Welcome to the huberman. Lab podcast, 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. We're talking all about goals and the science of goal setting and achieving your goals. There's a tremendous amount of information on the internet and in books and so forth about how to set goals and assess your progress towards goals and update your goals. And
Fourth, in fact, there are so many programs out there that includes so many different acronyms that it can be a little bit overwhelming. Today's conversation about goals is going to be quite a bit different. Indeed. We are going to talk about setting goals. We are also going to talk about how to assess progress towards goals, and we are going to talk about goal execution. However, we're going to do all of this in the context of Neuroscience, because it turns out that there are not hundreds.
Or dozens or even several neural circuits in your brain that control goal, setting and movement toward your goals. There is one. And while it includes many different brain areas. That one circuit is the same circuit that's responsible for pursuing all goals. And it relates to some very basic neurochemical mechanisms that are understood. So while there's a wealth of information out there about goals and goal, setting and goal achievement and so forth. There's comparatively little information that's been available to the public about the
Neuroscience of goal, setting and goal achievement. So that's what we're going to focus on today. I promise that we're going to get into the Neuroscience. We're going to touch on a little bit of the psychology and how the Neuroscience relates to what's known in the psychology literature. And we are going to establish several in fact for specific protocols that you can use for goal, setting goal, assessment and goal execution in an ongoing basis. Regardless of what your personal goals happen to be before we dive into our conversation about goals and goal, setting and goal.
Don't like to highlight some recent scientific findings that I think are going to be interesting and actionable. For many of you out there in earlier podcast. We talked about neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to change in response to experience. In fact, neuroplasticity underlies, all forms of learning whether or not its language learning or learning music, or math, or a physical skill. All forms of learning involve the reorganization of Connections in the nervous system, the brain and spinal cord and body one of
Key principles of neuroplasticity is this notion of making errors? As a good thing toward neuroplasticity is a little bit counterintuitive. But what the scientific literature tells us is that whenever we're trying to learn something new, if we make an error, we know it feels frustrating but that state of frustration actually cues up particular brain areas to be more alert. So that on subsequent attempts to learn that thing. We have a heightened level of focus and a higher probability of learning the new skill regardless of what that
At skill is, I've talked about this before in various episodes, as encouraging people to embrace errors or pursue errors not as their own end goal, but errors as an entry point for making the brain more plastic. And if you think about it really makes sense. Why would the brain change at all? If it's performing everything perfectly, when you make errors well in the immediate seconds and minutes. After those errors, you are in a better position to learn. A common question I get, however, is what should be the rate of Errors, which
Really just a way of saying, how hard should the given task be that you're trying to learn or perform and it turns out there's an answer. There's a recent paper that was published in a great journal Nature Communications. This is a paper last author. Jonathan Cohen and the paper is entitled, The 85% rule for optimal learning this paper. We will make available by a link in the show notes captions, but basically what this paper shows is that when trying to learn something new, you
Want to make the difficulty of what you're trying to learn such that you're getting things right about 85% of the time that you're making errors about fifteen percent of the time. And the reason I like this paper is it really points specifically to some protocols that we can Implement because people always say okay you want to set a high goal. You want to try and Achieve something that's really lofty, but you don't want to make the goal so lofty that you don't make any progress at all. Other people say, you really want to start with really small goals and make things very, very incremental, only set out to do things that you know,
You
can accomplish and that will feed back on your self-esteem and all these positive feedback loops and then, you know, layer by layer, layer by layer. You'll eventually, get where you want to go. Well, turns out that neither is true. You need to set the level of difficulty such that you're making errors about 15 percent of the time. And I want to emphasize about 15 percent of the time because there's no way to configure protocols for sport or language or math or anything else where you going to have exactly 15 percent of Errors. So anyway, this paper the 85 percent rule for optimal.
Learning. Again. We will supply the link but it really points the idea of making things pretty hard but not so hard that you're failing. Every attempt or even half of the attempts failing about 15 percent of the time, seems optimal for learning. Hopefully that information will be useful to any of you that are trying to learn something. Hopefully, it will also be useful to those of you that are teaching kids or other adults. If you're teaching, keep in mind that you want to keep the students reaching for higher and higher levels of proficiency in whatever that is.
That you're teaching and that 15 percent of the time, they should be failing if it gets to 20%, That's probably okay. If they start failing about half the time, then probably what they're trying to learn, is too difficult for them at that point. Now, of course, this is going to be controlled by all sorts of external factors like whether or not they slept well, the night before whether or not you slept well the night before and you're being clear in your instructions to them etcetera, but I think the 15% rule as we may call. It is a good metric to aim for and it can serve both students and teachers. In other words it can
Serve both those teaching and those that are learning. Before we begin. I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, a part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element element is an electrolyte drink. Mix with everything you need and nothing, you don't. That means lots of salt, some other electrolytes and no sugar as I mentioned before on this.
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Having goals setting and achieving goals is not a uniquely human endeavor. Other animals set an attempt to achieve goals, a honey, bee, attempts to collect honey, and bring it back to the hive. A herbivore will go out and forage for plants. And we'll also have a need to reproduce at some point in its life. So we'll need to find a mate and maybe even raise the young depending on what species that is. Predators will have to hunt and kill and eat their food and they have to avoid getting injured.
That process. They also have to raise young Etc. So humans are among the other animals or we could say the animals are Among Us in the need to set goals and to make efforts to achieve those goals. Now, why do I emphasize this commonality of process? The reason I emphasize this commonality of process is that it turns out that there is one basic system by which all animals including humans, set an attempt to achieve goals. Now, humans are unique in our ability.
To orient, our mind toward immediate goals moderately termed goals, meaning things that might exist on the scale of a week or a month or even a year and very long-term goals like a lifetime goal or a goal that lasts a decade or it takes a decade to achieve. That's what makes us unique. And of course we don't have access to the mindset or the thinking or the emotions of other animals, but what we do know is that common, neural circuits, meaning brain areas that are present in animal species and in humans.
Are responsible for orienting our thinking and our action toward particular goals. Another thing that's really unique about the human brain is that we are able to have multiple goals, interacting at once. So, for instance, we probably all have fitness goals goals, and relationships of different kinds friendships and romantic Partnerships as well as maybe Scholastic goals. Maybe, maybe you're in school or you're pursuing some kind of learning outside of the school environment, or you and or you have business goals, or
Goals, we are able to have multiple goals at once and other animals do this. But humans are unique in the ability to juggle a lot of goals. And actually one of the major challenges in pursuing goals. Is that goal pursued often interacts. Meaning, if you can spend 100% of your time, chasing one particular goal, that might be very effective for that goal. But then we tend to fall back on some of our other goals. You can imagine how this plays out. If you're working. Very, very hard, your solely focused on business often, your health will suffer. If you're solely focused on your health,
And other things will suffer. And so we have to juggle both our goal setting and our goal Pursuits. In today's we're going to talk about a number of different ways to work with what could very well be called these interleaving goals by focusing on a common practice or common set of mechanisms that are present in all aspects of goal-seeking. What is that process? Well turns out. It's a neural circuit. A neural circuit is simply a collection of brain areas that when active in a particular sequence, give rise.
As to a particular Behavior or perception. So for instance when you feel happy, it's not because you have a brain area. That's the happy brain area that is electrically active, rather. It's going to involve numerous brain areas being active in concert and two different degrees in the same way that the keys on a piano together, played in the appropriate sequence, represent a particular song. You would never say that one key on the piano represents that song but that key is necessary.
Three. Similarly, in the brain we can say that a brain area might be necessary but not sufficient to give us a particular experience or generate a particular Behavior. So when we think about goal-seeking and the pursuit of goals of any kind in the brain, it doesn't matter what the goal is. It involves a common set of neural circuits and the neural circuit that I'd like to orient us toward today and we will return to it a few times. Involves learning a couple of names, but you don't have to worry so much about memorizing. These just more important is to
The logic of how its put together and I will explain that and make it very clear. If you want to learn the names. That's great. One of the brain areas is the so-called amygdala. The amygdala is most often associated with fear. So you might say wow. How is that involved in goal-directed Behavior? Well, a lot of our goal directed behavior is to avoid punishments including things like embarrassment or financial ruin or things of that sort. And so the amygdala and some sense of anxiety or fear is actually built in to the circuits that generate goal seeking and our motivation.
Shinto Pursuit goals, the other areas are the so-called ventral striatum. The striatum is part of What's called the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia is a neural circuit that can very simply be described as a neural circuit that helps us generate go meaning the initiation of action and no-go the prevention of action type scenarios. Let me make that even simpler the ventral striatum is part of this thing called the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia has sort of two circuits within it. One circuit is involved.
Getting us to do things. Like, I'm going to get up tomorrow and I'm going to run five miles first thing in the morning. I don't know if I'm actually going to do that. But I'm just using that as an example. Another circuit within the basal ganglia is a no-go circuit. It's the one that says no, I'm not going to go for the second cookie or the third cookie. I'm not going to eat that. And then the ghost circuit would be the one that's responsible for instead eating something else. Okay, so we have go and no go circuits within the basal ganglia. So we've got a MIG Doula so you think of its kind of fear and anxiety and avoid
Since we've got the basal ganglia, which art for initiating action and preventing action. And then there is the so-called cortex. The cortex is the outer shell of the brain and their two sub regions of the cortex that are involved in goal-directed Behavior. One is the lateral prefrontal cortex. Prefrontal cortex is involved in so-called executive function. Things, like planning, thinking about things under different time. Scales are not just what we want in the immediate term, but what we might want tomorrow or the next day and how our actions currently are going to relate to the Future.
And the so-called orbital frontal cortex orbital frontal. Cortex has a large number of functions, but one of the key functions of the orbitofrontal cortex, it's involved in meshing, some emotionality with our current state of progress and comparing that emotionality to where we it might be when we are closer to a goal. Okay, so, they're basically four areas one involved in anxiety, one involved in Emotion, one involved in planning and another involved in this, go no-go.
