 Welcome to Agile Roots 2010, sponsored by Version 1, Rally Software, Vario, Amirsis, Agile Alliance, and Xmission Internet. Using your head, The Agile Mind by David Brady. My name is David Brady. I am a professional problem solver and pattern matcher. By day, I am a mild-mannered software architect at Crime Reports, and by night, I fight crime. Actually, technically, I fight crime at day, so at night I take time off. My coworkers will tell you I'm also lying about the mild-mannered. You can get ahold of me at D-Brady on Twitter, or Ratgeiser, at gmail.com. There's a funny story there, but I don't have time to go into it, so I'm not going to. We've got a really sparse group. Can you hear me okay in the back? I feel like I'm projecting okay. Okay, good. The first thing I want to start off with is that this session is going to be a little more hands-on, except that we're going to be talking about your brains. It's more like brains-on. I don't know if that makes any sense, but this is definitely high participation. I want to start with this quote by Tom Lear. Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it. This session is the same way, and you can expect the same quality. I want to tell you a little bit about this presentation to kind of set you up, because we've got a lot of information to cover. Your brain is wired to be agile, and I'm going to talk about as much of this as I possibly can. However, my brain is wired weird. I haven't found very many people who think the same way I do. I think in a very breadth-first kind of fashion. I'm very interested in how two things interact. If I pick up a system with two modules that interact, I'll have a co-worker every time I make them crazy. They go in, they open up Module A, they want to see how it works, they open up Module B, they want to see how it works, and then they want to see how they work together, and I don't do that. I go straight in, and I'm like, how do these work together? I don't care what's in them. I just want to know how they tie together. I'm very interested in the ligatures of systems, how they are tied together, and that's actually really valuable for this particular conversation, because we're going to cover some seriously geeky science. We're going to talk about neuroscience, the actual study of the neurons in your brain and your nervous system. We're going to talk about psychiatry, psychology. We're going to get into some spiritual pop-psych there at the end. I am not qualified to talk about any of those things, but the material that I'm presenting from them, from these from people, the material I'm presenting is from people who are, and we're really not concerned about the details. We're going to talk about the ligatures between them. We're going to talk about the way neuroscience informs psychiatry, the way it informs psychology, the way it informs pop psychology, and how all of this makes our brains more agile than we think, and how sometimes we fight against the way our brains want to be agile. This talk is in iterations. We're going to ship something in each iteration. There are four iterations. Iteration one, we're going to talk about neuroscience. We're going to talk about the hardware of your brain, the nervous system, and we're going to ship a hack on your hardware system. Then we're going to get an iteration two, which is psychiatry, which is kind of like the low-level drivers of your nervous system, and we're going to ship a hack for psychiatry. Iteration three is psychology, which is kind of like the application-level stuff. We're going to ship a hack for that, and then at the very end we'll do some pop-psych stuff, so we're going to write like a stupid video game for your brain. Or maybe a punch-the-monkey ad. I haven't really decided. What we're going to do, though, I want to make it very clear, in the next 45 minutes I am going to change the neurochemistry of your brain for the rest of your life. I'm not weaseling out. I'm not saying that, oh, the words come out of my mouth. They go into the language centers of your brain, and then they go to the hippocampus as stored as memory. No, I'm not weaseling out. I mean, I am going to make a change in your brain in the next 45 minutes. There's going to be a behavior that you will do at some future date of my choosing, and you will have a reaction of my choosing at that time, so I'm going to put a debug break point in your brain that will fire when I want it to, and if I'm feeling good, I'll do it on someplace nice. For most of you, this is going to be an insanely amazing feature upgrade for your brain. For a few of you, it's just going to be insane. It will be virtually indistinguishable from brain damage. And I can't wait to see who's who. Let's get started. Alright, iteration number one, neuroscience. We need to work harder, not smarter. The reason for this is because the hardware of your brain, there's not much I can do to make your brain, your nervous system rather, more agile. I can't open up your skull and do a recession of, or a rescission of the nervous structures in your brain. Neurosurgeons can do it, but I can't. So what we do want to do is focus for just a minute on how we can work harder. I can't help your nervous system be smarter, but I can help it actually work harder. And the reason for this is that your nervous system is an adaptive organic structure, which means it's like a muscle, right? It's not really a muscle, it's a nervous system. But if you