What we learned in the last five years is that memories are different in how they work,
and if I had to summarize that in one sentence? They change every time you use them.
So if you have a memory stored here about what you had for lunch yesterday
and I ask you, what did you have for lunch? You basically open the memory right
now and you tell me a story, but whatever happens right now
goes into the story and you say it differently. And if I ask you tomorrow,
what did you eat for lunch? You'll open the modified version.
So every time I ask you the same question, you open a different version,
which means that you can actually change the past. You can actually change your experience of things.
Your brain goes with you and it carries all of the history in the form of memories,
all you have from what happened before you is stored in the form of memories,
and they're not accurate and they're kind of compressed.
So that's all you have about the best. You have no idea about the future,
even though your brain tries to predict it all the time.
This is what dreams are for, this is what decisions are for, you try to kind of
simulate the future and make predictions, you don't know what's going on,
all you have is this kind of sliver of reality, which is the present,
which is all you have, and you control everything that happens there.
The nice thing about the present is that actually it interacts with
everything in your brain and you can change things.
What we learned in the last five years is that memories are different in how they work,
and if I had to summarize that in one sentence? They change every time you use them.
So if you have a memory stored here about what you had for lunch yesterday
and I ask you, what did you have for lunch? You basically open the memory right
now and you tell me a story, but whatever happens right now
goes into the story and you say it differently. And if I ask you tomorrow,
what did you eat for lunch? You'll open the modified version.
So every time I ask you the same question, you open a different version,
which means that you can actually change the past. You can actually change your experience of things.
This is why therapy works, like you go, your girlfriend breaks up with you,
you go to a therapist, she asks you what happened, you tell the story,
she intervenes, you save it differently. The week after, what happens,
you tell a different story, after five meetings, you have
a different version of the reality. And that is powerful because
it means that we control the narrative that we have.
We don't really have to be kind of confined to the story that we experience,
we can actually change it. This is what the brain is for,
to simulate and change and adjust and synthesize better version of life.
We can make ourselves happy. We can make bad things look better,
we can control things and it's all by virtue of just telling a story,
looking at it differently and saving it again. It's as simple as that.
We have the ability to actually change the story all the time.
So learning is one way to do that. Thinking, reflecting about yourself,
another way to do that, having more experiences allows us to do that.
So suddenly there's kind of essence to this self-help book
that we read when we were kids and we know how to implement that.
How can I get more motivation? And it's the one thing because
I've never lacked motivation, I don't know how to help people.
So motivation is a word, right? It's a it's a label that we put a set of
events in our brain. What you actually want is the outcome of that,
you want to do things when it's hard. So I think that there are a few kind of
things that we know work. One is evidence of past successes.
If I go back to your memories and I reframe them as successes,
suddenly the current event that's the same is success.
So I think that one thing is like having success stories and identification stories.
There's a lot of people out there,
there was a person that is like you that had similar experience
and chose the thing that you want to choose. Find this person or these people
and it's going to rub onto you. So I get asked by my students often,
“how do I become funnier?” “How do they become smarter?”
And like, my one tip that I give them all the time is surround yourself with people that
you want to be like. You want to be funny?
Just sit next to comedians, just go to the same
room where they are and just sit next to them, then it's going to rub onto to you by osmosis.
Because it's the environment that is around us that really changes everything.
And other people said that before, but I'll tell you the neuroscience behind that.
We know now that brains interact
with each other through language in a way that synchronizes the brains.
So when I talk to you right now, if you're engaged with what I say,
it means that if we scan our brains right now, our brains are going to look alike,
more than yours and someone on the street that isn't here.
So two people in the same room, as soon as they kind of interact,
their brains literally start kind of, pulsing in the same way,
parts of the brain light up in the same way, parts shut down.
So actually this is how we affect each other, this is how communication made humans
who they are, this is the one
thing that makes us better than all animals because we are able to communicate using language,
affecting the brain and create a narratives that don't exist together.
We both believe in things that we've never seen before,
like God or ideas like democracy or money, like those are things we invented,
and we can communicate them and create this image in people's brains
and they all share this thing. So in the same way,
if you surround yourself by people that you want to be like,
you hear them communicate, they change your brain and it's going to rub onto you,
you are going to actually become funnier, if you sit and listen to funny people next to you,
you'll actually become more motivated, if you're next to people that are motivated.
The next version of that, if you cannot find them, if you're sitting right now in a rural part of
Alaska and you can't just find yourself in Los Angeles where the people you
want to be with, is to actually just
look at them on videos and books, and that's the way our brain
basically gets content and change. So changing brains happens in many, many ways,
but the easiest one that everyone can try is to say what kind of world I want to be in
and bring this world to you in the form of movies, stories, TV shows or people.
That's the ways to kind of get things that you want next to you.
When you watch a movie, we see how your brain aligns with the movie,
and when you tell someone else the story of the movie,
their brain aligns with your brain, but also with the brain of the director of the movie,
so communication is this mechanism by which information flows between brains
and changes the brains. And actually,
if you want to take it one step above, this is also how we change our self
because we talk to ourselves all the time. You drive your car, you walk to work,
and you're just alone with yourself and you communicate, you also change your brain.
You kind of solidify the things that you want to be more like
and you suppress the ones that you don't want. So we always talk, and those voices,
those are basically the other characters in our brain that talk to each other.
You kind of choose which ones to give more weight to,
so this is how you become the person you want to be.
And I have an analogy that's going to be the kind of way I look at it.
Go back 406 years ago, 1610. Galileo Galilei, points his
telescope to the moons of Jupiter, and he looks at the orbit
and he expected to go in one way, but it doesn't, it goes in a different way.
And he kind of tries to say what's going on there and the only way to solve the equation
is to realign the planets of our Milky Way galaxy and specifically the solar system
by putting the sun in the center and put Earth as a number three planet
in the system, which to him is a dethroning to humankind.
“What does it mean that we are just one more planet out of many?”
“We're not the center”. It feels horrible to him, it changes everything,
but the equations required that so he does it. And in doing so,
he basically allows us to now see the wide reach of universe,
suddenly we see that the universe is much bigger than we imagined
and we can explore it. In the next four hundred years,
we saw more of the universe and we learned a lot about what is out there.
Now, in the same way in the last five years,
we begin to understand it in our own brain, there are many, many voices
and we are not the most important one, we're not even the center,
we're just one more voice out of many in our head, and we're the one who thinks is the
most important but actually the quiet ones that don't really
talk to us are the center of our universe. Now, this to us, again,
feels like a dethrone to humankind. “What does it mean that I'm not the
center of my own universe?” But the reality is that this
will allow us to understand the most important and interesting thing in the universe,
which is us. That's, I think, a profound understanding.
Yes, it's scary that we're not responsible for our choices,
that they happen to us, that we were creating a narrative based on
things that we're not really fully in control, but that's the beauty of us,
because now we can actually explore more things in our brain and learn
how things happen and maybe will understand how to become better people.