Pratica di Shadowing: Neuroscientist: How To Change Your Brain (Andrew Huberman) - Impara a parlare inglese con i video

Creazione lezione...
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In the health and optimization space now, there's so many tools, right?
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So what we need and what I try and highlight in the book are principles.
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High morning cortisol means low nighttime cortisol, means high nighttime melatonin, means great sleep, means better days, and so on and so forth.
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You're essentially got the gears of the system linking together with that.
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In 2026, right heading into 2027, I think we pretty well understand the principles of great mental health, physical health, and performance.
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The real question, I think, is how do we resolve all these tools and contradictions that are out there and put a structure on them?
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If somebody wants to learn, let's just say if you want to learn, you want to focus and get rid of brain fog, you want to learn.
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Here are the key steps.
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You need to focus, obviously, to learn.
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To focus, you need to be alert.
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To get alert, there are many things you can do.
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And I talk about all of them in the book.
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There are foundational things like sleep, all right, that's going to help you get alert and focused.
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But there are also things like exercise.
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We all hear that exercise makes our brain better.
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It makes us better at learning.
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Exercise makes you better at learning for two reasons.
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One, it increases the catecholamines, dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine.
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So in the four to six hours after exercise, you are more alert and you can focus better, unless you exercise to exhaustion
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if you have leg day for you know you know 10
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sets of 10 on the squats followed by a bunch of hamstring work
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and etc your brain's not going to be so good at focusing
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but you're going to come out of that more alert
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because you have more adrenaline in your body more norepinephrine being released in your brain
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and more dopamine being released in your brain
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and dopamine is a critical component for learning okay focus then it becomes easier to access.
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And in your focus, what are you focusing on?
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You need to focus on making errors through genuine attempts to do something.
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Something physical, maybe a tennis serve, or you're learning billiards.
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Something cognitive, you're trying to learn a language.
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The error between what you currently do and what you're trying to do, the error, is the signal that the neurons, the nerve cells, need to change.
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It runs through a circuit involving the cerebellum and a bunch of other things, but that gap is what the brain tries to close.
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If you can do something, there's no reason for your brain to change.
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And the agitation you feel from those errors reflects elevated levels of epinephrine and norepinephrine in the body and brain respectively.
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And those literally chemically tag the synapses so that then at night when you sleep,
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the synapses rearrange and you close the gap between your current ability and the ability you're striving to achieve.
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That's how it works.
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So that's how you learn.
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You have to bring yourself to those points of agitation.
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I wish I had learned that in the third grade.
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I wish they had told me that.
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Now, many people find that they are very disciplined about certain things.
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They're getting their sets in reps and they're pushed past failure.
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They love their video games.
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They love perhaps mathematics, but not literature.
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The things that we are not facile in that don't come easy to us, there are two reasons to do some of that learning at every stage of life.
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One is it enriches us.
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We often find that the things that are hardest to learn that we then learn are the most satisfying.
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This is the effort that precedes dopamine is far more reinforcing than when just dopamine comes in.
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Talk to anybody, anyone, and their life experience, if they've had a life, will say something like, oh yeah, everything was going great until this big thing then i overcame
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that big thing and that was really the thing that taught me
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that i'm capable of even bigger things right people say is it crossword puzzles
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if you love doing crossword puzzles guess what my friend you're
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they're not going to help keep your brain young you got to do the the hard puzzles you know
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if they're easy for you then it's not going to help
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you like chess play go you like checkers learn chess
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because i talk about behavioral tools i would say 80 of behavioral tools
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And then there's a lot of discussion about pharmacology and supplements, about the pros and cons of everything from nicotine to amphetamines and on and on.
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But multiple times I mentioned, I think that, you know, nowadays it seems like the are we over -optimizing becomes a big question.
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I think it's an important question.
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I mean, to me, optimization is just taking the, like, what do you got today?
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What's on your plate today?
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And how do you feel best and do best in that context?
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And this brings me back to something that I failed to say earlier, which is that top down versus bottom up dynamic tension,
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morning cortisol high, nighttime cortisol low, physiological size, et cetera.
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All of those things put you in the best position, put these circuits in the best possible position for you to have a more adaptive,
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less reactive life, right?
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To be more aware of the goodness in life and less reactive to the BS that you have no control over, this kind of thing to be less prone to impulse and more prone to focusing on what really motivates you,
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the people that you love and doing the right things in accordance with that.
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So I think that one of the most important questions
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that we should all ask ourselves anytime we want to learn
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or we want to relax or we want to sleep is ask ourselves, you know, where are we on this continuum of alertness and sleep? As a culture,
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we've spent a lot of time thinking about kind of the core things like get a good night's sleep
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because obviously the way I think about sleep and rest is when you're not getting enough or and it's different for everybody.
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But if you're not getting enough sleep on a regular basis, or you're just too stressed out, it's like the hinge on that seesaw is loose.
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So it's like you're up, you're down, you're all over the place.
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And so there's some foundational practices of sleep, hydration, exercise, social connection, good nutrition,
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whatever that means for the individual that put you in a place to be able to manage things really well.
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But what we've been talking about up until now are these what I call real -time tools.
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You know, I love the ice bath.
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I've done tumor breathing i still do it i really believe
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it in its virtues there's some good science about how it
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helps activate the immune system all these other great things
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but the ability to adjust in real time is what it's about
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because that's i think where real confidence comes from like you
