,
link |
I can't play tennis,
link |
I think I've probably played tennis twice.
link |
So if I throw the ball up in the air and hit it,
link |
I'm going to get it wrong and probably hit the net,
link |
then I'm going to hit the net.
link |
Then I'll probably go too long,
link |
then I'll probably go over the fence.
link |
At some point, I like to think I'll get it correct.
link |
The dopamine signal for that is going to be quite big,
link |
and I'll think, okay, what did I do there?
link |
I actually don't know, I wasn't paying attention.
link |
What I was paying attention to is whether or not the ball
link |
went to the correct location
link |
on the opposite side of the net.
link |
Remember, it's an open loop move,
link |
so I don't actually know what I did correctly,
link |
but your nervous system will take care of that
link |
provided I, in this case,
link |
complete more and more and more repetitions.
link |
Now, if I were to just elevate my basal level of dopamine
link |
by taking, I don't know,
link |
1,500 milligrams of L-tyrosine or something,
link |
that would be bad because the increase in dopamine
link |
would actually be much lower, right?
link |
We would say the delta is smaller,
link |
the signal to noise is smaller
link |
if my overall levels of dopamine are very, very high,
link |
so I'm actually going to learn less well.
link |
So for skill learning, motor skill learning,
link |
increasing your dopamine levels prior is not a good idea.
link |
It might help with motivation to get to the learning,
link |
but it's not going to improve the plasticity process itself
link |
and it's likely to hinder it,
link |
and so that's very important.
link |
So these errors cue the brain that something was wrong
link |
and they open up the possibility for plasticity.
link |
It's what's sometimes called the framing effect.
link |
It frames what's important,
link |
and so I think this is a shift that we've heard about,
link |
you know, growth mindset, which is the incredible discovery
link |
and theory and practice of my colleague,
link |
Carol Dweck at Stanford.
link |
This is distinct from that, right?
link |
This isn't about motivation to learn.
link |
This is about how you actually learn.
link |
So the key is designate a particular block of time
link |
that you are going to perform repetitions.
link |
So maybe that's 30 minutes, maybe that's an hour.
link |
Work for time and then try and perform the maximum number
link |
of repetitions that you can do safely
link |
for you and others per unit time.
link |
That's going to be the best way to approach learning
link |
for most sessions.
link |
I will talk about other things that one can do,
link |
but making errors is key,
link |
and this isn't a motivational speech.
link |
I'm not saying, oh, go make errors.
link |
Errors are good for you.
link |
You have to fail in order to win.
link |
No, you have to fail in order to open up
link |
the possibility of plasticity,
link |
but you have to fail many times within the same session,
link |
and those failures will cue your attention
link |
to the appropriate sensory events.
link |
Now, sometimes we're working with a coach,
link |
and so this is a shout out to all the coaches.
link |
Thank you for doing what you do.
link |
However, there needs to be,
link |
at least what the scientific literature say,
link |
there needs to be a period of each training session
link |
whereby the athlete or the person of any kind
link |
can simply pay attention to their errors
link |
without their attention being cued to something else.
link |
A really well-trained coach will say,
link |
oh, you know, your elbow's swinging too high
link |
or you're not gripping the racket
link |
in the appropriate way, et cetera.
link |
They can see things that the practitioner can't see,
link |
and of course that's vitally important,
link |
but the practitioner also needs
link |
to use this error recognition signal.
link |
They need to basically focus on something,
link |
and the errors are going to tell them what to focus on.
link |
So put simply, there needs to be a period of time
link |
in which it's just repetition after repetition
link |
I think many people, including coaches,
link |
are afraid that bad habits will get ingrained,
link |
and while indeed that's possible,
link |
it's very important that these errors occur
link |
in order to cue the attentional systems
link |
and to open the door for plasticity.
link |
So if I'm told, look, you know, I'm standing a little wide,
link |
I need to tighten up my stance a little bit, great,
link |
but then I need to generate many repetitions
link |
from that tightened stance, okay?
link |
So if I'm constantly being cued from the outside
link |
about what I'm doing incorrectly,
link |
that's not going to be as efficient, okay?
link |
So for some people, these learning sessions
link |
might be 10 minutes.
link |
For some people, it might be an hour.
link |
Whatever you can allocate, because your lifestyles will vary
link |
and whether or not you're a professional athlete,
link |
et cetera, will vary,
link |
you want to get the maximum number of repetitions in
link |
and you want to make errors.
link |
That's allowing for plasticity.
link |
So science points to the fact
link |
that there's a particular sequencing of learning sessions
link |
that will allow you to learn faster
link |
and to retain the skill learning,
link |
and it involves doing exactly as I just described,
link |
which is getting as many repetitions as you can
link |
in the learning session,
link |
paying attention to the errors that you make,
link |
and then the rewards that will be generated,
link |
again, these are neurochemical rewards,
link |
from the successful performance of a movement
link |
or the approximate successful performance.
link |
So maybe you get the golf swing better, but not perfect,
link |
but that's still going to be rewarded
link |
with this neurochemical mechanism.
link |
And then after the session,
link |
you need to do something very specific, which is nothing.
link |
There are beautiful data describing neurons
link |
in our hippocampus,
link |
this area of our brain involved in the consolidation
link |
Those data point to the fact that in sleep,
link |
there's a replay of the sequence of neurons
link |
that were involved in certain behaviors the previous day,
link |
and sometimes the previous day before that.
link |
However, there are also data that show
link |
that after a skill learning session,
link |
any kind of motor movement,
link |
provided you're not bringing in
link |
a lot more additional new sensory stimuli,
link |
there's a replay of the motor sequence
link |
that you performed correctly,
link |
and there's an elimination of the motor sequences
link |
that you performed incorrectly,
link |
and they are run backward in time, okay?
link |
So to be very clear about this,
link |
if I were to learn a new skill or navigate a new city,
link |
or let's just stay with the motor skill,
link |
let's say the free throw or a golf swing or a tennis serve,
link |
dance move novice,
link |
so I'm still going to make a lot of errors,
link |
don't get it perfectly,
link |
but maybe I get a little bit better
link |
where I perform it correctly three times out of 1,000,
link |
and it sounds like something I might do,
link |
and there I'm probably being generous to myself.
link |
After I finished the training session,
link |
I'm not focused on some additional learning,
link |
I'm not bringing a lot of sensory information in,
link |
if I just sit there and close my eyes
link |
for five to 10 minutes, even one minute,
link |
the brain starts to replay the motor sequence
link |
corresponding to the correct pattern of movement,
link |
but it plays that sequence backward.
link |
Now, why it plays it backward, we don't know.
link |
If I were to wait until sleep,
link |
or regardless of when I sleep later that night,
link |
the sequence will be replayed forwards
link |
in the proper sequence,
link |
immediately afterward, it's played backward
link |
for reasons that are still unclear,
link |
but the replay of that sequence backwards
link |
appears to be important
link |
for the consolidation of the skill learning.
link |
Now, this is important
link |
because many people are finishing their jujitsu class,
link |
or they're finishing their yoga class,
link |
or they're finishing their dance class,
link |
or they're finishing some skill learning,
link |
and then they're immediately devoting their attention
link |
to something else.
link |
You hear a lot about visualization,
link |
and we are going to talk about visualization,
link |
but in the kind of obsession
link |
with the idea that we can learn things
link |
just sitting there with our eyes closed
link |
without having to perform a movement,
link |
we've overlooked something perhaps even more important,
link |
or at least equally important,
link |
which is after skill learning,
link |
after putting effort into something,
link |
sitting quietly with the eyes closed
link |
for one to five to 10 minutes
link |
allows the brain to replay the sequence
link |
in a way that appears important
link |
for the more rapid consolidation
link |
of the motor sequence of the pattern
link |
and to accelerated learning.
link |
If you'd like to learn more about this,
link |
this is not work that I was involved in.
link |
I want to be very clear.
link |
There's an excellent paper that covers this and much more
link |
for those of you that really want to dive deep on this,
link |
and we will dive deeper in a moment.
link |
This is a review that was published in the journal Neuron,
link |
excellent journal.
