Loving the F

Episode 35 - Loving the F with Dr. Beau Lotto - Forbidden Deviation

Episode Summary

This weeks conversation is with Neuroscientist, Author and International Speaker Beau Lotto. His work on human perception has built bridges far beyond his lab of experiments. It has inspired collaborations in the worlds of the arts, education and business. on how perception and awe, can and do impact the stories we tell ourselves. What's more, he shares how we can change those stories to empower us.

Episode Notes

In this conversation, we talk about how perception and awe, can and do impact the stories we tell ourselves. What's more, Beau shares how we can change those stories to heal the past and empower our present and future.

Its only in not knowing that you have the possibility of doing something new.
Almost everything begins with perception. Not just the colors we see, but who we fall in love with and the clothes we wear.
When it comes to change, its probably one of the hardest challenges is changing our perceptions first. Perception comes before behavior. Having said that, behavior itself shapes perception so, their integrally related.
Our brain evolved to take what is uncertain and make it certain because, if you didn’t, you died during evolution because dying is easy. There are lots of ways of dying, but very few ways to survive.
The chance during the evolution of increasing the possibility of dying or something bad happen to you was quite high when you’re in a state of uncertainty…which is possibly why when we’re in uncertainty there are emotions attached with it like anxiety and fear – because it was a bad idea. The irony is that’s the only place you can go if you’re going to start doing something different.
Very few things begin, that are interesting, with knowing. They begin with not knowing…I want to celebrate questions.
Anger is in a sense a perceptual response to fear because what happens in your brain is you become incredibly certain. You sometimes become morally judgmental, you stop listening. You could argue that’s it’s a great response when you’re in fight or flight. If a lion is coming at you, you don’t really want to have doubt. You want to get out of the way as fast as possible. The problem is we live as if everything is a lion or everything is a bus coming after us. But it’s not always. So doubt by itself isn’t necessarily the motivator - its doubt with something else. Its doubt within a context and that context is courage. Having the courage to step forward despite not knowing what’s going to happen.
Enter the conflict with a question. Enter a conflict with the possibility of learning rather than being right. Sometimes it feels like you have two options – you can be right, or you can learn and sometimes the two are mutually exclusive – but not always.
I want to support the idea that you do it with the fear. That fear is a catalyst – not as something to ignore or something to pretend that doesn’t exist. Rather, its how you respond to the thing that gives it its meaning.
So, if you’re someone who is 80 years old and still willing to move (be mentally flexible) despite all the evidence and experience that bad things happen -I think that’s where true courage lives. That’s where we could be looking to find examples of courage.
You can create an environment, you can create an ecology that creates the possibility of stepping into uncertainty. But its even that, you have to have something in you that wants to change. And that can come from many different sources. Sometimes it comes from an incredibly powerfully negative source. Having fallen into complete disaster in a sense and there's literally, almost literally nowhere else for you to go and the only place you can go is to recognize the consequence of your own actions that have taken you there and only in that is there a possibility of doing something differently.
Choose your delusion.
In order to change, you first have to become aware. Being aware can, ironically, be very scary for people.
One of the ways we construct our perceptions is that everything we see and do and believe is grounded in our biases and our assumptions. It’s a reflexive response.
Biases and assumptions keep you alive…but they can also constrain you... Its only in knowing that, do you have the possibility of actually changing those biases and assumptions. The problem is, we often don’t know what they are.
If that bias is one that defines you, now you have to doubt what is true about you.
When your brain experiences awe, you feel small but connected to the world. Whereas depression is to feel small but disconnected from the world.
[Awe] Not only do you feel small but fundamentally connected - you also want to then step forward. You’re surprised, you’re experiencing something that doesn’t make sense. You have this desire to understand but to understand you’re going to have to shift your reference frame.
[With awe] you’re more willing to be in uncertainty. You actually want to step forward into uncertainty.
We’re often in conflict where we actually find excitement and that’s what we call learning. When we engage in a situation that is different from what we expect, and then we learn something from it, we shift from where we are, we feel that elation, we feel that expansion. But for some reason there are some situations where we don’t want to, we don’t want to move…what makes those different?
To doubt my story, to even know that I’m telling myself a story, much less a story that I could actually have agency in, often we’re just blind to. How do we then change that? One route is to change the meaning of what’s happened to you, not what happened to you.
What your brain is encoding is not simply that [the event] its encoding the meaning of that event. Not just the event itself. And it’s the meaning of the event that shapes your behavior – the cost and the benefit of that event. It’s the way you respond to something that gives that something meaning.
Until you become aware of the fact that its a reflex, only then do you have the possibility to do something different.
[Reframing past experiences] That then changes the history, almost literally the history of your past experience of the world and will alter the way you behave in the future.
Not all perceptions are the same. Not all perceptions are equally valid – some are more useful than others…they might even be hurtful toward another person.