Training Your Brain (Moran Cerf) | DLDsummer 15

this is going to be a before-and-after you can remember how your brain is right now and in 15 minutes it's going to be entirely different this is all it takes the reality is that our brain changes all the time I often give talks to my students or to audiences and at the end someone raises their hand and says you know I want to know if doing this drug is going to change my brain or if doing this behavior is gonna change my brain and reality is that pretty much everything we do changes our brain because our brain is the part of us that's supposed to change all the time our body is pretty much what it is when we were born we have genetics that kind of define our a lot of our traits and mother nature gave us one element our brain that's going to adapt to the environment this thing is actually learning things changing behavior and figure out what is out there so we can do better in the world so the brain is the kind of machine that I look at in the last couple of years trying to understand how people's behavior can be changed I'm going to show you what we know right now about what changes the brain and what the brain changes and I'll tell you a few things we know recently that you can all apply to indeed train your brain to behave and work better I like to start talking a deal this summer about the gym because we all can imagine going to the gym and doing things to our body but the reality is that while we know a lot about how to change our body we focus less on things that could actually make our brain be different and I found this nice cedis quote that says that many complain about their looks but none of their brains I actually heard people last night saying I want to stop having eating chocolates I want to stop smoking I want to exercise more so all of us have this idea that there's things we want to do differently and we work on the body a lot but we don't really know now how to just change the part of us that leads to those desires so I'm going to show you a little bit of what we know about that the reality is that we know a lot and the artist also that we can change so any of you that is in a couple therapy probably heard this thing and it says that you cannot change him with his ways and you should just accept with their art is that you can change some of him we're gonna see how it's done shortly so here's some things that we know about changes to the brain there's a bunch of things that change our brain and here's kind of the space of working in here are all the things that we can do to our brain that changes it and I'm going to focus on a few of them and tell you how you can actually do it yourself but here's things that we know so we all know that drugs change our brain and I'm putting in the category of drugs everything that is chemical that goes into our brain including placebo placebo is just another type of chemical that our brain produces to trick itself into changing behavior and we know that meditation makes some kind of a chemical imbalance in the brain that leads to changes and we notice exercises it actually releases all kinds of hormones in our brain that change our behavior so every part of us that actually uses those hormones in the brain the chemical ones changes who we are we know that intuition changes our brain and I imagine that many of you heard that if you eat well and focus on a diet you're gonna have better life the reality is that your brain is also the part of us that wants this sugar and what's the chocolate so there's a little trick here so we're going to see in a second how you can work with that we know also that a lot of things in our body that are not our body per se that actually change our brain so we know that if you look at the cells in your body 9 out of 10 cells in your body are actually not you there are bacteria that live in your body and that work with you over time and do things to you but you cannot really control them unless you connect things to them so we now have a really fancy study that came out a year ago let's took till 2 mice and actually took and I'm going to speak lightly they took the poop of one Mouse and put it inside the gutter another Mouse and if they took it for a while what happens is that one Mouse became younger so it somehow it took the the kind of ingredients that were in one of them move it to another and just by doing that here's your kind of growth hormone eaters that thing is going to change perfume you just eat the poop of your friends who's younger than you and your brain is going to a immediately think it shouldn't you be a younger we know that the same works we bloodstream if you take the blood of one Mouse and circulate it into another Mouse they the younger Mouse becomes older and the older Mouse becomes younger so we know there's something in the gut it goes to our brain changes it something that you can't really apply right away when our brain stimulation works we know that we can actually zap your brain with all kinds of machines from the outside and though things done in the right moment actually change your behavior we know that there's all kinds of activities that where you take your brain activity and connect to a computer and have your brain change something in the computer and the changes if they're done right can actually make your brain work better this is called brain computer interfaces of course we know that we can change your genetics by injecting viruses your brain and making you behave differently and we know of course that education talking right now changes your brains you actually learn some things you retain some things in memory and some things in your brain are now different than they were two minutes ago so it already does something and a lot of cognitive things work so if you talk to people especially a therapist and they ask the right question in the right time or say the right thing the right moment this immediately kind of registers in your brain is a difference and your brain