link |
Many of the papers that I'm referring to
link |
were covered in this review,
link |
which is titled neuroplasticity
link |
sub-serving motor skill learning
link |
by Dayan, D-A-Y-A-N,
link |
I hope I'm not butchering the pronunciation,
link |
and Cohen by Leonard Cohen,
link |
but not the Leonard Cohen most of us are familiar with,
link |
the musician Leonard Cohen.
link |
neuroplasticity sub-serving motor skill learning,
link |
and this was published in 2011,
link |
but there have been a number of updates
link |
and the literature that I've described
link |
in other portions of today's episode
link |
come from the more recent literature,
link |
such as the more recent 2021 paper, okay?
link |
So you have this basic learning session
link |
and then a period of time afterwards
link |
in which the brain can rehearse what it just did.
link |
We hear so much about mental rehearsal,
link |
and we always think about mental rehearsal
link |
as the thing you do before you train or instead of training,
link |
but this is rehearsal that's done afterward
link |
where the brain is just automatically scripting
link |
through the sequence,
link |
and for some reason that's still not clear
link |
as to why this would be the case, it runs backward.
link |
Then in sleep, it runs forwards,
link |
and certainly, absolutely,
link |
sleep and quality sleep of the appropriate duration, et cetera
link |
is going to be important for learning of all kinds,
link |
including skill learning.
link |
We did an entire four episodes on sleep
link |
and how to get better at sleeping.
link |
Those are the episodes back in January,
link |
episodes essentially one, two, three, and four,
link |
and maybe even episode five, I don't recall,
link |
but you can go there to find out
link |
all about how to get better at sleeping.
link |
Now, there are other training sessions involved, right?
link |
I'm not going to learn the perfect golf swing
link |
or the tennis serve or how to dance in one session,
link |
and I doubt you will either.
link |
So the question is when to come back
link |
and what to do when you come back to the training session.
link |
Now, first of all,
link |
this principle of errors, cuing attention
link |
and opening the opportunity for plasticity,
link |
that's never going to change.
link |
That's going to be true for somebody who is hyper-skilled,
link |
who's even has mastery or even virtuosity
link |
in a given skill, right?
link |
Remember, when you're unskilled at something,
link |
uncertainty is very high.
link |
As you become more skilled, certainty goes up, right?
link |
Then eventually you achieve levels of mastery
link |
where certainty is very, very high about your ability
link |
to perform yours certainty and that of other people.
link |
And then there's this fourth category of virtuosity
link |
where somebody, maybe you,
link |
invites uncertainty back into the practice
link |
because only with that uncertainty
link |
can you express your full range of abilities,
link |
which you aren't even aware of
link |
until uncertainty comes into the picture, right?
link |
I happen to have the great privilege
link |
of being friends with Laird Hamilton,
link |
the big wave surfer, who's phenomenal.
link |
I certainly don't surf with Laird,
link |
but he and another guy that he surfs with,
link |
Luca Padua, these guys, they're virtuosos at surfing.
link |
They don't just want the wave that they can master.
link |
They want uncertainty.
link |
They're at the point in their practice
link |
where when uncertainty shows up,
link |
like a wave that's either so big
link |
or is moving in a particular way
link |
that it brings an element of uncertainty for them
link |
about what they're going to do,
link |
that they recognize that as the opportunity
link |
to perform better than they would otherwise, okay?
link |
So they're actually trying to eliminate uncertainty.
link |
At the beginning of learning any skill
link |
and as we approach from uncertain to skilled to mastery,
link |
we want to reduce uncertainty.
link |
And that's really what the nervous system is doing.
link |
It's trying to eliminate errors
link |
and hone in on the correct trajectories.
link |
If you perform a lot of repetitions
link |
and then you use a period immediately after,
link |
we don't really have a name for this.
link |
Maybe someone will come up with it
link |
and put it in the comment section if you're on YouTube,
link |
if you're watching this on YouTube,
link |
a name for this post-learning kind of idle time
link |
for the brain, the brain isn't idle at all.
link |
It's actually scripting all these things in reverse
link |
that allow for deeper learning and more quick learning.
link |
But if we fill that time with other things,
link |
if we are focused on our phones
link |
or we're focused on learning something else,
link |
we're focusing on our performance,
link |
that's not going to serve us well.
link |
It's at least it's not going to serve
link |
the skill learning well.
link |
So please, if you're interested in more rapid skill learning
link |
try introducing these sessions, they can be quite powerful.
link |
And then on subsequent sessions,
link |
presumably after a night's sleep
link |
or maybe you're doing two sessions a day,
link |
although two sessions a day is going to be a lot
link |
for most people, unless you're a professional
link |
or a high level athlete.
link |
The subsequent sessions are where you get to express
link |
the gains of the previous session, right?
link |
Where you get to perform well, presumably more often,
link |
even if it's just subtle,
link |
sometimes there'll be a decrease in performance,
link |
but most often you're going to perform better
link |
on subsequent and subsequent training sessions.
link |
And there is the opportunity to devote attention
link |
in very specific ways, right?
link |
Not just let the errors inform you
link |
where to place your attention,
link |
but rather to direct your perception
link |
to particular elements of the movement
link |
in order to accelerate learning further, okay?
link |
So to be very clear,
link |
cause I know many of you are interested
link |
in concrete protocols.
link |
It's not just that you would only let errors
link |
cue your attention on the first session.
link |
You might do that for one session or five sessions,
link |
it's going to depend.
link |
But once you're familiar with something
link |
and you're performing it well every once in a while,
link |
you're accomplishing it better every once in a while,
link |
then you can start to cue your attention
link |
in very deliberate ways.
link |
And the question therefore becomes
link |
what to cue your attention to.
link |
And the good news is it doesn't matter.
link |
There is a beautiful set of experiments
link |
that have been done looking at sequences of keys
link |
being played on a piano.
link |
This is work that was published just a couple of years ago.
link |
There are actually several papers now
link |
that are focused on this.
link |
One of them was published in 2018.
link |
This is from Claudia Lape and colleagues, L-A-P-P-E.
link |
She's done some really nice work,
link |
which talks about the influence of pitch feedback
link |
on learning of motor timing and sequencing.
link |
And this was done with piano,
link |
but it carries over to athletic performance as well.
link |
So I'm going to describe this study to you.
link |
But before I describe it,
link |
what is so interesting about this study
link |
that I want you to know about
link |
is that it turns out it doesn't matter so much
link |
what you pay attention to during the learning sequence,
link |
provided it's something related to the motor behavior
link |
that you're performing, right?
link |
That seems incredible, right?
link |
I'm not good at a tennis serve.
link |
So if I've done, you know,
link |
let's say a thousand repetitions of the tennis serve,
link |
maybe I got it right three to 10 times.
link |
Now I'm being even more generous with myself.
link |
And I do this post-training session
link |
where I let my brain idle and I get some good sleep
link |
and I come back and now I start generating errors again,
link |
presumably or hopefully fewer errors,
link |
but I decide I'm going to cue my attention
link |
to something very specific,
link |
like maybe how tightly I'm holding the racket,
link |
or maybe it's my stance,
link |
or maybe it's whether or not I rotate my right shoulder in
link |
as I hit the ball across the net, I'm making this up again.
link |
I don't play tennis.
link |
It turns out that as long as it's the same thing
link |
throughout the session, learning is accelerated.
link |
And I'll explain why this makes sense in a moment,
link |
but just to be really clear, you can, and one should,
link |
use your powers of attention to direct your attention
link |
to particular aspects of a motor movement.
link |
Once you're familiar with the general theme of the movement,
link |
but what you pay attention to exactly is not important.
link |
What's important is that you pay attention
link |
to one specific thing.
link |
So what Claudia Lappe and colleagues showed
link |
was that if people are trying to learn a sequence of keys
link |
on the piano, there are multiple forms of feedback.
link |
There are error signals.
link |
If, for instance, they hear a piece of music
link |
and then they're told to press the keys
link |
in a particular sequence and the noise that comes out,
link |
the sound that comes out of the piano
link |
does not sound like the song they just heard, right?
