Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine. Today, my guest is dr. Emily bell chatas, dr. Bell chatas, is a professor of psychology at New York University. Her laboratory studies, motivation goal, setting and tools for successful goal completion. I learned about doctor about Chet has worked some
Years ago because I'm a vision scientist that is I study the visual system and I heard about this incredible psychologist at New York University who was studying how Vision that is how we visualize problems. Can predict whether or not we will successfully overcome challenges and how we strategize in order to set and meet goals and in 2020 I learned of dr. Bell Chet has his book which was written for the general public entitled clearer closer. Better how successful people see the world.
Old and I read, both the hard copy of the book, and listen to the audiobook. And I absolutely loved the material as you'll learn directly from dr. About us today, how people visualize a problem that is whether or not they think of a goal or a problem as residing at the top of a very steep hill or on the top of a shallower hill or whether or not they visualize a goal or a problem as far off in the distance or closer to them in the distance, visually in their
Strongly dictates whether or not, they will arrive at the challenge of meeting a goal. We're overcoming a problem with more energy, or less energy, indeed, it dictates whether or not, they can push to immediate Milestones or whether or not, they will think they have to overcome the entire task all at once basically, dr. Bell said, is his work has discovered that how we visualize a problem or a goal in our mind, has everything to do with how we lean into that goal whether or not we think of it as overwhelming.
Or tractable whether or not we think that we can overcome that goal and then it will lead to yet more possible rewards and goals or whether or not we feel that we're going to arrive at the finish line and then just be overwhelmed with fatigue, in other words, how you visualize things in your mind. And when I say visualize, I mean, literally how you visualize them as a visual problem or a visual goal, has everything to do with whether or not you will be able to meet those goals and whether or not, they will lead to still greater goals that you will be able to achieve
Eve today's episode is an especially important when I believe because you're going to learn about quality peer reviewed, science from the expert in this field of goal-setting motivation and pursuit. And you're also going to learn an immense number of practical tools that you can apply toward your educational goals. Your career goals relationship goals, goals of any sort. By the end of today's episode, you will be better equipped to set and achieve your goals doctor about redis also shares with us her own experiences.
Of how to set visualize and Achieve goals and she does that within the context of her role as a parent as somebody navigating relationships of various kinds and a demanding career. So again I think that you'll find the information today to be both extremely academically grounded in terms of research, extremely practical and realistic in terms of how you might apply it in your own life. I'm pleased to announce that the human Lab podcast is now partnered with Momentis supplements. We partnered with Momentis
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20% off your first order. Again, that's Roca are okay, a.com and enter the code huberman at checkout and now for my discussion with dr. Emily belches. Well thanks for being here. It's my pleasure. Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for a long time because as a vision scientist is also very interested in real life. Tools and goal setting and motivation. Your work lands squarely in the middle of those interests. So just to kick things off could tell us just a little bit.
About the relationship between perception and in particular how we see the world and goal setting and go retrieval. It's a vast landscape, but you're the expert. So I'll turn that over to you and then as time goes on, I may have some additional questions as it relates to different kinds of vision. But what's the deal with vision and motivation? How do those two things Lincoln?
Totally. I mean, like, when we, when psychologists ask people, like, how are you? What are you doing to help make progress on your goals? They say all
All kinds of things, a couple of things always pop to the top, which is, you know, try to talk myself in encouraging ways himself self pep talks or I remind myself of how important it is to do this job or, you know, I'll put up Post-it notes around to like constantly be nagging me about what I need to do. So those are common tactics that people use. What we'll notice is that those are really effortful having to constantly, remind yourself, having to constantly, talk to yourself, having to create those Post-it notes. Remember to look at them, all of that takes a lot of time and effort and commitment. And so, what is
Prize that people burn out, right? It's exciting to work on a goal. When you, when you first said it, you might make some initial progress but then eventually we get, you know, not even to the half way point, but before things get real, things are challenging and we fall by the wayside and that's I think because those tactics that are our go-to strategies are themselves, a goal to maintain. So it's like you know double-sided we're putting so much on ourselves to try to advance the thing that we originally set out to accomplish.
The night, you know, with my team, I was trying to think of like, what our strategies that don't require as much effort that we can automate. That we can take advantage of what's already happening within ourselves within our body, within our mind. That might overcome one of those challenges that will be easier, more automated. And that's when we started to land on the idea of vision, right? We look at the world without even thinking of it for those of us that are cited and and we thought, you know what, there are there are strategies that we can use to look at the world in a different way and that we can
Automate. That might help us to overcome some obstacles to make progress on our goals to maybe literally see opportunities that we hadn't been able to see before. So we started playing around with the idea of visual Illusions to see. Like, do people even know that there's other ways of seeing things around them? Can we tweak that or is there room for intervention? Can we encourage people to take a new way of looking to, to see things that they hadn't seen before? And that's what really opened us up to trying to look at that intersection between visions.
Science and motivation science.
It's gray, didn't I always say in here? I'm strongly biased. As a vision scientist that, you know, vision is the dominant sense by which we navigate the world and survive. I love this idea of real world. Real time access to vision and I'm certainly familiar with how goal setting or Post-its and you know, in magnets on refrigerators can have an immediate impact but then over time, it did they become? So part of the visual landscape that you overlook them and we know as Vision, scientists, if something is
Linear environment, eventually, you're blind to it, so that makes good sense. So, you've published a number of studies in this area, but maybe you could highlight some of the more, what you would consider an important findings in the area of how people can adjust their Vision in order to meet goals, more quickly and more efficiently and perhaps also how we come. We all arrived at goals with different visual perceptions and that.
It in some way may divide us into highly motivated and less motivated people. In other words, what's the link between vision and motivation? And how can we leverage that in order to better reach our
goals, really? So, you know, we started thinking about what are the goals that are most important to people that they struggle with the most. So we asked hundreds thousands of people but their New Year's resolutions, are we look to all the other polls that do the same kind of work and regardless of where you look or who you ask for when you ask it? People's number one goal is something related to their health.
Right. Said to lose weight to exercise more to get out, get more steps for mental, well-being, physical well-being. And and that's like the number-one goal every January 1st. So if we were able to accomplish that goal, you think it would drop a little bit in the rankings but it doesn't because it's really hard. So we thought, I wonder if there's a way for us to make some progress on that on helping people to exercise, better more often stick to it longer and make some progress there. We know diets don't work.
And why I why don't diets work for the same reason, that that self talk doesn't work. Is that, you know, we go in it, full bore hardcore, and it requires a major commitment and effort to a lifestyle change. So again, we were looking for somebody that might be easier than that, that could produce big big payoff, right? That's, that's the golden ticket. Is something that requires less effort for a bigger payoff. So one of the first things that I did was go over to Brooklyn to this old Armory building it. You know, used to be a
Terry Armory space. Yeah. I know that building. Yeah it's a beautiful
building now that houses a lot of businesses right with plants on the
walls. Yeah, there's businesses. There's a couple armories all around the the borough's here around New York City and one in the one in Brooklyn, in particular is now YMCA, right? So it's a family YMCA that's within us. Beautiful old, red brick building that used to be a military establishment long, long ago. And what's really cool is that, you know, one winter after afternoon. Somebody had invited me a physical
rapist said, hey, you should come out and check out what's happening here with your interest in exercise and trying to find new ways of helping people new tactics that they can add to their tool belt. I think you're gonna find some interesting people that are working out there. So I showed up, I look around, you know, there's families, there's new moms, there's kids that are you know mom's trying to get kids to burn off some winter, you know, energy that they have. There's people that look like they're just there for their you know every couple of days going out for a run. There's some people that look like they're training with a team and that's who this physical therapist introduced introduced me to.
Is that was the coach of this team. There's a bunch of people that were sitting down on the ground and I would be hard pressed to know who's the high school student that's in this group. And then who, as it turns out are some of the fastest runners in the world. Like, you know, one of the people that was in the, the last Olympics before I showed up on the gold medal, for the 400 meter and and from the looks of them. I mean, of course their bodies are in better shape than mine but there's nothing. So pretentious, of course, they're not wearing their medals. There's nothing pretentious about how they're walking around or anything.
Like that that would lead me to know like this person's amazing and they probably have some insight that I don't have. So once I got introduced to them and knew who are these people that were part of this pretty Elite Training team that happened to work out at this family? Jim
I had the chance to talk with them about what strategies do you use? Now I am not an elite Runner and having recently had a baby, I'm not really a runner right now at all but I thought when these people are running I bet they are like hyper aware of everything that's going on in their surroundings. Where are they relative to the competition? What's happening in their peripheral vision? What's going on on the side? Who's behind them? Who's in front of them? They probably have this, like, Master sense. This master visual plan any point in time and that's
Probably makes them Elite. So when I started asking them, is that the case? Do you do you really pay attention to what's in your surroundings? What's behind you? What's on the side? They said no like all of them said, no. And sometimes when I do do that, it's a mistake. It doesn't work for me. So that was surprising. I'm totally winning against my intuition about what they do that likely contributes to their success. What they said instead was that they are hyper focused. They assume this narrowed focus of attention almost like a spotlight is shining on a
It now, when they're running a short distance at Target, might literally be the finish line. The line that they're trying to cross if it's a longer distance, they set some goals like, you know, the person the shorts on the person up ahead that they're trying to beat or they choose some sort of stable Landmark like a sign that they would pass by and like a spotlight is shining just on that or like they have blinders on the sides of their face. That's all they're paying attention to really narrowed scope of attention and that was a strategy that they that all of these Elite.