No action, so that's a bunch of detail. But if I wanted to make it really simple for everyone, I would say. There are four areas one is an area associated with anxiety and fear the amygdala. The second is involved in action and inaction. Remember, go and no go. So that's the basal ganglia. The other one is involved in planning and thinking across different time scales. So that's lateral. Prefrontal cortex. And then the fourth one is involved in emotionality where we sit emotionally.
At present compared to where we think. We will be emotionally when we reach some particular goal. And that's the orbital frontal cortex. Okay? Again, you don't need to know all those names. You don't need to know all the details, just understand that those different elements are involved in the decision-making. Processes that lead us toward particular goals and have us update. Our goal seeking Etc. One key thing is it doesn't matter what the goal is, the same circuits are involved. So whether or not you're trying
to build a company that's a billion dollar company that's going to go public or you're thinking about planning a craft day at home with the kids or for yourself or your thing about what movie to go see goals goal seeking and assessing progress towards goals. All involve the exact same neural circuits. It's really remarkable. It's also very convenient for our discussion today. What's going on in these circuits can basically be boiled down to two particular things. The first is value information, trying to understand whether or not
Thing is really worth pursuing or not. Okay. So placing a value on a particular goal. The other component of this neural circuit is associated with action, which actions to take and which actions not to take given the value of a particular goal in a given moment time. I want to say that again. The other component of the circuit is involved in action, whether or not you should act or should not act based on your assessment of the value of a goal.
All at a particular moment in time and I won't you're going to hear me say over and over again. In this episode. The value information about a goal is so key. Here's why there is basically one neurotransmitter or rather neuromodulator system that governs. Our goal setting goal assessment and goal Pursuit. And that is the neuromodulator dopamine. Dopamine is the common currency by which we assess our progress toward particular, things of particular value. In fact,
Dopamine is the way that we assess value of our Pursuits. And so as we take a moment and we shift our attention to the psychology of goal, setting, the things that you've probably heard a bit more about about what sorts of goals are good and how to set goals and how to categorize goals. I want you to think about how dopamine could possibly be involved in these different processes. And the reason I want you to do this, is that all of the psychology of goal. Setting and goal Pursuit is wonderful because it places
has things into different categories. It allows us to parse our thinking and organize our thinking, but what's not often seen. In fact, I'm not aware of any literature out there. Scientific or literature in the popular press or in popular books is an understanding of how the underlying neurobiology can be layered on top of the psychology of goal. Setting to allow us to set and pursue our goals more effectively and that's what we're going to do today. We are eventually going to arrive at a set of four practices.
When performed on a regular basis will allow you to assess. What is the value of this next particular action step. How worthwhile is it to do Behavior a versus Behavior be in order to achieve a particular goal. If any of this is vague now, I'm going to make it all very clear for you. You're going to come away with some very specific lists of takeaways that you can put down on paper if you like and that you can use to set goals assess goals and execute goals, more effectively using the
Neuroscience of the circuits, I just described and an understanding of the neuromodulator dopamine. Let's take a look at the psychology of goal. Setting and goal Pursuit. This is an enormous literature. Meaning there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of scientific papers about the topic of goal, setting and goal Pursuit. There's also a lot of information on the internet about goal Pursuit and in looking over this information, one comes to appreciate pretty quickly. That acronyms are a big thing.
Couldn't hymns seem to dominate the area of goal setting, especially as it relates to things in the business sector, but also in the relationship sector. Now, acronyms are wonderful. They allow us to organize our thinking into lists and conceptually they can be very useful. But as I moved through this literature, I start to see some redundant themes. And so what I've attempted to do is distill out the Redundant themes that regardless of the person teaching or the scientific laboratory, that happened to come up with these acronyms that.
They boil down to some common features. So let's talk about that literature. And I think we'll come away with an understanding of some basic elements that are common to all goals. Now, the modern science or the modern psychological science of trying to understand goal, setting, and pursuit actually dates back to the 1930s and we have to be sure that members of our species were focused on goal, setting and goal Pursuit long before the Scientific literature emerged at just stands to reason that since the human brain hasn't evolved that much. We don't
In the last 10,000 years that people would be thinking about these things. They just didn't get them down into papers that we could evaluate on PubMed and so forth, but now we can. So we can look at those papers. And what you find is that acronyms abound in the psychology literature about goal setting and gold Pursuit. So, for instance, you hear about the work of Lock and small. For instance. These are the last names of various researchers. The so-called ABC method, that a goal should be achievable. It should be believable.
And that the person be committed. It's sort of obvious once a year, but the ABC method, then people came along and expanded on that. They talk about the so-called smart method. Smart being another acronym, that it be specific that the goal be measurable, that the goal be attainable, that the goal be realistic, and that it be time down, meaning that you set up a certain period of time in which a given goal should be performed. And then people come along and modify these, this is the way that psychology research is done. I'm not laughing at it. I'm just chuckling because it seems like the acronyms get longer and longer and longer they
Developed the smart herb approach adding an, ER, to the acronym smart, smartperson2011, achill, and rewarding, which fortunately are good things. I believe. Ethical and rewarding, what does all this mean? Well what it means is that any kind of goal Pursuit, any kind of goal setting really has to involve a number of different states and neural circuits in the brain and body. At least. That's how I view this literature. Why would I do that? Well, let's
About the very modern version of the kind of acronyms that I talked about a moment ago, dating back to the 1930s and extending into the 1990s. You can find beautiful talks online from people who have worked with some of the biggest companies and greatest High performers out there to achieve incredible things and they will talk about generating a sort of objective mindset for goal setting. They'll talk about goals needing to be significant as to be a big goal that it has to be concrete.
I have to be able to describe what the goal is. It has to be action-oriented. As to be inspirational. As to be time-bound. You have to have reasonable realistic verifiable measures. You have to constantly up the ante if it's trying to sound repetitive. It's because it is repetitive. There are basically only three or four elements to goal. Setting and goal Pursuit. Basically, an individual or set of individuals has to identify a specific thing that they're going to attain in some communities. They talk about knowing what right looks like meaning behave.
Being able to define a very specific goal. You can't just say, you know, I Want To Be A Champion athlete. You have to say what sport and you have to understand what the path to that is. So, any big goal, of course, is broken up into a series of smaller goals, but the whole thing starts with thinking, about the end in mind, and in a few minutes, we will talk about whether or not visualization of the end in mind is actually beneficial or detrimental to achieving goals. There's actually great neuroscience and psychology data on that now, so I mentioned all these acronyms
not as an attempt to disparage them. I think they're wonderful and I mention all that psychology literature not in an attempt to disparage it. But rather just say that goal setting is the first step assessment of what whether or not one is making progress towards those goals is a second but necessary step and then there's the business of goal execution. And that brings us back to the neural circuit components. Remember this neural circuit involving those four things earlier, the amygdala striatum over frontal cortex and the prefrontal cortex. They
Work
together to divide the whole process as I mentioned before into two general categories. The first is assessing value knowing whether or not we're one is it when given moment relates to some external thing are things going well or are things going poorly and knowing how to gauge that accurately and then action steps goes and no goes, do more of this. Do less of that do this. Don't do that etcetera. So now we are going to shift back to the neuroscience and we're going to talk about the practical.
Google applications of the information. I just described because I've given you a lot of kind of academic information. And as we do this, I'd like you to keep in mind, what are some things that you've either accomplished or that you'd like to accomplish going forward? Because as we do this, we can build toward a set of protocols. That at the end, you'll be able to very quickly plug in your particular goals and a route to those particular goals. That's grounded in the science. And I think are going to be very effective in allowing you to reach those goals more quickly and with indeed less effort.
Act. Let's start with a tool now, because as we move through all this information, I want to make sure that people are coming away with some practical things that they can Implement. And indeed, some things that you can even do during the course of listening to or watching this podcast.
The first thing to do is to understand the difference between Perry personal space and extra personal space. Perry, personal space is all the space. Literally that's with inside your body, the surface of your skin. And in your immediate environment. Perry personal space is a key Concept in Neuroscience because you have particular, neural circuits and particular chemicals that are geared toward what are called, consume ettore behaviors. Meaning using things and consuming things and
Doing things that are in your immediate Perry personal space. Let me give you an example of this for myself, just to make it concrete. You can imagine similar examples for yourself right now within my current Perry personal space is my interoception, my understanding or perception of my internal body. So how quickly, I'm breathing my heart rate, the feelings, on the surface of my skin Etc. But also within the confines of my perry personal space is this coffee mug. That if you're listening to this, you can't see this but
I'm lifting lifting up a coffee mug. I might take a sip of coffee.
That's a consumer Tory Behavior. I have the coffee. I don't have to do much or motivate much to get it. I've other things here pens, and computer Etc. Okay, so things in your Perry personal space and consuming those things is generally governed by a set of neurochemicals that center around the neuromodulator serotonin and there are a few others as well. Things like oxytocin, but mainly serotonin contrast that with the so-called extra personal space, extra personal spaces, everything beyond the confines of my reach.
Will be something in the Next Room. It'll be something down the street. It will be something at some other location in space and time. And the neuromodulators and neurochemicals that are associated with any kind of thinking about anything in the extra personal space are distinct from the neural chemicals and neuromodulators that are involved in thinking about were making actions towards the Perry personal space and the molecule that's most associated with thinking about or orienting towards the extra personal space.
Again, things beyond the confines of my skin, or your skin is dopamine. And this is a vitally important concept to understand when you're setting goals and seeking goals. If we are to be good at goal-seeking, if we are to be good at setting goals and assessing goals. If we are to achieve our goals, we have to be able to toggle back and forth between a clear understanding of our Perry personal space. What we have
How
we feel in the immediate present and our ability to understand what's out there in the extra personal space, and our ability to move into that extra personal space and a simple way to conceive. Of all this is that we evaluate our progress in the Perry personal space. We evaluate how we feel about some Pursuit, even if we haven't initiated that Pursuit, yet how we feel about a particular goal, is truly a feeling that we experience.
In the here. And now even though the goal is in the future. Okay, if we are going to evaluate whether or not we made progress today or yesterday or not. That's an evaluation of how we feel in the immediate Perry. Personal space. However, moving toward any goal, involves orienting are thinking towards the extra personal space. And as we go through today's episode, I'm going to teach you a technique or rather, a neuroscience based tool that will allow you to continue.
