#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks

25:11And as we get older, a lot of things happen. So I don't know whether it's like we lose that ability or we just get taught like, no, this is what you need to be doing between the hours of 10 and 12 on Tuesdays or whatever. And so we're we're following for reasons that are sometimes good. we're following patterns that are laid out for us by society, and we maybe get less good at understanding what's interesting to us intrinsically. And the problem is that what's interesting to us intrinsically is the best signal we have of that intermediate level of uncertainty. This is where we can learn about the world.

25:50But so, you know, when I, you know, I have this general feeling that we should quote unquote try to explore more like children. It's hard to articulate what that means, but part of it, I think, is trying to tap back into that innate sensation of understanding what you find interesting or curious or inexplicable. Like, huh, why did that happen? I'd like to know. I'd like to follow that up as opposed to just following someone else's curriculum or following what the algorithm is suggesting to you might be interesting. But reducing down predictability is going to help, but a lot of people get locked into their routines.

26:29I often think about this sort of tension between the enjoyment of serendipity and uncertainty and the reduction in the speed of the passage of time when things are novel and intense. And then also on the other side, the thing that everybody's trying to do, which is be optimal. And by optimal, what you mean is refine down all of the degrees of freedom to a point where you know the best path through a regularly traversed terrain. Like this is a situation that I come up against typically, it's morning, it's going to work. What's the best route to go to work? Well, I actually don't want to go past that set of traffic lights because if I hit it wrong and I try to go right, it takes ages.

27:07Google Maps doesn't even account for that. So I'm going to take this route and I'm going to work around it. So you end up with all of the degrees of freedom just like collapsing in on a very small number of very effective, very efficient, but largely unknowable and unstimulating and un uncertain or very certain pathways through life. And yeah, I guess that's the sort of perennial curse of the optimizer that you end up with a uninspiring but quite efficient existence. I think this is one of the like great tensions of modern life that were, I mean, it's It's one of the processes of adulthood and growing older is that we become more and more efficient.

27:49We know what we like, we know what we don't like, we know what works, we know what doesn't work. We converge on this ever narrowing set of options. There's a big movement or a big literature on habits and how to form better habits. There's a lot of good reasons for that. I'm a big habit guy myself, but the fact is habits are the antithesis of exploration. And you mentioned commuting and that's a great example. There was a two -day strike on the London Underground in I think it was 2014 and it was an optional strike. So workers could show up or not show up, which meant that some stations were open and some weren't depending on how many people showed up at a given station.

28:31So for two days, people had to kind of, they could still take the tube, but they had to adapt and say, oh, my station is an open or my destination station is an open. I have to find a different route or get off a different place. So this is taking the, as you said, the epitome of an optimized habit. You follow this commuting pattern twice a day every day of your working life. You know how to get to work. But what they found in a big and analyzed the OysterCard data and they found that of the most hyper -regular commuters, the people who always took the same route every work day, After the two -day strike, about 5 % of them adopted a completely different commuting pattern.

29:11And basically they'd realized, oh, actually if I get off one stop earlier, I can do it. It's a five minute walk instead of a 10 minute bus ride. It's a lovely shop that I like. Yeah, or it's a beautiful, I could take the boat along the canal and it's lovely. And so the point is that even repetition, repetition doesn't guarantee that you find the best, the optimal solution. And that even doesn't account for the fact that, hey, maybe it's nice to just change up your routine sometimes. But it's like, even if you're an optimizer, even if you're like, I want the best. Habit doesn't always get you there.

29:48Sometimes you need, you need, you don't want to explore every morning. Like, you don't want to wake up for work and say, all right, I'm going to invent a new way of tying my shoes and then I'm going to decide which parts of my body to cover with clothing and then I'm going to try and figure out a completely different way to get to work because you're going to be late for work every morning. But having some explosion, not getting totally calcified into your routines, I think, again, going back to steam. It's both fun and it can lead to better outcomes. What about effort, talk to me about the effort paradox?