It said that they used in those that were better rather than, you know, the then slower ones that used it more and I thought, oh, that's something we can play with, right? Like they are Elite in their accomplished but that visual strategy isn't necessarily something that you have to be in the perfect physical condition to be able to adopt. And so I wonder can that help the rest of us who aren't competing for an Olympic gold and who have no chance of ever getting one, but who want to exercise better have a better have a better time doing it and maintain a commitment to that exercise goal that they
That they might otherwise you know by February or March be giving up on if they had said it at the beginning of January. So that's really where the work started was you know what you might call like focus groups or case studies of these incredible athletes. And and then we did the other studies looking at, you know, you know, people who aren't Olympic athletes but who are competitive and New York, Road Runners Runners, and how are they running and races. And what we found is that those people have better Pace, faster, Pace, better time,
They use that narrowed strategy more often than this more expansive or, you know, open scope of attention and there seem to be a correlation between that better performance among a wider swath of hundreds of Runners who are doing it competitively but still, you know, could be like the person that you're sitting next to in the office or yourself, right? And the more often that they did it the and the more consistently they had adopted that that technique of the narrowed focus of attention. It seems that they were doing better in their
So then we started thinking, like, okay, what about people who aren't competitive Runners? What about with my mom? Can she can she, can she do that? Or me, when I'm trying to get back on the bandwagon? And exercise more? Is this a tactic? We can teach people. The answer is. Yes, you can tell people about what these Olympic athletes are doing. You can tell them about what the New York Road Runners Runners are doing, and just using the same language that I just use with you, right? Imagine that there's a spotlight shining just on a Target. Choose.
Choose something up ahead. The stop sign. Two blocks up that you can you can just see and you know imagine that you have blinders on so that you're not really paying attention to the people that are passing by or the buildings or the garbage cans or the or the trucks that are on the road. You know, tune those out and focus in on that Target until you hit it and then choose another one, right? Sort of recalibrate, choose the next goal.
Until we would Tesla. Can people do that? I mean, if you're listening right now, you probably are imagining that experience too. And the answer is yes. Like I can imagine that. I know what those words mean and I can do that and our work found that two people can do that. We have them. Say out loud. What is it? That's captured your attention. And of course sometimes something in the periphery like movement captures our gaze and we are pulled their for an instant but then we can refocus up again and adopt that narrowed attention. Now, one of the first studies that we did was was teach that strategy.
E and juxtaposed are compared it against a group that we said just look around naturally. You know, you might see that finish line up ahead and there's things on the periphery, whatever your eyes want to do, whatever you think is going to work. Best feel free to do that and tell us what you're looking at. Then we gave them a Finish Line, we created sort of you know an exercise that's moderately challenging but possible, we put ankle weights on that accounted for about fifteen percent of their body weight, told them to lift their knees up sort of high-stepping to a Finish Line. So this would be challenging for them to do.
but we said, you know, it's an indicator of overall health and fitness
Some of these people had narrowed, their focus of attention and some were just looking more expansively or naturally. And what we found is that those people that we trained just everyday, normal people doing this, this moderately challenging exercise, they were able to move 27 percent faster they could do the exercise more quickly and they said it hurt. 17% less the exercise was exactly the same. For all the people we set, we set the weight, we set the distance, it was in, you know, our lab space. So it was like a constrained environment everybody was
The same sort of circumstance but yet their experience was really different. We help them to move faster burn calories at a higher rate, right? Exercise more efficiently, the amount of time they put in is going to produce a better physical outcome and it also didn't hurt them. Right there saying it doesn't hurt as much. So we were really excited about that, right? Because it meant that this strategy we could use it on people who are not Elite athletes. It could be easily adopted a quick training session. I can teach people to look at the world in a different
Way again, this narrow detention was different than whatever they do, naturally the comparison group but it had a big outcome. It had a big difference on the way that they were engaged in the exercise. Those like some of the first work that we did and then since then we've done, you know, dozens more studies to look at what happens at that and and what else can we do with playing around with this?
Yeah, those are impressive differences as a consequence of narrowing visual attention, a couple questions about the actual practice of narrowing attention. Is there any indication?
Should have whether or not subjects are constantly updating their visual attention. So, for instance, if let's say the goal line is in view, literally from the beginning, I could imagine just holding visual attention on the, on the goal line. But if it's a oval track or it's a trajectory along a trail or through a city, how often do you think they are updating their their visual aperture and setting a visual goal?
And I could imagine that there's some energetic expense to that. So that meaning how, you know, you wouldn't want to do every crack on the sidewalk unless those cracks on the sidewalk were very far apart, right? Because I think it's some point that itself would be exhausted. So, is there an optimal strategy or a semi optimal strategy?
Yeah. So, you know, those Olympic athletes that we that we started by interviewing they tended to be sprinters. They were more often Sprinter short distance printers. So when they
Like yes, I narrow in more than I assume an expansive Focus. That's because they're not going that far, right? They have to do it as fast as humanly possible, but they're not going that far. And so we started asking that question too about like, well, wouldn't that be tiring? And the answer is yes. So when we start to look at what people who aren't sprinters who are accomplished but who are more long distance Runners, that's what we find that they do is that they, you know, they're using that narrowed attention strategy strategically, and it increases in use they use
It more often as the race progresses and they really start to do this. You know, major switch about the halfway point of say like a ten kilometer run. So people who are seasoned Runners, they really start making a switch with what they're looking at about halfway through and that's where they more. Often more frequently in our more intentionally adopting, a narrowed, focus of attention when they're in the last couple miles of run when maybe their resources are starting to get more thin, maybe their motivation is starting to fade, that Tipping Point,
Wait, in the middle is with any kind of goal where people struggle the most, and that's when they're like, doubling down on a strategy that they know to be effective. So, you know, at first longer distance, Runners, are not using that narrowed strategy there are. They're looking more expansively because I think that, that will, first of all, distraction is a thing, it's useful. Not necessarily that they're distracting themselves because people are still trying to hold pace and jostle among probably a more concentrated group of runners.
But it is a strategy that they use, and then sort of weaned off of as the race goes through. And it's particularly effective when we're looking for that last push, right? The last push to get over the Finish Line. When like you might be literally neck and neck with somebody that you're trying to to just beat out or when you're most tired. But you know like that. Last push you don't want to, you don't want to drop off, you know, you want to, you want to push through hard through that finish line. That's when people are using it at its peak level of intensity.
See ya. I to me, this makes total sense why it would work without going down the rabbit hole of visual Neuroscience of something for another time, the when we do these virgins eye movements when we bring our eyes to a visual Target, it's clear that some of the brain stem. Circuitry for alertness gets engaged to a greater degree. The other thing is that we know that when we focus on an object that yet the Optics of the eye change and narrow the visual
field. So that brings about this is a very detailed question, but I'm sure the audience is wondering, if let's say I'm focused on a goal line or or a intermediate goal, are they focusing on a specific point or is it kind of the entire Horizon of that goal because the finish line is indeed a line? So and of course this is it's impossible to know what someone is actually doing in their minds eye. But how do people report this? Do they see it literally as a spotlight and if so, how broad is that spot?
Yeah, so you know what is the
The length of their aperture rather than the maybe the diameter or the sphere sphere size of it. You know, in our interviews with people are sort of focus group studies. It seems like it's more like a circular point and that's in fact what we're teaching people what we're training them to do. So rather than going broadly looking across a line from left to right, we are encouraging them to like imagine a circle of light that's shining on some
Target. Now, of course, the finish line is a line but if they're staying in their Lane if they're on a track, right? You can imagine that there is that there is a circle shining just on where and they're laying, they'll cross that finish line or if it's a stop sign, you could imagine a circle of light, Illuminating that. So that's what we're teaching people to use. And that's what seems to be effective to maintain that Focus rather than sort of being pulled to engage with peripheral vision and there's some amazing people some runners in history, like Joan Benoit Samuelson, she's one of the first female
All Marathon competitors who has won multiple marathons? She's Canadian. I think she's one. Feel free to correct me like 10 marathons and in her life, and she talks about sort of not assuming this like this wide, but mmm, but narrow wide, but not Deport all attentional, Focus. She talks about like finding the shorts on, somebody ahead of me and focusing on on those shorts until she passes them and then resetting that goal. So
So in, you know, her interviews that she's done with Runners magazines, she talks about it in terms of this, the circle of attention.
