Podcast: Using Neuroscience To Improve Your Mental Performance

Margarida: On today’s podcast, we welcome Phil Dobson, author of The Brain Book. Phil is a facilitator, coach and the founder of Brain Workshops. A leading consultancy in the field of brain-based training. He works with companies all over the world, helping their leaders apply what we know about the brain to improve their performance at work.

Today, Phil is with us to speak about our brain on how to think and work smarter. Welcome, Phil.

Phil: Thank you very much, Margarida. Thank you very much for having me on.

Margarida: Tell us a bit about yourself. How did you get into the brain-based training field and why are you qualified to talk about it?

Phil: Well, you sort of introduced me with that introduction there. I mean, what I do now is I work with organisations. As you say, I kind of help them help their leaders and help everyone work smarter by applying what we know about the brain. Really then my journey has been from clinical hypnotherapy all the way through things like NLP, and learning how to coach people, learning how to facilitate, and all the while applying what we know about the brain and what neuroscience research can tell us to help people really apply this stuff at work, so it’s kind of a mixture of science and practical skills.

Margarida: Tell us about your book, The Brain Book.

Phil: Well, The Brain Book was – I was approached by a publisher a couple of years ago, so I’ve been doing this stuff for a number of years now working with organisations like Channel 4 and the BBC. I get a lot of feedback as to the things people really find helpful. A publisher approached me to say, “Look, we want to add to an existing series and we want The Brain Book. Would you be interested in writing it?” It’s really my top tips to help you apply all of this stuff, everything that neuroscience has to offer to do things quicker, to do things better, and ultimately enabling people to become more effective at work. Those people that can’t come on the training, you can now by the book.

Margarida: I had a quick look at the book and I loved it.

Phil: Oh, thank you.

Margarida: In it, you dedicate a chapter to what you call “improving brain fitness.” Tell us a bit about that.

Phil: Well, the brain is a muscle; we’re often told this or we may often read this, that the brain is a muscle, and yet I think most of us are never really taught how to take care of that muscle. We understand the role that physical exercise play in our physical fitness but when we talk about the brain, most people are still taught near to nothing about it. Brain fitness, understanding brain fitness for me is, firstly, understanding that your brain is much like your physical body which is that it responds to your decisions, to your choices. It responds to training and ultimately that puts the responsibility in your hands rather than the understanding that it’s all about your genes and it’s this predisposed kind of degeneration, which it’s not.

Brain fitness to me includes really three separate but linked concepts. One is your mental performance from one day to the next. We used to call that your IQ, but we’re really talking about your mental capacity, your thinking speed, and ultimately your mental performance or cognitive performance tomorrow. The second thing that brain fitness also includes, I think, is your learning potential. Neuroplasticity is a new term that a lot of people will be familiar with, which is really a description of your brain’s capacity to adapt, to learn, to respond to your environment or your choices, so that’s the second thing.

The third thing that I think brain fitness also includes is your long term mental health. The more we understand things like Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, the more we come to understand them as symptomatic of our behaviour. It’s not so much genetic; it’s much more a reflection on how you use your brain from one day to the next. Brain fitness for me is mental performance, it’s learning potential, and it’s long-term lucidity or the chances of you getting dementia as you get older. All of these things you have massive amount of influence over, far more I think than most people realise. You can invest in your brain fitness; you can strengthen your brain, you can develop your brain, and you can keep it younger for longer. It’s just understanding how to do it, and that’s part of what The Brain Book is about and part of the stuff that I teach.

Margarida: Can you share with us some practical tips for improving brain fitness?

Phil: Sure. Okay, so it really comes down to what I think are five points, five steps. I talk about it in a model that I’ve developed over the years that I’ve been researching which is the SENSE model, S-E-N-S-E, so five things. The first S is stress. Now we’ve probably all got a relationship with stress in our brain and to kind of preempt the question is, can stress be good for you? Of course it can. It can make you more alert, it can make you more motivated, but more often than not stress, as a lot of us will know, makes your thinking become kind of hijacked. People will find that they are scatty. They’re disordered. They can’t remember things. Their decision-making goes out the window, and there’s a good reason for that.

