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TEDx Talks
Published: 2013-11-30
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH0VGxNrzH4
thank you okay so this is not a great day are we inspire is that enough no you're actually correct if we're going to catalyze a catalyze means what it means to create or accelerate change and so what we want to talk about today and and I think this is something that you know I am sort of reluctant because I'm so no hyped up on all these
great speakers I don't really want to do my talk now because my talk is why Ted talks don't change your life and and I don't say this because I'm I'm just trying to be contrary I'm really trying to make an important point and the point is centered around the idea that we have this illusion that are conscious brain is in control and so if I think
something I would do it and I want to spend some time going over about the last two hundred million years of evolution arm I've got sixty minutes last so arm will will will cut to the chase here pretty quick so I mean that's drove here today okay guy get now how many of you were on your cell phone at some point during your trip and how
many of you the only reason you work on your cell phone is good you couldn't find anybody to call that early right now how can this be how can we be socially behind the wheel of a guided missile going sixty seventy maybe eighty miles per hour we are mere seconds in one distracted driver away from a potentially lethal accident and yet what we feel is boredom
right we we tend to wear pocket we pull out our phone Weezy who can I call now how many of you have had that creepy feeling I'm going five miles and not being able to remember them them well Gee just drove over does this freak you out right now I want you to relax that this is a great man window and how your brain really works
and this is something that escapes us emails in front of us all the time because we live in this illusion that we are consciously in control of what we do but what I want to assure you is even though your conscious brain may pick the destination it's your unconscious brain that's driving the car now if we look at an image like this and how many nodes
are trying to lose weight I mean is on a diet I mean this is not an exercise right why is it so hard right consciously you go Hey I should be ten fifteen twenty pounds lighter Hey I should eat better I should eat right and if you're married you here just continuously right you should eat better you should eat right you should exercise more and yet
this picture new groups apart all of our will power all of our conscious goals are gone and so what I want us to do is to understand that if we want this time to data matter it's not enough to be inspired it's not enough to have good happy thoughts what we have to do is to understand really how our brains work we need to understand that
there is there's been a lot of work and neuroscience and cognitive psychology and social psychology is given as a radical new picture of how the brain really works I wanna spend some time with you today because I will try real hard you can venture that you want to make changes in your life the trick is not convincing your conscious mind to do it the trick is
all about training your unconscious mind so the brain as far as we know is the most complicated thing in the universe other than the universe now this is not just human conceit inside the fifteen hundred CC carrying capacity of your school all one hundred billion neurons are planned together each nor Ron is touching ten thousand other neurons every thought you have everything you feel every experience
you have is communication between those neurons and even though it only weighs three pounds your brain uses twenty percent the energy of your body now we're gonna take a little bit of time and and start looking at the brain through some of the evolutionary ladder so when you come to think about the brain being built over time so when we go deeper into the brain we're
going back further in evolutionary history so I want to stop the dinosaur bring no the dinosaur bring this this this part of them of of our brains for the dinosaur brain because it was around when dinosaurs were here dinosaurs had this kind of a structure that allow them to do everything from autonomic functions controlling all in there their bodily processes but also giving them the ability
to control behavior it to a degree that they dominated the planet four hundred and sixty million years and the fact that this structure is is present in our brains is is testimony to its evolutionary utility that what's important is no this is critical not only to argue keeping you alive in terms of fuel homeostasis in processing food on the other kind of stuff it's also incredibly
important and controlling complex behaviors but it's all happening outside of conscious awareness you have no idea how this is going on you can't you cannot influence it by conscious law now I want to go to this next big evolutionary leap of the brain and this is the limit region the structure deep inside your your brain that has the was it originally emerged with mammals now once
a month for evolutionary powerful attributes that we get from the Olympic region that movie deceit everything we tried to do consciously alright and and the idea here is to is to not no really yeah underestimate the power of your cognitive processes which a fantastic for what they are but it's to really respect how your brain actually a ball in the fact that this processing is what
we rely on to stay alive so inside the structure is that the first thing we seem really with with the hit the limbic region is this ability to remember things so when no one's fire together they wired together to association that we make connections the early mammals developed this this structure called the hippocampus which stores are retrieved memories and in a way that is much more
complex than the simple arm firing together that we get where just associations so we can see how important that would be for early mammals may be great to remember where food was plentiful and where danger was prevalent right and it's the same thing with us our memories are being stored now we do have conscious memories but most of our memories are being stored unconsciously automatically but
what should be remembered right how do we decide what we're going to remember and at the unconscious level what the signs what it's remembered is another little structure at the end of the hippocampus called the amygdala and these names sound fancy hippocampus mean seaports I mean the law means almonds it just sounds better if I you know if we use Greek terms for these things are
Latin terms right so the amygdala is is processing strong emotions it's white and the enemy hippocampus social structure around the bottom of this in this yellow and how many laws were trained when we were growing up that there is rational decisions in there is emotional decisions right which one should you may right so this is a lot so this line is based on the idea that
you can make a decision without emotion a motion is what's telling you what's important with al and emotional tad you will not be remembered if you don't make an emotional connection you will not be remembered is why ninth grade history is a blur to me a teacher was not good and and I don't remember most actors are no emotional connection so so this idea of memory