exercise it, it becomes stronger. And it is also, very importantly, attached to your body. And we're going to find that there's an access point to get at our brains through there. But first, this will be a little bit like a book review. These are the people who are qualified to talk about what I'm talking about. The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Two amazing books about completely different subjects until you look at them from a neuroscience subject and you realize they're talking about the same thing. In The Talent Code, he talks about how to get better, how to become great at something through a specific type of practice that makes you specifically better at a certain skill. And Malcolm Gladwell and Outliers talks about how just one person out of 10,000 can become world class at something. And then he actually backs up and says, actually anybody can become world class at something if they will just put in 10,000 hours. Danny Coyle says the same thing in his book, basically, that you might not be able to become the next Michael Jordan, but you certainly could become world class at something that you are modestly, adequately talented and willing to be passionate about for a number of years. Okay? So let me give you the first magic word. The magic word is myelin. Who knows what myelin is? Oh, we got good hands. This is awesome. Okay, about 10%. Myelin is a protein that wraps around the neurons in your nervous system. What happens is a nervous impulse comes out of your brain and this axon is completely unshielded. This little ion impulse is flowing down the axon and it has ADD. It's talking to the neurons next to it. It's putting off, you know, communication. And this thing is poking. It's moving down your nervous system about this fast. It was about two and a half miles per hour. And it's not very fast. This is not a very good neuron. It arrives at its destination and does its job. But what happens is if you fire that neuron repeatedly, your body will start to wrap myelin around the axon. It works just like electrical tape in just about every sense. It's a long thin strip. It coils around and it insulates the axon. Well, now what happens is when that nerve impulse goes down, it can't talk to the axons next to it. So it starts to go faster. It's insulated. It's more efficient. It uses less energy to fire. It moves faster. When you have the kind of nerve impulse that Michael Jordan has for shooting a free throw, those nerve impulses, because they are insulated and extremely well adapted, they move, I'm not going to show you by walking, they move at about 250 miles an hour. Okay? Myelin, magic, magic term. The other magic term that we'll use for neuroscience is from Donald Hebb who said, neurons that fire together wire together. And this is also straight out of the talent code. What this means is that if you practice something over and over, there are a collection of states, a collection of nervous system. If you throw a ball to me and I reach up and catch it, there's a whole bunch of things that happen here. A whole suite of nerves have fired to raise my hand to a specific point. But even more has happened in this, right? My brain has calculated the trajectory. My eyes have tracked the ball. I have done integral calculus in my head to determine where that ball is going to end up over time integrated by the acceleration of gravity of the planet to put my hand there. These are all things that happen together. But if I practice them over and over and over, that collection of neurons will fire together. And this is how over a series of 10,000 hours you can become very, very effective at a certain thing or a skill by honing these things. And what happens is the myelin actually tunes. It grows in certain sets so that the timings all arrive at the right time to do the right job. Okay? All right. That was a lot of geeky science. Let's actually ship something, shall we? How many of you want to increase your executive? Who knows what executive function is? Ooh, okay. We've got one or two people. Okay. Executive function is... Do we all understand that IQ is BS? It's just bull crap. The IQ score is just completely meaningless. Okay? Well, if IQ wasn't BS, it would be called executive function. What executive function is, is it's a part of your brain that governs your ability to do higher reasoning, math, science, logical considerations. It also controls emotional governance. So emotional IQ and the ability to not punch somebody in the face who desperately needs it. This is all controlled by executive function. Okay? How many of you would like to be able to raise your executive function over the next four months? Well, we don't have enough time for that. How many of you would like to be able to raise your executive function in the next 45? No, we don't have enough time. How many of you want to raise your executive function 20% right now? Stand up. Stand up. This will just take a second. You don't even have to close your laptops. Okay. Now, do this. Move your legs. Okay? What you're doing is you're removing your quadriceps and your gluteus maximus. These are the two biggest muscles in the body. You can sit down if you want. If you want to be stupid. What you're doing is you are increasing, you are taxing the cardiovascular system. You are increasing the oxygen consumption in your body. If you do cardio with just your arms, it's not going to be enough of a cardio workout. But if you get your legs