back to indexDr. Emily Balcetis: Tools for Setting & Achieving Goals | Huberman Lab Podcast #83
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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,
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and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology
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at Stanford School of Medicine.
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Today, my guest is Dr. Emily Balchetes.
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Dr. Balchetes is a professor of psychology
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at New York University.
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Her laboratory studies motivation, goal setting,
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and tools for successful goal completion.
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I learned about Dr. Balchetes' work some years ago
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because I'm a vision scientist.
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That is, I study the visual system.
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And I heard about this incredible psychologist
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at New York University who was studying how vision,
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that is how we visualize problems,
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can predict whether or not
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we will successfully overcome challenges
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and how we strategize in order to set and meet goals.
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And in 2020, I learned of Dr. Balchetes' book,
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which was written for the general public,
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entitled, Clear, Closer, Better,
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How Successful People See the World.
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And I read both the hard copy of the book
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and listened to the audio book.
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And I absolutely loved the material.
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As you'll learn directly from Dr. Balchetes today,
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how people visualize a problem,
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that is whether or not they think of a goal or a problem
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as residing at the top of a very steep hill
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or on the top of a shallower hill,
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or whether or not they visualize a goal or a problem
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as far off in the distance
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or closer to them in the distance,
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visually in their mind,
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strongly dictates whether or not they will arrive
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at the challenge of meeting a goal
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or overcoming a problem with more energy or less energy.
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Indeed, it dictates whether or not
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they can push to immediate milestones
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or whether or not they will think they have to overcome
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the entire task all at once.
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Basically, Dr. Balchetes' work has discovered
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that how we visualize a problem or a goal in our mind
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has everything to do with how we lean into that goal,
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whether or not we think of it as overwhelming or tractable,
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whether or not we think that we can overcome that goal
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and then it will lead to yet more possible rewards and goals
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or whether or not we feel that we're going to arrive
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at the finish line and then just be overwhelmed with fatigue.
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In other words, how you visualize things in your mind,
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and when I say visualize, I mean literally
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how you visualize them as a visual problem or a visual goal
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has everything to do with whether or not
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you will be able to meet those goals
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and whether or not they will lead to still greater goals
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that you will be able to achieve.
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Today's episode is an especially important one, I believe,
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because you're going to learn
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about quality peer-reviewed science
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from the expert in this field
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of goal setting, motivation, and pursuit.
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And you're also going to learn an immense number
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of practical tools that you can apply
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toward your educational goals, your career goals,
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relationship goals, goals of any sort.
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By the end of today's episode,
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you will be better equipped to set and achieve your goals.
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Dr. Balchetes also shares with us her own experiences
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of how to set, visualize, and achieve goals.
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And she does that within the context of her role as a parent,
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as somebody navigating relationships of various kinds
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and a demanding career.
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So again, I think that you'll find the information today
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to be both extremely academically grounded
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in terms of research, extremely practical, and realistic
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in terms of how you might apply it in your own life.
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I'm pleased to announce that the Huberman Lab Podcast
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is now partnered with Momentus Supplements.
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We partnered with Momentus for several important reasons.
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First of all, they ship internationally
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because we know that many of you are located
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There you'll see those supplements,
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Again, that's livemomentus.com slash Huberman.
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Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast
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is separate from my teaching 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 about science
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and science-related tools 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 Thesis.
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Today's episode is also brought to us by Levels.
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Levels is what's called a continuous glucose monitor.
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Some of you may have heard of these before,
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others of you perhaps have not.
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Basically, it's a small device
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I first started using the Levels continuous glucose monitor
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about a year ago and it's taught me so much
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in terms of blood sugar spikes,
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how I respond to exercise.
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Even the sauna, it turns out,
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can modulate my blood glucose levels
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and your blood glucose levels in very interesting ways.
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So all of that is translated into a huge number
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of very directed changes that I've made
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in terms of what I eat, when I eat,
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and how I schedule exercise relative to eating
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That's levels.link slash Huberman.
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And now for my discussion with Dr. Emily Belchettis.
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Well, thanks for being here.
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That's my pleasure.
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Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for a long time
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because as a vision scientist who is also very interested
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in real life tools and goal setting and motivation,
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your work lands squarely in the middle of those interests.
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So just to kick things off,
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you could tell us just a little bit
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about the relationship between perception
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and in particular, how we see the world
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and goal setting and goal retrieval.
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It's a vast landscape, but you're the expert.
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So I'll turn that over to you.
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And then as time goes on,
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I may have some additional questions
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as it relates to different kinds of vision,
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but what's the deal with vision and motivation?
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How do those two things link up?
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When psychologists ask people,
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what are you doing to help make progress on your goals?
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They say all kinds of things,
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a couple of things always pop to the top,
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which is try to shock myself in encouraging ways
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and self pep talks,
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or I remind myself of how important it is to do this job,
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or I'll put up post-it notes around
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to constantly be nagging me about what I need to do.
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So those are common tactics that people use.
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And what we'll notice is that those are really effortful,
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having to constantly remind yourself,
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having to constantly talk to yourself,
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having to create those post-it notes,
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remember to look at them.
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All of that takes a lot of time and effort and commitment.
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And so what a surprise that people burn out, right?
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It's exciting to work on a goal when you first set it,
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you might make some initial progress,
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but then eventually we get, you know,
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not even to the halfway point,
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but before things get real,
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things are challenging and we fall by the wayside.
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And that's, I think,
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because those tactics that are our go-to strategies
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are themselves a goal to maintain.
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So it's like, you know, double-sided,
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we're putting so much on ourselves
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to try to advance the thing
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that we originally set out to accomplish.
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So then I, you know, with my team,
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I was trying to think of like, well,
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what are strategies that don't require as much effort
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that we can automate,
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that we can take advantage of what's already happening
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within ourselves, within our body, within our mind,
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that might overcome one of those challenges
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that'll be easier, more automated.
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And that's when we started to land on the idea of vision.
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We look at the world without even thinking of it
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for those of us that are sighted.
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And we thought, you know what,
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there are strategies that we can use to look at the world
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in a different way and that we can automate
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that might help us to overcome some obstacles,
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to make progress on our goals,
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to maybe literally see opportunities
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that we hadn't been able to see before.
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So we started playing around
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with the idea of visual illusions to see like,
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do people even know that there's other ways
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of seeing things around them?
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Can we tweak that?
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Or is there room for intervention?
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Can we encourage people to take a new way of looking
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to see things that they hadn't seen before?
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And that's what really opened us up
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to trying to look at that intersection
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between vision science and motivation science.
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And I always say, and here I'm strongly biased
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as a vision scientist that vision is the dominant sense
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by which we navigate the world and survive.
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I love this idea of real world, real time access to vision.
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And I'm certainly familiar with how goal setting
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or post-its and magnets on refrigerators
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can have an immediate impact,
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but then over time they become so part
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of the visual landscape that you overlook them.
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And we know as vision scientists,
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if something is stably in your environment,
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eventually you're blind to it.
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So that makes good sense.
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So you've published a number of studies in this area,
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but maybe you could highlight some of the more,
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what you would consider important findings
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in the area of how people can adjust their vision
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in order to meet goals more quickly and more efficiently.
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And perhaps also how we come,
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we all arrive at goals with different visual perceptions
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and that in some way may divide us into highly motivated
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and less motivated people.
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In other words, what's the link between vision and motivation
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and how can we leverage that
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in order to better reach our goals?
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So, you know, we started thinking about,
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what are the goals that are most important to people
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that they struggle with the most?
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So we asked hundreds, thousands of people
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what their new year's resolutions are.
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We look to all the other polls
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that do the same kind of work.
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And regardless of where you look or who you ask
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or when you ask it,
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people's number one goal
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is something related to their health, right?
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To lose weight, to exercise more,
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to get out, get more steps for mental wellbeing,
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physical wellbeing.
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And that's like the number one goal every January 1st.
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So if we were able to accomplish that goal,
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you think it would drop a little bit in the rankings,
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but it doesn't because it's really hard.
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So we thought, I wonder if there's a way for us
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to make some progress on that,
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on helping people to exercise better, more often,
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stick to it longer and make some progress there.
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We know diets don't work.
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Why don't diets work?
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For the same reason that that self-talk doesn't work
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is that, you know, we go in it full bore, hardcore,
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and it requires a major commitment
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and effort to a lifestyle change.
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So again, we were looking for something
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that might be easier than that
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that could produce big, big payoff, right?
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That's the golden ticket,
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something that requires less effort for a bigger payoff.
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So one of the first things that I did
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was go over to Brooklyn to this old armory building.
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It, you know, used to be a military armory space.
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I think I know that building.
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It's a beautiful building now
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that houses a lot of businesses, right?
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With plants on the walls?
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Yeah, there's businesses.
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There's a couple of armories all around the boroughs here,
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around New York City.
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And the one in Brooklyn in particular is now YMCA, right?
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So it's a family YMCA.
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That's within this beautiful old red brick building
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that used to be a military establishment long, long ago.
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And what's really cool is that, you know,
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one winter after afternoon, you know,
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somebody had invited me, a physical therapist,
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said, hey, you should come out
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and check out what's happening here
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with your interest in exercise
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and trying to find new ways of helping people,
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new tactics that they can add to their tool belt.
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I think you're gonna find some interesting people
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that are working out there.
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I look around, you know, there's families,
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there's new moms, there's kids that are, you know,
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moms trying to get kids to burn off some winter,
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you know, energy that they have.
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There's people that look like they're just there
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for their, you know, every couple of days
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going out for a run.
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There's some people that look like
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they're training with a team.
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And that's who this physical therapist introduced me to,
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is the, was the coach of this team.
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There's a bunch of people that were sitting down
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on the ground and I would be hard pressed to know
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who's the high school student that's in this group
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and then who, as it turns out,
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are some of the fastest runners in the world.
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Like, you know, one of the people that was in
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the last Olympics before I showed up,
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won the gold medal for the 400 meter.
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And from the looks of them, I mean, of course,
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their bodies are in better shape than mine,
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but there's nothing so pretentious,
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of course they're not wearing their medals.
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There's nothing pretentious about how they're walking around
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or anything like that that would lead me to know,
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like, this person's amazing.
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And they probably have some insight that I don't have.
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So once I got introduced to them and knew
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who are these people that were part of this
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pretty elite training team that happened to work out
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at this family gym, I had the chance to talk with them
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about what strategies do you use?
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Now, I am not an elite runner and having recently
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had a baby, I'm not really a runner right now at all.
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But I thought when these people are running,
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I bet they are like hyper aware of everything
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that's going on in their surroundings.
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Where are they relative to the competition?
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What's happening in their peripheral vision?
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What's going on on the side?
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Who's behind them?
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Who's in front of them?
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They probably have this like master sense,
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this master visual plan at any point in time.
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And that's what probably makes them elite.
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So when I started asking them, is that the case?
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Do you really pay attention to what's in your surroundings?
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What's behind you?
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What's on the side?
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All of them said no.
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And sometimes when I do do that, it's a mistake.
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It doesn't work for me.
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So that was surprising.
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It totally went against my intuition about what they do
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that likely contributes to their success.
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What they said instead was that they are hyper focused.
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They assume this narrowed focus of attention.
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Almost like a spotlight is shining on a target.
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Now when they're running a short distance,
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that target might literally be the finish line,
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the line that they're trying to cross.
