Shadowing Practice: Your Brain Is Smarter Than You Think | Daniel Steininger | TEDxEmory - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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Well, hello.

Every week, we hear about what we need to do to strengthen our bodies.

Physical exercise, better diet, better sleeping habits, right?

A week goes by, we don't hear about that.

But you know what we don't hear about?

How do we strengthen our brains?

Now, what's odd about that,

This three-pound brain we have up here is sort of like a car engine.

It controls everything we do.

You couldn't breathe without your brain,

you can't meet friends without your brain,

you can't even do your job without a brain.

In fact, we'd be vegetables without our brains.

So, today I'm going to share with you how your brain operates,

what neuroscientists have told us you can do to strengthen your brain.

And why is that important?

Because the stronger brain, as you go through life,

is important to take on the challenges of life that will come out of nowhere.

You can't study for life, okay?

All you can do is strengthen your brain so when those challenges come along,

and they'll surprise you, you'll be prepared for it.

So I'll tell you a personal story.

Just a few years ago,

I have a home out in Phoenix,

Arizona, and I'm hiking on a beautiful day in a sort of remote area.

And all of a sudden,

I heard a rattle, and boom,

I'm hit on the back of the leg by a rattlesnake.

And he slithers off, that little devil.

Turned to my wife who was hiking behind me.

I said, you know, you better call 911.

I've been bitten by a rattlesnake.

So she did it.

Now I got to thinking.

I've been bitten by this rattlesnake.

There's venom going into me right now.

So I turned to my wife and I said,

look, I was a Boy Scout.

In fact, I was an Eagle Scout.

You need to suck out the venom.

There's a thing called a divorce look.

Divorce first?

No way.

Okay, all right, fine.

I got a cell phone.

I'm gonna record my funeral narration right now and say I died because my wife wouldn't suck out the venom.

So she finally said, okay,

got her water bottle out,

washed it down and started sucking out the venom and of course spit it out,

which you have to do.

The helicopter finally comes.

The captain comes out to introduce himself and he says,

hi, I'm Captain Kirk.

The kind of day I'm having,

if you're Captain Kirk, I'm the Easter Bunny,

and I'm not making this up.

We helicoptered her to the Banner Hospital,

a major hospital in downtown Phoenix,

and the top toxicologist for the state of Arizona comes to visit me.

She says, I needed to see you.

I said, Doctor, I don't want to hear that.

She says, oh, no, it's good news.

You have less venom in you than the average rattlesnake bite.

We need to know why.

So I told her this story about what my wife had done,

And she said, well, our studies show over long term,

this and that and this and that.

She finally conceded, yes, it does work,

even though we don't recommend it.

How did the cowboys settle the West?

They didn't have antiviral.

So why do I tell you that story?

You can lose a limb, you can die.

Who knew you were going to get a bit of a rattlesnake on a normal hike?

So whether you're 25 or 75,

having a stronger brain can think creatively may save your life someday.

So let's talk a little bit about our brains.

Our brains, there you see it right now,

have roughly 85 billion neurons in them.

And those neurons are connecting to each other through things called synopsis.

And they're firing constantly, and they're like trillions of synopsis.

All that's going on in your brain right now,

or you wouldn't understand a word I'm saying.

These on went back and forth, back and forth.

Now, what scientists told us for years is that you lose those neurons all your life and then you die.

And the worst part is,

your brain peaks at around 25,

where you're highest in what they call fluid intelligence.

You can remember names better,

you can think quicker, and it begins to degenerate over time.

Pretty depressing, but I have good news for you.

Before I share the good news,

I want to do a disclaimer.

I'm not a scientist, I'm not a doctor.

We say I'm a recovering lawyer, a recovering CEO.

But when I had a trial and I had a doctor or scientist on that witness stand,

I had to know as much about that subject matter as that person did or I couldn't,

we would never won the trial.

