Liminal Collective - Andy Walshe, Naval Health Research Center - Karen Kelly, PFI - Kirk Krack

[Music] well good afternoon my name is andy on behalf of myself karen and kirk my partners here uh thank you for the afternoon a chance to share a little bit about what we do uh the topic of the conversation the neuroscience a threat really the underlying premise for this uh presentation so it was anchored in the signature characteristic of a great performer great performers typically can bring their very best when things are uncertain when it's chaotic when the stakes are really high and we figured given this room and the types of things you're trying to do reinvent the future go to space etc etc some of the things we've learned over the years working with this talent would hopefully have some relevance but given the last 18 to 24 months i guess we could all say the covet experience the fact that there was a threat itself the loss and the tragedy of losing loved ones and uh you know the uncertainty of whether the vaccines worked or not in the in the press the idea that we never knew when it was going to end the disinformation as we just heard all that layering on top of each other we felt that maybe this has broader application so hopefully everyone here today can take something from it um a little bit about uh our group our community just to give you some context the limo collective is sort of a global aggregation of people who are just passionate around human performance who work with the best in the world who train the best in the world and it's non-discipline it's like anything from the arts to music to sport to business and what you're hearing today is sort of the collective wisdom of that global community has been nutted down into some basic premises that we sort of anchor on we still love to work with the top talent in the world that sort of teaches us a couple of things one it's our north star it shows us what's possible it shows what humans are really capable of and that gives us something to benchmark against but also it allows us to test in in sort of you know real life application we've come up with these ideas we've come up with these concepts and these models but we can put them to test with this very top talent and see whether they work or not but ultimately where our real passion lies and where we focused heavily nowadays is the underlying idea that we should be democratizing all this information we should be taking all these lessons all this aggregated knowledge of how the real top talent has figured out to perform and giving it away to everyone so it's not just available for the talented the rich or those fortunate enough to get their hands on it so there's two parts to this there's the education and the training so we'll focus on the education to begin with whenever we're working with anyone especially people who are really trying to push the edge of what's possible we make sure they understand at the very basic level the underlying physiological biological neuroscience principles that a human faces and causes the threat response when they're challenged beyond their capacity if you can understand the basic premise then you as a talent can take those rules as principles and make them your own you can then come up with your own format your own models and then give yourself the very best chance to perform when it counts if not you sort of default to the buzzfeed cycle the top five things of high performance the top three ways to perform when things are stressful which is okay but doesn't really get it done so we could talk about this to death today but what we thought we'd like to try and do for you is actually give you a practical demonstration and yes that is a training evolution we use and uh we couldn't get a bearing here today so we had to settle for something else but um i have two volunteers adam and ronnie how are you good how you feeling okay okay so we know exactly how they're feeling because i think we can get up on screen uh yeah look at that so we didn't know who was going to volunteer today so we called them a couple of generic we've got thor and wonder woman and what you can see up there is their heart rate tacking away so a fundamental premise of what we're going to talk about today is how the body responds when it's challenged or threatened so let's just start with removing a little bit uncertainty if you guys wouldn't mind just putting on your uh mask there so now they can't see anything and humans in the absence of information will typically fill in the blanks with worst case scenario so we'll see how this goes we're going to let them sit there for a minute and think about what could be happening in a few next few minutes and see how they go um this is what we do for a living so yeah we're professionals up here um before we go any further before we laugh too hard about what's about to happen um the mechanism we're dealing with is an ancient one it's a primal threat response it's been with us since the dawn of time humans whenever they're challenged whenever they're threatened will adopt to this particular model that you're going to see here demonstrated today and what that means is that everybody is very specific and it's specific to you and the situation you're in so when we're talking about the training the adaptations and everything else remember it's making it your own that really counts if you want to learn how to perform in this space but to do a much more justice i'm going to hand over to karen here to present and she can give you a little bit of her