I think I've experienced this a little bit because we're visiting New York now, to do this interview and Runners here seem more competitive, the recreational Runners here. Seem more competitive, walk people walking on the street seemed competitive you're walking at near Pace to somebody. They'll quickly speed up if you speed up they'll speed up. I think there's been some studies about walking speed in different cities and New York ranks among the
Fastest Walkers around. I won't mention the slowest walking cities because we don't want to cast any judgments but fascinating and again makes total sense based on the way the visual system measures both space and time something. Maybe we'll get into a little bit later but I'm curious whether or not this the whole thing works in Reverse as well. Meaning do people who are very motivated to exercise.
Sighs. Do they think this way naturally, people who are averse to exercise or who find it hard to get motivated to exercise. Do they view the world differently? Literally.
Yeah, I have so much that I can say about this. So if you'll humor me, I'll give you a couple different stories about how we can answer that. So you don't have to do a deep dive in a vision science, which, of course, you are capable of doing. But but what I can share with you is some like, animal studies
This work kind of first started, this is in the 1940s, 1950s rat Labs, mice labs, and they were looking, you know, those were the first models of human behavior that people were trying to understand motivation motivation science within. So they would you know, deprive these poor rats and mice of food or water so that they were motivated to to get it. They were hungry and they were thirsty and they had practice running a maze. So they knew where they could.
Find that food or water, whatever that they were looking for. And what these researchers were studying was the pace of movement through the maze. So, as these, as the rats were like, going through the maze, they found that even though these rats were hungry, and they're having to expend limited caloric, energy to make it to the Finish Line. They actually ran faster the closer. They got to that finish line. So, once that Finish Line became nearer to them,
They actually use their resources. Probably sub-optimally to make sure that they cross the finish line and got their reward. So that was like, some of the first early work that was showing that, you know, proximity to a goal increases, the investment in resources, that people that animals use to meet that goal, even when they don't have that much to spare. And with the mice, the same kind of thing, you know, they were, they actually have these little harnesses on them. They're looking at how hard do the mice Pole to try to make it to
To the food or the water that they were trying to get and same deal. The closer they got to getting their reward. The harder they were pulling, even though they didn't have that much energy to spare and they had already used some up getting to that finish line. So that was that was that early animal research from the 1940s 1950s, then spurred, a whole wave of work in humans. Do humans do the same thing, you know, even when they're tired but they can, they can see or they can feel that their goal is closed. Do they doubled?
To work even harder to cross that Finish Line either like a literal finish line up for talking about exercise or metaphorical Finish Line. If we're talking about any other kind of goal that people might have. And the answer is, yes, they called that. The goal gradient. Hypothesis, the closer you get to the goal, generally, the harder people and animals work to finish that goal,
That's what led us then to think, okay? You know those rats those mice. Those people are seeing the Finish Line, right? And it's been there. Maybe seeing that Finish Line seeing that reward seeing the goal, they're hoping to accomplish. That is what's leading them to, you know, try harder to invest more so that they can finish it off. What if we induce that illusion of proximity? What if we can induce a visual illusion, a visual experience that approximates? What the real rats and mice were
Actually experiencing as I got closer. So that is what is happening. That's what's happening. Visually when we create that narrowed, focus of attention when we tell people. Imagine there's a spotlight on the shorts of the person up ahead or the stop sign that you're seeing it. Induces, an illusion of proximity that then is responsible for people, trying harder walking faster, feeling that it defied their expectations. And then it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. So we do things like measure like measure their visual experience.
How far away is that Finish Line course we can ask them to report and feet. How many feet is it? But that's challenging, right? Like nobody really knows what what three feet versus four feet. Really looks like, but but they do so we can ask them how many feet it is. We also use these other measures of visual matching measures to know like that distance to the Finish Line looks about as far away as as this other Target their matching up their visual experiences. So what we know is that inducing that narrowed focus of attention is creating an illusion of proximity,
That goal looks closer to them. And then there's all kinds of Downstream motivational psychological effects that happen from feeling like you're closer by by by visually misperceiving that space. It can have a really positive consequence. So your first question was, you know, which way does it go? Does it go both ways that people who are better Runners like happened to do this thing? Yes, some of our research shows that, that if they, you know, for whatever reason happened, upon this strategy and continued,
Practice it. They tend to be the better Runners but we also know from our experiments in the lab. But we take people who don't know about these strategies by a flip of the coin, we randomly assign them to either learn the strategy and use it or do. Whatever comes naturally to them, we can create that illusion of proximity that has a direct and causal impact on improving the performance when they're exercising. So yes it goes both ways that you can also
Teach yourself that you don't have to just rely on luck of the draw for being a person who happens to be better at exercising, or whose eyes happen to do this on their own.
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Offer the most pressing question I have in my mind is can we I all of us use this strategy to make the starting line a goal point because for a lot of people it's not about going from start to finish. It's about getting to start. And you know I would say here I'm estimating but fifteen percent of the content on social media is about motivation and how to get motivated to do things.
Neuro chemicals. Like dopamine, of course, being at the heart of motivation. I in my mind, I'm making strong links between some of these visual aperture effects and goal lines and dopamine that we could also dive into. But the simple question is, can I use this Finish Line strategy to make the start line a goal and get my system more engaged, or motivated? And is there any physiology or physiological?
Changes. I should say to reflect the idea that maybe just visually focusing on the start line would actually get me more excited as opposed to make me less excited to engage in effort.
There's certainly vision science that's tied up in that very first stage of goal setting. Identifying, what? That goal is in the first place and taking those first steps, a lot of people's go to strategies that involve Vision are our vision boards or dream boards or Post-it notes. Right there creating some sort of
Visual representation of what it is that they want to accomplish, where is it that I want to be in five years, ten days, ten years, whatever, whatever that timeline is, that they're working under. The idea of vision, boards are dream boards is that you almost like a scrapbook collect visual icons that reflect where you want to be to motivate yourself. The really common tactic that people use and it's not bad to do that, right? For some people just even knowing what they want in. Life is a major accomplishment, defining the goal,
Can be really challenging for people, and that's a strategy that works and involves our visual experience. Right? It's not just, people aren't saying like, why don't you just sit around and imagine what you want your life to be like, in 10 years? The strategy that people are suggesting is like, no, cut out the pictures, put it on a board and stick it by your bathroom mirror. So you see it every day, we'll make a list. Make a
list. People are big on these lists. I have a lot of friends. Well you have you made your list. Yeah. The list of things that you insist on having in the context of Fitness related,
Chef job, etcetera, Etc. The seems more and more
common. Yeah, totally in the idea that like, write it down right there, telling you write it down like or create a visual manifestation of it. And so, yeah, that's that's effective for identifying what you want, but it may not actually be effective for helping you to meet the goal to get the job done. So, colleagues of mine at New York University have probed why why is that? Why is just, you know, thinking about what you want and your life?
And and sort of putting yourself, vicariously into those shoes, imagining. What? My life would be like if I can accomplish everything on this list, why doesn't that work? Well, first of all, does it work? The answer is no. And why does it not work? Because what happens these colleague Gabrielle open, Jen and her and her research team have found is that you know, going through and dreaming about or or visualizing how great my life will be when I get X Y and Z done.
That is that is like a goal satisfied. I have identified what it is that I want. I have experienced it. Even if just in an imaginary way I've had that positive experience of thinking about how great my life is going to be when I get this thing done and they start to sort of rest on their Laurels, she's actually measured systolic blood pressure and heart rate. And they found that people who do that, who goes through. That experience of visualizing how great my life will be when I get X y&z done.
They're their systolic blood pressure, the bottom number on your blood pressure reading decreases. Okay? Now I'm all about finding ways to relax, especially in New York, right? You're constantly living at a high level of stimulation and so like cool. Great. So maybe I should just like, think about how awesome my life will be when I get my bucket by bucket list done. But motivation, scientists know that systolic blood pressure is actually an indicator of our bodies Readiness to get up an act to do something. Now that can be the going out for a walk going out for.
Run hitting the gym. It can also be things like doing math problems, right? Even if it's something that's just mental systolic. Blood pressure actually, goes up in anticipation of your body or your mind needing to do something. Taking the first steps on a goal.
So then it is it helps us to understand of like okay if I've just created this dream board this vision board and put myself psychologically in that space of a goal satisfied. Why is it bad that blood pressure goes down? Because it means your body is chilling out. It's like, all right. Cool, I just accomplished something pretty major. I'd actually now don't have the physiological resources at the ready to take the first step right now to do something about that. So, so that was a pretty Monumental finding for motivation.
