Dr. Emily Balcetis: Tools for Setting & Achieving Goals | Huberman Lab Podcast #83

- Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

where we discuss science

and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman,

and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today, my guest is Dr. Emily Balcetis.

Dr. Balcetis is a professor of psychology

at New York University,

her laboratory studies motivation, goal setting

and tools for successful goal completion.

I learned about Dr. Balcetis's work some years ago

because I'm a vision scientist,

that is, I study the visual system,

and I heard about this incredible psychologist

at New York University

who was studying how vision,

that is, how we visualize problems

can predict whether or not

we will successfully overcome challenges

and how we strategize in order to set and meet goals.

And in 2020, I learned of Dr. Balcetis's book,

which was written for the general public,

entitled "Clearer, Closer, Better:

How Successful People See the World".

And I read both the hard copy of the book

and listened to the audiobook,

and I absolutely loved the material.

As you'll learn directly from Dr. Balcetis today,

how people visualize a problem,

that is, whether or not they think of a goal or a problem

as residing at the top of a very steep hill,

or on the top of a shallower hill,

or whether or not they visualize a goal or a problem

as far off in the distance

or closer to them in the distance,

visually, in their mind,

strongly dictates whether or not they will arrive

at the challenge of meeting a goal

or overcoming a problem with more energy or less energy.

Indeed, it dictates whether or not

they can push to immediate milestones,

or whether or not they will think they have to overcome

the entire task all at once.

Basically, Dr. Balcetis's work has discovered

that how we visualize a problem or a goal in our mind

has everything to do with how we lean into that goal,

whether or not we think of it as overwhelming or tractable,

whether or not we think that we can overcome that goal

and then it will lead

to yet more possible rewards and goals,

or whether or not we feel

that we're going to arrive at the finish line

and then just be overwhelmed with fatigue.

In other words, how you visualize things in your mind,

and when I say, "Visualize,"

I mean, literally, how you visualize them

as a visual problem or a visual goal,

has everything to do

with whether or not you will be able to meet those goals

and whether or not they will lead to still greater goals

that you will be able to achieve.

Today's episode is an especially important one, I believe,

because you're going to learn about

quality peer-reviewed science

from the expert in this field

of goal setting, motivation and pursuit,

and you're also going to learn

an immense number of practical tools

that you can apply toward your educational goals,

your career goals, relationship goals,

goals of any sort.

By the end of today's episode,

you will be better equipped

to set and achieve your goals.

Dr. Balcetis also shares with us her own experiences

of how to set, visualize and achieve goals,

and she does that within the context

of her role as a parent,

as somebody navigating relationships of various kinds,

and a demanding career.

So again, I think that you'll find the information today

to be both extremely academically grounded

in terms of research,

extremely practical and realistic

in terms of how you might apply it in your own life.

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And now for my discussion with Dr. Emily Balcetis.

Well, thanks for being here.

- It's my pleasure.

- Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for a long time,

because as a vision scientist,

who is also very interested in real-life tools

and goal setting and motivation,

your work lands squarely in the middle of those interests.

So just to kick things off,

could you tell us just a little bit about the relationship

between perception,

and in particular, how we see the world,

and goal setting and goal retrieval.

It's a vast landscape, but you're the expert,

so I'll turn that over to you. [Emily laughing]

And then, as time goes on,

I may have some additional questions

as it relates to different kinds of vision,

but what's the deal with vision and motivation?

How do those two things link up?

- Yeah, totally, I mean, when psychologists ask people,

like, "What are you doing

to help make progress on your goals?"

they say all kinds of things,

but a couple things always pop to the top,

which is, "Try to shock myself in encouraging ways,

and self-pep talks,"

or, "I remind myself of how important it is to do this job,"

or, "I'll put up Post-it notes around

to constantly be nagging me about what I need to do."

So those are common tactics that people use,

and what we'll notice is that those are really effortful,

having to constantly remind yourself,

having to constantly talk to yourself,

having to create those Post-it notes,

remember to look at them,

all of that takes a lot of time and effort and commitment,

and so what a surprise that people burn out, right?

It's exciting to work on a goal when you first set it,

you might make some initial progress,

but then eventually we get not even to the halfway point

before things get real, [laughing]

things are challenging,

and we fall by the wayside.

And that's, I think, because those tactics

that are our go-to strategies

are themselves a goal to maintain.

So it's double sided, we're putting so much on ourselves

to try to advance the thing

that we originally set out to accomplish.

So then, with my team, I was trying to think of,

like, "Well, what are strategies

that don't require as much effort,

that we can automate,

that we can take advantage of what's already happening

within ourselves, within our body, within our mind,

that might overcome one of those challenges,

that'll be easier, more automated?"

And that's when we started to land

on the idea of vision, right?

We look at the world without even thinking of it,

for those of us that are sighted,

and we thought, "You know what?

There are strategies that we can use

to look at the world in a different way

and that we can automate

that might help us to overcome some obstacles,

to make progress on our goals,

to maybe literally see opportunities

that we hadn't been able to see before."

So we started playing around

with the idea of visual illusions to see,

like, "Do people even know

that there's other ways of seeing things around them?

Can we tweak that, or is there room for intervention?

Can we encourage people to take a new way of looking

to see things that they hadn't seen before?"

And that's what really opened us up

to trying to look at that intersection

between vision science and motivation science.

- That's great, and I always say,

and here, I'm strongly biased as a vision scientist,

that vision is the dominant sense

by which we navigate the world and survive.

I love this idea of real-world, realtime access to vision.

And I'm certainly familiar

with how goal setting or Post-its

and magnets on refrigerators

can have an immediate impact, but then over time,

they become so part of the visual landscape

that you overlook them,

and we know, as vision scientists,

if something is stably in your environment,

eventually, you're blind to it,

so that makes good sense.

So you've published a number of studies in this area,

but maybe you could highlight some of the more,

what you would consider important findings

in the area of how people can adjust their vision

in order to meet goals more quickly and more efficiently,

and perhaps also how we all arrive at goals

with different visual perceptions,

and that, in some way,

may divide us into highly motivated

and less motivated people,

in other words, what's the link

between vision and motivation,

and how can we leverage that

in order to better reach our goals?

- Totally, so we started thinking about,

"What are the goals that are most important to people

that they struggle with the most?"

So we asked hundreds, thousands of people

what their new year's resolutions are,

we looked to all the other polls

that do the same kind of work,

and regardless of where you look,

or who you ask, or when you ask it,

people's number-one goal

is something related to their health, right?

To lose weight, to exercise more,

to get out, get more steps,

for mental wellbeing, physical wellbeing.

And that's like the number-one goal every January 1st.

So if we were able to accomplish that goal,

you'd think it would drop

[laughing] a little bit in the rankings,

but it doesn't because it's really hard.

So we thought, "I wonder if there's a way

for us to make some progress on that,

on helping people to exercise better,

more often, stick to it longer,

and make some progress there?"

We know diets don't work. [laughing]

Why don't diets work?

For the same reason that that self-talk doesn't work,

is that we go in it, full bore, hardcore,

and it requires a major commitment and effort

to a lifestyle change.

So again, we were looking for something

that might be easier than that,

that could produce big payoff, right?

That's the golden ticket, [laughing]

is something that requires less effort for a bigger payoff.

So one of the first things that I did

was go over to Brooklyn,

to this old armory building,

it used to be a military armory space, yeah.

- I think I know that building.

- Yeah, it's beautiful. - It's a beautiful building,

now, that houses a lot of businesses, right?

With plants on the walls,

is that the one? - Yeah, there's businesses,

there's a couple of armories

all around the boroughs here around New York City,

and the one in Brooklyn in particular is now YMCA, right?

So it's a family YMCA,

that's within this beautiful old redbrick building

that used to be a military establishment long, long ago.

And what's really cool is that, one winter afternoon,

somebody had invited me, a physical therapist said,

"Hey, you should come out

and check out what's happening here,

with your interest in exercise

and trying to find new ways of helping people,

new tactics that they can add to their tool belt,

I think you're going to find some interesting people

that are working out there."

So I showed up, I look around,

there's families, there's new moms, there's kids,

moms trying to get kids to burn off

some winter energy that they have,

there's people that look like they're just there for their,

every couple of days, going out for a run.

There's some people that look like

they're training with a team,

and that's who this physical therapist introduced me to,

was the coach of this team.

There's a bunch of people that were sitting down

on the ground,

and I would be hard pressed

to know who is the high school student

that's in this group,

and then who, as it turns out,

are some of the fastest runners in the world.

One of the people that was in the last Olympics

before I showed up, won the gold medal for the 400 meter.

And from the looks of them,

I mean, of course,

their bodies are in better shape than mine,

but there's nothing so,

of course, they're not wearing their medals,

there's nothing pretentious

about how they're walking around or anything like that,

that would lead me to know,

like, "This person's amazing,

and they probably have some insight that I don't have."

So once I got introduced to them

and knew who are these people

that were part of this pretty elite training team

that happened to work out at this family gym,

I had the chance to talk with them about,

"What strategies do you use?"

Now, I am not an elite runner,

and having recently had a baby,

I'm not really a runner right now at all,

but I thought, "When these people are running,

I bet they are hyper aware

of everything that's going on in their surroundings.

Where are they relative to the competition,

what's happening in their peripheral vision,

what's going on on the side,

who's behind them, who's in front of them?

They probably have this master sense,

this master visual plan at any point in time,

and that's what probably makes them elite."

So when I started asking them, "Is that the case,

do you really pay attention to what's in your surroundings,

what's behind you, what's on the side?"

They said, "No,"

all of them said, "No, and sometimes when I do do that,

it's a mistake, it doesn't work for me."

