 I've been fascinated by, and that is rituals. Okay, like we're getting right into it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like extremely fascinated by rituals. Good. I'm a big student of mythology. Okay. Specifically like Joseph Campbell. Yeah, good. And I'm going deep on Joseph Campbell, looking at stuff like Arthur Schopenhauer talks about, but even looking at like modern day military where they have certain ritual practices or even looking at religion where they have ritual practices and looking at like how one ritual can be a catalyst to completely transform someone's perception of reality. And so you wrote this paper, how rituals alter the brain to help us perform better. Okay, I was wondering which paper you're really referring to, but that's it. Yeah, good, good. So I'd love to kind of do a deep dive on this. Yeah, totally. So I'll have to think back now because that's a few years in the middle of my PhD. That was work that I did with a shout out to a student, a former student of mine, Devon Bonk. Devon is now a PhD student in his own right at I think the physical education department, kinesiology department at University of Toronto. So he and I were just brainstorming one day talking about rituals in the context of performance and in performance generally, but in particular with athletes and professional athletes. And so you have, and I'll talk about athletes in a second to sort of set up context, but I remember I was actually talking to one of the lead surgeons, I think it was St. Mike's. She was a cosmetic surgeon, but it wasn't like breast implants and shit like that. It was like people who come have a car accident like burn their body. She will do the cosmetic surgery to help them and skin grafts, et cetera. And we sat down to her coffee and it was really interesting. She's like, we actually have these quirky pre-performance rituals before we go into the operating suite, the operating room, where the head surgeon and the nurses will engage in these really weird superfluous quirky behaviors that we could construe as ritualistic. And she said, it's particularly odd for us because doctors and in particular surgeons are seen as like the most cold calculated robotic like human being. If there ever was one or should be one, it should be a surgeon who's not operating or doing their job based off of some sort of emotion, but instead of sort of sticking to a process and a protocol. And she said, despite that stereotype, despite that image of the surgeon, we were still engaging in these performative rituals because they helped to, and they did, most people don't have an answer when you talk to them about why do you do these rituals? It's really, you have to probe them and unpack it. But she's like, yeah, it just makes us feel like where we can do our job. We feel better about it. So they even had like a shrine before. Really? They do, you know, they scrub whatever and they wash their hands and their arms. They would have this shrine that they would, dare I say, like pray to before going in and operating. So that psychology, which is, I'm going into some performance context. It's high stakes. I'm feeling particularly anxious. I'm feeling stressed. I need to do something to anticipate what's going to come. And that usually manifests itself in some form of ritual or ritualistic behavior. So we see it in there, insurgents. We see it in military and we see it in athletes. So athletes are the one that we sort of think about because it's sort of, you know, we see it in sports. We love to follow athletes. It's just sort of fun to see what they do. Raphael Nadal is highly ritualistic and, you know, bordering into compulsive, how obsessive and extreme he is when he does his pre-performance and during performance rituals. So you could argue that most professional athletes, most people who have some sort of high stakes performance will have a ritual. And so this is where we were starting at with the study. So then the next question was, okay, from process, from sort of looking at it mechanistically because we're scientists, we want to understand what's actually going on. Why are they doing these things? Because it's a bit of an opaque window. We're not really sure why they do them. So it's like, okay, let's look in the brain. And we have these great neuroscience methodologies and tools that we can use to sort of peer into the inner workings of a person's brain and see what is actually happening during a ritual when a person is doing that ritual and what is happening after they've done the ritual when they're mid-performance. And we had two hypotheses, two competing hypotheses. The first was that rituals help to alleviate anxiety and the part in the brain that's sort of responsible for generating that signal of anxiety, especially in particular in response to failure. So it's like, I just fucked up, what do I do? Some people will collapse under that pressure, under that weight, other people will sort of push it back and move on. So we thought that ritual is sort of helping them move on past that performance setback. And then the other function we hypothesized was that rituals are helping us to align our motivation, getting us in the right sort of frame of mind so that we can go into that performance with a degree of confidence, that we're