30:20Yeah, so this is the downside of exploring itself. This might seem like the downside of exploring is that it is hard. Let's say you decide that you want to find a new way to work. The most likely scenario is that you're going to get lost or you're going to take longer, it's going to suck. That's, I mean, there's a reason you're taking the roots you have been taking. So, and that's true, I think in general of any exploratory choice going back to what we say before, it's by definition the outcome is uncertain. And in most cases, on average, it's actually going to be worse than what you already know.

30:51So like ordering in a restaurant, if you, if you know what dish you like in that such and such a restaurant and then you decide, maybe I should try the, the meatloaf or whatever. Chances are it's going to be worse than what you already know you like. And so that seems like exploring stocks. It just brings you negative outcomes. Now in the long term by exploring, you can discover things that work out to be better. But there's another angle, which is that actually doing things that are challenging that involves some struggle, getting lost now and then, can actually be extremely satisfying. And so there's this idea of the effort paradox in psychology, which is that sometimes the harder we have to work at something the more we like it and whether that's, you know, running a marathon or whatever people don't run a marathon because it's easy they run it because it's hard.

31:39Like sometimes you may start I want to get in shape so I'm going to start running. But people who run more than one marathon, they're actually attracted to the difficulty of it. And you can extend that to buying furniture at IKEA. You can probably get a similar piece of furniture preassembled. But people have done studies of what's called the IKEA effect. If you've had to struggle with those pictographic instructions and figure out how that Allen Key works and all that stuff, you put the coffee table together. You end up valuing that coffee table more highly than if you'd got the exact same coffee table just delivered to your door preassembled.

32:15So there's something in us that values effort. What that is is is is hard to pin down, but there's there are a few studies that have been emerging in the last couple of years suggesting that putting an effort can his as a source of meaning. People can't define the many of life, but they can tell you when something feels meaningful and doing hard things tends to feel meaningful. I wonder whether that plays into relationships. Sometimes the classic I only want them if they don't want me dynamic. like, oh man, that's an interesting proposition or the stormy relationships where it seems like you're having to work at it at all times.

32:51I mean, I think there's probably a little bit there that relationships that are too easy tend to get, you know, I don't want to tar and paper people's, you know, be negative about relationships, but if it's just totally without strife, without any tension, then it may be feels so boring. Well, it didn't need to be tension or strife, right? effort. You know, if it's just always there, and I mean, look, I, I, pieces the most important thing in my life. So for me, the more peaceful, the better. But even within that, you don't want something to be again. So predictable, no uncertainty, no intrigue.

33:27So with this uncertainty and effort, sort of dynamic that's going on, how do you advise people to better embrace struggle. Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing to recognize is just to recognize that just because something is hard doesn't mean it should be shied away from it. In fact, you know, it's like with a hat tip to Michael Easter, whose email list is called 2 % because that's the percent of people who take the stairs when there's both the stairs and an escalator available. It's like you look at the stairs and you look at the escalator, it seems obvious that going up the stairs, going up the escalator is going to be a more pleasant and better experience.

34:14But when you take the stairs, I don't think it's just me. It's much more satisfying to have put in a little effort and recognizing that putting an effort is going to lead you to feel good is, you know, it doesn't make the effort go away, but it helps you reframe it as something that's positive, not negative. This is an opportunity for me to put an effort, which is going to make me feel good, as opposed to I'm obliged to take on something art. Can that, tying that back to your first book, can that help us with resilience, endurance, suffering, hard times? I mean, I think it's almost a precondition that if you're trying to push yourself, if you're trying to handle difficult times, if you view every negative feeling as a sort of disaster or as something that is as a negative, then it's just a miserable experience.

