Dr. Michael Kilgard

That's not a surprise children have that much anymore, someone just randomly knocking, because they would have texted.

And so the surprises are now coming from the donk, I got a text.

Oh, Bill wants to come over.

As the population ages, many people are likely to find out that having too many experiences that are disconnected from reality, that are just a show that's made to be engaging and interesting, isn't as good as getting on a boat and driving someplace, visiting some location, getting on a bus, driving, flying, wherever it is.

So travel gives you different experiences.

You smell different smells, you hear different things, and those engage, again, those neuromodulators.

Those neuromodulators then help

make changes because the vast majority of inputs we take in, we just throw away.

We're not memorizing every place I ever was, every place I ever set my keys, every word everyone had ever said to me.

None of us are tape recorders.

We're picking which moments are the moments that are useful.

And that's hard to know because we don't know what the future looks like, but we're making guesses based on what the past looks like.

And so when the past is abnormal, robotic, uh,

exaggerated in its novelty.

We make changes assuming the future is going to look like that, and the future may not be.

The future may be a job, and it may not be this exciting, and it may be hard to stay focused for eight hours a day.

If you're used to something exciting happening every two and a half seconds, and I now have to do a job, for me it's writing, where I have to sit and stay focused for hours at a time, trying to put a handful of ideas together in a way that other people understand, or try to develop a new treatment for someone who's suffering from a serious neurological or psychiatric disorder,

It just takes hours and hours of focus.

And for me, fishing was helpful for that.

Sit there with your dad and just fish for hours.