changes somehow we know that there's feedback we can actually get loops of information coming back to our brain invite moments and make these changes and we know we can even a look at the brain as a machine that sits in our head and connects to our world using sensations like the eyes or the ears or the mouth and gets information and because it sits there and doesn't really know what the world is it just sees what it gets from your senses we can actually trick the brain into getting information it's not out there and in doing so training to do different different things so this is a space but up to now you're kind of confused there's too many things and you don't really know what if you do tomorrow so let's zoom in and explain a few of the things that you can actually think of yourself before I do that I want to do one risky thing because some of you here might have tried that or some of you might might be the people who are behind it and I'm going to risk myself in going to lawsuits by telling you what doesn't work so here's a few things that don't work hey all that I'd put into work lets me back cure it there's a lot of companies out there that will offer you kind of instant brain training you just go to our website and you play a game or you play this video game out there and suddenly you're going to be smarter you're not going to have Alzheimer things are gonna change up to now there's almost zero evidence that any of those websites and games actually work I didn't want to tell you myself that I tried a few of them and tested them and found that none of them work so I was relying on someone else who did the work and this way you can sue him not me when he says that in a paper in one of the most prestigious journals in science called nature in 2010 Adrian Owen a professor Umbridge took a bunch of a classic games and websites that some of you probably know of because a very popular where people supposedly play games and at the end become smarter or have better memory and it just tested them in a paper that's called putting brain training to test and what they found is this graph which without going into too much details but you see that all the bars are kind of at the same height which means that before and after people who did get training people did not they are all the same what actually happens if you play those games those websites that teach you that you can kind of train your brain is that you become really good in those games and it doesn't translate to anything else so you can become really good in playing all kinds of card games memory tasks in this website and then you try outside to remember the phone number of a person you just met and you don't do any better so that's kind of a negative thing a in a way connecting to the panel just before me on wearable devices there's a lot of studies right now on a all kinds of EEG machines I intentionally took a picture of one that doesn't try to do that so I won't get in trouble with anyone here but there's a lot of like companies that offer you a headset that you put in your head and it's going to tell you what to think of and when to think of things and in doing so is going to turn your brain and again there's zero a to almost little evidence that those things actually work so right now a I'm telling you a if you're in the investing stage of working a company that's going to use some kind of brain stimulation to make you smaller take a different gamble because right now this doesn't seem to work ok so we know that this doesn't work so the question is a should looking at the brain even be what we're looking into or maybe we should just focus on you know exercising and dieting and doing other things because our personality is not in the brain so I want to convince you in five minutes first that looking in the brain is essential to your identity and to your behavior because in your brain lies the roots of who you are your behavior your intentions your motivations you'll love your desires you remember with emotions everything sits on your brain and I'm going to tell you that by showing you a few examples of stories that are going to make you question your a free will and whether your brain is yours like this story this is a story of a guy who became famous in the u.s. in the 60s in pretty grave circumstances in 1966 one day he takes a cab from his home to the University of Austin in Texas he gets university he climbed the tallest building there you sit at the top and then he pulls an ak-47 and he starts spraying people down below his name is Charles Whitman and he was one of the first people who were involved in that mass murder he killed 40 people right away then he may he waited for a while until the ambulance showed up quick people to help those people and then he shot them as well when he kept for one hour sitting there and reloading his rifle and spraying them from above for a while killing altogether about 80 people in injuring hundred and forty until eventually the police climbed to the building and shot him and killed him and while he is dead the police tries to figure out what could have led a person to do something like that what would be the reason behind this behavior so they went to his neighborhood and try to investigate and this was a classical case of a serial killer he was a great guy a great neighbor a great friend he used to they walk the dogs of his neighbors this is the picture that I found of him walking the dogs of his neighbors he was discharged honorably not working okay did you hear anything I said up to now okay it's just very fast now it's gonna be slow when I speak to the mind and so this guy is a great person he was discharged honorably for the Marines the year before everything about this guy seemed great they went to his apartment in his apartment they found that all of the clothes were color-coded nicely and folded neatly he was organized he was perfect there was no sign of this killing coming until they found his diary buried under his bed they found