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If it's a longer distance, they set sub goals,
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like the person, the shorts on the person up ahead
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that they're trying to beat.
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Or they choose some sort of stable landmark,
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like a sign that they would pass by.
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And like a spotlight is shining just on that,
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or like they have blinders on the sides of their face.
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That's all they're paying attention to.
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This really narrowed scope of attention.
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And that was a strategy that all of these elite athletes
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said that they used.
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And those that were better rather than slower
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were ones that used it more.
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And I thought, oh, that's something we can play with.
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They are elite and they are accomplished.
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But that visual strategy isn't necessarily something
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that you have to be in the perfect physical condition
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to be able to adopt.
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And so I wonder, can that help the rest of us
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who aren't competing for an Olympic gold
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and who have no chance of ever getting one,
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who want to exercise better, have a better time doing it
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and maintain a commitment to that exercise goal
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that they might have, that they might otherwise,
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by February or March, be giving up on
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if they had set it at the beginning of January.
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So that's really where the work started,
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was what you might call focus groups
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or case studies of these incredible athletes.
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And then we did other studies looking at people
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who aren't Olympic athletes but who are competitive
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and New York road runners and how are they running in races.
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And what we found is that those people who have better pace,
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faster pace, better time, they use that narrowed strategy
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more often than this more expansive
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or open scope of attention.
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And there seemed to be a correlation between that,
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better performance among a wider swath of hundreds of runners
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who are doing it competitively but still could be like
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the person that you're sitting next to in the office
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or yourself, right?
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And the more often that they did it
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and the more consistently they had adopted that,
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that technique of the narrowed focus of attention
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that seemed that they were doing better in their runs.
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So then we started thinking like, okay,
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what about people who aren't competitive runners?
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What about like my mom, can she do that?
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Or me when I'm trying to get back on the bandwagon
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and exercise more.
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Is this a tactic we can teach people?
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The answer is yes.
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You can tell people about what these Olympic athletes
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are doing, you can tell them about
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what the New York Road Runners are doing.
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And just using the same language
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that I just used with you, right?
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Imagine that there's a spotlight shining just on a target.
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Choose something up ahead, the stop sign two blocks up
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that you can just see.
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And imagine that you have blinders on
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so that you're not really paying attention
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to the people that are passing by
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or the buildings or the garbage cans
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or the trucks that are on the road.
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You know, tune those out and focus in on that target
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until you hit it and then choose another one, right?
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So to recalibrate, choose the next goal.
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And so we would test like, can people do that?
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I mean, if you're listening right now,
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you probably are imagining that experience too
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and the answer is yes, like I can imagine that.
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I know what those words mean and I can do that.
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And our work found that too, if people can do that,
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we have them say out loud,
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what is it that's captured your attention?
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And of course, sometimes something in the periphery
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like movement captures our gaze
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and we're pulled there for an instant,
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but then we can refocus up again
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and adopt that narrowed attention.
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And one of the first studies that we did
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was teach that strategy and juxtapose or compare it
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against a group that we said, just look around naturally.
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You know, you might see that finish line up ahead
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and there's things on the periphery,
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whatever your eyes want to do,
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whatever you think is gonna work best,
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feel free to do that and tell us what you're looking at.
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Then we gave them a finish line.
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We created sort of an exercise
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that's moderately challenging, but possible.
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We put ankle weights on that accounted
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for about 15% of their body weight,
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told them to lift their knees up,
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sort of high stepping to a finish line.
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So this would be challenging for them to do,
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but we said, you know,
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it's an indicator of overall health and fitness.
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Some of these people had narrowed their focus of attention
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and some were just looking more expansively or naturally.
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And what we found is that those people that we trained,
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just everyday normal people
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doing this moderately challenging exercise,
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they were able to move 27% faster.
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They could do the exercise more quickly
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and they said it hurt 17% less.
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The exercise was exactly the same for all the people.
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We set the weight and we set the distance.
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It was in our lab space,
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so it was like a constrained environment.
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Everybody was in the same sort of circumstance,
link |
but yet their experience was really different.
link |
We helped them to move faster,
link |
burn calories at a higher rate, right?
link |
Exercise more efficiently.
link |
The amount of time they put in
link |
is gonna produce a better physical outcome.
link |
And also it didn't hurt them, right?
link |
They're saying it doesn't hurt as much.
link |
So we were really excited about that, right?
link |
Because it meant that this strategy,
link |
we could use it on people who are not elite athletes.
link |
It could be easily adopted.
link |
A quick training session can teach people
link |
to look at the world in a different way.
link |
Again, this narrowed attention was different
link |
than whatever they do naturally, the comparison group,
link |
but it had a big outcome.
link |
It had a big difference on the way
link |
that they were engaged in the exercise.
link |
That was like some of the first work that we did
link |
and then since then we've done dozens more studies
link |
to look at, well, what happens with that
link |
and what else can we do with playing around with this?
link |
Yeah, those are impressive differences
link |
as a consequence of narrowing visual attention.
link |
A couple of questions about the actual practice
link |
of narrowing attention.
link |
Is there any indication of whether or not subjects
link |
are constantly updating their visual attention?
link |
So for instance, if let's say the goal line is in view,
link |
literally from the beginning,
link |
I could imagine just holding visual attention
link |
on the goal line, but if it's a oval track
link |
or it's a trajectory along a trail or through a city,
link |
how often do you think they are updating
link |
their visual aperture and setting a visual goal?
link |
And I could imagine that there's some energetic expense
link |
to that, meaning you wouldn't want to do every crack
link |
on the sidewalk unless those cracks on the sidewalk
link |
were very far apart, because I think at some point
link |
that itself would be exhausting.
link |
So is there an optimal strategy or a semi-optimal strategy?
link |
Yeah, so those Olympic athletes
link |
that we started by interviewing,
link |
they tended to be sprinters.
link |
They were more often sprinters, short distance sprinters.
link |
So when they said like, yes, I narrow in more
link |
than I assume an expansive focus,
link |
that's because they're not going that far, right?
link |
They have to do it as fast as humanly possible,
link |
but they're not going that far.
link |
And so we started asking that question too about like,
link |
well, wouldn't that be tiring?
link |
And the answer is yes.
link |
So when we start to look at, well, people
link |
who aren't sprinters, who are accomplished,
link |
but who are more long distance runners,
link |
that's what we find that they do is that they're using
link |
that narrow attention strategy strategically
link |
and it increases in use.
link |
They use it more often as the race progresses.
link |
And they really start to do this major switch
link |
about the halfway point of say like a 10 kilometer run.
link |
So people who are seasoned runners,
link |
they really start making a switch
link |
with what they're looking at about halfway through.
link |
And that's where they more often, more frequently
link |
and are more intentionally adopting
link |
a narrowed focus of attention
link |
when they're in the last couple miles of a run,
link |
when maybe their resources are starting to get more thin,
link |
maybe their motivation is starting to fade.
link |
That tipping point in the middle is with any kind of goal
link |
where people struggle the most.
link |
And that's when they're like doubling down on a strategy
link |
that they know to be effective.
link |
So at first, longer distance runners
link |
are not using that narrowed strategy.
link |
They're looking more expansively
link |
because I think that, well, first of all,
link |
distraction is a thing, it's useful.
link |
Not necessarily that they're distracting themselves
link |
because people are still trying to hold pace
link |
and jostle among probably
link |
a more concentrated group of runners.
link |
But it is a strategy that they use
link |
and then sort of wean off of as the race goes through.
link |
And it's particularly effective
link |
when we're looking for that last push, right?
link |
The last push to get over the finish line
link |
when like you might be literally neck and neck with somebody
link |
that you're trying to just beat out
link |
or when you're most tired,
link |
but you know like that last push,
link |
you don't want to drop off.
link |
And you want to push through hard through that finish line.
link |
That's when people are using it
link |
at its peak level of intensity.
link |
Yeah, to me, this makes total sense why it would work
link |
without going down the rabbit hole of visual neuroscience
link |
of something for another time.
link |
When we do these vergence eye movements,
link |
when we bring our eyes to a visual target,
link |
it's clear that some of the brainstem circuitry
link |
for alertness gets engaged to a greater degree.
link |
The other thing is that we know
link |
that when we focus on an object,
link |
that the optics of the eye change
link |
and narrow the visual field.
link |
So that brings about, this is a very detailed question,
link |
but I'm sure the audience is wondering,
link |
let's say I'm focused on a goal line
link |
or an intermediate goal.
link |
Are they focusing on a specific point
link |
or is it kind of the entire horizon of that goal?
link |
Because the finish line is indeed a line.
link |
So, and of course, it's impossible to know
link |
what someone is actually doing in their mind's eye,
link |
but how do people report this?
link |
Do they see it literally as a spotlight?
link |
And if so, how broad is that spot?
link |
Yeah, so what is the length of their aperture
link |
rather than maybe the diameter
link |
or the sphere size of it?
link |
In our interviews with people,
link |
our sort of focus group studies,
link |
it seems like it's more like a circular point.
link |
And that's in fact what we're teaching people,
link |
what we're training them to do.
link |
So rather than going broadly,
link |
looking across a line from left to right,
link |
we are encouraging them to imagine a circle
link |
of light that's shining on some target.
link |
Now, of course, the finish line is a line,
link |
but if they're staying in their lane,
link |
if they're on a track, right,
link |
you can imagine that there is a circle shining just on
link |
where in their lane they'll cross that finish line.
link |
Or if it's a stop sign,
link |
you could imagine a circle of light illuminating that.
link |
So that's what we're teaching people to use.
link |
And that's what seems to be effective
link |
to maintain that focus rather than sort of being pulled
link |
to engage with peripheral vision.
link |
And there's some amazing people,
link |
some runners in history, like Joan Benoit Samuelson.
link |
She's one of the first female marathon competitors
link |
who has won multiple marathons.
link |
I think she's won, feel free to correct me,
link |
like 10 marathons in her life.
link |
And she talks about sort of not assuming this wide,
link |
but narrow, wide but not deep or tall attentional focus.
link |
She talks about finding the shorts on somebody ahead of me
link |
and focusing on those shorts until she passes them
link |
and then resetting that goal.
link |
So in her interviews that she's done with runners magazines,
link |
she talks about it in terms of this circle of attention.
link |
I think I've experienced this a little bit
link |
because we're visiting New York now to do this interview
link |
and runners here seem more competitive.
link |
The recreational runners here seem more competitive.
link |
People walking on the street seem competitive.
link |
You're walking at near pace to somebody,
link |
they'll quickly speed up.
link |
If you speed up, they'll speed up.
link |
I think there've been some studies about walking speed
link |
in different cities and New York ranks
link |
among the fastest walkers around.
link |
I won't mention the slowest walking cities
link |
because we don't want to cast any judgments,
link |
And again, makes total sense based on the way
link |
the visual system measures both space and time,
link |
something maybe we'll get into a little bit later.
link |
But I'm curious whether or not this,
link |
the whole thing works in reverse as well.
link |
Meaning, do people who are very motivated to exercise,
link |
do they think this way naturally?
link |
People who are averse to exercise
link |
or who find it hard to get motivated to exercise,
link |
do they view the world differently, literally?
link |
Yeah, I have so much that I can say about this.
link |
So if you'll humor me,
link |
I'll give you a couple of different stories
link |
about how we can answer that.
