Unlock the Power of the Unfocused Mind
Episode Stats
Summary
Focus is seen as the key to greater productivity and success. While focus is important, my guest says there are also amazing powers to be found in something that gets a lot less attention: the unfocused mind. Dr. Srini Pillay is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, a brain imaging researcher, and the author of Tinker, Dabble, Doodle, Try, Unlock the Power of the Unfocused Mind.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:11.400
There are tons of books, blog posts, and podcasts about how to get more focused.
00:00:16.400
Focus is seen as the key to greater productivity and success. While focus is important, my guest
00:00:22.240
says there are also amazing powers to be found in something that gets a lot less attention,
00:00:26.520
the unfocused mind. Dr. Srini Pillay is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, a brain imaging
00:00:32.520
researcher, and the author of Tinker, Dabble, Doodle, Try, Unlock the Power of the Unfocused Mind.
00:00:39.620
Today on the show, Srini explains the downsides of excessive focus, the importance of tapping
00:00:43.540
into the unfocused mind, especially in the age of AI, and the benefits of doing so, including how
00:00:49.040
mind-wandering can help you be more productive and creative, allow you to see greater possibilities
00:00:53.340
for your life, and offer important insights that will get you unstuck from problems.
00:00:57.480
He shares strategies to incorporate unfocused time into your lifestyle, including how to
00:01:01.300
make daydreaming more beneficial, and why you should let yourself doodle without guilt.
00:01:05.460
Srini also makes the case for multitasking, and the sense of switching back and forth between
00:01:09.460
different tasks. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash unfocus.
00:01:23.340
All right. Dr. Srini Pillay, welcome to the show.
00:01:31.800
So you are a Harvard-trained psychiatrist. You've also taught at the Harvard Medical School and the
00:01:37.360
Harvard Business School. You're CEO of a consultant group. It's called Neuro Business Group. It's
00:01:42.560
executive coaching where you implement some of the things from your academic background and your
00:01:46.940
medical practice as a psychiatrist. I want to bring on the show because you wrote a really great book
00:01:51.160
called Tinker, Dabble, Doodle, Try, Unlock the Power of the Unfocused Mind. And that unfocused mind
00:01:57.940
thing really caught my attention because I think a lot of books, podcasts, blog posts, articles are all
00:02:03.980
about how to get more focused. We all want to be more focused. We feel distracted with our
00:02:09.020
smartphones and the internet. But one of the things you start off with your book is you argue that
00:02:13.840
focus can be good, but being too focused comes with some downsides. What happens when we focus
00:02:21.100
too much? Yeah. So I do think that focus is good. I think we all need to focus to be able to make it
00:02:26.720
to appointments on time and to be able to get tasks done. But when we focus too much, there are several
00:02:32.360
things that can happen in the brain that could be problematic. The first is that when you focus,
00:02:37.340
you can create what we call prefrontal cortex depletion. And really what that is, is the thinking
00:02:42.620
part of the brain loses energy. And one experiment, for example, showed that if you just, they took two
00:02:48.980
groups of people, one group was focusing on the video really intensely. The other group was just
00:02:53.300
looking at it normally. And then they gave them a problem to solve at the end of that. And what they
00:02:58.760
found was that in cases where they could have saved people's lives, the people who focused too much
00:03:04.520
couldn't care less until they were fed glucose. And what this tells us is that when you deplete the
00:03:10.300
thinking brain, it also depletes your capacity to care, which is why sometimes, you know, you come home
00:03:15.940
really exhausted from work and someone tells you something that sounds like you should react to it,
00:03:21.680
but you just don't have the energy to react to it. So the first piece is about energy depletion.
00:03:27.820
Also, if you are too focused, you're not really paying attention to what's going on around you.