link |
So instead of, and here, forgive me,
link |
because I'm neither musical nor can I sing,
link |
but instead of, da, da, da, da, da, da,
link |
they hear that, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da,
link |
and then instead when they play,
link |
or if it were me, it would sound something like,
link |
da, da, da, da, da, da, it wouldn't sound right, okay?
link |
It wouldn't sound right because I likely got
link |
the sequence wrong or I was pressing too hard on the keys
link |
or too lightly on the keys, et cetera.
link |
What they showed was if they just instruct people
link |
about the correct sequence to press on the keys,
link |
it actually doesn't matter what sound comes back
link |
provided it's the correct sound or it's the same sound.
link |
All right, so here's the experiment.
link |
They had people press on these keys
link |
and it was a typical piano
link |
and it generated the particular sequence of sounds
link |
that would be generated by pressing the keys on the piano.
link |
Or they modified the keyboard, in this case, or piano,
link |
such that when people pressed on the keys,
link |
a random tone, different tones were played
link |
each time they pressed on the keys.
link |
So it sounded crazy, it sounded like noise,
link |
but the motor sequence was the same.
link |
Or they had a single tone
link |
that was played every time they pressed a key
link |
and the job or the task of the subject
link |
was just to press the keys in the proper sequence.
link |
So instead of da, da, da, da, da, da, da,
link |
it was just da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.
link |
Instead of da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da,
link |
it's da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.
link |
It's even hard for me to say an even tone,
link |
but you get the idea.
link |
So a singular tone, just think a doorbell being rung
link |
with each press of the key would be really annoying, okay?
link |
But it turns out that the rate to motor learning
link |
was the same whether or not they were getting feedback
link |
that was accurate to the keys of the piano
link |
or whether or not it was a constant tone.
link |
Performance was terrible
link |
and the rates of learning were terrible
link |
if they were getting random tones back.
link |
So what this means is that learning to play the piano
link |
at least at these early stages
link |
is really just about generating the motor commands.
link |
It's not about paying attention to the sound
link |
that's coming out of the piano.
link |
And this makes sense because when we are beginners,
link |
we are trying to focus our attention
link |
on the things that we can control.
link |
And if you think about this, if you conceptualize this,
link |
pressing the keys on the piano and paying attention
link |
to the sounds that are coming out are two things.
link |
So what this means is that as you get deeper
link |
and deeper into a practice,
link |
focusing purely on the motor execution can be beneficial.
link |
Now, this is going to be harder to do
link |
with open loop type things where you're getting feedback.
link |
I guess a good example of open loop
link |
would be the attempt at a back flip, right?
link |
If you get it wrong, you will immediately know.
link |
If you get it right, you'll immediately know.
link |
Please don't go out and try and do a back flip
link |
on the solid ground or even on a trampoline
link |
if you don't know what you're doing,
link |
because very likely you'll get it wrong
link |
and you'll get injured.
link |
But if it's something that is closed loop
link |
where you can repeat again and again and again and again,
link |
that is advantageous
link |
because you can perform many, many repetitions
link |
and you can start to focus or learn to focus your attention
link |
just on the pattern of movement.
link |
In other words, you can learn to play the piano
link |
just as fast or maybe even faster
link |
by just focusing on the sequence
link |
that you are moving your digits, your fingers,
link |
and not the feedback.
link |
Now, I'm sure there are music teachers out there
link |
and piano teachers that are screaming,
link |
no, you're going to ruin the practice
link |
that all of us have embedded in our minds
link |
and in our students, and I agree.
link |
At some point, you need to start including feedback
link |
about whether or not things sound correct.
link |
But one of the beauties of skill learning
link |
is that you can choose to parameterize it,
link |
meaning you can choose to just focus on the motor sequence
link |
or just focus on the sounds that are coming back
link |
and then integrate those.
link |
And so we hear a lot about chunking,
link |
about breaking things down into their component parts.
link |
But one of the biggest challenges for skill learning
link |
is knowing where to place your attention.
link |
So to dial out again,
link |
we're building a protocol across this episode.
link |
Early sessions, maybe it's the first one,
link |
maybe it's the first 10, maybe it's the first 100.
link |
It depends on how many repetitions you're packing in.
link |
But during those initial sessions,
link |
the key is to make many errors,
link |
to let the reward process govern the plasticity,
link |
let the errors open the plasticity,
link |
and then after the learning sessions,
link |
to let the brain go idle,
link |
at least for a short period of time,
link |
and of course, to maximize sleep.
link |
As you start incorporating more sessions,
link |
you start to gain some skill level,
link |
learning to harness and focus your attention
link |
on particular features of the movement,
link |
independent of the rewards and the feedback, right?
link |
So the reward is no longer in the tone
link |
coming from the piano,
link |
or whether or not you struck the target correctly,
link |
but simply the motor movement,
link |
focusing your, for instance, in a dart throw,
link |
on the action of your arm.
link |
That is embedding the plasticity
link |
in the motor pattern most deeply.
link |
That's what's been shown by the scientific literature.
link |
I'm sure there are coaches and teachers out there
link |
that will entirely disagree with me, and that's great.
link |
Please let me know what you prefer.
link |
Let me know where you think this is wrong.
link |
And it rarely happens,
link |
but let me know where you think this might be right as well.
link |
So we're breaking the learning process
link |
down into its component parts.
link |
As we get more and more skilled,
link |
meaning as we make fewer and fewer errors
link |
per a given session per unit time,
link |
that's when attention can start to migrate
link |
from one feature, such as the motor sequence,
link |
to another feature, which is perhaps one's stance,
link |
and another component of the sequence,
link |
which would be the result that's one getting
link |
on a trial-to-trial basis, right?
link |
So changing it up each time.
link |
So maybe I serve the tennis ball,
link |
and I'm focusing on where the ball lands,
link |
and then I'm focusing on the speed,
link |
then I'm focusing on my grip,
link |
then I'm focusing on my stance, from trial to trial.
link |
But until we've mastered the core motor movements,
link |
which is done session to session,
link |
that, at least according to the literature
link |
that I have access to here, seems to be suboptimal.
link |
So hopefully this is starting to make sense,
link |
which is that these connections
link |
between upper motor neurons, lower motor neurons,
link |
and central pattern generators,
link |
you can't attack them all at once.
link |
You can't try and change them all at once.
link |
And so what we're doing is we're breaking things down
link |
into their component parts.
link |
Some of you may be wondering about speed of movement.
link |
There are some data,
link |
meaning some decent papers out there,
link |
showing that ultra slow movements,
link |
performing a movement essentially in slow motion,
link |
can be beneficial for enhancing the rate of skill learning.
link |
However, at least from my read of the literature,
link |
it appears that ultra slow movements
link |
should be performed after some degree of proficiency
link |
has already been gained in that particular movement.
link |
Now, that's not the way I would have thought about it.
link |
I would have thought, well,
link |
if you're learning how to do a proper kick
link |
or a punch in martial arts or something,
link |
that ultra slow movements at first
link |
are going to be the way that one can best learn
link |
how to perform a movement.
link |
And then you just gradually increase the speed.
link |
And it turns out that's not the case.
link |
And I probably should have known that.
link |
And you should probably know that
link |
because it turns out that when you do ultra slow movements,
link |
two things aren't available to you.
link |
One is the proprioceptive feedback is not accurate
link |
because fast movements of limbs are very different
link |
than slow movements of limbs.
link |
So you don't get the opportunity
link |
to build in the proprioceptive feedback.
link |
But the other reason why it doesn't work
link |
is that it's too accurate.
link |
You don't generate errors.
link |
And so the data that I was able to find
link |
showed that very slow movements can be beneficial
link |
if one is already proficient in a practice,
link |
but very slow movements at the beginning
link |
don't allow you to learn more quickly
link |
because you never generate errors
link |
and therefore the brain doesn't, it's not open for change.
link |
And the window for plasticity is never swung open
link |
So brings us back to this theme
link |
that errors allow for plasticity,
link |
correct performance of movements
link |
or semi-correct performance of movements cues
link |
the synapses in the brain areas
link |
and spinal circuits that need to change.
link |
And then those changes occur in the period
link |
immediately after skill learning and in sleep.
link |
So super slow movements can be beneficial
link |
once you already have some proficiency.
