Why TED talks don't change your life much: Neale Martin at TEDxPeachtree

you thank you okay so has this been a great day are we inspired is that enough no you're absolutely correct if we're going to be catalyzed I'll catalyze means what it means to create or accelerate change and so what we want to talk about today and I think this is something that you know I'm sort of reluctant because I'm so you know hyped up on all these great speakers I don't really want to do my talk now because my talk is why TED Talks don't change your life and and I don't say this because I'm just trying to be contrary I'm really trying to make an important point and the point is centered around the idea that we have this illusion that our conscious brain is in control and so if I think something I'll do it and I want to spend some time going over about the last 200 million years of evolution I've got 16 minutes left so we'll cut to the chase you're pretty quick so how many of us drove here today okay good good now how many of you were on your cell phone at some point during your trip and how many of you the only reason you weren't on your cell phone is because you couldn't find anybody to call that early alright now how can this be how can we be essentially behind the wheel of a guided missile going 60 70 maybe 80 miles per hour we are mere seconds and one distracted driver away from a potentially lethal accident and yet what we feel is boredom right we reach into our pocket we pull out our phone and we think who can I call now how many of you have had that creepy feeling of going five miles and not being able to remember the road you just drove over does this freak you out alright now I want you to realize that this is a great window and how your brain really works and this is something that escapes us even though it's in front of us all the time because we live in this illusion that we are consciously in control of what we do but what I want to assure you is even though your conscious brain may pick the destination it's your unconscious brain that's driving the car now if we look at an image like this I'm how many of us are trying to lose weight I've never thrown a diet how many of us are trying to exercise right why is it so hard right consciously you go hey I should be 10 15 20 pounds lighter hey I should eat better I should eat right and if you're married you hear this continuously right you should eat better you should eat right you should exercise more and yet this picture rips apart all of our willpower all of our conscious goals are gone and so what I want us to do is to understand that if we want this time today to matter it's not enough to be inspired it's not enough to have good happy thoughts what we have to do is to understand really how our brains work we need to understand that there's there's been a lot of work and neuroscience and cognitive psychology and social psychology there's given us a radical new picture of how the brain really works I wouldn't spend some time with you today because I looked real hard to convince you that if you want to make changes in your life that the trick is not convincing your conscious mind to do it the trick is all about training your uncle it's mine so the brain as far as we know is the most complicated thing in the universe other than the universe now this is not just human can see inside the 1500 CC carrying capacity of your skull 100 billion neurons are crammed together each neuron is touching 10,000 other neurons every thought you have everything you feel every experience you have is a communication between those neurons and even though it only weighs 3 pounds your brain uses 20% of the energy of your body now we're going to take a little bit of time and start looking at the brain through sort of the evolutionary lens and when you kind of think about the brain being built over time so when we go deeper into the brain we're going back further in evolutionary history so I want to start with the dinosaur brain now the dinosaur brain this part of our brain is called the dinosaur brain because it was around when dinosaurs were here dinosaurs had this kind of a structure that allowed them to do everything from autonomic functions controlling all of their their bodily processes but also giving them the ability to control behavior to a degree that they dominated the planet for a hundred and sixty million years and the fact that this structure is present in our brains is testimony to its evolutionary utility now what's important is though this is critical not only to you know keeping you alive in terms of homeostasis and processing food and all the other kind of stuff it's also incredibly important in controlling complex behaviors but it's all happening outside of conscious awareness you have no idea how this is going on you can't you cannot influence it by conscious thought now I want to go to this next big evolutionary leap of the brain and this is the limbic region the structure deep inside your brain that as that was originally emerged with mammals now when talking about for evolutionary powerful attributes that we get from the limbic region that really defeats everything we try to do consciously alright and the idea here is to is to not really you know underestimate the power of your cognitive processes which are fantastic for what they are but it's to really respect how your brain actually evolved and the fact that this processing is what we rely on to stay alive so inside the structure is the first thing we see really with with the the limbic region is this ability to remember things so when neurons fire together they wire together it's due Association that we make connections but early mammals develop this this structure called the hippocampus which stores and retrieves memories in a way that is much more complex than the simple firing together that we get with just associations so we can see how important that would be Furley mammals I may be great to remember where food was plentiful and where danger was prevalent right and it's the same thing with us our memories are being stored that we do have