link |
So you don't have to do a deep dive into vision science,
link |
which of course you are capable of doing.
link |
But what I can share with you is some like animal studies
link |
where this work kind of first started.
link |
This is in the 1940s, 1950s, rat labs, mice labs.
link |
And they were looking, those were the first models
link |
of human behavior that people were trying
link |
to understand motivation, motivation science within.
link |
So they would deprive these poor rats and mice
link |
of food or water so that they were motivated to get it.
link |
They were hungry and they were thirsty
link |
and they had practice running a maze
link |
so they knew where they could find that food or water
link |
or whatever that they were looking for.
link |
And what these researchers were studying
link |
was the pace of movement through the maze.
link |
So as the rats were like going through the maze,
link |
they found that even though these rats were hungry
link |
and they're having to expend limited caloric energy
link |
to make it to the finish line,
link |
they actually ran faster the closer they got
link |
to that finish line.
link |
So once that finish line became nearer to them,
link |
they actually use their resources probably sub-optimally
link |
to make sure that they crossed the finish line
link |
and got their reward.
link |
So that was like some of the first early work
link |
that was showing that proximity to a goal
link |
increases the investment in resources
link |
that people, that animals use to meet that goal.
link |
Even when they don't have that much to spare
link |
and with the mice, the same kind of thing,
link |
you know, they actually had these little harnesses on them.
link |
They were looking at how hard did the mice pull
link |
to try to make it to the food or the water
link |
that they were trying to get.
link |
And same deal, the closer they got to getting their reward,
link |
the harder they were pulling,
link |
even though they didn't have that much energy to spare
link |
and they had already used some up
link |
getting to that finish line.
link |
So that was, that early animal research
link |
from the 1940s, 1950s,
link |
then spurred a whole wave of work in humans.
link |
Do humans do the same thing?
link |
You know, even when they're tired,
link |
but they can see or they can feel that their goal is close,
link |
do they double down and work even harder
link |
to cross that finish line?
link |
Either like a literal finish line
link |
if we're talking about exercise
link |
or a metaphorical finish line
link |
if we're talking about any other kind of goal
link |
that people might have.
link |
And the answer is yes.
link |
They called that the goal gradient hypothesis.
link |
The closer you get to the goal,
link |
generally the harder people and animals
link |
work to finish that goal.
link |
That's what led us then to think,
link |
okay, you know, those rats, those mice,
link |
those people are seeing a finish line, right?
link |
And it's when they're maybe seeing that finish line,
link |
seeing that reward,
link |
seeing the goal they're hoping to accomplish,
link |
that is what's leading them to, you know,
link |
try harder to invest more so that they can finish it off.
link |
What if we induce that illusion of proximity?
link |
What if we can induce a visual illusion,
link |
a visual experience that approximates
link |
what the real rats and mice were actually experiencing
link |
as they got closer?
link |
So that is what is happening.
link |
That's what's happening visually
link |
when we create that narrowed focus of attention.
link |
When we tell people, imagine there's a spotlight
link |
on the shorts of the person up ahead
link |
or the stop sign that you're seeing,
link |
it induces an illusion of proximity
link |
that then is responsible for people trying harder,
link |
walking faster, feeling that it defied their expectations
link |
and that it wasn't as bad as they thought it would be.
link |
So we do things like measure,
link |
like measure their visual experience.
link |
How far away is that finish line?
link |
Of course, we can ask them to report in feet.
link |
How many feet is it?
link |
Oh, but that's challenging, right?
link |
Like nobody really knows what three feet
link |
versus four feet really looks like, but they do.
link |
So we can ask them how many feet it is.
link |
We also use these other measures
link |
of visual matching measures to know like that distance
link |
of the finish line looks about as far away
link |
as this other target.
link |
They're matching up their visual experiences.
link |
So what we know is that inducing that narrowed focus
link |
of attention is creating an illusion of proximity.
link |
That goal looks closer to them.
link |
And then there's all kinds of downstream motivational
link |
psychological effects that happen
link |
from feeling like you're closer.
link |
By visually misperceiving that space,
link |
it can have a really positive consequence.
link |
So your first question was, you know, which way does it go?
link |
Does it go both ways that people who are better runners
link |
like happen to do this thing?
link |
Yes, some of our research shows that,
link |
that if they, you know, for whatever reason happened
link |
upon this strategy and continued to practice it,
link |
they tend to be the better runners.
link |
But we also know from our experiments in the lab
link |
where we take people who don't know about these strategies
link |
and by a flip of the coin,
link |
we randomly assign them to either learn the strategy
link |
and use it or do whatever comes naturally to them.
link |
We can create that illusion of proximity
link |
that has a direct and causal impact
link |
on improving the performance when they're exercising.
link |
So yes, it goes both ways,
link |
but you can also teach yourself
link |
that you don't have to just rely on luck,
link |
luck of the draw for being a person
link |
who happens to be better at exercising
link |
or whose eyes happen to do this on their own.
link |
Before we continue with today's discussion,
link |
we're going to take a brief pause
link |
to acknowledge our sponsor, Athletic Greens,
link |
I started taking Athletic Greens way back in 2012.
link |
So I'm delighted that they've been a sponsor
link |
Athletic Greens contains vitamins, minerals, probiotics,
link |
digestive enzymes, and adaptogens.
link |
So it's got a lot of things in there.
link |
That's actually the reason I started taking it
link |
and the reason I still take it once or twice a day.
link |
It essentially covers all of my nutritional bases
link |
and the probiotics in particular are important to me
link |
because of the critical importance
link |
of what's called the gut-brain axis,
link |
that is neurons and other cell types in the gut,
link |
in the digestive tract that communicate with the brain
link |
and the brain back to the digestive tract
link |
in order to control things like mood, immune function,
link |
hormone function, and on and on.
link |
Whenever somebody has asked me
link |
what's the one supplement they should take,
link |
I always answer Athletic Greens.
link |
I gave that answer long before I ever had this podcast
link |
and it's the answer I still give now
link |
for all the reasons that I detailed just a moment ago.
link |
If you'd like to try Athletic Greens,
link |
you can go to athleticgreens.com slash Huberman
link |
to claim a special offer.
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They'll give you five free travel packs
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that make it really easy to mix up Athletic Greens
link |
while you're on the road,
link |
plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2,
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which are also very important for a huge number
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of bodily factors and brain factors
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that impact your immediate and long-term health.
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Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash Huberman
link |
to claim that special offer.
link |
The most pressing question I have in my mind is,
link |
can we, I, all of us,
link |
use this strategy to make the starting line a goal point?
link |
Because for a lot of people,
link |
it's not about going from start to finish,
link |
it's about getting to start.
link |
And I would say here I'm estimating,
link |
but 15% of the content on social media is about motivation
link |
and how to get motivated to do things.
link |
Neurochemicals like dopamine, of course,
link |
being at the heart of motivation,
link |
in my mind, I'm making strong links
link |
between some of these visual aperture effects
link |
and goal lines and dopamine that we could also dive into.
link |
But the simple question is,
link |
can I use this finish line strategy
link |
to make the start line a goal
link |
and get my system more engaged or motivated?
link |
And is there any physiology or physiological changes
link |
I should say to reflect the idea
link |
that maybe just visually focusing on the start line
link |
would actually get me more excited
link |
as opposed to make me less excited to engage in effort?
link |
There's certainly vision science that's tied up
link |
in that very first stage of goal setting,
link |
identifying what that goal is in the first place
link |
and taking those first steps.
link |
A lot of people's go-to strategies that involve vision
link |
are vision boards or dream boards or post-it notes.
link |
They're creating some sort of visual representation
link |
of what it is that they want to accomplish.
link |
Where is it that I want to be in five years, 10 days,
link |
10 years, whatever that timeline is
link |
that they're working under.
link |
The idea of vision boards or dream boards
link |
is that you almost like a scrapbook collect visual icons
link |
that reflect where you want to be to motivate yourself.
link |
It's a really common tactic that people use.
link |
And it's not bad to do that, right?
link |
For some people, just even knowing what they want in life
link |
is a major accomplishment.
link |
And defining the goal can be really challenging for people.
link |
And that's a strategy that works
link |
and involves our visual experience, right?
link |
It's not just, people aren't saying like,
link |
why don't you just sit around and imagine
link |
what you want your life to be like in 10 years?
link |
The strategy that people are suggesting is like,
link |
no, cut out the pictures, put it on a board
link |
and stick it by your bathroom mirror
link |
so you see it every day, right?
link |
Or make a list, yeah.
link |
People are big on these lists.
link |
I have a lot of friends who are like,
link |
have you made your list, right?
link |
The list of things that you insist on having
link |
in the context of fitness, relationship, job,
link |
et cetera, et cetera.
link |
This seems more and more common.
link |
And the idea, like write it down, right?
link |
They're telling you write it down
link |
or create a visual manifestation of it.
link |
And so, yeah, that's effective
link |
for identifying what you want.
link |
But it may not actually be effective
link |
for helping you to meet the goal, to get the job done.
link |
So colleagues of mine at New York University
link |
have probed why, why is that?
link |
Why is just thinking about what you want in your life
link |
and sort of putting yourself vicariously into those shoes,
link |
imagining what my life will be like
link |
if I can accomplish everything on this list.
link |
Why doesn't that work?
link |
Well, first of all, does it work?
link |
And why does it not work?
link |
Because what happens, these colleagues,
link |
Gabrielle Otengen and her research team have found,
link |
is that going through and dreaming about
link |
or visualizing how great my life will be
link |
when I get X, Y, and Z done,
link |
that is like a goal satisfied.
link |
I have identified what it is that I want.
link |
I have experienced it, even if just in an imaginary way.
link |
I've had that positive experience of thinking about
link |
how great my life is gonna be when I get this thing done.
link |
And they start to sort of rest on their laurels.
link |
She's actually measured systolic blood pressure
link |
And they found that people who do that,
link |
who go through that experience of visualizing
link |
how great my life will be when I get X, Y, and Z done,
link |
their systolic blood pressure,
link |
bottom number on your blood pressure reading, decreases.
link |
Okay, now I'm all about finding ways to relax,
link |
especially in New York, right?
link |
You're constantly living at a high level of stimulation.
link |
And so like, cool, great.
link |
So maybe I should just like think about
link |
how awesome my life will be
link |
when I get my bucket list done.
link |
But motivation scientists know that systolic blood pressure
link |
is actually an indicator of our body's readiness
link |
to get up and act, to do something.
link |
Now that can be the going out for a walk,
link |
going out for a run, hitting the gym.
link |
It can also be things like doing math problems, right?
link |
Even if it's something that's just mental,
link |
systolic blood pressure actually goes up
link |
in anticipation of your body
link |
or your mind needing to do something,
link |
taking the first steps on a goal.
link |
So then it helps us to understand of like,
link |
okay, if I've just created this dream board,
link |
this vision board, and put myself psychologically
link |
in that space of a goal satisfied,
link |
why is it bad that blood pressure goes down?
link |
Because it means your body is chilling out.
link |
It's like, all right, cool.
link |
I just accomplished something pretty major.
link |
I'd actually now don't have the physiological resources
link |
at the ready to take the first step right now
link |
to do something about that.
link |
So that was a pretty monumental finding
link |
for motivation scientists,
link |
to understand that like creating these dream boards,
link |
these vision boards or to-do lists might actually backfire
link |
because in and of itself is the creation of a goal
link |
and the satisfaction of the goal.