Early transition back and forth between the Perry personal space in the extra personal space, in a way that will allow you to update and evaluate and better. Execute your goal seeking.
The whole principle behind this is that human beings like other animals. Have to make evaluations about whether or not they are on the right track. However, the important thing to understand is that humans, in particular can do this over different time scales. We don't just pursue food because we are hungry, we preserve pursue food, scuse me for a particular meal that we might be having with people tomorrow, right? We can modulate the time scale in a way that other animals don't, that's how we adjust our goal seeking to different time.
And in addition to that humans are exquisitely good at biasing. Our Behavior toward particular goals over very long periods of time, but there are a lot of mistakes out there. In fact, things that are outright wrong in the literature and in particular in the internet and in the kind of wellness and fitness and cognitive Fitness space that send people down the wrong path and those things we will talk about in a few minutes but things like visualization, that visualization and visualization of this big
Goal is the best way to achieve your goals. In fact, that's not the case. There's a much better approach to doing all this. So now I'd like to shift gears towards talking about a few of the things that most people get badly wrong in setting and assessing and executing goals. This is based on peer reviewed research. So I think it's very solid. I know it is very solid and it runs counter to what many of us have been taught. Let's start with a simple one. We've all heard that multitasking is bad. Okay.
Over here
at multitasking is bad. It doesn't allow for Focus. If you want to achieve anything you want to accomplish anything. You should not multitask. Well turns out that's wrong turns out that there is a role for multitasking, but the multitasking has to be placed at a particular time within your goal, seeking behavior. In order to be effective, really nice studies, done at cardi Carnegie Mellon University and the dabish lab evaluated how long people are able to focus.
Us in different environments. How long they were able to stay concentrated on their work. And it turns out that number is exceedingly low, turns out that most people whether or not they're doing computer work or whether or not they're doing writing or accounting work or anything of that sort can hold their attention for about three minutes at a time before they shift their attention off, that's ridiculously low when you first hear it but that probably reflects a basic state of brain function that Harkens back to a time when
Were hunter-gatherers. I doubt that we were maintaining Focus solidly for hours and hours and hours. Unless we were under some particular threat or something. In some particular crisis, rather. You can imagine that people collected seeds and nuts and berries for about three minutes and then probably stood up looked around and then kept going, okay, where that they were hunting animals or in some sort of pursuit fishing, Etc, and focus, focus, focus. Then every three minutes or so, they might have looked up and, you know, take a look at the sky or looked around to make sure that other people were there or not there etcetera, it all stands to reason that
That would be the case. Again. The neural circuits, haven't evolved much. Now, multitasking has been shown to have a very interesting physiological signature when we multitask. When we jump back and forth between things, there is an increase in the level of the neurotransmitter. Also, sometimes called a neuromodulator, but basically, same thing for sake of this discussion, there's an increase in the neurotransmitter epinephrine, which is adrenaline. And so there are really nice studies. Now point to the fact that doing a bit of
Tasking prior to jumping into some focused goal directed Behavior, whether or not to mental behavioral, physical Behavior can actually be useful because it gets us into action. So we've all been told that multitasking is terrible. But if you, for instance, find yourself, cleaning up your house and also checking your phone and doing a number of things, right? At the point where you should be sitting down to write or do some focused work. It probably reflects some adaptive mechanism, where you use action and somewhat varied multitasking action in order to generate adrenaline in your system.
System because adrenaline just gets you into action now, that's great. But you don't want to multitask throughout any kind of goal seeking or goal Pursuit Behavior because what's also very clear we're going to talk about this in Exquisite depth today, is that visual focus. And in particular Contracting your visual window bringing the aperture of what you see to a very fine point. Can absolutely increase your Clarity of goal-seeking.
Likelihood that you will pursue your goals. I've talked about this a little bit before on the podcast as a way of increasing Focus for any kind of pursuit. I've talked about a practice whereby you can literally look at a DOT or a line placed on a wall or on your computer in front of you for 30 to 60 seconds and then moving into some dedicated work where you need to focus and indeed just looking at a narrow piece of the visual World, a small piece of the visual world for some period of time and forcing yourself to hold that Gaze on that location. As
Best, you can can increase your level of cognitive attention in your ability to focus and stay focused. And this is not magic. It is the consequence of the fact that most of your cognition follows your visual perception. For those of you that are low vision or no vision. Meaning you're blind or you have trouble seeing my lab does a lot of work with people who are low vision, no vision, they tend to use their auditory system, their hearing as a way to Anchor, their attention, to particular things. Okay, but most people out there can see and see
Well, and visual focus is the way to do that. Now earlier. We were talking about this notion of Perry personal space versus extra personal space. And I'm just going to seed a little bit of the later conversation by saying that when we focus on an external point, we are in a process of extra reception is that focus on the extra personal space, not the Perry personal space. So when we focus on something say a line on the wall,
Wall for 30 to 60 seconds or at our computer for 3060 seconds and just look at it and then move into any kind of action, whether or not its work action or physical action. We are at it's very core. We are engaging in this pursuit of extra personal space. We are placing our Focus outside our body. And therefore, we are placing the brain into goal Pursuit mode.
Work at NYU, in particular, in the laboratory of a phenomenal researcher in their psychology department by the name of Emily, Bell cetis, ba, l c. ET is Emily Bell. Set, has has done really nice work on this. They've done, is they've had people focus, their visual attention on a goal line of some sort. And then to engage in some sort of behavior that requires a lot of effort. And they've done a lot of different experiments like this, but I'll just explain one. They always include a control group where
People have to go through the same physical effort or mental effort, but they don't Focus their attention. Just on one location, the long. And short of these studies is that when people have to focus their attention on one location like a goal-line, they are much more effective in reaching those goals and they achieve them with the perception that they expended less effort. I'll give you an example of one, particularly nice study from the bail status lab. So this particular study involves physical exercise, although as
I mentioned before they've done similar studies, looking at cognitive type work and what they did is they had a group of people exercise wearing 15-pound ankle weights and they had to basically move a certain distance or run a certain distance to reach a goal line. One group was focused on the goal, line, visually focused on the goal line. The other group was not told to visually focus on the goal line and what they found was that the group that focused on the goal line. It was able to achieve reaching that goal.
With 17% less effort, they measured effort and the it got there, 23% quicker. That's a remarkable difference. Right? So, same distance traveled with same workload, because everyone's wearing the same 15 pound weights on their ankles. One group is simply looking at the goal line. The other group is not told to look at the goal line. Simply by looking at the goal line does something to the psychology and and physiology of these people that allows them to move.
Move forward with less perceived effort and to do it more quickly, that's remarkable. Right? And in this case, they're focused on the goal line, but in a few moments, we'll talk about how one can use updating of goal line. So incremental goal line starting with an intermediate goal and then extending the goal line further and further, but just sit back for a second and think about that, just by changing where a person looks, they change their perceived effort and their ability to do something more effectively, more quickly than
A group that is not deliberately focusing their visual attention on one location. That's incredible. And it's so incredible. In fact, you might say well, how could that possibly be what turns out it has a very specific underlying physiological reason and that has to do with changes in our so-called autonomic nervous system than aspects of our nervous system that prepare us for Readiness and action or that, prepare us for resting and relaxing. So what is special about focusing ones visual attention at a given location?
Ocean. Well turns out that we have two branches of our visual system. So visual information all comes in through our eyes, but then it can head down two different Pathways. One pathway is engaged when our vision is brought to a common Point, what we call a vergence eye movement. So if we're focusing very intensely on a given point regardless of how far away from us that point is our visual system. Engages a certain set of neurons neural circuits that are involved in resolving fine detail and that can evaluate small changes over small periods of
Time just think of it as a very detailed camera of the visual World. It tends to be very restricted. The other pathway through the visual system is a so-called magnocellular pathway in. This is a pathway that's involved in taking in Global Information. About lots of things that are happening around us, movement of things to our right movement of things to our left. Things are happening down on the ground and all around us and that pathway involves a sort of relaxation. If you will of the neural circuits that are associated with alertness and attention. When you walk down the street, you're not
About much provider. You're not looking at your phone. You're not focusing. On one location. You're more or less in a relaxed State compared to. When you're looking for particular sign, you're looking for a bus or a train that's coming or a particular person and that should inherently make sense, when your level of attention and alertness goes up there, sort of a small but perceptible increase in your level of arousal. It's not really stressed necessarily, but arousal of alertness and it turns out that the visual system accomplishes this increase in alertness by communicating,
With your circulatory system and the system that delivers blood and nutrients and oxygen to the rest of the tissues in your body. So let's talk for a second about what focusing, our vision on a particular location does because in this study from the bail status lab, what they found was focusing on a goal line allows people to move more effectively toward that goal. This is something you can leverage in all aspects of all gold, Pursuits. What happens when we focus on a particular location? Believe it or not. There's an increase in a particular feature of our blood pressure.
Now, your body has of course, arteries veins, and capillaries and your heart pumps blood first to the arteries and then to the other components of your vascular system and we have so-called blood pressure. High blood pressure is just how much the fluid volume is pressing on those arteries veins and capillaries, right? So you can imagine a pipe with very little fluid. Moving through it. That's low pressure. You have a pipe with a lot of fluid moving through it. That's even more pressure. You have a pipe with a lot of very viscous meaning very kind of sticky, thick stuff movie for it. That's
And
more pressure, we have blood pressure, and you've probably had your blood pressure measured. There's always two numbers, right? You have a top number which is the systolic blood pressure and then you there's the bottom number below, the line, which is the diastolic pressure. So the important thing to understand is that your blood pressure will rise when your heart beats because there's more fluid moving through those pipes that are your arteries or veins in your capillaries and that top number is called the systolic or the systolic blood pressure because that's the pressure at the time when your heart contracts.