Your evolutionary brain, your sort of mammalian brain, evolved to respond to stress as if it is a threat. If we were to be attacked by a bear, I wouldn’t want to rationally escape the bear. Instead I’d need to fight or flight. We know that, so stress in the short term makes us a little bit stupid and stress, chronic stress, unmanaged stress in the long term can actually start to shrink your brain. You get this thing called cortical atrophy, which is really a clever way of saying your brain cells die. The first way to improve your brain fitness is to acknowledge the role that stress has in your cognitive performance and to manage your stress response. My top tip will be make more time to relax. Make more time to do things that you love and invest in relaxation as an actual scale. Meditation and mindfulness are probably the top ways to do that. That’s the first thing, stress.

The E in the SENSE model is exercise, physical exercise. We know that the brain is a muscle and like any muscle, it needs certain things to get a function at its best, oxygen and glucose, and your brain gets these two things through blood flow. As you move, you are increasing the blood flow, thereby increasing the resources your brain has to function. In the short term just a 20-minute walk tomorrow morning will make you more productive tomorrow afternoon and again the long term piece is just as significant. As you move, as your body moves, and you engage in physical exercise, your brain produces BDNF, which is a protein that your brain needs to grow, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and that’s one of the reasons why some research suggests that 20 minutes of exercises just 3 times a week, so we’re talking about an hour a week, can cut your chance of dementia by over 50%. So stress, exercise.

The third key to improving brain fitness is nutrition. Again, I’m sure no one needs to be told to eat their greens, but what we now know from compelling research is a Mediterranean diet, which as again I’m sure you know, is fish, oily foods. It’s fruit, and berries, and nuts, seeds, and all of this other stuff we probably associate with brain food. It does keep your brain younger for longer. We know that sugar is particularly bad for the brain, so much so that Alzheimer’s is sometimes referred to as diabetes type 3. Top tips for nutrition is eat a Mediterranean diet, eat less sugar and drink more water. We often forget how important hydration is for your brain.

The fourth point in the SENSE model is back to S which is sleep. We, and so many people I work with, seem to sacrifice or compromise sleep with this illusion that if we have more hours awake, we have more time to work, which logically makes sense but actually experientially doesn’t because we know that sleep deprivation, while we may have more time, we have no sort of cognitive faculty with which to use it. Reliably 98% of adults need between 7 and 9 hours of sleep a night. If you have less than six hours, you’re really are at risk. Again, short term, long term; short term you can’t think straight, you become irritable, you make bad decisions, you can’t focus, and in the long term the more we understand about sleep, the more we see the long term benefits whereby as you sleep, your brain is washed of a neural toxin called beta-amyloid.

Now you don’t really need to know the specifics, but ultimately every day, your brain kind of becomes a bit more toxic with neural byproducts but every time you fall asleep, it’s washed of those things and it comes back to equilibrium but it seems to take maybe six hours so it’s critical to get your – the equivalent – sorry, the right amount of sleep not only for your short-term performance but for your long-term mental health, as well.

The fifth, the final piece of the brain fitness model, is experience, which we haven’t got long, but ultimately experience is about understanding that your brain responds to resistance training like any other muscle. While stress and exercise, nutrition and sleep will create the optimum conditions for mental performance, it’s the learning of new things, it’s novelty, it’s unfamiliarity, it’s learning curves, ultimately, that keep your brain younger for longer. I know that’s a long piece but there’s a lot to it. Improving brain fitness comes down to managing your strengths, moving more, eating a Mediterranean diet, prioritising your sleep, and continuing to challenge your brain through novelty, unfamiliarity, and learning new skills. That’s why things like language acquisition, musical instruments often score so high on things that are good for your brain because they put your brain through its paces. They really challenge it and make it uncomfortable and that, ultimately, is what keeps your brain younger for longer.

Margarida: Okay. Phil, for a business owner who wants their employees to be more productive and happier, what can they do, as a CEO, to help?