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do a lot of public speaking i do a lot of public speaking
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and there's still days where i'll show up
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and i'm you know all of a sudden like i'll feel
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my cheeks getting flush i'm like what's going on i have
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to be able to adjust in real time yeah it's not
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sufficient to be like oh you know i'm gonna go meditate for an hour
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or what did i do wrong the day before
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and this is what it's it's is a lot like driving
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a car everyone should know how to manage their internal real estate their mind
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and their body with do's and don'ts of physical practices of just you know practices with
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that don't involve ingesting anything it also puts you in a
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position to better navigate those extreme states right i mean the
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person who decides to dabble with nicotine like not by smoking but taking nicotine for focus,
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if you can't handle and manage your mind in a very alert state, it's just going to make things worse.
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You'll think that you're in a tunnel of focus, but you actually are in a tunnel of high stress and nothing good comes out of that.
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Whereas if you've already mastered what it is to be really alert and focused, and you want to take that to the next level,
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and you're an adult and it's appropriate for you and your health status, then you're going get that much more out of it
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and whereas i think a lot of people look first to
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like what's the thing i can take it's like well the
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thing you can take is master your sleep -wake cycle master
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your moment to moment kind of autonomic regulation this calm down get more alert
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and do it with some breathing or if you like the ice bath do
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that or if you um if you want to you know run up a steep hill
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and then see how quickly you can calm yourself down using
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double inhale exhale type sign that's cool there's a huge play space
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that you don't need to take anything
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and then once you feel like you're working well there well
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then sure maybe it's appropriate to go down the avenue of you know supplementation or other thing
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when people are confronted with an anxiety provoking scenario in our case we do this with virtual reality
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because we need to do it in the laboratory we find
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that we find their pain point essentially
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and by pain point I don't mean extreme fear I mean the thing
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that can raise their autonomic arousal
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that has them in a mode of considering different options
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and trying to figure out what is strategic
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and what they're capable of in
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that moment could be heights could be confrontation with a predator animal it varies by person to people
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but everyone has their pain point even uh even navy seals
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that we brought to the laboratory
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or other people from the special operations community they all each
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and everyone has their pain point what they do in response to that pain point is really what's interesting.
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And what we found was that the pause or freeze response certainly was associated with autonomic arousal, with stress and anxiety.
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We measure this in the brain and body.
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And then we found that there were a subset of individuals
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and animals in the parallel animal work that would confront a fear, not necessarily reflexively, but after some consideration, they would lean into the challenge,
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essentially confront the thing that was making them feel anxious.
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And it turned out that
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that response surprisingly was associated with the highest levels of autonomic
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arousal there the insula took on essentially a a change in
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its activity patterns this gamma pattern the heart rate increased breathing increased sweating increased
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so these are all the marks of an anxiety attack
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but here if you were to just look at the behavior of the person
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or the animal what you'd find is
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that they were marching forward toward their fear one reason to suppress the somatic response the bodily response is
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that tends to be a unitary interpretation meaning at this moment i feel alert
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but calm so i feel good
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but i'm guessing there's a lot of signals coming from the body
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and in fact there are to my brain
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but i tend to just say i feel pretty good those tend to be very kind of um binned responses
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and they're fairly generic you know i guess we can look
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to some of our podcasting colleagues like the Jocko Willinks or the David Goggins,
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you know, who are either forcing themselves or are somehow up at 4 .30 in the morning and pushing through that, what I call limbic friction.
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You know, the limbic system is saying, I'm tired or I'm anxious and going against that.
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So there's literally a required suppression of the bodily response in order to imagine how we would feel when we complete this.
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If we want to be very concrete, we should probably focus on actions and i'll use fitness as an example
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because it translates to everybody whereas you know people's circumstances differ
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let's say somebody really wants to take on a fitness routine
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they hate running
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or they want to lose weight in a in a healthy way this kind of thing
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so we've all heard the example well you put your shoes
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by the door on day one day two you put them
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on day three you go out the door day four you walk around the block
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and then you know and then eventually like they're running marathons okay great
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but to sustain that behavior or even to make the the behavior pleasure full
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and to give you energy the key is to subjectively reward those steps
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so it's not gonna be let's say I go out
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and I run a mile
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and my goal is to run 10 miles in a few
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weeks the key is as you're in the strain of
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that mile the hard part you want to tell yourself this is the good part this is the part
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that gives me energy and I'll be very surprised
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if people don't actually feel like they could continue further
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so it's a journey of a thousand miles starts is made up of you know single steps
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but the key is to reward the harder steps not the easier ones
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and not the ones where you get the thing
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that you want find the wall and push a little bit further through
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that wall and reward
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that process um in fact i'm not telling people do anything i'm just saying
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that there's our biology is primarily for taking us through these adventures of arousal
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and relaxation waking up in the morning is an exercise in autonomic arousal cortisol hits
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when you wake up boom can you do that without losing your mind
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and thought and obsession yeah can you put your head down at night
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and fall asleep without losing your mind in the previous day's events these are skills that we have to cultivate