It's okay. So the top number, which normally, if you have a healthy blood pressure somewhere in the range of 90 to 120 millimeters of mercury millimeters of mercury, is just the way that pressure is measured that top number your assist, your systole, your systolic blood pressure is what's measured when the heart contracts. Okay. So that's the amount of pressure when there's a heartbeat and it's moving through your vasculature. Now between beats, right the heartbeats, but then it relaxes
Your blood pressure is going to drop to a lower value, right? Because fluid isn't being pumped through the system at those moments and that's the bottom value, the diastolic pressure and typically for healthy people that's going to be 60 to 80 millimeters of mercury. So you might hear about a normal blood pressure being about again. This is an approximate 120 over 80, what that means is at the point where blood was being pumped through their your arteries and veins, boom, that it's 120 millimeters of mercury, but then, when the heart relaxes,
Just for a second before the next beat, then it drops to 80. Okay, so there's high pressure, low pressure, high pressure, low pressure, this the fluid is being pumped through the system. Why am I telling you all this? Well, it turns out that there are neural circuits that link your visual system and focusing on a particular point with that top number, the systolic blood pressure. And when you focus your eyes on a particular location, that systolic blood pressure goes up, and there are some other systems that are
Donated with it in your brain and body that start releasing adrenaline low amounts of adrenaline, in most cases and that adrenaline further, readies, your body for Action. So bringing our visual Focus to a particular location. Does a number of things to the brain, and the whole system of the body, to prepare it to place it into a state of Readiness. That makes us more likely to lean into our goals into action. And if we step back and think about this makes perfect sense, the brain and body need to be coordinated.
We can't just think about a goal. In fact, a deer or a lion, can't just think about a goal. It has to think about a goal and then has to feel some sort of activation energy, some willingness or desire to move forward in pursuit of that goal. So imagining a goal has to be coupled to the physical pursuit of the goal. So our visual system, in a beautiful way brings together a focus literally, a visual focus on a particular Point outside us. Then it recruits
an increase in systolic blood pressure, which creates a systemic, a body wide, and brain wide increase in fuel utilization, and oxygen availability in our willingness to move forward as a body as a whole coherent system. And then there are also neurotransmitter systems like epinephrine as as we will soon. See, dopamine that get recruited as well to place us into a continual mode of action. This to me is a remarkable feature of our physiology and it
Right to the point of some of the psychological phenomenon that we were talking about earlier. Let's just recall what some of those are, I won't list them all. But, you know, a goal has to be significant. They say, okay, all these psychologists, all the popular stuff online says, it has to be significant has to be inspirational and has to be action-oriented. Okay. So let's say, you look out into the landscape of what's available to you, whether or not it's just in your mind or you look at a specific point. You say, ah, I want to go to that particular restaurant, to eat that particular food and you Orient towards it and you move towards it. This
Is the way that your brain and body are coordinating their actions together. Conversely, when our visual system is in a mode of looking at everything, when the aperture of our visual system is very broad. We know that there's also a reduction in our goal directed behavior and a reduction in the systolic blood pressure. It's as if our Perry personal space is sufficient. We don't need to get beyond our current state. We're not oriented toward any one thing in particular. Okay, so I've now describe some of
Psychology and some of the underlying physiology. Now. I'd like to mesh this within the context of actual specific goal setting and goal Pursuit because what many of you are probably thinking there's okay. Well, that's some physiology. There's some psychology, but how do you actually apply this towards setting and achieving goals? Well, you do that by understanding that your mental frame, and your attention are always either, positioned to your Perry personal space focused on your immediate possessions and state or
Towards things outside you but that you also have the ability to dynamically travel back and forth between those. And so next, we're going to talk about what the literature says about things like visualization immediate and intermediate goals, long-term goals and how to best achieve those. And then we're going to move specifically into the protocols that you can use. It's a protocol that I've specifically developed for you. The listeners in order to incorporate all the signs into a best practice that you can do. Anytime any place to really identify what it is specifically that you want to
To and the best route to pursue and Achieve that goal. Focusing our visual attention on one particular point is incredibly effective for all types of goal Pursuit. And if you'd like to read some of the scientific studies or read a review of the scientific studies, that have looked at how narrowing ones visual attention can really enhance the effectiveness of pursuing goals. I'll put a link to this study. That title of the study is keeping the goal in sight, testing the influence of narrowed visual attention on physical activity and this is a
A paper from Emily Bell, statuses lab focuses mainly on physical activities, but it mentions some other things as well. This is a article published in Personality and Social Psychology bulletin in 2020. So it's recent it's exceptional paper. In my opinion, really gets to the heart of how all this works and some examples of where it's been implemented. So, let's apply this visual tool in a very simple way to any type of goal that you want to pursue.
If you already know what goal you want to pursue, maybe it's a workout, maybe it's cognitive work of some particular sort. Again. The process is very simple. You're going to focus your visual attention on one point, beyond your Perry, personal space so it could be on your computer. It could be on the wall. It could be a horizon. It could be out of at a distance and you're going to focus your visual attention there and with some effort you're going to hold your visual attention for 30 to 60 seconds. You might blink. That's okay, but you're going to try and hold your visual attention there. So no moving your head around. No diverting your attention to others.
Occasions. Some people will find it, very easy to do other people, find it quite hard. Your mind. May drift cognitively. That's okay, but try and bring your visual attention to that common Point, several episodes ago. I talked about how there are actually studies looking at developing this kind of training in students for ADHD. And the date on that are actually quite encouraging. So for people who have ADHD and focus issues and attentional issues. This can be effective for people who don't. This can also be effective again, it places your brain and body into a state of readiness.
Enos. And then the idea is to move into the particular actions that bring you closer to your goal. Okay. We haven't yet talked about how to set goals and how to assess progress. This is simply how to pursue goals. Okay, but the visual component is important. In fact, I would argue that the visual system and harnessing your visual attention to a narrow point is going to be the most effective way to get your brain and body into a mode of action to pursue. Whatever goal it is. You're trying to pursue that practice is in stark contrast to multitasking, whereby
Definition, your attention is moving from place to place to place, right? I mentioned that multitasking can be effective in getting your system into somewhat of an increased level of activation activation, so that you can pursue a more focused goal, but the visual attention to a particular point is going to be the most effective way to bring your system into a state of Readiness, in action for goal Pursuit. There's another really interesting way that you can leverage your visual system toward long-term goals, the Bell set of slab is also done some really interesting experiments looking at people.
Ability to set and stick to long-term goals, and the long-term goal that they looked at was one related to saving money for later in life. This is something a lot of people struggle with. A lot of people have a hard time investing money or saving money for later in life, simply because as human beings, we vary in the extent to which we worry about what's going to happen later. There's also a phenomenon of so called delayed discounting delay. Discounting is the fact that goals become less rewarding when they
Just further out in the future. Okay, you may have experienced this walking past a donut shop. I love donuts. I just going to admit it over and over again on the spot. I love the smell of them. I love the taste of them. I tried to eat them because I'm told they're not that good for me. And indeed. I don't think they are occasionally cave and I eat one or many. But in general, I try not to Cave to the river immediately rewarding properties of the smell and the taste of the donut, but what we know is that if you smell a donut, or you smell a wonderful piece of food in,
The immediate term, it brings your level of focus, your mental focus to the immediate phase and it feels very rewarding. Like if you had it, now, it would just be so good. But if you actually extend that reward out to tomorrow or the next day, I think. Oh, you know, today happens to be a Saturday that were recording but oh, you know on Tuesday morning, I'm going to get a donut. It doesn't have the same value because the reward system doesn't work as well. For long-term goals. It's not as a Salient. It's not as tangible, a goalless.
You were something like a donut whereas the kinds of goals that work when you place them out into the longer term and can create a heightened sense of motivation, tend to be things that are much more rewarding to us. So delay. Discounting simply says that the further out in time that a given goal is the less effective that reward will be in motivating, one's behavior, and indeed. You see this with saving money for retirement. You see this with all sorts of long-term investment, the bodice lab. Therefore did it an experiment where they looked at people's tendency.
To save money for later in life, but the groups that they created in the study were really interesting. They had one group. Imagine what it would be like to be 30 or 40 years older. And then to invest a certain amount of money according, to whatever it is. They thought that they would need and they measure the amount that they had set aside and saved for later in life. The other group actually viewed photos of themselves. So picture images of themselves that were
Lie by digitally age so that they could see themselves 30, or 40 years into the future. And it turns out that people in that second group simply by perceiving their own image in the future invested far more money into later life, right? They set aside, more money, somehow a bridge, the gap between their immediate experience of life and the longer Arc toward what it was going to be like in 30 or 40 years. It's a very powerful result in my opinion because what it says again
N is that our visual perception of the future or our visual perception of the present is what allows us to Anchor our goal-directed systems and our motivation to take on things that in the immediate term, might not seem that useful so you can imagine all sorts of variations on this. You can imagine that every time I want a donut, I'd see a vision of myself or an actual physical picture of myself. As a consequence of add having eaten, many doughnuts every day for the next 10 years. I don't know what that image would look like.
Because I've never seen it. That's not an experiment that I necessarily need to do because I'm not that motivated to eat donuts. But I have to confess. You know, I'm somebody who I think I'm pretty good at managing resources, but I think if I were to see an image of myself at 70 or 75, there's so many things that are associated with visual images like what our body must feel like what our needs are probably going to be like in that state or in that age. What sorts of things we may or may not still be able to do at that age and that anchors back.
Two immediate goal directed Behavior such as setting, aside money for retirement, such as investing in one's Health practices. And indeed there's a study that has looked at how people will invest in exercise and healthy eating. If they just think about the future and what they might be like in the future versus seeing images of themselves in the future, if they were to go down a healthy or unhealthy route. So again the point is that the visual system, what we see is principally important in defining
Meaning what we do in the immediate term, even if what we see relates to Something in the far off distance. I think these are phenomenal studies and they get right down to an important issue. That's been kicked around over and over in the literature and in the discussion about goal-seeking which is visualization. We here keep the big goal in mind, focus on the Big Goal. So now we're going to address. What does the science say about visualizing big goals, if you're somebody who's interested in business or let's say you're focused on relationship is thinking about the
Fect relationship and what that would look like and the family that you would have and where you would live is that effective in generating the kinds of behaviors that will lead you to that. Is it effective to think about the big win at the end. It turns out it is, but you have to be very, very careful with when and how you implement that visualization. Because if you do it correctly, it can really serve your goal seeking well and if you do it incorrectly it can undermine the entire process. So does visualization Work, Well, turns out that
Visualization of the big win, the end goal. So the Super Bowl win or eight gold medals in the Olympics or graduation from the University of your choice or making a certain amount of money or finding the partner of your choice at cetera that visualization is effective in getting the goal Pursuit process started but it actually is a pretty lousy and maybe even counterproductive way of maintaining pursuit of that goal, meaning
Oohing to engage the sort of actions that are going to get you to eventually achieve that goal. I think this is going to be surprising to people at first, but if we think back to our discussion about the physiology of the blood pressure system, it will make sense.
