Transcript
A (0:00)
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Emily Balcetis. Well, thanks for being here.
B (0:22)
It's my pleasure.
A (0:23)
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. Just to kick things off could tell us just a little bit about goal setting and goal retrieval. What's the deal with vision and motivation? How do those two things link up?
B (0:47)
Totally. When psychologists ask people like, how are you? What are you doing to help make progress on your goals? They say all kinds of things. A couple of things always pop to the top, which is self pep talks, or I remind myself of how important it is to do this job or put up post it notes around to constantly be nagging me about what I need to do. 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, but before things get real, things are challenging and we fall by the wayside. So then, you know, 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. And that's when we started to land on the idea of vision. 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.
A (1:56)
You've published a number of studies in this area, but maybe you could highlight some of the more important findings in the area of how people can adjust their vision in order to meet goals more quickly and more efficiently.
B (2:09)
So, you know, we started thinking about what are the goals that are most important to people, that they struggle with the most important. 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? So one of the first things that I did was go over to Brooklyn. There's a couple armories all around the boroughs here, around New York City. And the one in Brooklyn in particular is now ymca. 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 gonna find some interesting people that are working out there who, as it turns, are some of the fastest runners in the world. Like, you know, one of the people that was in the last Olympics before I showed up, won the gold medal for the 400 meter. I thought, when these people are running, I bet they are, like, 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. So that was surprising. 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 sub goals, like, you know, 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, like a spotlight is shining just on that, or like they have blinders on the sides of their face. That's all they're paying attention to. And I thought, oh, that's something we can play with, right? Like, they are elite and they are accomplished. So then we started thinking, like, okay, what about people who aren't competitive runners? Is this a tactic we can teach people? The answer is yes. You can tell people about what these Olympic athletes are doing. 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. You know, 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. 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 know, 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, you know, 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, 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. Everybody was in the same sort of circumstance, but yet their experience was really different. So we were really excited about that, right, because it meant that this strategy, we could use it on people who are not elite athletes. It could be easily adopted. A quick training session 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.