So that was surprising

and totally went against my intuition about what they do

that likely contributes to their success.

What they said instead was that they are hyper focused,

they assume this narrowed focus of attention,

almost like a spotlight is shining on a target.

Now, when they're running a short distance,

that target might literally be the finish line,

the line that they're trying to cross.

If it's a longer distance, they set subgoals,

like the person, the shorts on the person up ahead

that they're trying to beat,

or they choose some sort of stable landmark,

like a sign that they would pass by.

And a spotlight is shining just on that,

or they have blinders on the sides of their face,

that's all they're paying attention to,

this really narrowed scope of attention.

And that was a strategy that all of these elite athletes

said that they used,

and those that were better rather than slower

were ones that used it more.

And I thought, "Oh, that's something

we can play with, right?

They are elite [laughing] and they are accomplished,

but that visual strategy

isn't necessarily something

that you have to be in the perfect physical condition

to be able to adopt,

and so I wonder, can that help the rest of us

who aren't competing for an Olympic gold

and who have no chance of ever getting one,

but who want to exercise better,

have a better time doing it,

and maintain a commitment

to that exercise goal that they might have,

that they might otherwise,

by February or March, be giving up on,

if they had said it at the beginning of January?"

So that's really where the work started,

was what you might call focus groups

or case studies [laughing] of these incredible athletes.

And then we did other studies,

looking at people who aren't Olympic athletes,

but who are competitive and New York Road Runners runners,

and how are they running in races?

And what we found is that those people

who have better pace, faster pace, better time,

they use that narrowed strategy

more often than this more expansive

or open scope of attention.

And there seemed to be a correlation

between that better performance

among a wider swath of hundreds of runners,

who are doing it competitively,

but still, could be like the person

that you're sitting next to in the office,

or yourself, right?

And the more often that they did it

and the more consistently they had adopted that,

that technique of the narrowed focus of attention,

it seemed that they were doing better in their runs.

So then we started thinking like,

"Okay, what about people who aren't competitive runners?

What about like my mom, [laughing] can she do that,

or me when I'm trying to get back on the bandwagon

and exercise more,

is this a tactic we can teach people?"

The answer is yes, you can tell people

about what these Olympic athletes are doing,

you can tell them about

what the New York Road Runners runners are doing,

and just using the same language

that I just used with you, right?

"Imagine that there's a spotlight shining just on a target,

choose something up ahead,

the stop sign two blocks up that you can just see,

and imagine that you have blinders on

so that you're not really paying attention

to the people that are passing by,

or the buildings, or the garbage cans,

or the trucks that are on the road,

tune those out and focus in on that target,

until you hit it, and then choose another one, right?

Sort of recalibrate, choose the next goal."

And so we would test, like, "Can people do that?"

I mean, if you're listening right now,

you probably are imagining that experience too,

and the answer is yes,

like, "I can imagine that, I know what those words mean,

and I can do that."

And our work found that too,

that people can do that, we have them say out loud,

"What is it that's captured your attention?"

And of course, "Sometimes something in the periphery,

like movement, captures our gaze

and we are pulled there for an instant,

but then we can refocus up again

and adopt that narrowed attention."

Now, one of the first studies that we did

was teach that strategy and juxtapose or compare it

against a group that we said,

"Just look around naturally,

you might see that finish line up ahead

and there's things on the periphery,

whatever your eyes want to do,

whatever you think is going to work best,

feel free to do that, and tell us what you're looking at."

Then we gave them a finish line,

we created sort of an exercise

that's moderately challenging, but possible.

We put ankle weights on

that accounted for about 15% of their body weight,

told them to lift their knees up,

sort of high stepping to a finish line.

So this would be challenging for them to do,

but we said, "It's an indicator

of overall health and fitness."

Some of these people had narrowed their focus of attention

and some were just looking more expansively or naturally.

And what we found is that those people that we trained,

just everyday normal people

doing this moderately challenging exercise,

they were able to move 27% faster.

They could do the exercise more quickly,

and they said it hurt 17% less.

The exercise was exactly the same for all of the people,

we set the weight, [laughing] we set the distance,

it was in our lab space,

so it was a constrained environment,

everybody was in the same sort of circumstance,

but yet their experience was really different,

we helped them to move faster,

burn calories at a higher rate, right?

Exercise more efficiently,

the amount of time they put in

is going to produce a better physical outcome,

and also, it didn't hurt them, right?

They're saying, "It doesn't hurt as much."

So we were really excited about that, right?

Because it meant that this strategy,

we could use it on people who were not elite athletes.

It could be easily adopted,

a quick training session, right,

can teach people to look at the world in a different way.

Again, this narrowed attention was different

than whatever they do naturally, the comparison group,

but it had a big outcome,

it had a big difference on the way

that they were engaged in the exercise.

It was some of the first work that we did,

and then, since then, we've done, I don't know,

dozens more studies to look at,

"Well, what happens with that

and what else can we do with playing around with this?"

- Yeah, those are impressive differences

as a consequence of narrowing visual attention.

Couple of questions about the actual practice

of narrowing attention,

is there any indication of whether or not subjects

are constantly updating their visual attention?

So for instance, if let's say the goal line is in view,

literally, from the beginning,

I could imagine just holding visual attention

on the goal line,

but if it's a oval track,

or it's a trajectory along a trail, or through a city,

how often do you think they are updating

their visual aperture and setting a visual goal?

And I could imagine

that there's some energetic expense to that,

so meaning, you wouldn't want to do

every crack on the sidewalk,

unless those cracks on the sidewalk

were very far apart. - [laughing] Right.

- Because I think, at some point,

that itself would be exhausting.

So is there an optimal strategy

or a semi-optimal strategy?

- Yeah, so those Olympic athletes

that we started by interviewing,

they tended to be sprinters,

they were more often sprinters, short-distance sprinters.

So when they said like, "Yes, I narrow in

more than I assume an expansive focus,"

that's because they're not going that far, right?

They have to do it as fast as humanly possible,

but they're not going that far.

And so we started asking that question too,

about, like, "Well, wouldn't that be tiring?"

And the answer is yes,

so when we start to look at,

well, people who aren't sprinters,

who are accomplished,

but who are more long-distance runners,

that's what we find that they do,

is that they're using

that narrowed attention strategy strategically,

and it increases in use,

they use it more often as the race progresses,

and they really start to do this major switch [laughing]

at about the halfway point of say like a 10-kilometer run.

So people who are seasoned runners,

they really start making a switch

with what they're looking at about halfway through,

and that's where they more often, more frequently

and are more intentionally adopting

a narrowed focus of attention

when they're in the last couple miles of a run,

when maybe their resources are starting to get more thin,

maybe their motivation is starting to fade.

That tipping point in the middle is,

with any kind of goal, where people struggle the most,

and that's when they're doubling down

on a strategy that they know to be effective.

So at first, longer-distance runners

are not using that narrowed strategy,

they're looking more expansively,

because I think that that,

well, first of all, distraction [laughing] is a thing,

it's useful.

Not necessarily that they're distracting themselves,

because people are still trying to hold pace and jostle

among probably a more concentrated group of runners,

but it is a strategy that they use,

and then sort of wean off of as the race goes through.

And it's particularly effective

when we're looking for that last push, right?

The last push to get over the finish line,

when you might be literally neck and neck with somebody

that you're trying to just beat out,

or when you're most tired,

but you know that last push, you don't want to drop off,

and when you want to push through hard

through that finish line, that's when people

are using it at its peak level of intensity.

- I see, yeah.

To me, this makes total sense why it would work,

without going down the rabbit hole of visual neuroscience,

something for another time,

that when we do these vergence eye movements,

when we bring our eyes to a visual target,

it's clear that some of the brainstem circuitry

for alertness gets engaged to a greater degree.

The other thing is that we know

that when we focus on an object,

that the optics of the eye change

and narrow the visual field.

So that brings about, this is a very detailed question,

but I'm sure the audience is wondering,

if let's say I'm focused on a goal line

or an intermediate goal,

are they focusing on a specific point

or is it kind of the entire horizon of that goal?

Because the finish line is indeed a line.

And of course, it's impossible to know

what someone is actually doing in their mind's eye,

but how do people report this?

Do they see it literally as a spotlight?

And if so, how broad is that spot?

- Yeah, so what is the length [laughing]

of their aperture rather than maybe the diameter

or the sphere size of it?

In our interviews with people,

our sort of focus group studies,

it seems like it's more like a circular point.

And that's in fact what we're teaching people,

what we're training them to do,

so rather than going broadly,

looking across a line from left to right,

we are encouraging them to imagine a circle of light

that's shining on some target.

Now, of course, a finish line is a line,

but if they're staying in their lane,

if they're on a track, right?

You can imagine that there is a circle shining

just on where in their lane they'll cross that finish line,

or if it's a stop sign,

you could imagine a circle of light illuminating that.

So that's what we're teaching people to use

and that's what seems to be effective

to maintain that focus

rather than sort of being pulled

to engage with peripheral vision.

And there's some amazing people,

some runners in history, like Joan Benoit Samuelson,

she's one of the first female marathon competitors,

who has won multiple marathons.

She's Canadian, I think she's won,

feel free to correct me, like 10 marathons in her life.

And she talks about sort of not assuming

this wide but narrow, [laughing]

wide but not deep or tall attentional focus.

She talks about, like, "Finding the shorts

on somebody ahead of me

and focusing on those shorts,"

until she passes them, and then resetting that goal.

So in her interviews that she's done with runners magazines,

she talks about it in terms of this circle of attention.

- Mm, I think I've experienced this a little bit,

because we're visiting New York now to do this interview,

and runners here seem more competitive,

recreational runners here seem more competitive.