Good scientific Studies have been done where people are told to imagine or even script out their long-term vision and goal for themselves. What is the big goal and they're taught to or told to imagine it with a rich amount of detail to think about how it's going to feel in their body in the big win. And basically what happens is if you measure people's blood pressure or other metrics of physiology, you see an increase in that systolic blood pressure. There's in kind of a ramping up of the Readiness and excitement for that goal.
But that increase in blood pressure quickly Wayne's and over time that visual of the long-term goal becomes a poor thing to rely on in order to generate the actions that are required to reach that goal. In fact, there's a much better way to maintain ongoing action toward a goal that also involves visualization, but it turns out it's not about visualizing success. It's about visualizing failure. The Bell seta slab.
And other labs have looked at whether or not people make progress toward goals of different types whether or not they are thinking about the goal. They're thinking about that goal line. And what they want to achieve that long-term goal and all the wonderful things associated with it, or whether or not they are thinking about all the ways in which they could fail and route to that goal. Right? This is not typically what we are encouraged to do. Typically we are told, don't imagine failure, push failure, out of your mind, only focus on success, you know, fake.
It till you make it or is a phrase that I absolutely hate a frankly because it's not even clear what that means. And it's not even clear what the ethical form of that is. I think it means continue despite any anxiety or fear that things won't work out. But if you look at the literature, the scientific literature, what the Bible said, his lab and other labs have shown is that there's a near doubling near doubling in the probability of reaching one's goal. If you focus routinely on foreshadowing failure, you
About the ways in which things could fail. If you take action a or you take action B and instead, therefore, you take action. See, you're supposed to think about how things could fail if you don't get up and run each morning, if your goal is say a fitness goal. So let's use that as an example because even though I realize people are in pursuit of many things, not just Fitness fitness goals, and physical goals are very concrete thing that we can all get on the same page about because they're related to actions. Let's say somebody sets a goal.
Of running, five miles four times a week minimum. And as many as seven four times a week minimum before, 8 a.m. Okay, in a previous podcast on habits. I talked about the benefits of not necessarily setting specific times. That one will do things but setting time blocks, that one will do things you say before, 8 a.m. You're going to run five miles and that's going to happen up to 7 days a week. Okay? One version of this would be okay, sit back in a chair and think about how great you're going to feel. And look, if you're doing this everyday, how your health is going to improve. However,
Who's
going to be your blood markers of lipids? Etc. Going to improve? Okay, fine. That's the visualization goal of visualizing. The endpoint turns out that is far less effective and maybe even counterproductive compared to thinking about what's going to happen. If you don't do this, the negative Health outcomes that are going to occur the disappointment, you're going to have in yourself. The fact that you're going to wait until 7:30. That's not long enough for many people to run five miles, you go to put on your shoes, is to be pouring rain, or even hailing, or snowing outside and now, you're not going out.
Outside, unless you're somebody who's particularly motivated to do that. Okay. So foreshadowing failure, turns out to be the best way to motivate toward goal pursuit. In fact, as I mentioned before there's a near doubling in the likelihood that people will reach goals of any kind when they're constantly thinking about how bad it's going to be. If they fail, if we think back to the neural circuit associated with assessing value, in our goal Pursuits. This makes perfect sense, the amygdala, that center of the brain that's involved in anxiety and fear and worry. Well.
The amygdala is one of the four core components of our goal setting and goal Pursuit circuitry. And there's no bypassing that there is no one listening to this or watching this who's amygdala is not involved in their goal, setting and goal Pursuit behavior. And so, while I'd love to be able to tell you that all you should think about is rainbows and puppies and all the wonderful rewarding things. They're going to happen when you achieve your goals. The truth is you should be thinking mainly about how bad it's really going to get. If you don't do it. How
point in yourself, you're going to feel how it will negatively impact you. If not in the immediate term in the long term, if indeed, your goal is to reach your goal. So I want to emphasize that I'm not interested in encouraging people to flagellate themselves. I'm encouraging people to achieve their goals and it turns out the best way to do that is by foreshadowing failure. And the more specific you can get by writing down or thinking about or talking about how bad it will be. If you don't achieve your goals, the more likely you are to achieve
Those
goals part of the reason for that almost certainly has to do with increases in systolic blood pressure and increases in Readiness in your system. When you imagine failure, the brain and body are much better at moving away from fearful things. Then towards things we want. I wish I could tell you that wasn't the case but there is a true asymmetry. In the way. We are built. In fact, the brain and body can engage in what's called one, trial learning. When something bad happens. We eat a food that makes us sick. We have an interaction with a person or place that we really
Ali. Don't like it only takes one trial, two really one event. One time to reorient or rewire our neural circuitry. So that we have a bias toward moving away from that thing in the future. When things go, well, unfortunately, that doesn't often occur if things go really, really well. It might Orient our brain and body toward wanting more of that thing. And we'll have neural circuitry changes that will lead us to engage in that particular Behavior. Interaction again, but it is never as effective as these avoidance circuits. So again, foreshadow failure, if you're going,
Visualize in a positive way, do that at the very beginning of some goal pursued, maybe intermittently every once in awhile. You imagine the big win of, you know, scoring perfect on an exam or winning the championship or the great relationship, but most of the time, if you want to be effective, you should be focusing on avoiding failure and you should be really clear about what those failures would look like and feel like now let's talk about goal. Setting going back to that prominent literature the psychology and popular literature again and can hear some of these themes. Start to emerge.
The goal should be significant. We are told it should be inspirational. It should be aggressive yet realistic. Well, okay, that's all fine and good. But let's get semi-quantitative about this. Let's at least get biological about this. How inspirational does it need to be? Is does it need to be the kind of thing that is so inspiring to me that I can't sleep at all. Well, that wouldn't be good because as I believe and I know many of you have heard me say, many, many times before regular deep sleep, 80% or more of the nights that you go to sleep, is going to be crucial to your
Cognitive and mental functioning in your ability to achieve your goals in the long term. That's absolutely clear. So it's got to be inspirational and exciting. But what does that really look like? And what does that correspond to? And how do we actually make that happen? Well, once again, there is a mismatch between what the real data show and what we're most, often told turns out that again, work in Bell cetis lab, but also other Laboratories has us addressed whether or not the probability of achieving a
A goal goes up or down, depending on whether or not one, visualizes, or sets a goal that is easy moderate or impossible. Okay, an impossible goal would be, for instance. If I say, you know, I'm going to jump from my front driveway all the way up to the road. The roads, quite a distance away. It's more than 20 meters away. It's just not going to happen so I can happen in this. Lifetime is not gonna happen. Any other lifetime, not unless it involves some elaborate technology that I'm not aware of a jet pack or something.
It's just not going to happen. Right? An easy goal would be something like, can you jump or could I jump? You know, two feet in front of me? Obviously. Yes. Okay. Now I'm using a trivial example here, but this could be translated to any kind of goal. School goal, physical goal, etcetera.
Turns out that when people set goals whether or not they are nutritional goals, eat more of this or eat less of that without their fitness goals. Run more lift, more, some other goals swim less swim or whatever. It is. Their goal happens to be some learning goal, some relationship goal, some attempt to modify, their behavior turns out. That if the goal is to easy, it's to Within Reach, it doesn't recruit enough of the autonomic nervous system to make.
Suit of that goal likely. Now, that might be surprising. At least it was surprising to me, you think? Well, something is really, really easy. As a very low bar to achieve it, people are probably more likely to do it, but it turns out that's not the case. When we hear that, a goal needs to be inspirational. What do we mean? When we hear that something's too easy to recruit our action. What do we mean? Well, they'll set a slab measured systolic blood pressure, and found that when goals were too easy for people to attain, they didn't get that increase in systolic blood pressure and recruitment of the other neural and Vascular systems me.
Seeing the blood systems and the nervous system that would place them into ongoing effort. And so they quickly gave up. Also, if a goal was to lofty, if it was too far from their current abilities, it didn't recruit enough, systolic blood pressure, even if people could get very excited about something mentally. It's simply didn't Place their body into a state of Readiness because they wasn't tangible that they could actually perhaps really achieve it. So it turns out that when goals were moderate.
When they were just outside of one's immediate abilities or that one felt that yeah, that would take a lot of effort but it's within range or maybe in range. Like maybe I can do it. Maybe I can't then there was a near doubling of the systolic blood pressure in the good sense. It didn't go into the unhealthy range and a doubling or more of the likelihood that they would engage in the ongoing pursuit of that particular goal. So here we're talking about goal-setting what we're saying is
set goals that are realistic, but that aren't so realistic that they're easy. The goals need to be realistic and truly challenging. Don't set goals that are so challenging and so lofty that, they crash that blood pressure system in the other direction and make you or anyone feel unmotivated in hearing this, it makes sense, but I don't think I would have predicted it. Had, they not done this very controlled study. I would have thought the loftier the goal, the bigger, the goal, the more that it recruits, the autonomic nerves.
System and the more that people are likely to lean into the energy and effort to pursue and attain that goal. I also would have thought that if a goal is really easy to achieve that, it would engage the systems of action in the brain and body enough that people would sort of get into motion and pursue that goal. But neither is the case, again, set goals that are difficult to achieve, but that are not so lofty that they collapse your system, and that you feel overwhelmed. And the important thing here is that
How we perceive a goal whether or not we think it's within reach or not, of course, will vary, depending on whether or not we arrested depending on whether or not other aspects of our life. We're going well. I mean, we can think that we are hot on the heels of a lifetime goal and everything's going well and then they'll be some crisis interpersonal crisis or they'll be a Health crisis and you'll be shut down. And then that goal seems very, very hard to attain. So we will talk about how to update goals under different context, in a few minutes. But of course, this is going to be an averaging.