link |
And then people understandably give themselves some time
link |
to just enjoy that positive experience.
link |
So much for the secret.
link |
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
link |
I guess now the secret folks will come after me
link |
with pitchforks, but-
link |
I try to never say the name, right?
link |
Well, I'm not afraid to say the name.
link |
I mean, I imagine that certain strategies
link |
might work for other people,
link |
but everything you're saying, again,
link |
is consistent with what we know about the physiology
link |
of dopamine circuits for motivation.
link |
I have a good friend who perhaps incidentally,
link |
perhaps not, is a cardiologist at a major university,
link |
said that one of the major errors that people make
link |
with book writing and completion is they will tell people
link |
they're going to write a book and people will say,
link |
oh, you definitely should write a book.
link |
Everyone's going to love your book
link |
and they never end up writing it.
link |
And his theory is that they get so much dopamine reward
link |
from that immediate feedback with all the protection
link |
of never having the book criticized,
link |
that they never write the book.
link |
I'm sure there are exceptions to this,
link |
but I guess it raises the question,
link |
what's the better strategy?
link |
Yeah, so I'm not saying that people who enjoy
link |
a dream board creation should stop what they're doing.
link |
That's not the take-home message here.
link |
Oh, definitely not that, no.
link |
There's enough anxiety and fear in the world.
link |
We don't need to encourage more of it.
link |
But the process of goal setting shouldn't stop
link |
with articulating what the goal is.
link |
So at that same point that we're trying to figure out
link |
what do we want to do?
link |
What is my vision for the future?
link |
In those planning sessions, we need to simultaneously
link |
think about a couple other things.
link |
One is how are we going to get there?
link |
So take it out of the abstract,
link |
take it out of this idyllic visual iconography
link |
and start thinking about the practical day-to-day.
link |
We need to break it down into more manageable goals,
link |
not just my 10-year plan for myself, but my two-week plan.
link |
What can I accomplish in the next two weeks
link |
and the two weeks after?
link |
That's going to set me on the right trajectory.
link |
That's probably not surprising to anybody
link |
who's been thinking about how do I set goals better?
link |
Plan big picture, think big picture abstractly,
link |
but then also break it down more concretely.
link |
That's probably not surprising,
link |
but it's an important aspect of the goal setting process.
link |
Then again, Gabrielle Otengen in my department
link |
has identified a third often overlooked
link |
or underappreciated stage that has to happen
link |
at that goal in the goal setting process.
link |
And that's thinking about the obstacles
link |
that stand in your way of success.
link |
And that will actually help improve motivation
link |
And sometimes people think that that is counterintuitive.
link |
You're saying like, if I want to increase my motivation,
link |
have more motivation,
link |
then I need to think about how hard it's going to be,
link |
all the ways that I'm going to fail.
link |
How is that going to like jazz me up?
link |
How's that going to help me get through
link |
when I actually, you know, when things get hard?
link |
But it does because it's like coming up with a plan B,
link |
a plan C, plan D in advance of actually experiencing that.
link |
If you were on a boat and the boat started to sink,
link |
that's not the time you want to start looking
link |
You already want to know where one is
link |
so you can go to it right away.
link |
And it's the same thing with goal setting
link |
is that you want to know, what am I working towards?
link |
How am I going to get there?
link |
And if I experience this obstacle,
link |
here's what I'm going to do about it.
link |
You may never experience that obstacle,
link |
but if you do, you're probably going to be shy on time,
link |
thin on resources,
link |
maybe experiencing an anxiety that hijacks your brain
link |
so you're not functioning at that optimal level
link |
of judgment and decision-making,
link |
you want to already have like the snap next step in place.
link |
So you can just hop to it, right?
link |
We're not going to do our best thinking
link |
when we're in crisis mode,
link |
but we don't have to if we have used,
link |
if we have already used our resources in advance
link |
to come up with that plan B or that plan C.
link |
Michael Phelps, like incredible athlete, right?
link |
This is something that he and his coach
link |
have routinely incorporated into their training.
link |
So I love this story that like back in 2008,
link |
he was hot for the first time on the international stage.
link |
It was the Beijing Olympics.
link |
Michael Phelps was on the brink of doing something
link |
that no one else in the history of the Olympic games
link |
which is win eight gold medals in a single Olympiad.
link |
At the time of this story, he had already won seven
link |
and he had just the 200 fly in front of him
link |
before he could do what no one else has ever done,
link |
win the eighth gold medal.
link |
And like the fly is his thing, right?
link |
This should have been easy,
link |
like a no brainer, he's going to win this,
link |
he's going to break Olympic history.
link |
As soon as he dove into the pool,
link |
his goggles started to leak.
link |
And by the time he had done three lengths of the pool,
link |
he just had to flip around and come back
link |
to the starting line slash finish line, back to the edge.
link |
By the time that happened,
link |
his goggles were completely filled with water
link |
and he was swimming blind.
link |
I would have panicked,
link |
I would have sunk to the bottom of the pool.
link |
I wouldn't have even been in the pool to be honest,
link |
like I'm not a swimmer,
link |
definitely not going to be in the Olympics,
link |
but for him, he didn't.
link |
It wasn't a moment of panic,
link |
like it probably would have been
link |
for nearly every other person in that situation,
link |
because he had foreshadowed that kind of possible failure.
link |
He had imagined that obstacle hitting him in advance
link |
and not even just imagined it, but practiced it.
link |
He routinely practiced swimming with his goggles,
link |
not fully secured on his face.
link |
His coach notoriously would rip the goggles off of his head,
link |
smash them on the ground for maybe dramatic effect
link |
or something so that he didn't even have any goggles
link |
possible to grab as he's in practice.
link |
So because he had foreshadowed that possibility,
link |
and the solution, if my goggles start to leak,
link |
then I will do, in his case, start counting my strokes,
link |
then I'll make it through.
link |
He knew exactly how many strokes it would take
link |
for him to get from one end of the pool to the other.
link |
He started counting his strokes.
link |
He won that race, the 200 fly,
link |
he won his eighth gold medal
link |
and he'd go on to win 15 more in his career.
link |
So we might not all be swimmers,
link |
we might not all aspire to Olympic level performance,
link |
but I love that example because I think it helps
link |
sort of demystify or give us an alternative perspective
link |
on the importance and the motivational reasons why
link |
thinking about obstacles in advance,
link |
thinking about the ways, the two, three, four ways
link |
that your plan might go awry is actually effective
link |
at helping us to overcome the obstacle
link |
that might otherwise lead us to throw in the towel.
link |
That's a beautiful example.
link |
I'm going to springboard off that example
link |
to ask a question that has also been on my mind,
link |
which is, is there really anything special about vision?
link |
Because in the example you just gave,
link |
it was indeed vision that Michael Phelps was deprived of
link |
and it was counting strokes.
link |
Counting is another form of incremental measurement
link |
in the nervous system, obviously.
link |
There are others that could be the sensation
link |
of the hands smacking the water
link |
or breaking the surface of the water.
link |
So there are any number of different variables
link |
or metrics that one could use.
link |
I could imagine that setting out on a,
link |
let's say a three mile run,
link |
which for me is a decent distance run.
link |
It's one I do a few times a week.
link |
I'm also not a runner,
link |
but I try and complete some runs a few times a week
link |
at very slow pace just for my health.
link |
I could count every step.
link |
That would be kind of exhausting.
link |
But if I knew that three miles was,
link |
I'm going to estimate here, I don't know,
link |
a couple thousand steps, I could count backward.
link |
I could count forward.
link |
I count every 10, I confess.
link |
I spend every morning trying to find sunlight
link |
to get sun in my eyes to set my circadian rhythm
link |
and I do a hundred jumping jacks.
link |
So I'm the guy that people are looking at strange
link |
on the street, but sometimes I count every 10,
link |
sometimes I count backwards, sometimes I count forward.
link |
Is there any indication that it matters
link |
or is it simply that we attach some sort of meaning
link |
to that increment and the mode of reaching that increment?
link |
Because it does seem like there's something special
link |
about vision, we could maybe dive into a little bit more
link |
of why that is, but at a very basic level,
link |
how broadly or finally should one set the increments
link |
and does it matter if you're counting steps
link |
or counting strokes, if you're,
link |
maybe it's every other song,
link |
you're going to listen to an entire album.
link |
That's something that I don't know if people do anymore,
link |
or you're going to listen to a whole playlist
link |
and then listen to it again and you're going to run
link |
as long as the playlist is completed twice.
link |
You can obviously see what I'm getting at,
link |
but I know people are going to want to implement these tools
link |
and I have to guess that the nervous system
link |
is somewhat indiscriminate when it comes to these things,
link |
but that there might also be some specificity.
link |
I think vision is special and I think you do too.
link |
So, and for a variety of reasons,
link |
when you start, you can really nerd out
link |
on how cool the brain is and how cool vision is
link |
within the brain and when you do,
link |
then you start to find some things
link |
that make vision unique, right?
link |
More real estate, more neurological cortex,
link |
real estate is taken up by the visual sense
link |
than any other sense, more than taste, touch, smell, right?
link |
Vision gets more real estate,
link |
gets more neurological processing space
link |
than any other sense.
link |
Well, because evolution has led us to prioritize
link |
that visual, the visual experience.
link |
There's some cool illusions where like maybe
link |
somebody's mouth is doing something different
link |
than what you're hearing when people start to create these
link |
like weird tricks that might go on YouTube and go viral
link |
and people are trying to figure out what did I hear?
link |
What did I see his mouth doing?
link |
And what comes up is that people prioritize what they see
link |
over what they're hearing when the two are incompatible
link |
or kind of like out of sync.
link |
Yeah, every time, right?
link |
If you had to bet on it, bet on what it is
link |
that you're looking at rather than what you're seeing.
link |
Well, I guess a couple other things too, right?
link |
Like we can see super far.
link |
You can see like a flickering candle on our horizon
link |
if it was a totally clear sky several miles away.
link |
You can see the International Space Station
link |
floating up in the night sky, right?
link |
Like hundreds of miles away.
link |
Our eyes are amazing.
link |
And we prioritize what we see that.
link |
And I think that's because we never,
link |
we rarely get the experience
link |
of having our visual experience second guessed.
link |
You know, oftentimes we're having a conversation
link |
maybe in a loud restaurant
link |
and we know that we didn't hear the person right.
link |
And so we say like, oh, did you say that?
link |
Or like, oh, I thought you said this.
link |
And they're like, no, I didn't say that, right?
link |
So people will correct us when our ears get it wrong
link |
or we're tasting something amazing
link |
and we can't quite figure out what spices were in here.
link |
And so we know that our tongue
link |
isn't quite picking up the taste the right way.
link |
And that's why we read the menu
link |
to see what are the ingredients.
link |
Or we ask the chef, like, what did you put in this?
link |
It tastes amazing.
link |
So we know that our tongue is getting it wrong.
link |
Or you might be touching something
link |
and you look at the tag to see what sort of textile
link |
was used in this really amazing piece of clothing
link |
that you're looking to buy.
link |
So we know that our sense of touch
link |
isn't quite getting it right.
link |
But rarely do we have that experience
link |
of having our eyes get updated.
link |
Where we're looking at something,
link |
oh, I think I'm looking at my mom.
link |
Oh, no, actually it was actually my husband.
