Can You Really Change Your Brain?

Welcome, Jon. I’m so glad you could be here today.

Jon
Fantastic to be here, Susan. Thank you for having me.

of course. So for folks who may not be familiar with you and your work, could you just give us a brief overview of your background and how you became interested in the science of habits and why you wrote your book, The Habit Mechanic.

Sure, I’ve got three psychology related degrees, including a PhD. And when I went into the field and tried to help people to do better, I learned that pretty much everything I’d been taught didn’t really work. Because the things I’d been taught, like every other psychologist and coach and teachers get taught, is based on what we call black box models. This means that the things we learn about how to help others to be at their best are not based on the first principles of how brains actually work, because we’ve only been able to look inside human brains in real time for about 20 years or so. And the brain is the most complex thing in the known universe. Whereas if we think about physiological things and getting fitness training and that kind of stuff, we’ve been able to look inside the human body in a quite complex way for about 70 years or so. So.

Those of us that are trying to help us others to be at their best, we’ve been let down by those that have been teaching us because the stuff we’ve been taught isn’t all that good. So I made it my mission over the last 20 years to work out, well, how do we use the latest insights from neuroscience and behavioral science and applied psychology? How do we use the first principle insights to help us to be at our best, but also to help others to be at their best, not just to help people to know what it would be a good idea to do to revise better or to concentrate better or to be more confident or to be better leaders, but actually how do we help people to change their brains so they can actually change their behavior, the things they’re thinking they do? Because the most of what we’re thinking and doing most of the time is automatic or semi -automatic. In other words, it’s a habit. So the way we popularly understand habits, things like atomic habit, it’s not correct habits are not 60 or 70 percent or 80 percent of what we do they literally are most of the time 100 percent of how we’re thinking and doing and at our best it’s 98 percent so we have two percent capacity for conscious thinking and doing and that’s when i say don’t think of a white white elephant it’s already in your brain that’s how quick our brains process things.

So if we want to help people to do better, we think the only way to do that is to help people to become habit mechanics. And that’s why I wrote the habit mechanic book, which is a writer before the training, all the practical tools that we’ve been developing over the last 20 years. And that includes in education. So we’ve got curriculum for teachers, for pupils, for parents. We train teachers to become.

as certified habit mechanic teachers so they can use our techniques in the work they do with pupils. And we see that what habit mechanic teachers are able to do compared to other teachers is they’re able to improve kids’ examination results by about 50 % faster in six weeks. And that’s because we’re able to get the pupils actually doing high impact learning, not just passively staring at a textbook or a video, we show them how to actually learn in a supercharged way that speeds up how they’re able to bring their best self to the learning, get more out of the learning and perform better in exam results. And we work with children from about eight years old and we work with people all the way through to, well, through their public examinations, into their 20s, into their 30s, all the way through to when they’re running multi -billion dollar companies.

So our training is end to end. It’s not just for one particular group.

Yeah, that’s fantastic. So I’m really curious because, you know, the book Atomic Habits took off here in the US for a really long time. And there’s this underlying idea that first of all, I feel like there’s two myths that you bust in The Habit Mechanic. One, that a habit takes 21 days to form. And you say that’s not true. Right? No. So what makes that not true? 

That’s not true, no.

Yeah, so we have to go back to first principles all the time. So what is the most basic way we can understand the problem we’re trying to solve? So if we think we want to help young people, we want to help a particular person to get a better public examination results, what do we call the American public exam? So.

We call them all kinds of things. We call them standardized testing here. 

S -A -Ts.

Yeah. Is it, is that an SAT, right? Yeah. So better, better essay English, I say to you or something like that. Well, we’re actually, it’s not about, we could think about it. It’s about getting Sally, if that’s the student we’re trying to help to get more knowledge into her brain about, um, the questions that might be asked in the SAT examination. What we’re trying to do, we’re trying to help Sally to build more neurons, more English, SAT specific neurons that can be used in an exam to retrieve the learning. That’s what we’re trying to do. So when we’re trying to build new habits, we’re trying to change our brain by building new neurobiological connections. So everything that we’re good at in our brain, we have neurons that represent that. So if we think about how our memory works, for example.

