We all could use tips on how to stop scrolling and pay better attention to the world around us. Jeff Karp is a biomedical engineering professor at Harvard Medical School and MIT, a Distinguished Chair at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss his strategies for lengthening attention span coming from his experience with significant ADHD, and offers advice on how to put down our devices. His book is “LIT: Life Ignition Tools: Use Nature’s Playbook to Energize Your Brain, Spark Ideas, and Ignite Action.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd:
People go to amusement parks or the French Quarter or the Las Vegas Strip because occasional overstimulation can be a lot of fun. But there’s a reason nobody tries to write a college essay or do their taxes. In those places, some things can’t be done well unless they’re done with focus. But even if we live far away from a tourist trap, our digital devices, our lifestyles and for some of us, our very brains can make important goals feel impossible. As impossible as acing the LSAT in a room full of slot machines from KERA in Dallas, this is Think, I’m Krys Boyd.
My guest grew up in rural Canada, which is not. You know, Times Square, but given his ADHD and his challenges with processing information, he might as well have been living inside a buzzing, chiming, flashing casino. He struggled in school not because the teacher who called him a lazy con artist. Just was right, but because he had not yet developed a set of strategies to learn to control how he reacted to stimuli and pinch his attention where he needed it to be in order to get things done. Clearly it worked because Jeff Karp is now a biomedical engineering professor at Harvard Medical School and MIT, a distinguished chair at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. His book is called, “Lit Life: Ignition Tools Use Nature’s Playbook to Energize Your Brain, Spark Ideas and Ignite Action’. Jeff, welcome to the show.
Jeff Karp:
Ah, so good to be here. Thank you.
Krys Boyd:
Lazy con artist that seems like a harsh judgment for a kid in grade school. What did you have a hard time with that made it look like you weren’t trying?
Jeff Karp:
Well, if we go back to the second grade, I was really struggling. Nothing was working. I’d just sit at the back of the class frustrated, angry, feeling demoralized. I wasn’t connecting with anybody. My mom tried flash cards, she tried phonics, nothing worked. Got to the end of the year and the teacher held the conference with my parents, Mr. Studwell, and said, hey, I’d like to like Jeff to repeat the grade and my parents negotiated with the teacher so that I could go on to the third grade if I spent the summer. Now with tutors trying to trying to catch up, so all my classmates went on vacation. And here I am in summer school and it was really, really, really a struggle. I felt like an alien. I felt like I didn’t belong. I felt like it was just. I felt like I just needed to conform to, to survive. And it was tough. But eventually I was able to develop. Tools that initially were for survival. But then I started to be able to use them to thrive.
Krys Boyd:
Yeah, without even maybe realizing exactly what you were doing in the beginning, you started experimenting with habituation and sensitization. So how did you learn to ignore some distractions and also to pay more focused attention to things like that? Mattered to whatever you wanted to get done.
Jeff Karp:
Well, something very transformational happened between the 2nd and the 3rd grade when I was spending time with tutors. And So what happened is you know, I’d go in every day and they’d ask me a series of questions and read passages and things, and I’d give answers. But on one particular day, I’ll never forget it. Almost like it was yesterday, I went in and the tutor read a passage to me, asked me some questions, I gave answers, and then she looked me in the eye and paused and said how did you think about that? And I had never been asked that question before and it was almost like this portal. This like canvas opened in my mind, the ability to think about thinking, this newfound awareness that I had, and I would go on to bring that to everything in terms of how my. Mind you know, just process things and sort of pattern recognition of how other people were acting and just sort of observing the world. And I started to discover that one of the ways that I could learn hear this distracted kid I could barely pay attention in class. But by asking questions, I notice every time I asked a question, my brain would hyper focus for a few moments afterwards on what was said. And that could imprint in my mind, and it would stay there, and I could connect it to other things that I knew. And so very quickly, I realized that for me to survive, I needed to ask a lot of questions. And even in, for example, college, I stopped going to some of my classes because I just wasn’t able to ask enough questions to slow the process goes down and start imprinting the lessons into my mind.