Isn't something that you do just wants. But the takeaway again is very simple set. Goals that are moderately hard too hard but not so hard nor so easy that they don't engage your brain and body properly. Moderate goals are best. If you want to achieve your goals, now, I'd like to talk about three particular areas of scientific study, that point to goal Pursuit goal, assessment, and goal achievement.
Previously, I told you that it's great to foreshadow failure, that that's a great way to get your system into a state of activation. I also told you that you want to set goals that are challenging but possible. And again, here. I'm paraphrasing from the work of Emily Bell set aside want to be very clear. There are a few other things that one can do in order to bias the likelihood that you will succeed in trying to achieve your goals. First of all, limit your options trying to pursue to
Goals at once can definitely be counterproductive. Now. I realized that life is complicated. We all have multiple goals that we're trying to pursue. But if we have particular goals that are important to us, we have to be careful to not get distracted by other goals. And many people run into this problem. So setting one or two or maybe three major goals for a given year is going to be more than enough for most people and is actually going to be challenging for most people. Now, of course, we have daily goals, and monthly goals and yearly goals, but if we have big lofty goals,
We need to be careful not to contaminate our mental space and our visual space with too many goals. And why do I say visual goals? Well, what various department stores and supermarkets have discovered is that the greater the number of things in our visual attention, the more that we can draw our attention and our goals off a line of pursuit. What does that mean? Well, let's think about in the Practical context. This is actually been done, big department stores have figured out that if they stock their shelves
Chock-a-block with many, many options of food, or clothing items, or objects, or anything like that. People simply buy more stuff, people are very prone to orienting their attention to whatever is in front of them. You put a lot of stuff in front of them. Their attention drifts, you put fewer things in front of them. Their attention is more narrow in a later episode. We'll talk about designing a workspace that's optimized on the basis of this. It doesn't mean being in a room with nothing except just your desk and a computer doesn't have to be that.
That sparse but visual sparseness actually can help us Orient. Our focus and our behavior when we have a lot of things in our visual environment or a lot of things in our cognitive environment. It's the same thing. And so if you're going to try and pursue a fitness goal of relationship, goal and academic goal and a long-term Life Financial goal all at once, that's for things. And you're going to have to come up with systems that allow you to isolate those goals in a very rigid way. And if you do have multiple interleaving goals and overlapping,
Goals and simultaneous goals. In a few minutes, we're going to talk about a process that will allow you to use your visual system to align towards each of those goals sequentially in a way that makes it much more likely that you'll achieve them. So now let's talk about specificity of goals. We've all heard that the more specific goal is and the more specific we are about when and how we are going to execute that goal. The higher probability, that we will actually achieve that goal and indeed that's the case. But there's an additional feature. That's not often.
Discussed. That is vitally important and in fact, may be more important than having a specific time of day or a specific endpoint in mind. So really nice. Study that was done looking at recycling. This is something that a number of groups. Businesses households and individuals are trying to do more of, they're trying to lower carbon footprint or contribute to the world. In some general Way by throwing away fewer things that could potentially be recycled. So this has been studied
In the context of the work environment where a business decides and lets everybody know that there's going to be a greater effort toward recycling, cans or bottles or bottles and cans Etc. And then the way these studies were done is that the janitorial staff was swapped out temporarily for researchers. That actually measure the number of recyclable items that showed up in the trash and not in the recycle as a function of the total amount of trash. Why do I say is a function?
So now I'm trash. What's a way of controlling for differences in beverage consumption from one week to the next? Anyway, the point is they were able to very carefully measure how much people are recycling before and after this call to action to recycle more what they found was if they said we are going to try and recycle more, try not to put cans and bottles in the trash. There, of course was an improvement in recycling but it was pretty modest. Whereas, when there was a very concrete,
In and everyone knew what that concrete plan was for instance, to place all bottles and cans into the recycle, not the trash, or to limit the amount of trash by 50% or to eliminate all recyclable items from the trash. So when they made it very concrete exactly what the action steps were. There was a remarkable. I mean, close to 100 folder, more Improvement in recycling behavior that lasted many months after.
This call to action was made the takeaway from. This is quite straightforward. It means that having a concrete plan is essential. You can't just say I'm going to become a better recycler or I'm going to do things that are better for the environment or I'm going to become more physically fit. It has to be a specific set of action steps that get right down to details about what success would look like. I've heard this before described as what does right look like. What is the actual outcome? That one would like to achieve in terms of action steps?
So not necessarily feeling States. It wasn't that they all sat around said, how great we're all going to feel about ourselves in the world. When we accomplish this goal. It was very concrete statement, very concrete, plans about action steps that would deliver. 12 ones goal somewhat straightforward and intuitive but nonetheless worthwhile it what it suggests is that for all of us? If we have certain goals that we want to achieve, we need to be exquisitely detailed about what the action steps are that we are going to take and to constantly update those action steps.
Soooo, so that we have a higher probability of Meeting those action steps. Some of you may be asking how often should one assess progress. Well, that of course will depend on the given goal that you're trying to pursue. But in the studies that I've been referring to here, the assessment of progress and the updating of concrete plans was done weekly. So it seems like weekly as a good starting place to address how well one performed in the previous week. And then based on that performance to update the action plan for
For the upcoming week. So weakly seems like a good solid rule of thumb for setting particular action goals, and assessing one's progress towards the immediate and longer-term goals. Any discussion about goals and goal. Pursuit would be incomplete without a discussion. About the molecule dopamine. Dopamine is often thought of as the molecule of pleasure and reward, but actually it is the molecule of motivation. This is best illustrated by a classic set of studies.
That have been carried out in both animals and in humans. The animal study can be described the following way to rats each in a separate cage. You can provide those rats with the opportunity to indulge in something that they like like food or mating or heat. If it's cold in the environment or a cool spot in the cage. If it's warm in the environment and so forth. And what you find is that rats will very readily approach the rewarding.
They will mate, they will eat, they will pursue something that is of pleasure. Now, if you are to take one of those rats and deplete its dopamine neurons, you can eliminate its dopamine neurons or block dopamine in the brain. What you find is that those animals will still enjoy pleasure. They will consume the food. They will mate at cetera. However, their motivation to achieve pleasure is vastly reduced. In fact, if you
You place the item of pleasure. The mate, the food, Etc. Even just one rats length away from that rat. The rat without dopamine. Will not even move one length of its own body in order to achieve that pleasure and there are naturally occurring experiments in humans that mimic that result very accurately. There are certain conditions in humans where there is a depletion of dopamine and what you find is that the depletion of dopamine does not inhibit an ability to experience pleasure necessarily it
Inability to pursue or go through the series of action steps in order to achieve pleasure. So dopamine release. It's at the heart of our motivational state to seek out goals and to seek pleasure. And this is true for immediate goals that take place within a timeframe of minutes or a time frame of a day or the time frame of a week or the timeframe of a lifetime dopamine is the common currency, by which we pursue goals. Now, dopamine does a number of things that are
Are very interesting. I'm going to describe a few of them as they relate to goal seeking Behavior. First of all, there's a fundamental feature of how our brain releases and uses dopamine that's called reward prediction error. And the simplest way to think about dopamine reward prediction error is that dopamine is released in the greatest amount and place us as into a greater state of motivation when something happens that's positive and novel. Now, an important thing to
Stand about dopamine is that it's not always released on the same schedule. There are a couple different ways that dopamine is released and when it is released relative to your anticipation of a reward is key. If you don't expect something positive to happen, you're just going about your day and something positive happens. Dopamine and a lot of dopamine is released. I had this happen recently. I had no idea that I was going to be receiving something in the mail, but I went to the
The mail, I looked in the mail and I got something very positive and I was really, really excited about. This is a real event that happened just today. However, if we anticipate something positive is going to happen, and then that thing happens, we experience dopamine as part of the anticipation. So even before we get the reward, there's an increase in dopamine. It's not as high as it would be, if something really novel, and unexpected and positive happen, but we do get an increase in dopamine.
And then when we actually experience the reward, we experience the positive thing. There's a smaller increase in dopamine. Okay. So again, the biggest increases in, dopamine our response to things that are positive and unexpected, lesser dopamine is released when we anticipate something good will happen. And when that happens, yes, we get some dopamine and we also get some dopamine when the positive thing happens, think about anticipating a great meal with friends. We have some dopamine churning friends come over then we have the meal.
We also get some dopamine from that but not nearly as much as we would if it all happened as a part of a big surprise. Then there's also the case in which we predict that something good will happen, when that happens. There's an increase in dopamine, just as it was before but then if that thing doesn't happen for instance our friends don't show up for dinner. Then there's a drop in dopamine below our initial Baseline that drop in. Dopamine is the chemical essence of what we call disappointment. Now this dopamine reward
Prediction error as it's called can be leveraged toward trying to reach our goals because it tells us where we should set our milestones. We can't be in a mode of Simply being focused on the Finish Line. Very few. People can do that over long periods of time in a way that's effective. Now earlier. I talked about a study where people were focused on a Finish Line visually and they were moving through space with these ankle weights on, but that was a very short-term goal. Okay. So if a goal is within
You know, minutes or maybe even within an hour, or is in with our immediate visuals environment. Maybe we can do that. But most goals of the sort that most people are pursuing fitness goals academic, goals business, goals relationship, goals, Etc, involves some Milestones. So, understanding what we know about reward prediction error, we can make better choices about where to place the Milestones, how far out in the future to place Milestones. So then the question becomes how often or at what intervals should
Assess progress. And it turns out this is very subjective. But that there's a way to make it objective. Now, in a previous episode of the human Lab podcast. I had a discussion with the great Robert sapolsky and we were talking about how the brain can subjectively change whether or not a given Behavior or experience is positive or negative. And the example that Robert gave is a really phenomenal. One. It's a study that's been done in rats and also in humans where it took a rat, they had a rat run on a running.