a little diary that he kept meticulously for the months leading to this event and in the diary he started writing things about his brain he said my brain is not okay I feel I'm changing I'm not myself he goes to a psychiatrist and he asked this woman to look at him and she says you're okay go back home and he keeps reporting that every day he has awful thoughts and the night before the killing he actually writes his diary I'm afraid I'm gonna do something awful tomorrow I don't know what it is but if I do it and I end up dead I want someone to conduct an autopsy on my brain because it's not okay and even leaves a check for $30,000 for this autopsy so the police says okay we got we're gonna do that and I really look at his brain but I find it in his brain is a massive tumor Preston right at the center what a part of the brain called the amygdala it has to do with a aggression and feel and maybe maybe have led to this behavior we would never know but we could know something about this story the story of a person a whose wife calls the police in 2010 and says my husband whom I've been married to for 10 years now and we had a perfectly normal and great sexual relationship for the last 10 years he woke up one morning and he became a pedophile I don't know what to do he's a pedophile we have a four-year-old daughter and I'm worried about her you've got to arrest my husband so the police says ok this is kind of an extreme case they indeed a restaurant husband because they find child porn in his computer and he goes on trial and the trial begins any complaints as a file begins about having some headaches they ignore it first on day one they ignore it on day two but day three has a seizure in the court house so now they take him by the way in the regime to the medical center where they look at his brain and what they see in his brain is a massive tumor pressing on the left father is the brain part of the brain it has to do with with decision making and they say ok this is a massive tumor we've got to cure this guy so they take him from the emergency room the operating room where a doctor removes the entire a residue from the tumor and what's interesting about this case is that when this guy wakes up after a few days from the surgery no longer is he having a tumor but even more interesting he no longer is a pedophile he goes back to his normal sexual appetite so instead of being sent to prison that the judge sends him back home in probation and the story could already end here and be interesting but it actually is a twist it makes it even more interesting because 10 months later after this guy's at home the wife calls again and says my husband is again a pedophile we've got to do something about it this time they not do they took him they take him straight to the hospital look at his bearing what I see is that part of the way the tumor wasn't taken out there's a residue that's still there let go back so his pedophile behavior arrived again they take him to surgery a second time they remove this residues from the tumor and as he wakes up a second time he goes back to his normal sexual appetite this is almost like a controlled experiment you have think one way you behave one way you take it out you behave differently you bring it back you'll behave one way and so on so this just shows to you that indeed looking at the brain is actually a place that we can understand behavior and I don't have to look that far into cases like these two guys that pretty much had a very extreme situation you can all imagine yourself this afternoon going to the cocktail event in pulling some ethanol on your mucosal grant and suddenly everything around you becomes funnier and everyone becomes cuter you all saw these moments were changes to our brain lead to changes our behavior and the question now is can we somehow control those changes okay so when I wanted to look at changes like that I was interested in the type of changes that people care about and what I specifically wanted to see is what do people actually want to get with those changes because we can change a lot of things but what do people actually want to arrive at at the end and the answer that multiple give us is happiness so people want to be happy okay that's that's great the question is how do you get to happiness and what behavior would lead you to happiness so I didn't have to look far because people before me studied happiness and they actually arrived at a number of things that drive happiness and I want to ask you to participate with me in this kind of little survey and tell me what you think are the top five things that make people happy let's start from the kind of top to the bottom but you can guess anything what are the five things that you think make people happy freedom we have one not in the top five what else love not in the top five friends is number two family so a friends and family go into the same category of interaction health connection you said whether let's start with number five when we go climb after so here's number five the fifth thing that actually drives happiness exercise this is not surprising we know that the running and jogging and doing activity actually releases hormones in the brain that makes us a that actually we increase the happiness it's not surprising let's go to number four that's a lot more surprising and I think a lot more relevant to the audience here given what Steffi said yesterday about social behavior turns out volunteering is one of the most things that make us happier so doing things for others not only helps others but it turns out that when you come back home and you just look at the it people's B brain-wise turns out that the brain is just better and much more engaged more active when we're done doing things for others that's a pretty positive thing let's look at the more the worst thing now spirituality turns out that being spiritual regardless of what religion you're a part of or what spirituality you're you're engaged in it actually makes the