link |
So this might be standing in your living room
link |
and just in ultra slow motion performing your tennis serve,
link |
learning to or thinking about
link |
how you're adjusting your elbow and your arm
link |
and the trajectory exactly how you were taught
link |
by your tennis coach,
link |
but trying to learn it that way from the outset
link |
does not appear to be the best way to learn a skill.
link |
When should you start to introduce slow learning?
link |
Well, obviously talk to your coaches about this,
link |
but if you're doing this recreationally
link |
or you don't have a coach, I realize many of you don't,
link |
I don't have a coach for anything that I do.
link |
I'm going to just navigating it
link |
by using the scientific literature.
link |
It appears that once you're hitting success rates
link |
of about 25 or 30%,
link |
that's where the super slow movements
link |
can start to be beneficial.
link |
But if you're still performing things at a rate
link |
of five or 10% correct and the rest are errors,
link |
then the super slow movements
link |
are probably not going to benefit you that much.
link |
Also super slow movements are not really applicable
link |
to a lot of things.
link |
For instance, you could imagine throwing a dart
link |
super slow motion,
link |
but if you actually try and throw an actual dart,
link |
the dart's just going to fall to the floor, obviously.
link |
So there are a number of things like baseball bat swing,
link |
which you can practice in super slow motion,
link |
but if you try and do that with an actual baseball
link |
or softball or something like that,
link |
that's not going to give you any kind of feedback
link |
about how effective it was.
link |
So super slow movements or a decelerated movement
link |
but once you're already performing things reasonably well,
link |
like maybe 25 to 30% success rate.
link |
And I've tried this, I actually,
link |
I struggle with basketball for whatever reason
link |
and my free throw is terrible.
link |
So I've practiced free throws in super slow motion
link |
and I nail them every time.
link |
The problem is there's no ball.
link |
Some of you already have a fair degree of proficiency
link |
of skill in a given practice or sport or instrument.
link |
And if you're in this sort of advanced intermediate
link |
or advanced levels of proficiency for something,
link |
there is a practice that you can find interesting data for
link |
in the literature, which involves metronoming.
link |
So this you'll realize relates to generating repetitions
link |
and it relates to the tone experiment
link |
where it doesn't really matter what your attention
link |
is cued to as long as you are performing many, many reps
link |
of the motor sequence.
link |
You can use a metronome and obviously musicians do this,
link |
but athletes can do this too.
link |
You can use a metronome to set the cadence
link |
of your repetitions.
link |
Now for swimmers, there's actually a device
link |
I was able to find online.
link |
I forget what the brand name was
link |
and that's not what this is about,
link |
but that actually goes in the swim cap
link |
that can cue you to when you need to perform another stroke.
link |
And for runners, there are other metronome type devices
link |
that through headphones or through a tone in the room
link |
if you're running indoors or on a treadmill
link |
will cue you to when you basically
link |
you need to lift your heels.
link |
And if you do that, what athletes find
link |
is they can perform more repetitions,
link |
they can generate more output, you can increase speed.
link |
A number of really interesting things are being done
link |
with auditory metronoming and then I'm involved
link |
in a little bit of work now that hopefully
link |
I'll be able to report back to you
link |
about using stroboscopic metronoming.
link |
So actually changing the speed of the visual environment.
link |
These are fun experiments,
link |
basically changing one's perception
link |
of how fast they're moving through space
link |
by playing with a visual system,
link |
something for a future discussion.
link |
But you can start to use auditory metronoming
link |
for generating more movements per unit time
link |
and generating more errors and therefore more successes
link |
and more neuroplasticity.
link |
There are a number of different apps out there.
link |
I found several free apps
link |
where you can set in a metronome pace.
link |
So it might be tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
link |
That's a little fast for most things
link |
but you can imagine if this were darts
link |
or this were golf swings that it might be tick, tick,
link |
tick, tick or something more like tick, tick.
link |
And every time the metronome goes, you swing.
link |
Every time the metronome goes, you throw a dart.
link |
There are actually some wild experiments out there.
link |
There's a world championship of cup stacking.
link |
There's a young lady who I saw could take all these cups
link |
spread out on a table and basically just stack them
link |
into the perfect pyramid in the least amount of times
link |
all the kids go wild.
link |
This is something I'd never thought to pursue
link |
and frankly never will pursue
link |
unless my life depends on it for some reason
link |
but it's really impressive.
link |
And if you look at the sequence
link |
because these have been recorded
link |
you can look this up on YouTube.
link |
What you'll find is that these expert cup stackers
link |
it's just all about error elimination
link |
but there too metronoming and auditory cues
link |
can actually cue them to pick up the cups faster
link |
than they would ordinarily and to learn to do that.
link |
You can do this for anything.
link |
I think cup stacking is probably not a skill
link |
most of you are interested in doing, but for any skill
link |
if you figure out at what rate you are performing
link |
repetitions per unit time
link |
and you want to increase that slightly, you set a metronome
link |
which is slightly faster than your current rate
link |
and you just start generating more repetitions.
link |
Now what's interesting about this and is cool
link |
is it relates back to the experiment from
link |
Lapé and colleagues which is
link |
your attention is now harnessed to the tone
link |
not necessarily to what you're doing
link |
in terms of the motor movement.
link |
And so really you need a bit of proficiency.
link |
Again, this is for people who are intermediate
link |
or advanced, intermediate or advanced
link |
but what you're essentially doing is
link |
you're creating an outside pressure, a contingency
link |
so that you generate again, more errors.
link |
So it's all about the errors that you get.
link |
Now these aren't errors where all the cups tumble
link |
or you have to stop or you can't keep up.
link |
You have to set the pace just a little bit
link |
beyond what you currently can do.
link |
And when you do that, you're essentially
link |
forcing the nervous system to make errors
link |
and correct the errors inside of the session.
link |
I find this really interesting
link |
because what it means is again,
link |
you've got sensory perception
link |
what you're paying attention to, proprioception
link |
where your limbs are and the motor neurons
link |
in your upper, lower motor neurons
link |
and central pattern generators.
link |
And you can't pay attention to it.
link |
Well, they're my upper motor neurons,
link |
they're my lower motor neurons.
link |
Forget that, you're not going to do that.
link |
You can't pay attention to your proprioception too much.
link |
That would be the super slow motion
link |
would be the proprioception.
link |
But you have to harness your attention to something.
link |
And if you harness your attention
link |
to this outside contingency, this metronome
link |
that's firing off and saying, now, go, now, go, now, go.
link |
Not only can you increase the number of repetitions,
link |
errors and successes, but for some reason
link |
and we don't know why the regular cadence
link |
of the tone of the metronome
link |
and the fact that you are anchoring your movements
link |
to some external force, to some external pressure or cue
link |
seems to accelerate the plasticity
link |
and the changes and the acquisition of skills
link |
beyond what it would be
link |
if you just did the same number of repetitions
link |
without that outside pressure.
link |
We don't know exactly what the mechanism is.
link |
Presumably it's neurochemical.
link |
Like there's something about keeping up with a timer
link |
or with a pace that presumably, and I'm speculating here
link |
causes the release of particular chemicals.
link |
But I think it's really cool.
link |
Metronomes, they're totally inexpensive.
link |
At least the ones that you use outside of water
link |
are very inexpensive.
link |
You can find these free apps.
link |
You can use a musical metronome.
link |
So metronomes are a powerful tool as well.
link |
In particular for speed work.
link |
So for sprinting or swimming or running
link |
where the goal is to generate more strokes
link |
or more efficient strokes or more steps, et cetera.
link |
The rate of the metronome obviously
link |
is going to be very important.
link |
Sometimes you're trying to lengthen your stride.
link |
Sometimes you're trying to take fewer strokes
link |
but glide further in the pool, for instance.
link |
But the value of occasionally
link |
just increasing the number of repetitions,
link |
the number of strokes or steps, et cetera, per unit time
link |
is also that you're training the central pattern generators
link |
to operate at that higher speed.
link |
One of the sports that's kind of interesting to me
link |
It's not one I engage in or ever plan to engage in.
link |
But if you've ever tried to really speed walk,
link |
it's actually difficult to walk very, very fast
link |
without breaking into a run.