background on what she's going to talk about thank you hi thanks andy hi i'm karen i'm a physiologist in the department of warfighter performance at the naval health research center in san diego the last 10 years the thrust of my research has really focused on the stress and impact of stress in physical tactical environmental and mental spaces and accumulation of this stress load on our most elite military or special operations and their ability to perform in unconventional undefined and very kinetic war spaces so as you can imagine for them performance can mean the difference between life or death but independent on how you define performance so for a business executive it might be the acquisition of a company for an athlete it might be a national championship or for our military might be a hostage rescue but independent of how you define performance the fundamental on how our body responds to stress or how we perceive a threat is the same and as andy indicated or we can see from you know some changes or maybe not in their heart rate because they don't know what's going on right now and we'll see you soon is that this innate um response comes from our what's known as our sympathetic nervous system or our higher brain centers that primes us to fight or flee so basically it's increasing your heart rate opening up your eyes you can take in some visual information and then decide like is this really a threat or is it not a threat you know and so we have this response that is naturally built within us and one of us know that's in performance is that there's a really um tight association between arousal and between performance so if you're on the low end of arousal so if you're up here calm is a cucumber just relaxing and a saber-toothed tiger comes at me and i don't respond guess what i'm food so karen's survival goes down right and so on the other end of that spectrum if i'm very nervous and i freak out and i'm panicking my vision gets narrow i get tunnel focused i could pass out and then again on food karen's survival goes down right so we try to find this optimal level of arousal which we see in this green band here that you know we're primed enough to move we're primed enough to fight or flee or defend or maybe not depending on what the situation is and we can still maximize our performance we can hit that peak and so everyone it's very inner individual like how you respond to a certain amount of arousal but we all know from years of study this curve is from 1908 so two psychologists back in 1908 started really studying this com on you know this con this context between a real or this relationship between arousal and performance and ultimately what we've seen in our professions over time is you can train people this is the theory of practice right to that mind-body connection to whatever it is to shift that curve to the right and up so you can tolerate a lot more stress or a lot more arousal and still have your peak performance and keep pushing that ceiling of performance up so you can tolerate more pressure or more pressure or you can perform in higher stress type scenarios and so this is all just a matter of training and practice and we see it in the work we do every day with our military with our athletes i mean it's the same thing you know i also teach i apply to my students when they're taking a graduate exam hey go back to take your deep breaths write down what you know if you don't skip and go ahead you know so these are principles that can be applied really across a wide variety of um situations and so with that we're going to continue on with our demonstration so we can see this live okay we can see what's going to happen to their heart rate into this this fight or flight response as we we get our volunteers up here up and moving with our demonstration so right now they're normal okay right now heart rates are normal everything's okay and this is not yeah aside from the fun we're about to have the idea of getting yourself in that scenario feeling what it's like knowing that tightening your chest and getting used and practicing and training with it it's kind of the business we're in to help people then when they really are challenged to learn how to adapt with it so running an ad will you mind taking off those goggles for us and just okay great okay then quietly will you just get up behind these boxes here you can jump on this one there and then watch yourself go between the chairs here we'll see if this experiment actually works but you see their heart rate's already gone up right so you start to see yeah it's jumped up at least 10 or 20 beats so that's that sympathetic response like do i need to flee do i need to fight what do i need to do right now so before we do anything we could ask you maybe to try and belt out a few bars of the national anthem how would that yeah any chance no no no no chance okay sorry we'll go back all right so what all i need you to do and very quietly and very carefully and no sudden movements gently put your hand in there gently put it down and just let me know what you think's in the box but be very slow very slow and very careful all right there you go keep going keep going wow ronnie you're a rock star look at this oh do you feel anything what's in there i don't think it's a puppy it's not a puppy a snake it's a snake it's a snake yeah take your hand out well done everyone round of applause what's in there [Applause] spider yeah no i didn't see it oh my god it's a wrath oh they're cute i just felt the tail i thought it was the spiders that's worse it's a