link |
Okay, like that never happens, right?
link |
That we have gotten vision as wrong
link |
as we might get any other thing
link |
that we're experiencing through any other sense.
link |
We trust our visual experience.
link |
We have a sort of a naive realism
link |
that what we see reflects the world the way it actually is.
link |
Because it's never really fully tested.
link |
We never get the input or the feedback
link |
that you've seen something wrong.
link |
Until a visual illusion pops up on social media, right?
link |
Like the dress example or the last week or so
link |
there's been that horse seal line drawing
link |
that's been all over social media too.
link |
Someone says, I see a seal.
link |
And then like, you know, chaos erupts.
link |
Or I thought the dress was blue
link |
and I thought it was gold.
link |
There's options because I see it as blue, so, right?
link |
And it's like dividing up families and friendships
link |
because you've like seen something
link |
that the other person just literally cannot see.
link |
And that's why we love those examples
link |
when they pop up in social media when they do.
link |
Is because it defies all of our previous expectations.
link |
There's a really amazing, if this interests you,
link |
there's a really amazing visual artist, Anish Kapoor,
link |
who plays with these ideas too
link |
and his installations are just fascinating.
link |
I saw one at a museum once where, you know,
link |
walk down this long hall and it's just
link |
a big black rectangle that's painted on the wall.
link |
And I was like, this guy's super famous.
link |
It's just a big black rectangle painted on the wall.
link |
What is this about?
link |
What a hoax, you know?
link |
This museum paid how much, what, whatever.
link |
But then as you get closer, you get closer
link |
and your eyes start to settle in
link |
and they adapt to the different visual lighting.
link |
You realize it's not a black square painted on the wall.
link |
It's a huge hole he's carved into the wall.
link |
And there is a whole other world
link |
that's back behind there that you can't see right away
link |
until your eyes adapt to the different lighting conditions.
link |
As a vision scientist, I have to see,
link |
where is this exhibit?
link |
It's not up right now.
link |
I've seen, there was a retrospective several years ago
link |
that was done in Sydney, but his work is all over the place.
link |
So Anish Kapoor, definitely worth looking up
link |
because like the dress example
link |
or the horse seal line drawing
link |
or artists like Anish Kapoor's work,
link |
that is a moment that gives us a different,
link |
unexpected insight about the world.
link |
That it challenges us to see something
link |
that we hadn't seen before or it induces or tricks us
link |
into seeing something that we wouldn't
link |
have otherwise have seen.
link |
And so it's those rare moments
link |
that I think are actually really important
link |
for understanding what do our eyes normally do
link |
because we wouldn't find these examples so surprising,
link |
so engaging, so shocking,
link |
if we had routinely gotten the experience
link |
of realizing we're not seeing the world the way that it is.
link |
So that is why I think vision is special
link |
and why it can be thought of as a tool
link |
that we can add to our toolkit
link |
for how to better accomplish our goals.
link |
I'm not saying that we should just only focus
link |
on imagining the world through an attentional spotlight,
link |
but maybe that's something that we can employ strategically
link |
on occasion when we think it's gonna best help us,
link |
when we need an extra little push to cross
link |
the literal or metaphorical finish line,
link |
but it doesn't have to be the only tactic that we use.
link |
Just like it's not bad to use vision boards,
link |
but let's use something else also.
link |
It's not bad to talk to ourselves in encouraging ways,
link |
but let's try adding another tool to our tool belt
link |
in case that's not enough to get the job done.
link |
So I do think that there's great power
link |
in thinking about our visual experience
link |
alongside other tactics that we might use
link |
for meeting our goals.
link |
And another one of those tactics might be like
link |
the numerics that you're talking about.
link |
How do I think about my jumping jacks
link |
in terms of groups of 10 or as a set of 100?
link |
You do it routinely.
link |
So you might be able to set a goal of 100
link |
and have that sustain you through number 60, number 70,
link |
when maybe it's starting to get harder.
link |
But for somebody who's just starting out
link |
and wants to be able to make it to 100,
link |
that's probably not gonna work.
link |
That's gonna be maybe really,
link |
that could be quite challenging for them
link |
if it's the first time that they're trying it.
link |
And so instead, setting those micro goals
link |
of groups of 10 is gonna be useful
link |
because as we start to get to number eight or nine
link |
or number 88 or 89 and it's really getting hard,
link |
we need that extra little hedonic hit of pleasure,
link |
of accomplishment, the micro dopamine rush
link |
that you might get by hitting another 10,
link |
you know, another decade milestone,
link |
another group of 10 milestone.
link |
And once we get that little hit of pleasure,
link |
excitement or self congratulations,
link |
that might be enough to sustain us
link |
through the next challenging physical obstacle,
link |
the next group of 10 that we might experience.
link |
So there isn't any prescription that I would give
link |
and say every person should decide
link |
that 25 jumping jacks is the goal.
link |
No, we have to be idiosyncratic and introspect
link |
about where are we at with this goal,
link |
this thing that I'm trying to accomplish
link |
and set those goals realistically
link |
but inspirationally as well.
link |
We wanna set a goal that will challenge us
link |
but isn't impossible.
link |
We don't wanna set goals that are too easy
link |
because we're not gonna trick ourselves
link |
into like feeling so great about doing one jumping jack.
link |
Like pretty sure most people,
link |
if that's a goal, they can do one.
link |
So are you gonna feel so great when you hit that goal?
link |
No, because it was too easy.
link |
You didn't have any doubt that you could do that one.
link |
But what about 25?
link |
Okay, yeah, I might feel pretty good about that.
link |
Well, what about the next group of 25 and now I'm at 50?
link |
Those are goals that might seem
link |
just beyond the brink of what's possible
link |
but I will feel good when I hit that
link |
and that's gonna give me the next sort of boost of energy
link |
that I'm gonna need to go a little bit further,
link |
either that time or the next time.
link |
Yeah, I think vision is special.
link |
Again, I'm strongly biased here.
link |
My, you know, the reason I initially learned
link |
about your work was, well, now you have this amazing book
link |
but at the time there wasn't the book,
link |
there were just the scientific papers
link |
and of course upon which the book rests
link |
and those papers are really important.
link |
But was the relationship between vision
link |
and obviously is our sense of space
link |
but how the sense of space and time are related
link |
and to make the idea quite simple for those listening,
link |
you know, when you narrow your visual window,
link |
you're measuring the time bin also gets smaller, right?
link |
Which makes sense when you hear it
link |
whereas if you take on a huge visual landscape,
link |
you're actually carving up time differently.
link |
It's sort of like moving from a slow frame rate
link |
to a fine frame rate.
link |
You know, slow motion camera is actually taking
link |
a lot more snapshots, right?
link |
So you're measuring distance over time more finely.
link |
And so where a strobe would be the other example,
link |
which is strobe is very low frequency.
link |
So you're going here, here, here,
link |
as opposed to, you know, slow motion, right?
link |
Strobe gives a course view into the time domain
link |
and high-speed photography gives a fine view
link |
in the time domain.
link |
So I'm almost certain without any knowledge
link |
of underlying data,
link |
but knowledge of the mechanism then,
link |
I'm almost certain, if not certain,
link |
that by placing a narrow visual aperture,
link |
we change the way we perceive time.
link |
Now I have a question and to be honest,
link |
I know the answer in advance,
link |
but I'd love for you to tell us a bit about
link |
how some of this works still further in reverse,
link |
meaning how unfit people view the world
link |
versus how fit people view the world
link |
or how unmotivated people visually see the world
link |
as opposed to highly motivated people.
link |
You talked about these elite runners,
link |
you give them Michael Phelps's example,
link |
but maybe you could describe that study.
link |
I think it's a particularly important one,
link |
mostly because yes, it identifies perhaps a physiological
link |
or psychological differences between motivated
link |
and unmotivated or fit and unfit people,
link |
but it also provides a path to remedy that.
link |
Yeah, so out of my lab,
link |
but also out of several other labs,
link |
there's been work looking at that relation
link |
between states of the body and visual experiences.
link |
They haven't necessarily tried
link |
to integrate the motivation science element to it,
link |
but they were looking to see the visual experiences change
link |
as a function of different states of our body.
link |
So they've looked at people who experienced chronic fatigue,
link |
the elderly, people who are overweight,
link |
those that are wearing heavy backpacks
link |
and so who are sort of put into that experience
link |
of being overweight,
link |
what happens to their perceptions of the environment?
link |
Well, what they find is that distances look further
link |
to those that are overweight, chronically tired,
link |
older rather than younger, weighted down with extra baggage,
link |
distances look farther and hills look steeper.
link |
We've done some of those studies too,
link |
where we try to like give people more energy
link |
or deprive them of energy
link |
and see does that change their perception of space.
link |
And we did that by sort of a classic technique
link |
of a double blind study where the participant
link |
doesn't really know what they're experiencing.
link |
I thought you were gonna say a double espresso.
link |
That is also a good psychological experience to give people.
link |
Yeah, so a double blind experiment
link |
where the participant doesn't really know
link |
the full extent of what they're doing
link |
or what they're experiencing
link |
and the researcher who's interacting with them also doesn't.
link |
They do this a lot in medical studies.
link |
You give somebody a drug
link |
and you give somebody a placebo, a sugar pill
link |
and then importantly, nobody really knows who's got what
link |
until you've analyzed all the data
link |
and the results are revealed
link |
that these are the people that had the drug,
link |
Same idea in the psychological research.
link |
In this case, what we did was give people Kool-Aid to drink
link |
and for some people that Kool-Aid was sweetened with sugar,
link |
an actual caloric entity.
link |
It could give them energy.
link |
Other people have drank Kool-Aid sweetened with Splenda.
link |
So yeah, it's sweet
link |
but it actually doesn't have any caloric value.
link |
You're not giving people energy.
link |
You're just giving them that experience of sweetness.
link |
Now, some people of course are really good at identifying
link |
like what's real sugar and what's Splenda
link |
but when you put it in a Kool-Aid, a pretty noxious powder,
link |
it actually masked it for everybody
link |
and nobody had any idea.
link |
Because it tastes like garbage to everybody.
link |
It tastes like garbage.
link |
I'm sure there are many people that love Kool-Aid.
link |
I guess the sales of Kool-Aid will reveal the data.
link |
I grew up in Nebraska actually where Kool-Aid is from.
link |
It originated in Nebraska.
link |
So I do feel like I'm betraying my roots slightly
link |
by casting some shade on Kool-Aid
link |
but that's how it worked
link |
is that we asked them to guess what they got.
link |
We tested them afterwards and they were wrong.
link |
So nobody is able to guess with accuracy
link |
what was your drink sweetened with
link |
which is important because they were blind.
link |
The way that scientists use it,
link |
they didn't know what it was that they were drinking.
link |
We give them about 10 to 15 minutes
link |
for that sugar to metabolize
link |
and we measured their circulating blood glucose levels
link |
to make sure that we had in fact given their body
link |
a circulating glucose energy
link |
that they might use in the next activity.
link |
And the researcher again didn't know
link |
whether they had just served sugar or Splenda.
link |
Then we asked people to estimate distance.
link |
So we gave some people more energy
link |
or we kept others sort of at
link |
like whatever their normal level was.
link |
And what we found is that those people
link |
who didn't even know it but who had been given more energy
link |
by drinking Kool-Aid sweetened with sugar
link |
perceived their space as more constricted.