I understand that like reading these dream boards, use vision boards or a to-do list might actually backfire because it needed a in and of itself is the creation of a goal and the satisfaction of the goal. And then people understandably give themselves some time to just enjoy that positive experience so much for the secret. Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. I guess. Now, the secret folks will come after
me that works. But try to never say the name,
right? Well I'm not afraid to say the name. I mean I imagine that certain strategies might work for other people but
I everything you're saying again is consistent. What we know about the physiology of dopamine circuits for motivation. I have a good friend who perhaps incidentally, perhaps not is a cardiologist and a major university said that one of the major errors that people make with book writing and completion as they will tell people, they're going to write a book and people will say, oh, you definitely should write a book. Everyone's going to love your book and they never end up writing it. And his theory is that they get so much dope.
In reward, from that immediate feedback, with all the protection of never having the book criticized that they never write the book. I'm sure there are exceptions to this but I guess it raises the question. What's the better
strategy? Yeah. So I'm not saying that people who enjoy dream board creation should stop what they're doing. That's not the take-home message here at a board, definitely not nothing. There's enough anxiety, and fear in the world, we don't need to encourage more of it, but the process of goal setting shouldn't stop with articulating. What the goal is
So at that same point that we're trying to figure out, what do we want to do? What is my vision for the future? In those planning sessions? We need to simultaneously, think about a couple other things. One is, how are we going to get there? So take it out of the abstract, take it out of this idyllic visual iconography and start thinking about the Practical day-to-day. We need to break it down into more manageable goals. Not just my 10-year plan for myself, but my two week plan, what can I accomplish in the next two weeks?
So in the two weeks after that's going to set me on the right trajectory, that's probably not surprising to anybody who's been thinking about. How do I set goals better? You know, plan plan, big picture, think big picture, abstractly, but then also break it down, more concretely, that's probably, not surprising, but it's an important aspect of the goal setting process. Then again, Gabrielle out anjana, my department has identified a third often overlooked or underappreciated stage that has to happen at that goals in the goal setting process,
Yes, and that's thinking about the obstacles that stand in your way of success, and that it will actually help improve motivation in the long run. And sometimes people think that that like is counter-intuitive you're saying like for, if I want to increase my motivation, have more motivation than I need to think about how hard it's going to be all the ways that I'm going to fail. How is that going to like? Jazz me up. How's that going to help me get through when I actually you know, when when things get hard?
But it does because it's like coming up with a plan B, a plan C Plan D in advance of actually experiencing that if you were on a boat in the boat started to sink that's not the time you want to start looking for life jackets, you already want to know where one is so you can go to it right away. And the same thing with goal setting is that you want to know, what am I working towards? How I'm going to get there. And if I experience this obstacle, here's what I'm going to do about it. You may never experience that obstacle, but if you do, you're probably going to be shy.
Time. They're non resources may be experiencing an anxiety that hijacks your brain so you're not functioning at that optimal level of judgment decision-making you when I already have like the snap next step in place so you can just pop to it right? We're not going to do our best thinking when we're in crisis mode. But we don't have to if we have used, if we have already used our resources in advance to come up with that plan, b or that plan C, Michael Phelps, incredible athlete. Right? This is something that he and his coach have routine.
We incorporated into their, into their training. So I love this story that like back in 2008 he was you know, hot hot. For the first time on the international stage, it was the Beijing Olympics. Michael Phelps was on the brink of doing something that no one else in the history of the Olympic games has ever done, which is when a gold medals and a single Olympiad. At the time of this story, he had already 17 and he had just the 200 fly in front of him before he could do what? No one else has ever done when the 8th gold medal.
And like the fly is his thing, right? This should have been in. This should have been easy, like a no-brainer. He's gonna win this. He's gonna break Olympic history. As soon as he dove into the pool, his goggles started to leak. And by the time he had done three lengths of the pool, he just had to flip around and come back to the, to the starting line / Finish, Line back to the Edge. By the time that happened, his goggles were completely filled with water and he was swimming blind. I would Panic that would have sunk to the bottom of the pool. I wouldn't even been in the pool to be
It's like I'm not a swimmer, definitely not going to be in the Olympics, but but for him he didn't it wasn't a moment of panic. Like it probably would have been for nearly every other person in that situation because he had foreshadowed that kind of possible failure. He had imagined that obstacle hitting him in advance and not even just imagined it, but practiced it, what will we do? He routinely practiced swimming with his goggles, not fully secured on his face. Coach notoriously would rip the goggles off of his head. Smash him on the ground for maybe dramatic effect or something, so that he didn't even have.
Goggles possible to grab as he's as he's in practice. So because he had foreshadowed that possibility and the solution. If my goggles start to leak, then I will do, in his case, start counting my Strokes, then I'll make it through, he knew exactly how many strokes it would take from him to get from one end of the pool to the other. I started counting his Strokes, he won that, he won that race that you hundred fly. One has a gold medal and he would go on to win 15 more in his career. So we might not all be swimmers, we might not all aspire to Olympic level.
Or performance. But I love that example because I think it helps sort of demystify or give us an alternative perspective on the importance and the motivational reasons. Why thinking about obstacles and advanced thinking about the ways, the two, three, four ways that your plan might go. Awry is actually effective at helping us to overcome the obstacle that might otherwise lead us to throw in the
towel. That's a beautiful example. I'm going to springboard off that example to ask a question that
Has also been on my mind which is, is there really anything special about Vision because in the example you just gave it was indeed Vision that Michael Phelps was deprived of and it was counting Strokes. Yeah. Counting is another form of incremental measurement. The nervous system, obviously, there are others. They could be the sensation of the of the hands smacking the water breaking, the surface of the water. So there any number of different variables are metrics that one could use.
I could imagine that setting out on a. Let's say a three mile run, which room is a decent distance. Run. Its, when I do a few times a week I'm also not a runner but I try and complete some runs a few times a week, very slow pace just for my health. I could count every step that would be kind of exhausting, but if I knew that three miles was, I'm going to estimate here, I don't know, a couple thousand steps. I could count backward, I could count forward. I count every 10.
I confess I spend every morning trying to find Sunlight to get sun in my eyes to set my circadian rhythm and I do 100 jumping jacks. So I'm the guy that people are looking at strange on the street. But sometimes I count every 10, sometimes they count backwards. I'm like, count forward. Is there any indication that it matters or, is it simply that we attach some sort of meaning to that increment and the mode of reaching that increment? Because it does seem like there's something special about Vision. We can maybe dive into a little
More why that is but at a very basic level.
How broadly or four or finally should one set the increment and does it matter. If you're counting steps are counting Strokes if you're maybe it's every other song, You're gonna listen to an entire album. That's something that I don't know if people do anymore or you can listen to a whole playlist and then listen to it again and you're going to run as long as the playlist is completed twice. Hmm, you can obviously see what I'm getting at. But I know people are going to want to implement these tools and I have to guess that the nervous system is somewhat indiscriminate.
When it comes to these things but that there might also be some
specificity. I think vision is special and I think you do too. So in for a variety of reasons when you start, you can really nerd out on how cool the brain is and how cool vision is within the brain. And when you do, then you start to find some things that make Vision unique, right? More more real estate more neurological. Cortex. Real estate is taken up by the visual sense than any other sense more than taste touch smell right vision.
Gets more real estate, gets more neurological processing. Space than any other sense. Why is that? Well, because Evolution has led us to prioritize that visual, the visual experience. There's some cool illusions where like maybe somebody's mouth is doing something different than what you're hearing when people start to create these like you know, weird tricks that might go on YouTube and go viral and people are trying to figure out what did I hear? What did I see his mouth doing and what comes up, is that people people prioritize what they see you over. What?
Hearing when the two are incompatible or kind of like, out of sync every time. Yeah, every time, right? If you had to bet on it, bet on BET on what it is that you're looking at rather than what you're seeing and why is that? Well, I guess a couple other things to write like we can see super far. You can see like a flickering candle on our Horizon. If it was a totally, you know, clear sky, several miles away. You can see the International Space Station floating up in the, in the night sky, right? Like hundreds of miles away, our eyes are amazing.
And and we prioritize what we see that and I think that's because we never, we rarely get the experience of having our visual experience second guest. You know, oftentimes we're having conversation maybe in a loud restaurant and we know that we didn't hear the person, right? And so we say like, oh, did you say that? Or like, Oh, I thought you said this and they're like, no, I didn't say that, right. So people will correct us when our ears get it wrong or were tasting something amazing. And we can't quite figure out what spices were in here. And so we know that our
Hyung isn't quite picking up the The Taste, the right way and that's why we read the menu to see. What are the ingredients? Are we ask the chef like, what did you put in this? It tastes amazing. So, we know that our tongue is getting it wrong, or you might be touching something. And you look at the tag to see what sort of textile was used in this really amazing piece of clothing that you're looking to buy. So we know that our sense of touch isn't quite getting it, right. But rarely do, we have that experience of having our eyes get updated where we're looking at something? I think I'm looking at my mom. Oh no. Actually, it was actually my
Spend like okay like that never happens. I'm right. That we have gotten Vision as wrong as we might get any other thing that we're experiencing through, any other sense, We Trust our visual experience. We have a sort of a naive realism that what we see reflects the world. The way it actually is because it's never really fully tested. We'd never get the input or the feedback that you've seen something wrong.