link |
All animals have these kind of crossover points
link |
where they go, where you go,
link |
I think with horses, it's like, what is it?
link |
They trot, then they gallop.
link |
I don't know what's the next thing.
link |
I don't know clearly.
link |
I don't know anything about horses
link |
except that they're beautiful and I like them very much.
link |
But they break into a different kind of stride.
link |
And that's because you shift over
link |
to different central pattern generators.
link |
So when you're walking or a horse is moving very slowly
link |
and then it breaks into a jog and then into a full sprint
link |
or I got to get gallop for the horse,
link |
you're actually engaging
link |
different central pattern generators.
link |
And those central pattern generators
link |
always have a range of speeds
link |
that they're happiest to function at.
link |
So with the metronoming for speed purposes,
link |
what you do is you can basically bring the activity
link |
of those central pattern generators
link |
into their upper upper range
link |
and maybe even extend their range.
link |
And there's a fascinating biology
link |
of how central pattern generators work together.
link |
There's coupling of central pattern generators, et cetera,
link |
in order to achieve maximal speeds and et cetera.
link |
It's a topic for kind of an advanced session.
link |
Costello loves this topic.
link |
He just barked and loves it so much he barked again.
link |
In any event, the metronome is a powerful tool,
link |
again, for more advanced practitioners
link |
or for advanced intermediate practitioners.
link |
But it's interesting because it brings back the point
link |
that what we put our attention to
link |
while we're skill learning is important
link |
to the extent that it's on one thing,
link |
at least for the moment or trial to trial,
link |
but that what we focus our attention on can be external.
link |
It can be internal.
link |
And ultimately the skill learning
link |
is where all that is brought together.
link |
So let's talk about where skill learning occurs
link |
in the nervous system.
link |
And then I'm going to give you a really,
link |
what I think is a really cool tool
link |
that can increase flexibility and range of motion
link |
based on this particular brain area.
link |
It's a tool that I used and when I first heard about,
link |
I did not believe would work.
link |
This is not a hack.
link |
This is actually anchored deeply in the biology
link |
of a particular brain region that we all have
link |
whose meaning is mini brain.
link |
And that mini brain that we all have
link |
is called your cerebellum.
link |
The cerebellum is called the mini brain
link |
because it's in the back of your brain.
link |
It looks like a little mini version
link |
of the rest of your brain.
link |
It's an absolutely incredible structure
link |
that's involved in movement.
link |
It also has a lot of non-movement associated functions.
link |
In brief, the cerebellum gets input from your senses,
link |
particularly your eyes and pays attention
link |
to where your eyes are in space, what you're looking at.
link |
It basically takes information about three aspects
link |
of your eyes and eye movements,
link |
which are occurring when your head goes like this,
link |
which is called pitch, okay?
link |
For those of you that are listening,
link |
I'm just nodding up and down.
link |
Then there's yaw, which is like shaking your head no
link |
from side to side.
link |
And then there's roll, which is like sometimes
link |
if you see a primate, like a marmoset or something,
link |
they will roll their head when they look at you.
link |
Actually, the reason they do that
link |
is it helps generate depth perception.
link |
It's a kind of form of motion parallax
link |
if you're curious why they do that.
link |
It's not to look cute.
link |
They do it because when they do that,
link |
even if you're stationary and they're stationary,
link |
they get better depth perception
link |
as to how far away from them you are.
link |
So you've got pitch, yaw, and roll.
link |
And as you move your head and as you move your body
link |
and you move through space,
link |
the image on your retina moves, pitch, yaw, and roll,
link |
and some combination.
link |
That information is relayed to your cerebellum.
link |
So it's rich with visual information.
link |
There's also a map of your body surface
link |
and your movements and timing in the cerebellum.
link |
So it's an incredible structure
link |
that brings together timing of movements,
link |
which limbs are moving, and has proprioceptive information.
link |
It really is a mini brain.
link |
It's just the coolest little structure back there.
link |
And in humans, it's actually not that little.
link |
It's just an incredible structure.
link |
Now, all this information is integrated there,
link |
but what most people don't tell us
link |
is that a lot of learning of motor sequences,
link |
of skill learning that involved timing
link |
occurs in the cerebellum.
link |
Now, you can't really use that information
link |
except to know that after you learn something pretty well,
link |
it's handed off or kind of handled by your cerebellum.
link |
But there is something that you can do with your cerebellum
link |
to increase range of motion and flexibility.
link |
Much of our flexibility, believe it or not,
link |
is not because our tendons are of particular length
link |
or elasticity, although that plays some role.
link |
It's not because our muscles are short.
link |
I don't know what that would even mean.
link |
Some people have longer muscle bellies
link |
or shorter muscle bellies,
link |
but your muscles always essentially span the entire length
link |
of the bone or limb or close to it,
link |
along with your tendons.
link |
But it has to do with the neural innervation of muscle
link |
and the fact that when muscles are elongated,
link |
there's a point at which they won't stretch out
link |
any longer and the nerves fire and they shut down.
link |
You actually have inhibitory pathways
link |
that prevent you from contracting the muscles
link |
or from extending them, from stretching them out anymore.
link |
So you can do this right now.
link |
If you're driving, don't do it,
link |
because unless you have a self-driving car,
link |
you'll need to take your hands off the steering wheel.
link |
But because of the way that vision
link |
and your muscles are represented in your cerebellum,
link |
it turns out that your range of visual motion
link |
and your range of vision,
link |
literally how wide a field of view you take,
link |
impacts how far you can extend your limbs, okay?
link |
So we'll talk about this in a second,
link |
and about exactly how to do this and explore this.
link |
But as you move through space, as you walk forward,
link |
or you walk backward, or you tilt your head,
link |
or you learn a skill, or you just operate
link |
in the normal ways throughout your day,
link |
driving, biking, et cetera,
link |
your eyes are generating spontaneous movements
link |
to offset visual slip.
link |
In other words, you don't see the world as blurry
link |
even though you're moving,
link |
because your eyes are generating
link |
little compensatory eye movements to offset your motion.
link |
So if I spin, we could do this experiment.
link |
There's a fun experiment we do with medical students
link |
where you spin them around in a chair
link |
with their eyes closed, and then you stop,
link |
and you have them open their eyes,
link |
and their eyes are going like this,
link |
doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, nice stagmus.
link |
I don't suggest you do this experiment.
link |
When we were kids, we did a different experiment,
link |
which was to take a stick,
link |
and to look at the top of the stick,
link |
and to spin around on the lawn,
link |
looking at the top of the stick,
link |
then put it down on the ground and try and jump over it,
link |
and you end up like jumping to the side,
link |
you miss the thing entirely.
link |
The reason those two quote unquote experiments,
link |
which I hope you don't do, or force somebody else to do,
link |
the reason they work is because normally your eye movements
link |
and your balance and your limb movements are coordinated,
link |
but when you spin around looking up at the stick,
link |
what you're doing is you're fixating your eyes
link |
on one location while you're moving,
link |
and then when you stop,
link |
those two mechanisms are completely uncoupled,
link |
and it's like being thrown into outer space.
link |
Never been to outer space, but probably something like that,
link |
low gravity, zero gravity.
link |
If you spin around in your chair with your eyes closed,
link |
you're not giving the visual input that you're spinning,
link |
and then you open the eyes,
link |
and then the eyes only have what we call
link |
the vestibular signal,
link |
your eyes jolding back and forth, back and forth.
link |
Again, these aren't experiments you need to do
link |
because I just told you the result.
link |
However, if you want to extend your range of motion,
link |
you can do that by, these things always look goofy,
link |
but at this point, I'm just kind of used
link |
to doing these things.
link |
If I want to extend my range of movement,
link |
first I want to measure my range of motion.
link |
So I'm trying to, if you're listening,
link |
what I'm doing is I'm stretching out my arms
link |
from like a T on either side,
link |
and I'm trying to push them as far back as I can,
link |
which for me is, you know,
link |
feels like it's in line with my shoulders,
link |
and I can't get much further.
link |
I'm not really super flexible,
link |
nor am I particularly inflexible, at least physically.
link |
So what I would then do is stop.
link |
I would move my eyes to the far periphery, right?
