Andrew Huberman- The neuroscience of Creativity

[Music] welcome to the optimal performance guide where we have conversations with high-level humans to provide clear guidance to the mindset and habits required for optimal performance i'm your host rory cordial [Music] welcome everyone today's show is a special one for me i've been looking forward to sitting down with my good friend andrew huberman and today is the day also this is our first sponsored episode which i couldn't be more grateful and proud to align with the company is made for for those of you who are regular listeners first thank you thank you for being curious about your own personal formula for optimal performance and just living your best life and second if you're new to the show welcome one of the made for co-founders and former navy seal pat dossett was on the show in an earlier episode so check that out pat is a very inspiring human so i'm confident it'll be worth your time okay what is made for it's a 10 month program that delivers the essential science tools steps and support to help you live better in a world of quick fixes and fads made for stands apart co-founded by a former navy seal and built alongside a team of world-class experts made for delivers a science-based approach to personal growth so if you feel like you've gone off track you're being overrun by life or you're just ready to up your game and take back control let made4 be your guide and get started today visit getmadefor.com to learn more and use my personal code mf rory for 20 off the entire program or follow them on instagram at made4team m-a-d-e-f-o-r thank you made for okay what can i say about andrew he has his phd in neuroscience he's a tenured professor in the department of neurobiology at stanford university school of medicine he's got his own lab at stanford hubermann lab where he has two main focuses one working to halt and reverse vision loss two how visual perception and autonomic nervous system arousal states are integrated and impact behavior so obviously super smart and driven but what really makes andrew special is he cares deeply about people he's a big strong guy on the outside but on the inside has a huge heart and really goes out of his way to help others many of you listening will have heard andrew before because he's done almost every major podcast out there he has a great instagram channel where he shares all kinds of actionable knowledge about neuroscience so definitely check that out if you haven't already in this episode we talk about all kinds of topics neuroscience and performance related but really emphasize and dive deep into creativity and how the relationship between time and space and our sense perception shape our reality okay i hope you guys enjoy enough talking and let's get to the show [Music] headphones oh yeah headphones it's different huh well you get a little bit of reverb in your head when you first start talking you can hear the the not reverb but you get a little bit of the resonance from your own voice but i just feel like it um yeah the brain is it's just different because you know what it is there's a neuroscience thing okay actually this is this is the neuroscience this is our start so who would have thought that that uh yeah so when you this is kind of a duh when you hear it but when you listen to something with headphones like say if you say your name rory i hear your name and you speaking your name in my head if i'm wearing headphones whereas if i took off the headphones and you say it i hear it in the room and that's fundamentally different oh yeah listen to music with headphones and listen to music in the room and it's very different right that's the basis of the ventriloquism effect so ventriloquism is when the you know the the person holds the puppet and is like moving the mouth and moving the head and and they're speaking they don't throw their voice but you your brain assigns the movement of their mouth if it's matched to the voice if i do something like hello my name is andrew like of course you realize i'm saying it not the puppet but there's no puppet on my hand anyway but the brain starts to move the set the or the location of the sound literally the map of the sound to the location that matches it visually and there's all these great experiments on the ventriloquism effect so what we're doing now is a little bit of a ventriloquism effect because if you speak i hear it over here not from over there i hear it in my head because i'm wearing the headphones and it has a profound influence on how we process the information anyway there's a there are a bunch of ways we could uh circle back to this later as it relates to hypnosis yeah self-talk i've always wanted to do this like have you heard self-talk recorded through a speaker in the room versus in your head with the headphones totally different because in one case it's self-talk heard in your head and the other one it's self-taught you talking it's uncomfortable to hear yourself in the room yeah anyway yeah um i swear i'm sober yeah the the way our brain perceives senses i'm interested in that you you spoke before about the eyes obviously you study the eyes but you mentioned how our acuity is better straight ahead and as we get into the periphery we're less you know it's less acute or the clarity um when i'm working with people i will kind of like gaze off and you can tune into the tissue or the body at like a different level of like your ability to listen with your hands and tune into the body is different uh i just do it naturally and my dad does it my brothers do it i was listening to a musician winston marsalis was on a podcast talking about he's a jazz musician and he would say that he likes to listen to other jazz musicians and would be in the audience and when he knows when their eyes kind of gaze off they're in the flow or the zone or what is that is that i was wondering if like that lack of acuity is part of how we're wired to heighten our sense of touch or like uh you know like to be able to um anticipate or take in the environment at a different level or or heightened touch or something like that yeah and access other senses so there's a ton to say about this um i'm not known for being succinct so i'll try for sake of everybody's time but i i won't rush but i'll do my best to be succinct about this so you're absolutely right the eye toward the center of your eye you essentially have what could be described as more pixels so imagine on your phone or with a camera a digital camera you take a picture and you have whatever you know they'll say like 7000 pixels or 12 000 whatever i don't know how many it is now it's many many thousands of pixels and the more pixels the higher the resolution right you're just sampling space more finely the eye isn't quite like that because the eye has a higher density of pixels in the middle an area that we call the fovea and as you move towards the periphery of the eye the pixels get bigger and you have fewer of them so a simple way to realize this and to see and feel this is if you look right in front of you at the distance of like that you would hold a tablet or a book or a laptop or a phone you can see quite a lot of detail and you can read fine print if you take your hand and you move it out towards the periphery so move out to the side but you keep your gaze forward sooner or later you can move your hand and you've got motion perception out there but you can't actually see the number of fingers now as you bring it closer sooner or later you can see the number of fingers now the temptation is always to move your head and look at it when it's off to the side but the the point is that and actually for a well-sided person if you hold your hand your excuse me your arm out at um arm's length and you raised up your thumb like you're giving a thumbs up the limit of human visual acuity is what's called 60 cycles per degree which sounds really technical but what it means is if i drew 60 lines black lines or whatever on my on my thumbnail i'll be able to say oh there are like a bunch of lines on my thumbnail but if i drew 70 of them it would look like one big white stripe now a hawk can see a hundred and twenty cycles per degree so when a hawk is sitting up on a lamp post and looking down at the ground they they can actually see the the differences between blades of grass depending on how high that they're out there but in your peripheral vision you can only see about two cycles per degree maybe not even that so you can see if something's moving but you can't see what it is okay so to circle back to your question yes the acuity as we're describing it here is different for the center of your visual field versus your periphery and this can sound a little technical and it sounds like i'm trying to be a theoretical physicist but i'm not when i say that space and time are linked in the nervous system and it makes very good sense if you think about if something moves from one of those little lines on my thumbnail to the other when it's right in front of me it moves i can see if it moved a very small distance time is just you know just it's basically like what is the distance traveled in a given amount of time okay whereas if i'm slicing time more different out in the periphery i've got my analysis of space is different i don't see as well out there i have better motion detection but i don't see as finely so the simplest way to describe this is if you ever look at a super slow-mo video imagine like those you know basketball videos like going up for the dunk shot those are shot at maybe 120 or 300 or 400 frames per second your slicing time very thinly so that's how you get slow motion whereas typical video is 60 on your phone is 60 frames per second so you don't really get really good slow motion although now it's getting better so you have more frames per second at one visual location versus the other so you're so when you say you um you're working with a client you look off to the side and what you're doing is you're actually without realizing you're subconsciously switching your brain to a mode where you're analyzing time differently you're slicing time differently and when you move from high acuity vision where you really focus your eyes on something and look at it and read it or scroll through your instagram or whatever it is to where you're not really looking at it directly you also make real estate available in the brain to process the other senses you're hearing your touch the most extreme example of this would be a blind person blind people are really good at hearing subtle differences in where things are in the room because they analyze space and time with their hearing not with their eyes because they're blind and they're real they braille read and they can feel really subtle distinctions in like oh what's that have you ever seen like a blind person when they're like that their typewriter off to i spend a lot of time with blind people because my lab works on vision loss in addition other things and they look off to the well they're not looking but they they turn their head off to the side and it's sort of like a natural reflex sometimes they're listening even to the feeling of the braille it sounds crazy i realize i said what i said so wait you said listen into the field yeah that's what they're emerging feel and sound and i i know i won't go totally down the rabbit hole with this but every once in a while it's kind of fun to think about how an animal that's not as visually dominant but is more like olfactory dominant and relies on its nose we see in in three-dimensional space in depth so if you're navigating like where's that thing and where's that landmark and is that the building is that the restaurant there's the parking lot you're walking through doors and you're doing this all very subconsciously a dog or let's say another animal on a scent they don't smell like oh weak smell strong smell they smell in depth in odor plumes so they can actually it's hard to to imagine because we don't do this but they see they smell depth so they can say not just i'm getting closer or i'm further away from something but they can tell you how fast it's moving they and then they don't tell you they can't tell us if they try we don't understand but they can understand how fast it's moving um so they know trajectory and you know this with sound if you hear an ambulance go by it's called doppler we go [Music] you can tell which direction it's going based on the the doppler effect the change in the sound so to circle back to kind of more conventional life the brain is constantly bringing in the different senses and we use our eyes mainly but also our head and where we tilt it our body position our hand position to create these little like cones or tunnels of attention that combined and so i i was smiling when you were describing how you turn your head to the side and work with clients because i've seen you do this before and it's like this is where your magic comes out as you you'll it's like you're tuning off your visual system because you're going pure kinesthetic it's like how does it feel how does the tissue feel what's not i don't even know what you're doing so i'm making up a story about how you do it and you know i don't know what you do you're a jedi but uh for those of you who don't know you probably know if you're listening to this but like rory is a like a total jedi when it comes to all things movement and body kinesthetics and um you think in this in the kinesthetic domain some people think in the auditory domain a musician would do that some people think in the visual domain like our friend michael mueller just a brilliant photographer right and so it just depends on how you're oriented towards something and yeah you can switch these things on and off it's why some people close their eyes when they're really thinking hard some people look up and yeah well it's cool to hear that you so we can fine-tune our senses or like for me kinesthetic or if if if i'm dominant or i'm you know more tuned into that sense to to learn and to feel things that just moving the head or