Until a visual illusion pops up on social media, right? Like the dress example or the last week or so, there's been that horse seal line-drawing that's been all over social media to what do you see? I see a horse sometimes, I see a seal and then like, you know, chaos erupts, or I thought the dress was blue, and I thought it was cool. I don't remember the option because I see it as blue, so, right. And it's like, dividing up families and friendships because you've liked seen something that the other person just literally cannot see, and that's why we love those.
Those examples, when they pop up and social media, when they do is because it defies all of our previous expectations, there's a really amazing if this interests you, there's a really amazing visual artist and each Kapoor who plays with these ideas to and his installations are are just fascinating. I saw one at a museum once where you walk down this long haul and it's just a big black rectangle that's painted on the wall. It's like this guy is super famous. What the hell is? Just a big black rectangle, painted on the wall.
What is this about? Like but hoax, you know, this Museum paid how much, what, or whatever. But then, as you get closer, you get closer and your eyes start to settle in, and they adapt to the different visual lighting. Realize, it's not a black Square painted on the wall. It's a huge hole. He's carved into the wall, and there is a whole other world that's back behind there that you can't see right away until your eyes adapt to the different lighting. Conditions. Beautiful. It's
amazing Vision scientist I have to see. Where is this exhibit? It's
not up right now. I've seen there was a
Prospective several years ago that was done in Sydney but his work is all over the place. So Anish Kapoor definitely definitely worth looking up because because like the dress example or the horse seal line drawing or artists like Anish Kapoor's work. That is a moment that that gives us a different unexpected insight about the world that it challenges us to see something that we hadn't seen before or it induces or tricks us into seeing something that we wouldn't have otherwise have seen. And so it's those rare moments.
Points that I think are actually really important for understanding. What do our eyes normally do because we wouldn't find these examples. So, surprising so engaging, so shocking. If we had routinely gotten the experience of realizing we're not seeing the world, the way that it is. So that is why I think vision is, is special, and why it can be thought of as a tool that we can add to our toolkit for how to better accomplish our goals. I'm not saying that we should just only focus on Imagining the world through a an
Channel Spotlight but maybe that's something that we can employ strategically on occasion when we think it's going to best help us when we need an extra little push to cross that physical literal or metaphorical Finish Line but it doesn't have to be the only tactic that we use just like it's not bad to use vision boards but let's use something else also. It's not it's not bad to talk to ourselves and encouraging ways but let's try adding another tool to our tool belt in case. That's not enough to get the job done. So I do think that there's
has great power and thinking about our visual experience alongside other tactics that we might use for meeting our goals. And another one of those tactics might be like the numerix that you're talking about. How do I think about my Jumping Jacks in terms of groups of 10 or as a set of 100, you do it routinely. So you might be able to set a goal of 100 and have that sustain you through number 60, number 71, maybe it's starting to get harder. But for somebody who's just starting out and wants to be able to make it to 100, that's probably not going to work. That's going to be
Maybe really that could be quite challenging for them, if it's the first time that they're trying it. And so instead setting, those micro goals of groups of 10 is going to be useful. Because as we start to get to number eight or nine, or number 88 or 89 and it's really getting hard, we need that extra little hedonic hit of pleasure of accomplishment. The micro dopamine Rush that you might get by hitting another 10. You know, another decade Milestone, another group of ten Milestone. And once we get that
A little hit of pleasure, excitement, or self? Congratulations. That might be enough to sustain us through the next challenging, physical obstacle, the next group of 10 that we might experience. So there isn't any like prescription that I would give and say every person should decide that 25. Jumping jacks is the goal. No, we have to be idiosyncratic and in introspect about, where are we at with this goal? This thing that I'm trying to accomplish and set those goals realistically but inspirationally as well we want to set a goal that will
Alan just but isn't impossible. We don't want to set goals that are too easy because we're not going to trick ourselves into like feeling so great about doing one jumping jack, okay, great. Like pretty sure most people, if that's a goal, they can do one. So are you going to feel so great when you hit that goal? No, because it was too easy. You didn't have any doubt that you could do that one. But what about 25?
Okay. Yeah, that I might feel pretty good about that. Well, what about the next group of 25? And now I'm at 50, those are goals that might seem just be on the brink of what's possible, but I will feel good when I hit that and that's going to give me the next sort of boost of energy that I'm going to need to go a little bit further either that time or the next time.
Yeah I think vision is special again, I'm strongly biased here. Might you know the reason I initially learned about your work was well now you have this amazing book but be at the time there wasn't the book there.
Just the scientific papers and of course upon which the book rests and those papers are really important but was the relationship between vision and are obviously is our sense of space but how the sense of space and time are related and to make the idea quite simple for those listening, you know, when you narrow your visual window, you're measuring the time bin also gets smaller, right? Which makes sense when you hear it, whereas if you take on a huge visual landscape, you're
Carving up time differently. It's sort of like moving from a slow frame rate to a fine frame rate. You know, slow motion camera is actually taking a lot more snapshots, right? So you're measuring distance over time more. Finally. And so we're a strobe would be the other example, which is strobe is very low frequency. So you're doing here here here as opposed to, you know, slow motion, right? Strobe gives a course, course view into the time domain and high-speed photography gives a fine view in the time domain. So I'm almost
Certain without any knowledge of underlying data, I'm but knowledge of the mechanism them. I am almost certain, if not certain that, by placing an arrow visual aperture, we change the way we perceive time. Now, I have a question and I to be honest, I know the answer in advance, but I'd love for you to tell us a bit about how some of this works still further in Reverse meaning how unfit people view the world,
World versus how fit people view the world or how unmotivated people visually see the world as opposed to highly motivated. People, you talked about the easy Elite Runners give them Michael Phelps example but maybe you could describe that study, I think it's a particularly important one mostly because yes, it identifies a perhaps a physiological or psychological differences between motivated and unmotivated or, or fit and unfit people, but it also provides a path to to
He that hmm.
Yeah. So you know there's out of my lab but also out of several other labs, there's been work looking looking at that relation, between states of the body and visual experiences, they haven't necessarily tried to integrate the motivation science element to it, but they were looking to see the visual experiences change as a function of different states of our body. So they looked at people who experience chronic fatigue, the elderly people who are overweight, those that are
Are you wearing wearing heavy backpacks? And so who are sort of put into that experience of being overweight, what happens to their perceptions of the environment? Well what they find is that distances, look further to those that are overweight, chronically tired older rather than younger weighted down with it. With extra baggage distances, look farther and hills look steeper. We've done some of those studies to where we try to give people more energy or deprive them of energy and see does that change their perception of space.
And we did that by, you know, a sort of a classic technique of a double-blind study where the participant doesn't really know what they're
experiencing. I thought you against a double espresso,
that is also a good psychological experience to give people. Yeah. So, you know, double blind experiment where the participant doesn't really know the full extent of what what they're doing or what they're experiencing and the researcher, who's interacting with them also doesn't, you know, they do this a lot in medical studies.
You give somebody a drug and you give somebody a placebo, a sugar pill. And then importantly, nobody really knows who's got what until you've analyzed all the data. And the results are revealed that these are the people that had the drug, the active agent, same idea, and the psychological research. And this case, what we did was give people Kool-Aid to drink and for some people that Kool-Aid was sweetened with sugar and actual caloric entity, it could give them energy. Other people drank Kool-Aid, sweetened with Splenda
Yeah, it's sweet but it actually doesn't have any caloric value, you're not giving people energy, you're just giving them that that experience of sweetness. Now some people of course are really good at identifying like what's what's real sugar? And what Splenda, but when you put it in the Kool-Aid a pretty noxious powder. It actually masked it for everybody and nobody had any
idea it is like garbage, everybody garbage. I mean I'm sure there are many people that love Kool-Aid I guess the sales of Kool-Aid will reveal the data.
Yeah, I grew up in Nebraska. Actually, we're cool.
Blade is from it, originated in Nebraska. So I do feel like I'm betraying my route slightly by by casting some shade on Kool-Aid but but it but that's how it worked is that you know we asked them to guess what they got, we tested them afterwards and they were wrong. So nobody is able to guess with accuracy. What was your drink sweetened with which is important because they were blind that way. The way that scientists use that they didn't know what it was that they were drinking. We give it, you know, we give them about 10 to 15 minutes for that sugar to
Taba lies and we measured their circulating blood glucose levels to make sure that we had in fact, to give in their body circularly not circulating glucose energy that they might use in the next activity. And, and the researcher again, didn't know whether they had just served sugar or splenda. Then we asked people to estimate distance, so we gave some people more energy or we kept other sort of at like, whatever their normal level was. And what we found is that those people who didn't even know it, but who had been given more
Or energy by drinking, Kool-Aid, sweetened with sugar perceived their space. As more constricted, they, that visual illusion of proximity was induced. They felt that their Finish Line again in the context of an exercise task was closer to them. So in just the same way that these other physiology Labs vision, science, physiology Labs found that people who are chronically tired who don't have don't feel like they have as much energy or those that are physically weighted down and for whom moving within an environment is more costly.