00:03:32.600
And as a result, if you're someone who has a business and there are new, there are other
00:03:36.120
competitors who are working in a particular way, you may not be aware of them. If you are focused with
00:03:41.420
your nose to the grindstone, it's really difficult to know about upcoming trends. You know, if you
00:03:45.980
were just looking at what you were looking at, you would not know about what's going on with AI and
00:03:50.980
how this could change your business. Also, when you focus, you're looking at one point. And when you
00:03:57.760
look at just one point, it's difficult to innovate because innovation and creativity often require
00:04:03.160
making connections across two or more points. And finally, what we know about the unfocused circuit in
00:04:10.500
the brain, and there actually is a circuit like that. What we know about the unfocused circuit
00:04:14.780
is that when you unfocus, you actually activate the part of your brain that codes for self,
00:04:21.400
the part that is involved in self-awareness, self-regulation. And so it's really only when
00:04:27.080
you go off of focus that you can more deeply connect with yourself. I like to say to people that
00:04:31.700
when you focus, it's a little bit like your brain operates with a version of you that's more like
00:04:37.720
your LinkedIn profile. You know, and everybody knows your LinkedIn profile doesn't really describe
00:04:42.120
what is particular about you. Whereas when you turn on the unfocused circuit, this actually
00:04:48.580
metaphorically invites other utensils to the table. You know, the focus circuit is more like just having
00:04:54.960
a fork that picks up sort of big elements about who you are. But the unfocused circuit will invite
00:05:00.720
things like a spoon to express the delicious melange of flavors of your actual identity. It will also
00:05:07.300
invite chopsticks to the table so that you can make connections across your brain. And it will invite
00:05:12.540
sort of anything that can dig into nooks and crannies to be able to reveal details that your
00:05:18.580
focused brain cannot reveal. So all in all, the problems with excessive focus are that it depletes
00:05:26.080
your thinking brain of energy and makes you careless. It also prevents you from seeing what's going on
00:05:31.760
around you. It prevents you from seeing what's coming up ahead. It prevents you from being creative. And it
00:05:39.960
prevents you from expressing the fullness of who you are. And as a result of that, being able to not
00:05:45.440
just live through the day with focus, focus, focus, fatigue, but to build in periods of unfocus can be
00:05:52.740
I imagine everyone has experienced the fatigue that comes with just focusing all day. They're at work
00:05:58.580
and they have to focus on a task or maybe multiple tasks. They're shifting their focus
00:06:02.860
from one task to the next. And by the time they get home, they're just exhausted. I just experienced
00:06:07.880
this, the focus fatigue recently. I was driving home on a back road here in Oklahoma and there was a big
00:06:14.560
storm and it was raining and you can't really see. And so I had to pay a lot of attention to get my
00:06:20.420
family home safely because I had to watch the road because visibility was low. And when I got done
00:06:25.320
with that trip, it was only an hour, but I was tired. I was tired. I needed a break for about an
00:06:30.120
hour to recoup myself from just all the hypervigilance I was in in that hour long period. And that idea of
00:06:36.120
when you focus too much, you might miss things in your periphery. I know that fighter pilots have to
00:06:41.260
deal with this. There's this idea with fighter pilots, it's target lock where they get so keyed in
00:06:46.600
on a target that they stop paying attention to their environment and then they might get hit by
00:06:52.440
an enemy that was, you know, behind them that they weren't paying attention to because they're so
00:06:57.280
focused on the target ahead of them. Yeah. In fact, and there are also examples in the business
00:07:02.280
literature, you know, Ann Wang, who invented the word processor, was so intent on inventing version
00:07:08.880
two that he didn't notice that the PC was actually being invented. Had he known that, he might have
00:07:14.460
thought differently. But if you're only focused on what you're doing and you're not paying attention
00:07:18.460
to competitors, you can really lose out in business as well. So it's not just the physical
00:07:23.280
focus, but also in terms of a lifestyle, being able to take time out to unfocus can have huge
00:07:29.580
consequences. So you mentioned when we focus or unfocus, we use two different systems in our brain.
00:07:35.340
What system do we use when we focus? So first of all, I mean, this is an oversimplification,
00:07:39.500
but when you focus, you're mostly using what we call the central executive network or sometimes
00:07:45.060
simplified as the prefrontal cortex, which is really the thinking brain. When you unfocus,
00:07:51.700
you are using a network called the default mode network, which actually requires a lot of energy,
00:07:57.800
which is why a lot of people just avoid using that circuit. You know, for example, if I said to you,
00:08:03.560
what's your next task, that's pretty much using your focus brain and you'll tell me what that is.
00:08:09.620
But if I ask you, what is the greatest possibility for you in your life? Suddenly you're plunged into
00:08:15.340
this kind of unfocused space where you've got to search for answers. Part of the reason I think
00:08:19.720
this is such a timely conversation for us to be having is I believe that in terms of what we can do
00:08:26.260
with our focused brains, AI, artificial intelligence is going to be very, very, very good at that.
00:08:31.300
And what we have is this capability in the DMN or default mode network. And I think the more we
00:08:39.080
can learn how to exercise those capabilities, the more we'll be able to work with the advances in
00:08:44.680
technology as well. Yeah, it was interesting about the default mode network. For a long time in
00:08:49.480
psychology and psychiatry and cognitive science, they didn't really know what that was about. They
00:08:53.780
just thought, well, there's this thing that your brain does when it's not focused, but they didn't
00:08:57.760
really think about, well, it's actually doing something productive and useful. It wasn't until
00:09:01.260
I think the past 20 years where they just finally figured out, wait, this is actually really
00:09:04.720
important. Yeah. In fact, I used to joke that we used to think of the DMN as the do mostly nothing
00:09:10.340
network because we used to think, you know, this thing just sort of active when you're idle. So
00:09:15.680
maybe it's like just idling the way an engine would idle. But then when you take a look at what the
00:09:20.960
default mode network can do, it's really quite a magnificent network. There are three things that
00:09:27.160
perhaps I could highlight about that network. The first is that it turns the brain into a crystal
00:09:32.060
ball, meaning the default mode network is wired for prediction. So if you're trying to predict more
00:09:38.460
effectively, like when I've worked with fund managers, for example, who've built these unfocused
00:09:43.560
times into their lives, they're able to make calls on the proper investments in much more effective ways
00:09:49.660
when they activate this network by changing their lifestyles. Also, the default mode network is
00:09:56.540
really wired to provide a level of detail that the prefrontal cortex cannot. You know, the focus brain
00:10:02.560
can pick up large amounts of information and can pick up large chunks of information. But for the real
00:10:08.120
subtle things, you need to activate the default mode network. The other thing is that the default mode
00:10:14.360
network is super important when it comes to abstract and complex thinking. You know, one of my pet peeves
00:10:20.740
in the way we're communicating medical information these days, we're communicating information as if
00:10:25.400
there's only one size fits all. You know, people will say you should lower your LDL cholesterol.