People walking on the street seem competitive.

- Yeah. [laughing] - You're walking at near pace

to somebody, they'll quickly speed up.

If you speed up, they'll speed up.

- Yeah. - I think there have been

some studies about walking speed in different cities,

and New York ranks among the fastest walkers around.

I won't mention the slowest-walking cities.

[Emily laughing] 'Cause we don't want to

cast any judgments.

But fascinating, and again, makes total sense

based on the way that the visual system

measures both space and time.

- Yeah. - Something maybe we'll get

into a little bit later,

but I'm curious whether or not the whole thing

works in reverse as well.

Meaning, do people who are very motivated to exercise,

do they think this way naturally?

People who are averse to exercise

or who find it hard to get motivated to exercise,

do they view the world differently,

literally? - Yeah,

yeah, I have so much that I can say about this,

so [laughing] if you'll humor me,

I'll give you a couple different stories about

how we can answer that. - Please.

- So you don't have to do a deep dive into vision science,

which, of course, you are capable of doing,

but what I can share with you

is some animal studies where this work

kind of first started.

This is in the 1940s, 1950s,

rat labs, mice labs.

And they were looking,

those were the first models of human behavior

that people were trying to understand motivation,

motivation science within.

So they would deprive these poor rats and mice

of food or water,

so that they were motivated to get it. [laughing]

They were hungry and they were thirsty

and they had practice running a maze

so they knew where they could find that food or water,

whatever that they were looking for.

And what these researchers were studying

was the pace of movement through the maze.

So as the rats were going through the maze,

they found that even though these rats were hungry

and they're having to expend limited caloric energy

to make it to the finish line, they actually ran faster

the closer they got to that finish line.

So once that finish line became nearer to them,

they actually used their resources,

probably suboptimally,

to make sure that they crossed the finish line

and got their reward.

So that was some of the first early work

that was showing that proximity to a goal

increases the investment in resources that people,

that animals use to meet that goal,

even when they don't have that much spare.

And with the mice, the same kind of thing,

they actually had these little harnesses on them,

they were looking at how hard do the mice pull

to try to make it to the food or the water

that they were trying to get.

And same deal, the closer they got to getting their reward,

the harder they were pulling,

even though they didn't have that much energy to spare

and they had already used some up

getting to that finish line.

So that early animal research from the 1940s, 1950s,

then spurred a whole wave of work in humans.

Do humans do the same thing?

Even when they're tired, but they can see

or they can feel that their goal is close,

do they double down and work even harder

to cross that finish line,

either a literal finish line,

if we're talking about exercise,

or a metaphorical finish line

if we're talking about any other kind of goal

that people might have?

And the answer is yes,

they called that the goal gradient hypothesis,

the closer you get to the goal,

generally, the harder people and animals work

to finish that goal.

That's what led us then to think,

"Okay, those rats, those mice,

those people are seeing a finish line, right?

And it's when they're maybe seeing that finish line,

seeing that reward, seeing the goal

they're hoping to accomplish,

that is what's leading them to try harder,

to invest more so that they can finish it off.

What if we induce that illusion of proximity?

What if we can induce a visual illusion,

a visual experience that approximates

what the real rats and mice were actually experiencing

as they got closer?"

So that is what is happening,

that's what's happening visually

when we create that narrowed focus of attention,

when we tell people, "Imagine there's a spotlight

on the shorts of the person up ahead,

or the stop sign that you're seeing,"

it induces an illusion of proximity

that then is responsible for people trying harder,

walking faster, or feeling that it defied their expectations

and that it wasn't as bad as they thought it would be.

So we do things like measure,

like measure their visual experience,

like, "How far away is that finish line?"

Of course, we can ask them to report in feet,

"How many feet is it?"

Ah, but that's challenging, right?

Nobody really knows what three feet

versus four feet really looks like,

but they do, so we can ask them how many feet it is.

We also use these other measures of,

like visual matching measures

to know that distance to the finish line

looks about as far away as this other target,

their matching up their visual experiences.

So what we know is that inducing

that narrowed focus of attention

is creating an illusion of proximity,

that goal looks closer to them.

And then there's all kinds of downstream,

motivational and psychological effects that happen

from feeling like you're closer,

by visually misperceiving that space,

it can have a really positive consequence.

So your first question was, "Which way does it go?

Does it go both ways,

that people who are better runners

happen to do this thing?"

Yes, some of our research shows that,

that if they, for whatever reason,

happened upon this strategy

and continued to practice it,

they tended to be the better runners.

But we also know from our experiments in the lab,

where we take people who don't know about these strategies,

and by a flip of the coin,

we randomly assign them

to either learn the strategy and use it

or do whatever comes naturally to them,

we can create that illusion of proximity,

that has a direct and causal impact

on improving their performance when they're exercising.

So yes, it goes both ways,

but you can also teach yourself

that you don't have to just rely on luck,

luck of the draw for being a person

who happens to be better at exercising

or whose eyes happen to do this on their own.

- Before we continue with today's discussion,

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The most pressing question I have in my mind is,

can we, I, all of us,

use this strategy to make the starting line a goal point?

Because for a lot of people,

it's not about going from start to finish,

it's about getting to start.

And I would say, here, I'm estimating,

but 15% of the content on social media

is about motivation and how to get motivated to do things.

Neurochemicals like dopamine, of course,

being at the heart of motivation.

In my mind, I'm making strong links

between some of these visual aperture effects

and goal lines and dopamine

that we could also dive into.

But the simple question is,

can I use this finish line strategy

to make the start line a goal

and get my system more engaged or motivated?

And is there any physiology,

or physiological changes, I should say,

to reflect the idea

that maybe just visually focusing on the start line

would actually get me more excited

as opposed to make me less excited to engage in effort?

- Mm-hmm, there's certainly vision science

that's tied up in that very first stage of goal setting,

like identifying what that goal is in the first place

and taking those first steps.

A lot of people's go-to strategies that involve vision

are vision boards, or dream boards, or Post-it notes, right?

They're creating some sort of visual representation

of what it is that they want to accomplish,

"Where is it that I want to be in five years,

10 days, 10 years?"

Whatever that timeline is that they're working under.

The idea of vision boards or dream boards

is that you, almost like a scrapbook, [laughing]

collect visual icons that reflect where you want to be

to motivate yourself.

It's a really common tactic that people use,

and it's not bad to do that, right?

For some people, just even knowing what they want in life

is a major accomplishment,

defining the goal can be really challenging for people,

and that's a strategy that works

and involves our visual experience, right?

It's not just, people aren't saying like,

"Why don't you just sit around and imagine

what you want your life to be like in 10 years?"

The strategy that people are suggesting is like,

"No, cut out the pictures,

put it on a board and stick it by your bathroom mirror

so you see it every day,"

right? - Or make a list.

- Or make a list, yeah. - People are big

on these lists, I have a lot of friends

that are like, "Have you made your list?"

The list of things that you insist on having

in the context of fitness, relationship, job,

et cetera, et cetera, this seems more and more

common now, yeah. - Yeah, totally, and the idea,

like, "Write it down," right?

They're telling you, "Write it down,"

or, "Create a visual manifestation of it."

And so yeah, that's effective for identifying what you want,

but it may not actually be effective

for helping you to meet the goal,

to get the job done.

So colleagues of mine at New York University

have probed, "Well, why, why is that?

Why is just thinking about what you want in your life

and sort of putting yourself vicariously into those shoes,

imagining what my life will be like

if I can accomplish everything on this list,

why doesn't that work?"

Well, first of all, "Does it work?"

The answer is no, "And why does it not work?"

Because what happens,

these colleagues, Gabriele Oettingen

and her research team have found

is that going through and dreaming about

or, "Visualizing how great my life will be

when I get X, Y and Z done,"

that is like a goal satisfied.

"I have identified what it is that I want,

I have experienced it, even if just in an imaginary way,

I've had that positive experience of thinking about,

well, how great my life is going to be

when I get this thing done,"

and they start to sort of rest on their laurels.

She's actually measured systolic blood pressure

and heart rate,

and they found that people who do that,

who go through that experience of,

"Visualizing how great my life will be

when I get X, Y and Z done,"

their systolic blood pressure,

the bottom number on your blood pressure reading, decreases.

Okay, now, I'm all about finding ways to relax,

especially in New York, right?

You're constantly living at a high level of stimulation,

and so like, "Cool, great,

so maybe I should just think about

how awesome my life will be

when I get my bucket list done,"

but motivation scientists know that systolic blood pressure

is actually an indicator of our body's readiness

to get up and act, to do something.

Now, that can be the going out for a walk,

going out for a run, hitting the gym,

it can also be things like doing math problems,

[laughing] right?

Even if it's something that's just mental,

systolic blood pressure actually goes up

in anticipation of your body or your mind

needing to do something,

taking the first steps on a goal.

So then it helps us to understand of like,

"Okay, if I've just created this dream board,

this vision board, and put myself psychologically

in that space of a goal satisfied,

why is it bad that blood pressure goes down?"

Because it means your body is chilling out,

it's like, "All right, cool,

I just accomplished something pretty major," right?

"I actually now don't have the physiological resources

at the ready to take the first step right now

to do something about that."

So that was a pretty monumental finding

for motivation scientists,

to understand that creating these dream boards,

these vision boards, or to-do lists,

might actually backfire,

because it in and of itself

is the creation of a goal and the satisfaction of the goal,

and then people understandably give themselves

some time to just enjoy that positive experience.

- So much for "The Secret".

- [Emily] Yeah, exactly, [laughing] exactly.

- I guess now "The Secret" folks will come after me

with pitchforks, but. - I try to never

say the name, [laughing] right?