We could create that experience for people. We did an experimental version of that, that if you have more energy, the world looks easier, the distances to a Finish Line. Don't look as far.
So, that was some of the experimental evidence that we had to show that people States their body do impact their visual experience. Now, I'm a motivation researcher. So for me, the big question is, well, what's the point of that study? Then besides just showing this connection between the body and the eyes, and the visual experience? We think that that's fundamental to one of the reasons that people experience difficulty when they're exercising when it's really harder for your body because of its physical state to move within a space.
Why don't want him? You might say like, well, why don't you just go exercise because the world looks harder to them because that distance that that they're supposed to walk because a doctor tells them to or that a partner encourages them to, or a hill that they should hike up, because someone told them that would be good for their health, it looks more challenging to them than it does to somebody who isn't, who isn't, who's in, and who's in better physical health. Now, if it looks that way, if it looks harder, if it feels like, it might be harder.
Then psychologically, we know that it is when you have set yourself up psychologically mentally for that kind of failure experience. Like I don't know that I have the resources that to get this job done. This this looks really hard. You're already motivationally in a place for this task to be closer to impossible for you. So, to put it all together, then what we know is that people whose bodies might make it more challenging for them to exercise are seeing the world in a more challenging way. And that is having these Downstream motivational and psychological.
That makes it less likely for them to try to take on the task in the first place, or to experience it as harder than other people would, or do
is the solution the same. However, meaning if these people are taught to adjust their visual goal line or to set up visual Spotlight on an intermediate goal. Can they overcome some of this, this challenge that they face simply by virtue of their skewed perception?
Yes. So in all of this
Studies that we have done looking at that connection between this narrowed focus of attention and improvements in exercise. We do not find that it only works for the people who are in shape or that it backfires for people who are out of shape. It works for everybody. This is a strategy that everybody can adopt because it's just simply about like what do you allocate attentional resources to what do you sort of ignore and what do you focus on? And that in that visually induces the same kind of Illusion for everybody, regardless of whether you're overweight or your or your at your target
If you're struggling to get there or you've already accomplished where you want to be that visual illusion can be induced for everybody and it has the same kinds of
consequences. Terrific earlier, I made a joke about Double Espresso but now I'll make a serious statement about Double Espresso which is that it contains caffeine. And caffeine is a stimulant like all other stimulants cause a change in our visual world. The most Salient one is the one that police officers, look for parents suspecting that their kids have
Have ingested substances of any kind look for which is if somebody's pupils are unusually large for a given visual environment, that is an indication of high levels of autonomic arousal. In the street drug translation of this. You know, people who take amphetamines or cocaine will have very big pupils people are very relaxed, a small pupils however, everyone should know that people size also is dynamically regulated by how bright the visual environment, so they're multiple things controlling pupil size. However, we know that when we are very stressed,
Very aroused in any way positive or negative, the pupils get big. But within the visual system, what that equates to is a narrowing of the visual aperture?
So rather than ingesting sugar which I'm guessing most of the world, certainly the US needs to ingest less sugar at least. That's what we're hearing. I'm sure there are local few sugar sukra. Nice does out there sucrose in East has, who will also come after me with pitchforks, but let's face it. Most people probably better off ingesting, less, simple sugar. But caffeine is a great motivator because of the internal sense of arousal, but it also Narrows our visual window. I could imagine using healthy amounts of caffeine combined with maybe even
Years of the sort that horses wear maybe like a hoodie and a hat. Maybe even blinders in order to get over some of those more challenging Milestones. Is there any evidence that people are doing this without? Well, obviously, people are doing it without knowledge of how it works. But are there any studies looking at how adrenaline or epinephrine or any other stimulants impact
motivation?
I don't know honestly. Yeah I'm in
energy. Drinks are a big thing now.
Yeah. Yeah. For sure they are and you know if if you actually are more physiologically aroused or jazz or whatever you know amped up or you just think you are in our studies. We have found that they work in the same way that it can produce the same kinds of consequences. So and I like that because it tells us that you can actually change the state of your body to induce these kinds of experiences, or you can try to, you can just think
That you can trick yourself, you can placebo effect yourself out and produce the same kinds of effects. I had to give up coffee like 12 years ago. Not because not for any sorry. I love the taste and so decaf Is My Jam but I can't drink the caffeine because it didn't actually do the thing that it does for so many other people like make me feel more energized and more awake. I just got sweaty and jittery and anxious and I couldn't
focus. Yes, some people who already have a fairly High Baseline level of attention and motivation, they find it puts the autonomic seesaw too far in
The
sympathetic tone. Yeah, and I happen to marry the same kind of person. He also can't drink caffeine but loves the taste of coffee. The interesting thing is that we both have to have coffee in the morning to feel like we're ready to go for the day. So it's just part of our routine or whatever to have that taste and have that sensation to feel like I'm ready to take on the day. Even though, I mean, yeah, decaf still has some caffeine in it but we're not drinking that much of it to probably actually create a caffeinated experience in our body. But we're tricking ourselves psychologically in
And to doing that thing that in years past used to work for us both. So I think that's something to keep in mind. Like, you know, you might have a hoodie that you can wear to induce that visual illusion, or you can take advantage of the power of your mind. At the end of the day. I'm a psychologist and I believe that we have some non-zero power over. What our mind is doing what we're thinking about, what we allocate our attention to that can do the same kind of thing that a hoodie might do or that a cup of caffeine might
do, I completely agree the visual
Mature is under our conscious control. That's an amazing feature of our visual system. We can narrow or expand. It takes a little bit of practice, I think for people to learn how to do this without moving their head around to expand their visual aperture and how to narrow it. But what I always tell people is just imagine a really troubling text message or a really exciting text message coming in all of a sudden you forget about the world around you so it's it can be triggered by these outside events and we can learn how to Anchor our visual attention. I'd love to ask about other kinds of goals meaning non-physical.
Also because many people are trying to read more, I would hope or learn music or a language or things that really involve cognitive goal lines or internal goal lines. You know, reading one chapter out of a book, each night is a tangible goal. The other that I've often wondered about are these systems that allow you to highlight individual lines or even words on a page, that's a very visual obviously, and everything else is ruled out. Except that
Word, I've always wished for books, that would naturally highlight each page. And as I say that someone will put in the comments as probably existed for 10 years. And I'm just showing how what are the load I am. But is there any example that were or tactic that people could use to better approach cognitive goals of school work?
Recreational to but that don't exist in the in the kind of fitness and sports domain. Like
yeah. So just to shout out to my brother-in-law who has done some of that research, where it does highlight different parts of words in paragraphs and he found it to be an effective way for English as a second language Learners to pick it up that that is that tying that Vision to the process of learning, languages effective. And so there's, you know, whole cool body of work and researchers looking at that. So you're right about
that if you want to mention, what he
Cause I is there a place that people can learn more about that we can provide links? Yeah, let me okay. We will provide links to those resources because I want those resource. I've been trying to learn a second language for a long time. Yeah, I we I speak Spanish pretty weekly, but I would love to get better at it. Okay,
Albert you later my five-year-old. Son speaks Spanish better than I do at this point. So, yeah. So, you know, I was thinking that too, you know, we started this work within the context of exercise, but of course that's not people's only gold.
I have in life and it isn't mine either. You know I have interests outside of improving my exercise game a couple years ago when I was writing the book. I also had a child, the same, the same month that I had the opportunity to, like, pull all this research together is the same month that my son came to be. And and I started to realize like I became a lot less interesting once he was around, he was fascinating but I was changing
Purrs and feeding him in like that, was it people will come over like, what's up? Have you been like tell me something that's going on in your life? And like, all I had to talk about was this what was boring and I just felt like I've lost myself, I used to pride myself on the crazy adventures and problems. I would get myself in and I was a great Storyteller and that all of a sudden disappeared as soon as he came into the world because he became my world. So then I started thinking like I need to pull back some coolness and if I ever had it in the first place, but I need to be a cooler person that I'm coming across right now. So I decided I
Learn to play drums. I'm going to be like a one-hit wonder as a rock star drummer. I only want one song because I know I'm not gonna be able to do more than that. I'm not coordinated at all. You know, like from the beginning of time in fifth grade, I have this really Vivid like flashbulb memory of playing basketball for the very first time. I lost my footing, I knocked into my own teammate, pushed out of bounds when she had the ball, we lost the game and I was not invited back on the team for the next season and so that, you know, for minted myself
Mission of uncoordinated. I am a musician, but I'm not a drummer. And the idea of coordinating forelimbs in real time was like if I could do that would be so proud. So that's a goal that I set for myself at the same time that my son came into this world. When I was also trying to think about goal setting and how to improve my ability and all of our ability to get a job done when you're faced with some pretty big obstacles. So, I got to practice all these techniques that were talking about on myself and
For myself, when I tell people, hey, try this thing, like narrowed focus of attention, does it help with something like, becoming a better drummer and the answer is. Yeah, these tactics at least work for me, sometimes under some circumstances, and they do for other people who try them for other goals that aren't necessarily about exercise. You know, one that I found particularly helpful
Was overcoming my bad memory that everybody's memories are faulty, right? Everybody has sort of a warped perception of the past. It might be skewed more positively than maybe we deserve, or might be skewed more negatively. If you feel that, you know, what looms large in your mind, as you reflect on something from the past mistakes that you've made, the things that the social faux pas that you had or, you know, challenges that you faced it work, when you got in trouble with a boss or with a colleague, if that's what really stands out in your mind.