00:10:31.040
Well, there have been a lot of studies in prominent medical journals that show that it's really important
00:10:36.780
to lower your LDL cholesterol. But studies also show that in certain instances, you might increase your
00:10:43.340
chances of dying if you lower that. You know, similarly, people will say antioxidants are really important
00:10:48.680
in food. But we also know that there's a literature that shows that antioxidants can increase the rate of
00:10:55.140
malignant progression. So how do you put all of this together? Well, you actually can't look at each
00:11:01.460
recommendation separately. Ideally, you want to be able to create a complexity of thinking that applies to you. If you
00:11:08.980
just listen to one set of recommendations with your focus brain, you might go ahead and follow that set
00:11:14.220
of recommendations. But over time, you'll learn about the abstraction of who you are as a subjective
00:11:20.180
human. And you begin to group these variables. Ideally, this will be done by AI for us in the near
00:11:26.260
future. But what AI can do is then represent this kind of complexity. And the reason I'm even talking about
00:11:33.020
artificial intelligence is because I think that we're at a point where we really need to focus on what we
00:11:38.340
want to hone in human intelligence. And I believe that learning strategic ways to unfocus can be super
00:11:44.840
helpful. Well, you talk about, yeah, what we're seeing now is, I think you said earlier, is that
00:11:49.720
artificial intelligence is starting to do, be able to do some of the stuff that our prefrontal cortex,
00:11:54.840
the central executive network is able to do. The thing it can't do very well yet, and maybe could
00:12:00.520
never do very well, is that default mode network stuff. Yes, absolutely. In fact, that's something that
00:12:05.800
I'm actively working on right now, trying to understand, you know, how we can help people
00:12:10.660
hone their intuition, you know, hone empathy, mentalize, understand other people's points of
00:12:17.060
view. You know, we have some amazing capabilities as humans. And we have these networks that are geared
00:12:23.260
to actually operate at levels that it's difficult to make machines operate at. For example, when
00:12:30.760
artificial intelligence is working, it's mostly through associations and speed. Whereas there are
00:12:36.880
phenomena that have yet to be explained in human existence that have to do with things like what
00:12:41.700
Carl Jung called meaningful coincidence, where we seem to have the ability to not just make associations,
00:12:49.660
but to feel our way into the future to be able to make things happen. And so I think our capacity to
00:12:57.980
feel is remarkable, and there are extensive connections between the default mode network
00:13:04.380
and some of the feeling centers in the brain. So I do think that honing our skills in the realm of
00:13:11.280
what we can do, like intuition, imagination, you know, artificial intelligence can imagine something
00:13:19.140
upon instruction. We have a certain freedom to be able to create. And I think that what's exciting
00:13:27.420
about this next phase of life is that we can work on these more human capabilities, allowing us to
00:13:33.220
accentuate our humanity as well. One of the points you make in the book when you're talking about these
00:13:37.400
two systems, the CEN and the DMN, is that they work together naturally. If we just left things alone
00:13:43.780
and try not to manipulate, you know, try to focus more, there would be a rhythm. What does that rhythm
00:13:48.860
look like typically? And then how do we mess it up?
00:13:52.540
So yeah, the central executive network, the focus network, and the unfocused network, the default mode
00:13:58.280
network, do work together well. But we have to figure out how to change our days. I'll give you an
00:14:03.740
example of just from a personal example, and then I'll give you some ideas of strategically how you can
00:14:09.040
accentuate this cognitive rhythm. You know, when I went to Harvard, I was sort of very ambitious. I
00:14:13.700
wanted to really go to, I went to 100% of my didactics. I stayed, you know, in the hospital
00:14:18.180
units till late at night. I read every single thing that was given to me. And at the end of my
00:14:22.540
first quarter, I expected to get, you know, really amazing feedback. And, you know, I thought I'd done
00:14:28.100
really well. And when I spoke with my supervisors, one of the things they said was, you know, you clearly
00:14:33.760
know the most information in the class, but we're really worried about you. We don't see you sitting
00:14:37.880
on park benches during the day. You go to 100% of your didactics, shows no discernment.
00:14:42.940
If you wanted to train like that, this is probably not the place for you. What we want you to do
00:14:48.240
is develop the fullness of your intelligence. And we recognize that off time is as important
00:14:55.040
to your creative ideation as is on time. And that really sort of woke me up in a certain way,
00:15:00.940
because I realized, you know, initially I thought, well, what do you mean? Isn't it just important to
00:15:05.580
just be working all the time and absorbing all that information? But I realized that in the same way
00:15:10.540
that people get their best ideas in the shower, creating these off times gives your brain a time
00:15:17.180
to sort this out. So one of the questions you asked was, how do you then establish this cognitive
00:15:22.740
rhythm? I would say principle number one is build frequent times during your day when you can actually
00:15:30.060
take a break, but take a break strategically. And here are some things that you can do.