sneak what kind so um well thanks everyone you guys can go backstage now thanks adam and ronnie appreciate it thank you thank you a little demonstration there they're a little briefed so i think we've got to rise but that's fundamentally the principle we're talking about the idea of preparing someone to perform when it really counts you have to put them in scenarios that get that rise get them on that edge just to that point where they're not freaking out but where they can manage it so we'll move from sort of that understanding that education and the more you do it the better you get at it to the idea of how do we actually train and there's a lot of techniques similar to the one you just saw but many years ago when working in the big wave community we're asked to help this particular group of athletes survive in this sort of and perform really well in this sort of scenario and obviously the tactical side of this practice is to learn how to hold your breath for a long period of time in case the wave crashes on top of you so what we did at that moment in time is we connected up with the free diving community and through their techniques they had developed over many many years to learn how to regulate yourself to down regulate yourself to prepare yourself to manage that exquisite process that they have to undergo when they're diving down to the depths they do we recognize that we not only had a tool that taught you how to hold your breath for a long time but we had a tool that really was first class and probably best best case scenario for us in terms of regulating yourself in any high stakes environment so subsequent to the what we call the big wave surf survival program being developed we came up with a modified version of that and every talent that we've since worked with goes through it artists djs ceos programmers coders hackers esports athletes no matter who you are the fundamental techniques of down regulating through control of breath that you can apply in the free diving environment a staggering opportunity for everybody and those lucky few have already signed up and the rest who may sign up after this that's the session we're going to do tomorrow morning but to really unpack it for you we're going to turn it over to kirk here whose experience speaks for himself thanks andy um my name's kirk crock so i'm an ocean explorer and an educator i work in a lot of extreme environments that would be caves in racks under ice scuba dives into the 600 foot range where it's six and a half seven hours of decompression to get out of it on a vertical wall in the cayman islands and over the last 20 years what i've really specialized in is the sport of free diving and in that time on one breath of air i've been able to achieve 115 meters or 375 feet of of depth and free diving is really it's basic snorkeling it's a simple breath from the surface using simple equipment mask fin snorkel wetsuit weight belt maybe a free dive computer we challenge time depth and and uh distance and when you look at the current world records right now uh riding a sled to depth in a balloon of air backup we have achieved 214 meters or 700 feet so next time you're downtown count a 70-story building to get an idea of that that depth and that distance static apnea simply holding our breath for time at the surface on air not using oxygen we've done 11 minutes and 35 seconds and horizontal distance in a pool an olympic 50 meter pool uh six lengths or 300 meters so what the human physiology is capable of is really quite astounding and through my worldwide uh educational system i work with a lot of people that are really doing this for sightseeing they're doing it for harvesting they're doing it for competitive free diving or they're individuals who work in a high risk environment where controlling breathing controlling your your stress response and being functional uh while you're in a breath hold situation is uh is important so in my time i've been able to work with seven athletes trained them to 23 world records i've worked with nine special operations groups from three different countries and then red bull athletes from ian walsh surfing 100-foot wave right down to e-gamers and so it's it's quite amazing because really what i'm trying to teach and impart to them is the idea of bumping up and controlling what are going what are our primal fears and our primal fears as we've discussed but really what we're looking at is the fear of falling the fear of being eaten and in this case in my sport the fear of suffocation and when we let those primal fears take control of us and we don't control them that's where we risk um the fight flight or freeze reflex and that's not an option when you're a special operations member in the mid in the dead of night with the enemy above you or you're about to surf that hundred foot big wave off of jaws or you're going to be a free diver going to hundreds or a hundred meters of depth because when you get down there and you grab your tag you still have to get to the surface even though you've achieved your depth so how do we do this how do we manage to challenge these extreme environments and we do it by keeping our fecal matter consolidated if you can figure that one out so how do we keep it consolidated well from a free diving point of view i go down with one lung full of a finite amount of oxygen molecules and so it's really about the conservation of the engine that i'm using and so i'm trying to induce mammalian diving reflexes and those diving reflexes are adaptations to an extreme environment and