link |
So I'm moving my eyes all the way to the left
link |
while keeping my head and body stationary.
link |
I'm trying to look over my left shoulder as far as I can,
link |
then off to the right.
link |
It's a little awkward to do this, then up, then down,
link |
but I'm mostly going to just focus on left and then right.
link |
Now, what that's doing is it's sending a signal
link |
to my cerebellum that my field of view
link |
is way over to there and way over to there.
link |
Remember, your visual attention has an aperture.
link |
It can be narrow or it can be broad.
link |
And I've talked about some of the benefits
link |
of taking a broad visual aperture
link |
in order to relax the nervous system.
link |
This is just moving my eyes, not my head,
link |
like I just did for a second, from side to side.
link |
Now I can retest, and actually,
link |
you get about a five to 15 degree increase
link |
in your range of motion.
link |
Now I'm doing this for you.
link |
You can say, well, you know, he gamed it
link |
because he knew the result that he was hoping for,
link |
but you can try this, okay?
link |
And you can do this for legs too, right?
link |
You can do this for any limb, essentially,
link |
and it's purely cerebellar.
link |
And it's because the proprioceptive visual
link |
and limb movement feedback converge
link |
in the ways that we control our muscle spindles
link |
and the way we control the muscle fibers and the tendons.
link |
And essentially, you can get bigger range of motion.
link |
So I actually will warm up before exercise
link |
or before skill learning by both doing movements
link |
for my body, but also moving my eyes from side to side
link |
in order to generate larger range of motion,
link |
if range of motion is something that I'm interested in.
link |
So that's a fun one that you can play with a little bit.
link |
And it's purely cerebellar.
link |
Some other time we'll get back into a cerebellar function.
link |
There's all sorts of just incredible stuff
link |
that you can do with cerebellum.
link |
I talked in an earlier episode on neuroplasticity
link |
about how you can disrupt your vestibular world.
link |
In other words, by getting into modes of acceleration,
link |
moving through space where you're tilted in certain ways,
link |
it can open up the windows for plasticity
link |
and yet other ways.
link |
So you can check that out.
link |
It's one of the earlier episodes on neuroplasticity
link |
and everything's timestamped.
link |
But meanwhile, if you want to expand your range of motion
link |
before doing skill learning or afterward, this is a fun one.
link |
It's also kind of neat
link |
because I have this kind of aversion to stretching work.
link |
It never seems like something I want to do.
link |
And so I always put it off.
link |
So if I start with the visual practice
link |
of expanding my field of view off to one side
link |
or the other side or up or down,
link |
then what I find is I'm naturally more flexible.
link |
I'm not naturally more flexible.
link |
What's happened is I've expanded my range of motion.
link |
Let's talk about visualization and mental rehearsal.
link |
I've been asked about this a lot
link |
and I think it relates back
link |
to that kind of a matrix Hollywood idea
link |
that we can just be embedded with a skill.
link |
Although in this case, in fairness,
link |
visualization involves some work.
link |
And I've talked about this on an earlier episode
link |
that some people find it very hard
link |
to mentally visualize things.
link |
And some people find it very easy.
link |
There was great work that was done in the 1960s
link |
by Roger Shepard at Stanford and by others,
link |
looking at people's ability
link |
to rotate three-dimensional objects in their mind.
link |
And some people are really good at this
link |
and some people are less good at this
link |
and one can get better at it by repeating it.
link |
But the question we're going to deal with today is,
link |
Does it let you learn things faster?
link |
And indeed the answer appears to be yes, it can.
link |
However, despite what you've heard, it is not as good.
link |
It is not a total replacement
link |
for physical performance itself, okay?
link |
So I'm going to be really concrete about this.
link |
I hear all the time that just imagining contracting a muscle
link |
can lead to the same gains
link |
as actually contracting that muscle.
link |
Just imagining a skill can lead
link |
to the same increases in performance
link |
as actually executing that skill.
link |
And that's simply not the case.
link |
However, it can supplement or support physical training
link |
and skill learning in ways that are quite powerful.
link |
One of the more interesting studies on this
link |
was from Ranganathan et al.,
link |
forgive me for the pronunciation.
link |
This was a slightly older paper, 2004,
link |
but nonetheless was one that I thought
link |
had particularly impressive results
link |
and included all the appropriate controls, et cetera.
link |
And what they did is they looked at 30 subjects
link |
and they divide them into different groups.
link |
They had one group perform essentially finger flexion.
link |
So it was actually just sort of the,
link |
imagine if you're just listening to this,
link |
the come here finger movement.
link |
They also had elbow flexion,
link |
so it's our bicep curl type movement.
link |
And they either had subjects do
link |
a actual physical movement against resistance
link |
or to imagine moving their finger
link |
or their wrist towards the shoulder,
link |
meaning at the bending at the elbow,
link |
towards actual resistance.
link |
Just to make a long story short,
link |
what they found was that there were increases
link |
in this finger adduction strength,
link |
abduction, excuse me, strength of about 35%.
link |
And the elbow flexion strength by about 13.5%,
link |
which are pretty impressive considering
link |
that it was just done mentally.
link |
So they had people imagine moving against a weight,
link |
a very heavy weight,
link |
or had imagined people moving their wrist
link |
towards their shoulder against a very heavy weight.
link |
But again, they weren't doing it.
link |
They were just imagining it.
link |
Other experiments looked at the brain
link |
and what was happening in the brain during this time.
link |
So we'll talk about that in a moment.
link |
But essentially what they found were improvements
link |
in strength of anywhere from 13.5 to 35%.
link |
However, the actual physical training group,
link |
the groups that actually moved their wrist
link |
or move their finger against an actual physical weight
link |
had improvements of about 53%.
link |
So this repeats over and over throughout the literature.
link |
Mental rehearsal can cause increases in strength.
link |
It can create increases in skill acquisition and learning,
link |
but they are never as great if done alone
link |
as compared to the actual physical execution
link |
of those movements or the physical movement
link |
of those weights, which shouldn't come as so surprising.
link |
However, if we step back and we say, well,
link |
what is the source of this improvement?
link |
You might not care what the source is
link |
because I could tell you it's one brain area
link |
or another brain area, what difference would it make?
link |
But again, if you can understand mechanism a little bit,
link |
you're in a position to create newer
link |
and even better protocols.
link |
What mental rehearsal appears to do is engage the activity
link |
of those upper motor neurons that we talked about
link |
way back at the beginning of the episode.
link |
Remember, you have upper motor neurons
link |
that control deliberate action.
link |
You've got lower motor neurons that actually connect
link |
to the muscles and move those muscles
link |
and you have central pattern generators.
link |
Mental rehearsal, closing one's eyes typically
link |
and thinking about a particular sequence of movement
link |
and visualizing it in one's quote unquote mind's eye
link |
creates activation of the upper motor neurons
link |
that's very similar if not the same as the actual movement.
link |
And that makes sense because the upper motor neurons
link |
are all about the command for movement.
link |
They are not the ones that actually execute the movement.
link |
Remember, upper motor neurons are the ones
link |
that generate the command for movement,
link |
not the actual movement.
link |
The ones that generate the actual movement
link |
are the lower motor neurons
link |
and the central pattern generators.
link |
So visualization is a powerful tool.
link |
How can you use visualization?
link |
Well, in this study, they had people perform this
link |
I believe that it was 15, yes, it was 15 minutes per day,
link |
five days a week for 12 weeks.
link |
So that's a lot of mental rehearsal.
link |
You know, it's not a ton of time each day,
link |
15 minutes per day, but sitting down,
link |
closing your eyes and imagining going through
link |
a particular skill practice or moving a weight.
link |
Maybe it's playing keys on a piano,
link |
if that's your thing, or strings on a guitar.
link |
For 15 minutes a day, five days per week for 12 weeks
link |
I think most people, given the fact that the actual practice,
link |
the physical practice is going to lead to larger
link |
improvements, greater improvements than would,
link |
the mental training would opt
link |
for the actual physical training.
link |
But of course, if you're on a plane
link |
and you don't have access to your guitar
link |
and you're certainly not going to be sprinting
link |
up and down the aisle,
link |
or you are very serious about your craft
link |
and you want to accelerate performance of your craft
link |
or strength increases or something of that sort,
link |
then augmenting or adding in the visualization training
link |
very likely will compound the effects
link |
of the actual physical training.