00:15:35.240
The first thing is, and there are caveats with each of these, but the first thing is napping.
00:15:40.060
Five to 10 minutes of napping can give you one to three hours of clarity.
00:15:44.620
Now, sometimes in the middle of your afternoon, you might be dragging through the day and you've
00:15:47.960
got five more things in your list. And you just say, I just got to get this finished. Well,
00:15:52.780
if you just took five to 15 minutes to nap, you would be able to then come back to that task
00:15:57.880
with a much clearer brain. Now, you might ask, well, you know, is napping always good? But it
00:16:03.160
actually isn't always good. So if you nap too much so that it disrupts your sleep, this can affect
00:16:08.320
your cardiac function. So you really want to think about what you're napping for and how often you're
00:16:13.680
napping. So I would say once or twice a week when you're exhausted, take those five to 15 minutes
00:16:19.080
if you want greater clarity. For greater creativity, you actually need 90 minutes of napping. And most people
00:16:25.520
don't have 90 minutes to nap during the day. But if you're taking the weekend off and you have a
00:16:29.960
creative problem at hand, try going back to that problem after taking 90 minutes off and then see
00:16:36.620
if that improves your performance. The other thing you can do is take booster breaks of just 15 minutes.
00:16:43.120
15 minutes of physical activity each day can actually completely clear up your mind. It can even improve
00:16:48.880
the relationships with people around you and decrease your stress. So taking booster breaks can be
00:16:54.800
super helpful. Then there's doodling. You know, just scribbling on a piece of paper, Jackie Andrade
00:17:00.740
and her colleagues found that doodling improves memory by 29%. And that's because your brain is less
00:17:06.720
like a stiff sponge and is much more absorbent of information. Now, more recent studies have shown that
00:17:14.000
you actually should be doodling something that's relevant to the conversation. So I would add that to
00:17:18.800
that as well. So there's napping, there's doodling, there's a booster breaks, then there's a concept
00:17:25.040
called psychological Halloweenism. It's a term that I coined, and it refers to a study that showed that
00:17:31.800
if the same person takes on the identity of an eccentric poet, that person is more likely to be
00:17:41.020
creative statistically significantly than if they took on the identity of a rigid librarian. Now, this to me is a
00:17:48.120
pretty profound study, because what it tells us is that when we're not able to solve problems in our
00:17:53.160
lives, whether it's a day-to-day problem, or a relationship problem, or a work-related problem,
00:17:59.520
it tells us the problem is not how we think, it's who we think we are. And if you embody the personality
00:18:06.660
of someone who is different from you, it will change your pattern of thinking to be more like that person.
00:18:12.940
So, you know, napping, doodling, psychological Halloweenism are all really important ways in
00:18:19.680
which you can help your brain to unfocus. The key is to do this regularly throughout the day.
00:18:26.600
Now, most people will say, well, you know, I don't have time to actually do this. And what I would say
00:18:32.960
is I completely understand that. And if you want to start small, then start with maybe two 15 to 20
00:18:38.040
minute breaks. But consider the following. Consider the fact that McKinsey has done a study showing
00:18:44.880
that CEOs who are in a flow state, meaning they're locked into their work, are five times more
00:18:50.740
productive than CEOs who are not in a flow state. That means you can do five days of work if you are
00:18:58.240
locked in, in one day. And so it's not that there's not enough time. It's about the quality of focus that
00:19:05.520
we can help by preparing the brain with unfocus.
00:19:09.560
So help me make sure I'm on the same page. So when we focus, we take an information, we read a text,
00:19:15.980
we're writing things, making lists, maybe even just, you know, thinking about things intentionally,
00:19:20.500
like a problem. When we do that, does our DMN, the default mode network, kind of soak that in? And then
00:19:27.280
when we let the DMN do its thing, it sort of takes the things that we've input into our brain with our
00:19:33.620
executive function and starts going down different roads where we can get these new insights that we
00:19:38.520
otherwise wouldn't have if we just stayed in focus mode.
00:19:43.220
So yeah, the moment you focus, and again, this is a slight oversimplification, but it's a good
00:19:47.480
overall principle. And overall, this is true. The moment you focus, the DMN is turned off.
00:19:53.520
And so it's your central executive network and your prefrontal cortex that is turned on.
00:19:57.860
When you unfocus, this information is handed over to the DMN for processing. And the DMN can then come
00:20:05.060
up with these insights. It can then feed this information and these insights back to your
00:20:10.140
prefrontal cortex or central executive network to then execute on the task logically. You know,
00:20:15.580
a good example of this is Albert Einstein, who said that his discovery was a musical perception.
