David Oakley, Ph.D. discusses how measuring brainwave activity can improve performance. The conversation covers failure as a learning tool, how brain monitoring reveals what's happening during experimentation, and practical ways to upgrade how you think and work.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. Do you think that science and medicine have become too conservative?
I don't know. I hope not. I'm kind of. My instinct is that it is. I read a nice article from a dean, a Harvard dean, lamenting the fact that all the students were now had never failed, even from elementary school. Right. They're groomed to go to Harvard. No failures on any tests. And so if you haven't failed, you haven't explored, you haven't experimented. That's why I like a lot of stuff you're doing. Let's try it. Like the sticker, which we're not going to talk about. Let's just try it. And so he's lamenting the fact that his students didn't know how to experiment and explore. And he said, really in this article, his conclusion was all they can do is become consultants and bureaucrats when they're done with the Harvard education. And that was, that was kind of sad. But it's easy to change.
It is totally true. I did once hire an exec in my career who had never failed from one of the big name schools you mentioned. And when you've never failed, when you are failing, you'll be unable to see it and you'll tell yourself you're not failing. And that can be a complex destroying events.
Yeah, yeah. Or you won't want to push the boundaries to fail. Oh yeah. Like any sports that one does. I took up mountain biking when I was old. Not old, but oldish. And I took up skiing when I was a young kid. So I can ski really well. But mountain biking, I don't know the boundaries. I don't push them because I don't want to fall. I'll get hurt. So I never did really well on the mountain biking. I can go uphill, fine. I can't go downhill. It's horrifying. But yeah, to get good you have to fail. You gotta fall. Yeah.
I've been working on that with my kids a lot where I praise them for working hard, but not necessarily for success. Right. And when they fail, even at night when we're going to bed, tell me something you failed at today.
That's great.
And if they don't have anything, I say maybe tomorrow can be a better day.
Better day.
Because that means you push yourself. And I hope it learns.
You learn something.
They're getting old enough that it's less than it was when you're five or six. But maybe the programming landed, I don't know. Do you think we'd ever be able to see that in their brainwaves?
No.
Like a failure?
Well, yeah, maybe. Yeah. Sometimes we overrate what is in the brain waves. Oh, yeah. Because everybody's so different. But yeah, Maybe an artificial intelligence could find that pattern. I don't know.
I suspect we probably could find people who are afraid of fear. In fact, I bet there'd even be a clamping down of certain brain waves in certain Envision. When you're envisioning certain things.
Yeah. Yeah, possibly. Yeah. If you did a task, you could certainly see it. I can give you a task and then measure the brain response to the test.
Even like a Stroop test or something?
Yeah, something like that. That.
