Joys of J (ep.20)
📝 What Blog Post I Learned From
“It’s my birthday. I’m 68. I feel like pulling up a rocking chair and dispensing advice to the young ‘uns. Here are 68 pithy bits of unsolicited advice which I offer as my birthday present to all of you.”
A few I wanted to highlight below:
Rule of 3 in conversation. To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they just said. Then again, and once more. The third time’s answer is close to the truth.
The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth, to flossing.
When you are young spend at least 6 months to one year living as poor as you can, owning as little as you possibly can, eating beans and rice in a tiny room or tent, to experience what your “worst” lifestyle might be. That way any time you have to risk something in the future you won’t be afraid of the worst case scenario.
If you are not falling down occasionally, you are just coasting.
You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.
When crisis and disaster strike, don’t waste them. No problems, no progress.
How to apologize: Quickly, specifically, sincerely.
🎙️ What Podcast Episode I Loved
If the word NEUROPLASTICITY gets you as juiced as it does I…..
This is a must listen.
The Rich Roll Podcast - How to Change Your Brain with Dr. Andrew Huberman (+Utkarsh)
And if the word doesn’t get you juiced, well then, this is a great place to start.
Put simply, Andrew Huberman is an absolutely fascinating creature. One whose story will blow your mind as he transcended family dysfunction and life as a young skater truant to go on to become one of the countries most renowned neuroscientist working as a professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine.
But more than anything, this episode is about “how to better self-regulate ourselves as animals and how to better understand the powerful role cognitive bias and hormones like dopamine and adrenaline play in affirming our world views—and shutting us down to the opinions and experiences of others.”
A few quotes to highlight:
Stress and agitation were designed to mobilize the body to take us in the direction of something that is adaptive.
In terms of where the nervous system can be steered, it’s absolutely clear that the nervous system can change in response to experience. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to modify itself in response to experience. From birth to about age 25, the brain is extremely malleable.. in a passive way. The brain is designed to adjust itself in order to be in concert with its surroundings. The brain is basically designed to be customized in the early part of life and then to implement those algorithms and circuitry for the rest of it’s life. The brain can change in adulthood and it can change provided there is an emphasis on some perceptual event. If you want to change your brain as an adult… say you want to be less anxious or learn a new language, be more functional in some way, the key thing is to bring focus to some particular perfection of something that is happening during the learning process.
The brain really wants to pass as much as what it does off to reflexive behavior as possible. The brain loves to be able to do things and not put much energy into it… like walking, talking, eating, etc. When we decide to focus, the brain switches on a set of circuits that involves the frontal cortex and others and its trying to understand duration, path, and outcome. One of the reasons why it’s so exhausting to be alive in 2020 is because we are now having to pay attention to duration, path and outcome… How long will this last? When will the world open up again? Did I touch that door handle? Who are the experts? Where as normally we can just move through life without having to do all this analysis.
The way to think about neuroplasticity if one wants to change their brain is to bring about the most intense concentration you can to something and then later bring about the least concentration to that thing.
A study showed that if there is a serious contingency like in order to get your ration of food each day you have to do this thing, the degree of plasticity is remarkable. If there isn’t an incentive, it just won’t happen. So these circuits in the brain that Mother Nature set up are designed to be anchored to a real need. If people are interested in modifying their brain for the better, understanding that urgency and focus must converge is imperative.
🎥 What Talk I Learned From
How Language Shapes The Way We Think
“There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world -- and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language -- from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian -- that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. "The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is," Boroditsky says. "Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000."
🎵 What Song is Moving Me
Latest Shower Thought:
Fact That Blew My Mind:
“Lake Superior contains 10% of all the earth's fresh surface water.”
^Will leave you with this stunner of a triple rainbow that we had the pleasure of having front row seats to as we canoed through Lake Superior all last week.