00:20:21.600
Now, the theory of relativity obviously has a lot of logical steps connected to it. But what he's
00:20:26.780
saying is that to source information, you actually have to be in this unfocused state. So you activate
00:20:32.640
the default mode network. There are other people as well, Cary Banks Mullis, who discovered a way of
00:20:37.580
making synthetic DNA called PCR. Cary Banks Mullis was actually, you know, his lab mates didn't like
00:20:44.840
him at all because he didn't follow a strict protocol. He discovered this while he was driving from Berkeley
00:20:49.620
to Mendocino with his girlfriend in his car. He had a bottle of wine in the car that he was taking home.
00:20:54.880
He stopped. He scribbled on a cave face, then went to their little place. And then suddenly,
00:21:00.300
things started coming to him. You know, Sarah Blakely, who founded Spanx, she founded Spanx while
00:21:05.440
she was preparing for a party. So there are a lot of different examples of how unfocused can truly help.
00:21:12.460
And I think Steve Jobs really captured this well in his quote in his Stanford commencement speech when
00:21:19.340
he said, in life, you cannot join the dots moving forward. You can join them looking backwards, but
00:21:25.160
to move forward, you have to have something. And he called it gut, karma, life, destiny, whatever. And I'm
00:21:31.640
calling it the default mode network. And I'm saying that in order to move forward into the black box that
00:21:37.580
life often is, because things change so much, building unfocus into our lives will help us to join those
00:21:45.220
dots. Another person or group of people that comes to mind where they use the power of unfocused to
00:21:50.340
make an important insider discovery, Watson and Crick with the double helix DNA, they spent so much
00:21:56.260
time focused on the problem, trying to figure out what does DNA look like. And it wasn't until they
00:22:00.840
just took a break that the insight finally came to them. I think it might have, one of them might
00:22:04.640
have been like a dream or it was like, it was sleep or a nap where they finally got the insight.
00:22:09.560
Charles Darwin, he spent maybe just like a few hours a day focused, you know, thinking and writing.
00:22:14.960
But then he'd spend the rest of the day just walking. And that's where he got the insights
00:22:19.320
for natural selection. Yeah, I'm so glad you pointed out those different examples. Because,
00:22:25.100
you know, I think that part of it is that particular sort of element of taking time out to unfocus.
00:22:31.720
And part of it is also thinking about the way you construct your life. Because people who have more
00:22:37.320
hobbies, for example, often do better than people with fewer hobbies. So the unfocus pertains to that as
00:22:43.700
well. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:22:50.680
And now back to the show. Okay, so there's different ways we can wander into this default
00:22:55.040
mode network. You mentioned a few taking naps, taking breaks, moving your body. You also talk
00:23:00.480
about just letting your mind wander. I think we've all had those moments where you zone out,
00:23:04.880
where you're just staring at a wall. And you think, oh, my gosh, why did I zone out? What's wrong
00:23:09.060
with me? But I've actually, it feels good. So you've probably taken a break from all that focus
00:23:13.880
that you've been engaging in. But you also start thinking weird things that maybe, not all the time,
00:23:20.200
but maybe might provide an insight. So don't be afraid of mind wandering as well.
00:23:24.120
Yeah, you know, when it comes to mind wandering, studies have shown that mind wandering can be
00:23:28.260
associated with depression. Because a lot of times, and also with anxiety, because your mind starts
00:23:33.060
wandering to all those bad things, the stuff that's worrying you. So part of what you want to do when
00:23:37.800
you're thinking about mind wandering is say to yourself, how can I actually do this in a way
00:23:43.360
that's strategically positive? You know, one type of mind wandering is called positive constructive
00:23:47.900
daydreaming. And this was studied by Jerome Singer in the 1950s. And what Singer said was that daydreaming
00:23:54.700
at your desk and looking out the window is not that helpful. Daydreaming, when you're thinking about
00:24:00.240
just the prior night's indiscretions, you know, what did I say at the party? That's not that helpful.
00:24:05.740
But positive constructive daydreaming is helpful. And this is the way you do this. You set aside 20
00:24:12.820
minutes, you do something low key, like knitting, gardening, or walking. Obviously, it needs to be
00:24:19.140
something that is truly low key for you. And then you just let your mind go to something that is
00:24:24.580
positive or wishful, like running through the woods with your dog or lying on a yacht. And by doing this,
00:24:31.440
your perception becomes decoupled from the environment. And like a torch that swings
00:24:38.200
inwards, your mind starts paying attention to what's inside you. And so mind wandering can result
00:24:44.660
in feelings of distress. But if you want to counter this, use this technique of positive constructive
00:24:49.940
daydreaming, because that then immediately sets the tone that what you're going to be thinking about
00:24:55.260
is positive. Can journaling or just sort of just kind of free write journaling, could that help as
00:25:01.340
well? Absolutely. There's lots of examples in history. I think Eleanor Roosevelt might have been
00:25:06.920
one of those people who actually used free writing to decrease and write their anxieties away. And I
00:25:12.220
wrote about this in Harvard Health once that the fact that any kind of free form writing lets your mind
00:25:18.820
go and lets your mind go into very special places. You know, but as another personal example, you know,
00:25:26.380
another thing that I do is I'm a musician. And I decided that I wanted to write, I wanted to just write
00:25:32.220
something, but I didn't know what it was. And one day in the middle of a pianolist, and I just said to my piano
00:25:36.700
teacher, I don't feel like playing the piano, I just want to sing. And so he was a pretty, you know, regimented
00:25:43.060
guy. I said, well, what would you like to sing about? And I said, I don't know. And he said, well, you know, what
00:25:47.840
key do you want to sing in? I said, I don't know. I just would like you to sit at the piano. And I want
00:25:52.660
to see what's going to come up. And let's see what happens. And by using this technique, like in just
00:25:59.020
over a month, I had composed 42 songs with zero planning, zero decision. I didn't even really know
00:26:05.440
what story I was putting together. It was on a long trip back from the east somewhere where I once said,
00:26:11.100
okay, I'm going to listen to all of this, see what it is I've been wanting to say, and then backtrack,
00:26:17.200
and then fill in the gaps where those gaps need to be filled. And I think what that really taught me
00:26:22.220
was that, you know, initially, he was quite alarmed and was like, you know, why don't you just plan
00:26:25.900
this out and sketch it out? And I said, no, I do that the rest of my time, just one hour a week.