and emotion two huge evolutionary steps now can we call emotion that's our term for I think about what it really is imagine a gazelle going to water hole and you survive an attack right every aspect of that experience is now part of the memories of the gazelle is gonna have a much higher likelihood of survival because the sights the sounds the location all those things are
encoded in its memory and I will be able to respond faster as he goes forward that memory and our motion come together to create this nother great evolutionary leap which is judgment so our unconscious mind is continuously making judgments all the time write it in the way it works is it will make a judgment based on how little information is available if you if you meet
somebody for three seconds you party made a judgment about right now do you have five minutes to make another judgment you make it you know them for a few weeks another judge right but it's happening all the time in your conscious mind doesn't know what he's judgments are coming from you had this instantaneous you know a couple of seconds and that's good that's bad arm why
would I write a book and and I was was doing my publisher and they said that in the book store a book has three seconds to make a connection and when when my %HESITATION my of the publisher was taking this book to a one of the European book fairs she said that the professional book buyers will give her twenty seconds to make a set that's how
long that they have to make up their mind would not there and carry the book we're doing this all the time now then the fourth evolutionary leap from this part the brain is habits know how much of the area that I studied this is this is where where I do most of my research and work and habits are incredibly powerful because they allow us to do
behaviors without having to consciously think about so if I've done something in the same situation multiple times and gotten good outcomes I no longer have to think about so all of this stuff is happening unconsciously into the and then we have to understand this if we want to make a change in our wide we're having to overcome this we have no becoming brain it's always working
it's working effortlessly it's making snap judgments as processing millions of pieces of information and talk now what we're dealing with then in this last evolutionary leap of the neo core tax is the new right now it's it's it looks great it's big it took us from being nomadic you know tribes forging for existence to space explorers who are held unravel the mystery of the atom the
architect of the universe rights is very present don't get me wrong I'm impressed by but it's slow and it's lazy and it's completely unreliable so you know well and what looks much experience now this is an example of unconscious mental processes right now most more you recognize that there's a spider there your unconscious mind was already processing that information you are your heart rate went up
you're getting a little bit nervous you may move back a little bit how many of us when George showed us how much CO two was in the room start to feel like we couldn't breathe my all of a sudden I gotta know where all the sun you can go into somebody opened the doors in the back and maybe right now this is an example of conscious
level processing this hurts right this takes more this takes more energy just so slow this is Arab from for this will wear me out so as we go forward it's important for us to realize that if we want to actually analyze what we've experienced in that we've got to do more than simply have these thoughts about %HESITATION I ought to do that saying that that person
talked about okay because if you don't if you don't change your behavior you will not achieve these goals so what I'm gonna do is take the last few minutes is a you know how many of us want to make a difference how many of us want this experience we catalyze alright so we're going to spend some time doing just that pull out your tenants booklets find
the the speaker you found most inspiring go to that page and we're gonna we're gonna show you how to go through this process now my curious habits and so you'll see things like this like context you behavior reinforce these loops right some people had an even simpler still it's like %HESITATION chew reinforcement and and routine or something a reward bikini this is why this shows a
habit is a two dimensional bank right I don't know if I've done this ten times a thousand times habits or springs screams store energy as you do a behavior more times the habit becomes more strong it becomes more reliable it's more powerful alright so the idea of the hand that spring was that when you compresses spring it's storing energy in it so when you're trying to
change behavior with your will and your conscious mind you're basically trying home spring now this brings ready to fire you're trying to hold it down your brain is lazy you're conscious brain is lazy it's easily distracted and it tires easily so some point you're going to want and the spring is just going to go right you son of Sam and I wanna eat right today what
did you get hungry you get compressed with time and been snickers bars right there right and then you the net and they go all I'm a bad person you're not that you're not week well you can understand how your brains working so what we want to do is to think through this process so if in your change that you have identified you need to change an
existing behavior what we have to understand is the discipline is the only way that you're going to be successful discipline is not punishment discipline is your conscious brain training your unconscious bring you unconscious brain is powerful it's reliable right your brains are designed to work these two brains to the minds come together disposed to work together and they can work together great but you gotta understand
what the strings witnesses on the March right so discipline is how you take a conscious brain to make a goal train your entre their unconscious brain to cheat because his brain can't do it trust me I tried this before myself does not own drug counselor for years so this is where latticed up comes from you're dealing with somebody who is who's up you know has had
alcohol drug problems and they know what they they use again and lose their job their family they gonna go to jail and they and they swear new and you know they believe it I am not going to use again right doing Slater they're using to get and you're the crazy on the stupidity would now this is the power in the unconscious mind we have to understand
that so the first thing is when to disrupt an old habit is don't load the spring so avoid the locations the people all the time of day whatever it is that says I'm in this contact you got to open it in if you can't avoid that contacts you got to make sure that you're consciously aware that when you're in that situation and not to have your
own behavior trigger so the first thing is like if you're if you're trying to on and you'll lose weight is was like just because it's a it's a it's a a place holder for whatever it is you're trying to do arm then you don't get the only still be hungry going stuff gets higher that just loads the spring eliminate that you Shusterman behavior automatically habits is
so powerful because they don't require any conscious thought process shoot triggers it so one of the one of the key elements is to try to read remove it you should try to be more productive turn your phone off right when you get interrupted you lose about twelve minutes it takes about twelve minutes to get back to where you work so don't respond to emails don't respond