For that reason. - Well, I'm not afraid

to say the name, I mean,

I imagine that certain strategies

might work for other people,

but everything you're saying, again,

is consistent with what we know

about the physiology of dopamine circuits for motivation.

I have a good friend who perhaps incidentally, perhaps not,

is a cardiologist at a major university,

said that one of the major errors that people make

with book writing and completion

is they will tell people they're going to write a book

and people will say,

"Oh, you definitely should write a book,

everyone's going to love your book,"

and they never end up writing it.

And his theory is that they get so much dopamine reward

from that immediate feedback,

with all the protection of never having the book criticized,

that they never write the book.

I'm sure there are exceptions to this,

but I guess it raises the question,

what's the better strategy?

- Yeah, so I'm not saying

that people who enjoy dream board creation

should stop what they're doing,

that's not the take-home message here.

- Nightmare board. - [laughing] Oh,

definitely not that, no. - Okay, okay.

- There's enough anxiety and fear in the world,

we don't need to encourage more of it.

But the process of goal setting

shouldn't stop with articulating what the goal is.

So at that same point that we're trying to figure out,

"What do we want to do,

what is my vision for the future?"

in those planning sessions,

we need to simultaneously think about

a couple of other things.

One is how are we going to get there?

So take it out of the abstract,

take it out of this idyllic visual iconography

and start thinking about the practical day to day.

We need to break it down into more manageable goals,

not just, "My 10-year plan for myself,"

but, "My two-week plan,

what can I accomplish in the next two weeks

and the two weeks after

that's going to set me on the right trajectory?"

That's probably not surprising

to anybody [laughing] who's been thinking about,

"How do I set goals better?"

Plan big picture, think big picture abstractly,

but then also break it down more concretely,

that's probably not surprising,

but it's an important aspect of the goal setting process.

Then, again, Gabriele Oettingen in my department

has identified a third often overlooked

or underappreciated stage that has to happen

in the goal setting process,

and that's thinking about the obstacles

that stand in your way of success,

and that, it will actually help improve motivation

in the long run.

And sometimes people think that that is counterintuitive,

"You're saying if I want to increase my motivation,

have more motivation,

then I need to think about how hard it's going to be,

all the ways that I'm going to fail?

How is that going to jazz me up?

How's that going to help me get through when things get hard?"

But it does because it's like coming up with a plan B,

a plan C, plan D,

in advance of actually experiencing that.

If you were on a boat and the boat started to sink,

that's not the time

you want to start looking for life jackets.

You already want to know where one is

so you can go to it right away.

And it's the same thing with goal setting,

is that you want to know, "What am I working towards?

How am I going to get there?

And if I experience this obstacle,

here's what I'm going to do about it."

You may never experience that obstacle,

but if you do, you're probably going to be shy on time,

thin on resources,

maybe experiencing an anxiety that hijacks your brain

so you're not functioning

at that optimal level of judgment and decision making.

You want to already have the snap next step in place

so you can just hop to it, right?

We're not going to do our best thinking

when we're in crisis mode,

but we don't have to if we have already used

our resources in advance to come up with

that plan B or that plan C.

Michael Phelps, incredible athlete, right?

This is something that he and his coach

have routinely incorporated into their training.

So I love this story that, back in 2008,

he was hot for the first time on the international stage.

It was the Beijing Olympics,

Michael Phelps was on the brink of doing something

that no one else in the history of the Olympic Games

has ever done,

which was win eight gold medals in a single Olympiad.

At the time of this story,

he had already won seven

and he had just the 200 fly in front of him

before he could do what no one else has ever done,

win the eighth gold medal.

And the fly is his thing, right?

This should've been easy, a no-brainer,

he's going to win this, he's going to break Olympic history.

As soon as he dove into the pool,

his goggles started to leak.

And by the time he had done three lengths of the pool,

he just had to flip around

and come back to the starting line slash finish line,

back to the edge.

By the time that happened,

his goggles were completely filled with water

and he was swimming blind.

I would've panicked,

I would've sunk to the bottom of the pool,

I wouldn't have even been in the pool to be honest,

I'm not a swimmer, definitely not going to be in the Olympics,

but for him, he didn't, it wasn't a moment of panic,

like it probably would've been

for nearly every other person in that situation,

because he had foreshadowed that kind of possible failure.

He had imagined that obstacle hitting him in advance,

and not even just imagined it, but practiced it,

"What will we do?"

He routinely practiced swimming with his goggles

not fully secured on his face,

his coach notoriously would rip the goggles off of his head,

smash 'em on the ground

for maybe dramatic effect or something,

so that he didn't even have any goggles

possible to grab as he's in practice.

So because he had foreshadowed that possibility

and the solution, "If my goggles start to leak,

then I will do," in his case,

"start counting my strokes,

then I'll make it through."

He knew exactly how many strokes it would take from him

to get from one end of the pool to the other,

he started counting his strokes.

He won that race, the 200 fly,

he won his eighth gold medal

and he'd go on to win 15 more in his career.

So we might not all be swimmers,

we might not all aspire to Olympic-level performance,

but I love that example

because I think it helps sort of demystify

or give us an alternative perspective on the importance

and the motivational reasons

why thinking about obstacles in advance,

thinking about the ways, the two, three, four ways

that your plan might go awry

is actually effective at helping us to overcome the obstacle

that might otherwise lead us to throw in the towel.

- That's a beautiful example.

I'm going to springboard off that example

to ask a question that has also been on my mind,

which is, is there really anything special about vision?

Because in the example you just gave,

it was indeed vision that Michael Phelps was deprived of

and it was counting strokes.

Counting is another form of incremental measurement,

in the nervous system, obviously.

There are others, they could be the sensation

of the hands smacking the water

or breaking the surface of the water,

so there are any number of different variables

or metrics that one could use.

I could imagine that setting out on a,

let's say, a three-mile run,

which, for me, is a decent-distanced run,

it's one I do a few times a week,

I'm also not a runner,

but I try and complete some runs a few times a week,

at very slow pace,

just for my health. [Emily laughing]

I could count every step,

that would be kind of exhausting,

but if I knew that three miles was,

I'm going to estimate here, I don't know,

a couple thousand steps,

I could count backward, I could count forward,

I could count every 10.

I confess, I spend every morning

trying to find sunlight to get sun in my eyes

to set my circadian rhythm,

and I do 100 jumping jacks.

So I'm the guy that people

are looking at strange on the street.

[Emily laughing] But sometimes I count

every 10, sometimes I count backwards,

sometimes I count forward.

Is there any indication that it matters

or is it simply that we attach some sort of meaning

to that increment and the mode of reaching that increment?

Because it does seem like

there's something special about vision,

and we could maybe dive into a little bit more why that is,

but at a very basic level,

how broadly or finally should one set the increments,

and does it matter if you're counting steps

or counting strokes,

maybe it's every other song,

you're going to listen to an entire album.

That's something that I don't know if people do anymore.

[Emily laughing] Or you're going to listen

to a whole playlist,

and then listen to it again,

and you're going to run as long as the playlist

is completed twice,

you can obviously see what I'm getting at,

but I know people are going to want to implement these tools.

And I have to guess that the nervous system

is somewhat indiscriminent when it comes to these things,

but that there might also be some specificity.

- I think vision is special, and I think you do too,

and for a variety of reasons.

When you start, you can really nerd out

on how cool the brain is

and how cool vision is within the brain.

And when you do, then you start to find some things

that make vision unique, right?

More real estate, more neurological cortex real estate

is taken up by the visual sense than any other sense,

more than taste, touch, smell, right?

Vision gets more real estate,

gets more neurological processing space

than any other sense, why is that?

Well, because evolution has led us

to prioritize the visual experience.

There's some cool illusions

where maybe somebody's mouth

is doing something different than what you're hearing,

when people sort of create these weird tricks

that might go on YouTube and go viral,

and people are trying to figure out, "What did I hear?

What did I see his mouth doing?"

And what comes up is that people prioritize

what they see over what they're hearing

when the two are incompatible or kind of out of sync.

- Every time. - Yeah, every time, right?

If you have to bet on it,

bet on what it is that you're looking at

rather than what you're seeing.

And why is that?

Well, [sighing] I guess, a couple other things too, right?

We can see super far, you can see a flickering candle

on a horizon if it was a totally clear sky

several miles away.

You can see the International Space Station

floating up in the night sky, right?

Hundreds of miles away,

our eyes are amazing.

And we prioritize what we see,

and I think that's because we never,

we rarely [laughing] get the experience

of having our visual experience second guessed.

Oftentimes, we're having a conversation

maybe in a loud restaurant

and we know that we didn't hear the person, right?

And so we say like, "Oh, did you say that?"

Or like, "Oh, I thought you said this,"

and they're like, "No, I didn't say that," right?

So people will correct us when our ears get it wrong,

or we're tasting something amazing

and we can't quite figure out what spices were in here,

and so we know that our tongue

isn't quite picking up the taste the right way,

and that's why we read the menu

to see what are the ingredients or we ask the chef,

like, "What did you put in this?

It tastes amazing."

So we know that our tongue is getting it wrong,

or you might be touching something

and you look at the tag to see what sort of textile

was used in this really amazing piece of clothing

that you're looking to buy.

So we know that our sense of touch

isn't quite getting it right.

But rarely do we have that experience

of having our eyes get updated,

where we're looking at something,

"Oh, I think I'm looking at my mom.

Oh, no, actually, it was actually my husband."

Okay, that never happens, [laughing] right?

That we have gotten vision as wrong

as we might get any other thing

that we're experiencing through any other sense.

