Dr. Cal Newport

You get 250 beats a minute, and it could be exercise-induced, which is not optimal.

You could take beta blockers,

which would moderate the electrical timing.

But beta blockers reduce your max heart rate.

And if you're an athlete where the entire thing that matters is your max heart rate, so you're doing something like 2,000-meter rows, your performance on beta blockers just goes down.

It makes no sense.

It's like being a basketball player that wears weighted shoes.

It's too frustrating.

I was a pretty mellow guy.

But I was a worse rower.

So I stopped that.

I was like, okay, I want to get serious about my studies.

I said, I'm going to get serious about my studies in writing, right?

That's when I actually made the decisions that I'd been stuck with for the next 25 years after that.

But one of the things I did to get serious about my studies is I said, I'm going to systematically experiment with how to study for tests and how to write papers.

And I would try this.

How did it go?

Deconstruct experiment.

Try this.

How did it go?