So what I'm going to do is take the neuroscience

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and I'm going to put it in layman's terms and you're going to be the jury.

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So let's start with with the good news.

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First of all, thanks to 20-25 years of great inventive devices,

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medical devices like MRIs and PET scans,

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they can now see, neuroscientists can now see inside our brains.

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And that's how they discovered this whole fact that brains can actually grow new neurons.

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It's called the process of neurogenesis.

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Think about it.

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You cannot grow this finger.

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You've got a hip problem and you need to replace me,

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you have to replace the hip,

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you can't grow a new one.

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But you can grow new brain cells.

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This is phenomenal because those brain cells make your brain stronger.

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So the question becomes, how do you do it?

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Well, you know, if you want to get stronger, you physically exercise, right?

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You do resistance training and so forth.

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Well, the brain's the same way.

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How do you exercise your brain?

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You do creative things.

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Creativity is the key to growing neurons in your brain.

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Now you say, creativity, I'm not creative,

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I'm not an artist, I'm not a musician.

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I wouldn't think about little children when they're not long after they're first born.

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They start to crawl, then they try to walk.

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Does anyone tell them they have to crawl or walk?

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No, right?

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They start to do it on their own.

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And then they begin to do the thing that's the most complex thing we will ever do in our lives

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and it's all over by five they learn to communicate

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that means learning thousands of words thousands of sentence patterns

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and even grammar it's an amazing thing you all did it

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when you were little kids you all did it you wouldn't be here be here today

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or you wouldn't understand a word i'm saying

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so by nature you are creative

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so the question is why is it hard for you to

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be creative to grow your brain stronger well think about it

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if you're in school as we all are and And when we go and you come into class and the teacher says,

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two plus two is four,

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you go, I have a better idea.

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Right?

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No. You're going to do what you're supposed to do to get the grades.

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And then you graduate from,

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you bond from school to the professional world.

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And now you're working for a supervisor or whoever, or CEOs like myself.

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And you say, I don't think I want to do that.

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I have a better idea what I want to do.

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It's not the way it works.

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The system is geared up to beat creativity out of us.

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It's not evil, but there's a certain amount of information you have to have,

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and there's certain things you have to do.

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But it takes that creativity out of us.

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So I'm here today to say,

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look, you are by nature creative.

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You just have to start bringing it out in yourselves again.

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So how do you do that?

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Well, first of all, you have to develop lifestyle changes that creative people tend to have.

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And I'll give you some tips,

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and then you can start doing them tomorrow.

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Number one, solitude.

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Now, why do I say solitude?

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Well, all of us go to sleep at night, right?

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Hopefully you do, unless you have an exam the next morning.

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Now, up here in the cerebral cortex of your brain is what I call sort of like a governor.

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It's your executive function.

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And it's seeing what I'm saying right now.

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It's seeing memories all day long.

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Things are coming.

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It's sorting things out, making sense of the environment.

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When you go to sleep at night, that turns off.

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So right now, you're in your left side of your brain,

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the analytical side, and when it turns off,

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you flip into your right side, the creative side.

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That's what happens when you sleep at night.

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And do you ever have weird dreams?

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Right?

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You bet you do.

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You know why?

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Because your right brain is unleashed.

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Do you ever wake up in the morning and you've come up with some new ideas?

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You wonder why?

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Again, your right brain's unleashed.

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Have any of you ever gotten creative ideas being in a shower?

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The executive function turns off.

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I get it when I swim,

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I'm a swimmer, ideas come to me.

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So turning that off is important.

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So, every day build solitude into your daily life.

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I mean, we're inundated with social media,

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we're inundated with texts and emails,

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and it goes on and on and on.

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Find, meditate, whatever, find time every day for solitude to allow that right brain to emerge with creativity.

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There's another thing you can start doing,

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and this is going to sound a little odd,

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but it's built humor into your life every day.

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Now, why humor?