our body naturally can amplify that sense oh yeah the ability to amplify that well and it's an ancient thing so if you think about animals that will prick up their ears when they want to hear something so imagine uh i don't hunt but you know i uh i deer you know or i but i do like the taste of elk and deer so um free you know apologies to the vegans out there but you know um when an animal pricks up its ears or and then tilts it the they're called the pinna of the ears which is the outside part of the ears humans do this a little bit we have a lo some people can wiggle their ears a little bit that's a residual ability they have neurons that innervate the ears we all do but animals are really good at this and we mostly rely on vision i mean we orient our eyes we do what's called foveats we'll bring our eyes together just a little bit you don't realize you do it but when you see something that's really important both your eyes just kind of go just a little bit forward and they lock on a particular place in space that gives you better depth perception it's called stereopsis and most of us aren't certainly not me i'm not used to doing this with touch because my job doesn't rely on kinesthetic stuff whereas somebody who's in massage therapy or or sorts of rehabilitation stuff um a painter probably knows probably doesn't even think about it probably feels like the viscosity of the paint at the tip of the brush they're probably not thinking about it but these the human nervous system is amazing because unlike other nervous systems we can get really good at a lot of different things depending on our lifestyle choices and what we learn other animals as amazing as the vision of a hawk is they don't do artwork and they might do massage they they don't i don't know i doubt it they don't emphasize other senses we can move through our different senses in ways that um based on learning and experience that other animals cannot how does a hawk now or like an osprey navigate through the reflection of water to anticipate a fish moving to catch a fish this is my favorite question now this is like my favorite question in the whole did you did you like hack my computer so um i've always i've thought about that i mean fish hunt awesome we were friends we were friends before but we are better friends now so when i was an undergraduate at um university california uh wait santa barbara way back when i had a professor he's still alive now unfortunately his name is jerry jacobs who's like the world expert in the evolution of visual systems he's a member of the national academy is a big deal in in the vision science world he's also a super nice guy he also had like a mean marathon time he was like running seven minute miles in marathons which sounds fast to me or feels fast when he was in his 70s so yeah and super nice guy so i took this course where it was all about the evolution and special specializations of eyes everything from octopus eyes to you know hawk eyes human eyes and so here's what's wild the diving birds have a very important set of tasks which is they have to navigate relative to the horizon so they have this so they have instead of a pupil like we have these round pupils in our eyes and that corresponds to the fovea that's that high acuity region we were talking about before they don't have that they've got what's called a visual streak so they have a like the pixel density is much higher they sample at a much higher rate in a stripe along each eye so that they can monitor the horizon as they fly so they're like flapping or you know monitoring the horizon and they also have a pupil in the lower part of their eye so they have what's called a visual streak to view the horizon and they have a pupil in their lower eye to view into the water because they have to do exactly what you described which is when they see a school of fish they need to ballistically dive down into the water and catch that fish but the fish is usually moving right which itself is amazing so they have to calculate speed trajectory there's a lot of intense analysis and they have to offset for the refractory index of the water because if you've ever reached for something underwater depending on how deep it is it's not really in the position where you see it they learn that they learn to based on how fast that fish is going the direction it's going to essentially dive ahead or to the side of that of that fish now the denser the school of fish the more likely they are to just plummet into the middle but just taking a step back for a second that is an incredible set of analyses now they learn this through a lot of failures and the incentive is high because unless uh you know the mom or dad bird is gonna feed you you gotta eventually get your own fish so they learn it but the specializations of eyes are incredible like and i won't spin off all the examples but for instance the the elephant has a j shaped fovea to not the tusk or the no so it's so the highest acuity is in the shape of a j in their eyes so it allows them to view the tip of their trunk as they reach for things up high because they sometimes need to go no not that apple that apple and grab it they're very good with their trunk movements and my favorite example um of all well is the diving fish diving bird excuse me but my second favorite example is the sloth because there's a sloth that has a pupil in the middle of its eye and that's a sloth that walks along the jungle floor and eats and does its thing and whatever it is that slaws do but then some slaws hang upside down the three-toed sloth hangs upside down and its pupil is on the top of its eye so it can view the jungle floor so this is wild because what it means is that the body plan and the way that our senses are organized are tightly tied to the niche in which our species evolved and it's not due to learning during development it's not like if you took a diving bird and took it out of that environment you change the the way the eye works the brain so all the eyes are part of the brain i've said that many times before publicly but they really are part of the brain the retinas part of the brain but the rest of the brain is really good at adapting to whatever you give it so the person that's blind from birth for instance they don't just leave a bunch of empty real estate in their brain where vision would be processed they use that for heightened auditory processing to get better at somatosensory processing touch and if you were to take a one of these diving birds and you know you wouldn't want to do this because it would be cruel but you know put in a situation where it couldn't fly and dive the eye would still be the eye and would be organized the way it is but the brain would adapt and would shut down the circuitry that would correspond to the stuff for diving and horizons and would do something different with it um but there are limits to that whereas the human brain has a very long period of plasticity where it can do stuff so in any case um every animal has a different visual system depending on its niche and there's some animals like you know those naked mole rats those like hideous things with the local some people think they're kind of cute but uh um i think they're pretty ugly um even though they deserve our love and respect they're pretty ugly they have little tiny residual eyes they barely see it all because they live in holes they don't need the eyes so they use their brain for some the visual brain for something else do they have really good touch probably or sit here they must send space so so this is really cool um so there's a guy at university of connecticut named bruce goldman who worked on these animals for years and bruce is a really terrific scientist you can look up his work if you like they sense space on their body because they're constantly rubbing against each other moving through these like very complicated naked mole rat societies under underground they have narrow tunnels and they're like they can sense space they also pass hormones through the skin from one to the next which technically makes those pheromones because that's the definition of a pheromone they're constantly um i was gonna make a bad joke about them rubbing off on each other um which just means that they're influencing each other by the way um and that was a completely pg-13 statement they're basically rubbing hormones from one to another they're sensing space because they don't see so like with your eyes closed i mean you could try this like how would you send space where you could touch things with your hands but they've got this they have to walk on their hands so the like the um the starter knows mole that thing is chock-a-block full of sensors though there's a woman at berkeley um diane bautista who studies their that thing is like it's like having 20 000 fingers and it can sense variations in the dirt and it can smell things and so yeah when we think about life and the way that we interact with the world we are thinking about it through a very limited set of sensory filters and um all you have to do it's kind of a fun thing to do we have these in our lab um is throw on a pair of night vision goggles we have them because not because we do kind of cool military stuff but because we do some experiments that require we be in the dark we need to see so if you spend a little while in night vision goggles you start to appreciate what it is to have infrared vision and it's especially cool to be in a room with people that don't have that on and they're like groping around they don't know where anything is or they sit very still and you have full mobility you're moving about you are essentially a night vision animal at that point and it's a total trip because you realize that we you know some people are like we're in a simulation or we're not i don't know i don't think we're in a simulation but our experience of the world is bound and limited by the number of sensory channels that we can perceive the way to think about the color spectrum i was talking to a a friend of a mutual friend um this morning coleman ruiz um former seal team guy who is also very active in the um kind of like performance human performance space now and and does really interesting work uh with teams and this kind of thing and he's very interested in neuroscience and coleman we were talking a little bit about this and coleman was like yeah i always just think of it like the spectrum of light and since he said it better than i could i'll just quote him he said you know we see in one portion of the spectrum but there's all this other stuff there's infrared there's uv and it's there we just don't see it we just don't see it and if you put on the right apparatus or if you're a different animal you see it and it means everything is different we would be emitting heat right now i'd be able to like set if i was a pit viper i'd be like oh man like you're like you're you're high metabolism right now right or you're you're cold right now i would just have to look at you and know that so i love thinking about this because i love animals but i it also it it gives us a window into how limited but also how fantastic our our nervous system is it's a bunch of like two little antennas how much can we tap into that broader electromagnetic spectrum even though we can't see like i can't see your thermal you know or infrared i can't see the heat but i what if am i able to to uh train like i can feel heat off the body just from working with the body for so long so like what's that is that a well um so it's unlikely um so there's it's unlikely that anyone has an ex like some receptor that other people don't have like i mean we can't rule it out completely but it's very unlikely that there's somebody walking around who sees in the infrared without infrared goggles right or who can sense heat emissions without you know putting on some piece of equipment so what different people can do though is use their senses in different combinations so you are describing the jazz musician who can you know maybe take less of a visual less visual information in and start to allocate more mental energy and focus towards other senses and that those unique combinations of senses will will afford them an ability other people don't have um we can all sense heat with our hands but i've never put any practice to getting better at it and if i put practice getting better at it i'll get better at it so if it's a source of information and it's important you will start to rewire the brain circuitry that represents that because we have maps it's a little complicated thing about but we have maps of all this stuff in our head so you literally have a map of your body surface it's called a homunculus in your head so much so that if i stimulated like the hand region of your cortex you would feel it in your hand and if i stimulate it in the hand representation of your motor cortex you would move your hand you would have no control over it you would just do this which itself is amazing because it means that the brain controls the body not just that the body controls the brain it's totally bi-directional so that the experiences are are different for different people depending on their job tasks and their upbringing but for the most part we all have the same receptors now there's one category of exception that if i had said this like 10 years ago um people might you know wonder whether i was completely sane i mean they might wonder anyway but um and that's magnetoreception so turtles that migrate long distances do that through magnetoreception they actually have they can sense magnetic fields they have neurons that fire when magnetic fields change in very in a very systematic way um there are birds that migrate long distances by the um by looking at polarized light um which for your optics savvy folks out there will make sense but you know when you hear about like polarized non-polarized sunglasses it's a little bit like that you can filter that stuff off or not and they're birds that migrate long distances by looking at the polarized light because it gives them information