conscious memories but most of our memories are being stored unconsciously and automatically but what should be remembered right how do we decide what we're going to remember and at the unconscious level what decides what gets remembered is another little structure at the end of the hippocampus called the amygdala now these names sound fancy hippocampus means seahorse amygdala means almond it just sounds better if I you know if we use Greek terms for these things or Latin terms right so the amygdala is is processing strong emotions it's right at the end of the hippocampus the social structure down at the bottom of this in this yellow and how many of us were trained when we were growing up that there is rational decisions when there is emotional decisions right which one should you make right so this is a lie so this lie is based on the idea that you can make a decision without emotion emotion is what's telling you what's important without an emotional tag you will not be remembered if you don't make an emotional connection you will not be remembered this is why ninth-grade history is a blur to me my teacher was not good and I don't remember most of that because there's no emotional connection so so this idea of memory and emotion are two huge evolutionary steps now again we call it emotion that's our term for it but think about what it really is imagine the gazelle going to a waterhole and you know surviving an attack right every aspect of that experience is now part of their memory so that gazelle is going to have a much higher likelihood of survival because the sights the sounds the location all those things are encoded in its memory and it will be able to respond faster as it goes forward but memory and emotion come together to create another great evolutionary leap which is judgment so our unconscious mind is continuously making judgments all the time right and the way it works is it will make a judgment based on how little information is available if you if you meet somebody for three seconds you've already made a judgment about them right now do you have five minutes you'll make another judgment if you make it you have know them for a few weeks another judgment right but it's happening all the time and your conscious mind doesn't know where these judgments are coming from you have this instantaneous you know a couple of seconds and that's good that's bad why I wrote a book and I was dealing with my publisher and they said that in the bookstore a book has three seconds to make a connection and when when my my the publisher was taking this book to one of the European Book Fairs she said that the professional book buyers will give her twenty seconds to make a sale that's how long that they have to make up their mind whether or not they're going to carry the book we're doing this all the time now the the fourth evolutionary leap from this part of the brain is habits no habits of the area that I studied this is this is where I do most of my research and work and habits are incredibly powerful because they allow us to do behaviors without having to consciously think about them so if I've done something in the same situation multiple times and gotten good outcomes I no longer have to think about it so all of this stuff is happening unconsciously because I and we have to understand this if we want to make a change in our life we're having to overcome this we're having to overcome a brain that's always working it's working effortlessly it's making snap judgments and it's processing millions of pieces of information at a time now what we're dealing with in in this last evolutionary leap of the neocortex is the new brain now it looks great that's big it took us from being dramatic you know tribes foraging for existence to space explorers who are unravel the mystery of the atom and the architecture of the universe right so it's very impressive don't get me wrong I'm impressed by it but it's slow and it's lazy and it's completely unreliable so you know and let's experience this now this is an example of unconscious mental processing right now before you recognize that there's a spider there your unconscious mind was already processing that information you or your heart rate went up you're getting a little bit nervous you may have moved back a little bit how many of us when George showed us how much co2 was in the room started feeling like we couldn't breathe my all of a sudden like out of nowhere all of a sudden you're kind of going could somebody open who the doors in the back and maybe right now this is an example of conscious level processing this hurts right this takes more this takes more energy this is slow this is effortful this will wear me out so as we go forward it's important for us to realize that if we want to actually catalyze what we've experienced today we've got to do more than simply have these thoughts about oh I ought to do that thing that that person talked about okay because if you don't if you don't change your behavior you will not achieve these goals so what I'm going to just take the last few minutes and say you know how many of us want to make a difference how many of us want this experience to be catalyzed all right so we're going to spend some time doing just that pull out your TEDx booklets find the speaker you found most inspiring go to that page and we're going to we're going to show you how to go through this process now my areas habits and so you'll see things like this like context cue behavior reinforce these loops right some people have it even simpler still it's like cue reinforcement and and routine or something a reward routine this is Wong this shows a habit is a two-dimensional thing right I don't know if I've done this ten times a thousand times habits or Springs Springs store energy as you do a behavior more times the habit becomes more strong it becomes more reliable it's more powerful all right so the idea of a habit spring is that when you compress a spring it's storing energy in it so when you're trying to change behavior with your will and your conscious mind you're basically trying to hold