link |
There are not a lot of studies looking at how visualization
link |
on top of pure physical training
link |
can increase the rates of learning
link |
and consolidation of learning, et cetera.
link |
It's actually a hard study to do
link |
because it's hard to control for,
link |
because what would you do in its place?
link |
You would probably add actual physical training
link |
and then that's always going to lead to greater effects.
link |
So the point is if you want to use visualization training,
link |
great, but forget the idea
link |
that visualization training is as good
link |
as the actual behavior.
link |
You hear this all the time.
link |
People say, do you know that if you imagine an experience
link |
to your brain and to your body,
link |
it's exactly the same as the actual experience?
link |
This is not the way the nervous system works.
link |
I'm sorry, I don't mean to burst anybody's bubble,
link |
but your bubble is made of myths.
link |
And the fact of the matter is that the brain,
link |
when it executes movement,
link |
is generating proprioceptive feedback.
link |
And that proprioceptive feedback is critically involved
link |
in generating our sense of the experience
link |
and in things like learning.
link |
So I don't say this because I don't like the idea
link |
that visualization couldn't work.
link |
In fact, visualization does work,
link |
but it doesn't work as well.
link |
It doesn't create the same milieu,
link |
the same chemical milieu,
link |
the same environment as actual physically engaging
link |
in the behavior, the skill, the resistance training,
link |
And I'd be willing to wager that the same is true
link |
for experiences of all kinds.
link |
You know, PTSD is this incredibly unfortunate circumstance
link |
in which there's a replay often of the traumatic event
link |
that feels very real,
link |
but that's not to say that the replay itself
link |
is the same as the actual event.
link |
And of course, PTSD needs to be dealt with
link |
with the utmost level of seriousness.
link |
It should be treated.
link |
In fact, my lab works on these sorts of things,
link |
but my point about visualization and imagining something
link |
not being the same as the actual experience
link |
is grounded in this idea of proprioception
link |
and the fact that feedback to the cerebellum,
link |
the cerebellum talking to other areas of the brain
link |
are critically involved in communicating
link |
to the rest of our nervous system
link |
that not just that we believe something is happening,
link |
but something is actually happening.
link |
And in the case of muscle loads,
link |
muscles actually feeling tension,
link |
the actual feeling of tension in the muscle,
link |
the contracting of the muscle under that tension
link |
is part of the important adaptation process.
link |
In a future episode, we'll talk about hypertrophy
link |
and how that works at the level of upper motor neurons,
link |
lower motor neurons, and muscle itself.
link |
But for now, just know that visualization can work.
link |
It doesn't work as well as real physical training
link |
and practice, but these effects of, you know,
link |
35% or 13.5% increases are pretty considerable.
link |
They're just not as great as the 53% increases
link |
that come from actual physical training.
link |
For those of you that are interested
link |
in some of the skill learning
link |
that more relates to musical training,
link |
but also how cadence and metronoming and tones, et cetera,
link |
can support physical learning,
link |
if you're interested in that, if you're aficionados,
link |
there is a wonderful review
link |
also published in the journal Neuron,
link |
again, excellent journal, by Herholtz and Zatorre,
link |
that's H-E-R-H-O-L-Z,
link |
and Zatorre, Z-A-T-O-R-R-E,
link |
that really describes in detail
link |
how musical training can impact
link |
all sorts of different things and how cadence training,
link |
whether or not with tones or auditory feedback
link |
and things of that sort,
link |
carries over to not just instrumental music training,
link |
but also physical skill learning of various kinds.
link |
So if you want to do the deep dive, that would be the place.
link |
You can find it easily online.
link |
It's available as a complete article,
link |
free of charge, et cetera.
link |
Many of you are probably asking,
link |
what can I take in order to accelerate skill learning?
link |
Well, the conditions are going to vary,
link |
but motivation is key.
link |
You have to show up to the training session
link |
motivated enough to focus your attention
link |
and to perform a lot of repetitions in the training sequence.
link |
That's just a prerequisite, right?
link |
There's no pill that's going to allow you
link |
to do fewer repetitions and extract more learning
link |
out of fewer repetitions.
link |
It's actually more a question of,
link |
what are the conditions that you can create for yourself
link |
such that you can generate more repetitions per unit time?
link |
I think that's the right way to think about it.
link |
What are the conditions that you can create for yourself
link |
in your mind and in your body
link |
that are going to allow you to focus?
link |
And I've talked about focus and plasticity and motivation
link |
in previous episodes.
link |
Please see those episodes if you have questions about that.
link |
I detail a lot of tools and the underlying science.
link |
So for some people, it might be drinking a cup or two
link |
of coffee and getting hydrated before the training session.
link |
For some of you, it might be avoiding coffee
link |
because it makes you too jittery
link |
and your attention jumps all over the place.
link |
It's going to vary tremendously.
link |
There's no real, there is no magic pill
link |
that's going to allow you to get more out of less.
link |
That's just not going to happen.
link |
It's simply not going to happen.
link |
You're not going to get more learning
link |
out of fewer repetitions or less time.
link |
However, there are a few compounds
link |
that I think are worth mentioning
link |
because of their ability to improve
link |
the actual physical performance,
link |
the actual execution of certain types of movements.
link |
And some of these have also been shown
link |
to improve cognitive function,
link |
especially in older populations.
link |
So I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention them.
link |
I'm only going to mention one today, in fact.
link |
The one that's particularly interesting
link |
and for which there really are a lot of data is alpha-GPC.
link |
And I'm going to attempt to pronounce
link |
what alpha-GPC actually is.
link |
It's alpha-glycerophosphocoline, right?
link |
Alpha-GPC, alpha-glycerophosphocoline.
link |
See, if I keep doing it over and over repetitions,
link |
alpha-glycerophosphocoline.
link |
There, I made an error.
link |
Okay, so the point is that alpha-GPC,
link |
which is at least in the United States
link |
is sold over the counter,
link |
typically is taken in dosages of about 300 to 600 milligrams.
link |
That's a single dose or have been shown
link |
to do a number of things
link |
that for some of you might be beneficial.
link |
One is to enhance power output.
link |
So if you're engaging in something like shot put throwing
link |
or resistance training or sprinting
link |
or something where you have to generate a lot of power,
link |
maybe you're doing rock climbing,
link |
but you're working on a particular aspect
link |
of your rock climbing that involves generating
link |
a lot of force, a lot of power.
link |
Well, then in theory, alpha-GPC could be beneficial to you.
link |
For the cognitive effects, the dosages are much higher,
link |
up to 1200 milligrams daily divided into three doses
link |
of 400 milligrams is what the studies
link |
that I was able to find show or used.
link |
The effects on cognitive decline
link |
are described as notable.
link |
Notable meaning several studies showed a significant
link |
but modest effect in offsetting cognitive decline,
link |
in particular in older populations and some populations
link |
even with some reported neurodegeneration.
link |
Power output was notable.
link |
What does that mean, notable?
link |
A study noted a 14% increase in power output.
link |
That's pretty substantial, 14% if you think about it,
link |
but it wasn't like a doubling or something of that sort.
link |
Believe it or not, the symptoms of Alzheimer's
link |
have been shown at least among the nutraceuticals
link |
of which alpha-GPC is to significantly improve cognition
link |
in people with Alzheimer's.
link |
Now, this episode isn't about cognitive decline
link |
and longevity, we will talk about that,
link |
but this is a so-called another effect of alpha-GPC.
link |
Fat oxidation is increased by alpha-GPC,
link |
growth hormone release is promoted by alpha-GPC,
link |
although to a small degree.
link |
So as you can see, things like alpha-GPC in particular,
link |
when they are combined with low levels of caffeine
link |
can have these effects of improving power output,
link |
can improve growth hormone release,
link |
can improve fat oxidation.
link |
All these things in theory can support skill learning,
link |
but what they're really doing
link |
is they're adjusting the foundation
link |
upon which you are going to execute
link |
these many, many repetitions, okay?
link |
The same thing would be said for caffeine itself.
