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The Case of Arrested Development

Because I was I was washing gas this morning and I'm just gonna bring this up for people in their training at home, you mentioned you slept really well last night, and a couple of you have mentioned me today that was pretty tiring and one of the things that most of us don't give a lot of credence to is fatigue from doing something like this doesn't seem like it should be that big a deal, but whenever our eyes air so habitual for us in the way that we use our eyes is so habituated that when we do anything different, it actually requires a lot of fuel is that's one of things I want to remind you about that part of the whole program that we're looking at is, how do I feel the brain better right now? Obviously we're talking about fuel, we could talk about diet a lot of other stuff, but in this segment we're actually talking about breathing a little bit because breathing, providing good oxygen or providing a good mixture of oxygen and go to in the body is really, really important to get bra...

in function that's one of the things we're gonna get into s so hopefully, like I said, you guys were getting energetic, and you do want to make sure that you're awake when you're doing your vision stuff that's pretty important now what I want to talk about before we go any further though is we're starting to get close to the end of the day we've got this segment in the final segment we're gonna be putting together kind of our personalized program so I want to spend a little bit of time talking about practice in talent development, okay? And this is ah, this is one of my pet topics so I might get a little a little passionate about all right, so I just want to be prepared. Have any of you guys have ever read a book called the talent code or another one's called talent is overrated? You ever heard of them? Okay, if you want to jot those down, I would strongly recommend that you think about purchasing and reading. Either the talent code or talent is overrated, right? A couple different authors and the reason that I loved these books s o much is they look at a growing body of what we call expertise research all right in this a gentleman that's mentioned right here erickson cantor's erickson is one of the guys has really brought this to the forefront of kind of modern consciousness because he got very interested in expertise he's like, you know, the question that I have is are these really talented, amazing performers that we see are they just genuinely innately talented or is there something different meaning did they earn it or were they born on third base? Right it's a really important question because most of us grow up hearing stories of uniquely talented individuals right? We hear about mo start playing piano at four and we watch specials on savants who developed some kind of amazing skill set when they were really young and so what happens I believe in the general consciousness is that most people believe if I'm not that person then I'll never reach a certain level of accomplishment and so erickson said let's let's find this out so he actually went out sort of doing a lot of research on experts and one of his very first thing that he did is he went to the berlin conservatory of music, which is a very prestigious conservatory and he basically did a analysis analysis of the first second and third chair violin players and basically what he found was really, really interesting he found that everyone that was sitting first year right the most talented musicians had actually averaged on a I had practiced on average about ten thousand hours the second shares had practiced on average about eight thousand hours and the third chairs had practice on average about six thousand hours and he went huh? And so he then went out he started researching a lot of other activities now the next place he actually went outside music was actually chess chess is a very interesting sport now a lot of people don't think of chess is of sport, but it actually is an incredibly competitive sport and what most people like when you think about chess, what do we think about really good chess players? What we think about them mentally, they must be totally, really smart, right? Like they we think, man, they think thousands of hundreds of moves ahead or ten moves ahead. There's got to be really, really smart in there, they're geniuses. Well, the fact is, whenever he went out and started researching and studying chess grand masters, he found that on the average muslim weren't much smarter than anyone else, they actually had a fairly normal iq's, um, and some grandmasters actually had below average iq's, which he was very surprised about, so he said, well, I wonder what it is about these guys, and so they set up a really interesting experiment. He said, all right, what we're gonna do is we're gonna take chess, grand masters and amateur chess players, and we're going to show them aboard, so they took a chessboard and they set it up in a game situation, and they said, I bet chess grand masters have better memories. Like, they're just able to memorize stuff better. So I brought them the grandmasters in. They let him see the board for thirty seconds for a minute. I think it was thirty seconds and then they took him over to a blank board and said, hey, set up what you just saw. And then they did the same thing with the amateur chess players and their grand masters, as we would all expect were remarkably