Krys Boyd:
So ultimately, you started thinking of these experiences of deep awareness and engagement that you were able to cultivate as a state where your brain was lit. What does a lit brain feel like?
Jeff Karp:
A lit brain feels- I mean, it’s just it feels incredible really, because I think that, you know, when we’re following our curiosity, when we’re tapping into things that we’re really interested about, our brains light up, they glow orange on an MRI. And we just have this, this incredible sense of Wellness and connectedness with others. And I think, you know, it’s like if we’re having a conversation with somebody and we’re leading with curiosity, that just opens these channels for connection. And it feels incredible. And when we’re tapping into the lit state, we’re really. Doing our best work where it’s when we’re in the most creative and coming up with ideas and doing lateral thinking and connecting, you know, thoughts in our mind to things that that people just said and things that we thought about, you know, months or years before. And I think it’s really where all the good stuff is.
Krys Boyd:
How does control over our attention Jeff affect our motivation?
Jeff Karp:
Well, I think that in some ways, we need to think a little bit about what we’re up against today, you know, and I think a big part of it is in our culture of this digital age, there’s literally $900 billion is spent every year on hijacking our attention. And I think that when our attention is focused on things that we’re not. Curious about it becomes very. It actually digs into our cognitive stamina to focus on the things that we are really curious about and interested. And so I think that when our attention essentially is on things that don’t interest us it sort of has this negative, it brings this sort of negative aura around us. And I think when we can focus on the things that are most that that sort of excite us electrify us that most interest us that tap into our curiosity. It really helps us to align with what’s truly most important. I think in this digital age, it’s almost like advertising and the marketing and the algorithms is telling us what we should believe is important. But I think that what we really ought to do is be open to the cues from our minds. And our bodies, our bodies are so intelligent and sort of interacting with other people. We’re always getting these cues that can help lead us to what truly is most important. You know, for us and. And I think when we start paying attention to that, it really just lights us up.
Krys Boyd:
So, at one end of the spectrum, the end, we want to be at is the lit brain on the other end is what you call the low energy brain or, what is that exactly?
Jeff Karp:
So, the low energy brain state is something that I just I I sort of think of it that way because that’s how I feel, and I think it really has an evolutionary basis. So you know, if we go back like 10,015 thousand years ago when we were all Hunter gather. And for many, many years before that as well, we were outside doing hard work and it didn’t make sense to exercise or over exert our bodies or even our brains. And so, our brains and bodies kind of gravitate to this low energy state and. Where? Where it’s kind of like this energy saver mode, it wouldn’t make sense to exercise or to do anything cognitively unless it was for survival reasons. And I think that wiring that programming stays with us today. So, we naturally gravitate to this low energy brain and body state. And it’s like where our brains anticipate, you know, what comes next. It’s like that robotic mode, like for example, it could be you drive from point A to point B. And you get to point B, but you don’t even remember the route that you took, or you walk into a room and you kind of you forget like, why you walked into that room or you lose your keys and your keys. You find them. They’re like in your pocket. It’s because our brains, like, just naturally gravitate to that low energy state. And we need to. Tools to be able to intercept that and bring our brains into the high energy state where we can really be intentional and deliberate.
Krys Boyd:
Yeah, because scaled up to the level of society, those low energy bodies and brains can really be detrimental, can’t they?
Jeff Karp:
They can be incredibly detrimental because you know, and especially for people who have ADHD and. Attention challenges I think that like myself, you know, we more easily fall prey to the algorithms and to, you know, this $900 billion of marketing and advertising. And I think that because our brains, just for everybody, gravitate to this low energy state. It makes us it’s easier for our minds to be hijacked and for us to believe in the importance that others are, you know, are defining. Press.
Krys Boyd:
So we need to sidestep our low energy brains to get our brains lit and the first step in this is what you call lowering the activation energy. What is that about exactly?