35:13And you're going to be inclined to quit earlier. And if you can reframe that and just, and it's in the same way that one of the things I talked about it in a duer is the power of your inner monologue. If you're running a marathon and you're telling yourself, this is so hard, there's no way I can do this. I better I'm going to drop out. That becomes a self -fulfill in prophecy because your ability to continue depends in part on what your brain believes about your ability to continue. If you can turn that around to, I can do this. I've trained for this. I know it's hard. It's supposed to be hard.

35:47Everybody else around me is feeling at the same time. this is part of the experience, then that becomes a performance -enhancing frame of mind. So I think recognizing that effort can be, it doesn't make it easy. It doesn't change how hard it is, but recognizing that it's not a signal that you're doing something wrong and that it actually can be something good. I think that helps you endure it for longer. You're less likely to quit on things. Have you thought about how people can avoid seeing all of life instrumentally? If everything is done in service of what you get out of it in the future, you actually end up spending all of your days delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification.

36:37You're like winning the marshmallow test over and over again every single day, but never caching it out. Yeah, you've touched on one of the big dilemmas and something that I really struggled with and that evolved as I was writing this book in my mind. When I started thinking about exploring, I thought I'm gonna write a book and the subtitle is gonna be something along the lines of, you know, the case for why we should explore more or the case for more exploring, but it's like I'd into it. I started to have the thoughts that you've just expressed of like, oh wait, like, it's like, think of listening to music, for example.

37:14It's like, most people tend to, you find the music you love when you're young, when you're in your teens and 20s, and then most people tend to listen to less and less new music as time goes on. And there's, you know, it's not totally irrational because you've spent some time exploring now, you know, what you like. So, but you might say, that's a shame. We should explore more. I'm not going to fall victim to this narrowing of my tastes. I'm going to keep exploring new music. And I think that's great. But if you were to take that next two and three minutes, say, in fact, I'm never going to listen to the same song twice because exploring is what it's about.

37:47Then it's that we can see on that's absurd on the face of it, right? But it's that's the the perspective of like always keep exploring, always keep looking for the future and never stop and like, I really love this song. I'm going to listen to it 17 times in a row on repeat, even if my wife kills me. So you do have to stop and enjoy it. I think that's a really... So in a sense, there's this idea in decision science called the Explore Exploite Dilemma. And it is a dilemma. It's not like, Explore Exploite you should always explore. Whenever you come to the fork in the road, take the road less traveled.

38:24You've got to think about maybe now's the time to exploit, to take the music that I just discovered and sit down and listen to it or to figure out what I... Or maybe it's not. Maybe this is a good time to explore. But it's not... It's a lot less obvious than I thought it was for precisely the reasons you said that, yeah, if you never stop and enjoy what you got, then I'm not sure that the exploring is super satisfying. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Sleep isn't just about how long you rest, but how well your body stays in its optimal temperature range throughout the night. and this is where 8 sleep comes in.

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39:34Plus they ship internationally. Right now you can get $350 off the pod for ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8sleep .com, sash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom, a checkout. That's e i g h t sleep .com, sash modern wisdom and modern wisdom, a checkout. How can people better navigate that Explore Explite trade off. Yeah, so I went down a big rabbit hole on this. I come from a physics background, I'm a quantitative guy. I want the formula that will tell me when to explore Explore Explite. And I guess I apologize for chapter five in my book, which kind of follows that, tries to follow that rabble because there is a ton of attempts to produce the formula.

40:20And it turns out the math is in any real world context, the math is ridiculous and becomes very hard to follow. But there are some big principles that I think that come out of the math, but that also are practical in a day to day scenario. So one concept is the idea of an uncertainty bonus. And we kind of do this intuitively, but I think it helps to think of it in terms of it consciously. And this is when you're considering a decision, you don't automatically opt for the one you know less about or the unexplored road. But the less you know about an option, you give a bonus that's proportional to how little you know about it.