link |
That visual illusion of proximity was induced.
link |
They felt that their finish line,
link |
again in the context of an exercise task,
link |
was closer to them.
link |
So in just the same way that these other physiology labs,
link |
vision science physiology labs found that
link |
people who are chronically tired,
link |
who don't feel like they have as much energy
link |
or those that are physically weighted down
link |
and for whom moving within an environment is more costly,
link |
we could create that experience for people.
link |
We did an experimental version of that,
link |
that if you have more energy, the world looks easier.
link |
The distances to a finish line don't look as far.
link |
So that was some of the experimental evidence that we had
link |
to show that people states their body
link |
do impact their visual experience.
link |
Now, I'm a motivation researcher.
link |
So for me, the big question is,
link |
well, what's the point of that study then,
link |
besides just showing this connection between the body
link |
and the eyes and the visual experience?
link |
We think that that's fundamental to one of the reasons
link |
that people experience difficulty when they're exercising.
link |
When it's really harder for your body
link |
because of its physical state to move within a space,
link |
why don't, you might say like,
link |
well, why don't they just go exercise?
link |
Because the world looks harder to them.
link |
Because that distance that they're supposed to walk
link |
because a doctor tells them to,
link |
or that a partner encourages them to,
link |
or a hill that they should hike up
link |
because someone told them
link |
that would be good for their health,
link |
it looks more challenging to them
link |
than it does to somebody who's in better physical health.
link |
Now, if it looks that way, if it looks harder,
link |
if it feels like it might be harder,
link |
then psychologically, we know that it is.
link |
When you have set yourself up psychologically, mentally,
link |
for that kind of failure experience,
link |
like I don't know that I have the resources
link |
to get this job done, this looks really hard,
link |
you're already motivationally in a place
link |
for this task to be closer to impossible for you.
link |
So to put it all together then,
link |
what we know is that people whose bodies
link |
might make it more challenging for them to exercise
link |
are seeing the world in a more challenging way,
link |
and that is having these downstream motivational
link |
and psychological effects that makes it less likely
link |
for them to try to take on the task in the first place
link |
or to experience it as harder than other people would or do.
link |
Is the solution the same, however?
link |
Meaning if these people are taught
link |
to adjust their visual goal line
link |
or to set a visual spotlight on an intermediate goal,
link |
can they overcome some of this challenge
link |
that they face simply by virtue of their skewed perception?
link |
Yes, so in all of the studies that we have done,
link |
looking at that connection between
link |
this narrowed focus of attention
link |
and improvements in exercise,
link |
we do not find that it only works
link |
for the people who are in shape
link |
or that it backfires for people who are out of shape.
link |
It works for everybody.
link |
This is a strategy that everybody can adopt
link |
because it's just simply about
link |
what do you allocate attentional resources to?
link |
What do you sort of ignore and what do you focus on?
link |
And that visually induces the same kind of illusion
link |
for everybody regardless of whether you're overweight
link |
or you're at your target weight,
link |
or if you're struggling to get there
link |
or you've already accomplished where you want to be,
link |
that visual illusion can be induced for everybody
link |
and it has the same kinds of consequences.
link |
Earlier I made a joke about double espresso,
link |
but now I'll make a serious statement about double espresso,
link |
which is that it contains caffeine
link |
and caffeine as a stimulant,
link |
like all other stimulants,
link |
cause a change in our visual world.
link |
The most salient one is the one
link |
that police officers look for,
link |
parents suspecting that their kids
link |
have ingested substances of any kind look for,
link |
which is if somebody's pupils are unusually large
link |
for a given visual environment,
link |
that is an indication of high levels of autonomic arousal.
link |
In the street drug translation of this,
link |
people who take amphetamine or cocaine
link |
will have very big pupils.
link |
People are very relaxed, have small pupils.
link |
However, everyone should know
link |
that pupil size also is dynamically regulated
link |
by how bright a visual environment.
link |
So there are multiple things controlling pupil size.
link |
However, we know that when we are very stressed
link |
or very aroused in any way, positive or negative,
link |
the pupils get big, but within the visual system,
link |
what that equates to is a narrowing of the visual aperture.
link |
So rather than ingesting sugar,
link |
which I'm guessing most of the world,
link |
certainly the U.S. needs to ingest less sugar,
link |
at least that's what we're hearing.
link |
I'm sure there are a few sugar,
link |
you know, sucronistas out there, sucrosanistas,
link |
who will also come after me with pitchforks,
link |
but let's face it,
link |
most people will probably be better off
link |
ingesting less simple sugar,
link |
but caffeine is a great motivator
link |
because of the internal sense of arousal,
link |
but it also narrows our visual window.
link |
I could imagine using healthy amounts of caffeine
link |
combined with maybe even blinders of the sort
link |
that horses wear, maybe like a hoodie and a hat,
link |
maybe even blinders in order to get over
link |
some of those more challenging milestones.
link |
Is there any evidence that people are doing this without,
link |
well, obviously people are doing it
link |
without knowledge of how it works,
link |
but are there any studies looking at how adrenaline
link |
or epinephrine or any other stimulants impact motivation?
link |
I don't know, honestly, yeah.
link |
I mean, energy drinks are a big thing now.
link |
Yeah, yeah, for sure they are.
link |
And, you know, if you actually are
link |
more physiologically aroused or jazzed or whatever,
link |
you know, amped up,
link |
or you just think you are in our studies,
link |
we have found that they work in the same way,
link |
that it can produce the same kinds of consequences.
link |
So, and I like that because it tells us
link |
like you can actually change the state of your body
link |
to induce these kinds of experiences,
link |
or you can try to, you can just think that.
link |
You can trick yourself.
link |
You can placebo effect yourself out
link |
and produce the same kinds of effects.
link |
I had to give up coffee like 12 years ago,
link |
not for any, I love the taste, and so decaf is my jam,
link |
but I can't drink the caffeine
link |
because it didn't actually do the thing
link |
that it does for so many other people,
link |
like make me feel more energized and more awake.
link |
I just got sweaty and jittery and anxious,
link |
and I couldn't focus.
link |
Yeah, some people who already have
link |
a fairly high baseline level of attention and motivation,
link |
they find that it puts the autonomic seesaw too far
link |
in the sympathetic tone.
link |
And I happen to marry the same kind of person.
link |
He also can't drink caffeine, but loves the taste of coffee.
link |
The interesting thing is that we both
link |
have to have coffee in the morning
link |
to feel like we're ready to go for the day.
link |
So it's just part of our routine or whatever
link |
to have that taste and have that sensation
link |
to feel like I'm ready to take on the day,
link |
even though, I mean, yeah,
link |
decaf still has some caffeine in it,
link |
but we're not drinking that much of it
link |
to probably actually create a caffeinated experience
link |
in our body, but we're tricking ourselves psychologically
link |
into doing that thing that in years past
link |
used to work for us both.
link |
So I think that's something to keep in mind.
link |
Like, you know, you might have a hoodie
link |
that you can wear to induce that visual illusion,
link |
or you can take advantage of the power of your mind.
link |
At the end of the day, I'm a psychologist,
link |
and I believe that we have some non-zero power
link |
over what our mind is doing,
link |
what we're thinking about,
link |
what we allocate our attention to
link |
that can do the same kind of thing that a hoodie might do
link |
or that a cup of caffeine might do.
link |
I completely agree.
link |
The visual aperture is under our conscious control.
link |
That's an amazing feature of our visual system.
link |
We can narrow or expand it.
link |
It takes a little bit of practice, I think,
link |
for people to learn how to do this
link |
without moving their head around
link |
to expand their visual aperture and how to narrow it.
link |
But what I always tell people is
link |
just imagine a really troubling text message
link |
or a really exciting text message coming in.
link |
All of a sudden, you forget about the world around you.
link |
So it can be triggered by these outside events,
link |
and we can learn how to anchor our visual attention.
link |
I'd love to ask about other kinds of goals,
link |
meaning non-physical goals,
link |
because many people are trying to read more, I would hope,
link |
or learn music or a language
link |
or things that really involve cognitive goal lines
link |
or internal goal lines.
link |
You know, reading one chapter out of a book each night
link |
is a tangible goal.
link |
The other that I've often wondered about
link |
are these systems that allow you
link |
to highlight individual lines or even words on a page.
link |
That's very visual, obviously,
link |
and everything else is ruled out except that word.
link |
I've always wished for books
link |
that would naturally highlight each page.
link |
And as I say this, someone will put in the comments,
link |
this has probably existed for 10 years,
link |
and I'm just showing how what a luddite I am.
link |
But is there any example or tactic that people could use
link |
or tactic that people could use
link |
to better approach cognitive goals
link |
of school, work, recreational too,
link |
but that don't exist in the kind of fitness
link |
and sports domain?
link |
Yeah, so just a shout out to my brother-in-law
link |
who has done some of that research
link |
where it does highlight different parts of words
link |
in paragraphs, and he's found it to be an effective way
link |
for English as a second language learners to pick it up,
link |
that that is, that tying that vision
link |
to the process of learning language is effective.
link |
And so there's, you know, a whole cool body of work
link |
and researchers looking at that.
link |
So you're right about that.
link |
If you want to mention what he does,
link |
is there a place that people can learn more about that?
link |
We can provide links.
link |
Okay, we will provide links to those resources
link |
because I want those resources.
link |
I've been trying to learn a second language for a long time.
link |
I speak Spanish pretty weekly,
link |
but I would love to get better at it.
link |
Okay, I'll approach you later.
link |
My five-year-old son speaks Spanish better
link |
than I do at this point.
link |
And clearly better than I do too, thank you.
link |
Yeah, so, you know, I was thinking that too.
link |
You know, we started this work
link |
within the context of exercise,
link |
but of course that's not people's only goal
link |
that they have in life, and it isn't mine either, you know?
link |
I have interests outside of improving my exercise game.
link |
A couple of years ago when I was writing the book,
link |
I also had a child.
link |
The same month that I had the opportunity
link |
to like pull all this research together
link |
is the same month that my son came to be.
link |
And I started to realize, like,
link |
I became a lot less interesting once he was around.
link |
He was fascinating, but I was changing diapers
link |
and feeding him, and like, that was it.
link |
People would come over, like, what's up?
link |
Where have you been?
link |
Like, tell me something that's going on in your life.
link |
And like, all I had to talk about was this,
link |
And I just felt like I've lost myself.
link |
I used to pride myself on like crazy adventures
link |
and problems I would get myself in,
link |
and I was a great storyteller.
link |
And that all of a sudden disappeared
link |
as soon as he came into the world
link |
because he became my world.
link |
So then I started thinking, like,
link |
I need to pull back some coolness
link |
if I ever had it in the first place,
link |
but I need to be a cooler person
link |
than I'm coming across right now.
link |
So I decided I want to learn to play drums,
link |
and I want to be like a one-hit wonder
link |
as a rock star drummer.
link |
I only want one song,
link |
because I know I'm not gonna be able to do more than that.
link |
I'm not coordinated at all.
link |
Like, from the beginning of time in fifth grade,
link |
I have this really vivid, like, flashbulb memory
link |
of playing basketball for the very first time.
link |
I lost my footing.
link |
I knocked into my own teammate,
link |
pushed her out of bounds where she had the ball.
link |
and I was not invited back on the team for the next season.
link |
And so that, you know,
link |
fermented my self-definition of uncoordinated.