about solar angle and day and night and whether or not they're going north or south they don't think north south they don't use compasses they just do that stuff so humans it seems there was an article published in science have kind of weak magnetoreception so there are these crazy devices that almost look like tinfoil hats like that you put people in and you put them in this big cage to eliminate electric noise and it looks like some bizarre science fiction experiment from the 70s or something but if you ask people where is this magnetic field strongest in this environment you know maybe divide it into a couple locations in front of them they're better than chance at detecting the magnetic fields but it's still weak it's a weak magnetoreception and it can be improved with training but that says that you know we do have some magneto reception now of course in fairness maybe we haven't done the we i mean those weren't my experiments but maybe the scientific community hasn't done the killer experiment that would show that i'm making this up now by the way that for instance maybe there's um strong magnetoreception in the gut for all we know it's just the experiment hasn't been done and then people always say well why haven't they done the experiment it was like all right well if you send me half a million bucks then i'll hire the most dog and the student to do it you know research is expensive and people are mostly focused on trying to deal with things like autism schizophrenia and parkinson's and all the other major issues that that harm society and in ways that i think everyone would agree would be great if we could resolve so magneto reception isn't high on the list of important problems right now um for the very limited number of taxpayer dollars for research but um someday someone would get around to it what about i've heard the brain you know our nervous system our central nervous system i've heard our heart has its own nervous system stomach the enteric has its own nervous system um the heart tell me if this is accurate having a stronger electromagnetic field to the brain is that accurate yeah so well each one of those every one of our organs is innervated by nerves so it's it's woven into the nervous system in a very um intense way intense meaning lots of nerve endings there a good example was um sorry to interrupt is it all like the nervous system's the nervous system and we separate to try to understand at a deeper level would you say like it's yeah we do that obviously with everything we do that science yeah i mean um i i you know we there are lumpers and there are splitters right but you got to split someplace i mean you can't go into science and say i'm going to study the whole brain with the whole body so you got to you know we have cardiologists we have neurologists so that the fields of medicine are generally not integrated across the whole organism now some you know some people think very broadly about how things interact across organs this actually uh i won't do a whole history lesson on this but for those that are interested um there's a wonderful book um called the prince of medicine which talks about galen also called galin he was the physician to marcus aurelius the famous stoic that now everyone's excited about stoicism i actually lost a lot of respect for the stoics when i read the book because it turns out that the stoics believed in all these um like uh first of all they didn't want people to dissect people even cadavers and so for like 2 000 years there was a lot of stuff that was just made up that people accepted because they wouldn't let them dissect cadavers there was a lot of animal experiment they were allowed to do animal experiments there's actually a case for uh i want to get into the controversies around animal research but certain things are different in animals and so galen couldn't work on humans even deceased humans so he went and worked on gladiators because they they'd get like a big abdomen slash and then he would dig around in there a little extra or they'd have like a fractured skull and so he could do experiments and he said look we've got all these things called organs and at the same time they're all linked to one another like when i squeeze have wrote this kind of stuff like when i poke on the liver the heart changes it's heartbeat when i when i squeeze the heart or i tie off a valve the liver turns a different color and when i like do things to the brain or when the brain is damaged this other stuff happens and so um it was about 2000 years later before we really got all this also because i'm going to lose some friends here but because some really annoying philosophers who were really good at math but really bad about thinking about biology started creating ridiculous conversations that still can't be solved like the mind body problem the brain mind problem and just discussions that are interesting but we're way behind in medicine as a consequence of getting really distracted about those things in my opinion and i'm sure i just alienated like half the listeners who it's fun discussion but what it turns out that all the organs are linked and the nervous system is brain spinal cord remember brain includes eyes and then the peripheral nervous system and a really good example would be the spleen so someone earlier today say what does the spleen do well the spleen isn't a is an immune organ it creates cells that go and combat infection bacteria and viruses but you ask what's the signal for the spleen to deploy these immune cells like does the spleen just sit there and go oh is there anything in the body that's like bothering me does the person have a cold no the nervous system through the splenic nerve right the splenic nerve sends a signal and says i'm really stressed i'm really hot i don't feel good and then the spleen goes oh and it just it's a dumb organ it just goes and releases all this stuff no disrespect to the people who work on spleen but it's not a thinking organ so likewise the heart has a lot of neural innervation as you mentioned the entire nervous system of the gut and all of these are linked and so nowadays i think you know brain mind i don't even distinguish some people like well that's the interesting discussion yeah but what what's the question like what's the question i think brain and body are linked through the nervous system and body is sending brain information through the nervous system too so we're like a two-way super highway and it is true that the heart has very strong effects on all the other organs maybe more so than like the liver or something like that but it's all interwoven at a in a way that it would be hard for me to say you know um you've got a that the nervous system part of the heart is way more important than the nervous system part of the pancreas or something like that in embryology what comes first the heart of the brain that's a good question so it wikipedia says like the heart oh well google but i know you you know yeah i started off in developmental neurobiology i teach it so i'll i will uh i'll go on record here saying they more or less develop at the same time um you know it's uh and just because it doesn't mean it's more important necessarily but i just thought that's an interesting lens to look at just embryology is fascinating and how we develop from one cell to trillions so i mean you have a child now that's how old he's 15 months right so it's crazy right unbelievable development is i love development it's still to me one of the most amazing things it's like look everyone knows this but if you just think about it's like sperm meets egg okay at the location where the sperm enters the egg it's called the sperm entry zone by biologists a little lip of tissue forms like a little in indentation that's where the nervous system will form so the whole business of development is about breaking symmetry you've got this beautiful round egg and all of a sudden it's got a little dimple in it and a little fold and that little fold then turns into a tube across the rest of the egg and inside the big globe of the egg it's there's duplications you're getting more eggs and more eggs and words so now it's a big ball of eggs it's called a blaster level which literally means a ball of eggs okay and then across the top imagine like a piece of like putty that's kind of strong out across the top that's going to be the nervous system now the body is developing inside of the bigger egg and the nervous system is developing on top so when you ask is it the heart or the brain that develops first they're developing simultaneously although at different rates and they each have their own neural components and the amazing thing is it's just cell duplication after cell duplication and so you're just getting tons and tons they're called daughter cells you're getting tons and tons and tons of daughter cells tons of proliferation and so that ball of eggs is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and pretty soon it starts folding over on itself and the folds and then pretty soon it gets these little out pouchings which are the the limb buds and i don't have children but i i've been fascinated by embryology forever um ever since i got into science and it's incredible one of the most fun times i ever had in science was my graduate advisor when i joined her lab she said um you should just take one night and just watch development and i was like what do you mean and so what she did is she fertilized some zebrafish embryos for me uh some zebrafish eggs they weren't embryos yet and they're clear so they're optically clear and you sit down you add some food at some music i sat down in the microscope and you watch a an egg duplicate and you can see all this down the microscope and 12 hours later a fish a little larval zebrafish swims away and so for 12 hours i got up from time to time but you're sitting there just watching i mean i don't want to get biblical about it but you're watching the genesis of an animal and there it forever changed me like if i die if i get hit by a bus tomorrow i'm good because i've seen this thing and it's and for the parents out there and even for those of you that don't have kids like just think about that all of the programs for generating a human being are contained in these this dna that's just age a's and g's and c's and t's right the n the genetic code and embryology is just about cells next to each other saying hey we got a lot of these eye cells like let's make some eyelid cells and then the eyelid cell is going oh wait hold on no light's going to get in here unless we create like an eyelid opening because that's actually what happens you know you see the baby in there or the animal and in there and its eyes are closed and what happens is the cells along the eye opening get a signal from the eye to die so the cells die in a little strip like and then that's where the eyelid will open and so you have two processes going on in embryology one is signals that say really three processes sorry signals that say let's make more cells let's make more of what's ever happening and then you've got signals that say wait hold on we have enough let's make less and then you've got signals that sometimes say you know what let's make more of something different and the way they do that is not by talking to one another it's not even by turning on their own genes the way they do it is by talking to one another and saying like oh it's kind of crowded in here i think like the mole or whatever like the morale exactly so anyway this is somewhat an abstract and topical view of embryology but it's incredible that all the information to for to build a very complicated nervous system that comes into the world to learn even and self-organize is contained in two cells of information right sperm and egg and that the fish experiment is the most like exciting thing i've ever seen in a laboratory in one moment i've had some great results but like to stretch out that moment to like a 12-hour block i guess that's a moment of some sort and because you realize you go this is happening all the time and this this is you think differently about yourself you're a collection of cells and and i know that's kind of a duh everyone goes well of course you're a collection of cells i think i'm an idiot but but there's something i don't know to me it's still profound maybe i'm just too easily dazzled by biology but uh it's incredible yeah yeah even seeing even planting a seed and maybe 30 days later if you water it like a plant for a flower to come up is amazing so amazing i would love to see the fish like 12 hours is nothing 12 hours we could do the experiment i have you need a very low tech microscope okay you need a little bit of water and that's you know zebrafish everything you can get at your fish store if you want i don't really want people doing experiments at home but i'll set it up for you when jax is a little older yeah we should do that for them this is why i think every child should have a fish tank provided they're they're able to take good care of it i just set up fish tanks for my friends kids because often times like new life crops up in there the snails are doing their thing and the and the fish are doing their thing and then you got some baby fish and you get a lot of the life cycle and i have total respect for fish but it's a different thing when like one of your fish kind of like craps out then when like the cat or the dog right i just can't i guess i am a little bit of a speciesist i can't really put my bulldog on the same you know stance with a you know a goldfish or something you can get pretty attached to anything but um but kids i think in a very kind of low um like low bar way can really start to see the cycle of life and it's happening fast enough that they can see cool stuff so it's um but it's not so slow it's not so fast that like it's over in a day or two anyway how much with the brain and for us learning like if the eyes bump into each other and if they bump into each other and then they die off to signal to allow the light to come in um how much do we have to