41:03So you say, all else being equal, I'm going to take the one that I know less about. So that kind of helps to make sure you're not getting too calcified into that sort of set of habits that you're talking about. It's not it's not the only factor you consider, but it's like I'm gonna add a bonus if it's gonna teach me something new or take me down a fresh path and then the one other Kind of Heuristic that that I think is useful that this is a sort of approximate way of solving this explore exploit dilemma It's it's something called the upper confidence about algorithm and that's the math version and the way they translate that into the regular language is optimism in the face of uncertainty, that you should be optimistic about the choices you make.

41:50What that means in practice is that if you're choosing between options, you should take the scenario with the best case or the best realistic upside or the best, the best case scenario. Realistic isn't there because it's like, I'm not saying by a lottery ticket because because its best case scenario is your millionaire, because that's unlikely to happen. But for scenarios that are realistic, it pays to be optimistic. So an example I guess would be you're considering different job possibilities. One has a higher starting salary and a stable, and so that's a real positive. The other may be less money, a little less stable, but it has a pathway towards your dream job.

42:39That's a pathway to what you actually really want to be doing in the long term. It's all else being equal. It's probably worth taking a shot on that because that's the optimism and the face of uncertainty that I don't know how things are going to turn out. But that's the being optimistic if things do turn out. That's the one that will make me happiest. And what the math shows is if you... Individual decisions, all bets are off. It might turn out well. It might turn out poorly. But in the long term, if you're optimistic in the face of uncertainty, this will minimize your regret. This will minimize you looking back and saying, I wish I had done that.

43:13And I think that makes a two -it -of -sense as well as mathematical sense. It's like, you don't look back and say, you're more likely to look back and say, I wish I had asked that person to dance. Then I really regret asking that person to dance and they said, no. Digging to regret minimization a bit more from... Yeah, I wasn't sure how mathematical to get. But regret in the mathematical sense is it's the difference between what outcome you got and the best you could have gotten if you'd magically made all the right choices. Nobody has a crystal ball so nobody can make all the right choices all the time.

43:49But regret is like often you can think of these sort of decision trees as gambling games in reality. We may be talking about careers or dating decisions, but it's like I bet $5 on this, I bet on. And maybe the best you could have done in a series of 10 bets is getting $100. And if you get, if you made a series of bets and ended up with $70, your regret is $30. So that's the mathematical way of thinking about it. And because nobody is perfect, nobody has clever yons, regret always increases, which is kind of a depressing thing to say. But there's no way of going through life without accumulating some regrets of thinking, I kind of wish I had asked her to dance, not the other one.

44:37We accumulate regret, but so the goal is not to eliminate regret because that's impossible but to minimize regret. And the math shows that this kind of optimism in the face uncertainty is one way of guaranteeing that over the long term, your regret will increase as slowly as is realistically possible unless you find the magic genie with the three wishes. Yes, yeah, I'm very happy. Which I'm looking for. Yeah, you know, like that would be nice. So you know, it's sort of I guess talked about environmental lifestyle sort of external exploration. What have you come to learn about cognitive exploration?

45:18Thinking patterns are seeking of new behaviors, are seeking of new information, algorithms, modern world, stuff like that. Yeah, so you know, when I initially started on this topic, Like I'm interested in exploring. I think it's more than just about like the way I take my vacations or whatever. I think it's also about ideas, but it's like an analogy, it's a metaphor. And what I was really surprised to discover is that actually, no, in your brains, it's like the same thing. You know, when you're wandering through a town that you've never been to before, you are mapping it in your hippocampus. So you're forming cognitive maps, like literally there are individual neurons that will light up when you go to a specific point on that map.

46:01And there are other neurons that will keep track of what direction you're facing and how close you are to the borders of town. You're building maps in your brain. There's a famous study about London cab drivers that their hippocampus is in large. That's why because they are mapping a very complicated city. So their hippocampus actually have to get physically bigger. So it turns out that the hippocampus isn't just a place for mapping, like landscapes. It's a place for mapping ideas too. And we keep track of ideas. And so, these ideas that are close to each other are far away from each other. This is a physically manifested in the brain.