link |
I am a musician, but I am not a drummer.
link |
And the idea of coordinating four limbs in real time
link |
was like, if I could do that, I would be so proud.
link |
So that's a goal that I set for myself
link |
at the same time that my son came into this world
link |
when I was also trying to think about goal setting
link |
and how to improve my ability
link |
and all of our ability to get a job done
link |
when you're faced with some pretty big obstacles.
link |
So I got to practice all these techniques
link |
that we're talking about on myself and see for myself.
link |
When I tell people, hey, try this thing,
link |
like narrow focus of attention,
link |
does it help with something like becoming a better drummer?
link |
And the answer is, yeah.
link |
These tactics at least work for me sometimes
link |
under some circumstances,
link |
and they do for other people who try them for other goals
link |
that aren't necessarily about exercise.
link |
One that I found particularly helpful
link |
was overcoming my bad memory.
link |
That everybody's memories are faulty, right?
link |
Everybody has sort of a warped perception of the past.
link |
It might be skewed more positively than maybe we deserve,
link |
or it might be skewed more negatively
link |
if you feel that what looms large in your mind
link |
as you reflect on something from the past,
link |
or the mistakes that you've made,
link |
or the things that, the social faux pas that you had,
link |
or challenges that you faced at work
link |
when you got in trouble with a boss or with a colleague,
link |
if that's what really stands out in your mind,
link |
or the good side of all of those possibilities,
link |
we probably aren't getting the world right.
link |
And that is something that our brain has evolved,
link |
to give us a faulty memory, to level and sharpen,
link |
to not encode and remember and be able to recall
link |
everything that we've experienced
link |
with accuracy and precision.
link |
And that's a problem when it comes
link |
to assessing our own goal progress,
link |
when we wanna be our own accountant
link |
and try to determine how are we doing?
link |
If I wanna become a drummer,
link |
am I on track for getting there before X,
link |
before my time runs out?
link |
Am I gonna make it or not?
link |
And I think that's an experience,
link |
whether they wanna be a drummer or not,
link |
that a lot of people can resonate with,
link |
of like trying to determine is this trajectory,
link |
is this rate of progress gonna get the job done
link |
by X amount of time?
link |
Will I have my swimsuit body by summer
link |
or will I save enough for retirement by the time I hit 65?
link |
For these goals where time is involved
link |
and there is a deadline,
link |
we do take moments to assess our trajectory.
link |
And if we just rely on our memory,
link |
we're probably gonna do a bad job
link |
of assessing that trajectory,
link |
of knowing whether we're on pace to meeting our deadline.
link |
And I found that to be the case as I was thinking about,
link |
am I actually gonna be able to learn this song?
link |
I mean, I know that it's going a lot slower
link |
than it probably would for anybody else,
link |
but to give myself a deadline and a commitment,
link |
I decided I was gonna put on a show.
link |
I was gonna invite everybody I knew
link |
and also people I didn't know,
link |
and I was gonna play my one song for them.
link |
This is while writing a book
link |
and having just had a child.
link |
Yeah, so when you read the book, you'll see my story
link |
and it's the real truth of it.
link |
I mean, I did play that show and it was fine.
link |
And then I've, because I wrote about it in the book,
link |
then some other opportunities to play it publicly
link |
have come up and it's like, all right,
link |
I told people I can play drums.
link |
I better show them that I actually still can play this song.
link |
Yeah, so that's been fun.
link |
I have become a one hit wonder
link |
if you ask me to play the song again,
link |
like Encore, it's just gonna get that same song
link |
a second time, so literally one hit wonder.
link |
So in the process of figuring out,
link |
am I gonna be able to play this show,
link |
I sent out invitations, the date is committed.
link |
People are coming to listen to my one song, God bless them.
link |
How's it gonna go?
link |
And it felt awful.
link |
It just felt like I am not making progress here
link |
because there's a lot more things
link |
that actually are pressing, right?
link |
Like the kid does need to get fed.
link |
I do have to go to my day job.
link |
The editor is asking for the next draft of this book
link |
and that is gonna take precedence
link |
like it does for so many people,
link |
that things command your bandwidth
link |
even when you have this goal that you've committed to
link |
and that you've got on the books.
link |
And so I just felt this looming anxiety
link |
about this goal that would require,
link |
didn't have to be daily practice,
link |
but you can't cram that kind of a goal.
link |
It does take committed investment
link |
for a sustained period of time.
link |
And so I had this looming anxiety
link |
that I'm not making good enough progress.
link |
But that's because I was relying on my memory
link |
and my brain to recall, how many times did you practice?
link |
What was it like the last time you practiced?
link |
What was it like when you tried to play this bit,
link |
or this riff like two weeks ago,
link |
have you gotten any better since then?
link |
And it just felt like, no, I haven't practiced enough.
link |
I don't remember when the last time I played was,
link |
but it definitely doesn't feel like I'm getting any better.
link |
Then I thought, you know what?
link |
I should stop relying on my brain
link |
to tell me where am I at and am I on an upward slope here?
link |
I need to look at the data.
link |
I love data, scientists love data.
link |
So I started to collect data on myself.
link |
What I did was download this app
link |
that a friend had told me about called the Reporter app.
link |
There's lots of these kinds of things out there.
link |
Basically, it just like sets up your phone
link |
to randomly ping you
link |
with whatever questions you want your phone to ask.
link |
It records your answers, you can download the data,
link |
you can make pretty graphs to see what's my change
link |
and how I've answered these questions over time.
link |
So I did that for a month.
link |
For a month, I had my phone ask me a couple times a day,
link |
oh, maybe twice a day, really.
link |
Did you practice since last time I asked you?
link |
My phone says, did you practice?
link |
If mostly it was no.
link |
And if yes, then it would funnel a couple other questions
link |
like how did you do?
link |
Check a couple of different emotion words now
link |
about your experience when you played.
link |
So when I, and I did that for a month.
link |
After a month, went into my office, downloaded the data
link |
and first took stock before I looked at the numbers
link |
like how do I think I did over the last month?
link |
And I thought, same as every other month,
link |
I didn't really get anywhere.
link |
Yeah, I practiced, but I still feel awful.
link |
I cried having to practice.
link |
I like was upset with myself for setting this goal
link |
and feeling like so anxious about it.
link |
All I remember is that I cried.
link |
Cried too much about this personal conquest
link |
that wouldn't matter to anybody else.
link |
Honestly, it really doesn't matter
link |
in the scope of things anyway.
link |
I'm not gonna become a drummer professionally.
link |
So who cares if I embarrass myself publicly?
link |
But what I found from the data
link |
was my memory was totally wrong.
link |
I actually had practiced far more times than I remembered.
link |
And when I looked at like my emotion words that I used,
link |
it was a clear upward trajectory.
link |
That part I hadn't misremembered or made up.
link |
But by the end of that month,
link |
like I had gotten a compliment from my husband
link |
who actually is a drummer and said like,
link |
hey, that wasn't that bad.
link |
And then there was like one expletive,
link |
you were effing amazing at that one thing
link |
you've been practicing at.
link |
But like, okay, fine, he's my husband, right?
link |
Is he just, you know, so at the moment,
link |
it didn't really feel that great.
link |
And I downplayed it and as a result,
link |
it didn't stick in my brain, right?
link |
I remember how stupid it felt that I cried
link |
because I can't do this, I can't make progress.
link |
And I downplayed in my mind,
link |
the thing that actually should have been
link |
a legitimate indicator that progress was being made.
link |
So all of which is to say,
link |
I needed to see, to collect that data on myself
link |
and to look at it objectively, accurately and completely
link |
because my brain wasn't doing that for me.
link |
That visual experience of downloading that data
link |
and looking at like, what was my actual experience,
link |
gave me a better insight.
link |
As I was trying to assess the trajectory of my progress,
link |
I became a more accurate accountant of my own progress,
link |
which is important for, you know,
link |
setting goals or resetting them
link |
when you need to calibrate in light of what's left to do
link |
and how much time do you have to do it in.
link |
So basically, if I understand correctly,
link |
when the intermediate goals of say daily practice
link |
or twice a day practice or reading or math, et cetera,
link |
are not a visual goal line,
link |
it really does help to visualize some aspect
link |
related to that non-visual goal line.
link |
In this case, the reporter app was a useful tool.
link |
I've never heard of it.
link |
I'm sure a number of people will be interested in it.
link |
It sounds like there are others out there,
link |
but that's the one that you found most useful.
link |
Yeah, there's another one too
link |
that is even more visual than that, than the reporter app.
link |
Although that has visual components
link |
and is really effective if you like data
link |
and wanna collect numbers on yourself or your experience,
link |
there's another one called the One Second Every Day app.
link |
This is really awesome because the app is a mechanism
link |
to record one second of your life.
link |
The goal, there's such an awesome community of people
link |
that just live by this and love having these experiences.
link |
And the creator of it, I got a chance to talk with,
link |
and he has done this.
link |
He's taken a one second video of some aspect of his life
link |
every day for 12 years, 13 years or something.
link |
And then what the app does is like smash them together
link |
and give you like a chronology of what your year
link |
or your month or your last decade of life has been like
link |
and presents it as like a streamlined video for you.
link |
So you just see these flashes of your life
link |
over however long you tell the app
link |
to create a montage for you.
link |
And so when you see these videos that people have made,
link |
especially those that have been doing it
link |
for a really long time, it's fascinating.
link |
I did that for myself too.
link |
One second of today's drumming performance.
link |
Another second, it's not enough to capture it.
link |
Am I actually doing a good job of drumming
link |
or what's my trajectory for drumming?
link |
But the guy who made it says one of the most like awesome
link |
one second videos that he ever made is of a brick wall.
link |
I was like, well, you don't need a video of that.
link |
Like what's the wall doing?
link |
It's not crumbling.
link |
It's not like in earthquake land or something like that.
link |
It's just like, you know,
link |
slightly jittery one second of a brick wall.
link |
And I was like, how is that motivating
link |
or exciting to you?
link |
You've been doing this for 13 years every day, one second.
link |
Why is that the one second that matters to you most?
link |
And he says, because when it comes up in my montage,
link |
it reminds me of like a really horrific moment in my family.
link |
That was the first wall that I saw
link |
when I walked out of the room,
link |
having heard that my sister-in-law
link |
had this awful, awful experience.
link |
Her intestines started to twist up on themselves and not up.
link |
And she was on the brink of death.
link |
And we had just found this out.
link |
She had just gotten into the hospital.
link |
They diagnosed this issue that required immediate surgery.
link |
And our family was there to hear about this.
link |
And we were all stunned that she might die.
link |
Like right now, she might die.
link |
And that's the first thing that I saw.
link |
And it reminds me of how precious life is,
link |
how important family is,
link |
and how the rest of whatever we were doing that day
link |
didn't matter because we all needed
link |
to be here together right now.
link |
And that is like all of this emotion
link |
and like purpose in life is conjured up
link |
or reminded when he looks at one second
link |
of a brick wall as it pops into his video feed.
link |
So if you're visually oriented
link |
and you do want ways to like remember what was life like,
link |
what has my year in review, what does it look like?
link |
That's an awesome app.
link |
One second every day that can help you do that.
link |
These are great recommendations.
link |
And a couple of reflections.
link |
First of all, the brick wall example is a beautiful way
link |
of highlighting this other feature of the visual system,
link |
which is that the brain largely thinks in symbols.
link |
It's very efficient.
link |
It batches entire experiences into symbols.
link |
In this case, the brick wall can be attached
link |
to a whole set of experiences that are very meaningful
link |
to this individual that brick walls don't mean that
link |
or didn't mean that to me until hearing this.
link |
So I think that it highlights the fact
link |
that the actual symbol is less relevant
link |
than what we attach to that symbol,
link |
but that symbols are so efficient
link |
that even in a one second view of something,
link |
we can attach to it for better or for worse.
link |
The other is that I'm an absolute almost rabid proponent
link |
of people getting morning sunlight in their eyes
link |
as the fundamental layer of setting their circadian rhythms
link |
and sleep and health as a zero cost practice
link |
that believe it or not can be done
link |
anytime of year or anywhere.
link |
But it does take a little bit of effort.
link |
You know, you have to get outside.
link |
You can't do it through a window or a windshield
link |
for it to be efficient,
link |
but it has huge outside effects on human health.
link |
This has now been demonstrated again and again and again.
link |
And so I'm going to just do a sort of call to action
link |
if people aren't already doing this.
link |
I'm going to start using the one second app
link |
to record my morning sunlight viewing
link |
and prove that even through cloud cover,
link |
you're getting more photons than you are indoors
link |
and that it's worthwhile.
link |
I also would love to do this for my next dog
link |
to go from puppy to a full-sized dog
link |
and maybe even to the end, who knows?
link |
Great, these are wonderful tools.