Jeff Karp:
OK, so when I was in a chemistry class many years ago, I learned about this concept and I literally was like my God, this applies to every area of. My life. And So what happened was, is that OK? You gotta consider let’s say 2 molecules in a beaker of water, let’s say right glass beaker of water. And the molecules are just kind of moving around a little bit not but not much is happening. And then you add a bit of heat to it and they start moving around a little more and then you add more heat. And now they’re really moving. And you add a little more heat and then all of a sudden they collide and a chemical reaction occurs. So the total amount of heat that you add to the system. Is the activation energy the amount of energy you need to add in order for a reaction to occur? And when I heard that I was like, Oh my gosh, I could apply this everywhere because there’s so many things I want to do, but they feel like they’re so high energy I let I need to put so much energy of myself into it to. For it to happen and so I’ll give you an example. And so actually before I do that, I’ll say so. The goal is what I’ve learned is that I can actually by taking certain steps forward, I can lower the activation energy to a point where it then becomes very easy to take that step forward and get the ball rolling. OK, here’s the. Example. So last summer, a good friend of mine, Michael Gale, called me when he was on his bike and he said that being on his bike was his happy place and I immediately resonated with that. And I was like, Oh my God, I love being on my bike. I feel free as a bird. And just so many fond memories. And I was like, wait a moment. I have a bike. Why am I not going on my bike if I if I feel so good when I get on it and I knew that the activation energy was too high for me to just go home and and get on my bike and so. What I did is I used this this this tool of lowering the activation energy and So what I did was I the next day I said I’m just gonna wash my bike, just get it clean and I wouldn’t let myself do anything else except that. And then the next day I said I’m gonna put air in the tires. And so I did that. And then the next day. I put the bike beside the car so I would see it every day and I hung the helmet on the handlebars and so all I needed was like 10 minutes to jump on the bike and go around the neighborhood a couple times and I was able to last summer do over 1000 miles. The biking.
Krys Boyd:
This is so interesting. The need to pace yourself. It sounds like each day when you’re doing this, you’re a little more excited about doing the actual thing.
Jeff Karp:
Exactly. And I think that is a huge part of it as well that when we lower the activation energy and we sort of like tighter it or we just allow ourselves each day just to. Sort of, you know, bite off a little piece of it. It does build the excitement inside and that that increases the motivation and our ability to actually take a step forward and do the things that we really. Want to do what?
Krys Boyd:
Kinds of rewards can keep us motivated. Jeff, is it? I mean, I guess it’s different for everybody, but what can we look at to reward ourselves? We’re actually doing the things we want to do.
Jeff Karp:
Ohh there’s there’s so many things that we can do and you know I feel like sometimes it’s even just sort of like tricking our brains even just a little bit. So I mean, there’s so many things that I’ve experimented with over the years. I’ll give you an example actually from college. So I found it really difficult to go to the library. And steady for my exam. Dams. And So what I did back then is, and here’s a fast food example is that I said to myself, you know what if I can stay here for just two more hours, I’m gonna allow myself to go to Wendy’s and have a full meal there. And. And I was actually able to do that. Like, I was able to sort of. Like you know, motivate myself with these little things when I went. To McGill, there was like this candy machine, and I kind of was able to create these little rewards. So initially kind of started off with food. I don’t do so much with the food anymore as I used to, but that’s kind of how it started for me. As I said, OK, I’ll allow myself if I can get to this time, I’d allow myself to go to the the vending machine and get something. Out of it. And that actually worked pretty well for quite a while, and now I have actually switched it to a completely different strategy. So what I do is I almost the reward for me also almost make like a challenge and so for. Apple, I’ll put my my phone up and I’ll put on the stopwatch and what I’ll do is I’ll say I’ll let this. So I’ll kind of hit start and I’ll start working. And when I feel like a distraction coming on, I’ll look at the stopwatch and I’ll say OK, can I go another two minutes? Before I go to this distraction and then, you know, I kind of keep doing that and it almost creates this challenge and allows me to hyper focus more and it has also helped me to get into the the flow state. Another thing actually that I do is I now write the word distraction on a piece of paper beside me, and any time I feel like I’m being distracted or catch myself in a distraction, I’ll put a check mark on that word or in the box distraction. And that actually intercepts the distraction. And helps me to get like more familiar with it. And as I do it, it’s. Very empowering to catch myself in a distraction and bring myself back to the task at hand. And that in and of itself is I find very rewarding.