going, it becomes a cardio workout. Okay? It actually turns out that you can increase your executive function by 20% to 60%. You can just about double your effective intelligence just by moving these muscles. Okay? So iteration one, we're going to ship three things out of iteration one. But iteration 1.1, the thing we're going to ship is a walking meeting. Okay? If you need to get yourself, if you're at a whiteboard with a coworker and you can't figure out how to solve this problem, say screw it. Chuck the whiteboard marker in the tray and go for a walk. Okay? This is me speaking. Well, actually, let me go forward a little bit. This is all, don't take this from me. Take this from John Medina, who wrote a book called Brain Rules. This is incredible. He is a neurochemist of the first caliber and the flat period, he's actually the one who did the testing on this. He's the one who can actually come back and tell you, no, you really do increase your executive function. What I can tell you from David Brady's personal experience is that in about 20 minutes of walking, I can accomplish about an hour's worth of whiteboard heavy lifting. Like if I'm trying to solve a problem on the whiteboard, 20 minutes of walking is worth about an hour of doodling on the whiteboard. Okay? So that's 0.1. You want to shift executive function right now, go for a walk. Cardiovascular exercise. All right. How many of you would like to be able to raise your executive function in the next 45 minutes without doing anything? Okay? Are there any of you who would not? Tough, because it's going to happen anyway. Okay? Your executive function, this is another reason why IQ is BS. IQ also measures things like your ability to take an IQ test. It also measures what time of day you took the test, how you felt, et cetera. Well, guess what? You go to sleep at night. When you wake up in the morning, huge pieces of your brain are still asleep. When you're in the shower, there are huge chunks of your brain that have not come online yet. And if you've ever had really vivid imaginings in your shower, the reason why is you're still dreaming. Okay? And this cycle, you come up in the morning, you have a big peak. In the evening, you have another big peak. What happens at two o'clock? Your brain desperately wants a nap. Andrew was going to actually schedule me for two o'clock. I am so glad he didn't, because you guys were so dumb two hours ago. Okay? And there's nothing you can do about it. Okay? This is a natural cycle. Actually, there's plenty you can do it. If you're agile, you adapt to it. Okay? You turn to adapt to this cycle to respond to it. Don't do a heavy big planning session at two o'clock right after a big carb-filled lunch, right? If you've got to do heavy problem-solving, do it at ten in the morning. If you've got to have a boring meeting, do it at two. Right? Okay. Last one. This is John Medina again. How many of you would like to increase executive function? Oh, by a hundred percent. Be twice as smart. Permanently. Okay? It'll take you four months. And the answer is cardiovascular exercise. Now, we just sit up and do a little bit of work here. But we're not going to do big design up front. We're not going to angst about this, because the amount of CV you have to do is like 45 minutes a week. Okay? Two to three times a day, 20 minutes a day. Don't make an exercise program. Don't be big design up front. Don't get big up front. Just at the next 30-minute break, walk out the front door, set your stopwatch, and start walking. When you've gone 10 minutes, come back. You'll be smarter for the rest of the day, and you will literally, this is John Medina talking, not me, increase the blood flow to the part of your brain responsible for executive function by 300%. And every measure we have for testing executive function goes up by over double. Okay? So there's your first hardware hack. Let's get into our second iteration. Sprint kickoff. What are we going to ask her? We'll just jump right into the iteration. You guys can catch up. We're going to talk about cycles. Actually, we already talked a little bit about cycles, right? About knowing where you are in the daily cycle. The important thing about cycles, after you become aware that they exist, the first thing that you need to know about cycles is, and in each of these three things, each one seems more important than the previous one, but what it really is is when you get to the next one, you realize that, oh man, the previous one just was not that big a deal. Okay? But the first one, really most important one, is to learn to drive a cycle up. Okay? I can move my brain by moving my body. Getting my quadriceps and my glutes going, I can energize my brain and get moving. This is a cycle I can drive. Okay? Can I do this all day? No. There's another cycle involved here, right? I'm exchanging oxygen for CO2 and lactic acid and an adenosine triphosphate in my legs. That's going to burn out. Okay? And equally, at two o'clock in the afternoon, I'm too tired to do a really hard planning session. Okay? So first, so while the first one is, you need to remember to drive a cycle up when you want. The second one is, you need to know when to pull a cycle back in. This will be really critical as we get into some interactions later on, especially when we start hacking it in the brainstem here. You have to remember to ease up on the gas pedal. You can't go 24-7 balls to the wall. Okay? You've got to learn to ramp