We trust our visual experience,

we have a sort of a naive realism

that what we see reflects the world the way it actually is,

because it's never really fully tested,

we never get the input or the feedback

that you've seen something wrong,

until a visual illusion pops up on social media, right?

Like the dress example,

or the last week or so,

there's been that horse-seal-lion drawing

that's been all over social media too, "What do you see?"

"I see a horse," someone says, "I see a seal,"

and then chaos erupts,

or, "I thought the dress was blue,"

"No, I thought it was gold."

I don't remember the options 'cause I see it as blue,

so, [laughing] right? [Andrew laughing]

And it's dividing up families and friendships

because you've seen something

that the other person just literally cannot see.

And that's why we love those examples

when they pop up in social media when they do,

is because it defies all of our previous expectations.

If this interests you,

there's a really amazing visual artist, Anish Kapoor,

who plays with these ideas too,

and his installations are just fascinating.

I saw one at a museum once,

where I walked down this long hall

and it's just a big black rectangle

that's painted on the wall.

And I was like, "This guy's super famous, what the hell?

It's just a big black rectangle painted on the wall.

What is this about, what a hoax? [laughing]

This museum paid how much, what?" or whatever.

But then as you get closer, you get closer,

and your eyes start to settle in

and they adapt to the different visual lighting,

you realize it's not a black square painted on the wall,

it's a huge hole he's carved into the wall,

and there is a whole other world

that's back behind there that you can't see right away,

until your eyes adapt to the different lighting conditions.

- Beautiful. - It's amazing,

yeah. - As a vision scientist,

I have to see, where is this exhibit?

- It's not up right now,

there was a retrospective several years ago

that was done in Sydney,

but his work is all over the place.

- Great. - So Anish Kapoor,

definitely worth looking up,

because, like the dress example,

or the horse-seal-lion drawing,

or artists like Anish Kapoor's work,

that is a moment that gives us

a different unexpected insight about the world.

That it challenges us to see something

that we hadn't seen before,

or it induces, or tricks us into seeing something

that we wouldn't have otherwise have seen.

And so it's those rare moments

that I think are actually really important

for understanding what do our eyes normally do?

Because we wouldn't find these examples so surprising,

so engaging, so shocking,

if we had routinely gotten the experience

of realizing we're not seeing the world the way that it is.

So that is why I think vision is special,

and why it can be thought of as a tool

that we can add to our toolkit

for how to better accomplish our goals.

I'm not saying that we should just only focus on

imagining the world through an attentional spotlight,

but maybe that's something that we can employ strategically

on occasion when we think it's going to best help us,

when we need an extra little push to cross

that literal or metaphorical finish line,

but it doesn't have to be the only tactic that we use,

just like it's not bad to use vision boards,

but let's use something else also.

It's not bad to talk to ourselves in encouraging ways,

but let's try adding another tool to our tool belt

in case that's not enough to get the job done.

So I do think that there's great power

in thinking about our visual experience

alongside other tactics that we might use

for meeting our goals.

And another one of those tactics

might be like the numerics that you're talking about,

"Do I think about my jumping jacks in terms of groups of 10

or as a set of 100?"

You do it routinely,

so you might be able to set a goal of 100

and have that sustain you through number 60, number 70,

when maybe it's starting to get harder,

but for somebody who's just starting out

and wants to be able to make it to 100,

that's probably not going to work,

that could be quite challenging for them

if it's the first time that they're trying it.

And so instead, setting those micro goals of groups of 10

is going to be useful,

because as we start to get to number eight or nine,

or number 88 or 89, and it's really getting hard,

we need that extra little hedonic hit

of pleasure of accomplishment,

the micro dopamine rush

that you might get by hitting another decade milestone,

another group-of-10 milestone.

And once we get that little hit of pleasure,

excitement or self-congratulations,

that might be enough to sustain us

through the next challenging physical obstacle,

the next group of 10 that we might experience.

So there isn't any prescription that I would give

and say, "Every person should decide

that 25 jumping jacks is the goal."

No, we have to be idiosyncratic

and introspect about, "Where are we at with this goal,

this thing that I'm trying to accomplish?"

and set those goals realistically,

but inspirationally as well.

We want to set a goal that will challenge us,

but isn't impossible.

We don't want to set goals that are too easy,

because we're not going to trick ourselves

into feeling so great about doing one jumping jack, okay?

Great, I'm pretty sure most people,

if that's a goal, they can do one,

so are you going to feel so great when you hit that goal?

No, because it was too easy,

you didn't have any doubt that you could do that one,

but what about 25?

Okay, yeah, I might feel pretty good about that.

Well, what about the next group of 25

and now I'm at 50?

Those are goals that might seem

just beyond the brink of what's possible,

but I will feel good when I hit that,

and that's going to give me the next sort of boost of energy

that I'm going to need to go a little bit further,

either that time or the next time.

- Yeah, I think vision is special,

again, I'm strongly biased here.

The reason I initially learned about your work was,

well, now you have this amazing book,

but at the time, there wasn't the book,

there were just the scientific papers,

and of course, upon which the book rests,

and those papers are really important,

but was the relationship between vision

and obviously is our sense of space,

but how the sense of space and time are related.

And to make the idea quite simple for those listening,

when you narrow your visual window, you're measuring,

the time bin also gets smaller, right?

Which makes sense when you hear it,

whereas if you take on a huge visual landscape,

you're actually carving up time differently.

It's sort of like moving from a slow frame rate

to a fine frame rate,

slow-motion camera is actually taking

a lot more snapshots, right?

So you're measuring distance over time more finely.

And so, whereas strobe would be the other example,

which a strobe is very low frequency,

so you're going here, here, here,

as opposed to slow motion, right?

Strobe gives a course view into the time domain

and high-speed photography gives a fine view

into the time domain.

So I'm almost certain,

without any knowledge of underlying data,

but knowledge of the mechanism,

that I'm almost certain, if not certain,

that by placing a narrow visual aperture,

we change the way we perceive time.

Now, I have a question, and to be honest,

I know the answer in advance,

but I'd love for you to tell us

a bit about how some of this works still further in reverse,

meaning how unfit people view the world

versus how fit people view the world,

or how unmotivated people visually see the world,

as opposed to highly motivated people.

You talked about these elite runners,

you gave them Michael Phelps's example,

but maybe you could describe that study,

I think it's a particularly important one,

mostly because, yes, it identifies

perhaps the physiological or psychological differences

between motivated and unmotivated,

or fit and unfit people,

but it also provides a path to remedy that.

- Mm-hmm, yeah, out of my lab,

but also out of several other labs,

there's been work looking at that relation

between states of the body and visual experiences.

They haven't necessarily tried to integrate

the motivation science element to it,

but they were looking to see

do visual experiences change

as a function of different states of our body?

So they've looked at people who experience chronic fatigue,

the elderly, people who are overweight,

those that are wearing heavy backpacks,

and so who are sort of put into that experience

of being overweight,

what happens to their perceptions of the environment?

Well, what they find is that distances look further

to those that are overweight, chronically tired,

older rather than younger,

weighted down with extra baggage,

distances look farther and hills look steeper.

We've done some of those studies too,

where we try to give people more energy,

or deprive them of energy,

and see does that change their perception of space.

And we did that by sort of a classic technique

of a double-blind study

where the participant doesn't really know

what they're experiencing.

- I thought you were going to say, "A double espresso."

- Oh. [laughing]

That is also a good psychological experience to give people.

Yeah, so a double-blind experiment

where the participant doesn't really know the full extent

of what they're doing or what they're experiencing,

and the researcher who's interacting with them also doesn't.

They do this a lot in medical studies,

you give somebody a drug

and you give somebody a placebo, a sugar pill,

and then importantly, nobody really knows

who's got what until you've analyzed all the data

and the results are revealed

that these are the people that had the drug,

the active agent,

same idea in the psychological research.

In this case, what we did was give people Kool-Aid to drink.

And for some people, that Kool-Aid was sweetened with sugar,

an actual caloric entity, it could give them energy.

Other people drank Kool-Aid sweetened with Splenda.

So, yeah, it's sweet,

but it actually doesn't have any caloric value,

you're not giving people energy,

you're just giving them that experience of sweetness.

Now, some people, of course,

are really good at identifying

what's real sugar and what's Splenda,

but when you put it into Kool-Aid, a pretty noxious powder,

it actually masked it for everybody

and nobody had any idea.

- 'Cause it tasted like garbage

to everybody. - It tastes like garbage,

yeah. [laughing] - Sorry, Kool-Aid.

I mean, I'm sure there are many people that love Kool-Aid,

I guess the sales of Kool-Aid will reveal the data.

- [laughing] Yeah, I grew up in Nebraska actually,

where Kool-Aid is from,

it originated in Nebraska. - Oh.

- So I do feel like I'm betraying my roots slightly

by casting some shade on Kool-Aid,

but that's how it worked,

is that we asked them to guess what they got,

we tested them afterwards and they were wrong.

So nobody's able to guess with accuracy,

"What was your drink sweetened with?"

Which is important because they were blind,

the way that scientists use it,

they didn't know what it was that they were drinking.

We give them about 10 to 15 minutes

for that sugar to metabolize,

and we measured their circulating blood glucose levels

to make sure that we had, in fact,

given their body circulating glucose,

energy that they might use in the next activity.

And the researcher, again,

didn't know whether they had just served sugar or Splenda,

then we asked people to estimate distance.

So we gave some people more energy,

or we kept others sort of at

whatever their normal level was,

and what we found is that those people

who didn't even know it

but who had been given more energy

by drinking Kool-Aid sweetened with sugar,

perceived their space as more constricted,

that visual illusion of proximity was induced,

they felt that their finish line,

again, in the context of an exercise task,

was closer to them.