00:26:31.540
Why don't I just meet myself in the moment and see what's going to come out? And I would recommend
00:26:37.360
to people that this is not some special talent. Everybody has this default mode network. Everybody has a
00:26:43.000
central executive network. Why not see what's waiting for you in your brain by waiting on yourself?
00:26:49.780
When you talk about, yeah, be intentional about it. Set aside time in your schedule,
00:26:53.000
your day for those periods. So you have, you call it a tinker table, right? Instead of a timetable,
00:26:58.380
you set up a tinker table where it's like, I'm going to schedule the times where I'm just going
00:27:01.660
to let myself run free. Whether that means I'm going to use a music lesson just to improvise and come up
00:27:07.260
with stuff. Or it could be, I'm just going to use an hour where I'm just going to draw and just see
00:27:11.940
where it goes. You have to be intentional about it. Because if you're not, there's so many other
00:27:16.180
things out there that can control your attention, that wants your attention, your focused attention.
00:27:20.500
So if you want to create that default mode network time, you have to create it for yourself.
00:27:26.860
I really think so. And the reason I call it a tinker table is that in the same way
00:27:31.560
that you schedule in actual appointments during the day. Schedule this tinkering time into your day.
00:27:38.340
I can't tell you how many organizations I speak to about burnout and about what the different causes
00:27:43.000
of burnout are and about how they can approach this. And everybody understands what that is.
00:27:47.580
But when push comes to shove and I say, who's going to implement this? Most people say,
00:27:52.320
I don't have the time to implement this. I don't have the time to take time off. I don't have the time
00:27:57.680
to do this for myself. And essentially what I've said to them is that what we all need from time
00:28:04.060
to time is some kind of re-skilling for self-care. We need to realize that we're taking care of
00:28:09.300
ourselves in a way that makes life more enriching if we build these tinker tables. You're not just
00:28:16.300
rushing through your day and trying to get everything checked off and not really caring about
00:28:21.260
taking these times off. It's doing a disservice to yourself.
00:28:24.940
I think when sometimes when people, I know I do this, when I have a break, when I want to take
00:28:28.900
a break, I'll immediately go to the internet, right? So I'm taking a break from my focused work
00:28:34.240
work. And then I'll just, well, I'm just going to browse the internet, see what's on Instagram or see
00:28:40.200
what's on the news site. Is that detrimental or should people, is that okay to let your mind wander
00:28:49.500
So I think studies in general show both sides of it, that sometimes if your mind's wandering,
00:28:53.560
you might be wandering only into negative information. So it depends on how much negative
00:28:59.100
information versus positive information you're allowing your mind to wander into. So in general,
00:29:04.480
I think that that's okay. But there is a void in your mind that's an important place to reach
00:29:10.000
so that you can become a creator of your new future. Wandering through the internet, I think,
00:29:15.980
is a great way to take yourself off of super focused tasks. But what if you use this time
00:29:21.300
to use what I call possibility thinking? You know, a lot of people don't realize that possibility,
00:29:27.940
just the hope, the possibility of something actually changes your brain chemistry. It can
00:29:33.060
increase your opioids, helping you to de-stress. And it can also, it can really sort of help you calm
00:29:38.960
down and it can help you control your brain much more effectively. And one of the things that I like
00:29:46.120
to remind people of is that possibility thinking involves asking the question, what if? You know,
00:29:51.820
some of the greatest things in the world that have been created have been created in what if time.
00:29:57.320
And again, most people will say, I don't have what if time. But if you think about some people who I
00:30:02.520
think are just great examples of possibility thinkers, Martine Rothblatt, for example, who's the CEO of a
00:30:07.840
pharmaceutical company now, had no background in medicine, but two of her kids had lung diseases and
00:30:14.220
there was pulmonary hypertension, I believe. And there were no drugs out at all for this. So she did
00:30:19.120
what any loving mother would probably wish they'd done. She decided to start a pharmaceutical company.
00:30:24.040
She gathered the expertise that she needed and she now has five drugs that have been approved so that
00:30:29.100
her kids can breathe and other kids with the same disease can breathe. But she didn't stop there.