When we were at primary school or elementary school, we knew everybody’s name in our class. We were in small classes and you can’t really help not knowing everybody’s name. But right now you probably don’t know everybody’s name anymore. So when you were young, you had wires in your brain that represented, when I say wires, I mean neurons. And we have about a hundred billion neurons in our brain. You had wires that represented everybody’s name in your class.

So let me make this up now to give you an example. So we won’t think of a class example, we think of a family example. So let’s say that you just met a new family, maybe some people that are thinking of coming to your school. The father is called Mark, the mother is called Elizabeth, and there are three children. One is called Thomas, one is called Martin, and one is called Leanne. So right now you can hold those three, those five names in your short term memory, especially if I say them again. So it’s Mark, Elizabeth, Thomas, Martin and Leanne. And that’s about the limit of our short term memory. So if we want to move something from our short term memory, Mark, Elizabeth, Thomas, Martin and Leanne into our long term memory, we need to repeat it. Otherwise our brain will just dump it. So,

If we don’t use those five names again in the next 30 seconds or minute or so, we’ve repeated them a few times now, our brain will just dump them because it dumps information after about 30 seconds if you don’t reuse it. So if we repeat it again, Mark, Elizabeth, Thomas, Martin and Leanne, we’re starting to move it from our short -term memory, our working memory into our longer -term memory. And we’re starting to create new neurobiological connections in our brain that represent those five names. And the more we repeat the names, and so right now those connections are a bit like cobwebs. The more we repeat the names, the more the cobwebs turn into what we could think of as cables. So we say Mark, Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Thomas, Martin, and Leanne. Mark, Elizabeth, Thomas, Martin, and Leanne. So we’re creating new neurobiological structures in our brain.

That’s how learning happens. And if after you’ve listened to this podcast, you never repeat those names again or think about them, the little neurons that you created will die.

Our brain is consistently growing new neural connections and killing old neurological connections for a process called pruning. Everybody’s brain is doing this all the time. In education, we’ve been educated to believe that some people are good at learning and some people are not very good at learning. That is an absolutely nonsensical idea. Homo sapiens are designed to learn.

And everything a homo sapien can do, which is our species, they’ve learned how to do. Because when we’re born, we can’t do much. We don’t even know how to smile. We learn how to smile by watching people who are looking at us smile via something called mirror neurons in our brain. So you asked me a question about 21 days to form a new habit. Any new habit I want to build will not be equal.

What I mean by that is if I want to build a new habit of, let’s just take a simple physical habit of kicking a soccer ball with my left foot to make a short pass. If I can already make a long pass with my left foot or I can already, let’s spin that around actually. So I want to build a better habit of making a long pass with my left foot with a soccer ball and I could already make a short pass and I could already make a long pass with my right leg, that looks very different for me forming that habit for someone who can’t even kick a soccer ball. So we’re not all starting from the same place. Also, let me extend that example. I might be really good at throwing a ball with my left hand a long distance.

So what I might already have when I’m starting out, but it’s quite a lot of neural architecture for it. So therefore I can establish a new behavior probably much faster than 21 days. Here’s the kicker. Once I’ve established that behavior, that new way of doing something, which is represented by new neurobiological connections in my brain, it isn’t guaranteed to be there forever. It will only be there as long as I practice doing that thing.

So this idea that you can build any habit in this set amount of time and then it’s habit for life is just nonsense because our brain is made of about 100 billion neurons. We might have loads of neurons in our brain already that are similar to that new thing that we want to practice or we might have pretty much none at all. And I will only get good at the things I’m practicing. I think I’ll only continue to be good at the things that I want to be good at if I keep practicing them. So you might want to ask some follow up questions to that.

Susan (11:50.68)

Yes. So what about something like muscle memory? Like for musicians that they’ve practiced something for years and years and years and years and then maybe they dropped it and then years later they come back and they can still pick up something. What happens then?