46:36And so, one example is, we keep track of our social networks in the hippocampus. And so, you can think of, we know people, we have some sense of hierarchy, are they more powerful than us than less powerful than us? And how well do we know them? Are they close to us? And so that's a two -dimensional map. And people literally map their social networks in their hippocampus in this two -dimensional way. So all of this is to say that when we talk about different ways of exploring and exploiting, these really, this is intimately tied to creativity and coming up with new ideas, expanding our cognitive maps of ideas.

47:18And so there's a bunch of interesting findings that that that fall out of that about how we should mix exploring and exploiting to come up with better ideas. And it's in this context is exploration and curiosity the same thing similar thing related. I think they're very very closely related curiosity is a name for the drive that compels us to explore I would say. And you know I'm not a dictionary guy but but that's that's how I would classify them. And so I think curiosity, yeah, a lot of the same discussion applies and exploration is what you actually end up doing once because of curiosity. Does that you talk about humans becoming smarter but less creative?

48:04Yeah, so there's a well -known effect called the Flynn effect. And it's been like a century now, IQ scores keep going up gradually. And so they have to keep rebalancing the scores every few years. There's a lot of debate about why this is probably just that the modern world requires a lot more abstract cognitive, you know, abstract thinking than it did to be, you know, of hunter -gatherer a long time ago, or even a farmer. That's one effect. What's less well -known is that there are similar tests that assess creativity. There's one something set of tests called the Torrance tests for creative thinking.

48:44And they also have to re -normalize those scores periodically. But that's because the scores keep dropping. Kids are getting less creative. And so between about 1990 and 2008, there was a significant drop. And after 2008 to 2017, which is the next re -normalization, there was a much steeper drop. And it's tempting to say, what happened between 2008 and 2017? Let's see, when did I get my first smart phone and when did social media write? You know, like all of that is speculative, but the fact is there's evidence that creative thinking, the ability to just come up with, you know, totally new ideas is maybe going down.

49:30And I should say that there's, it's not just these tests of kids. If you look, there's been big analyses of patents and of scientific papers finding that the number of breakthroughs or disruptive papers that really take a field in a different direction seems to be dropping. I need to dig into some of your other stuff just for a moment, the cognitive thing sort of got me thinking. Talk to me about recent data. You must have looked at this exercise, activity, physical activity, and mental health. Where are we at with that current world? Yeah, actually it's good timing. I wrote about that recently because there was a big study, there was a big skeptical study because so people like me, I'm a, you know, health and fitness journalist.

50:17So I'm always like, the best thing you can do for your mental health is exercise, you know, it'll cure your depression, it'll grow your hair back, it'll do all these great things. I try not to be a booster, but it's hard not to you. It's, you know, I guess I'm a strong believer in the power of exercise. So there was a big review recently that said, hang on, how good is the evidence really that exercise promotes mental health. And the overall conclusion is the exercise is pretty good, but it's really hard to tease out what. So for example, there's a lot of studies that find that exercise can be as powerful as, for depression, can be as powerful as cognitive behavioral therapy or of antidepressants.

51:01It depends on the population a little bit, but exercise really has powerful effects. The question is, is it because there's more blood pumping to your brain or there's more BDNF or other brain chemicals being produced that promote the formation of good connections in between your neurons? Or is it because if you get in an exercise habit, you have a feeling of self -efficacy, you feel like, hey, I set this goal for myself and I'm doing it. I'm really doing something good for myself. And actually I'm meeting my friends there three times a week and I'm having some social interaction. So there's a lot of things that go along with taking up exercise.

51:38And so it's not entirely clear which of these are the key ones and what's doing what. So I think it's a very strong evidence that exercise both maintains and promotes and can actually sort of cure, quote unquote, not cure, but ameliorate mental health. But we don't know exactly why or whether you could get the same thing out of joining a bridge club or something like that. Yeah, how much of it is the pro social getting yourself out of the house, structure of your day? How much of this is, I guess, just straight up selection bias for who it is, the what's the cohort of people, who are the sort of people that are prepared to do that?