00:30:33.360
She then said, but what if I could actually make lungs? And so she's now started to make lungs.
00:30:39.320
But she also didn't stop there. She asked, what if I could invest in helicopters that could
00:30:44.700
efficiently transport these lungs to people when they needed them? And when I talked to her about
00:30:49.240
this and I said, you know, this is such a remarkable thing. How can anyone live to this level of life?
00:30:55.480
And she said, it's really not that remarkable. I just give myself time to think of what's possible.
00:30:59.980
And then I gathered the resources to make that happen. Now, for most of us, we're always wishing
00:31:05.220
and dreaming and thinking, I wish I had more money. I wish I were less lonely. I wish I could
00:31:10.240
feel happier. But what if we committed to this possibility? What if we set aside time for this
00:31:16.480
possibility? You know, if you think about it, when you're building a building, in most cases,
00:31:21.460
if you're building a house, it doesn't happen without a blueprint. And the blueprint takes time to put
00:31:26.060
together. And then you've got to get builders to build a house. And then you've got to find a way
00:31:30.380
to put all this stuff together. In the same way that you build a house, to build a life without a
00:31:36.020
blueprint, I think is a crime. Because you can change the blueprint, you can build new houses,
00:31:40.640
you can build new possibilities. But why would one live a life without creating time for this blueprint?
00:31:46.440
Okay, so we can go into default mode network on a day to day basis, where we intentionally block in
00:31:51.780
time where we're just going to let our mind wander and explore daydream journal, we could play, we could
00:31:57.780
do music, we could walk, run exercise. Showers have been known for to put people in that default mode
00:32:03.660
network. That's why you get these great insights while you're taking a shower. I want to talk a bit
00:32:07.600
about multitasking, because you have a chapter dedicated in the book about this. And multitasking
00:32:12.560
gets a bad rap. We talk about how, you know, we actually don't multitask, we just instead shift
00:32:17.940
our attention back and forth between tasks. And we shouldn't do that, because it just wears our
00:32:21.660
brains out. But you actually, in this book, you make a case for multitasking. What do you think the
00:32:25.980
benefits of multitasking are? Yeah, so in general, I would say the overwhelming number of studies have
00:32:31.320
shown that multitasking in the way that people usually do it, I had an experience recently where
00:32:35.640
someone was on a zoom call with me off screen, while they were on two other calls at the same time.
00:32:41.280
And I was sort of like wondering, how are they doing this? And can you really absorb information?
00:32:46.380
I don't think you can multitask like that and take in information. However, there are a group
00:32:51.920
of people who are called super taskers, who are like expert jugglers, who can juggle a number of
00:32:57.500
different things in the course of a day. Now, if you have a rigid mindset, you're not going to give in
00:33:02.840
to the freedom of juggling, right? You're going to keep on thinking in a rigid way. It's going to be hard
00:33:07.540
to juggle throughout your day. But what studies show is that for the small percentage of people
00:33:12.280
who do allow themselves this kind of freedom and flexibility, they are able to multitask.
00:33:18.740
Bob Johansson from the Institute of the Future, who talks about what we're going to be seeing in
00:33:23.780
workers of the future, says that the future is really going to be about continuous partial
00:33:28.800
attention. Someone's going to pay attention to what's on their phone. They're going to pay attention to
00:33:33.600
what's in their email. They're going to pay attention to some other tasks that they have
00:33:38.460
to do that suddenly comes in. For each of these phenomena, there's obviously a point at which
00:33:42.720
it's not helpful. But before it's not helpful, if we can grant ourselves that flexibility,
00:33:49.840
if we can train our brains to be flexible, our ability to do those multiple things will probably
00:33:55.960
improve. So while I don't wholeheartedly recommend multitasking, I will say that super tasking is
00:34:01.900
possible by developing the flexibility of your brain and the default mode network can be super
00:34:07.140
helpful with that. What does productive super tasking look like? What would that look like in
00:34:11.640
a practical, concrete example? Well, there are a couple of different ways. I think if I think about
00:34:17.740
what practical super tasking is, when I put videos together for marketing, for example, I will allow
00:34:24.300
myself to acknowledge when I feel bored. So I'll collect images and then when I get bored of that,
00:34:30.680
I'll collect B-roll. And when I get bored of that, I'll think about text. And then I'll put this all
00:34:37.940
into an iMovie file, for example. And then I'll realize that I really had the permission to go back
00:34:45.640
to stuff when I was not bored, rather than just sticking to one thing. But in the end, I had a high
00:34:51.300
quality experience by putting that all together. So productive super tasking is about how in certain
00:34:58.700
situations, you don't have to do everything from start to finish. You can stop midway, take a break,
00:35:05.960
do something else, come back to what you're doing, and then start that again. In that way,
00:35:11.720
boredom does not become a rule in your life. Boredom, I think for a lot of people, boredom is one of those
00:35:18.440
toxic forces that makes them burn out far more easily. Whereas if you could do something until you
00:35:24.860
stop being interested, you can actually allow yourself to feel excited more often than not.