Wheel rats. Turns out like to run on running wheels and the blood pressure of that animal. The health metrics for that animal, the lipid profiles, many, many things improved. Okay, the rat was exercising and it got healthier and presumably a happier. We don't know. We could have asked it but we wouldn't know doesn't know how to tell us but we can measure blood lipids. We can measure blood pressure and all sorts of things and indeed when that rat exercised or when people exercise they generally get healthier. Except in that particular experiment they had another
Animal where every time rat number one ran rat. Number two was forced to run. It was on a running wheel and it was forced to run, not because it wanted to, but because it was forced to and what was remarkable is that the physiological effects of being forced to do something where in the complete opposite direction as they were, when those same behaviors were undertaken voluntarily. In other words, the rat that was choosing to run, got healthier and the rat that was forced to run.
Became unhealthy. Blood pressure went up in a direction that wasn't effective and useful. Blood lipids got worse, stress hormones went up, etc. Etc. And you see the same thing in humans. Now, what this says, is that our subjective understanding of why we are doing something is fundamentally important for the effects that we will get from that behavior and indeed the effects of that behavior will have on us. So this has two major implications. First of all, in terms of reward schedules, we can decide to use.
Reward schedule that we want for a given Behavior. We can decide that the milestones for a, let's say a plan of getting in really terrific cardiovascular shape over the next year. We can decide to assess every day and ask ourselves how good was our progress. And if we made progress, then we're going to reward ourselves. We could do that every third day. We could do it every week. We could do it every five minutes. If we actually have the time to do that, the reward schedule, the dopamine system is highly susceptible to these subjective.
Of affects these so-called top down effects of when we decide that something is going to be good for us. If we analyze it on a given time frame. Well, then it's going to be good for us. So what I suggest people do is pick a particular interval at which they are going to assess progress. And if you've been making regular progress towards a goal that you reward yourself and the reward indeed is all cognitive. It's all mental. It's telling yourself. Yes. I'm on the right track. Now, some people will say wait, but I want to know exactly how
Often I should do that. You need to do that at an interval that you can maintain consistently. Okay, so you're not going to reward yourself every minute or every step of every jog that you take unless you can do it every minute of every step of every jog that you take for that reason. I think that month that daily or ideally weekly assessments are going to be best. I think that checking in at the end of a week, looking back on the previous week and assessing how well you performed in pursuit of a given goal. How many times a week you ran or how many times you?
Studied or how many times you did something that you wanted to do or avoided something that you didn't want to do? I think that's a reasonable and tractable schedule to assess once a week. So that's one point that pick a milestone that you can maintain consistently throughout the pursuit of a goal. The second thing is that the subjective effects that were described by that. Sapolsky study, or that sapolsky described rather are absolutely essential for all.
Specs of goal seeking Behavior, we cannot underestimate the extent to which the dopamine system and our sense of whether, or not we are on the right track is under our cognitive control. If we constantly Place ourself into a mode of thinking that we are failing. Well, then indeed, we are not going to turn out much dopamine. Now earlier I said we need to predict and visualize failure, but that is not the same thing as thinking about ourselves as failing. We need to predict what the outcome would.
Would be if we failed but then encountering that and in behaving in a certain way and thinking in a certain way in pursuing our goals in an effective way, maybe checking in on that each week. We definitely need to reward ourselves cognitively for the correct and successful Pursuit. What this means is that anticipate and think about failure as a mechanism of generating motivation and indeed fear and anxiety so that you lean into the correct behaviors and you lean away from the incorrect behaviors to reach your goal. But then
Weekly or so, whatever you can maintain consistently. You absolutely want to reward Yourself cognitively by telling yourself. I'm on the right track. I got another week, where I compost, whatever it is that I'm trying to. Accomplish a concrete example that I'm following now, is this 150 to 200 minutes of Zone to cardio per week. Because that's shown to be very effective in improving, mental and physical health metrics. So, once a week, I'll check in with myself. If I reach that hundred fifty to hunt to 200 minute threshold, then I'll reward myself simply by checking off.
A box and saying, okay. I'm on track. I'm on track. I'm on track. This dopamine system is critical to re-up to remind ourselves that we are on track. If indeed, we are on track, because dopamine itself provides a state of motivation and Readiness to continue in the regular pursuit of our goals. Dopamine. The molecule is actually used to manufacture epinephrine and norepinephrine which are other molecules in our brain and body, which put us into that Readiness and action state.
Are actually the molecules that help generate that increase in systolic blood pressure, that put it puts us into a state of Readiness. So you can think about dopamine as I self amplifying system, provided that you are leveraging, the dopamine system on a consistent schedule. Now by also following a consistent schedule of self reward, you set yourself up for any positive unanticipated rewards, that may happen. So for instance, if you're checking in with yourself weekly telling yourself that you're doing well, if indeed you are
You are. And then out of nowhere. For instance. You're out on a run or you're doing something. I'm using Fitness as an example, but you're doing something, you find yourself performing, particularly. Well, that's a unexpected dopamine reward that will further amplify the system. Now. I know many people out there, having heard me talk about dopamine before worry. Well, can I release too much dopamine? And then the whole system will crash and then I'll run out of motivation in general, that doesn't happen. Unless people are using pharmacology supplements or prescription drugs, or illicit drugs to increase.
Reese dopamine. This is why I'm a big fan of things. Like, cold showers and cold water, exposure was, which has been shown to lead to long lasting 2.5. X increases in dopamine or in some cases supplementation with things like l-tyrosine which are precursors to dopamine or in some cases caffeine which can increase the number of dopamine receptors that we have. So that whatever dopamine we have floating around, can be more effective in activating these motivational States, but things that really increase dopamine and then
Cause it to crash can be problematic. One way to conceive of dopamine is as a sort of dopamine, wave pool. You've probably seen these wave pools where some pressure is pushed into the pool, and then you get these waves going. If those waves are consistent enough, but the end thereof, high enough amplitude, the waves can continue to go up and down, and up and down. But if it's a giant wave, if you get a huge blast of dopamine, well, then a bunch of the water sloshes out of the wave pool, and then you basically have to take some time off reset. That Dope.
A level, that's what happens in addiction and when people start pushing in a lot of drugs or other things, into the system that increase dopamine too much. So today we've almost exclusively been talking about behavioral tools. It is possible to incorporate supplements and things of that sort. They can increase dopamine as a way to getting into ongoing motivational States, but I caution people in about relying on those too much, really what you want is you want a situation where your own positive feedback your own understanding.
Being that you are reaching the Milestones, that you've set out for yourself that you're achieving those, and that is what's causing these waves or these increases in dopamine, that will further amplify your motivational States. Another very interesting aspect of dopamine that I've not talked about at all. On this podcast before is actually how the dopamine system interacts with the visual system. We've talked a lot about how harnessing your visual attention to a particular point is great and can help serve your ability to both.
And Achieve goals.
Really wonderful work that was done by Wolfram Schultz who is one of the great pioneers in this area of dopamine and dopamine reward prediction error showed that for people that have normal levels of dopamine their visual search, meaning, how they scanned visual environments, tends to be pretty constrained. They might move their eyes around a particular visual environment searching somewhat for people that lack dopamine. They actually have very little movement of their eyes. They don't actually tend to look very far into the Horizon there. Don't have that very focused.
Since point that we're talking about the kind of, I guess for lack of a better phrase that kind of Eye of the Tiger focus on a goal. Rather their eye movements are depleted and they're not actually evaluating Horizons often their future. They're not focused so much on the extra extra personal space and this actually can be restored in some of these. It took place in Parkinson's, patients and other people who have dopamine depleted that when dopamine is restored pharmacologically, their visual focus is rien, Hance to gehen. Now. There are a lot of details
Tales of the study that don't map perfectly onto everything that I've talked about. But the point is this, when we are focused on a particular point in visual space, or its particular goal or Horizon, although systems are blood pressure epinephrine and indeed, dopamine get recruited to put us into a state of Readiness and willingness to go pursue things in that extra personal space. When our visual attention is very diffuse, all of that relaxes and we tend to be more comfortable staying in the place that we are in our
Very personal space and the effect works in the other direction to when dopamine is increased our visual attention for particular things out in space increase. So the way it works is reciprocal when we use our visual system, in a particular way, bring it to a point of focus, it recruits chemical and neural systems in our brain and body that put us into a state of Readiness and pursuit. And when we increase certain chemicals in our brain and body like epinephrine, like dopamine, then we
Also allow our visual system to be in a state of looking out at particular locations in our visual world. So the system works in both directions and some people leverage this by using things like caffeine or taking things like l-tyrosine to increase dopamine and again, it works both ways. There's no right or wrong way to do it. I'm a particular fan of using behavioral tools, always prior to using supplementation or any kinds of other tools because behavioral tools have a very unique feature that supplementation and
Other chemical tools don't which is that behavioral tools used over time engage neuroplasticity as we start to practice using our visual system, to harness our attention to particular locations. And in that way, move toward particular goals, we get better and better at using those systems. In fact, the systems for focus and motivation, themselves have plasticity. So we get better at being motivated and focused when we place our visual attention at a given location using chemical assistance of a safe. Kind, of course, check with your doctor.
Doctor but things like l-tyrosine or caffeine or those combined. Yes, it will increase dopamine and will increase our ability to engage in visual, Focus somewhat, but those compounds alone, don't modify the circuit trees and the way that we want. So I always say behavioral tools first, then nutritional tools, then supplementation tools, and then if it's right for you and safe, maybe you advance into some of the other more sophisticated tools. I'd like to just briefly recap what I've covered up until now. And again emphasize that much of what I've covered has been based on the beautiful work of Emily Bell cetis, and
I do hope to get her as a guest on the podcast, by the way, first of all, set goals that are challenging but possible. Those moderate goals, not super easy, not super difficult, but moderately challenging goals seem to be the most effective in moving people towards their goals over the short and long term. S plan concretely. You need a concrete set of actions that you're going to follow in order to reach your goals. Third foreshadow failure. This is a somewhat surprising one to me. I would have anticipated.