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53:28That's nomatic .com slash modern wisdom. And what about the link between exercise and brain health? Is that something else that's been sort of reassessed? Yeah. I think the evidence is pretty strong that exercise either increases or slows the decline in the size of some brain regions. This is another topic I looked at recently where you look at it and you can find this, I can find studies that make me feel really good. It's like exercise is going to make your brain super healthy for, you know, no matter how old you get. But you can also find studies that don't find a strong and effect or that say, oh, it seems to maintain the size of this region of the brain, but not that one.

54:17And those sorts of findings always give you pause because then it's like, there's no reason that should be selectively. So excuse me, if I were summing up my impression of the evidence is that exercise has actual positive structural effects on the brain, which will in turn help ward off cognitive decline, delay or maybe even prevent depending on how long you can delay it, or at the very least slow down cognitive decline. So I think that's, when I'm getting out of bed on a cold winter morning, that's one of the most powerful motivators for me. The truth is, the evidence is not like bulletproof at this point, but I find it convincing enough to get me out of bed.

55:04If you were to lay at the feet of a particular style of exercise, what you think gives the most benefits to brain health, what would it be? Yeah, I'm hopelessly biased here. Look, I was a former columnist for Runners World magazine, and I've been a runner since I was 15. I think aerobic exercise, that's doing my best to put aside my biases. I think aerobic exercise probably packs the biggest punch for brain health, we're talking for physical brain health, and not necessarily for the mental health aspects, where I don't think it's clear, which is better. I certainly try and do both resistance exercises and aerobic exercise.

55:51And I also like playing like games that involve team orientation, which I think is also like, like another aspect of brain health is like, are you using your brain sharing exercise? And there's a little bit of evidence that doing things like coordination games, like juggling or playing football or basketball. That's even better for your brain, because you're using your neurons at the same time that all these growth promoting things are happening. So I would go with running, but with such a small margin that the bigger factor I would say is whatever exercise you enjoy and are willing to do, you're likely going to get a benefit.

56:29So it's not like other forms of exercise don't have the benefits. What's the truth on Zone 2 at the moment? There was a period. Everyone was super into Zone 2. That was the hot new girl in school. Now it's VO2 max training and Zone 2 is out the window. What's, I imagine, this is a Kardashian getting divorced in your world. There will be more fads and they will be interesting. Actually, Zone 2 and VO2 max are actually, if you were using modern buzzwords to describe the training of champion endurance athletes, you would say, yeah, about 80 % zone two and 20 % VO2 max. That's kind of what they do.

57:09I would say, so in terms of the zone two stuff, I think it's true that it's a very effective way of both getting fit for performance and also for metabolic health, maybe more importantly. My main quibble with it would be, I think it's been sometimes prescribed didn't overly specific way. That it's not like zone two is magic and zone 2 .1 is nothing and zone 1 .9 as you might as well not get out of bed. In fact, there's a new there's a new paper that just came out from a panel of experts in the last week or two that that among other things makes this point that they're saying that their consensus is like zone 2 .5 zone 3 .5 it's a continuum and so you don't need to stress about it.