sort of self-signaling to ourselves, I'm ready for this, whatever it might be. So why that's important is because there's a particular brain signal, a particular signal in the brain that arises from the anterior cingulate cortex or the ACC, which is just behind our prefrontal cortex. It's sort of seen as the, in sort, our ancestral past, our evolutionary past is seen as the first prefrontal cortex before the humans had the massive prefrontal cortex that we have. So the ACC, and the ACC generates the error-related negativity signal or the ERN, often called the oh shit signal, which is like you're doing a task, you screw up and your ACC will fire off this sharp inflection that basically is there to tell you something happened in your environment that's not good, I don't like it, I being the brain, let's pay attention to that thing so that you can avoid making that mistake again down the line. Very adaptive, very functional signal that we have. And so we wanted to see, does ritual mute that signal, sort of turn it down, or does ritual heighten that signal? And why that's important is because that signal has been associated with chronic anxiety. So people with clinical generalized anxiety disorder and OCD tend to have a very high amplitude, a very high signal of the ERN, because they're hypervigilant, what's going on? What's going on? Am I feeling a certain way? Why am I feeling that way? So they have this massive ERN signal. So a big signal can mean that you're overly anxious and overly hypervigilant, which is not good for performance. So ritual might actually help to just turn down a little bit, not so much so that you're sort of not seeing any of the failure. You don't want to mute it completely, but you want to see it in such a way so that you don't react defensively. So that you accept the failure, you integrate it and you move forward in an adaptive way. So we call this like priming. Yeah, I guess it's, yeah, the ritual, you mean? Yeah. Yeah, so the ritual sort of sets you up in this, yeah, primes you for that state of mind so that when a performance failure is going to happen and it's going to happen, how have you primed your brain and your behavior in your mind, your mental functioning in such a way so that you can respond adaptively to that performance setback, to that failure. And so the opposite of just to go back a second, I'm going all over the place here, hope you don't mind. Yeah, that's good. Going back to, so the people with generalized anxiety to sort of have a really high signal, people who are super religious, zealots extreme, even extreme like in their religiosity and religious behavior have a very low signal, meaning sort of like back to, I can't remember who said it, maybe Marx, religion is the opiate of the masses. So religion is this analgesic, it's this distraction so that we don't have to face some of the most harsh realities of our existence, which is like we're mortal. What Nietzsche had is saying, like the toughest thing a man can do is to sit by himself. That's it, exactly, exactly. And there's a study that gets at that, which is hilarious, talk about it in a second. And so the ritual for an athlete or for anyone who's going into performance is sort of somewhere in between those two states. You're not the extreme religious person who's refusing to acknowledge that life is tough, but you're also not the hyper-vigilant chronic warrior and worry-wartened person with anxiety, who's just picking up type two errors everywhere they go. So you're sort of right in the middle. And that's what we find with the study. And one other thing I'll say about that is why that's a particularly cool study, aside from the fact that we did it, is that we designed an ad hoc ritual, so something that we created. That's not cool. Because we couldn't, because as a scientific experiment, we couldn't go to a person and say, do your ritual before, because there's all sorts of confounds with it. Yeah, it skew the results too. Exactly, so anytime you're doing a true experiment, you have an experimental condition and a control condition, you need all of the participants in both conditions to have the same starting point. And so the only way to do that, and this is why it makes it so difficult to study rituals in the lab, and why my PhD was such a shit show, but I'm out of it now, is that you need to create the ritual from scratch. And so that's what we did. I created up, I designed this set of behaviors that involves repetition, redundancy, a lot of movements and vocalizations. And then we said to them, we didn't even use the term ritual whatsoever, because that comes with its own hidden meanings. Of course, yeah. Confrontations. So we said to them, do these actions once or twice a day for a week, memorize them and then come into the lab and you're gonna do this performance thing and we gave them the opportunity to do the ritual one last time. But essentially what they were doing was they were taking these arbitrary ad hoc behaviors and ritualizing them as a function of doing them every day at home. So that by the time they came into the lab on the eighth day or whatever it was, those behaviors are no longer just mere behaviors. Those are in a sense, ritualized behaviors. So that was another important point, sort of a value out of that particular study.