brain a lot better so if you're one of those people who believe in something you're already much better than us people who don't believe because it gives your brain a little bit of a thing that makes gives meaning to life you just kind of think that the world has a greater meaning than what it is and it actually ties closely to number two which is social interaction so it turns out our brain really loves to get input and outputs from the outside to get input me as a load and in between outputs so the brain when it's processing information that's not it's information that came out from the outside world it actually a change itself a lot and it makes us happier so in this applies to family friends any social interaction it doesn't matter with whom and love it but it actually makes our brain behaves better and accordingly I think number three is now explained well because if you're spiritual you actually feel that you're never alone there's always someone with you even when you go to bed by yourself there's kind of someone in there with you so this I think is why number three actually is there but number one is the interesting thing that none of your guests and I didn't guess and this drives much of what I'm going to tell you in the next 10 minutes which is how you can change behavior and it turns out that the things that makes us happiest the most the things that is above everything else that controls happiness more than anything else is sleep turns out that having a better sleep is a collated highly with having much more happiness more than anything else and there's a little trick you because we don't even know if it's correlation or causation it's unclear the people that are happy sleep better lot people that sleep better are happy but regardless of that we all we know know the people that are actually reporting a higher happiness or report better sleep and what I mean by better sleep is not that necessarily they sleep for more hours they just wake up feeling that they slept enough so if you sleep 10 hours but you wake up tired or if you sleep for hours you wake up very very alert the the number of hours as a matter what matters is how you wake up in sleep is interesting because what's neat thing about sleep is it a moment where our brain is in many ways shut down we're not really there to control things we're just kind of sitting there in our brain does strings and somehow this makes us happy and this is interesting because this is what we learned recently is the moment where changes could occur in the best way when we're sleeping we're not there are to exist things so if you target the right moments in your sleep and you do things to your brain that's when the changes can happen in the best way and here's what I mean by that I'm going to now list a few of the studies all from the last three or four three or four years and what's common to all of them is that they actually lead to changes in the behavior there are part of the big space of things I showed you before and what's nice about them is that they actually were working in different states of our work so of our life so here's one type of change we all want to do learning content we all imagine to go to sleep one day and wake up knowing Chinese or go to sleep for a little nap in the afternoon and wake up knowing kung fu the reality is that we don't know yet how to do that but we do know how to use your sleep to make sure the things that you learn yourself stay there turns out that in our sleep there's many many stages if we go to sleep and if or even a nap of 90 minutes there's different stages that we're going through and one of those latest ideas is called slow-wave sleep it's a stage where our brain basically does the following thing it takes information from one side of the brain things that we learned during the day when Peaks they want that it thinks are important and save them for later so it says okay this thing that I learned today is important I want to retrieve that I want to stow it so it's going to be there in the future and if we target the brain in that particular moment and tell the brain this is important your brain is going to take information and store it in the brain so all we have to do now is the following we have to during the day time learn something as in read a book look at the movie listen to someone talking and been doing that we are going to put things in our own brain and now we go to sleep and in our sleep we have to have someone do the right thing I'm gonna tell what it is in a second and if you're dividing at the right time our brain thinks that this emotion is limp or this thing is important and it just saved it so we now have a bunch of studies all from the last year that show that we can actually make your brain retention a basically detect information if we target fusion in the right moment and I'll show you a few solids so over about two months ago a study came up that showed how you can actually make people smoking so people stop smoking for a while people try to stop smoking for a while there's been a lot of ways that a study from a group of a guy called Nam sabelli a show the for anything new to people who are smokers they brought them to the lab and they told them to go to sleep for 90 minutes in the specific window that I called slow-wave sleep it's a specific window that is easy to identify those people where they're sleeping had someone spray the smell of nicotine the spent smell of cigarettes into their nose and immediately afterwards the smell of rotten eggs so you get you go to sleep you get to the right momentum and sprays the smell of cigarettes and immediately after a bad smell it doesn't to be alternext it could be anything and what your brain does is it learns quickly that this thing is bad so just spraying a few times this particular smell that you don't want to have anymore in a bad smell afterwards makes your brain associate the experience with is a bad thing and when as people wake up not only did not want a they don't