Yeah, so you spent a lot of time practicing something. So you haven’t killed the entire connection. I mean, muscle memory is a myth also because the memory doesn’t reside in your muscles, it resides in your brain, right? Brains are connected to muscles. So it’s the same way, Susan, that you could say, well, why can’t I still remember certain people’s names that were in my elementary class, even though I haven’t used their name for 10 years? It’s because…

Most of our thinking is subconscious. We’re not conscious of everything that we’re thinking and practicing. So most of it is just whirling around in the background. And those people that you can remember the most from your elementary class, you’ve got deep emotional connections with them. And there’ll be things going on in your life all the time that activate those deep emotional connections with those key people. In the same way, if you’ve dedicated 10 – 20,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert musician, then you’re not easily going to forget that stuff.

Yeah, so then here’s the, you just said something that spurred another thought for me. So you just mentioned emotional connection. So do you find that the emotional connection makes a stronger neural connection or a longer term neural connection because of an emotional connection that somehow fused that?

Potentially, I think the way that we commonly think about emotions isn’t probably the way emotions really work. Emotions are driving our lives. They are the most immediate signal to our brain to pay attention to something. So you will hear about language of the attention economy. So if you’re using a product that’s free, like Facebook, then you are the product.

They are selling you to their customers, right? They’re selling your attention, your habits, your likes, your interest to their customers. This is the attention economy. But actually it’s not really the attention economy. It’s the emotion economy because emotions drive attention and attention drives learning. So emotions are implicated in every element of learning that we do. So it would be very hard to isolate them. But when you have a deeply emotional experience with them, with an individual, for example, then the likelihood is, is that you will develop much stronger neurobiological connections in your brain for that experience than an experience with someone that wasn’t emotional, it was just passive. But you bring me on to, and I’ve got a copy of, I don’t know if this is a video recording, but I’ve got a copy of the habit mechanic. This took me over 20 years to write.

It’s 107 ,000 words long over about 38 chapters. It’s not a traditional book. It’s a manual for life. It’s an assistant. It’s like a coach. That’s what it’s written to be like. And we have an app that goes with it, the Habit Mechanic University app. But right at the start of the journey of becoming a habit mechanic, we really go deep into learning. And one of the things that we share early on in the book is what we call the 10 intelligence factors.

So these are the gateways to learning anything. And we hear that narrative, Sarah will just never be able to learn math. She’ll just never be any good at math. She’ll just won’t be able to do it. That just is not true. Anyone can learn anything because we are designed primarily to learn. Homo sapiens, our species, are designed to move around and solve problems, problems first of all relating to threat. We’re designed to move around about 10 miles a day.

The way we currently live our lives is radically different to what we’ve evolved to do over the last 300,000 years. Radically different. Which is why, for example, in the UK right now, mental health issues are costing our economy about 300 billion a year. That is double the size of the National Health Services budget.

Because people are not sleeping like they’re meant to, they’re not eating the stuff they’re meant to eat, they’re not exercising how they’re meant to exercise, they’re not living their lives like we’re designed to live our lives. But the good news is we can learn how to get better at anything, we can learn how to speak to ourselves in a different way so we can build more confidence, we can learn how to be more focused and more productive. So all these labels that we’re being given by people, whether it’s ADHD or whatever it is, we can learn how to think and concentrate in a different way. Here are the 10, what we call intelligence factors. These are the 10 gateways that either block our learning or we can use to enhance our learning. So, and they apply to anything we wanna learn. So the first one is how motivated we are to learn something.

So if we take a school example and I’m working towards my maths SAT examinations, is that a thing? Do you have a maths SAT? Yeah, okay. Yeah, so.

If I can connect getting a good SAT score in maths with my longer term goals, and I believe that I can learn, I understand neuroplasticity and I have in simple language, I have a mechanic mindset or a growth mindset, then that’s going to make it easier for me to pay attention in my maths class. So motivation is the first thing that we need to activate. Does that one make sense, Susan?

Absolutely. This is good.

Number two.