Krys Boyd:
It took me into my 30s, but I eventually built this habit of exercising every single day and I I find I have to do it every day or else I lose motivation. Because I I feel like keeping up with that streak is really motivating. I mean, I wonder if that’s something that works.
Jeff Karp:
That definitely works for me, so that, yeah, kind of like the streak motivator and a number of people actually that I interviewed for the book. That was something that they spoke about as well. I would say, personally, you know, I’m just so curious about everything, and I love experimenting. And so I’ve also found myself. Both at times sort of doing the same thing for too long. I start to lose interest in it, so I also have sort of been able to create this scenario for myself where I can sort of stop doing something like let’s say on the exercise bike I get on and I start doing it every morning and I do it for several months. Then I start to lose a bit of motivation. I allow myself to lose that motivation because I know that there’s gonna be this pain point within that’s gonna bring me to something new to fill that space. And I just try to turn my attention. To it and then I start having conversations with other people about what did they do, you know, for exercise. And I keep an open mind, and I find I’m able to actually switch from one thing to another thing. And sometimes there’s a little bit of time in between. But I also find that there’s a lot of reward to be found within that. You know, like the that just this idea that we don’t have to do the same thing, there’s so many possibilities of how we can exercise and experience the world. Held. And I like to also be open to, too.
Krys Boyd:
That is this what you call intentional novelty.
Jeff Karp:
Yes, well, intentional novelty. Our brains love novelty and I think that this this is directly connected to it because one of the tools is called do new and there’s I think there’s like fear and has itation that we have that kind of. Builds up over time. To do something new, like if we do the same thing over and over and over again, eventually our brains stopped firing the same as when we were learning and kind of starting off. And so this is the habituation sort of part of it. And when we get to habituated within our lives, we can get into a rut. We can start to feel, you know, our sense of Wellness starts to decline. And I think there’s real power and reward. In in doing new things and experimenting, there’s just so many possibilities our I think our brains kind of gravitate to this place where we see things that’s linear. We draw these solid lines, these boxes around things we try to frame things from 1 angle and then base everything on that. And when we start. Sort of looking around us and having conversations with people from different backgrounds, we start being able to to see the different ways we can frame things and and new ways of thinking and our minds start expanding and we start to realize there’s infinite possibilities in everything.
Krys Boyd:
How can we break unhelpful mental habits that demotivate us? Like the idea that someone with ADHD can’t focus long enough to read an entire book, let alone write one, let alone complete, a PhD program.
Jeff Karp:
I think that well, the first there, there, there, one of the tools is is flip the switch and there’s four steps. So the first step is noticing our inner desire for possibility. And so you know, just having awareness that there’s a another way of being, another way of doing something, another way of thinking, you know, could be in like, a relationship could be at work or it could be something with like, personal evolution. So just sort of noticing that inner desire and turning our attention to it is really a powerful first step. And I think. One of the challenges with this step is that we tend to, you know, in this, on demand culture, we tend to want to see results or changes happen really fast and sometimes the powers to be the magic of the universe, it just takes time to we have to turn our attention to it and start to draw more awareness and have conversations with others. And we start to get ideas and the second step is to consider what’s working and what’s what’s holding us back. And so often when we start to assess whatever it is in our lives that we’re sort of noticing, there might be. Something more or different that we want to think about or embrace. We can realize that there are things that are going well and there are maybe some impediments that, that, that are sort of holding us or stopping us from achieving what we want actually. Maybe I’ll give you an example. That’s OK where?
