David Oakley explains how measuring brain activity reveals individual differences that affect performance and ADHD. Rather than treating variation as disorder, he argues for leveraging how your brain actually works as a strength.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. What I prefer to do if someone's going to do a qeeg is you have to have a neuroscience, not a doctor because your MD won't know what to do. Look at it go, hmm, here's what's going on and it's, it's a full on exploration of the brain if you want to get into it. Otherwise just getting it on paper doesn't matter. But the, the risk of a quantitative eeg, and this is more for listeners, you obviously know this stuff. It's that if you take an average of 1000 or 10,000 brains and you say, okay, this is the average and you make that normal, well, you could say that's great. So now let's do some brain training and let's train you to be normal. Except normal. Another word for that is average. Right. And if you're even 1% above average, you're abnormal. So half the population is going to get made dumber by that kind of training and half is going to be made better. So the A students become C students, the F students become C students. And that seems like a horrible world. So cues are useful, but on an individual basis, like do you want to look like everyone? It's like that song they made a while back, like looking at what the average of people like in music, and they made a song no one could listen to that should have been the most popular song ever. We don't want to do that in our brains. Right.
How do we avoid that? There's a book. Everybody's normal until you get to know them. I think we just have to be careful. We have to find out who you are. And people have to learn to work with their own brains. We have a situation in our company. We have this Theta Beta, anonymous Theta Beta. But it's not anonymous because we know everybody's brains.
You're saying that people work at the company.
It's kind of a joke. Yeah, yeah.
We might do some of that at 40 years end too, which is a very different kind of company. Equipment manufacturers, to be super clear.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Theta Beta is the famous ADHD marker. But at some point just people relate to that Theta Beta marker say, well, I identify as adhd, but not as a disorder. They can use it to their strength. So once they know who they are. So you can say, yeah, Theta Beta should be in this range. But it would hurt some of the people that, for example, some of the quarterbacks. We've measured a lot of hall of fame quarterbacks. They have high theta beta. They have to see everything at once. If they focus one direction, they get killed. However, we also measure some super bowl winning defensive backs. They have to focus. So just different brain. Is that a disorder? Is that if they all were normal like you said, the quarterback would get killed?
Interesting. So even different positions on the field have different brains. It makes so much sense.
We gotta appreciate the differences. If it becomes a disorder, then, yeah, do something about it. But first step is to know thyself.
I've had ADHD for my whole life and probably don't have nearly as much of it now, just because you can tune the brain. But it is an absolute superpower. It means you only pay attention to stuff you care about. And as a researcher, for instance, and there's no shortage of ADHD in physics and chemistry and hard sciences, it's abundantly common engineering. So it's good because you just filter out all the stuff that's not the most interesting. And it's bad because you might have three interesting things and you bounce around. But to say it's a disorder, a lot of that is because people are taught, well, you're not normal, therefore you're bad, versus you're not normal, therefore you have a potential superpower if you amplify that. And that's a big part of my life's path has been figuring that out and learning how to amplify my strengths and the weaknesses. Honestly, I can hire someone to do that or I can ask for help. You don't have to pay people to do it because there's people who have their superpowers are my weaknesses. I'm like, can we be friends? And then it works. Yeah.
And then teams work well that way. Like somebody in this room who may or may not have high theta beta, great at sales, but there's a low theta beta. People come around and say, okay, did you get the email out? Which is perfect. Perfect team. Let people be who they are.