fail like is it all about failure for our brain to learn versus because this whole idea of perfection that stops a lot of us from doing maybe certain things that we want to do is it just the biggest illusion there is so are you talking about during develop like embryology or well just that idea of like um the i think more learning but that idea of failure being just like it's just part of how is it part of our nervous system like how we develop how we uh how our brain can into the neuroplasticity like is failure uh critical to us learning and yeah so growing so so if we're thinking about like if we take like acquisition a new motor skill um you work with some tennis players right okay um i i don't play tennis so i don't know anything about tennis except that it's a net and a ball and two to four people hitting back and forth but there's a a guy at harvard um his name is he's hungarian his name is hard to pronounce but yes i'll get it wrong ben solevsky he's a really nice guy and he studies motor learning and he has these um beautiful videos of um federer yeah okay so his serve and the trajectories that the racket takes in like a hundred serves and it basically looks like one line it's a very narrow line so they've overlaid line after line after line after line and then they show the trajectories of the racket and somebody that's learning how to serve and the lines are like like it's a huge swath it's like a big spaghetti mess of lines over these videos and as that person gets better now none of them achieve the federer serve i'm guessing but what you're essentially doing is error correction you're gradually measuring oh wait the ball went over or it hit the net or it didn't go right or you know i missed entirely whatever it happens to be until you're essentially generating you're creating narrower and narrower cone of error that's most of motor learning and it has a very well established physiological basis which is the earl early in development we see this also like a little baby that's like flopping around and then they eventually learn to ambulate crawl walk run the motor neurons in the spinal cord that innervate the muscle fibers and cause the muscle fibers to contract which is how we move our limbs early on they're multi-innervated it's motor neurons are connected to many different muscle fibers but by time you reach you know teenage years or so it's one to one and then you have to work with those one-to-one connections and you have to recruit different motor units now the exercise physiologists will understand what we're talking about but you have to recruit the units in the right order right like are you going to move with the more proximal meaning close to the midline limb or then the more distal limb first and what order and what with what force so there are two kinds of learning one is the developmental learning where you're shaping the neural connections themselves and then there's the kind of learning where you're taking existing neural connections and you're modifying the sequence in which things are done and that largely has to do with a brain area called the cerebellum it's an area we don't really talk about much it literally means mini brain and it looks like a little mini brain stuffed in the bottom back right above the spinal cord is where you'll see it in the um even though it's kind of up a little bit higher that's where you'll see it in the human and it has at its own map of the body surface there's a lot of people don't know this but you have a homunculus a body map in the front of the brain and you have another one in your cerebellum and it's actually represented on both sides of the cerebellum so you and the map there is very interesting because the map is of body space but it also has a lot of timing information so it's about the movement of different limbs and their timing and so a lot of motor learning like the example of the serve is done in the cerebellum and we always think of the cerebellum as balance but the cerebellum has a lot of other functions besides balance uh i don't know if i answered your question correctly oh as you learn are you is it all about eliminating things no occasionally you're making certain nerve connections stronger you're really emphasizing certain nerve connections um we think about motor learning but it's muscle memory but most that is neural in a basis although the muscle probably has some recollection too like if you lift very heavy objects you can actually change gene expression in the muscle fiber itself it can hypertrophy and or build higher contractile strength and that kind of thing and um andy galpin will probably correct me on the use of some of my language because i'm not a muscle physiologist so um forgive me andy i but i think you know i last time i checked it you know i think what i said was more or less correct for information traveling through the body what's the speed what's the fastest um like electrical impulse going along like an action potential with the nervous system or hormones or blood lymph there's all these different fluids and um traveling through our body all the time um they all carry information and yeah is there is there like something that's the fastest is there uh or is it not that simple yeah no it's a it's the question so um we can divide things into categories so um there's endocrine signaling which is generally hormonal and endocrine signaling is sort of like if i wanted to send a bunch of people the same message i'd probably send them an email like if it was like 100 people um it you know endocrine or hormone hormones are things that are secreted from one organ in the body and travel and have effects on lots of different other organs that's pretty slow because it's got to go through the bloodstream there's some fast hormones like adrenaline released from the adrenals you know immediate effect um and then there's some slow ones like um the steroid hormones like testosterone and estrogen work a little bit more slowly or prolactin pheromones are molecules that are made by one member of a species that go and act on another member of a species and that's even slower so yes there are very strong pheromone effects between individuals and animals also like the hunters listening to this will will know um you know for instance that like elk and other animals will they do something called fleming which is where they lower their lip like this and they're actually have little sensors in their lip that smell the odors from con specifics that they are in heat so the males will phlegm they'll go like where are the females and they're actually trying to catch molecules pheromone molecules from the females in the environment and then go mate with them wild so that's really slow right it's like carried by the wind then there's endocrine organ organ then there's neural and neural is at the speed of electricity so that's the fastest that we're aware of but within the the range of neural there sorry within the category of neural there's a range so there's neuromodulation so things like dopamine serotonin epinephrine and acetylcholine are generally kind of slower than what we call fast synaptic transmission now the best example fast synaptic transmission was that we want nerve to muscle connections to be reliable so i can lift up my hand lift up a glass every single time until i get too tired and i fall asleep but there are no failures of that whereas there are some areas of the brain like that are involved in thinking and imagination or if you want to write a new song or you want to write a book you can afford some failures right and if you put a gun to my head and you said you know get it right this time i might get it right a little bit quicker but you can't force that so nerve to muscle connections are what we call very reliable and when we say reliable what we mean at a cell biological level is every time i decide to move to have a motor neuron twitch muscle and move that limb in a certain way it releases neurotransmitter neurotransmitters like just little puffs of chemicals into the area that surrounding the next neuron and then the next neuron becomes electrically active so it just falls like a bunch of dominoes and so the chemicals for fast synaptic transmission are very reliable and they're woven in areas of the body that have to work and the best example of this within the muscle system would probably be the heart or breathing because you can't afford to get that wrong for terribly long you're dead um yeah did i say something wrong yeah you're dead or you're dead yeah yeah you know at that point there's no nerve transmission um i work with a lot of creative people and i'm curious about the brain's ability to pattern recognition as well as prediction how important is the brain um how does that work how's the brain predicting what's going to go on and how do you find if you know some of the most creative artists and musicians the way that they they hear something there's inspiration everywhere and the way that they they're inspired by something they see some pattern in this painting that sparks a song or you know what i mean how does that work yeah why are creative people so crazy no um i'm just kidding the uh creative people are just creative they're just brilliant but they are different like strong like heavily creative people are different because for the following reason so kind of takes us back to this whole space-time thing the brain and the nervous system are always predicting things and when we say things it's the nervous system wasn't designed to predict whether or not a particular person is going to walk down the stairs or whether or not an animal is going to hunt you or whether or not you're going to marry the person you're going to marry it doesn't work like that it runs statistics uh not to get technical here but it just runs probabilities it's like you don't have to be on alive and on this planet very long to realize that objects fall down not up so you you start the brain creates this expectation that when something falls it's gonna fall down or maybe when it falls and it falls down you get yelled at there'll be a loud noise soon and it doesn't um analyze every little thing it starts creating categories of relationships now the visual system is a great example of this because if i move my hand up and down for instance or if i see a car drive by depending on the speed it's moving i can predict where it will be in a moment right like if i were to suddenly start moving my hand very slow it would be weird because it's a weird movement for me in this regime right whereas if we were doing something else it wouldn't be that weird so there's an the updating of expectation and prediction is very fast because if i suddenly started speaking really slowly be like are you okay right so but if i spoke more slowly than i do might be fine right so we're always doing this in fact if we run our hand across a surface that has texture then very quickly you start to get what's called the periodicity the distance between the lines you just you can just figure it out to the point where if you went like this you could probably make a pretty good guess with your eyes closed so you're doing this at the level of the periphery the eyes the skin the nose the mouth when you bite into an apple you expect it to taste like an apple and if it didn't you would notice immediately right so you're doing this from the first stages of neural processing so space and time and expectation are very closely linked now let's think about what creativity is and then the opposite of creativity and what that is because oftentimes when you want to ponder something it's helpful to think about its opposite so for those of you who are like consciousness junkies and you really want to have that conversation think if you want to understand consciousness then you got to think about what it is to be not conscious right you can't just make up some pithy argument about what consciousness is you have to talk about what it isn't also in order to get there right and just as a useful guide so the when we start thinking about creativity we should think about the opposite as well so i define creativity as create as thinking of new things or reorganizing existing concepts or objects or whatever in new ways something's different and so what you're really doing is you're either taking existing objects and organizing them differently in space and time or like in the case of a steve jobs you're trying to imagine entirely new objects which itself is actually a pretty hard exercise but it's kind of cool because that's kind of the essence of creativity is to take your pre-existing notions of space-time relationships i don't mean the cosmos i mean space and time through the senses and reorganize them reshuffle them in ways that matter now let's let's come up with an example that works but is um amusingly terrible which would be me trying to play music so i could sit down and say you know give me a song rory like mention any song like what's a i don't know um i'm not gonna sing either way songs uh okay like i'm really i'm also really bad with names of something like i know oh i can recognize faces i can recognize songs but then but naming a song or naming the artist i'm all right well i think i think one of the van halen van ha eddie and hayley jump jump is john and van uh eddie van gaal just died so out of reverence for him like that song people have an expectation right people have an expectation about how that song is played now i could worry be happy don't worry be happy is a good one but so i could play like a punk rock version of that one you know whatever you know or i could do a hip-hop version of i could do it but but you're gonna know it's don't worry be happy because the relationship between the notes is still in the same sequence the inflections can change like i could whisper it or shout it or whatever but i could use different tone of voice i would do it poorly i don't have a good a singing voice but you would recognize as the song but now what if i were to abstract it where in for every for every don't and