57:52Actually, I wrote about zone two for the New York Times, I don't know, last month maybe. I'm trying to make this point that it's like, yeah, it's good, but don't, you know, you don't have to like, be pricking your fingers to test lactate every two minutes to make sure you don't accidentally get out of zone two. Now, I was thinking, I was a little worried that I created a straw man. I was like, do people really believe that you have to be this precise? And I got an email afterwards from someone who's saying, thank God you wrote this. This morning, I was out for my run and I was sprinting down a hill because I wanted to keep my heart rate high enough to stay at the magical zone two and I tripped and I fell and as I was walking home leading my watch kept beeping at me telling me that I was outside of zone two and I was thinking to myself there has to be a better way and I was like okay it wasn't a strong end there are people who have taken this very literally that you have to be exactly at the magical zone two and I don't think that's correct but the idea of I think that this is like a a great misunderstanding is that endurance athletes train hard all the time and in fact it's like 80 % of the time out there conversational pace, having a laugh and maybe not enjoying it in the way that the effort paradox allows us to enjoy it, which is that we're doing a challenge, we're doing something somewhat difficult, but not killing ourselves.

59:06Then 20 % of the time you go out and you try and find God by pushing yourself really hard, but not all the time. There's only two still king. So in two, yeah, but if the largest component, or somewhere near it, is the largest component of the territory of zone two, the territory in and around the blast radius of zone two. That's right. If you can see it with your binoculars, you're doing okay. Okay, cool. Getting back to exploration. Did you make any changes to your life after looking at this buck, what was this netted out practically? So there's the vague, big picture things, but I'll give you a concrete practical thing, which is that I do my best not to turn on the turn turn -by -turn directions in my car when I'm going out or even on my phone when I'm going for a walk.

59:56This is for a couple of reasons. One is that it's like, okay, I'd like to be a little more present in my environment and be looking out the window instead of looking at my screen. But actually, in the book, I have a little bit of, I spoke to some neuroscientists who are actually concerned about this. They were actually concerned that just as London cab drivers have enlarged hippocampus because they've learned so much about their environment. People who use what's known as stimulus response navigation, that is who just follow, like, turn left here, turn right there, turn left. And we can do that with, you know, with or without GPS.

1:00:32Their hippocampus is, they're not using their hippocampus. They're using a different part of the brain called the Codate Nucleus. And that actually translates into difference, you know, your hippocampus gets smaller and your Codate Nucleus gets bigger. And this overlife, when we're kids, we're all hippocampus. We don't know the way around the world, so we're cognitive mapping everywhere we go, trying to figure out where we are. As we get older, we learn to use this stimulus response approach, because it's faster, it's more efficient, it's less prone to errors. But the problem is, as the world gets more and more optimized, as I can get into my car and just press a button and I never even have to know my own neighborhood, then we're not using our hippocampus as much.

1:01:12And that leads them to being smaller. And there is research. And it's a chain of logic that isn't, you know, nobody is showing that turning on your GPS is going to make you get dementia. But there is a chain of logic that people who rely most on stimulus response navigation have smaller hippocampus. People who have smaller hippocampus are, that is a known risk factor of conditions like Alzheimer's, PTSD, depression. So I don't want to over sell that, but I would say even with caveats, my takeaway has been, I look at, I figure out where I'm going, I look at the directions I try and figure out, understand where I'm going, and then I turn it off until I need it.

1:01:57So I don't use the turn -butt in directions. And that means I get lost sometimes. And that means I have my kids chirping me from the back seat saying like, mommy uses ways. Mommy wouldn't have missed that turn. Why don't you use ways? And I'm like, kids, we're going to be 90 seconds later than we would have, like simmer down. And think about my hippocampus. Okay. Exactly. Think about my hippocampus. Think about my hippocampus. Yeah. So that's it. That's a concrete thing. What would you say to people who like the thesis that you're putting forward, but still I'm met with a degree of discomfort when it comes to the prospect of exploring novelty and certainty?

1:02:39No. No, fuck you Alex, I quite like my certainty. I don't want to, where would you go? Sort of, essentially philosophically mantra wise, what can people use to rely on to help them feel more comfortable in their new world of exploration? Well, if this was at a cocktail party, I would say, that's great, you're fine. I'm not gonna try, you don't need to, you do you. But if they were open to gentle nudging, the question I would ask them, I think, is, Are you doing anything in your life where you don't already know the outcome? Is there anything you do today or this week or this month or this year that isn't the same as what you were doing a year ago or five years ago?