smoke they actually don't want to somehow their brain learned that smoking is something that they don't really want and I just wake up not wanting to smoke as much so these people were asked to keep a diary half the people were going through this treatment where they were learning that smoking is not something that they want half we're not and what they show is that there's a drop in the people who get the treatment in the amount of smoking so we can actually now think of anything that you don't want to have you don't like chocolate you want to not it's my chocolate we now take a go again let you take a nap in the right wind over time slow-wave sleep we spray the smell of chocolate into your nose and immediately after a bad smell and your brain if you do it enough times in right moment it's going to wake up really learning that this thing is not an idiot once we don't know if it's reversible so if you not sure if you don't like chocolate you might not do it right away but if you really ever be a good you want to stop we now know that this particular thing came out a few months ago actually leads to a change in a behavior here's another example biases in a study that came out about a four weeks ago on science what they show is that the same window the same unique window sleep isn't just about changing changing a behavior actively like eating it cannot change your biases what they did is they took people and they measured all kinds of associations inside their head and they show that people have some kind of racial biases so some people actually have all kind of tendencies that even if they don't themselves think they're racist we have those racial biases in their brain when they got to the specific moment in the slip they played into the ear just words that are reversing the associations and again it's important that it happens in the right moment in slower your sleep and it doesn't wake you up and when those people wake up they have a take they take a test and in a test they show less tendencies for the hotel associations so we don't know that this window of sleep is good for changing behavior like smoking like eating biases and even for learning we can now have you learn history when you're awake and when you get to this particular moment we're just going to play a little bit of sounds that remind you of history it's going to make your brain Technovation out there and save it in your brain so what we did another study they took people and they had them take learn some things very basic some words in Chinese and intersession to English they waited for the right moment while the person was asleep they played only the Chinese words not the English one and they brain just rehearsed that and when they wake up in the morning the words that were rehearsed were remembered and the words that were not - not remembered so here's what you always wanted a way to actually change your brain in a very active way by targeting slow-wave sleep the problem there it's really hard to find this moment called story of sleep so what you have to do is if find a partner let's taste next to you in bed wait for you to get to the right moment then when you're asleep spray this thing too you know so whisper the right word in your ear and then when you wake up you're gonna do this thing I stood every 90 minutes not a is it do but actually the tools that we use in our lab to measure sleeps sleep stages is not too hard so you can actually train your husband or your wife or your boyfriend or your spouse to a step into that for you it's a nice gesture for one night in return for a forever eternal non-love for chocolate okay we also know now that we can a a toy with the brain when it comes to engagement so in get me to the word that a lot people care about and we now have tools using neuroscience to look at the brain and learn when your brain is more likely to retain information and less likely and this is really important it's a positive education for instance when when we educate educate people right now in class we still use the same metadata please two hundred years ago which is one person speaking to another but the allottee is that when I stick you right now I probably speak too fast for 40% other people too slow for 10% and just the right speed for some of you but that's the method with each people right now we just have one person speak to people and we assume that somehow they're going to catch up and this is very outdated it means it in our classroom you have to assume that 40 people in the classroom are all the same person but now we can actually look at their brain and see exactly what's the right moment that they're more engaged or less engaged and maybe create teachers that are better for this guy than that girl or all students that go well in this subject but not in that subject and actually start creating classrooms not based on just the age group or the successive tests but on the right moment for a brain to capture things and since we know now let's look at the brain and measure engagement we can actually look at a person is an individual and rank people by engagement levels and find teachers that work best with those students we also know how to forget how to make you forget stuff turns out that when we remember something we don't just load stuff from our hard drive and use it and store it back we actually change it so every time I ask you a question and you go to your memory and kind of pull something tell me the answer you actually pull the memory and it's floating in the air and it's kind of very malleable it's very fragile so if I ask you right now how was it to be a four-year-old SMS me Steffi was to a four-year-old if they oh it was amazing I was a riding bicycle and I was learning this thing and I was playing in in the sandbox in order to me that thing get to go back to your memory and kind of pull information keep it in mind and tell it to me in this particular moment it's very fragile as soon as you're done telling it you're going to save it