So in just the same way that these other physiology labs,

vision science, physiology labs,

found that people who are chronically tired,

who don't feel like they have as much energy,

or those that are physically weighted down

and for whom moving within an environment is more costly,

we could create that experience for people.

We did an experimental version of that,

that if you have more energy, the world looks easier,

the distances to a finish line don't look as far.

So that was some of the experimental evidence that we had

to show that people's states of their body

do impact their visual experience.

Now, I'm a motivation researcher,

so for me, the big question is,

well, what's the point of that study then,

besides just showing this connection between the body

and the eyes and the visual experience?

We think that that's fundamental to one of the reasons

that people experience difficulty when they're exercising,

when it's really harder for your body,

because of its physical state, to move within a space,

you might say like, "Well, why don't they just go exercise?"

Because the world looks harder to them,

because that distance that they're supposed to walk

because a doctor tells them to,

or that a partner encourages them to,

or a hill that they should hike up

because someone told them

that would be good for their health,

it looks more challenging to them

than it does to somebody who's in better physical health.

Now, if it looks that way, if it looks harder,

if it feels like it might be harder,

then psychologically, we know that it is.

When you have set yourself up, psychologically, mentally,

for that kind of failure experience,

like, "I don't know that I have the resources

to get this job, this looks really hard,"

you're already motivationally in a place

for this task to be closer to impossible for you.

So to put it all together then,

what we know is that people whose bodies

might make it more challenging for them to exercise

are seeing the world in a more challenging way

and that is having these downstream motivational

and psychological effects

that makes it less likely for them

to try to take on the task in the first place

or to experience it as harder

than other people would or do.

- Is the solution the same, however?

Meaning, if these people are taught

to adjust their visual goal line

or to set a visual spotlight on an intermediate goal,

can they overcome some of this challenge that they face

simply by virtue of their skewed perception?

- Yes, so in all of the studies that we have done,

looking at that connection

between this narrowed focus of attention

and improvements in exercise,

we do not find that it only works

for the people who are in shape

or that it backfires for people who are out of shape,

it works for everybody.

This is a strategy that everybody can adopt,

because it's just simply about like,

"What do you allocate attentional resources to?

What do you sort of ignore, and what do you focus on?"

And that visually induces

the same kind of illusion for everybody,

regardless of whether you're overweight,

or you're at your target weight,

or if you're struggling to get there,

or you've already accomplished where you want to be,

that visual illusion can be induced for everybody

and it has the same kinds of consequences.

- Terrific, earlier I made a joke about double espresso,

but now I'll make a serious statement about double espresso,

which is that it contains caffeine

and caffeine as a stimulant,

like all other stimulants,

cause a change in our visual world.

The most salient one

is the one that police officers look for,

or parents suspecting that their kids

have ingested substances of any kind look for,

which is if somebody's pupils are unusually large

for a given visual environment,

that is an indication of high levels of autonomic arousal.

In the street drug translation of this,

people who take amphetamine or cocaine

will have very big pupils.

People who are very relaxed have small pupils.

However, everyone should know that pupil size

also is dynamically regulated

by how bright a visual environment,

so there are multiple things controlling pupil size.

However, we know that when we are very stressed

or very aroused in any way, positive or negative,

the pupils get big,

but within the visual system,

what that equates to is a narrowing of the visual aperture.

So rather than ingesting sugar,

which I'm guessing most of the world,

certainly the US needs to ingest less sugar,

at least that's what we're hearing.

I'm sure there are a few sugar sucro-nistas out there,

sucrose-anistas. [Emily laughing]

Who will also come after me with pitchforks,

but let's face it, most people will probably be better off

ingesting less simple sugar,

but caffeine is a great motivator

because of the internal sense of arousal,

but it also narrows our visual window.

I could imagine using healthy amounts of caffeine

combined with maybe even blinders

of the sort that horses wear,

maybe like a hoodie and a hat. [Emily laughing]

Maybe even blinders in order to get over

some of those more challenging milestones.

Is there any evidence that people are doing this without,

well, obviously people are doing it

without knowledge of how it works,

but are there any studies looking at how adrenaline,

or epinephrine, or any other stimulants impact motivation?

- I don't know, honestly, yeah.

- [Andrew] And energy drinks are a big thing now.

- Yeah, yeah, for sure, they are,

and if you actually are more physiologically aroused,

or jazzed, or whatever, amped up,

or you just think you are, in our studies,

we have found that they work in the same way,

that it can produce the same kinds of consequences.

And I like that because it tells us

you can actually change the state of your body

to induce these kinds of experiences,

or you can just think that, [laughing]

you can trick yourself,

you can placebo effect yourself out

and produce the same kinds of effects.

I had to give up coffee like 12 years ago,

and not for any. - I'm so sorry.

- I love the taste, [laughing] and so decaf is my jam,

but I can't drink the caffeine,

because it didn't actually do the thing

that it does for so many other people,

like make me feel more energized and more awake,

I just got sweaty and jittery

and anxious and I couldn't focus.

- Yeah, some people

who already have a fairly high baseline level

of attention and motivation,

they find that it puts the autonomic seesaw

too far in the sympathetic tone.

- Yeah. - Yeah.

- And I happened to marry the same kind of person,

he also can't drink caffeine, but loves the taste of coffee.

The interesting thing is that we both have to have coffee

in the morning to feel like we're ready to go for the day.

So it's just part of our routine [laughing] or whatever,

to have that taste and have that sensation

to feel like I'm ready to take on the day,

even though, I mean, yeah,

decaf still has some caffeine in it,

but we're not drinking that much of it

to probably actually create

a caffeinated experience in our body,

but we're tricking ourselves psychologically

into doing that thing that,

in years past, used to work for us both.

So I think that's something to keep in mind,

like you might have a hoodie that you can wear

to induce that visual illusion,

or you can take advantage of the power of your mind.

At the end of the day, I'm a psychologist,

and I believe that we have some non-zero power

over what our mind is doing, what we're thinking about,

what we allocate our attention to,

that can do the same kind of thing that a hoodie might do

or that a cup of caffeine might do.

- Mm-hmm, I completely agree,

the visual aperture is under our conscious control.

That's an amazing feature of our visual system,

we can narrow or expand it.

Takes a little bit of practice, I think,

for people to learn how to do this

without moving their head around

to expand their visual aperture and how to narrow it,

but what I always tell people is,

"Just imagine a really troubling text message

or a really exciting text message coming in,

all of a sudden, you forget about the world around you."

So it can be triggered by these outside events

and we can learn how to anchor our visual attention.

I'd love to ask about other kinds of goals,

meaning non-physical goals,

because many people are trying to read more, I would hope,

or learn music, or a language,

or things that really involve cognitive goal lines

or internal goal lines.

Reading one chapter out of a book each night

is a tangible goal,

the other that I've often wondered about are these systems

that allow you to highlight individual lines

or even words on a page,

that's very visual obviously,

and everything else is ruled out except that word,

I've always wished for books

that would naturally highlight each page.

And as I say that, someone will put in the comments,

this has probably existed for 10 years.

[Emily laughing] And I'm just showing

what Luddite I am,

but is there any example or tactic that people could use

to better approach cognitive goals,

of school, work, recreational too,

but that don't exist

in the kind of fitness and sports domain?

- Totally, yeah, so just to shout out to my brother-in-law,

who has done some of that research,

where it does highlight

different parts of words in paragraphs,

and he's found it to be an effective way

for English-as-a-second-language learners to pick it up,

that that is, that tying that vision

to the process of learning language is effective.

And so there's a whole cool body of work

and researchers looking at that,

so you're right about that.

- If you want to mention what he does,

is there a place that people can learn more about that?

We can provide links if.

- Yeah, let me.

Yeah, yeah. [laughing] - Okay, we will provide links

to those resources,

'cause I want those resources. - Yeah, yeah.

- I've been trying to learn a second language

for a long time. - Yeah, cool.

- I speak Spanish pretty weakly,

but I would love to get better at it.

- Oh, yeah. - Okay, I'll approach you

later about that. - My five-year-old son

speaks Spanish better than I do at this point,

so yeah. [laughing] - And clearly,

better than I do too,

thank you. [laughing] - Yeah, yeah,

yeah, so I was thinking that too,

we started this work within the context of exercise,

but of course, that's not people's only goal

that they have in life,

and it isn't mine either,

I have interests outside of improving my exercise game.

A couple years ago, when I was writing the book,

I also had a child,

the same month that I had the opportunity

to pull all this research together

is the same month that my son came to be.

And I started to realize

I became a lot less interesting once he was around,

he was fascinating,

but I was changing diapers and feeding him

and that was it.

People would come over, be like, "What's up?

How have you been?

Tell me something that's going on in your life,"

and all I had to talk about was what was boring?

And I just felt like, "I've lost myself,"

I used to pride myself on crazy adventures

and problems I would get myself in

and I was a great storyteller,

and that, all of a sudden, disappeared

as soon as he came into the world,

because he became my world.

So then I started thinking, like,

"I need to pull back some coolness,

if I ever had it in the first place,

but I need to be a cooler person

than I'm coming across right now,"

so I decided, "I want to learn to play drums,

and I want to be a one-hit wonder as a rockstar drummer.

I only want one song,

'cause I know I'm not going to be able to do more than that."

I'm not coordinated at all,

from the beginning of time,

in fifth grade, I have this really vivid flash bulb memory

of playing basketball for the very first time,

I lost my footing, I knocked into my own teammate,

pushed her out of bounds while she had the ball,

we lost the game and I was not invited back

[laughing] on the team for the next season.