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If you go back thousands of years to,

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and this is what anthropologists say,

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and you're in plains of Africa,

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that's where human beings started in East Africa,

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and you see people coming at you with spears,

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how are you going to let them know you're friendly so I don't kill you?

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You don't have email, you don't have text, you can't call them.

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So what early persons did is they started doing dances, funny dances.

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You don't want me doing one.

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If I dance, it'll be funny, so don't read.

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Ain't going to happen.

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So at least signal that I'm friendly, don't kill me.

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And what

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that does is humor moves you again from your left analytical

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side of your brain into the right analytical side of your brain,

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and therefore that's what creativity comes from.

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imagine how valuable humor is to getting you to think creatively.

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So build it into your daily life.

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And one other thing, just briefly,

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this is everyone knows your exercise is good for your body.

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Well, guess what?

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Scientists have now discovered, because they can see inside our brains,

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that when you exercise, it puts blood flow up into your brain.

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That helps your brain grow,

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get stronger, and on top of it,

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releases endomorphins, relaxes the brain,

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and allows for more creativity.

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So those are the big habits you can start tomorrow in your own lives developing to strengthen your brain.

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Now, I'm going to give you what I call the secret sauce of creativity.

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Because in the coming years,

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as you go through life,

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we're all going to be hit with surprises.

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And when those surprises come along,

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you have to have a way of figuring out a solution.

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Now, in my youth, I worked in Glacier Park in my summers off.

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I was from Wisconsin, I'd take the Great Northern across the plains,

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the northern plains of eastern Montana,

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and as you're coming to the great Rocky Mountains,

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they emerge out of the plains.

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Wow, this is fantastic.

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For a boy from the Midwest, it was phenomenal.

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And then you get out of the train and you're smelling all this great mountain air.

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What do you think Lewis and Clark,

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who were on their way to the Pacific,

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thought when they saw those Rocky Mountains?

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good grief if we don't get through them we're not going to get to the Pacific

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and probably who knows it would be Spanish people in control

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or Russia and how did they get through them creativity they found a passage through

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and who how did they get

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that of course they turned to a woman right her name was Sacajawea she had grown up in the tribe

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that was from that area the Blackfoot Indian and And she was able to show them the path through.

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So when you're faced with a surprise,

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a challenge, a personal or professional,

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it makes no difference, begin by trying to understand the problem.

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And from there, what's its number one cause?

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And then take that cause and start ideation.

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Step two, ideation.

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Put as many ideas in play that might solve this as you can.

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You have all these ideas, what's the last step?

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And this is the most important in many ways.

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Create your criteria.

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Now, you're all going to either own or lease a car at some point, right?

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So you go to dealerships,

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you try them, they all feel good.

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How do you decide?

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So, develop criteria.

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What's the most important?

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Cost, safety, fuel efficiency, style.

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Put those, weight them in order,

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top gets five, four, three down,

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and then put them against each choice that you're looking at.

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When in my youth I was in the Peace Corps,

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the United States Peace Corps, in Kenya, East Africa.

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And to this day, I can still speak Swahili.

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So we were in a remote village up in northern Kenya,

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and I was teaching class,

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and I have a blackboard,

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and I dropped my chalk,

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and I went down the picket up,

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and I couldn't get back up.

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I was really frozen.

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I was a young guy in the United States Peace Corps.

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I didn't know it, but I was in the early stages of malaria.

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Now, malaria is a killer.

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It kills people across the globe into the hundreds of thousands every year.

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It's deadly.

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Our village had nothing but dirt roads to it,

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was very isolated, and it was the rainy season.

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And when the rainy season was out, it wipes out.

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We had no way again.

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There's no medical help.

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There's no doctors in our village.

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And nobody we can go.

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I don't have cell phones.

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I don't have mobile, no email, anywhere.

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We're stuck.

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So my wife and I start researching everything we can do about Kenya quickly,

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and found out there were missions.

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And missions usually have some medical staff.