Phil: I think there might be two ways to answer that. One is what are the principles that help anyone become more productive? Then maybe the second piece is well is there a difference for a CEO, given that you also manage a number of people. I think working smarter. Okay, so becoming more productive. There is a massive desire and understandable motive to become more productive but I think people miss the distinction between being more productive and being more effective.

Ultimately, being more productive, all that really means is you’re getting more stuff done. Being more effective means you’re also choosing to do the right thing. The first thing I would encourage CEOs and anyone that is invested in their output is to become more goal oriented. To understand that you need to set specific and measurable goals that have a timeline, and to always remind yourself of where it is you want to be going. Ultimately, there’s no point accelerating if you’re going in the wrong direction.

The first point and the only real distinction between productivity and effectiveness is goal orientation. Step one, whether you’re a CEO or anyone else, set goals and work towards those goals. If you’re a CEO, that becomes even more important because people work hard if they understand the meaning and the purpose of their work. Often, I work with CEOs and leaders and not only do I help them formulate their strategy, but we also discuss how to communicate that strategy to everyone in the business because that’s critical. Anyway, step one, to working smarter, always has to be set your goals, work to your goals.

I think the next thing to acknowledge, and again, this works for CEOs as it does for managers as it does for anyone else, is to have a deep understand and appreciation of the 80/20 principle. Pareto’s Rule, which as I’m sure you know, is an understanding that 20% of what you do generates 80% of your results, or specifically, 80% of your progress towards your goals. Just the same is true that 80% of what you do really doesn’t matter that much. If you understand where the force multipliers are, if you understand the things that really generate the greatest value – that could be sales, it could be business development, it could be delivery on your promises, it’s really understanding what they are.

As a CEO, you need to know what they are but instil this understanding, this deep understanding, of where a value is really created. As a CEO and as anyone that works in, ultimately, the culture in which we all work, we are all busy and we are busier – we’re probably busier this year than we were last year, which means if the things continue, next year will be even busier. The problem with busy is not just because it affects our sleep and our relationships and our wellbeing, it affects our decision-making. The busier you become, the more likely you become, to try to do everything, forgetting that 80% of what you’re doing really doesn’t matter very much. Yeah, really understanding the 80/20 principle is critical.

Step three I think, so you’ve got goals, you’ve got 80/20 analysis, is really just understanding – and this is a small maybe simple bit, but the importance of planning, of understanding the – knowing your most valuable tasks isn’t enough. You also need to allocate the right amount of time to those most valuable tasks. For CEOs, I would challenge this love affair with meetings. I would challenge this love affair with getting people together and just spending time unnecessarily, I think is the third thing. Just to be really aware of the degree to which you are allocating your energy to the right tasks I think.

Now we talk about energy, so I think step four in working smarter is to understand that mental energy is more of a limited resource than we probably think. Physically, we know if we’re lifting weights all day, at the end of the day we’re going to be tired. Well the brain is no different. Yet, we reliable hear people say, oh I’ve done ten hours work today. I was like, no you haven’t. You’ve taken ten hours to do your work; that’s not the same thing as having ten hours of output.

I think understanding, and this is where a bit of understanding of neuroscience can really help people become more effective, is understanding the brain reliably oscillates throughout the day. Most people, in fact I would suggest 85 if not 90% of people are better at sustaining their attention, better at becoming more productive in the morning than they are, let’s say, just after lunch. Most people at three o’clock in the afternoon are a bit sleepy and a bit useless. While at the same time, most people at 10 am are really sharp and really on it. We don’t really attend to apply that to our daily calendars.

We are just as likely to book in a meeting at 10 am as we are at 3 pm. That to me is crazy. The equivalent is having three members of staff perhaps, or a team of three people, with very different competencies. One of them works in the morning, one of them works just after lunch, and one of them works in the afternoon. Now, if the person who works in the morning was really sharp, and the person that works in the afternoon is very slow, and the person who works in the late afternoon is maybe a mixture of the two, maybe they’re the most creative of the three, I’m sure it would affect to whom you delegate what tasks, forgetting whether you’re a CEO or whatever your role.