better at setting it up. But then they had a really intelligent thought. They said, is it because I have a better memory or they just have more experience with the game? So they came back and they did the experiment again. But instead of setting up the chessboard in a game, they set it up randomly. They just put the pieces in random positions and orders that looked nothing like a chess game. And what they found from that was at the grand masters, and amateurs were about equally accurate in resetting. And so what's come out of a lot of this research with eriksson, his number one. What we find is that experts are really, really awesome at recognizing patterns. They have what's called a huge library of prior experience to draw from and so that's very intriguing in the whole building and better visual skills. Uh context because one of the reasons I'm giving you all these weird little exercises couldn't I just go out and say hey concentrate really hard looking up stuff up close and looking at stuff far away I mean in essence that's what kind of what we're doing but the reason I'm giving you all these different drills to do with the string with the convergence cards utilizing the snail in charge doing hand eye coordination is that what I'm trying to do is expand your library of experiences visually because as we expand our libraries of experiences, what happens is we get better at recognizing patterns and brains love patterns that's one of the things that we're learning more and more about them we actually operate our brains operate on a pattern recognition system that's how we judge things are safe if things aren't safe in other words when we're having a conversation I smile at you and you start to smile back we talk about mirror neurons a little bit yesterday I recognise that I'm probably ok and safe having a conversation with you because you're smiling at me because I recognised it smiles normal mean I'm happy so pattern recognition is a really big deal and so one of the reasons I'm giving you this menu of tests and assessments and exercises is I want to give you a lot of different visual experiences even though we may be working on the same stuff everyone clear on that? Yes, sir. In addition to to get us here in addition to books you mentioned the thailand code and talent is overrated is that a third book experience and deliver a practice that is actually a it's an article it's a paper okay, but if you want you can google just google scholar look up anything by ericsson gonna find a lot of research on talent development no, I want to talk about a couple of other things with regards to practice though because like I said, the main goal of this segment is to talk about how to practice not just vision but anything and get better at it. All right, so what harrison talks a lot about is the fact that the way the human brain works is that in general, once we reach a satisfactory what I like to call survival level of performance if we don't do something about it, our brain will go to sleep all right and here's what I mean by that, um we've all heard let's say, for instance, that for example, we've all heard of speed reading we have seen examples probably on tv of people that can read two thousand three thousand words a minute with good, you know, when you're like holy cow that be really, really cool to dio but if you've ever studied speed reading while them the process is a little different than traditional reading is not massively different it is however you can't do speed reading practising how you currently practice right? We reach as we're going through school we reach our but our brains consider to be a satisfactory reading speed and unless we do something to make ourselves trained beyond that we will stop there that's just how brains are wired right? Because brains we talked about the brain that requires fuel and activation to stay healthy write the other thing I really haven't talked about though is that every change you make with your brain had comes at a cost there's an energetic cost to it so um I'm gonna flip this back over yesterday I drew this really strange looking cartoon in the brain and the mickey foote okay, um so we talked a little bit earlier today about the frontal lobe what do we say happens up in the front of the brain? What kind of cool stuff happens reasoning yeah, right. So we can talk about the term that gets used in in literature is executive function all right? So I'm just gonna kind of abbreviate that way executive functions so if I want to concentrate well, I want to think, well, I wantto do behavior change I have to have some deliberation around that right? Have you guys ever tried to change your diet like I'd give up food and you give up food no don't give a food I'm gonna give up bread I'm going to give up chocolate I'm going to give up whatever. Well, whenever we make a decision we're trying to turn that into a habit. Most of that actually starts up here in the frontal lobe habits however don't live in the frontal lobe happens actually live. I'm just gonna put this kind of down here all right? When we were talking about the brain stem yesterday well, just kind of above that there's some areas called the basal ganglia so it's kind of deeper older areas of the brain that arm or automatic and that's where habits live. So whenever we start with an idea the ideas, the frontal lobe when we practise it and practise it and practise it eventually we could drive it down toward the basal ganglia area of the brain and