again but what you're going to save is not the original you're going to save the thing you open with some changes that come from the right moment so every time you remember something you actually pull it and save it again put it save it again which means it if we intervene the right moment we can actually make your memory changed which means also that if I ask you tomorrow how it was to be a four-year-old the answer is not going to be again just pulling from back in the past it's going to be the last thing you saved it and how it was so telling a story many many times actually means you change it a lot there's a joke some joke among neuroscientists that the best memories are kept in the brain of people with Alzheimer because they never used the memories they're just kind of kept there the way it wasn't they never use them so if you can just get in you can get the memory in the raw form but all of us I'll keep always changing it so we get the kind of the worst version of our memories we just keep changing all the time so if you want I remember something I just have to keep it there and not touch it but at least we'll just touch it at a time and this means that we can now find a moment and ask you a question and make you member something and just when you talked about that intervened and in doing some we make you save it a different way this is basically what tella P does for you right you go to a therapist they ask you about your boyfriend and why he dumped you you answer the question and they say well maybe he didn't really think that and just by doing that they make you save the memory a little different version this is what we do with trauma people people have a post on tech stress they come back they had some bad experience we ask them tell about talk about experience and we intervene in the middle of this talk and make them save it differently now we understand how many work we can actually understand why does those therapies work but we can also do it in a very aggressive way by making you tell us a story and intervene medically right when you tell the story and make you not save it so you basically forget it entirely now again this is something that we did that up to now with animals like rats and mice and monkeys and we know that it works the question of doing it with humans is a bit tricky because we don't know that a waiting memo is is good or bad for you we know that there's a things that called web / we can actually look at your brain and see when your brain is vulnerable things and change them we know that we can also look at your brain and learn how risk work we know that your brain actually has internal mechanisms that assess risks and and evaluate them another of them are available to us so when we come to make a stock whether to invest something or not to invest in something we basically assess a lot of information and make a decision but the reality is that in our brain there's a lot of other processes that work together to make a decision and not all of them are available to us now we can put electrodes in your brain and see what's involved and what's not involved in the decision and actually help you understand how you make decisions better and give you information about the way my decisions yesterday and helped you know how to make it in a different way I'm going to mention it in a second in the last slide and they also know that we can help your brain think better of the future so we know that our brain is really good in thinking about the present and understanding what's going on right now but it's not really great in thinking about the far future we know that we're not really good in saving money we're not really good in not eating things right now so you're going to be healthy in the future and we know that we really embed in climate change because now it's really fun to just throw things on the ground and we don't really think that it's going to be different in 100 years when our kids are going to be there what we can do right now is we can actually trick your brain into thinking it's in the future and actually simulating fast forward movement in the brain such that you really live different times within your life we can actually think of yourself at different ages and in doing so you actually are better in controlling yourself and I'm going to finish by talking about the one thing which is called self-control which is the ability for the brain to control itself and I'll do that by I went backwards by showing you the last study that we did in that something I'm going to enter that I get assigned time should end soon and we really want to know if we can change people's a behavior in a way that's going to make them better and we wanted to do that in various ways and we took one that's kind of interesting which is working with people whose brain is different than anyone elses which are athletes so what we did is we took people and we partnered with a company that's known for having a lot of access to athletes and we had people a elite athletes come to the lab and exercise we told them one thing we tell them we wanted to go on the treadmill and star in the session airbag and exercise for a while and we have one request from you please don't ever stop go Preston says oh we what say just exercise and don't stop until I tell you to just continue until I tell you to stop in the person exercise for a while and make it harder and harder for them eventually they break now a quickie robot is looking at their brain just before daybreak so the reality is that when you start cycling your legs like no problem and your brain say exercise and it kind of works together but after one mile your legs I please stop and your brain says continue and after two miles the blank says please stop and the brain says continue and at some point you get to the moment where your brain really struggles against your feet and your leg and eventually they like winning you just stop the question is how does the brain look at this moment what we did