your cycles up and to ramp them down. Those two things combine to be maybe 20% of what is the most important thing about cycles. The most important thing, 80% of cycles... Are there any mothers in the audience? Got one in the back? When you had a baby, when did you sleep? Can you drive the baby cycle? Can you make the baby sleep when you want? Make her get up when you want? This is some of the best advice you can get about cycles. Sleep when the baby sleeps. At 2 o'clock, don't plan your hardest meetings. Also, a really big cycle you need is to sleep. Don't set an alarm at 2 o'clock in the morning to wake yourself up to tell you, I need to go to sleep. You might need to set an alarm at 2 o'clock to tell you to stop playing World of Warcraft and go to sleep. But if you're already asleep, just let the cycles go. 80% of your cycles is just to let them happen because your brain and your body is wired to manage these cycles itself. You can push them, you can manipulate them, you can play some games with them. Just let them happen. We're going to talk about... This is basically just honoring the cycle. In Thailand, there's a saying, don't push the river. And that's kind of what this means. Just let the cycles happen. Be aware of when they're there. Plan your hardest stuff for when you're your sharpest. If you're not at your sharpest and you need to be, then plan an intervention. Go for a walk to raise your brain power, that sort of thing. The second half of the psychological section is cognitive complexity. Who knows what cognitive complexity is? A couple hands in the back. Cognitive complexity is a term that describes the number of mental structures you have for describing the world and the nuances involved in those structures. As an example, here's a picture of our former Commander-in-Chief. If you are a conservative Republican, you will look at this person and you like this picture, because it's a tasteful picture done of President Bush, and you will go through what he had done, what he has done, what he has achieved, the problems that he faced, and how he handled them, and you'll be okay with that. If you're a liberal Democrat, you're probably not as happy with this picture. You would probably prefer maybe this one. Low cognitive complexity means we want our bad guys to wear black hats and we want our bad guys to wear white hats. And the same thing is true in the other direction. If you're a Republican, you don't like this picture, you might prefer this one. We want people, if we don't like them, if they're not on our team, we want them to look dumb. We want them to be evil. We want them to be wrong team. We want to lump all these things together. But the world isn't wired like that. The world is incredibly interesting and fascinating and complex. Cognitive complexity, we're not going to have a really good ship out of this iteration, by the way, this is mostly just groundwork. I'm sorry, there's kind of an internal feature here. But cognitive complexity is something to be aware of that you need to work on raising. Because it turns out that this guy, even if you are a Republican, has done some really interesting things with the country. Even if you were a Democrat, this guy did some really interesting things with the country. And if you are a Republican, this guy did some embarrassing things with the country. And even if you're a Democrat, this guy has already made some gaffes. If you can appreciate the reality for what they are, you can use, you can take what's good, leave what's bad behind. Here's another quote that may be a little polarizing. Jesus saw sin is wrong, but was also able to see sin as springing from deep unmet needs on the part of the sinner. Those of you who are not religious might be bothered by me citing a quote about Jesus. I might be upset that I'm quoting an LDS prophet. Okay? But take the value in it, right? Deep unmet needs on the part of the sinner. What are we really talking about here? We're talking about somebody who did not honor their cycles. Somebody who did not manage the realities of the situation that they were in. Let me pick somebody that we do like. We'll pick on Alistair. This is another example of high cognitive complexity. This is the oath of non-allegence. We promise not to exclude from consideration any idea based on its source, but to consider ideas across schools and heritages in order to find the ones that best suit the current situation. This is high cognitive complexity in a nutshell. If you can love someone but hate what they do or be really annoyed with somebody but actually say, wow, you just did something amazing, that's high cognitive complexity. And you need that because you're going to be picking things apart deep down in the deep structures of your brain that you're going to poke on it and you're going to get a visceral response. You're going to get a fight-or-flight response out of your brain and you have to be able to go, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is a good thing. Relax. You're going to fight-or-flight on this side and logical detail over here. You need to be able to separate these things so that you can take the good and leave the bad. All right. That was kind of a crappy ship, sorry. This iteration, we're going to ship something big though. And I think this is the only slide I have how do you form a habit? How long does it take to form a habit? Over here. Two weeks, 21 days. Okay. You're all wrong. Okay. The answer is it