for every worry instead i just say apple and gorilla so now i could say well that's the song to me i'm just going to abstract it and i'm going to just do that and it would be a terrible song it would have no meaning it'd just be a terrible song it wouldn't sound good it would take a like a good good ish song with a great message don't worry be happy it's almost impossible to do by the way don't worry be happy you know okay um and convert that to an abstract representation the song i could say well i'm being creative and you'd say well your creativity is pretty poor and i'd say no actually my creativity is great but you'd be right and the reason you'd be right is because i took a simple rule of just replacing two of the words with something else now that's being creative but it's trivially creative but it is an organization of space i organize the elements differently now what if we say don't worry be happy we keep the words the same but now i just say them backwards right well that's also that's changing the time sequence right space time reordering but it's just shuffling but it's not shuffling in any interesting way so so what's so creativity is just taking existing elements existing paints existing notes of music new words new clothing if you're into fashion new new ways of movement new ways of moving a basketball new ways of thinking about a scientific experiment whatever and organizing them in new ways to to through space and time so in order to do that you have to break some pre-existing rules and the question is if you're going to be creative or you're trying to access that process which rules are you going to break they have to be the same elements and you're dealing with space and time but which i decided to just swap words that's lame i decide to swap the order of the words that's also lame it's creative but it's not interesting making a color movie just black and white doesn't that's not that creative so when you start to think about like a cool movie like momento where the guy has no memory and he you realize that you are carrying information that he's not having it was a cool movie because you have access to information the characters don't about their own story then you start thinking like cool now this is kind of a space time warp where i gotta think about what's happening differently and it ended up being kind of cool wasn't i don't know that was the best movie i ever saw far from it but it's pretty cool so creativity is a restructuring of something in a way that for whatever reason stimulates a sense of delight and this is key so if i was like oh i'm going to start making movies which i'm not by the way um i'm gonna start making movies at the end everyone's gonna be pointing a gun at one another and gonna kill one another you'd be like tarantino movie that's like his thing that's like his signature thing and he probably i don't know if he was the first one to do it but but he'd probably be like that's my thing like you know so it's not really original what what is original is the first time you see one of his movies and you go oh wild like normally this is not what i see at the end of a movie and the sense of delight is very important because the dopamine system this reward system in the brain when it sees a space-time relationship that's novel but triggers a potential new set of rewards or creates a whole set of ideas of what this means you get this sense of awe or delight now i it's sort of like if you i think the first time i saw one of those cirque du soleil things like it was like that i was like i can't believe they're riding the bicycles the motorcycles through the globe like i mean at some point acrobatics are ridiculous because they just become like extreme and dangerous at some point everything is ridiculous so the key is with creativity is how do you create that sense that there's a whole lot of other information to come from something and comedians do this beautifully they pick some topic they drill into that topic and they create a case for it and the reason it's funny is because it violates some rule that you had about the way that the world works that creates a whole set of other implications and then they usually close the hatch and just move on to the next thing because that's how they go they're they're kind of quick creativity on the basketball court is like when you have to have a certain skill set i should mention that you in order to rearrange elements and be spontaneous you have to have the elements worked into the musculature right so when a team is moving down court and all of a sudden they do something amazing you go oh my god it's usually it's oh my god because you didn't realize that that could happen and you're not thinking about it consciously but the reason it's cool it's not just like somebody moving down court spinning the ball on a finger or something like harlem globetrotters kind of stuff right is that when you see something really exciting happen in sport it means that that's possible in the future and you don't go that's possible in the future like a scientist would but you think oh my goodness this changes the game this changes the space-time element in football it's like just you know you got to get first downs you got to get to the end zone but when you see something truly new it's it sparks a whole set of categories in the brain of new operations and so the way i'm defining creativity is rearranging existing elements in new ways in space and time or thinking up new things entirely but you know good creativity is the kind that sparks entire categories of new space-time understanding in the viewer right because if i'm an abstract artist and all i do is smear mud on a little bricks and and you know like tell you how incredible it is because of what it you know no one's done this before like that's lame it doesn't open up anything new it's kind of it doesn't do anything exciting but when somebody breaks a rule a space-time rule i'm not talking about an ethical rule but when someone breaks a rule in a way that opens up new possibility of thinking that's when we go oh like the game has changed and i'm sure we can all think of examples like i can think of a growing up skateboarding where you'd see someone do something you like like the you know first time anyone actually did like legitimate you know ollie on ver you're like oh my goodness like they don't need to grab the board and then it's like first time someone's like flipping it now that's a skateboarding example but there are a lot of examples of this and this is why when some people go look at abstract art and they see like a a rothko or something like oh it's like just two squares why is that worth four million dollars like it's because they don't understand the rules of art so they don't understand what was broken and so they don't understand the implications which were that for instance rothko opened up a whole new dimension of way to use color because he eliminated the white space between things on on the with the paint plus other things you know it's like it opened up all sorts of possibilities in the color space and you don't look at it and think oh now there's so much possibility in the color space you don't do that your brain does it subconsciously yeah so i know i went on long there but i i hope that makes sense because for the creatives out there the challenge is like how do you know when you've broken rules in a way that open up a lot of possibilities well the pros the people that are really good they know because they know the rules so well that subconsciously they know all the implications of the rules now in sport it's usually about attaining a particular goal and i want to distinguish between spontaneity and impulsivity because impulsivity is like just doing whatever just to see what happens spontaneity is when you when you're taking rules and doing them without much forethought and you sometimes do them in a way that creates new outcomes and um you know maybe i i don't know much about jazz but from what um people and the reason i don't know much about jazz is because when i was a kid my sister told me that um that that guys that take um girls or women to hear jazz it means they can't dance something like this and it would and she was like you know anytime someone would take her to hear jazz she was like it's because he can't dance he doesn't want to have to dance i don't know if that's true or not but jazz is brilliant fair it's spontaneity right because with jazz you don't know what's going to happen that's the fun that's the fun of it i see yeah jazz is all about breaking rules right all about improvising and maybe people dance at jazz concerts i don't know but anyway sorry i just popped in my head this is the thing about doing a podcast after 6 p.m i'm out of gaba so i like really just will say whatever comes to mind oh man that's so amazing though because i i mean i thought of so many things you think of great athletes like lebron james michael jordan uh when he did the dunk contest where he jumped from the free-throw line that broke like i i think at that time was like wait no one's jumped from the free throw line like you know uh or i was thinking of a saquon barkley a great running back like running through the through the line and he cuts to a point where he he like breaks the rules of space like he separates space so much so fast that you're like wait it's just this awe moment because no one's you haven't seen it you haven't seen it like you've seen before the bottle fell up not down right yeah and when that happens that element of surprise and here i'm quoting david eagleman um who's you know got a great book on on neuroplasticity called live wired and he didn't tell me to say that it's just a really cool book and he's a great scientist and great guy he says you know one of the strongest triggers for plasticity is surprise like that element of surprise like wait what and kids are all about that it's like you know they're all about surprise and a lot of the best toys are about surprise and things popping out i mean i think one of the reasons you see kids so mesmerized by the ipad is because there's a lot of motion there there's a lot of visual motion the real world there's not a lot of visual motion in comparison to what's going on on a screen so but in terms of creativity i mean you have to have the core set of operations dialed in like expertise is required for creativity uh and you just have to have those that's important right because i was thinking like some of the best athletes in the world are incredibly creative or have that potential but it comes from so much repetitions and work or musicians that master their voice that have several octaves of just of range and control but all this time that they put in you obviously have some god-given gift you know talent but the work um it's a lot of work right but that opens the door to exceptional creativity absolutely fundamentals are the foundation of creativity i mean you can't be you know it's like i i do love poetry and occasionally you'll read a piece of poetry or you hear a song like i'm a big joe strummer fan from the you know singer for the clash i actually don't really like the clash much i like i lose punk points for saying that but the stuff he did with the mescaleros later in life like it's incredible like it makes me feel all sorts of incredible things as he's singing and like i don't understand what he's talking about half the time bob dylan there's a lot of songs that way too where really in you know true strong strong strongly creative people they it's almost at a subconscious level that you're realizing emotions you're not realizing like linear uh sentences in this or declarative sentences or it's it's um and we're getting abstract here but there's something there that's universal and we don't even know what what it is right and i think in sport you absolutely have to have the core elements i one person i think that deserves a reference in context in this context and that somebody i know we both appreciate so much his work i've never met him um but we've had some exchanges um idol portal like his stuff is just it's so beyond what i think about in terms of movement and i think the enormous um you know popularity that his whole movement culture has brought is there's really he's organizing existing elements in ways that are completely unpredicted sometimes even just the speed of movement and also the things he writes about it are really interesting this he had a little a post that he talked about suppleness like because you hear about explosiveness and flexibility but this notion of suppleness and the visual representation of suppleness and i don't want to tread too far here because like i don't know that work in detail enough to be able to talk about it intelligently but everything i see of this is like to me it just it just it just shines of creativity because i never know what to expect but what i do see makes me think oh my goodness that's possible yeah not for me to do it maybe but i doubt it because he he's and that's not my goal it's that's possible for the human animal and i've just never seen that before so when he does something i don't see him and say oh he's moving like a monkey or he's moving like a lizard i go it's totally new because he's he's bridged enough elements in new ways through speed so space and time right trajectory half time i don't even know which direction he's going to go and some other elements that i don't even really know that we have a language for and it's it's just pure poetry and power in what you see and we see this from time to time we get little glimpses and when somebody's badly creative it's you know it too because it's got that trivial thing of don't worry the way we describe the don't worry be happy think so you've got your edos on one end of the continuum that are just so far beyond anyone else in terms of creativity in their space and everyone can appreciate it that's what's cool you don't have to be a movement person to just look at that and go that is amazing yeah right whereas like there are certain