And or the good side of all of those possibilities, we probably aren't getting the world, right? And and that is something that our brain has evolved to give us a faulty memory to level and sharpen to not encode and remember, and be able to recall everything that we've experienced with accuracy and precision. And that's a problem when it comes to assessing our own gold progress, when we want to be our own accountant and try to determine how are we doing? If I want to become a drummer?
Am I on track for getting there before X? Before my time Runs Out? Am I going to make it or not? And I think that's an experience. Whether they want to be a drummer or not that a lot of people can resonate with, like, trying to determine is this trajectory, is this rate of progress, going to get the job done by x amount of time? Well, I have my swimsuit Body by summer or well, I save enough for retirement by the time I hit 65 for these goals where time is involved. And there is a deadline we do take moments to assess
Are our trajectory, and if we just rely on our memory, we're probably going to do a bad job of assessing that the that trajectory of knowing whether we're on Pace to meeting our deadline and I found that to be the case as I was thinking about am I actually going to be able to learn this song? I mean I know that it's going a lot slower than it probably would for anybody else. But to give myself a deadline and commitment, I decided I was going to put on a show. I was going to invite everybody I knew and also people I didn't know and I was going to play my one.
One song for them. So as
well, writing a book and have yes, had a
child. Yeah. So when you read the book, you'll see my my story and it's the real truth of it, you know, I mean, I did play that show and it was fine. And then I've because I wrote about it in the book, then some other opportunities to play it publicly have come up and it's like, alright, I told people I can play drums. I better just like, show them that I actually still can play this song. Yeah. So that's been fun. I have become a one-hit wonder.
If you ask me to play the song again, like like Encore, it's just going to get that same song a second time. So like literally one hit wonder but so in the process of like figuring out, am I gonna be able to play this show? I sent out invitations like the date is committed. Like people are coming to listen to my one song. God bless them. How's it going to go? And and it felt awful. It just felt like I am not making progress here because there's a lot more things that actually are pressing, right? Like the kid does need to get fed. I do have
To go to my day job. The editor is asking for the next drafted, this book. And that is going to take precedence, like, it does for so many people that things command your your bandwidth, even when you have this goal that you've committed to, and that you've got, you know, on the books. And so I just felt this looming anxiety about this. This goal that would require, you know, like didn't have to be daily practice. But like you can't, you can't cram that kind of a goal. It does take, you know, committed investment for a sustained period of time.
So, I had this looming anxiety that I'm not making good enough progress, but that's because I was relying on my memory and my brain that to, to recall, like, how many times did you practice? What was it? Like, the last time you practice what was it like when you tried to play this bit, you know, or this riff like two weeks ago? Have you gotten any better since then and it just felt like, no haven't practiced enough. I don't remember when the last time I played was but it definitely doesn't feel like I'm getting any better then. I thought, you know what? I should stop relying on my brain to tell me, where am I at? And is is am I on
On an upward slope here. I need to look at the data, I love data scientist love data. So I started to collect data on myself. What I did was download this app that a friend had told me about called the reporter app. There's lots of these kinds of things out there. Basically, it just like, sets up your phone to randomly ping you, with whatever questions you want, your phone to ask it, records, your answers, you can download the data, you can make pretty graphs to see. Am I getting how what's my change? And how I've answered these questions over time. So, I did that for a month.
For a month. I had my phone asked me, you know, a couple times a day. Well, maybe twice a day. Really did you practice since last time I asked you, my phone says, did you practice if mostly it was no and if yes, then it would funnel a couple other questions. Like, how did you do, how do you feel check, a couple different emotion words now about your experience when you played, so when I and I did that for a month after month, went into my office, downloaded the data and first took stock before, I looked at the numbers, like,
Do I think I did over the last month and I thought same as every other month. I have like, I didn't really get anywhere. Yeah, I practice. But I still feel awful and I cried, I cried having to practice I like was upset with myself for setting this goal and feeling like so anxious about it. All I remember is that I cried cried too much about this personal Conquest that wouldn't matter to anybody else. Honestly, really doesn't matter in the scope of things. Anyway, I'm not going to become a drummer professionally, so who cares if I embarrass myself publicly
But what I found from the data was my memory was totally wrong. Actually had practiced far more times than I remembered. And when I looked at, like, my emotion words that I used, it was a clear upward trajectory. Yeah, I did cry. That part, I hadn't missed remembered or made up. But by the end of that month, like I had gotten a compliment from my husband who actually is a drummer and said like hey, that wasn't that bad. And then there was like one expletive you were effing amazing at that one thing you've been practicing at but like okay fine he's my husband, right.
Is he just, you know? So at the moment it didn't really feel that great and I downplayed it and as a result, it didn't stick in my brain, right? I remember how stupid it felt that I cried because can't do this. I can't make progress and I downplayed in my mind. The thing that actually should have been a legitimate indicator that progress is being made. So all of which is to say I needed to see to collect that data on myself and to look at it, objectively accurately and completely because my brain wasn't doing that for me that visual
Experience of downloading that data and and looking at like, what was my actual experience gave me a better insight as I was trying to assess the trajectory of my of my progress, I became a more accurate accountant of my own progress which is important for you know, setting goals or resetting them when you need to calibrate in light of what's left to do and how much time do you have to do it
in a little bit? So basically if I understand correctly when the
In the intermediate goals of say, daily practice or twice a day, practice, or reading or math Etc, are not a visual goal line. It really does help to visualize some aspect related to that non-visual goal line. In this case, the reporter app was a useful tool. I've never heard of it. I plan to use it. I'm sure number of people will be interested in it. Sounds like there are others out there but that's the one that you found most
useful. Yeah. Yeah. There's another one to that is even more visual than that, than the reporter Apple.
Oh, that has visual components and is really effective if you like data and want to collect numbers on yourself or your experience. There's another one called the 1 second everyday app. This is really awesome because the app is a mechanism to to record one second of your life. The goal. There's such an awesome community of people that just live by this and love having these experiences and their the creator of it. I got to a chance to talk with and he has done this. He's taken a one second video.
Of some aspect of his life every day for 12 years. 13 years or some second. Yeah one second and and then what the app does is like smash them together and give you like a chronology of what your year or your month or your last decade of life has been like and presents it as like a streamlined video for you. So you just see these flashes of your life over however, long you tell the app to create a create a montage for you. And so when you see these videos that people have made, especially those that I've been doing
For a really long time. It's fascinating. I did that for myself to. I tried it. One second of today's drumming performance, another second. It's not enough to capture. Am I actually doing a good job of drumming or what's my trajectory for drumming. But the guy who made it, says, one of the most like awesome one second videos that he ever made is of a brick wall. It's like we didn't need a video of that. Like, what's the ball doing? It doesn't. It's not crumbling, it's not like an earthquake land or something like that. It's just like, you know, slightly jittery one, second of a brick wall. That's like
Was that motivating or exciting to you? Why is that you've been doing this for 13 years everyday? One second, why is that the one second that matters to you most and he says, because when it comes up in my Montage it reminds me of like a really horrific moment in my family. That was the first wall that I saw, when I walked out of the room, having heard that my sister-in-law had this awful awful experience, her intestines started to twist up on themselves and not up, and she was on the brink of death, and we had just found
Found this out had just gotten into the hospital. They diagnose this issue that required like immediate surgery and her family was there to hear about this and we were all stunned that she might die. Like right now, she might die. And that's the first thing that I saw and it reminds me of how precious life is how important family is and how the rest of whatever we were doing that day, didn't matter because we all needed to be here together right now and that is like all of this emotion and like purpose in life is conjured up or reminded when he looks at one second.