When we think about our own behaviour in that same frame, I think we become less clear on when we are at our best to do what tasks. I think, yeah, understanding that time management is one thing but energy management is far more important. That’s a big takeaway I think for CEOs.

The final piece of working smarter, step five, is understanding how to focus your attention. Multitasking, distractions, noisy offices, open-plan offices, email alerts, WhatsApp and Snapchat and God knows what else, all of these multiple streams of information, all they are doing are making it hard for our brain to focus on one thing. Our brain, whenever it’s involved in important stuff, typically works on one thing at a time. It can’t multitask. It instead attention shifts. The cost of me shifting my attention from task one to task two, or from task important to some random email, the brain can’t do it.

It takes longer than we probably realise to refocus on the task, which is why you get statistics like it takes 25 minutes to refocus or it takes three times as long to complete a task when you’re multitasking as it would if you didn’t, yet so many of us are multitasking all the time without even realising it. We’ve got lots of tabs open on our laptop. We’ve got lots of applications open. Many of us leave our email application open the whole day, with no real explanation as to why. All the time our phone is beeping or it’s buzzing. We’ve got our team members coming up to ask for one quick question. It can be no surprise why our goals that we set a year ago are suddenly taking us three years rather than a quarter.

Yeah, I know I’ve covered a lot again but working smarter for CEOs or anybody else is about five things. Just like the sense model is five things. The five steps to working smarter are: set your goals, do an 80/20 analysis, work more on your most valuable tasks, manage your mental energy, focus your attention. If you do those five things, all things will happen quicker and better.

Margarida: What have you discovered about creativity and the brain?

Phil: Creativity that’s a big one! Okay, from the brain’s perspective, we’ve probably all experienced a good idea that sometimes comes to us in the shower. Sometimes when you go for a walk, you have your most potent creative insight. For some people it’s in their sleep. Neurologically, I think that’s fascinating. It demonstrates that there are neural correlates to our a-ha moments. This has actually been studied and the more we understand about it, the more we tend to notice that the Archimedes-esque eureka moment, that flash of inspiration that seemingly comes from nowhere is dependent on a brain state that is ultimately idle.

This is critical. While I’m all about becoming more productive, and all about becoming more effective, and I really see the merits in learning how to focus your attention and learning how to get a lot done, actually what we know about creativity and problem solving, the creative brain flourishes under almost opposite conditions. What have I learned about creativity in the brain? Well firstly, creativity is a skill. A lot of people think or say they’re not creative but they’ve just forgotten, or they’ve forgotten to include things like problem solving in creativity. Of course, problem solving, coming up with new ways to do things, coming up with better ways to do things, that’s all part of creativity, so we’re all creative.

It’s a skill but it also follows a process, much like the other things we’ve spoken about. There’s asking questions. There’s immersing yourself in lots of unfamiliar material. All of these things make you more creative. As far as the actual brain state that tends to have that spark of inspiration, it is when you’re on holiday or when you’re having a break or you’re going for a walk round the park, or maybe you’ve just had your second glass of wine. This is so important because I think we neglect this creative part of our brain.

Einstein said it best perhaps. He said something along the lines of the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant, but we’ve created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift. For every person like me saying productive organisations of effective organisations are all about goal-orientation and getting stuff done, we forget that there is just as loud a voice or there should be just as loud a voice that is saying, kind of, the opposite. To say well in order to fulfil your goals, to get your objectives, you also need to be a good problem solver. You need to be able to innovate. You need to come up with new ways of doing things.

In order to get that creative brain state, you’ve actually got to stop working. There’s this paradox where, ultimately, the effective brain – sorry, the productive brain and the creative brain are quite different beasts that thrive under very different conditions. Again, I think there is this overarching premise here, the more you understand about the rules and the limitations of both, the more likely you are to be able to create the conditions for whichever part of your brain or whichever brain function you’d like to thrive.