forms of creativity they're only going to be recognizable to the aficionados and the people in that field because they're making little minor tweaks that are kind of like inside ball this is one of the reasons i love um close contact uh card magicians um before kovid i was hanging out at magic castle a lot and i go out there and they're breaking all this that's what magic is they break space-time rules you took the card you ripped it up you put it in your pocket you thought it was there and then at the end they've got it fully intact in their hand and you're like how how but it's they know how to break the space-time rules so that you don't see what they don't want you to see anyway you can tell i get really excited about this stuff because i don't know how it all works at a core mechanics level at a neural processing level but it is there are these rules of space-time violation that um just make life so much more interesting yeah now i'm gonna when i recognize a great creative or artist uh i'm gonna think what rule do they just break or i think that'll that'll hit me like oh they just broke some rule that i expected to happen that didn't or went they did something beyond what i expected to think about it as like they break a rule like there's like there's a combination on a lock let's say a three number combination and the the linear space time operation would be to say let the combination is like 15 11 7 okay and then it opens a vault and the vault has all the things you expect but creativity is like finding a new way to open the lock that when you open the vault there's a bunch of new things that depend on how you open how you broke the lock how you picked the lock that's the way you think about because it's not just what rule they broke it's all the new implications of that rule break it's what this means and you don't think about it like the first time i saw i guess there's a tyson fight coming up against roy jones and so the first time mike tyson yeah he's back oh yeah now he's back in his 50s he's looking oh they're both looking great this is gonna be amazing fight but the first time i saw a guy that big move that fast and more importantly that big who could swivel his torso that far and that fast like the ways that he his style is so unique that body form making those movements it just shouldn't work that way but it does and it looks natural for him to do it so what it meant is that a heavyweight could do that kind of like bobble toy kind of movement yeah and still have all that power so compact and so much power instant power i still i s it still boggles my mind to see the way that's done it that's a really good example it's just this unique blend of speed power size flexibility i'm probably missing some of the critical words here but um when rules are broken in these ways it's it's beautiful because it it makes us realize that we're looking through looking at life through a very fixed set of lenses and the part that's also beautiful about it is that in order to break those rules you have to have those fundamentals like you can't you can't buy there's no trampoline up to the top of the mountain and i think one reason why a lot of really creative people especially the artist types and the music types sometimes they're a little weird they're a little different they sometimes they're like they're not in linear processing and so they're like looking at space and time differently all the time and the opposite extreme we didn't mention the opposite extreme when you're stressed you start looking at the world in very uncreative ways because your space the more stressed you are the more your space-time processing becomes if a then b if b then c wait hold on something happened emergency okay i need to call this i need to do this i need to do this it's a very effective thing for safety but that's why when people get up to high high levels of expertise they can start playing in that creative zone this is like you know our friend laird hamilton right if if a bigger wave comes in i don't know anything about surfing either but if wave comes in and it's different and there's a whole set of new things that he's never seen before that's an opportunity for him that's an opportunity for me to get killed that's an opportunity for him to be creative because it requires new organization of space and time elements and so the first time people saw him surf on the foil like that really long you go oh my god i never thought that you could surf above the water like that doesn't make any sense but then you go wow like everything's changed now because he can ride you know for six minutes or whatever probably longer yeah that's brilliant huh that he did that it's brilliant and it came from his deep understanding of fluid mechanics the fact that the most powerful portion of the wave is beneath the you know the water deep and and you know and putting i'm getting the language wrong forgive me laird sorry but that you know building those foils that you could pull from the energy deeper in the ocean and that's and it's also wild even just to think about it so you can almost when you see him doing that at least when i see him doing that i think you can alm i can see kind of the deeper like stronger energy of the ocean but it looks like he's just flying yeah you know it looks like he's just gliding along and so it's this mismatch of the deeper like gears of the ocean and then this like just like almost effortless although i know it's a lot of physical work to do that properly and it's um that's incredible yeah i wonder his conversation with the wave i'm not a surfer either so i have no idea but accessing the power like you said below the surface i wonder it's probably a completely different experience oh yeah to a certain degree right it has to be still the same wave essentially but but riding it from below or underneath the surface and above it's probably like a whole new canvas for him i would imagine it has to be you know it's funny i as uh the other day i was taking a walk and i was thinking about um creativity uh i'm supposed to be writing this book and i'm like it's really hard for me to put my you know they always say you're not supposed to work things out by saying them out loud like that's kind of you know a lot i'm much much quicker on uh speaking than writing and that's the frustration so i was recording something on creativity i was walking around again some funny stares i started to realize that like what if the same rules carry over to relationships of all kinds like because when you first got jacks like he's genetically bound to you guys right and but the rules early on are pretty simple it's like feed them change them you know but over time you start to learn the people's patterns and you start to learn and because we were talking about a relationship to a craft but the relationship between people also has certain core elements right like i don't know like like she likes to wake up at this time and she likes her tea and so you don't want to start messing with that stuff right because um predictability is a big part of safety but i started thinking about you know creativity and the kind of depth of relationship is kind of an interesting one too i think about this with my dog because he's getting towards the end and i think at the beginning i just want to keep him alive i want to get some sleep i want to house train him i wanted him to attach to me i there were a bunch of like basic things and now it's like i'm probably making this stuff up in my mind but i almost feel like that because he's a dog there's a dialogue there where i'm you know maybe pausing for a couple more seconds when we walk he likes to pause a long time he likes to spend an hour sniffing at something um he's a bulldog he's a bulldog you know he's an intellectual okay um and you know there are these little ways that we can change the way that we relate in creative ways too that are not drastically disrupting the space-time rules because predictability is so important in relationship but i realize that if the same thing is true where this where it's about existing taking existing elements and slightly rearranging them in time in ways that open up new possibility i was thinking about this because i have a lot of friends um uh who are in very happy relationships and unfortunately i have a lot of friends who um who've also reached this point where their relationships sort of like hit this wall and there's always this like thirst for novelty but the the thirst for novelty never seems to feed back into the relationship it usually seems to break it so i was thinking wouldn't it be interesting if we could figure out how creativity works in terms of craft and then someday someone might think of how by rearranging just subtly certain space-time variations maybe it's like i don't know um tearing down a wall and putting in a uh like a like a glass wall that looks out on a forest or something like maybe it would be something like that maybe it would just be different ways of relating verbally or something in ways that open up all sorts of new possibility because in the end the dopamine system and excitement about the future and motivation is all about possibility it's and that's why when people work really hard to attain something and they get it oftentimes they're like oh what now well the dopamine system shut down it wasn't the reward is attached to effort and motivation and direction right vector as we say not to the goal line so i thought i don't have any ideas about how to do this and i'd be the last person to devise this uh relationship based creativity thing um except maybe the dogs but i think that there's something there because in the end the most important thing to understand about the brain is it's a bunch of core operations for stress for sleep for focus for task switching for creativity that were designed to be generic so they could be applied to any scenario not just to a tiger or not just to you know marriage for five years or marriage for 20 years and we're we're a smart species like we can do way better than we're doing right now and it always makes me uh think you know like creativity is really just about opening up these new rule sets and wouldn't it be cool if we could figure that out for the relationships that matter most right like i don't want to see anyone stay in bad situations that are like abusive or or really bad for either party but um wouldn't that be cool because once you start to feel new possibility everything changes everything even if it's just like a one category of things so anyway i don't have any ideas but maybe one of the listeners will uh implement my crazy idea and go build some system you have ideas because you said even just maybe you tear out this wall because you think about possibly a relationship uh if that if there's an ability to change that physical environment could spark that's opening an actual like physical window to see that could change the energy of a room that could change the potential energy of interaction in that room uh i was also thinking in relationships there's this idea of who's in charge if you can get tired if you feel like you're doing everything right yeah invert the power higher yeah between like it's like if your relationship's like a blank piece of paper here like this it's like this art canvas that you can fill up right um but when you're in sync and making art together it's beautiful but sometimes there's this shuttle between okay i've been painting for like five years like maybe you should start painting or if you start to have this conversation of um yeah maybe i take the lead on the paint and then i give the brush to you and now you let's see what you make out of this you know that kind of analogy but uh yeah because absolutely i mean i think and i have a hidden agenda in this which is you know i feel like there weren't i feel like um i would like to see a world where there were more um complete families you know whatever that looks like to people um and i think a lot of the suffering in the world has to do with people just not feeling like they have a i mean it's a human thing and all animals need to know that there's a kind of a core foundation of safety from there they can go they can try new things they can be more you know more adventurous in life i think that a lot of the i don't want to get into the woes of society but uh certainly not my place to comment on but um it you know i think that the 80s and 90s and 2000 showed us that um given the opportunity a lot of times people will walk away from commitments of various kinds and i'm assuming they had good reasons to do it in most cases so it's kind of interesting to just think about like what's the what said differently like what is this realm of possibilities in terms of human connection and not just in couples but like animal to human connection right what what are the realm of and of course i'm referring to like good space-time rule breaks have to be they have to be a couple things they have to they have to obey the rules of ethics right i'm not talking about just breaking rules here by the way people like you know because that's that's not interesting it's not creative it's destructive right so it has to be bound you can't break the rules it's like the football example it's like you can't decide no you know what like i'm gonna just go i'm gonna just turn around go the other end zone because it's closer haha that's that's not a touchdown you're talking about depth i talk about depth like taking the existing rules and moving through those and i think that in human relationships and these could be business relationships too we haven't even begun to scratch the surface i actually think that um pandemic's been terrible for so many reasons all the consequences just but one of the things that's kind of interesting is that i heard this on a different podcast recently is that um you know it used to be in a meeting there was the person in charge it was the white person had control of the whiteboard well now with zoom like multi everyone has control of the whiteboard so