1:03:26Because if not, then when you think about it that way, you might think, huh, there was a time in my life when every day I went to school or whatever and learned something new or did something different or learned a skill or tried a game. And that's actually can be really rewarding. So I would say if you don't have to go to the South Pole to be exploring, but if there's not some area of your life where you're pushing into territory where you don't know how it's going to turn out whether it's exploring new music or taking up a new hobby or wandering through your neighborhood by a different route than you normally do.

1:04:08You know, these are all steps on a very broad scale. And you can be anywhere on that scale. Your want curve is different from everybody else's want curve and it will change through a life. But if you're way on that left side of the want curve where everything is predictable, everything is the same. You've optimized everything to the point of total predictability. Consider that you might enjoy a surprise now in that. Yeah, I have been trying over the last couple of months to live the philosophy that I don't necessarily know what's best for me all the time. I typically do. Yeah, but there's a degree of, do you say, self -knowledge, self -management lifestyle design narcissism.

1:05:01It doesn't affect anybody else, but you know, it's just, no, no, no, I know what's bad. I know what I want to order from flower child. I don't want to try that new thing. I know the best route to get to Gold's Gym at 3pm on a Tuesday. And yeah, I'm trying to, somebody that quite likes control, somebody that likes to reduce down uncertainty. I would say I have maybe like probably quite a lot of people. I love adventure, I have a lot of curiosity inside of me, but I also like control. I don't like to feel like stuff's out of control. I like order, I like structure, I like having a routine and these two things, you know, the tension exists between the ears.

1:05:44Yeah, there's a definite yin and yang and I'm like you I must I'm actually I would describe myself as like a recreational optimizer. It's like no seriously I know how we should load the dishwasher like if you put that plate there and we're not gonna get as much water on that and then we'll be like I've thought this through I've gained it out I've performed the experiments so don't load the dishwasher this other way and And there's a fun in the optimization, but it is intention with my simultaneous desire to have adventure. So I think of this in the context of like going on vacations, my wife and I, my family and I, we do some fun, like backpacking, I do some canoeing where the goal is to get out and to have an adventure.

1:06:29And yet the instinct is also, let's Google and see if we can find trip blogs from anybody else who's done this trip will find pictures of everything we're going to see there will know exactly what to expect. We'll know whether we need to bring crampons, we'll know whether we need this or that and we'll be fully prepared for this. And then you go on the trip and it's like, all right, it's exactly what I expected. So hang on, why did I come here? If I already did all the research. So these impulses are constantly at war and always will be, I think. And sometimes you just need to give a push. And so it was interesting last summer my family, we did a hiking trip in the Pyrenees, and my wife and I were both super busy leading up to it.

1:07:12And we got there and we were like, holy crap, we actually didn't do our usual like obsessive level of research on this hiking route. It was awesome. So we, I mean, each day we were like, well, let's figure out what's coming next, because we don't know. We didn't, we didn't research it. So, and then that's a lesson that I'm I'm trying to keep in mind that it's like, yeah, control and optimization are great, but sometimes it's nice to just like, who the hell knows? Let's see what happens. Alex Hutchinson, ladies and gentlemen, Alex Stood, Euroson, whatever, seven and a half years, parentheses on the show.

1:07:47And yeah, I mean, the stuff that you write, what is it? What is it you write for? Run as well? I'm now at Outside Magazine. Outside Magazine. But once a week for outside magazine on new research in fitness endurance, that kind of thought. Yeah, everyone needs to follow you on Twitter at sweat science. It's, you know, if you like evidence -based exercise stuff, you're awesome. And new book, why should people go and get it? Well, they should explore the topic of exploring. I hope it'll, you know, there's no magic formula, but I hope it'll encourage people to find spaces in their life to to be surprised.

1:08:20Sick. I like, I appreciate you. Thanks so much, Chris.