when you look at the example of riding a sled down to 700 feet that's 22 times atmospheric pressure you're experiencing right now which means your lung bone wants to be compressed one twenty second the size right that's the increase of carbon dioxide that would make the average person gasping for air minutes ago or the average person blacking out from lack of oxygen these are extreme environments that that we work within so how we moderate our demand for that oxygen is through these diving reflexes and one of them is called bradycardia it's a it's a slowing of the heart the heart is a cardiac muscle with each beat it takes its consuming oxygen and so when we can slow it down that's an oxygen conserving mechanism we get breath holds or sorry we get heart rates as low as seven beats per minute on some of our more extreme dives we'll shunt blood from our peripheries i don't need oxygen right here i need it heart lungs brain so we'll constrict our blood vessels in the extremities and move it to the core or i'll shunt the spleen and push more oxygenated blood red blood cells into the circulatory system like really it's a form of doping so breathing and breath control is the foundation for all of that in how we control our physiology as a free diver how we remain focused how we remain on task and control stress breathing in breath control from the day you were born in that first year of life you were your most efficient in breathing look at a baby on its back and it's a belly breather the chest doesn't move it's only using the diaphragm and the diaphragms this incredibly important muscle for us uh from a breathing point of view it gets air into the lower third of our lungs where two-thirds of the blood supply is going to oxygenate the body so it's super important for us and by the time you're 18 years old your lung volume is set where it's at you're going to make small changes to the flexibility of the cage or the rate at which you can move oxygen across the blood barrier membrane but really by the time you're 18 it's set so the greatest gifts you can give your kids besides love education a language music is going to be cardio right by the time they're 18. so breathing and breath control is about exerting control over your sympathetic and your parasympathetic system your sympathetic system is trying to jack everything up and your parasympathetic system is trying to slow it all down and when we don't control those things that's where fight flight and freeze reflex takes over and as a free diver at maximum depths the difference in a little bit of a heart rate increase is the difference in more oxygen consumption and being successful or unsuccessful and how we apply that to our day-to-day living is really important as well because there's that point on friday when you're leaving work and the boss says i need to see you in my office monday morning so how do you keep that all together how do we manage the daily uh stresses in life paying the mortgage and putting the kids through school and all of those things and we can use breathing and breath control for that because it helps us focus and at the purest form we can induce states of flow and a state of flow is the peak at which you perform via intellectual spiritual whatever it is you're doing it's your peak of work performance and we know that breathing and we know ritualization helps all that so tomorrow we're going to have a lucky group of people who are going to join us in the uh in the pool we're going to start first with a little dry session showing you what breathing and breath control is some of the basics of of how we breathe and different styles of it and then we're going to move that into the pool where we get to apply it to something where we start our breath holds with a finite amount of oxygen and work towards times with it and be able to experience something that's pretty radical be able to achieve something you haven't uh maybe thought was possible yet there you are trying it and and achieving some pretty amazing times so if you haven't signed up yet we still might have a few spots you can meet us after we'll get you registered get you in wetsuits we'll answer any questions that you might have the future of breathing and breath control just isn't about the air we take in right now that as i'm speaking the liminal collective we are working towards advancing the integration of physiology and science together in technology and that is going to be through the future of exploring inner space to its maximum and outer space and that's going to be through something we're forwarding and advancing and that's of liquid breathing the idea of putting liquid into your lungs for all those inner and outer space advantages and hopefully we'll see you here at some point talking with code again from that point of view thank you for your time thank you and i'll just i'll just wrap it up with whether your proverbial threat is a snake a rat a grizzly or it's the boardroom it's that deadline it's the making sure you spend the time with your family whatever that is these techniques we've developed as you start to think about and learn they apply across the board and so for those lucky for you tomorrow like i said we'll show you the basic techniques it won't be anything crazy but hopefully some of these ideas give you a sense of how to navigate these stressful times in your life so thank you everybody thank you very much you

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Length: 22min 20sec (1340 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021