Jeff Karp:
Yeah, when COVID hit, I had become a workaholic and I I was so into it. I was so tapped into the dopamine, and I’d been struggling when I was younger so much. And then I finally got identified as having learning differences in ADHD. And I got some accommodations, extra time and extra space, and my grades went from C’s and D’s to A’s. But I was so focused on trying to improve efficiency and be more productive cuz I was just so my mind just sort of operated more like slowly cuz I was just considering all these possibilities. Someone asked me a question I could think of multiple answers, and I never knew what was the answer they wanted. And and so I spent so much time conforming. And when COVID hit my life literally came crashing down in my living room because I had just become a workaholic. And I was. I mean, I could give you so many examples of of this, but what essentially happened was I noticed this inner desire for possibility. Me. I took stock of what was working. What was holding me back. I was, you know, things were going amazing at my laboratory. But at home, I wasn’t connecting with my family. My wife and I. Our marriage had kind of deteriorated, like we was like 2 ships passing in the night. And my kids weren’t coming to me anymore. And and so the third step is to notice other possibilities and other ways of thinking. And I sort of sat with that for a little while. And then it hit me. My wife was exploring spiritual questions. She was interacting with very spiritual teachers. And the 4th step is to take a deliberate step forward. And I just knew what I had to do. So I said, Jessica. Would you please introduce me to your teachers and that you know, these spiritual leaders that you’ve been working with? And I started interacting with them. I started experimenting with various forms of. Station I found Transcendental Meditation and it truly allowed me to really create this pause in my mind and really understand deeply what it means to be intentional. And I’ll give you an example where now when I’m in conversation, let’s say with my children, I see the energy of the conversation. Let’s say they’re speaking. And I know that now if I say something, it’s going to change the focus from them to me, and they’re gonna stop talking. And I. So. So now what I can do is when they’re speak. Being it’s like I can feel myself wanting to say something or pull out my phone and say look at this on my phone, but now I let that thought just drift out of my mind to keep the focus on them and to me when I do that, I just feel so good and and I kind of, you know, I sort of say in my mind that’s a win. And so that’s one of the ways. I’ve been using this tool. Flip the switch to really cultivate strong relationships with my family and my friends.
Krys Boyd:
How could we build a habit of questioning our assumptions about just the way things are in order to find our way to new goals and creativity?
Jeff Karp:
Questioning has been such a big part of my life and actually when I was in, when I got to grad school, you know, I had, I’d spent my whole life, I sort of iterating questions and try to figure out the best questions to ask and. But I was about to learn a whole new level of questioning. That really helped me to question assumptions and really find the to to figure out what those high value questions really are, and So what happened was, is that when in academia you go to you just one of these things, you go to invited speakers, you go to see them speak. And there I was kind of drifting in and out of the talk. And then at the end of the talk, people ask questions. And I was blown away by the questions that people were asking around me like, and started to almost shame myself. Like, why are these questions not coming into my mind? And I used to play chess with my dad when I was younger. And what really separates an amateur chess player from an advanced chess player is pattern recognition. Advanced chess players can see like 1213 whatever 14 moves ahead and they started to think, OK, maybe I could bring pattern recognition to questioning. And So what happened was I went to the next seminar. I went to everyone was focused on what the seminar speaker was talking about, and I was focused on something completely. That I was focused on the questions that people were asking, and I actually wrote them all down for weeks, so maybe 6 to 8 weeks of seminars and then I went through them and I noticed that there were patterns in the motivation behind why people were asking the questions. There were four or five different categories. Which I’m happy to go into, but it gave me this empowerment and I learned that questioning is a skill that we can all get better at and we can improve. And in fact, and even in social settings. I’ve been. I’ve watched the people who are really the schmoozers, the one who connect with the most people, and I’ve written down the questions that they ask so that I can learn how to connect more deeply with people.
Krys Boyd:
OK, Jeff, So what, what are the patterns that distinguish what you call high yield questions?