A brick wall as it pops into his video feed. So if you're visually oriented and you do want ways to like, remember what was life like, what has my year in review? What is it? What does it look like? That's an awesome app. One second, every day that that can help you do
that. These are great recommendations and a couple of Reflections. First of all, the brick wall example is a beautiful way of highlighting this other feature of the visual system, which is that the brain largely things in symbols. It's very
Sent it batches entire experiences into symbols. And this case the brick wall can be attached to a whole set of experiences that are very meaningful to this individual that brick walls. Don't mean that or didn't mean that to me until hearing the. So I think that the it highlights the fact that the, the actual symbol is less relevant than what we attach to that symbol. But that symbols are so efficient that even in one second view of something we can attach to It For Better, or For Worse. The other is that I'm a absolute
Almost rabid proponent of people getting morning sunlight in their eyes as the fundamental layer of setting their circadian rhythms and sleep. And health is a zero cost practice that believe or not can be done anytime of year anywhere and but it does take a little bit of effort you have to get outside, you can't do it through a window or windshield to for it to be efficient, but it has huge out size effects on human health. This is now been demonstrated again and again and again. And so I'm going to just do a sort of call to action. If people aren't already doing this, I'm going to start using the one second after.
My morning sunlight viewing and prove that even through cloud cover you're getting more photons than you are indoors and then it's worthwhile. I also would love to do this for my next dog to go from puppy to to full size dog and maybe even to the end. No, it's great. These are wonderful tools. I do you given us a huge number of practical tools which frankly isn't always the case on these podcast. We always strive to do science and science based tools is our kind of Mantra, but you give it a rich set of tools here too.
Apply. I just want to briefly backtrack to something, and then and then a final question earlier, we were talking about how unfit people see the world as more challenging maybe even Hills is steeper distances as further. And how shifting people into a state of energy either cognitively or through the ingestion of real glucose to get an energetic lift or maybe through caffeine if that's within their practice and span of healthy behaviors. They could do that.
You know, there's so many people who are suffering from depression, which it one of the, you know, key features of depression is a lack of energy, even though there can be anxiety associated with depression, I have to wonder whether or not some of these tools are being deployed or will be deployed in the context of mental health. Because depression is this vicious Loop, right? People feel a lack of energy and hopelessness and then things just look harder. And so that it just verifies that
There - worldview it and it's a downward spiral. That's why medication and some cases and social sport, Etc, can be helpful because they feel more energized. The side effects often our problem. However, have been have there been any efforts to implement some of these visual tools, to create this increase in systolic blood pressure and it kind of Readiness, and willingness to linking into what people perceive as immense Challenge. And if not for anyone listening, I know we have a lot of listeners in the mental health space, and then helping space, so to speak.
I can imagine these are zero cost, right? They we all provide people are cited. Have the apparatus. Hi to do it. Are you aware of any studies like this? Or is your laboratory involved in any studies? Because I just see an immense value of implementing the sorts of tools that you've
developed. Yeah. You know we haven't explored that those ideas directly. So call to all the scientists that are out there, this is there's a great opportunity to start looking at these tools within the mental health space. You're right other researchers.
So have, you know, not this use of narrowed like inducing a narrowed attentional focus, and can they now feel more energized to go for a run, but they have looked at the relationship between anxiety, depression and visual experience and found, you know, over decades evidence that people with depression, or with anxiety, what their attention is captured by within the bigger Global surrounding world are those things that are negative or reinforcing of their world view. Now, that happens for everybody that things that are on our
Find tend to like pop out that if whatever we're thinking about, we might start seeing some version of it showing up in the world around us. It captures our attention, that's an idea called priming what we're thinking about might, then lead us to attend to the world to see things in a way that aligns with what we're already thinking about. It's just that, when what we're thinking about, are those depressive, ruminative, anxiety, fearful thoughts. When that is, what is cognitively accessible when that's what's going through our mind. Then that's also what cap.
Others are visual gaze. So when we think like the world is hard, the world is full of sadness, and that's the thought in our mind. And then we start seeing the people with frowns on their faces or who are experiencing anxiety, and and that's what captures our attention. Even when there's other people around, that might not be seeing the world are experiencing the world, that way. It becomes reinforcing. When I think that the world is is threatening and then I noticed the threats that are around me confirms what I'm thinking, which heightens my anxiety, or my fear. And then it further leads me to
Too narrowly focus on those elements of the environment that are aligned with that world view. It's really hard to get out of that. Like, that's where the Vicious Cycle can come from. So that has been, you know, really well established within the medical community, this, this selective attention relating to states of mental unwellness. That's that's been pretty well established. And and so there's been some interventions done with people that have depression or anxiety, trying, you know, saying like you know,
Here's an array of photograph of a bunch of different faces. Yes, it's artificial. Kind of looks like a page from a yearbook, a high school yearbook but look for the faces that are smiling. Look at the faces that are smiling, like try right now, spend 10 minutes, having your eyes, focus on those. And look at those people that it is an effective intervention at try at improving people's sense, of self. Efficacy of what can I accomplish next? They feel a little bit more energized. It doesn't cure depression. It doesn't cure anxiety, and these are
Literal, physical afflictions that we have. So it's not a quick fix, but it can produce a temporary change. That might be a way to start getting out of that
rut. Yeah, and I think nowadays there's an increasing attention on tools that will help people Orient as they are start to Veer towards suicidal depression or Veer back into a depressive episode or anxiety episode. I mean, you know, the trying to reverse an entire syndrome or set of syndromes as far more complicated like
Wise in the health space, just trying to get people to deploy real-time tools to adjust their anxiety or to exercise more often and so on, as a kind of a final, but also kind of high-level question. I'm imagining that and I plan to use this visual goal setting of spotlighting. I've been using it actually for some time on runs. It works really well. Yesterday, I took a run near the Waterfront here and the entire I think I did it somewhat incorrectly the entire run. I was think about getting back to the Statue, which I started, but I did find that.
Ran fastest in the final 20 meters, which I admittedly wasn't fast at all, but it was faster than what preceded it. So it works and it makes perfect sense as to how it works. You've done other studies exploring, some of the other features of vision, like the Luminosity, how bright something is and how people perceive it that was in a completely different context. But is there a kind of a higher level kind of a black belt version of what we're talking about here? We're not only am I focusing on a specific visual
Ation, as an inner intermediate or a long-term goal or I'm using an app to ask me a question and tap into how I'm feeling create a visual representation of my motivational state, but that I'm also making my phone as bright as possible. I'm also trying to take that visual window and actually pay attention to more of the details at that location. Or is it simply a matter of kind of in in geek-speak visual Neuroscience? We would just call this like low spatial frequency. Just sort of grabbing a black-and-white snapshot of something here, or
In my mind, if I attach more detail in effort to the specific thing that I'm focused on. Is there any evidence that that's more effective?
It certainly, you know, changes what our brains are doing. So, you know, how do we Define effectiveness? That's a question for philosophers and that scientists will look keep me running. Yeah, it will, when you use it towards the end of your run just like you've picked up on ya. So you know, there's there's cool studies that neuroscientist, not not, I not coming from my lab that know.
Oh, scientists have done looking at it. What is it? What is it doing to your brain? When you've decided that you're going to focus your attention on on this element of the world and not pay attention to something else? Is that just sort of like tricking your thoughts, or is it doing something different to something more? Basic more low-level and the answer is yes. So there's an area of the brain and brain, the fusiform face area. It's part of our brain. That's really specialized for, for making sense of faces important as a social species to pay attention to other people, pay attention.
Faces what they're trying to communicate through their face. So our brain has developed a really specialized Central area for doing that then and so people, so these neuro scientists will present like a face to somebody but superimposed over that is house or something else. That is less special to us as a social human species. And so both of those things because it's sort of like both images are sort of transparent overlay it over one another
Other it, you know, our eyes are getting both of those images in and our brain is getting both of those images in, but we can Will ourselves to focus on the house. Just really pay attention to the features of the house. Even though everything about that face is still there to or pay attention to the face and just tell me like, what is it that you are deciding that you want to hold on to that you want to look at right now and you can see that the brain is responding to that. So when people are saying like I'm really I'm really seeing that face. The details of the
Some paying attention to the face even though we know their eyes are also looking at engaged with the contents of the house. That's right there. Smacked on top the fusiform face area lights up and when they're saying like no I'm really focused on the house. Now we see activation the fusiform face area Decline and other areas of you know, the brains neurological restate. What real estate start to engage so yeah, I think you know there's something to it that you know we can at a high level.
Our brains are responding to our psychology as well. And we have that great power to really, you know, with intention with practice decide, how do I want to engage with the world? And can it produce real change in our, in our bodies? And in the way that we experience the world, the answer is
yes, fantastic. Well, you've given us a ton of mechanistic and conceptual and practical information. So,
I'm speaking for a lot of people when I say, thank you for taking the time out of your schedule and it's kids and running a lab and teaching at the University and your book which we will Point people to and provide a link to is a wonderful resource and we hope to have you back again.
Thank you so much. This is a great conversation. Thank you. Thanks.
Thank you for joining me today for our discussion about motivation, goal, seeking and research supported tools for achieving your goals with dr. Emily Bell chatas, if you're learning from enter enjoying this podcast,
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