Yeah, creativity is something I love to facilitate, or love to run workshops on it because I do believe everyone is creative and I believe strongly that everyone has new ideas and that’s really what creativity is about. The more you can understand about, alright well why is it that I have a good idea in the shower and how can I create that state neurologically, without getting in the shower, then the more effective we’re likely to become.

Just briefly, the sort of things you can do to create creative brain states, well they’re some of the things I’ve already mentioned. Have more breaks. Go for walks. Have walking meetings. Steve Jobs used to do this all the time. If you’ve got a problem, go for a walk. Use your sleep. Lots of scientific discoveries we owe to people’s night-time processing. The periodic table came in someone’s dream, the structure of a benzene atom, the same thing. We sometimes need to defer or delegate problem-solving tasks to our unconscious brain, and we can only access that by actually working less.

Margarida: Is it possible to improve our memory and how?

Phil: Yes, it is. The memory is another I suppose modular – well I suppose it’s almost like an application in one sense. The brain is a formidable thing and if you were to invest in your brain fitness, like we’ve said, stress, exercise, nutrition, sleep, and experience, then indirectly, your brain becomes more powerful and therefore memory would improve. You can address memory more directly.

I think the first step is to acknowledge, much like creativity, well it’s like many of these things, memory follows a process. Typically, it’s described in terms of you encode stuff then you store stuff and then you retrieve stuff. The best way to think about it is if you were to create a document on your computer. You would create a file. You would then save that file, and if you’d have done both of those things, if you did a search for that file, you’d find it. Whereas if you hadn’t created it and you hadn’t stored it, no search will ever find it.

With memory, it’s exactly the same thing. We, inaccurately, measure out memory on stage three of a three-stage process. We say oh my memory is awful. What we actually mean is our recall is awful, but the reason that is bad is because we’re not very good at paying attention, and we’re not very good at storing the information in an active way. If you want to improve your memory, they’re the two things to do. The first is pay closer attention. Be less distracted. Be more present.

A lot of that sounds obvious but most of us are really bad at remembering people’s names. Now, the reason that happens, I would suggest nine times out of ten, is not because we’re bad at recalling information; it’s simply when we’re introduced to someone we’re not paying attention enough to remember their name. Often we will forget someone’s name within seconds of being told it. Now that is an anomaly I think as far as memory is concerned. It can only reflect that we’re not giving then our undivided attention. Step one, pay closer attention.

As far as the storing of memories, there are, reliably, three ways that is supposedly gets better. One is through repetition; one is through association; and the other is through visualisation. I would suggest that the third one is the most potent. If you want to remember something, the more active you engage with it through, typically, your imagination, the more successful you are likely to become. If you want to remember lists, the best thing to do is to form or create what’s called a memory palace.

I’m sure if people go online, they do a memory palace for a Roman room, they’re the same thing, they involve creating a visual map of, let’s say, your house and using that to memorise stuff that you don’t know. Very briefly, if I walk into my house, I see a table, a chair, and a bookcase; that’s my one, two, third space. If I then want to remember three things, I put the first thing on the first and the second thing on the second, and the third thing on the third. That’s one exercise that a lot of memory champions use.

Remembering names is no different. You need to do things actively. Ultimately, memory, I would suggest, is no more than a reflection on previous attention. If you’re not paying attention, it’s not going to work but if you are paying attention, if you also add to that deliberate and active use of your imagination – I think people will be amazed at how quickly their memory will improve, not only for lists, but for names, for things that you read, just about any form of declarative memory. Again, your memory, just like your brain, it’s like a muscle. If you practice it, you will be astounded how quickly it can develop.

Margarida: We are closing this interview, one last question for you. Where can people go if they want to find out more about your work?

Phil: Well I would have thought the website is probably the best place, www.brainworkshops.co.uk. If you type in brain workshops into Google, if you find Twitter or Facebook, it’ll all be me. Any social channel, or the website itself, www.brainworkshops.co.uk, or just give me a call. I’ll pick up on anything we haven’t had time to mention.

Margarida: Okay, Phil. Thank you very much.

Phil: Thank you, Margarida; it’s been an absolute pleasure.