Jeff Karp:
OK, so there are a lot of a lot of patterns I think for the high yield questions. And one thing I’ll just give you is an example from my laboratory. That a question that I asked in every single lab meeting and it took me time to figure out that this was a really important question. But I realized in academia and I think probably everywhere there’s like this tendency to be incremental in our lives. I mean, I just, I don’t have this sort of visceral reaction to it in academia. Because. We have so much opportunity to create impact, but we gravitate because our brains gravitate towards this low energy state. We tend to focus on just doing a little thing to step wise, move things forward and I thought, OK, I really want to commit my laboratory to to not just. Discovering new things and publishing papers, but to actually advancing therapies to patients in the shortest period of time. And I came up with this question, which is what’s the bar that we need to exceed to get people excited? In other words, it’s like this. So what question? What’s the best result that anyone has ever achieved in a particular model and how much better do we need to do to claim that we have made us a valuable advance, you know, to get our colleagues excited to get investors. Excited to get the world excited and by focusing on that which really is is all about impact, it’s thinking about how much further do we need to move the field in order to claim the impact. It really it. It’s so amazing because it’s and it’s a hard question to answer, but at the same time, when we focus on it, when we make it our North Star, it really helps us to focus on impact and it also helps to mobilize the whole team because they see that we’re headed towards something that if we can achieve it. We can really make a huge difference and I think it’s one of the reasons why I. Almost every project in my lab has turned into a company that’s now either in the process of bringing new therapies to patients or there’s products on the market that are helping patients.
Krys Boyd:
One question you love is why not? What does that question do for us?
Jeff Karp:
Well, when we ask why not? I think it just really intercepts the pattern of questioning it. I think that often when we are brainstorming or when we’re in conversation, you know, trying to figure out the next thing to do. To we need to have questions that make us sort of stop and go into this higher energy brain state so that we’re not just sort of flowing, we need to sort of intercept the flow of the where our brains are naturally going because truly there are so many different facets to what we do, so many different ways. And frame things in so many different perspectives. Another way that we sort of intercept in in in addition to the why not is we’ll bring somebody into the conversation who’s new, who has maybe a completely different expertise than everybody else in the room. And when they come in, they start asking questions that are completely different from the questions that are currently being asked. So I think these questions like why not and there’s a lot of other questions we can ask and even like the simplest questions are usually the ones that allow us to gain the greatest insights to enable us to make those leaps forward.
Krys Boyd:
I think sometimes, Jeff, we struggle to get motivated because we have only like the broadest, vaguest sense of what it is. We actually want we sort of know what we’re supposed to want. What are some ways we can start to figure this out? Not by just ruminating on the question, but by taking some action.
Jeff Karp:
I think that you know the genesis of any project. In my lab. You know, we never know at the beginning, actually many stages, we never know whether it’s gonna work out or whether we’re sort of like especially in the beginning, whether we’re headed in the right direction. And but I think that you know what we try to do is we try to take steps forward where we can learn. And in particular, we try to gain an insight or learn something that maybe others have missed or maybe overlooked. And when we start focusing. Our process on learning and gaining insights, it really starts to electrify the team because it starts to sort of help us move in a direction that’s different than where others have moved in the past. And I think that. That generates momentum. It creates gravity for other people to start. You know coming in because now others are curious about what we’re finding and discovering. And I think that that really sort of helps us to tune more into the direction that we need to go.
Krys Boyd:
OK, let’s talk about attention. This notion of pinching our brains sounds painful, but what you’re referring to here is a little bit like the way we pinch a photo on our phone. To see the small details that might otherwise elude us.
Jeff Karp:
Actually, I’m in the third grade. We moved out to the country and one day I, you know, got off the the bus because now you know, out in the country. And I would walk along our driveway, which is, you know, it was 1000 feet long, carved through a forest. And, you know, I had been ruminating all day, very frustrated. Here I am in the third grade with undiagnosed ADHD and learning differences, and one day as I was walking along the driveway, I noticed something that I had never seen before. And I got closer and I got closer and closer and I was trying to see it. And then. All of a sudden. I was face to face and I looked and I was like oh. My God, this is. A bat I I’d never seen a bat before. And now because I had had this newfound awareness from my experience in between the second and third grades.
Krys Boyd:
Huh.
Jeff Karp:
I immediately tuned in to how it was almost like all the other thoughts in my mind were being squeezed out, and all I could think about was the B. That year, this this, you know, kind of extreme, you know, this extreme case of ADHD and and just my mind bouncing all over the place. I was amazed at how almost the bat was like. It was like pinching my brain and I started to think, OK, could I actually bring this to other areas of my life? In addition to asking questions. Where I knew I could then hyper focus for a few moments afterwards on the answer. Could I intentionally use my intention? To focus my attention on to help me learn, and I started to bring that to school and I found that I actually could indeed focus my attention at various times throughout the day by pinching my brain to squeezing other thoughts out and really sort of putting my brain into this high energy. Brain state where I could more easily learn.