We’ve got to get our brain working well. So our sleep, our diet, our exercise. So I could be, I could have all the motivation in the world to want to learn math, but if my brain isn’t working very well, because I’m not sleeping properly, I’m not eating properly, I’m not exercising properly, walking is included in exercise by the way, then I’m not going to be able to learn the math because I can’t, my brain is not going to be working very well. Does that one make sense? Number three: my emotional state whilst learning. So I could be really motivated. I could, my brain could be, the basics could be working whilst I could be sleeping properly. I could be eating good nutritious food that can nourish my brain. I could have done some exercise before I came to school. So I’ve got some BDNF in my brain. As soon as I walk in the door, the teacher tells me off or I just don’t have a good emotional relationship with this teacher. So when that teaching me about long division, my attention isn’t on the long division, it’s on why I hate this teacher or why they’ve made me feel useless. So we have to be in the right activation state, the right emotional state. Does that one make sense? The next one, closely connected to emotional levels, but it’s something different, we call activation levels. So there is an optimal activation level for learning math look a little bit different for everybody, but there’s an optimal level. That means that we’ve got the right neurotransmitters in our brain so we can concentrate properly.

So I could be motivated. My brain, the basics of my brain could be working well because I’ve got the right diet, exercise, sleep. My emotions could be in a good place. But if I’m not at the right activation level, so the activation we think of on a scale of zero to a hundred, zero means you’re dead. That’s the starting point. If you’re in a deep sleep, you’ll be one, two maybe.

If your heart is pounding as quickly as it can and your mind is racing, you’ll be at 100. I might say that my optimal activation level for learning math is a 60. So if I’m not at the right activation level, I won’t be able to learn the math. Next one is attentional style.

Everybody’s attention, unnatural way of paying attention is on a continuum.

One range of the continuum is broad, so I naturally pay attention in my periphery.

People who do that.

It’s one of the symptoms of why we’d say someone is dyslexic. And possibly, I mean, ADHD is a made up thing. It’s not a real thing. It’s literally not a real thing. It’s just loads of things compounded together. So if you’ve been tested for ADHD, the chances are you don’t have what it said you’ve got. And if someone tells you you’ve got poor short -term memory and poor long -term memory, just think about how you’ve learned all the things you’ve managed to learn in your life, including walking and talking.

So I’d be questioning those results. But so attentional style can be broad, naturally broad, which is really helpful for playing sport like American football, soccer, hockey, because it’s really helpful to be able to see peripherally. And if you go to the Institutes of Sport in England, they teach you how to do that. They show you how to get better at paying attention in the periphery. On the other end of the continuum.

You could have a really narrow way of paying attention. So I just see what’s in front of me. That is really helpful for learning in school because everything I want to learn in school is right in front of me. The textbook, the screen, the teacher, the whiteboard. So if I pay attention like that, then I’ve got a buy it. I’ve got an advantage for learning an academic context. And we teach people to get better at paying attention like that. So attentional style.

Whatever natural attentional style you’ve got, there will be a huge benefit to it, but you can also learn how to tweak it. So if you’re naturally paying attention in the periphery, you can learn how to focus it in. So go to chapter 25 of the habit mechanic, focus words and pictures, or you can learn to broaden it out. Go to chapter 26 of the learning chat.

Can I pause you there for a second, Jon? For just a second. So there’s a difference between concentration and attention from what I’m hearing from the two that you just shared. Because what you just shared with attention, the broad versus the narrow, and then the optimal concentration is slightly different, but they have different ramifications, right? Because the narrowing of focus is different than the concentration level.

So I think concentration in the way you’re terming it is three discrete parts of what we’re talking about. Let me come on to the next one and it will maybe give some more context. So the way I explain the tension there is the natural way our eyes are geared up to look at the outside world. Just the way our eyes are structured and maybe some of the ways that our brain naturally regulates what we’re interested in.