it's more democratic in many ways and so what it was a rule that was forced on us we didn't want to have to do things this way but it leads to new solutions and this is what humans are really good at is finding new solutions wanna um we're talking about space time and creativity i'm curious about dreams because you know artists will have even myself uh i play guitar write songs i've had songs in a dream state come completely crystal clear all the words just like uh and i know that there's artists that write music from their dreams what's that about that it's like there's this aspect of this unconscious or this other state of the brain that you've mentioned abstract but opens the door to different realms of possibility different but you know what what is that yeah uh so in stress you're very alert and space and time are analyzed in very rigid preset rule type ways in deep states of states of deep relaxation like sleep and dreams space and time it's like no rules and that's the amazing thing right like you know people can fly you can fly um uh dead people can walk around that are alive you know every all the rules are off space and now the question is always what you bring back from that so the transition into sleep and the transition out of sleep have been written about and talked about um over many thousands of years as important periods that are as important as the dreams themselves and i'm a big believer in this i'm also i think every every time i say do any kind of like uh public teaching i always talk about yoga nidra or hypnosis or anything that brings the brain into states of deep relaxation and the body into states of relaxation is when you start to see rule breaks you start getting breaks in the typical way that you organize information and sometimes new solutions pop up this is why like if you're ever working hard on a problem you can't figure it out you can't figure out and then you're like ah fine just step away from it you're showering or you walk away and you're thinking about something different all of a sudden it pops in your head you're like how'd it work well your brain was was shuffling the deck and then splaying out the cards and going no shuffling the deck and it was doing that subconsciously for you but you had given it the intention we hear about intentions to shuffle the deck and try and find an organization of the cards that is i don't know the the equivalent of the perfect you know what i don't play cards either flush flush i don't do anything i just do science no no i do science i i do neuroscience um but i don't i don't play cards i when i go to casinos which i do enjoy doing by the way because it's mindless for me i sit down i play roulette you do i do i love roulette i give myself a certain amount of money that i'm willing to lose i'm always tempted to put it all on red or all in black and just call it knight one way or the other but i just like here you know i like hearing the ball go and when it lands i'm like oh and when it hits it feels so good so i love doing that and also it's just totally mindless you need no skill whereas like the craps table or blackjack it looks like there's actually some math involved so um i go to the relax now i out of myself so when i really need to decompress from work i get a ticket out to vegas and i just go and i book myself into a hotel by myself and i just play roulette wow is it weird and then i always go home like a day and a half later like so reset or i'll go into nature but yeah i'll escape if you ever can't get a hold of me i'm in vegas i'm not condoning gambling but i don't i don't i wonder how much how much is the sound and how much is just the predictable and um why is it such a release do you think i think it's just because so much of my life is about trying to be linear and organize things and respond to all the incoming and get it right and i hate to you know disappoint people and i want to take care of my lab and my family and my dog and all this of my friends and then when i'm they're like all i have to worry about is if the ball lands on whatever black 31 and if it doesn't it's not such a big deal i think i just get to i finally just get to turn off yeah yeah i also like the order of it you know i like that they shuffle the thing and then they like i like the i feel like there's a um there's a contract and it's very simple anyway i know we got onto that but um yeah there's nothing creative about about gambling you know on the on the roulette table i use binaural beats a lot to access uh i mean you don't have to go into an in-depth lesson but on brain waves like a theta or delta like a slower brainwave so this is what i hear conscious brain subconscious or unconscious is a slower brainwave can you know so putting on binaural beats does that really help assist my brain to does my brain pick up on that you know the difference of the beats and then a tune to a slow so can i attune myself to a theta delta slower wave and when you mention the tension or even earlier when you had me pull like rub down the table just doing that you know you have you feel the awareness of doing that motion but when you said feel the stripes there's stripes in this table immediately my brain picked up on the stripes and then you you can pick up the gap between the the lines but it's because you you brought that to my awareness and immediately i was picking up that the gaps like what you said so that power of intention and can i visit you know you go to the crap st or the roulette table to decompress can i use binaural beats and can i be mindful of my intention to to set my brain in the environment to then be creative or solve problems that if i'm stressed and linear thinking that i don't have access because it's everything so solid in that state yeah when yeah so the um one way to think about the kind of rigidity space-time stuff first is um kind of driving like are you gonna stay in the lane lines are you allowed to cross over the lane lines in dreams like the lane lines disappear right and when we're stressed it's like you you're kind of you have to stay in the lane lines so binaural beats are interesting i um we tend to so there's a word that's important here called entrainment so en tr um m-e-n-t entrainment and our nervous system entrains to external stimuli so one of the best examples of this is our our brain is entrained to the light dark cycle of the sun you know it's no cons it's no coincidence that every cell in our body has a 24 hour clock the earth spins once about every 24 hours and that is not a coincidence folks okay that is that is it's clear there's a a an adaptive uh advantage to that and because we are a diurnal species we do best in the day of being awake in the daytime and asleep at night for even if you can invert that schedule with artificial lights and because you feel better being up at night like health-wise it's just you live longer you do better you resist infection all that stuff if you're matched to the light dark cycle so we're entrained to the light dark cycle or if we decide we're not we can pull ourselves off that we will also entrain to shorter rhythms so we entrained to ultradian rhythms every 90 minutes we tend to go through a cycle of increased focus and then it drops off at the end last you know 20 or 30 minutes and then it repeats in sleep every 90 minutes we cycle back and forth between slow wave sleep and rem sleep with a higher percentage of that being rem sleep toward morning rem um yeah you rem more rem toward morning so we entrained a lot of different things and we can entrain to anything this is what's kind of cool so maybe it's with the roulette table example every time they throw the ball in there like i'm in training to oh there's another roulette spin so you kind of the expectation is for that thing that's what my dopamine system or whatever is oriented towards is the the ball clickety clackety in the in the the spinning wheel binaural beats are an interesting case because you can i'm not sure exactly what pattern of beats will draw the brain into one rhythm or one brain wave state or another but we know that there is this property that could absorb be described as metronoming where if you're listening to a metronome going your brain processes space and time information differently than if it's your it's kind of frames per second like with the slower one being fewer frames per second and when it's unpredictable when it's right when it starts being random that's when the brain starts set getting kind of higher levels of alertness because it's sort of like expectation what's going to happen what's going to happen what's going to happen and you can't really follow and if you can't follow then the brain tends to drop into states that are more highly relaxing think the lava lamp it's like you never know which direction it's going to go you can watch it for a while and then eventually you're kind of like when away you go right whereas if bubbles are kind of coming out of something and it's very linear then you can predict it with a high degree of certainty when the next bubble is going to come then it tends those kinds of visual images tend and auditory too tick tick could be the equivalent of the bubbles as opposed to just random ticks will tend to place the brain into higher levels of alertness again because the brain is a prediction machine but it works both ways more so than the speed that things are coming in if you know what the speed is at that point your brain goes oh i don't need to follow this anymore i you know and actually this is such a profound thing in the visual system where if information is very constant in the visual system and this has been done experimentally images disappear to you consciously so like if i uh you know like if i were to walk in and like you know if at some point like if certain things are regular enough in my visual field they literally disappear and camouflage a lot of camouflage relies on this it's not just colors it's about creating a frequency of pattern in the camouflage that matches the background to the point where you just disappear because there's regularity whereas if tigers were just one big yellow you know like like a blue animal they wouldn't camouflage well the stripes break up patterns in ways that match the jungle or the environment they happen to be in in and so anyone out there who's you know done who's a sniper has spent some time in the military or likes animal camouflage which i do i'm not a sniper i didn't spend time in the military but i love animal camouflage it's all about breaking patterns in a way that's either very that's very consistent with the environment and some environments are very unpredictable so they break patterns in unpredictable ways like the stripes on the tiger it's all about it's about lack of pr of periodicity they're meaning the distance between the stripes so this whole time that we've been in this discussion we've been jumping back and forth between space domain and time domain and when i say space i literally just mean like things that are or like stripes or things are organized in space and time is just that like the distance in that different space events have relative to one another again it's this is not like quantol this is not um like cosmos type stuff so when you listen to um binaural beats that i think it does work to shift your brain state the question that i have and i haven't looked at the research on this is what binaural beat pattern will shift the brain toward a particular state but i think we can use the general categories of the more relaxed the brain is without being completely asleep the more you're going to be able to access these breaks and space time rules and kind of have creative mindset the more regular the predictions are the more linear typically you're going to be about your analysis of of of things um so that's interesting so like the binaural beat could be effective but it could lose its effectiveness if you play the same track over and over and the brain predicts starts to predict it uh that's from the frequencies now it's it stops paying attention and or even even heightens its state yeah and it depends on what what operation you want to carry out so like there are a lot of people out there that um but there's some people out there that will listen to the same song on repeat when they need to work this is a really good example they need a certain amount of background chatter in order to be able to focus but if the background chatter is changing too much then they're not able to focus because it's like the novelty is what cues the brain so obviously when you play a song it's not like it's the same note over and over that would be mind-numbing for me but maybe that would work for some people but your brain eventually if it hears things enough times it knows what to predict so it stops paying attention to that so in the same way that like if i look at the same pattern of something and the pattern is unbroken and just repeating for a long stretch of time or space eventually the image literally disappears to your conscious mind even though the retina is still seeing it and they've done these experiments by a limit that's why your eyes move your eyes have these little microcodes like they're the kind of like movements to specific locations of space but they do these little microcodes little micro movements and that's so that images on your retina don't disappear because if they were the brain is a statistics machine it goes see not seen that scene that seen that and it gives or driving late at night when you see the lines like uh if you you know hypnotic and you'll oh your mind will go elsewhere the magicians are they haven't given me all their secrets but i'm working on them they and because i promise i wouldn't give them away but a lot of what they do like if they count out cards for you they count with me they go one two three they're trying to entrain you to a particular space time pattern meanwhile they're doing things right in front of you and you actually don't see it if not you missed it it wasn't like they quickly did something