we took those athletes then we look at their brain just before they broke we also took a lot of things I'm gonna ask you so you want to just look at that and we look at the brain when they broke and we saw how the brain of an athlete looks just before she or he break and we saw that compared to regular people and what we found is like the way the brain looks when you're about to break and what we took is regular people out there we begin to lobotomy exercise on a treadmill but this time we tell them just before you're about to break we tell you so you're exercising a treadmill and you're about to stop and we tell you now now is the moment we are about to stop continue for one more minute so basically train them by now not by looking at the muscles but on their brain so it doesn't matter to me if you run for one mile or for ten miles but I will know when your brain is about to give up and I'm going to tell you now to stay for one minute longer and this is training you not by your muscles but are your brain basically I'm going to give an indication that your brain is about to collapse and make you do further what we do that is we seem to see that after very little training we can take any person and make them look like an athlete they just continue a little longer and this also changes your body but it actually shows you that you can control the brain differently so now you might ask yourself okay so there's a lot of things that I heard and they're interesting I might ask my spouse to spray smell at me when I'm sleeping but what can actually do tomorrow that works and the reality is that we can do a lot of things right away and that is we can learn our own brain and the reality is that in the wound is a couple of dozens of people here and all brains are different and I can't give you just like one answer that says here's what you do to make your brain way better but all of you have different brains that fall into one category and we can actually help you find what brain you have to change yourself in the most accurate way for yourself and what we see looking at all those athletes and the people people work with is that everyone is a little different but all brains are the same in a sense that when they get to a moment of conflict or a moment of trajectory or folk in the road they actually employ all kind of things to make a decision for instance we see that some people make this better stages we in the morning some in the evening some when they're hungry some other fool some when they're sad some when they're happy some of the talking to other people some of the baculum to themselves some a close the deadline some may follow heading and all of you know what brain you have so what you need to do as a first step is to keep a diary just work live for a week with your a real diary and then we get to a fork in the road make a decision invite a decision that you made and write also your state right what were your brain conditions at that moment were you happy said were you angry were you hungry will you adjust keep a diary again of the week look back in your you can see for all your decisions which ones you were happy with which ones you're not and just see which one day Alan what we look at athletes and our patients we see that we sync to see that there is kind of a set of a brain that is really good for making decisions and some that are very bad in order to do is we just ask them of decisions you made last week which ones were you happy with and which ones were you not look at your brain and take a snapshot of the brain at those moments and tell them something about the ways by which they should behave next time when I make decisions and this is kind of what leads to good drains I opened with showing this quote and the picture of the gym a kind of an emitter analogy that your brain is kind of like another muscle you can train but this picture I put there for different reasons this is a picture from a gym in Los Angeles people can't exercise and they had two options the eater could take the stairs up to exercise or take the escalators and even though they all came to exercise they all came to train there was an option that was very easy out there and they just picked the easy option that is that we live in a world right now that makes things easy for us and it kind of caters to our faulty brains instead of fixing our brain we just give our brains all kinds of ways to go a an acknowledged public rated the the enemy of all brains which is the snooze button right we go to sleep we set the alarm to 6 a.m. in the alarm rings at 6 a.m. and we wake up and we just insane people anymore suddenly suddenly the different brain wakes up and doesn want to wake up anymore and instead of the fixing our brain we created a button that works just with that how about we can press that just gives the brain a little more time instead of learning how to make our brain better we created a world that doesn't that doesn't treat pain train our brain but actually trains our bodies to live in this thing and this makes a for a wall that actually is functional for us but also merely makes lets our brain not work hard which means that we're kind of getting a less and less good in controlling it and I think that the best thing we could do right now for our brain is learn how it works and actually work against it as in train it rather than give in to it and just give create all kinds of escalators next to James Hall snooze buttons to make things better for us thank you

Channel: DLDconference

Views: 81,278

Rating: 4.8342214 out of 5

Keywords: DLDsummer, DLDsummer15, Munich, health, lifestyle, technology, DLD, conference, 2015, June, network, digital, life, design, media, upcoming trends, connect the unexpected, Moran Cerf, health care, 15, dld, summer, brain, neuroscience, Life & Science

Id: _XD-KIeVfeg

Length: 34min 54sec (2094 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 24 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/helpinghat]

TLDW, please :)