Krys Boyd:
So what are some strategic questions we can ask to pinch our attention if we don’t have a daytime bat to observe?
Jeff Karp:
Right. Well, there’s a lot of things that we can do to focus our attention and I’ll just give you, I think you know, part of this is really practices, things that we can engage in to really tap into our neuroplasticity and rewire our brains. I mean, we all have that capability. And so one of the things that I do is really, really simple. Which is, it’s just my interaction with food, for example, and I think today in our society we’re kind of at this point where we just sort of shovel our food down and we move on. Maybe we’re on our phones when we’re eating. And so one thing that I’ve been doing is I pay attention to the flavors in the food, and I make the intention to try to connect with the flavors of what I’m. Eat. And when I do that, then I can’t be looking at my phone. I can’t really be in a conversation with somebody else. So, you know, I try to do this for, like, one or two meals a day. And I start to really focus my attention on the sense of taste. And that has helped me to resensitize. That set. And now I’ve actually moved beyond that to all the senses because what I’ll do is when I walk around my neighborhood, I actually cycle through my senses. So when I’m walking and what I’m doing essentially is laser focusing in on each sense, one at a time. So I’ll say site. Now look at the bark on the trees and the texture of the bark, and I’ll look at the clouds and then I’ll look at look at the tops of the trees and then I’ll say hearing and I’ll listen for like the wind rustling and the leaves and the birds. And then I’ll say touch and I’ll feel my heel hit the ground and then my toes and I’ll feel the clothes against my skin and maybe the wind against my face. And by doing that, I’m actually training my brain to focus attention. And I’m also at the same time resensitize my aliveness, because. It’s our senses, which is, you know how we experience the world and our current culture has really flattened our senses. And so I think that this is one of the ways that we can really help to to develop these practices to, to improve our focus and our attention so that we can pinch our brains, you know, throughout the days on the things that are most meaningful to us.
Krys Boyd:
Of course there are also, as you’ve mentioned. Million external forces clamoring for our attention, pulling on our attention, what can we do to learn to put up speed bumps, to resist those diversions when we know they don’t really see?
Jeff Karp:
Yes. So, there’s a lot of things that we can do to create the speed bumps. I think the distraction disruptor I’ve used that one quite a bit. You know, I was saying that you can write the word distraction on a piece of paper and put a check mark when you feel like you’re being distracted or the stopwatch. There’s also an app that I’ve been using. My sister’s a child psychologist and. In Ottawa, and she sometimes she told me that she recommends this one app to patients called Flora, which essentially is on your phone. It’s like a little plant or a flower and it grows. But if you go on your phone, go to Instagram, then the flower will. Guy. And so it really is a way to sort of help to train our brains to remain focused on something for longer periods of time and to cultivate that awareness around. I think there’s just so many, so many things grabbing our attention and pings and stimuli. And you know another thing that I’ll do is just as an example. In between meetings I I I I press pause, which is such an important tool, because what I found is that I gravitate towards having these back-to-back, to back-to-back meetings all day long. But I realized that when I create a pause in between meetings then. My mind can actually, and I’m not talking about going on emails or anything. I’m just saying like maybe going for a walk or just sitting there, maybe closing my eyes. Then what? That person just told me or said to me, I’m now thinking about it in relation to other things that people may have said during the previous weeks and are making connections that can really be incredible and bringing people together and sort of connecting dots between ideas. And I think if I don’t. Do that, then my mind just becomes distracted on. Things that end up being lower value and more on productivity versus on purpose and really trying to seek high value outcomes.
Krys Boyd:
There are of course 1,000,000 reasons Jeff why exercise is good for our bodies. Why is physical movement such a powerful but maybe underutilized tool for building our ability to focus?