Perché praticare il parlato con questo video?

Questo video è una risorsa eccellente per la pratica di conversazione in inglese e per approfondire tecniche come lo shadowing in inglese. Il discorso del neuroscienziato è fluido ma accessibile, con un tono informativo che simula una conversazione educativa—perfetto per esercitarti a seguire e ripetere frasi in tempo reale. Oltre a migliorare la pronuncia, ti aiuta a capire come strutturare argomenti complessi in modo chiaro, un'abilità chiave per le conversazioni in inglese. Inoltre, le nozioni su come il cervello apprende possono anche rafforzare la tua strategia di studio: saper che gli errori e l'agitazione sono parte del processo ti dà la motivazione per continuare a praticare, anche quando le cose sembrano difficili.

Grammatica e espressioni nel contesto

Analizziamo alcuni strutture chiave del video:

  • "High morning cortisol means low nighttime cortisol...": L'uso di "means" per spiegare cause e effetti è molto comune in contesti esplicativi. In italiano corrisponde a "significa" o "implica", ma nella pratica del shadow speech è importante notare come la parola si integra nel flusso, senza pause eccessive.
  • "You need to focus on making errors through genuine attempts...": La struttura "focus on + gerundio" è fondamentale per parlare di attività su cui concentrarsi. Ricorda che "making errors" non è un errore grammaticale, ma una frase corretta per indicare "commettere errori"—un esempio di come l'inglese usa i verbi in modo flessibile.
  • "The things that we are not facile in...": "Facile" è una parola inglese che deriva dall'italiano, ma qui è usata come aggettivo nel contesto "not facile in", cioè "non abili in". È un esempio di come il lessico può essere familiare, ma la struttura richiede attenzione per la pronuncia e l'intonazione.

Trappole comuni di pronuncia

Nel video, alcuni termini possono creare difficoltà per gli apprendisti. Ecco i più comuni:

  • "Catecholamines": La pronuncia corretta è /ˌkætəˈkoʊləmiːnz/, con l'accento sulla seconda sillaba. Molti tendono a sbagliare la posizione dell'accento o a tralasciare la "l" finale—attenzione a ripetere la parola lentamente durante lo shadowing.
  • "Epinephrine": Si pronuncia /ˌɛpɪˈnɛfrɪn/, con l'accento sulla terza sillaba. La "ph" si legge come "f", e la "e" iniziale è breve. Evita di pronunziarla come "epinefrina" (italiano), perché l'inglese ha una melodia diversa.
  • "Synapses": La pronuncia è /ˈsɪnæpsɪz/, con l'accento sulla prima sillaba. La "y" si legge come "i" breve, e la "es" finale è una "z" sonora. È importante non confonderla con "synapse" (singolare), che si pronuncia allo stesso modo ma con un accento leggermente diverso.

Usando questo video per la pratica di conversazione in inglese e per esercitarti con lo shadowing, migliorerai non solo la pronuncia ma anche la capacità di seguire argomenti complessi. Ricorda: gli errori sono parte del processo—e questo video te lo insegna bene!

Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?

Shadowing è una tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue supportata da studi scientifici, originariamente sviluppata per la formazione dei traduttori professionisti e resa popolare dal poliglotta Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Il metodo è semplice ma potente: ascolti un audio in inglese di madrelingua e lo ripeti immediatamente ad alta voce — come un'ombra che segue il parlante con un ritardo di solo 1–2 secondi. A differenza dell'ascolto passivo o degli esercizi di grammatica, lo shadowing costringe il tuo cervello e i muscoli della bocca a elaborare e riprodurre simultaneamente i modelli di discorso reale. La ricerca dimostra che migliora significativamente la precisione della pronuncia, l'intonazione, il ritmo, il discorso connesso, la comprensione dell'ascolto e la fluidità del parlato — rendendolo uno dei metodi più efficaci per la preparazione alla prova di speaking dell'IELTS e per la comunicazione reale in inglese.

Tecnica dello shadowing: leggi la guida completa passo dopo passo →