depends. All right. Or a better answer is what does that even mean? What does it mean to form a habit? Would we agree perhaps that a definition of forming a habit is that you will unconsciously perform an action without having to be reminded? Is that fair? Okay. Then for the brain hack I'm going to give you at the end of the session I'm going to set a habit in you in two minutes. You will remember something when I want you to at a future date. And if you're lucky it won't be at the urinal in the bathroom. Habits are the unit tests of consciousness. These are unconscious brief actions that happen instinctually. Why do they happen? They close together so that in a certain context they happen. Habits are really, really hard. We get a lot of people getting paid a lot of money to go rah, rah here's product management, not product management motivational speaking, self-help all this stuff. Habits are the solutions to the world's problems, right? But they're not, are they? We are here creatures of bad habits and we don't have enough good habits. Why is that? Any ideas? You didn't expect me to ask questions, did you? What's that? Karma? Yes. We'll talk about that in just a second. The question is why don't we have all the good habits that we want and have gotten rid of our bad habits? If habits are the solution a good habit is your best friend a bad habit is your worst enemy and there's a reason for this habits are unconscious they are efficient, they are fast all the way in the back yes? Good habits are hard to cultivate and bad habits are easy. I am very excited to tell you that you were wrong but I'm going to show you I know exactly what you mean you are correct and we're going to do high cognitive complexity I'm going to split, there's actually two thoughts in what you've just said, I'm going to split those apart in just a minute there's a hand over here good and bad is subjective create your comforts we do them because we like the way we feel when we do them yes, yes that's very related to this comment over here and we're going to tease those apart in just a second the reason good habits are your best friends because they are unconscious, they are fast, they are efficient and you don't have to think about them the reason bad habits are your worst enemies is because they are unconscious they are fast, they are efficient and you don't get to think about them I could spend an hour talking just about formation of habits the concept of habits in this iteration so I'm going to cover the value of habits one of the best ways you can use your head is to learn to stop using your head when you don't have to, set a habit for something I run my unit tests every time I commit code it's a habit, it's instinctive I feel wrong if I don't do it I've ingrained this into my neural structures and the payoff to it is my code always passes unit tests except for when it doesn't, shut up Chuck but it's a habit I don't have to remind myself to do it I don't have to set an alarm to go do this so don't use your head if you let's talk about a bad habit the absence of a good habit have you ever locked yourself out of your car? a lot of us have done this, or out of your house so you go to get out of the car you grab the handle, you push the door open your keys are in the ignition but you're not thinking about it you get out of the car, you close the door and that's when you realize that 30 seconds ago it would have been nice to have had a habit to always pull your keys out of the ignition maybe we'll do that for the hack yeah, I think we will, that'll be fun if you have a habit of doing this every single time you no longer have to use your head to remember to pull the keys out of the ignition and the reason this is awesome and wonderful is because now you don't have to think about it you don't have to waste energy every time reasoning about of course it's a good idea, you don't have to think about it it's unconscious, you're getting out and your arm is pulling the keys out by itself okay more notes on the slide alright so we've talked a little bit already about forming a habit let me answer the earlier question I asked about why do we not have as many habits why do we have as many bad habits and not as many good habits some quick flaws that you might run into if you're trying to set a habit the first one is that habits are not routines a habit is a quick unconscious thing getting up in the morning and going for a 20 minute run or shipping code every single day of the year I did that as a New Year's resolution two years ago and I thought I was forming a habit it took me 90 days to lock in this habit why did it take so long, well the answer is because it wasn't a habit it was a routine okay and the difference might be a little bit semantic except that the routine requires conscious engagement every single time no matter what you're doing going for a run is going to require conscious engagement now what you can create unconsciously is this deep seated need to tie on your running shoes and go for a run you can make yourself want to brush your teeth okay but forcing yourself to do it is not the habit okay the biggest one I think, I don't think I've yet to see a self-help manual talk about the cost of forming a habit forming a habit is actually a very expensive thing the hack that I'm going to show you actually has a very high cost associated with it electrochemically and neurochemically in the body it's hard to do it, you can't focus on