link |
If that's something that motivates you
link |
and gets you out of a chair
link |
to actually do the physical training,
link |
then that's something that can perhaps improve
link |
or enhance the rate of skill learning
link |
and how well you retain those skills.
link |
Now, on a previous episode, I talked about,
link |
and this was the episode on epinephrine, on adrenaline,
link |
I talked about how for mental, for cognitive learning,
link |
it makes sense to spike epinephrine,
link |
to bump epinephrine levels up,
link |
adrenaline levels up after cognitive learning.
link |
For physical learning, it appears to be the opposite,
link |
that if caffeine is in your practice
link |
or if you decide to try alpha-GPC,
link |
that you would want to do that before the training,
link |
take it before the training, use it,
link |
its effect should extend into the training,
link |
presumably throughout, and then afterward,
link |
if you're thinking about following
link |
some of the protocols that we discussed today,
link |
that you would use some sort of idle time
link |
where the brain can replay these motor sequences in reverse,
link |
and then, of course, you want to do things
link |
that optimize your sleep.
link |
A lot of the questions I get
link |
are about how different protocols
link |
and things that I described
link |
start to collide with one another.
link |
So let's say, for instance, you go to bed at 1030
link |
and you're going to do your skill training at 930,
link |
well, taking a lot of caffeine then
link |
is not going to be a good idea
link |
because it's going to compromise your sleep.
link |
So I'm not here to design the perfect schedule for you
link |
because everyone's situations vary.
link |
So the things to optimize are repetitions, failures,
link |
more repetitions, more failures,
link |
at the offset of training,
link |
having some idle time that could be straight into sleep,
link |
or it could be simply letting the brain just go idle
link |
for five to 10 minutes,
link |
I mean, not focusing on anything,
link |
not scrolling social media, not emailing,
link |
ideally not even talking to somebody,
link |
just lying down or sitting quietly with your eyes closed,
link |
letting those motor sequences replay.
link |
Then we talked about how one can come back
link |
for additional training sessions,
link |
use things like metronoming,
link |
where you're cuing your attention to some external cue,
link |
some stimulus, in this case, an auditory stimulus,
link |
most likely, and trying to generate
link |
more repetitions per unit time.
link |
So again, it's repetitions and errors, that's key.
link |
And then we also talked about some things that you can do
link |
involving cerebellar neurophysiology
link |
to extend range of motion,
link |
if that's what's limiting for you,
link |
or to use visualization to augment the practice,
link |
or let's say your particular skill involves nice weather
link |
and it's raining or snowing outside
link |
and you can't get outside a thunderstorm,
link |
then that's where visualization training
link |
might be a good replacement under those conditions,
link |
or in most cases, it's going to be the kind of thing
link |
that you're going to want to do
link |
in addition to the actual physical skill
link |
or strength training session done,
link |
at least in the study that we described,
link |
for 15 minutes a day, five days a week,
link |
over a period of 10 to 12 weeks or so.
link |
So hopefully that makes it clear.
link |
Today, we've covered a lot of mechanism.
link |
We talked so much about the different motor pathways,
link |
central pattern generators.
link |
So you now are armed with a lot of information
link |
about how you generate movement.
link |
And I like to think that you're also armed
link |
with a lot of information about how to design protocols
link |
that are optimized for you,
link |
or if you're a coach, for your trainees,
link |
in order to optimize their learning of skills
link |
Today, we focused almost entirely on motor skills,
link |
things like musical skills or physical skills.
link |
These have some overlap.
link |
They're partially overlapping with neuroplasticity
link |
for learning things like languages or math or engineering
link |
or neuroscience, for that matter.
link |
Before we depart, I just want to make sure
link |
that I return to a concept, which is the ultradian cycle.
link |
Ultradian cycles are these 90-minute cycles
link |
that we go through throughout sleep and wakefulness
link |
that are optimal for learning and attention
link |
in the waking state.
link |
They are the stages of sleep
link |
in which we have either predominantly
link |
slow-wave sleep or REM sleep.
link |
Some of you who have been following this podcast
link |
for a while might be asking,
link |
well, should a physical practice be 90 minutes?
link |
That's going to depend because with physical practices,
link |
oftentimes, for instance, with strength training,
link |
that might be too long.
link |
You're not going to be able to generate enough force output
link |
for it to be worthwhile.
link |
For golfing, I don't know, I've never played golf,
link |
although my friends that play golf,
link |
they disappear under the golf course for many hours.
link |
So I know there's a lot of walking and driving
link |
I even hear that somebody carries your stuff around for you.
link |
Sometimes, not always, but it's going to differ.
link |
A four-hour golf game,
link |
you're probably not swinging the golf club for four hours.
link |
So it's going to depend.
link |
I would say that the ultradian cycle
link |
is not necessarily a good constraint for skill learning
link |
And I should say that for those of you
link |
that are short on time or have limited amounts of time,
link |
10 minutes of maximum repetitions, maximum focus,
link |
skill learning work is going to be very beneficial.
link |
Whereas two hours of kind of haphazard,
link |
not really focused work,
link |
or where you're not generating very many repetitions
link |
because you're doing a few repetitions
link |
and you're texting on your phone
link |
or paying attention to something else,
link |
that's not going to be beneficial.
link |
It's really about the density of training
link |
inside of a session.
link |
So I think you should let the,
link |
work toward maximal or near maximal density of repetitions
link |
and failures, provided they're failures
link |
you can perform safely.
link |
In order to accelerate skill learning
link |
and don't let some arbitrary,
link |
or in this case the ultradian constraint
link |
prevent you from engaging in that practice.
link |
In other words, get the work in,
link |
get as much work done as you can per unit time.
link |
And based on the science,
link |
based on things that I've seen,
link |
based on things that I'm now involved in
link |
with various communities,
link |
you will see the skill improve vastly at various stages.
link |
Sometimes it's a little bit stutter start.
link |
It's not always a linear improvement,
link |
but you will see incredible improvement in skill.
link |
If you're enjoying this podcast
link |
and you're finding the information interesting
link |
and or of use to you,
link |
please subscribe on YouTube.
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That really helps us.
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As well, please subscribe
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and download the episodes on Apple and Spotify.
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On Apple, you also have the opportunity
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And on YouTube, please hit the thumbs up button
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Place your feedback in the comment section.
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We read all the comments.
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It takes us some time to work through them,
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As well, please check out our sponsors.
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The sponsors that we mentioned
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and as well, we have a Patreon.
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It's patreon.com slash Andrew Huberman.
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There you can support us at any level that you like.
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In previous episodes and in this episode,
link |
I mentioned some supplements.
link |
Supplements certainly have their place for various things.
link |
They aren't necessary, but many people, including myself,
link |
derive benefit from supplements
link |
for things like improving sleep
link |
and immune system function and learning and so forth.
link |
If you're interested in seeing the supplements that I take,
link |
you can go to thorn.com slash you,
link |
that's the letter U slash Huberman
link |
and you can see the supplements that I take.
link |
If you want to try any of those supplements,
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you can get 20% off simply by accessing the Thorne webpage
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through that portal, as well as 20% off
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any of the other supplements that Thorne makes.
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The reason we've partnered with Thorne
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in terms of the quality of the supplements
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and the accuracy about the amounts of each supplement
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One of the major problems in the supplement industry
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that the amount of a given ingredient is far lower
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or far greater than what's reported on the bottle.
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That's not the case for Thorne.
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Thorne has very high levels of stringency.
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They partnered with the Mayo Clinic
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and all the major sports teams
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and that's why we've partnered with them as well.
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So if you want to check those out,
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again, it's Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E slash the letter U
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slash Huberman to get 20% off
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any of the supplements that Thorne makes.
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And last but not least,
link |
I want to thank you for your time and attention.
link |
I very much appreciate your interest in neuroscience
link |
and in physiology and in tools that are informed
link |
by neuroscience and physiology.
link |
Today, we talked all about skill learning.
link |
I hope that you'll consider the information.
link |
You might even decide to try some of these tools.
link |
If you do, please let us know your results with them.
link |
Give us feedback in the comments.
link |
And as always, thank you for your interest in science.
link |
We'll see you next time.