And so that fomented my self-definition of uncoordinated.

I am a musician, but I am not a drummer,

and the idea of coordinating four limbs in real time

was like, "If I could do that, I would be so proud."

So that's a goal that I set for myself,

at the same time that my son came into this world,

when I was also trying to think about goal setting

and how to improve my ability

and all of our ability to get a job done

when you're faced with some pretty big obstacles.

So I got to practice all these techniques

that we're talking about on myself and see for myself,

when I tell people, "Hey, try this thing,

narrowed focus of attention,

does it help with something like becoming a better drummer?"

And the answer is yeah,

these tactics at least work for me,

sometimes, under some circumstances,

and they do for other people who try them

for other goals that aren't necessarily about exercise.

One that I found particularly helpful

was overcoming my bad memory,

that everybody's memories are faulty, right?

Everybody has sort of a warped perception of the past,

it might be skewed more positively than maybe we deserve,

or it might be skewed more negatively

if you feel that what looms large in your mind,

as you reflect on something from the past,

or the mistakes that you've made,

or the social faux pas that you had,

or challenges that you faced at work

when you got in trouble with a boss or with a colleague,

if that's what really stands out in your mind,

or the good side of all of those possibilities,

we probably aren't getting the world right.

And that is something that our brain has evolved,

to give us a faulty memory,

to level and sharpen, to not encode and remember

and be able to recall everything that we've experienced

with accuracy and precision.

And that's a problem

when it comes to assessing our own goal progress.

When we want to be our own accountant

and try to determine, "How are we doing?

If I want to become a drummer,

am I on track for getting there before X,

before my time runs out?

Am I going to make it or not?"

And I think that's an experience,

whether they want to be a drummer or not,

that a lot of people can resonate with,

of trying to determine, "Is this trajectory,

is this rate of progress going to get the job done

by X amount of time?

Will I have my swimsuit body by summer?"

Or, "Will I save enough for retirement

by the time I hit 65?"

For these goals where time is involved

and there is a deadline,

we do take moments to assess our trajectory.

And if we just rely on our memory,

we're probably going to do a bad job

of assessing that trajectory,

of knowing whether we're on pace

to meeting our deadline.

And I found that to be the case as I was thinking about,

"Am I actually going to be able to learn this song?

I mean, I know that it's going a lot slower

than it probably would for anybody else,

but to give myself a deadline and a commitment."

I decided I was going to put on a show,

I was going to invite everybody I knew

and also people I didn't know,

and I was going to play my one song for them, so.

- This was while writing a book

and having just had a child. - Yeah, yeah.

- Yeah. - So when you read the book,

you'll see my story,

and it's the real truth of it.

I mean, I did play that show and it was fine.

And then, because I wrote about it in the book,

then some other opportunities

to play it publicly have come up.

And it's like, "All right, I told people I can play drums,

I better show them

that I actually still can play this song."

- [Andrew] I love it.

- Yeah, so that that's been fun.

I have become a one-hit wonder,

if you ask me to play the song, like, "Encore,"

it's just going to get that same song a second time,

so literally one-hit wonder.

But so in the process of figuring out,

"Am I going to be able to play this show?

I sent out invitations, the date is committed,

people are coming to listen to my one song,

God bless them, how's it going to go?"

And it felt awful, it just felt like,

"I am not making progress here,"

because there's a lot more things

that actually are pressing, right?

Like the kid does need to get fed,

I do have to go to my day job,

the editor is asking for the next draft of this book,

and that is going to take precedence,

like it does for so many people,

that things command your bandwidth,

even when you have this goal that you've committed to

and that you've got on the books.

And so I just felt this looming anxiety

about this goal that would require,

didn't have to be daily practice,

but you can't cram that kind of a goal,

it does take committed investment

for a sustained period of time.

And so I had this looming anxiety

that I'm not making good enough progress,

but that's because I was relying on my memory

and my brain to recall, like,

"How many times did you practice?

What was it like the last time you practiced?

What was it like when you tried to play this bit

or this riff like two weeks ago,

have you gotten any better since then?"

And it just felt like, "No, I haven't practiced enough.

I don't remember when the last time I played was,

but it definitely doesn't feel like I'm getting any better."

Then I thought, "You know what?

I should stop relying on my brain to tell me,

where am I at and am I on an upward slope here?

I need to look at the data."

I love data, scientists love data,

so I started to collect data on myself.

What I did was download this app

that a friend had told me about called the Reporter App,

there's lots of these kinds of things out there.

Basically, it just sets up your phone

to randomly ping you

with whatever questions you want your phone to ask.

It records your answers, you can download the data,

you can make pretty graphs to see, "What's my change

and how I've answered these questions over time?"

So I did that for a month,

for a month, I had my phone ask me a couple of times a day,

well, maybe twice a day really, "Did you practice,

since last time I asked you," my phone says,

"did you practice?"

Mostly it was no,

and if yes, then it would funnel

a couple of other questions,

like, "How did you do, how do you feel?

Check a couple of different emotion words now

about your experience when you played."

And I did that for a month,

after a month, went into my office, downloaded the data,

and first took stock before I looked at the numbers,

like, "How do I think I did over the last month?"

And I thought, "Same as every other month,

I didn't really get anywhere.

Yeah, I practiced, but I still feel awful."

And I cried, I cried having to practice.

I was upset with myself for setting this goal

and feeling so anxious about it.

All I remember is that I cried,

cried too much about this personal conquest

that wouldn't matter to anybody else.

Honestly, it really doesn't matter

in the scope of things anyway,

I'm not going to become a drummer professionally,

so who cares if I embarrass myself publicly?

But what I found from the data

was my memory was totally wrong,

I actually had practiced far more times than I remembered,

and when I looked at my emotion words that I used,

it was a clear upward trajectory.

Yeah, I did cry,

that part I hadn't misremembered or made up,

but by the end of that month,

I had gotten a compliment from my husband,

who actually is a drummer,

and said like, "Hey, that wasn't that bad."

And then there was one expletive,

"You were effing amazing [laughing]

at that one thing you'd been practicing at."

But like, "Okay, fine, he's my husband, right, is he just?"

So at the moment, it didn't really feel that great,

and I downplayed it, and as a result,

it didn't stick in my brain, right?

I remember how stupid it felt that I cried

because I can't make progress,

and I downplayed in my mind

the thing that actually should've been

a legitimate indicator that progress was being made.

So all of which is to say,

I needed to collect that data on myself

and to look at it objectively, accurately and completely,

because my brain wasn't doing that for me.

That visual experience [laughing] of downloading that data

and looking at what was my actual experience

gave me better insight

as I was trying to assess the trajectory of my progress,

I became a more accurate accountant of my own progress,

which is important for setting goals

or resetting them when you need to calibrate

in light of what's left to do

and how much time do you have to do it in?

- I love it, so basically, if I understand correctly,

when the intermediate goals

of say daily practice, or twice-a-day practice,

or reading, or math, et cetera,

are not a visual goal line,

it really does help to visualize

some aspect related to that non-visual goal line,

in this case, the Reporter App was a useful tool.

I've never heard of it, I plan to use it,

I'm sure a number of people will be interested in it,

sounds like there are others out there,

but that's the one that you found most useful?

- Yeah, yeah, there's another one too

that is even more visual than that,

[laughing] than the Reporter App,

although that has visual components

and is really effective if you like data

and want to collect numbers on yourself or your experience,

there's another one called the 1 Second Everyday app.

This is really awesome because the app is a mechanism

to record one second of your life.

There's such an awesome community of people

that just live by this and love having these experiences,

and the creator of it I got to a chance to talk with,

and he has done this,

he's taken a one-second video of some aspect of his life,

every day, for, I don't know, 12 years,

13 years or something. - One second?

- Yeah, one second.

And then what the app does is smash 'em together

and give you a chronology of what your year,

or your month, or your last decade of life has been like,

and presents it as like a streamlined video for you.

So you just see these flashes

of your life over however long you tell the app

to create a montage for you.

And so when you see these videos that people have made,

especially those that have been doing it

for a really long time, it's fascinating.

I did that for myself too, I tried it,

one second of today's drumming performance, another second,

it's not enough to capture,

"Am I actually doing a good job of drumming?"

or, "What's my trajectory for drumming?"

But the guy who made it says

one of the most awesome one-second videos that he ever made

is of a brick wall.

I was like, "Well, you didn't need a video of that,

what's the wall doing?"

It's not crumbling,

it's not in earthquake land or something like that,

it's just slightly jittery, one second of a brick wall.

And I was like, "How is that motivating

or exciting to you, why is that?

You've been doing this for 13 years every day, one second,

why is that the one second that matters to you most?"

And he says, "Because when it comes up in my montage,

it reminds me of a really horrific moment in my family.

That was the first wall that I saw

when I walked out of the room

having heard that my sister-in-law

had this awful, awful experience,

her intestines started to twist up on themselves

and knot up,

and she was on the brink of death.

And we had just found this out,

she had just gotten into the hospital,

they diagnosed this issue that required immediate surgery.

And our family was there to hear about this,

and we were all stunned that she might die,

like, 'Right now, she might die.'

And that's the first thing that I saw,

and it reminds me of how precious life is,

how important family is

and how the rest of whatever

we were doing that day didn't matter,

because we all needed to be here together right now."

And that is all of this emotion and purpose in life

is conjured up or reminded

when he looks at one second of a brick wall

as it pops into his video feed.

So if you're visually oriented

and you do want ways to remember,

"What was life like,

what has my year in review, what does it look like?"

that's an awesome app, 1 second Everyday,

that can help you do that.

- These are great recommendations.

