Dr. Poppy Crum

But, you know, what is successful human performance in training and all of these things?

It's to make those probabilistic situations more deterministic, right?

That's when you are, if you're training as an athlete, you're really trying to

not have to think and to have the fastest reaction time to very complex behaviors given complex stimuli, complex situations and contexts.

But that situational awareness or physical behavior in those environments, you want that as fast as possible with as little cognitive load as possible.

And it's like that execution is critical.

You love looking across species, so do I. And looking for these ways where...

you know, we are, a brain is changing or you've got a species that can do something that is absolutely not what you would predict or it's incredible.

And it's, you know, how it can evade a predator, how it can find a target, you know, find a mate.

And, you know, it's doing things that are critical to it being able to survive, much as you said.

Like if I make it something that is absolutely necessary for success,

it's going to do it.

One of my favorite examples is a particular moth that bats predate on, echolocating bats.

And frankly, echolocating bats are sort of nature's engineered, amazing predatory species.

Their brains, when you look at them, are just incredible.

They have huge amounts of their brain just dedicated to what's called a

FM, constant frequency FM sort of sweep the, some of the bats, you know, elicit a call that's sort of like, woo, woo, but really high.

It's doing two things.

One, that constant frequency portion is allowing them to sort of track the Doppler in a moving object.

So, and they're even so, I mean, it's such clever and sophisticated.