changing 17 habits at once right you can only change one thing at a time so you can stay focused on it so be aware of the cost don't create a habit that does not honor your cycles if you're going to create a habit to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning and go running in the habit of going to bed at midnight every night you're going to run into a problem because you are not honoring your cycles you will create a deeply unmet need very quickly that will assert itself over the top of your habit don't create unmet needs less point and then this is the answer to the comment that we talked about a little bit how many of you have tried to create a habit to do something like brush your teeth or to clean or to run your unit tests and the whole time you're doing it you're thinking I hate doing this neurons that wire together fire together so what are you doing every time you're brushing your teeth and saying I hate doing this okay you are wiring a deeply unmet need into your lower psyche to please get me the hell away from this toothbrush this is a habit that as soon as you put that toothbrush down you're going to do this a day because you really just need a day off from the hatred of the toothbrush you're going to do it you're going to take that shot the first chance you can and you're going to fall right out of your good habits so yes you were right the good habits are hard bad habits are easy and the reason why is because bad habits feel good they wire there are creature comforts right they wire us for pleasure they wire us for happiness so here's a little trick what if you could wire for happiness and you can do this it takes executive function next time you're brushing your teeth or washing the car or the dog or doing what it is you don't want to do there are certain it's hard to go man I really like doing this your brain won't buy that but you can end run your brain and say I am grateful for certain things gratitude is a very powerful positive emotion that you can summon at will to associate positive neural connections with any activity and what the effect of this is it's like driving in a rivet you put in a rivet it's just like a nail that you it's got a head on both ends you push it through and then you hammer on the other end until it mushrooms out well if you hate something you push in the rivet that's your habit you push it in if you hate it you push it right back out every single time if you don't care either way you push the rivet in well if you do it enough times eventually the rivet will stick and it will hold if you experience actively pleasurable emotions I could not do I look like I get enough cardio exercise but this year I started telling myself I'm going to enjoy and pay attention to the pleasurable sensations of exercise I have exercised more this year than I think I have my entire life and I'm in much better health and have much more executive function as a result does that make sense neurons that fire together wire together if you want to have it to stick fast you can stick with this trick you can wire a habit to stick in three days because what will happen is you wake up in the morning and you're like man I can't wait to brush my teeth because it just feels good okay so you go do that alright so that's how to make a habit that is the ship product for iteration 3 iteration 4 we've got 15 minutes and if you guys want to do any questions we need to hustle but that's okay because there's really only one thing we need to do in iteration 4 and that's for me to mess with your heads I learned this technique from someone who used this power for awesome I apologize for the crudeness of this image but I learned this technique by having somebody hack a breakpoint into my brain that caused me to laugh while I was in the bathroom and I made a mess on myself um it was pretty awesome actually okay alright so let's hack our brains let's make sure we never ever forget our keys in the car again does that work for everybody? okay this is just kind of an experimental two ways you can use this to break a bad habit or to break a bad habit or to add a habit to a point in your life when you're not paying attention so you're running in release mode you're not paying attention you're not firing interrupts and what you really want to have happen is right at the moment you're getting out of the car before you shut the door when it's too late which is when you usually have that do I have my keys right before you get out you want this breakpoint to fire and say hey I need my keys okay this is really easy alright this is hands on um so or brain on as the case may be so what we're going to do is we're going to wire as many neurons together as we possibly can so I want you to imagine your car I want you to imagine you're sitting in your car in the driver's seat I want you to imagine what the feel of the drivers of the steering wheel is like is it plastic is it leather does it have that crud on it from your skin because you don't clean it because you're gross like me um what does your car smell like get your olfactory sense going what does your car pressure does your car need one what does it smell like now imagine the sensation of sitting in the chair the actual position of your body the kinesthesis of your body get as many neurons as we can go we're going to access as much brain state as we possibly can for this event because we're going to wire and interrupt onto it and the more stuff you have