00:35:31.220
I do this sometimes with deadlines. Rather than setting one deadline for one project,
00:35:37.080
then going on to the next project, I'll have three projects and I'll set a deadline that I have to meet,
00:35:43.260
but I won't have a rule about which task I'm going to be working on at a particular point in the day.
00:35:48.120
And what I find is that by giving myself permission to not be bored, by allowing myself to switch tasks
00:35:55.120
when I need to, not only do I develop the ability to switch tasks, which has been shown by research,
00:36:01.700
this capacity is, it is possible to develop this capacity. What I also do is I give myself the
00:36:08.100
opportunity to have a more excited and engaged life. Have you noticed when you do that task switching,
00:36:13.800
so you say you switch from one task to the next, you're in a way, you're giving your brain a chance
00:36:19.140
to unfocus on that previous task. And you're focusing on this different task. Are you able to
00:36:25.560
get the benefits of unfocus on that previous task? You know what I'm saying? So if you're working on
00:36:30.240
project B, do you get insights on project A while you're working on project B?
00:36:36.400
Yes. I think a lot of the time you actually get insights. So task switching can have a price in that
00:36:42.260
if you completely lose connection with something, and then you got to come back to it, and you got
00:36:45.820
to start all over again, that can be problematic. But if you can, if you can switch at a point where
00:36:51.260
you can retain what you've been working on, and then you move on to the next task, you often see,
00:36:56.860
for me, I often see insights across both things. You know, right, people will often ask me,
00:37:02.540
you know, how is it that you work at the intersection of science, art, and technology? Well, I find them all,
00:37:07.440
they're all extremely exciting. You know, I can design the art based on brain science. I can then ask
00:37:15.300
actual digital artists to come work on our technology platform. We can, I can work closely with a computer
00:37:22.140
scientist to set up a machine learning algorithm that will match an experience to someone's anxiety
00:37:28.440
state so that it's individualized for them. That only happens because I'm thinking in a cross-domain
00:37:35.720
way. I'm thinking about the brain. I'm thinking about how might I design this video based on the
00:37:43.600
brain. And then I'm thinking about how can I then create a machine learning algorithm that can deliver
00:37:50.060
an experience that's specific for an individual. That kind of thinking is not possible if you stick to
00:37:55.780
one domain only. Well, you mentioned another way earlier, how we multitask with probably not
00:38:01.460
knowing that we're multitasking. That's doodling, right? Like when we're in a boring meeting and you
00:38:06.520
might start doodling on a piece of paper, we talked about that actually can help you focus more. Like
00:38:10.820
that multitasking is actually good for you. Yes, absolutely. You know, so I think, I think when
00:38:16.780
you're doodling, you're actually giving yourself permission not to hyper attend to something. Like
00:38:22.680
sometimes people will be so concerned about what they're listening to that they don't understand
00:38:27.840
that letting your mind go can actually be extremely important. Yeah, with the doodling, I know when you
00:38:33.620
go back through some of the archives for the presidents, you look at their notes, they keep
00:38:37.520
that stuff. A lot of them in these really big, important meetings where they're discussing battle
00:38:42.420
plans, high-level strategy, there's doodles. Like JFK has got doodles when he's having meetings about
00:38:48.660
nuclear arms negotiations. And you're like, why are you, you should think, well, you should be
00:38:52.680
focused, man. You should just be like, you shouldn't be doodling, but it probably helped him.
00:38:57.160
Yeah, absolutely. I think, I think when, and also when you're doodling, you're also contemplating
00:39:02.200
more deeply, right? You're letting an idea sink into your mind. You're listening, but you're letting
00:39:07.740
it sink into your mind and you're also involving yourself in the listening. And I think that's a pretty
00:39:14.260
effective form of listening in many instances. And as you pointed out, there've been many notable
00:39:18.740
presidents who've doodled as well. Okay, so don't be afraid of doodling. If you're at a meeting and
00:39:22.980
you're starting to feel antsy and bored and you start doodling, that's okay. It could actually be
00:39:27.460
helping you. Well, Srini, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more
00:39:30.800
about your work? Well, thanks so much, Brett. Yeah, lovely talking to you. You can find me at
00:39:35.820
drsreenipillai.com. You can also find me at nbgcorporate.com, N as in Nancy, B as in boy,
00:39:43.900
G as in girl. And you can follow me on Instagram at drsreenipillai.
00:39:48.180
Fantastic. Well, Srini Pillai, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:39:52.360
My guest here is Dr. Srini Pillai. He's the author of the book,
00:39:55.120
Tinker, Doodle, Dabble, Try. It's available on amazon.com. You can find more information about
00:39:58.980
his work at his website, drsreenipillai.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash unfocus.
00:40:04.320
We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.
00:40:14.400
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at
00:40:18.240
artofmanliness.com. We find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we've written
00:40:22.320
over the years about pretty much anything you'd think of. And if you haven't done so already,
00:40:25.740
I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps
00:40:29.260
out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend
00:40:32.880
or family member who would think we get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued
00:40:36.300
support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay reminding you to listen to the AOM podcast,