And a couple of reflections,

first of all, the brick wall example

is a beautiful way of highlighting

this other feature of the visual system,

which is that the brain largely thinks in symbols,

it's very efficient,

it batches entire experiences into symbols,

and in this case, the brick wall

can be attached to a whole set of experiences

that are very meaningful to this individual,

that brick walls don't mean that,

or didn't mean that to me until hearing this.

So I think that it highlights

the fact that the actual symbol is less relevant

than what we attach to that symbol,

but that symbols are so efficient

that even in a one-second view of something,

we can attach to it, for better or for worse.

The other is that I'm a absolute, almost rabid proponent

of people getting morning sunlight in their eyes

as the fundamental layer of setting their circadian rhythms

and sleep and health as a zero-cost practice,

that believe it or not, can be done

any time of year, or anywhere.

[Emily laughing]

But it does take a little bit of effort,

you have to get outside,

you can't do it through a window

or a windshield for it to be efficient,

but it has huge outsize effects on human health,

this has now been demonstrated again and again and again.

And so I'm going to just do a sort of call to action,

if people aren't already doing this,

I'm going to start using the 1 Second app

to record my morning sunlight viewing,

and prove that even through cloud cover,

you're getting more photons than you are indoors

and that it's worthwhile.

I also would love to do this for my next dog,

to go from puppy to full-size dog,

and maybe even to the end, who knows?

Great, these are wonderful tools,

you've given us a huge number of practical tools,

which, frankly, isn't always the case on these podcasts.

We always strive to do science and science-based tools

as our kind of mantra,

but you've given a rich set of tools here to apply.

I just want to briefly backtrack to something,

and then a final question.

Earlier, we were talking about how unfit people

see the world as more challenging,

maybe even hills as steeper, distances as further,

and how shifting people into a state of energy,

either cognitively or through the ingestion of real glucose

to get an energetic lift, or maybe through caffeine

if that's within their practice

and span of healthy behaviors, they could do that.

There's so many people who are suffering from depression,

which one of the key features of depression

is a lack of energy,

even though there can be an anxiety

associated with depression,

I have to wonder whether or not some of these tools

are being deployed or will be deployed

in the context of mental health,

because depression is this vicious loop, right?

People feel a lack of energy and hopelessness,

and then things just look harder,

and so then it just verifies their negative worldview

and it's a downward spiral.

That's why medication, in some cases,

and social sport, et cetera, can be helpful,

because they feel more energized,

the side effects, often, are a problem, however.

Have there been any efforts to implement

some of these visual tools

to create this increase in systolic blood pressure

and a kind of readiness and willingness

to lean into what people perceive as immense challenge?

And if not, for anyone listening,

I know we have a lot of listeners in the mental health space

and in the helping space, so to speak,

I can imagine these are zero cost, right?

We all provide, with people that are sighted,

have the apparati to do it.

Are you aware of any studies like this

or is your laboratory involved in any studies?

'Cause I just see an immense value

of implementing the sorts of tools that you've developed.

- Yeah, we haven't explored those ideas directly.

So call to all the scientists that are out there,

there's a great opportunity to start looking at these tools

within the mental health space, you're right.

Other researchers though have,

not this use of inducing a narrowed attentional focus

and can they now feel more energized to go for a run?

But they have looked at the relationship between anxiety,

depression and visual experience,

and found, over decades,

evidence that people with depression or with anxiety,

what their attention is captured by

within the bigger global surrounding world

are those things that are negative

or reinforcing of their worldview.

Now, that happens for everybody,

that things that are on our mind tend to pop out, [laughing]

that whatever we're thinking about,

we might start seeing some version of it

showing up in the world around us

that captures our attention.

That's an idea called priming,

what we're thinking about might then lead us

to attend to the world,

to see things in a way that aligns

with what we're already thinking about,

it's just that when what we're thinking about

are those depressive, ruminative, anxiety, fearful thoughts,

when that is what is cognitively accessible,

when that's what's going through our mind,

then that's also what captures our visual gaze.

So when we think like, "The world is hard,

the world is full of sadness,"

and that's the thought in our mind,

and then we start seeing the people

with frowns on their faces

or who are experiencing anxiety,

and that's what captures our attention,

even when there's other people around

that might not be seeing the world

or experiencing the world that way,

it becomes reinforcing.

When I think that the world is threatening,

and then I notice the threats that are around me,

that confirms what I'm thinking,

which heightens my anxiety or my fear,

and then it further leads me

to narrowly focus on those elements of the environment

that are aligned with that worldview,

it's really hard to get out of that,

that's where the vicious cycle can come from.

So that has been really well established

within the medical community, this selective attention

relating to states of mental unwellness,

that's been pretty well established.

And so there's been some interventions done

with people that have depression or anxiety,

saying like, "Here's an array,

a photograph of a bunch of different faces.

Yes, it's artificial,

it kind of looks like a page from a yearbook,

a high school yearbook,

but look for the faces that are smiling,

look at the faces that are smiling.

Try right now, spend 10 minutes

having your eyes focus on those

and look at those people,"

that it is an effective intervention

at improving [sighing] people's sense of self-efficacy,

of, "What can I accomplish next?"

They feel a little bit more energized.

It doesn't cure depression, it doesn't cure anxiety.

I mean, these are literal physical afflictions that we have,

so it's not a quick fix,

but it can produce a temporary change

that might be a way to start getting out of that rut.

- Mm-hmm, yeah, and I think nowadays

there's an increasing attention on tools

that will help people orient

as they start to veer towards suicidal depression,

or veer back into a depressive episode, or anxiety episode.

I mean, trying to reverse an entire syndrome

or set of syndromes is far more complicated.

Likewise, in the health space,

just trying to get people to deploy realtime tools

to adjust their anxiety or to exercise more often and so on.

As a kind of a final,

but also kind of a high-level question,

I'm imagining that,

and I plan to use this visual goal setting of spotlighting,

I've been using it actually for some time on runs,

it works really well.

Yesterday, I took a run near the waterfront here,

and I think I did it somewhat incorrectly,

the entire run, I was thinking about

getting back to the statue,

at which I started. - [laughing] Yeah.

- But I did find that I ran fastest in the final 20 meters.

- Cool. - Which, admittedly,

wasn't fast at all,

but it was faster than what preceded it.

[Emily laughing]

So it works and it makes perfect sense as to how it works.

You've done other studies

exploring some of the other features of vision,

like the luminosity, how bright something is

and how people perceive it.

That was in a completely different context,

but is there a kind of a higher level,

a kind of a black belt version

of what we're talking about here,

where not only am I focusing on a specific visual location

as an intermediate or a long-term goal,

or I'm using an app to ask me a question

and tap into how I'm feeling,

create a visual representation of my motivational state,

but that I'm also making my phone as bright as possible,

I'm also trying to take that visual window

and actually pay attention to more of the details

at that location?

Or is it simply a matter of kind of,

in geek speak, visual neuroscience,

we would just call this like low spatial frequency,

just sort of grabbing a black and white snapshot

of something here or there in my mind?

If I attach more detail and effort to the specific thing

that I'm focused on,

is there any evidence that that's more effective?

- It certainly changes what our brains are doing, [laughing]

so how do we define effectiveness?

That's a question for philosophers and that scientists

will always debate. - Will it keep me running?

- Yeah. [laughing] [Andrew laughing]

It will when you use it towards the end of your run,

just like you've picked up on.

Yeah, so there's cool studies that neuroscientists,

not I, not coming from my lab,

that neuroscientists have done

looking at, "What is it doing to your brain

when you've decided that you're going to focus your attention

on this element of the world

and not pay attention to something else?

Is that just sort of tricking your thoughts

or is it doing something different,

to something more basic, more low level?"

And the answer is yes,

so there's an area of the brain,

the fusiform face area,

it's a part of our brain that's really specialized

for making sense of faces.

It's important as a social species

to pay attention to other people,

pay attention to their faces,

what they're trying to communicate through their face,

and so our brain has developed

a really specialized central area for doing that then.

And so these neuroscientists

will present a face to somebody,

but superimposed over that is a house

or something else that is less special [laughing]

to us as a social human species.

And so both of those things,

because it's sort of like both images

are sort of transparent, overlaid over one another,

our eyes are getting both of those images in

and our brain is getting both of those images in,

but we can will ourselves to focus on the house.

"Just really pay attention to the features of the house,

even though everything about that face is still there too,"

or, "Pay attention to the face

and just tell me, what is it that you are deciding

that you want to hold on to,

that you want to look at right now?"

And you can see that the brain is responding to that,

so when people are saying like,

"I'm really seeing that face, the details of the face,

'cause I'm paying attention to the face,"

even though we know their eyes are also looking at

and engaged with the contents of the house

that's right there, smacked on top,

the fusiform face area lights up.

And when they're saying like,

"Nah, I'm really focused on the house now,"

we see activation in the fusiform face area decline

and other areas of the brain's neurological real estate

start to engage.

So yeah, I think there's something to it,

that, at a high level,

our brains are responding to our psychology as well.

And we have that great power to really,

with intention, with practice,

decide, "How do I want to engage with the world?"

And can it produce real change in our bodies

and in the way that we experience the world?

The answer is yes.

- Fantastic, well,

you've given us a ton of mechanistic

and conceptual and practical information,

so I'm speaking for a lot of people

when I say thank you for taking the time

out of your schedule,

amidst kids and running a lab

and teaching at the university and your book,

which we will point people to

and provide a link to, as a wonderful resource,

and we hope to have you back again.

- Thank you so much, it was a great conversation.

- Thank you. - Thanks.

- Thank you for joining me today for our discussion

about motivation, goal seeking

and research-supported tools for achieving your goals

with Dr. Emily Balcetis.

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