turn into something more habitual. Okay, you guys with me so far now here's the interesting part yesterday I said that the human brain uses about twenty five percent of all the fuel so use about twenty five percent of the oxygen twenty five percent of the glucose and some play in some cases they say a lot more, but if we then subdivide the brain in the little pieces, guess what part uses the most energy the habit part or the I have to think about it part have to think about a part right? So the frontal lobe use is about twenty to thirty percent mohr of the fuel coming into the brain than anywhere else which means that haven't change actually cost mohr energy and this is one of the things that's just really coming out as we do more and more research on why people stay the same it actually cost more energy to change and it's not just energy like thinking energy is literally calories it cost more calories to make a change which means then that our brain is kind of resistant to it because from a basic survival perspective, spending calories to change something that I'm already kind of decent at doesn't make a lot of sense someone clear on that so this is why you're getting a little fatigued to do envision work why sometimes whenever you try and make a diet change like I'm gonna give up bread all that you can think about is eating bread again because you want it because you're losing some calories and it's there and you're actually like a man because your brain fights change it really fights it so one of the things that comes out of all this research jj from erickson is the fact that experts in every field have actually figured out how to make themselves practice over time in a really specific way all right and that's what we're going to cover but does that kind of makes sense to you because what I want for all of you guys that are watching this either here and the audience are at home is I want you to walk away going how do I get the most out my vision drills hideaway for this I'm going to invest and the danger erickson is kind of kind of a funny word but he calls the problem we run into is what he calls premature automation where I may something automatic too fast right and so this little chart over here basically what it means these words hear associative autonomous and cognitive these come from the science was called motor learning all right motor learning is this weird field the basic psychology and how your body moves and it basically says hey how do we learn stuff ah yes anyone ever tried to learn to play tennis before or got you play golf remember remember your first golf lesson ever you walk into the golf instructor and he's like okay here's how I'm going to stand and now here's how you get a grip the club and you're like what why would I what are you talking about weird why would I do that and so you start playing with all these different grips and then he's trying to teach you to swing and if he's a bad instructor he gives you tons of information he's like stand like this get your weight here now you know when you come back when your risk now let's keep the elbow straight note rotate and you get thirty instructions and you're overwhelmed and that is called the cognitive stage of learning cognitive stage means I'm thinking and thinking and thinking about everything right kind of like some of the vision drills yesterday I'm saying stand up staying long spine you know keep your chin down focus on the stick now maintain your peripheral awareness so that's cool that's all cognitive as we get better and better with something and maybe have accumulated some repetitions of my golf swing I start to move into something called the associative stage, which means that I'm thinking about les I've got two or three things that I folk it's on and then finally after I've hit and honestly once we get into sports I can give you some real numbers once you've hit a tennis ball about one hundred thousand times are one hundred thousand golf swings you start reaching the autonomous level and autonomous sounds like automatic and that's kind of what it means it means you've just done it so much that you can do it almost automatically now here's what's important all of you are autonomous in how you use your eyes you are autonomous and how you use your eyes and you were autonomous and how you breathe right, because you use your eyes millions of times, you breathe about twenty two thousand times a day if you're not if you don't know that. So in about a week's time, how you breathe becomes very automatic. So if you've ever had a rib injury, you ever had a broken rib or something, all of a sudden you're breathing differently if you don't ever go back and we have that and pay attention, your breathing, your breathing patterns may change forever and so that's kind of stuff that we're talking about. Now, what we have to do if we want to be real experts with our visual systems is we have to stop using our eyes automatically all the time, riel experts over time, they don't let themselves go through this premature automation process, they actually go, you know what? I'm going to slow down, and I think about it and I'm gonna practice intentionally, and this is the nature of the beast if you've ever worked with. Like I said, a lot of what I do is work with high level athletes and high level athletes. While most of us would think they practice just kind of automatic because I've been doing it for so long, they actually practiced with mohr intention than anyone else.