Jeff Karp:
Well, I think that our bodies were really made to move, but not to to exercise, you know, because of this, you know, evolution for evolutionary reasons that you know, we were meant to really move our bodies for survival reasons, not move our bodies to. Exercise. But really, what’s really amazing? You know, there’s these kind of other layers to look at, is that when we move our bodies, it really floods our brains with positive neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin and oxytocin. And all these, all these incredible transmitters that make us feel great. And we can feel great. 4 hours after. We move and you know this simply can we can get them from walking or doing more strenuous activities like biking or running or whatever. Whatever it is, my wife is a Pilates instructor and owns a studio. And I’ve been engaging in Pilates and always feel amazing after I. Do after I do Pilates, feel like then that can bring that to everything that. We do. And one of the goals of of lit is really to intercept patterns in our lives and create new patterns and rewire our brains. And it’s really hard to do that unless we’re feeling good about ourselves. And so I think that movement and committing to movement is just so important in a very holistic sense. Of not just doing it for physical fitness or to look good, for example, but to actually help us to lower the activation energy to be more intentional in our lives.
Krys Boyd:
Not all practice is equally effective. How can we structure practice to maximize our learning of new skills we want to master?
Jeff Karp:
One of the people I interviewed for the book, Molly Berberian, is a neuroscientist and and and she plays some musical instruments as well. And in her research, which she discovered was, she said actually, when I was speaking to her, she said if people are given an hour, let’s say, to practice. A thing they generally will try to force themselves to practice just like straight through for that hour and she said. But the neuroscience says that that’s actually not the best way to do it. That that one of the best ways to to to go is to actually do let’s say 15 minutes and then take a 5 minute break and then do another 15 minutes and and so on. And she said there’s a couple reasons for this. One is that we turn mind into matter in between. The practice like actually when we’re resting is when our brains actually undergo the rewiring, so it’s important to pause. Was and the other thing she said was that she referred to something called the startle effect. And so let’s say, for example, we’re trying to memorize something and we take 15 minutes and we feel pretty good about the few sentences that we’ve memorized. And then we come back 5 minutes. We take a break, we come back 5 minutes later. Or 10 or you know whatever it is. And we kind of forget some of it. What that does is it actually puts our brains into this higher energy brain state where we’re more hyper focused. And so when we repeat, we actually have a greater chance of then imprinting into our minds.
Krys Boyd:
What is defamiliarization? What does that do for our brains?
Jeff Karp:
Again, I think it comes back to this sense that our brains really love novelty and our brains sort of gravitate towards linear thinking. And you know, some of the astronauts that I spoke to said, you know, when they go up into space, they need to look at Earth and say that’s down.
Which is pretty interesting, right? Because when you think about it, there really is no down, but we need these sort of frames of reference in order to function in our. But I think it’s important for us to disrupt those frames of reference frequently to be able to expand our minds, because if we stick with a certain framing for too long again our brains stopped firing to the extent that they did when we were learning. And that’s what can really get us into a rut and into kind of feeling lethargic and so deep familiar familiarization is something that we can embrace. And one of the ways we do it in the laboratory is I populate the lab with people from very different disciplines. In fact, minimizing the overlap of expert. Teeth. So we have chemical engineers, Mechanical Engineers, electrical engineers, biologists, immunologist. We’ve had a gastrointestinal surgeon, a cardiac surgeon, a dentist in the lab, people from over 30 countries, and the education system is different. So people think differently. And so by having an environment where there’s so much diversity in thought. And in experiences and in knowledge and skills, it creates this incredible defamiliarization environment where we’re constantly sort of being challenged to look at things in different ways. But by doing that, we’re able to expand our minds and then access all sorts of knowledge and skills and resources that. Increase our chance of succeeding and, you know, moving toward more towards our goals.
Krys Boyd:
Jeff Karp is a biomedical engineering professor at Harvard Medical School and MIT, a distinguished chair at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a Fellow of the National Academy of. Inventors. His book is called, ‘Lit Life Ignition Tools to Use Nature’s Playbook to Energize Your Brains, Spark Ideas and Ignite Action. Jeff, thanks for the conversation.
Jeff Karp:
Thank you so much. This has been fun.
Krys Boyd:
You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and subscribe to the podcast wherever you like to get podcasts or listen to it at our website: Think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