That imagining success is the way to go. It turns out that imagining success and visualizing success can be useful at the outset of a goal and maybe every once in a while in pursuit of that goal, but that it's not terrific for putting you in constant pursuit of that goal, rather foreshadowing, failure, visualizing failure, and all the terrible things that it's going to bring seems to be more effective in that Maps. Very well to what's known about the neural circuitry in the involvement of the amygdala.
Focus on particular visual points as a way to harness your attention and to remove distractors, removing distractors, and getting your body and brain into a mode of activation, getting that healthy increase in systolic blood pressure, that puts you into Forward Motion. Towards your goals is absolutely key. So that's a brief summary of what I've covered up until now, there were other things too, of course, the dopamine system and the power of subjective top-down control.
In regulating that dopamine system, but I want to be sure to include a tool that's been especially powerful for me, that's grounded in the Neuroscience research and in the psychology research and as I describe this tool next, I think you'll see the ways in which it meshes nicely with the work that Emily Bell said us and colleagues have done. This is something that I've personally been doing for many years based on my understanding of the visual system and the understanding that indeed, we can move our cognition.
And our perception from a place of interception and focusing on our Perry personal space that space within us and immediately around us. And on the things that are immediately accessible to us, that we can shift from that mode to this mode of extra reception of focusing on things outside the confines of our skin and that are beyond our reach that are literally goal-directed, behaviors and goal-directed thoughts. And this is something that in the past. I talked about a little bit, I've talked about
Called space-time bridging in it. We haven't talked too much about the time domain of the visual system today, but space-time, bridging is simply a way of using one's visual system to focus on the Perry, personal space and interception. And then gradually in a deliberate way. Stepping ones focus into the extra personal space, and then back to the Perry personal space in a way that gives you a lot of flexibility and control over that ability in your daily life. So, I'm going to first describe.
The tool. And then I will explain more about the underlying science and the underlying mechanism.
Here's how you would do this.
You could do this indoors or outdoors, although ideally you would do it in a location where you could view a horizon. It could be through a window or ideally Outdoors without a window. Could be done. Anytime of day at night. It might be a little more challenging but it goes the following way. You first do is you would close your eyes. This could be done seated or standing but you would close your eyes and you would focus as much of your attention, including your visual attention on your inner landscape on your interoception. So,
Be your breathing your heart rate, maybe even the surface of your skin, but really focusing internally. Now, how can you focus? Your visual attention internally, if your eyes are closed. Well you do that by imagining your inner landscape. Okay, so you don't have to imagine your heart beating and so forth. But what you're trying to do is eliminate perception of the outside world, you're eliminating extra reception, and you're focusing. All of your cognitive attention and your perceptual attention on what you're experiencing within the confines of your skin, or at the level of the surface of your skin and inside your body.
And you would do that for a duration of approximately three, slow breaths. Okay. So, close your eyes. You would do breath one breath to and breath three concentrating. All your attention on your internal landscape. Then you would open your eyes and you would focus your visual attention on some area on the surface of your body. So for me, the way that I typically do this will be to focus on say the palm of my hand. So I'll Focus my visual attention on the palm of my hand and I then do three breaths again.
Kissing on my internal state. But now I'm splitting out. A little bit of my attention from interoception to extra reception. Focusing on something outside me the ratio or the split of attention is about 90. 10 about, 90% of my attention, is focused internally, but I'm also focusing some of my attention externally go. Most people can do this pretty easily. Then there's a third what I call station. I now move my visual attention to outside my body, to some location in the room or if I'm outside in
The external environment something in the range of 5 to 15 feet away. And I'm trying to move 90% of my attention to that external object. So now I'm really biasing my perception and my attention towards extra reception.
As I breathe, I'm paying attention to those three breaths. So that's why they're still 10% that's focused on my internal landscape because I want to pay attention to those three breasts, but I'm focusing as much of my attention outside of myself. Maintaining just a little bit on my internal state so I can measure the Cadence of those three breaths. Then I move my visual attention to yet another station, which is further away. Typically a horizon or something as far off in the distance as I can, possibly see again for the duration of three breaths.
And at that point, I'm trying my very best to move 99 if not 100% of my attention to that external location. Okay. And then what I typically will do is I will try and expand both my vision and my cognition to a much broader sphere. This is that magnocellular Vision that we talked about before, where I'm not focusing on a particular location on the horizon. I'm trying to dilate the aperture of my field of view so I can see as much of the visual landscape as I'm in as possible.
But if you're an internal, excuse me, if you're an indoors, then that might be the ceiling, the walls and the floor of the environment you're in. If you're Outdoors, it would be to expand your visual Focus as broadly as you possibly can. Again for the duration of three breaths. Then I would return immediately to my internal landscape. I would close my eyes and I would do three more breaths focusing entirely on my interception on my internal landscape, what we call before it. My
Personal space, and I would then repeat that Perry personal space hundred percent focused on my hand. 90 percent 10 percent on my perry personal space or my internal landscape. Stepping out to another location where it's mostly XT reception, maybe a little bit of recognition of my internal State, then to the Horizon, then to this broader visuals fear than back into my body. And I would work through each of those stations, maybe two or three times. The entire thing takes about 90 seconds to 3.
It's depending on how many breaths you. Do. I said three but you could do one or 10. It doesn't really matter or it's also going to depend on for instance, how slowly you're breathing? Because you're breathing might be faster than mine or vice versa. What is all of this doing? Why do I call the space-time bridging? And why is this useful for goal setting? Hmm. The reason I call it space time bridging is that the visual system is not just about analyzing space. It's actually how we batch time. It's how we carve up.
Line. And the simple way to State this is that when we focus our visual attention on a very narrow Point, that's close to our body and our immediate experience. We tend to slice up time, very finely, we're focused on our breathing. We're focused on our heart beats. In fact, our breathing, and our internal landscape and our heartbeats become the sort of second hand. If you will on our experience, we are carving up time according to our immediate physiological experience. Whereas when we focus our visual attention,
Outside our body. Not only do we engage that extra receptive, extra personal space system and we start to engage the dopamine system, the goal-directed system, but we also start batching time differently when we focus our visual system into a broader sphere of space or it into a space, beyond the confines of our skin. We start carving up time our frame rate changes. Now, this is useful in the context of goal setting goal assessment and goal Pursuit because with
The exception of a very few isolated examples. Almost all goals involve setting some goal, that's often the future and then carving up the time between now and the achievement of that goal into Milestones that range in duration and the rewards, even if we try and just make them every week are going to come at some unexpected intervals. And that's actually can be helpful for reinforcing Behavior intermittent reward. That's intermittent and random is the most
of reward schedule. We know.
But the problem is always how do we keep our cognition in line with the long-term goal while also being focused on these more immediate goals. And so this particular practice that I call space-time bridging, but we could give it a different name. I'm sure there are better names. Maybe can suggest some in the comments section on YouTube that are more accurate or more map to it better. But this Behavior or this practice rather is teaching us to use our visual system and thereby our cognitive system and thereby, our reward systems to orient to different locations.
In space and therefore different locations in time. And that is the essence of goal-directed behavior. That is the essence of setting a goal. It's about thinking about what you want. Then it's about setting Milestones that are intermediate to that goal. Then it's about assessing, whether or not you're reaching those milestones. And then it's, of course about updating your goals. If you need to update your goals, all of that is an enormously confusing batch of challenges, if you think about it all at once, but if you
break it down into these elements that the visual system can help you find and move towards those Milestones. I think there's ample evidence to support that, and that your control over your visual system is indeed yours. That you can deliberately set it to different locations. And then you make a practice of stepping through these different stations on a regular basis. Again, I do this each morning. I do this once a day rarely have. I done it twice a day, rarely have I missed a day but by doing that, you can be very effective in teaching the system.
Of your brain that are related to goal setting. A reward to map to different time frames. So I found this to be a very effective protocol. The Bell cetis work has mainly focused on visual tools that are of a single Horizon. Here. I'm talking about multiple what I called stations or Horizons, but what's very clear is that an ability to move from different visual stations and to do that in a deliberate way, in a focussed and conscious way clearly maps to an ability to
conceived of different goals, over different periods of time. And I do believe can be greatly beneficial in allowing one to set particular goals and then move through the Milestones to those goals and to constantly update one's Pursuit and reward in reaching those milestones and eventually the overall goal per usual and covered a lot of material today. We talked about some of the neuroscience and psychology and popular understanding of goal seeking Behavior, how to assess goals Etc, talked about the beautiful work of Emily. Bell said,
At New York University and her work on the use of the visual system to better achieve goals, and indeed things like visualization. And why forecasting failure can be more effective than forecasting success as counterintuitive as that might seem, that's what the data point to and we talked about the importance of setting concrete plans. And really what that means and what intervals at which to assess progress and what intervals at which to assess reward and how the dopamine system is involved.
Moved. And in addition, I described this practice that one can incorporate as a daily or semi daily. Practice of so-called space-time bridging of using the visual system, and your ability to deliberately step, your visual system from stations that are within your body. So called Perry personal or interoceptive space out into the world further and further. And then back again in sequence as a way to harness and cultivate and build up these systems. That link Vision space-time reward systems and so forth.
Ultimately, as you set out to accomplish your goals, there are going to be a number of basic steps that everyone will have to follow. You have to clearly identify what the long arching ultimate goal is, you have to identify what the Milestones will be, might not know all of them at the outset, but you ought to have some idea about the intervals, at which you are going to set those milestones and set your reward schedule for assessing progress, in route to those milestones. In your ultimate goal. My Hope Is that
You'll be able to incorporate these tools. If not, all of them. Perhaps just one of them or two of them in pursuit of whatever particular goals, you happen to be focused on at this point and in the future, if you're enjoying an or learning from this podcast, please subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, apple and Spotify. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition on YouTube. You can leave us comments and feedback. You can also leave us suggestions about guessed that you'd like us to include or topics that you'd like us to cover in the comment section on YouTube and on
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It's of goal-setting goal assessment and achieving goals and last but certainly not least. Thank you for your interest in
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