they can do things and i've seen this where they literally can reach out and change things right in front of you and you are blind to that event that's fascinating they're so good they're so good if any there's there are a couple um there's a guy in i think he's in new york who i saw a a show ozzy mind i think is his name i think he's israel he's in new york um i still don't i'm still kind of disturbed awed troubled by someone he had me sign my name on a card and then rip it up i did it with my own hand and put it in my pocket my pocket then we went through it and we were sitting right next to each other and then a couple minutes later i went into my pocket it wasn't there and i'm like that's weird and then he produced the card fully intact with my name written on it from his shoe what how's it possible i don't know i don't know if you know how to break the space-time rules in the right sequence you can do that kind of stuff and i think he's considered one of the very very best in that kind of thing and it yeah it's it's messed up and it's really cool like david blaine too someone like yeah i mean this scene i don't you know i think it even goes beyond for me it went beyond that experience because i was closely linked to it but you know obviously blaine is good at what he does very good at what he does yeah i don't want him to make me disappear or something is this similar with heart rate variability because the a higher hrv score is actually the heart beating at random right like that it's not in the same yeah correctly like yeah so the autonomic nervous system tends to um uh you know it shifts us towards high heart rates or low heart rates depending on where we are in terms of alertness or relaxation sympathetic parasympathetic for those that use that language and the heart rate variability is good we know that because um heart rate variability reflects the activity of the parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system which is the kind of calming arm of the nervous system if you were to completely um take away the the calming aspect of the nervous system the heart would beat really really fast so it's sort of like always wants to go fast but then there's a break right and actually um uh there you when you exhale right when you like you breathe out the diaphragm moves up when it does that the heart actually gets compacted a little bit blood then flows faster through the heart because it's a smaller volume and there's a little node it's called a little set of neurons sends a signal to the brain and the brain sends a signal to slow down the heart rate this is why excelling exhaling slows down your heart rate oh that's cool and so there's a direct link between your breathing your diaphragm your heart rate and the heart volume and this is not like woo mystical stuff this is like every every uh you know physician learns this and so heart rate variability is how many times like the break has been deployed the break being the slow down calm and relaxed thing so if your heart's like consistently sitting up here all the time and you never get that variability that's not good but a lot of heart rate variability is good now whether or not that how the heart entrains space-time analysis in the brain i don't know because a lot of the space-time stuff in the brain has to do with like neural events and chemical events but roger penrose who just won the nobel prize in physics has a really great theory that um neurons aren't just about sending action potentials but that's actually not quantal but that it's like about the microtubules and that we're not thinking about the math of the brain quite right and um he's far far smarter than i'll ever be and i listened to him talk about this and at first i thought oh no here's another nobel prize winner who's like you know who's diving into neuroscience and thinks they can say something but it actually hung together pretty well and he may be onto something so it he definitely understands the space-time relationships of the brain but he's arguing that maybe there's some there's some there's some math that the rest of us um uh mere mortals uh don't understand that folks like him can understand and hey you know that's why they make guys like roger penrose that's a great last name oh yeah especially if you're gonna win a nobel and also um i've never met him i feel safe saying this but like i have some friends at cambridge i used to go to cambridge university a couple times a year to visit and there's a certain style of discourse even the way they sit like you know it can and like penrose is like if you had to draw a cambridge professor right down to the sweater it would be penrose and congrats on your nobel roger you deserve two yeah who can win and what can you win a nobel prize uh well i won't win a nobody could can anyone either who can do you have to be a neuroscientist oh no no mathematician um the nobel is given in a couple different categories um i grew up totally geeking on this nah this side can really you know um the nobel has a couple categories one is it's called physiology or medicine so that would be for kind of biology or this uh you know this year was for like hepatitis c discover hepatitis c and it's and it's treatment um oh no sorry well that was sorry that was last year was that yeah that's right because doudna and oh um her name is it um it wasn't long chantilly yeah doudna and chantellier dowdness in berkeley and chantilly as in europe um those two women won the nobel in chemistry for crispr for gene editing so they give it for chemistry for physiology medicine for physics economics and then there's a peace prize the peace prize is a little bit different because the peace prize they actually announce who got nominated before they announce who got it obama won the peace prize um i think mother teresa won the peace prize and then there's a poetry prize bob dylan won the poetry prize oh i didn't know but he didn't go pick it up why i don't know he's dylan he's like he's just he's creative too busy but yeah it's the nobel is cool because like for scientists it's like the one time of year when like anyone pays attention but no scientist does science to get nobels or get any prizes and there are prizes that give way more money like the kyoto prize or the the um the x i think it's called like the x prize or something like that um but uh it it's cool because it has a long history you know some people hate it because of like the dynamite story and like they admit they invented dynamite you know nobel and head to dynamite i think he killed a relative really i think so yeah so there's always some darkness around some lightness but hey i just think a prestigious like a nobel prize definitely allows somebody to say all sorts of things and sometimes nobels have gone completely off the rails and started talking about things they had no place talking about um madness and brilliancy are they uh not always you know the nobels in in things like physics and chemistry and biology tend to be given to people who can achieve very linear thinking i mean you no matter how far out at the edge you go if you don't bring anything back that can be implemented you're just another crazy person right and there are a lot of crazy people out there who have brilliant ideas that never implement but of course at the other extreme are people that all they can do is implement the same space time rules and you know they can get as good at what they do as a diving bird can get at what it does we see athletes like this we see artists like this we see scientists like this but they're not they're not again what i mean is ethical rule breakers they don't know how to break the rules of their game in a way that's still within the ethics and the and so they look like they're kind of turning a crank and um every team needs some of those every profession needs some of those but uh those generally aren't the people that uh they help the world go round but they aren't the people that really change the the trajectory of humanity it's interesting to hear you talk about the neuroscience behind creativity but then because the creative they just create and it's like they're not thinking about why or how it happens right it's just you know what i mean right well this is the right so it's like i'm intellectualizing a lot here and i should be clear to me an intellectual isn't somebody that like uses a lot of fancy language an intellectual is somebody that can appreciate and describe something in a lot of different levels of granularity and i'm giving a lot of words to a process that most people as you point out they probably don't even know how they don't know how they do it they might even not realize they do it but um but the awareness could open the door to even greater creativity i think because if you understand oh this is what i've been doing and just by shining that light could open the door to ten other door you know or just just really open things up uh for that creative person that maybe they weren't aware that they could tweak a little thing and have all kinds of new ideas you know what i mean i think or map their activities to points of the day like for instance if you want to do if you're in a very if you're very alert like first thing in the morning um or you're very alert at a certain time of day like you're going to be great for linear type operations if you're a little sleepier that's a great time to start playing with new space time rules now some of it may be terrible right but some of it might be sticky and would work and i think so you can start to think of this alertness calmness thing and that continuum as a way to place yourself into a better opportunity to be creative or better opportunity to implement you know i think that's super smart because i just think naturally i wake up and want to write or be creative but some people my wife wakes up and wants to do yoga or be active so just the awareness of yeah when are you i do yeah when are you linear when are you not i actually uh creatives the real extremes are amazing because a few years ago um i was many years ago when i was like 10 years ago i i was living in san francisco and i want to go see the pogues play right and so rainwind knows the pogues like shane mcgowan is like singer for the pogues and this guy is like on a totally different dimension so that day i went out early um because i was staying at a hotel in the city and i see this guy walking down the street and he's like stumbling and he's got a like a brand new shirt on it's got the tag hanging off it and he's just kind of like shuffling along and i was like oh man that poor guy like he's in san francisco we got all these like you know mental health issues and stuff and then that that was mcgowan so that night he gets up on stage and he's just like everything he's just so on point he just killed and i was like wow these these creatives like they often need handlers they need people they can be like hey we need to have lunch at this time and do this because they never snap out of that thing i think it's also one of the reasons why really creative people sadly get involved in narcotics so that you know like narcotics they again they take heroin they take opiates they tend to gravitate towards drugs that put them into these very like fluid states that are not um that are damaging to the body and brain but for them that's also been a the the creative state not the drug but the creative state has been a great source of of growth for their career so the ability to access creative states or linear states for that matter without the use of destructive drugs like heroin which is a highly destructive drug right would be wonderful and i think there's a whole future ahead of us where machines binaural beats vr um maybe safer drugs will pharmacology better safer pharmacology would help people access these states of mind that are are important i mean there's so many if you just think back so many highly creative people have died of opioid or heroin overdose it's just like it can't be coincidental it just can't be coincidental and i'm not saying anyone definitely not saying anyone should go do those those drugs i think the ability to access creative states without them is really the goal but i have a feeling they gravitate towards those things for a reason because it's familiar or it's yeah you don't hear about too many football players dying of heroin right um they have other issues if they have issues but you just don't it's just a different thing altogether and there are other reasons for it but um space-time fluidity and those kind of said it said it sedated mindsets you know maybe that's how they're able to access their craft but you know it'd be great if they could do it without those things thank you so much thank you thank you we just need to get you the roulette wheel and uh what else did you need well i like i like animal camo i like the uh well i i like going to there's just something about sitting down at that table i don't have to worry about anything i'm not a big drinker but i'll have like a drink and just i don't know just play it's just fun and and the idea that your your room is just above you and you just go back up there but but it's good that i i can control it i don't i don't you know spend a lot of money on it i won't mention what i do spend but i and i've walked by the way to the people who own the casinos i've left i've left las vegas with their money so i don't feel too bad about it awesome yeah all right andrew thank you so much i really appreciate it my pleasure thank you thank you [Music] thank you so much for listening if you enjoy this show please subscribe share with your friends and leave a 5 star review every listener matters to us so please leave your comments along the way to let us know how we're doing until next time wishing you all the wealth health and happiness in the world

Channel: The Optimal Performance Guide

Views: 14,537

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Id: aw1YLygxKxU

Length: 114min 6sec (6846 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020