Six is working memory and memory recollection. But so you’re now jogging my memory. So in our approach, we break concentration into three discrete parts, which I can go into, but I’m really covering them here. So working memory. We talked about working memory before with. Pause the podcast, see if you can remember it. Mark, Elizabeth, Thomas, Martin, Thomas, and Leanne, okay? So our working memory is only about, people say you’ve got really bad short term memory. And our best short term memory is only about 30 seconds and five to seven bits of information. You see these people on TV that can remember all these things because they’re using loads of tricks. They’re using loads of tricks. They’ve worked out systems to do it. But naturally our short term memory is very short and it’s getting shorter because we’re paying attention in short abouts of attention.

And then memory recollection. So how good am I at retrieving things? These capacities are learnable. So like the people you see on TV that can remember all these amazing things and apparently hold all these amazing things in their short term memory, they’ve learned how to do it. So all these things we’re talking about are learnable. We can get better. So wherever you think you are right now is a starting line.

Your brain is designed to change. That’s what it’s doing. So whatever you want to get better at, you can. This is why diagnosis for things like ADHD are just not very good because it’s not like you say, you’ve broken your arm. Okay, let’s put a cast on it. Let’s rehabilitate it. They’re saying, you got ADHD. Oh, it’s a real big problem. ADHD is a bigger strength as it is a problem, right?

We just got to work out what are the strengths of it and why is it a problem? And if it’s a problem, I’m going to get better at paying attention. I’m going to strengthen my short -term memory. I’m going to work on sleeping better, exercising better, all this kind of stuff. So repeat to remember, remember to repeat. Number one, barrier for learning, motivation levels and a belief that we can learn. Number two, sleep, dine exercise. Number three, emotional state. Number four, activation levels.

Number five, attentional style. Number six, working memory and memory recollection. Number seven, the friendliness, the brain friendliness of the learning material and the quality of the learning material. So if I’m not very good at paying attention to black and white textbook copy, because it doesn’t suit my attentional style, I need to get some other ways of learning that is more friendly to my attentional style like my GCSE science, which is a YouTube channel in the UK, puts across quite complex science topics in a really user -friendly way. Khan Academy are big players in this space, right? So they’re making high quality learning material accessible to everybody. So we’ve got to make sure the learning material is brain friendly.

Eight, the skill of your teacher. If I want to learn to drive and I’m being taught by someone who’s only just learned to drive themselves, or I’m being taught to someone that’s been I’ve been taught by someone that’s been teaching people to drive for the last 30 years, who’s going to have a better chance of teaching me? Exactly right. So this is real. The skill of your teacher is not all about the learner. The teacher has to be skilled as well. The Khan Academy data is showing that their new AI tutor is 80 times cheaper than a normal teacher at teaching someone. Wow, 80 times cheaper. So we’re moving towards, it’s not software as a service anymore, the service will be delivered by software, but we’re gonna need expert teachers who are habit mechanic teachers in the middle teaching the kids all these emotional skills. That is the future of education and the administrators who are listening to this, the ones that adopt that the fastest will be the ones who are the pioneers in this space. But the skill of your teacher is number eight. Number nine is the volume and quality of prior learning. So not all learning is equal. Some learning is really deliberate and it really changes our brain in a supercharged way. The kid was sat in my maths class for 100 hours and they still can’t do long division. Guess what?

They have been paying attention to your teaching. They’ve been looking out of the window just because they’re sitting in the classroom. They’re looking at the board. It doesn’t mean they’re paying attention to what you’re saying. So not all learning is equal. So goes back to the this. This one goes back. It’s about the prior learning. Often. What we think the kids already know the basics in order to learn how to do long division, you need to know how to do addition, subtraction and basic division.

If I don’t have those building blocks, I can’t get up to long division. And then the final one is the volume and quality of your current learning. So just because I’m in the room, it doesn’t mean that I’m doing high quality learning. Just because I’ve been revising for 10 hours doesn’t mean I’ve done high quality learning. So what I’m reading from here is mapped out in chapter five of the Habit Mechanic book. We go much deeper into that in chapter 26. But learning is not a magic. Humans are designed to learn.