the spring down this brings ready to fire you're trying to hold it down your brain is lazy your conscious brain is lazy it's easily distracted and it tires easily so at some point you're going to what and the spring is just going to boom right so you're sort of saying I want to eat right today but then you get hungry you get compressed with time and then Snickers bars right there right and then you've eaten it and then you go oh I'm a bad person you're not bad you're not weak will you just got to understand how your brain is working so what we want to do is to think through this process so if in your change that you have identified you need to change an existing behavior what we have to understand is the discipline is the only way that you're going to be successful discipline is not punishment discipline is your conscious brain training your unconscious brain your unconscious brain is powerful it's reliable right your brains are designed to work these two brains to the minds come together they're supposed to work together they can work together great but you get it I understand what the strengths and weaknesses of them are right so discipline is how you take your conscious brain to make a goal to train your aren't your unconscious brain to achieve your conscious brain can't do it trust me I've tried this before myself I was an outgoing drug counselor for years so this is where a lot of this stuff comes from you're dealing with somebody who is who's a you know has had alcohol drug problems and they know what they they use again going to lose their job their family they're going to go to jail and they and they swear do and you know they believe it I am NOT going to use again right two weeks later they're using again and you are they crazy are they stupid or they would know this is the power of the unconscious mind we have to understand that so the first thing is when to disrupt an old habit is don't load the spring so avoid the locations the people the time of day whatever it is that says I'm in this context you've got to it and if you can't avoid that context you've got to make sure that you're consciously aware that when you're in that situation not to have your old behavior trigger so the first thing is like if you're if you're trying to lose weight I use lose weight just because it's a it's a it's a placeholder for whatever it is you're trying to do then you know don't get don't let yourself be hungry don't yourself get tired that just loads the spring eliminate the cue choose triggered and behavior automatically habits are so powerful because they don't require any conscious thought processes the cue triggers it so one of the one of the key elements is to try to remove the cues if you're trying to be more productive turn your phone off right when you get interrupted you lose about 12 minutes it takes about 12 minutes to get back to where you were so don't respond to emails don't respond to your phone if you wanna be if you know if that's really your your goal you cannot it's very hard to ignore that cue when it comes in especially you know and the younger generation with text messaging and all the things that seem to be grafted into their DNA now reframe the feedback so your brain is always making these associations reframing the feedback and the way I do this with you know successfully was with my favorite ice cream which was so rich and creamy I converted the thought of that creamy texture to that's it's high fat content so whatever I read it I think about the fat instead of the wonderfulness of the flavor now to create a new Ted habit first translate the goal into behavior again thoughts a weak behaviors are strong establish a clear context make sure you have a time of day day of the week whatever that you can execute the behavior consistently develop a reliable cue and your electronics are great for this so a lot of us are wearing wearable electronics we have cell phones computers a lot of these things can activate the that that behavior contribute that behavior if we repeat it consistently your alarm clocks a great example of that it's a great cue to wake up create a powerful reinforcement make sure that your initial experience is successful all right you want to guarantee success in the early stages make sure that you build reinforcements into it make sure that you don't leave that up to a chance to just say oh well if I work out that's going to be the thing if you work out too hard and your muscles are sore you probably won't work out the next day guarantees the success of your early trial and the last thing is repeated until it feels normal more importantly repeated until not doing it feels abnormal now this is my passion because so much of what we're dealing with as a culture and a society is about habits it's about things that were not aware of consciously so two-thirds of our healthcare costs are based on people's behavior last year that was 1.8 trillion dollars untold human misery premature death a hundred thousand people a year die from infections they get in hospitals again completely avoidable deaths that are the consequence of behavior the issue is not that we don't know what to do we do it's what we do that matters not what we know and so what I wanted to do today is to really give you the tools necessary to make this day not be just a great day but to be the beginning of real changes in your life so the key here at the end of the day is that your goal has to become a habit and that's that's the end

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 463,693

Rating: 4.8462338 out of 5

Keywords: tedx talks, TEDxPeachtree 2013, ted talks, tedx talk, tedx, TEDx, ted x, TEDxPeachtree, English Language (Human Language), Neale Martin, ted, United States Of America (Country), ted talk

Id: AH0VGxNrzH4

Length: 20min 24sec (1224 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 30 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

The anti-TED talk lol

[u/hesunderthebed]

It changed my life. I save about 15 seconds of my day everytime I need to tie my shoelaces. I've even taught my kids the quick technique.