6/1/2023

Howdy,

Let’s jump in!

Clip:

🤯 On Brain Plasticity and Learning

This blew my mind… I highly recommend listening to the entire episode, but here are my main takeaways:

Brain plasticity is basically your brain’s ability to learn.

There’s no such thing as muscle memory. It is the neurons that control those muscles and their firing patterns, in which the information for motor patterns are stored.

After 25, brain plasticity decreases. Thus, learn as much as your can before then. More of a parental tip at this point…

The way to create plasticity is to send signals to the brain that something is wrong, something is different, and something isn't being achieved.

If you can actually ‘enjoy’ the process of making errors, you can further increase the conditions for plasticity and learning.

Getting into ‘flow state’ does not create brain plasticity.

You can encourage plasticity by activating your vestibular system, which functions to detect your head’s position and movement in space. Ex. new yoga poses, hanging upside down, or anything that creates novel imbalance. It sounds like if you’ve already been doing hand stands for 10 years, it probably doesn’t activate as much.

Thought:

Over the past year or so, I’ve been trying to get better at capturing fleeting thoughts and insight. Depending on what it is, I really only have a few minutes to get something out of my head somewhere or it’ll be lost.

As David Allen, author of “Getting Things Done” says, “Your brain is for having ideas, not holding them.”

There are other use cases I’m trying to get better at capturing as well. Ex. I’ve just had an interesting coffee conversation and I’ll try to capture some context and anything that stuck out to me. But if I wait until hours later, I won’t remember half of the valuable stuff. I don’t always remember to do this, but I’m trying to get better.

At first I was using Siri to “remind me something”, which gets an A for speed, but if I stop talking, she stops listening. And the transcription cleanup exercise I have to go through afterward is no fun.

Then I switched to an app that was meant for delegating tasks to EAs. Good, but again, the transcription created more work for me, not less.

So I am now in process of building my own “genius catcher”. An app that makes it super easy to capture thoughts and then send them to a useable place.

If you resonate with this problem and know this tool would be extremely useful to you, reply to this email, and I’ll let you know when it’s ready to test.

Photo:

Check out this super weird vase we found at a restaurant in Lisbon.

See ya next month!

-Troy