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They may not have doctors,

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but at least they can give you medical help.

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Sure enough, we found one not too far within hiking distance,

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knocked on the mission door,

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none came to the door,

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and she took one look at me.

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She must have been the medical person and said, don't move came back with a syringe.

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It was so big, I think you got to inoculate a horse with this thing.

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And she gave me a shot.

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The next day, I started to break the fever.

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If it hadn't been for that quick creative action,

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I wouldn't be here to talk to you today.

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One other thought.

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Dr. Sherry All from the Cognitive Research Center in Chicago says,

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when you strengthen that brain,

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create new neurons, you are like creating a bank account,

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or a savings account, or a money market for yourself.

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and you're storing it in your brain.

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And those neurons that you're storing and building will come back to help you when you need them.

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They may go into other parts of your brain.

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They may actually enlarge your brain.

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They're still doing that study.

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But create that bank.

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Who doesn't want a bank account?

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Who doesn't want a money market?

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You can do it.

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You can create those neurons yourself.

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I'm not saying it's easy.

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I'm studying Spanish.

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Why?

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Because it's creating more neurons in my brain.

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Take up a musical instrument, whatever.

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If you're in a course,

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and I don't want to take that course.

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That's too hard.

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I don't think I'll do it.

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Excuse me, take it because it's going to grow new runs.

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It's going to help you grow your brain and make it stronger.

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Now, there's another benefit here to growing that stronger brain of yours.

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And I call this the double bottom line.

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Human happiness, what is human happiness?

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By the way, my undergraduate was in philosophy.

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That's why I went on to become a lawyer.

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What do you do with a philosophy degree, right?

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But Aristotle, thousands of years ago,

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said human happiness comes from setting a goal and achieving that goal.

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Fast forward to more recently the Maslow hierarchy.

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What's at the top?

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Self-actualization.

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Think for a second about a child learning to ride a bike.

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Or you may even remember when you tried to ride a bike.

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It was your goal, that child's goal.

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You fell, no one ever rides the first time, unless they're really gifted.

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You skinned your knee, you might have cried,

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they cried, but they kept getting up again.

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At some point, they get airborne on that bike.

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And when they get airborne on that bike, now the world opens.

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They can leave their home block.

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Nothing can substitute for the happiness they feel in achieving that goal.

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So there's this double value to growing those neurons in your brain and the challenges.

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It's not going to be easy.

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Which brings me to the last and final point.

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Now, we all know about that in life ahead,

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we don't know what's going to happen to us as we do it through this journey.

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But we do know one thing,

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that people experience terrible loss,

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it's called post-traumatic stress syndrome.

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And we understand that.

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Violent, horrible things happen.

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But you know something, I've seen enough over my lifetime,

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which I call post-traumatic growth,

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where you recover, use your creative talent to recover from those tough blows of life,

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whether you lose a loved one,

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didn't get the job you wanted,

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or lost the job you wanted,

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whatever those tragedies come, there can be post-traumatic growth.

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A movie, you can still find it,

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it's called Little Miss Sunshine.

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She's talking to her grandfather and said,

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you should be so proud.

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What do you remember most of all the great things you've done with your life?

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And she said, you know,

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Little Miss Sunshine, I'm proud of those things,

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But you know what I remember the most?

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I remember most when I was knocked down by life.

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I dealt a hard blow.

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And I got back up.

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I got back in the game.

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So that's what you'll remember most as you go through life.

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And if you have a stronger brain,

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more neurons in it, you'll be able to navigate those challenges.

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So I wish you best on your creative journey.

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Start tomorrow.

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And I'll be your number one cheerleader.

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So thank you.

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Thank you.

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Shadowing Practice: Your Brain Is Smarter Than You Think | Daniel Steininger | TEDxEmory - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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Shadowing Practice: Your Brain Is Smarter Than You Think | Daniel Steininger | TEDxEmory - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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