wired together the better the interrupt will fire the keys are in the ignition but that's ok don't worry about that you haven't ever remembered them before you don't have to worry about them right now you're reaching for the door handle the plastic of the door the metal of the door handle you can feel that tactile sensation that neuron sensation just as your hand makes contact with the door I want you to imagine that a huge hairy evil clown is eating your hand ok and fire ants are coming out of his mouth picture this they're on fire they're on your hand you need to put this fire out well there happens to be an elephant handy so you stick your hand in the elephant's rear and then the elephant's rear gross teeth and bites your hand oh this is gross this is disgusting that's good stay with it two things affect the ability of you to trigger a breakpoint and let me tell you you can open your eyes at this point the next time you go to get out of the car you're going to picture an elephant's butt with your hand in it you're going to laugh and you're going to be really grateful you're not at a urinal ok the more neurons you can wire together the better the more effective the interrupt will be the more powerful the interrupt you can generate the more accurate and effective this interrupt will be and the reason why is because your brain this is an interaction a ligature between neuroscience psychiatry psychology and the crap the basically says look your brain is wired whenever you have something that startles you you have a nightmare or you have a near miss on the freeway your brain has the ability to go into a super hyper drive mode and analyze the situation to identify what was the threat we have to be able to deal with this threat again the next time it happens oh my gosh what happened I need to analyze I need to identify and I need to have a threat response ready for the next time this happens ok that chemical surge you went ew and then you startled at the clown then you went ew at the other stuff and then you laughed because I'm being gross all of these are emotional peaks that trigger this chemical response ok all I can really say is the next time we walk by in the hallway if you have been out to your car and back just nod at me and smile if it worked not to tell me that I'm great and that I successfully did it but to nod and say yeah you have taught me how to hack my own brain I now know how to hook this because what's going to happen is you're going to startle and you're going to go oh I'm in debug mode now I am now consciously aware of what I am doing what am I supposed to do oh so let's take my keys congratulations you just set a habit in 5 minutes ok you'll have to refresh it you'll have to keep practicing it ok but you will not forget now the next time it will just happen automatically and you will be just fine let me give you one last piece of advice which is if if you do not want this image in your head and I do not blame you this chemical response is very expensive which means that if you're going to practice this you can't set 5 habits for this way at once you can really only work on one habit at a time and when I mean one habit at a time I mean in the course of this entire day you can really only work on one habit if you decide to change habits you need to wait until tomorrow to change habits and then you can really only work on the same thing in the same course of a day and the reason why is because this threat response is actually very chemically expensive you will find the next time you try it that it's hard to muster the same level of emotional response if that happens in your mind like the elephant butt on fire just keep escalating keep giving yourself something creative and new and weird novelty to attract your brain and keep the chemicals going alright the reason why this slide is titled defense against the dark arts is because if you want to remove the brain hack that I just put in your brain too bad it's in there you're going to remember this you can get rid of it quickly over time however by taping over it you really can only work on one of these things in a day period if you work on two or three you're going to lose one so if you want to get this image out of your head pick another habit pick another visual image something that makes you laugh, something that makes you go ew something that makes you jump with fright and just tape over it that's exactly how you can hack your brain to have a debug interrupt and that's it are there any questions go ahead the question is does this work for all age levels and my answer is I do not know I suspect that there is a certain youth age level at which point you might have some problems with it you don't you definitely I think I think a five year old could do it but I think if you did it wrong you'd give them nightmares so I think an eight year old definitely could do it I think a three year old lacks the attention span to visualize and imagine something maybe I don't know I don't know somebody who is really good with kids might be able to play a game with them to teach them something so you know certainly I've been in a class before where the kids all at two minutes before the hour start singing clean up clean up it's time to clean up and that's a habit and they're 18 months old so I started out saying no and I'm ending saying maybe maybe any other questions okay then for that gratuitous graphical image I put in your brain I am truly sorry thanks