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You've given us a huge number of practical tools,
link |
which frankly isn't always the case on these podcasts.
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We always strive to do science and science-based tools
link |
is our kind of mantra,
link |
but you've given a rich set of tools here to apply.
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I just want to briefly backtrack to something
link |
and then a final question.
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Earlier, we were talking about how unfit people
link |
see the world as more challenging,
link |
maybe even hills as steeper, distances as further,
link |
and how shifting people into a state of energy,
link |
either cognitively or through the ingestion of real glucose
link |
to get an energetic lift or maybe through caffeine,
link |
if that's within their practice
link |
and span of healthy behaviors, they could do that.
link |
There are so many people who are suffering from depression,
link |
which one of the key features of depression
link |
is a lack of energy,
link |
even though there can be anxiety associated with depression.
link |
I have to wonder whether or not some of these tools
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are being deployed or will be deployed
link |
in the context of mental health
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because depression is this vicious loop, right?
link |
People feel a lack of energy and hopelessness
link |
and then things just look harder
link |
and so then it just verifies their negative worldview
link |
and it's a downward spiral.
link |
That's why medication in some cases and social sport,
link |
et cetera, can be helpful because they feel more energized.
link |
The side effects are a problem, however.
link |
Have there been any efforts
link |
to implement some of these visual tools
link |
to create this increase in systolic blood pressure
link |
and a kind of readiness and willingness to lean into
link |
what people perceive as immense challenge?
link |
And if not, for anyone listening,
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I know we have a lot of listeners
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in the mental health space and in the helping space,
link |
so to speak, I can imagine these are zero cost, right?
link |
They, we all provide with people are sighted,
link |
have the apparati to do it.
link |
Are you aware of any studies like this
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or is your laboratory involved in any studies?
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Cause I just see an immense value of implementing
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the sorts of tools that you've developed.
link |
Yeah, you know, we haven't explored those ideas directly.
link |
So call to all the scientists that are out there,
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this is, there's a great opportunity to start looking
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at these tools within the mental health space, you're right.
link |
Other researchers though have, you know,
link |
not this use of narrowed,
link |
like inducing a narrow attentional focus
link |
and can they now feel more energized to go for a run,
link |
but they have looked at the relationship
link |
between anxiety, depression, and visual experience
link |
and found, you know, over decades,
link |
evidence that people with depression or with anxiety,
link |
what their attention is captured by
link |
within the bigger global surrounding world
link |
are those things that are negative
link |
or reinforcing of their worldview.
link |
Now that happens for everybody.
link |
The things that are on our mind tend to like pop out
link |
that if whatever we're thinking about,
link |
we might start seeing some version of it
link |
showing up in the world around us
link |
that captures our attention.
link |
That's an idea called priming.
link |
What we're thinking about might then lead us
link |
to attend to the world, to see things in a way
link |
that aligns with what we're already thinking about.
link |
It's just that when what we're thinking about
link |
are those depressive, ruminative, anxiety, fearful thoughts,
link |
when that is what is cognitively accessible,
link |
when that's what's going through our mind,
link |
then that's also what captures our visual gaze.
link |
So when we think like the world is hard,
link |
the world is full of sadness,
link |
and that's the thought in our mind,
link |
and then we start seeing the people
link |
with frowns on their faces or who are experiencing anxiety
link |
and that's what captures our attention,
link |
even when there's other people around
link |
that might not be seeing the world
link |
or experiencing the world that way,
link |
it becomes reinforcing.
link |
When I think that the world is threatening
link |
and then I notice the threats that are around me
link |
that confirms what I'm thinking,
link |
which heightens my anxiety or my fear,
link |
and then it further leads me to narrowly focus
link |
on those elements of the environment
link |
that are aligned with that worldview,
link |
it's really hard to get out of that.
link |
That's where the vicious cycle can come from.
link |
So that has been really well established
link |
within the medical community,
link |
this selective attention relating
link |
to states of mental unwellness,
link |
that's been pretty well established.
link |
And so there's been some interventions done
link |
with people that have depression or anxiety trying,
link |
saying like, here's an array,
link |
a photograph of a bunch of different faces.
link |
Yes, it's artificial,
link |
it kind of looks like a page from a yearbook,
link |
a high school yearbook,
link |
but look for the faces that are smiling,
link |
look at the faces that are smiling,
link |
try right now, spend 10 minutes having your eyes focus
link |
on those and look at those people,
link |
that it is an effective intervention
link |
at improving people's sense of self-efficacy
link |
of what can I accomplish next?
link |
They feel a little bit more energized.
link |
It doesn't cure depression.
link |
It doesn't cure anxiety.
link |
And these are literal physical afflictions that we have.
link |
So that's not a quick fix,
link |
but it can produce a temporary change
link |
that might be a way to start getting out of that rut.
link |
Again, I think nowadays there's an increasing attention
link |
on tools that will help people orient
link |
as they start to veer towards suicidal depression
link |
or veer back into a depressive episode or anxiety episode.
link |
I mean, trying to reverse an entire syndrome
link |
or set of syndromes is far more complicated.
link |
Likewise in the health space,
link |
just trying to get people to deploy real-time tools
link |
to adjust their anxiety or to exercise more often and so on.
link |
As a kind of a final, but also again, a high-level question,
link |
I'm imagining that,
link |
and I plan to use this visual goal setting of spotlighting.
link |
I've been using it actually for some time on runs.
link |
It works really well.
link |
Yesterday, I took a run near the waterfront here
link |
and the entire, I think I did it somewhat incorrectly.
link |
The entire run, I was thinking about getting back
link |
to the statue, which I started,
link |
but I did find that I ran fastest in the final 20 meters,
link |
which admittedly wasn't fast at all,
link |
but it was faster than what preceded it.
link |
So it works and it makes perfect sense as to how it works.
link |
You've done other studies exploring some
link |
of the other features of vision, like the luminosity,
link |
how bright something is and how people perceive it.
link |
That was in a completely different context,
link |
but is there a kind of a higher level,
link |
kind of a black belt version
link |
of what we're talking about here,
link |
where not only am I focusing on a specific visual location
link |
as an intermediate or a long-term goal,
link |
or I'm using an app to ask me a question
link |
and tap into how I'm feeling,
link |
create a visual representation of my motivational state,
link |
but that I'm also making my phone as bright as possible.
link |
I'm also trying to take that visual window
link |
and actually pay attention to more of the details
link |
Or is this simply a matter of kind of in geek speak,
link |
visual neuroscience, we would just call this
link |
like low spatial frequency,
link |
just sort of grabbing a black and white snapshot
link |
of something here or there in my mind.
link |
If I attach more detail and effort
link |
to the specific thing that I'm focused on,
link |
is there any evidence that that's more effective?
link |
It certainly changes what our brains are doing.
link |
So how do we define effectiveness?
link |
That's a question for philosophers
link |
and that scientists will always-
link |
Will it keep me running?
link |
It will when you use it towards the end of your run,
link |
just like you've picked up on.
link |
Yeah, so there's cool studies that neuroscientists,
link |
not I, not coming from my lab,
link |
that neuroscientists have done looking at
link |
what is it doing to your brain
link |
when you've decided that you're gonna focus your attention
link |
on this element of the world
link |
and not pay attention to something else.
link |
Is that just sort of like tricking your thoughts
link |
or is it doing something different
link |
to something more basic, more low level?
link |
And the answer is yes.
link |
So there's an area of the brain, the fusiform face area.
link |
It's part of our brain that's really specialized
link |
for making sense of faces.
link |
It's important as a social species
link |
to pay attention to other people,
link |
pay attention to their faces,
link |
what they're trying to communicate through their face.
link |
So our brain has developed a really specialized
link |
central area for doing that.
link |
Then, and so these neuroscientists will present
link |
like a face to somebody,
link |
but superimposed over that is a house or something else
link |
that is less special to us as a social human species.
link |
And so both of those things,
link |
because it's sort of like both images
link |
are sort of transparent, overlaid over one another,
link |
our eyes are getting both of those images in
link |
and our brain is getting both of those images in,
link |
but we can will ourselves to focus on the house.
link |
Just really pay attention to the features of the house,
link |
even though everything about that face is still there too,
link |
or pay attention to the face and just tell me like,
link |
what is it that you are deciding that you want to hold on to
link |
that you want to look at right now?
link |
And you can see that the brain is responding to that.
link |
So when people are saying like,
link |
I'm really seeing that face,
link |
the details of the face, I'm paying attention to the face,
link |
even though we know their eyes are also looking at
link |
and engaged with the contents of the house,
link |
that's right there, smacked on top,
link |
the fusiform face area lights up.
link |
And when they're saying like,
link |
no, I'm really focused on the house now,
link |
we see activation in the fusiform face area decline
link |
and other areas of the brain's neurological real estate
link |
So yeah, I think there's something to it that we can,
link |
our brains are responding to our psychology as well.
link |
And we have that great power to really, you know,
link |
with intention, with practice,
link |
decide how do I want to engage with the world?
link |
And can it produce real change in our bodies
link |
and in the way that we experience the world?
link |
The answer is yes.
link |
Well, you've given us a ton of mechanistic and conceptual
link |
and practical information.
link |
So I'm speaking for a lot of people when I say,
link |
thank you for taking the time out of your schedule
link |
amidst kids and running a lab
link |
and teaching at the university and your book,
link |
which we will point people to and provide a link to
link |
is a wonderful resource.
link |
And we hope to have you back again.
link |
Thank you so much.
link |
It was a great conversation.
link |
Thank you for joining me today for our discussion
link |
about motivation, goal-seeking and research supported tools
link |
for achieving your goals with Dr. Emily Balchetes.
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If you're learning from and are enjoying this podcast,
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please subscribe to our YouTube channel.
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In addition, please subscribe to the podcast
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goal-seeking, and pursuit.
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And last, but certainly not least,
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We'll see you next time.