They’re the rules of learning, the first principle rules. So if we want to, and habits are just the learning process. So we go from knowledge to skill to habit. So if we want to build more helpful habits, those rules are driving our ability to do that or our inability to do it. Susan, sorry, I speak a lot. I get carried away with this subject. So hopefully I’ll be able to ask you more questions.

No, I love this. Jon, this is fantastic. And we’re like getting to the end of our time here. But before I go, I want to make sure I want to ask you one more question. I know we’re going to go over our time, but it’s OK. When from your expertise and from what you’ve seen, what role do you find that creativity plays when it comes to building and maintaining better habits and practices and building these capacities?

Yeah, well, what we need, I mean, creativity is a subconscious process. That’s why we have the eureka moments. So right now your brain is whirling away on ideas that you were thinking about this morning or yesterday or last week. And that’s why the answer pops up. But in order to get, um,

In order to allow our brain to do that stuff, we need to get the basics right. Good sleep, good diet, good exercise. Creativity is helpful in helping us to solve complex problems in our lives. I don’t feel very good about myself. What can I do to help myself to be better?

That’s at the heart of what we call habit mechanic intelligence, which is the backbone of becoming a habit mechanic. So what we want to help people to do is, none of our training is, none of our tools, none of our frameworks are prescriptive. They just give people guidance. So you take an idea, one of our simple and practical tools you try and test it out, but then you start to get creative with it to make it work better in your life or for your kids or whatever you want to do. So, yeah, I think creativity is misunderstood because creativity is a subconscious process. And to create new ideas, you’ve got to really, you know, you’ve got to focus, you’ve got to work hard, you’ve got to delay the short -term gratification. And that’s how you get creative. It’s by doing the hard work in the first place. And the idea is then just emerge.

Wonderful, wonderful. I was just, I wanted your take on that given all of the work that you’ve done in the last two decades on taking a look at this process. Thank you so much. So before we go, where can people learn more and stay in touch with you? Because I think the work that you’re doing, I mean, first of all, the results are fantastic, but more than that, it’s crucial for where we’re going in education, what our students need, what our teachers need. So I want to make sure that people know where they can find you and your work so that they can learn more.

Yeah, well, people can get a free paperback copy of the habit mechanic plus shipping. It still works out about a third of the price is what it would cost you on Amazon. And you can do that at our website, which is tougher minds .co .uk, which I’m sure will be linked about somewhere. So tougher t -o -u -g -h -e -r minds m -i -n -d -s and it’s dot co .uk.

Absolutely. Yep.

Just Google tougher minds and you’ll find us. And that’s the starting point. If you’re interested in training to become a certified habit mechanic teacher or a certified super habit mentor, then just reach out to us and we can explain what that looks like. Or if you’re interested in your teachers learning how to do that. For me, these are the teachers of the future because clever AI, like the stuff that Khan Academy is developing with OpenAI is going to do the day -to -day teaching of dispensing knowledge. What we need our teachers to be able to do, we need them to become habit mechanics themselves and then we need to teach our young people how to become habit mechanics because the world is tough. We’re working on our own habit mechanic AI coach and we say it’s like Uber for happiness and performance and it’s designed for the 41%.

And the 41%, what does that mean? Big sets of data show that yesterday, 41 % of people in the world had a really bad day and they had a really bad emotional experience. So we wanna help everyone, but especially we wanna help those people. And a lot of your kids are feeling like that. We’ve got the solutions, we’ve worked in education for over 15 years now. In fact, working in education was pivotal to the development of our approach. I worked in some boarding schools in the UK for two years with a blank piece of paper to create a performance happiness curriculum. And that’s the bones of a lot of what we now teach in the Habit Mechanic program. We have a school curriculum ourselves. We train parents as well. So yeah, if you’re interested, get the book.

We’ve got an app as well, habit mechanic university and reach out and let’s have a conversation.

Fantastic. And we will put all of that in the show notes so that people can know exactly where to get in touch. Jon, thank you so much for this enlightening episode today. I’ve learned so much from you. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

Likewise, thank you, Susan. Bye for now.