Dr. Jeff Karp
speaker
137 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Jeff Karp’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's like we have so much information coming at us from every meeting we have. And a lot of it's in our subconscious mind. We need to take time for these thoughts to swirl around our mind to process them and to kind of place them. And I found that my best thinking happens when I do that, when I'm actually pausing.
And there's a neuroscientist that I spoke to, actually interviewed for the book, and a musician, Molly Gerbrian is her name. And just amazing things that she said. So she said, actually, it's in the pauses is when mind turns into matter, right? So when we're learning, it's actually, our brains aren't rewiring in the moments that like, you know, so much of just, you know, engaging.
It's actually when we pause, that's when the circuitry is really changing and the remodeling is occurring, you know, like during sleep, for example. And she said, actually, a lot of people, if they're practicing a skill that a lot of people will do is they'll, if they have one hour, they'll just practice for the whole hour.
And she said, no, no, no, that's not, the neuroscience shows that's not the best way to do it. She said the best way to do it is practice for 15 or 20 minutes, take a five or 10 minute break, and then approach it again. And this engages something called the startle effect.
And so the startle effect is where the next time that you approach something, you clue into your attention is focused on what you forgot, right?
So let's say you try to build a skill, you learn something in 20 minutes, then you go back, you realize what you've forgotten now, because now you're applying it again, that hyper focuses your brain on what you forgot and helps you to imprint whatever you're learning. And so by doing that over and over, that's how we start to rewire our brains and develop skills.
I think it's difficult to practice new skills because of the way that we practice. And that's why one of the tools is actually fall in love with practice. Because what I have found, right, and through some of the people that I've spoke to and interviewed for the book, is that practice can become monotonous really fast. It can become boring.
But there are, just like with everything, there's limitless possibilities in the way that we can practice. And so I interviewed the five times US memory champion, Nelson Delis, for the book. And I specifically asked him, Nelson, how... At some point, it's got to get boring, right? If you're just practicing the same thing over and over and over again. I said, what do you do?
And he said, well, sometimes when I get to that state, he said, instead of like, he would memorize like a 52 deck of cards and I forget how many, like 20 seconds or whatever it is.
Like in a random order, someone hands him a deck and 30 seconds, he could memorize like the whole thing. And so I said, what do you do?
No. He wasn't. He had someone in his family, I think it was his grandmother, who got Alzheimer's, and he never thought he had a good memory. And he was concerned that that would be his fate, and he turned to memory games and learning how to build his memory. And so he told me that what he does is he will insert a few extra cards in the deck. So he'll change it up.
And he said that presents a new challenge to him that activates his mind and it makes it more engaging. Like when I was younger, and I was always the last chosen for sports at school, right? Actually, it was me and this other kid. And...
And I was probably maybe like 11 years old, 10, 11, something like that. And he would just stand with me and he would say, okay, shoot it there. Here's the angle. Here's how to do your hand. And over time, I got better at it. Like I was almost getting it every single time.
And to me, that was shifting from the possibility of me just standing there trying to do it on my own to having someone supportive there with me, showing me how to do it. And so it was just, I was engaging in another possibility. It's finding the process that works for you. And when you start, I almost think of it as like a knob, like it's like click, click, click, click. There it is.
Now I'm improving. And we need to be able to tune in to those incremental improvements and incremental progress in order for us to continue to advance. And to me, it's like falling in love with practice is the key to persistence. It's how we become persistent in anything in our life. If we can find ways to infuse joy into practicing, then we can keep at it for longer and we can be persistent.
And we all know that persistence is so important for progress.
wow, I've experienced so many setbacks and, you know, just nothing has ever come easy to me. And I would say, you know, the way I would describe it really is that let's say I ended up talking about my experiences, just all of my experiences in life, really. Okay.
Like you have a big failure. I have a lot of big failures. Okay. So for example, um, I applied to medical school, got rejected from all three schools that I applied to. I had so many failures. I was the kid in high school who got up to do a Walkman sing and got booed off the stage, right? I'm that kid. Wow.
I tried out to be on student council multiple times and I didn't get on, although I actually did get on in my final year of high school from pattern recognition. I figured some things out. But yeah, I almost visualize it's like I'm in a boat. I'm trying to get to the end of the stream, right? And I am bumping into every single rock along the way, every overhanging branch.
I mean, that's sort of like my experience with everything. And so one of the massive failures that I had is with TedMed. I was invited, actually, Jay Walker, the CEO of Priceline, was the CEO of TedMed. And he gave me a call and he said, hey, I would like to invite you to give a talk on your bio-inspiration work, how you turn to nature for inspiration over to develop medical technologies.
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