Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This podcast is recorded on Gadigal land. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. Hey chicks, I'm Sal, and it feels so weird just ending it there, but this is Two Broke Chicks, the show that shares life lessons and tips to help make you rich in life.
And today, Al's not with me because she's had to jet off to Melbourne, so she will be very sorely missed, but I'm not alone because I am joined by the absolutely incredible Dr. Leela Landowski, award-winning neuroscientist, lecturer at the University of Tasmania and Vice President of Science and Technology Australia.
welcome thank you i am so excited to have you on the pod today because we're talking all things productivity memory popcorn brain so i feel like i've got a lot of questions for you that i'm like yeah look the chicks are going to get a lot from this but so am i so i'm excited to dive in sounds fabulous i can't wait to talk about my favorite body parts so it's good the best one and honestly needs more attention
But before we get into the juicy questions, what's your life lesson of the week?
Chapter 2: What life lesson does the neuroscientist share about human connections?
Look, I think my life lesson of the week is probably like a life lesson of all time for me. And I've learned that the richness of life for me comes from the people in it. Not the stuff I have, not anything else that's material, but it's actually the connections with people, making new friends and having those really great people in your life.
Honestly, I think you kind of get that understanding more and more as you grow up, because I know for me personally, in my early 20s, I was so, and I guess I still am, but, you know, very career oriented and really thought about that as being the biggest marker of having a successful life.
And then the more amazing things I've experienced, which are all so great and I'm so grateful for, it is like the relationships and friendships that you have at the end of the day that mean the most, right? Truly, absolutely.
And you want to share them with people who have the same values who actually want the best for you. I think when we're younger, we're friends with whoever's at school with, and we don't necessarily have things in common with them. And I think as we get older as well, we meet people who are on the same path of life or have those things in common with us.
And I think you can form some really robust friendships because you have those things in common.
Exactly. Instead of relationships by proximity, it's based on values. Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
I love that. What a beautiful way to start the episode. My life lesson is something that I saw when I was scrolling this week that I actually thought was kind of relevant to today's topic. And it's that our skin is the largest sensory organ on our body, which makes sense and seems super obvious, right?
But then I realized that's why it's so important to prioritize materials that make you feel good and make you feel comfortable. Like whether that is your bedding or your clothes and being really conscious of that and how that has like a huge impact on your mental health and what's going on. Yeah.
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Chapter 3: How can we improve our productivity and memory?
Yeah, it truly is. Okay, well, let's get into the juicy stuff of the episode. Before we really dive in, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into neuroscience?
I never wanted to be a neuroscientist. I never planned to be a neuroscientist. I always wanted to work in developing therapies for things. So when I was at a grade four school camp, I caught my first fish and I remember holding it and it was disgusting. It was covered in slime.
Yeah.
And the slime was kind of like forming webbing between my fingers. I'd heard of things like shark liver oil or like fish extracts that could be helpful for people. And I remember holding it thinking, oh, wouldn't it be cool if one day when I grow up I could find a fish extract that could help people.
And that was really my naive idea that I took all the way through to uni because I didn't have any mentors. I didn't have anyone who could kind of guide me in life. So I ultimately did a degree in medical research. And when I was doing that degree, I was sitting in a neuroscience lecture and the neuroscientist that was giving that lecture was talking about some of his work.
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Chapter 4: What are the six hacks to learn faster according to neuroscience?
And I remember looking at it thinking, maybe have a different way to interpret what he's talking about. And maybe I wanted to really test this idea that I'd had. And I ended up, yeah, testing that idea. doing a doctorate in neuroscience and then making that my career.
And the cool thing is, is that through that work, I discovered a natural protein that could regenerate nerves in the skin and that protein can be found in fish. So it's almost like life came full circle. Oh my God.
The fish oil prophecy came true. I love how that's the like mind blowing, life altering realizations you were having when you were in year four.
Wow. It's one of those things that like unless you've been exposed to something, you don't know that you might want to do it as a career. So we're totally influenced by what we see on TV and, yeah, Britney Spears is awesome. Like who wouldn't want to be her?
True, so, so true. But I think it's really interesting because like we were saying, all of these things are connected like when we were talking about the relationship between your brain and your body and your mental health and how a lot of these things that we think are different parts of our body and they have their own functions, which they do, but they truly are all – very, very related.
And in, you know, today's society, we're so productivity and output focused, but has our constant need and chase for productivity made us less productive?
Yeah, definitely. Because I mean, our brain can only do so much and we're constantly pushing it and pushing it and trying to do more and more with what we've got, right? And one of the big things that happens is we're constantly context switching. So we're doing one thing and then we're doing the next thing. And I mean, just think of it like this.
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Chapter 5: How does sleep impact memory consolidation?
If you're let's say you're in a kitchen making a meal and then every five minutes you have to go to another kitchen to start making another meal. You never finish the first one and then you go to the next one and you've got to figure out what this new recipe is and you've got to, you know, it takes time. And that's basically kind of what the brain is doing each time we context switch.
We've got to take time to refill what we call our working memory with whatever it is that we're doing and And like it just, it basically costs the brain. So it takes a lot of energy and it's just really inefficient. So we're never multitasking. What we're doing is really task switching and it's just really inefficient for the brain.
Wow, that's so interesting because typically we would have seen like having a skill to multitask is like a badge of honour and that women are especially expected to multitask and juggle multiple things at once. And it's like, yeah, that's probably good to be able to do to a point, but a lot of the time it's to our detriment, right?
Yeah, and look – honestly, we never really had to multitask as much as we did today. Like back in the day, you'd have a village that would bring up a family, you know, you wouldn't just be trying to do everything and trying to juggle everything.
And I think this, not just the emotional load, but the need to get kids to an appointment or worry about it, you know, worry about sports or all of these different things, worrying about navigating traffic, all of these things take a lot of mental load and that has consequences. Yeah. You know, like we've gone so far away from the way we as social beings were meant to live.
You know, we've forced ourselves into this nuclear family and we put all of this pressure on ourselves and, you know, maybe our significant other to get things done. But we've actually never really in human history had to do that until recently.
Yeah, like so many of the things that occupy our brain space and our sources of stress are things that probably didn't even exist 50, 100 years ago. And thousands of years ago, right?
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, now we have to worry about, you know, getting stuck in traffic or, you know, is there going to be a breakdown on the road or all of these things that, you know, are part of our life now but never used to be part of our lives. Yeah. And being certain places at a certain time, you know, before you just do things as they arise and go with the flow.
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Chapter 6: What role do mistakes play in the learning process?
Yeah. You'd have that kind of, we call it time affluence. So when you feel like you've got control of your time and then you feel happier and you're less stressed. But in today's society where you're running from one thing to the next and you don't feel like you have any control over things, that's a stressor and it's not good for us.
You did a really interesting TED Talk that I wanted to tap into a little bit, and you spoke about hacks for learning faster. So what are six hacks to learn faster?
They sound really logical, but when I explain it, it'll make more sense. So attention, alertness, sleep, repetition, breaks, and mistakes. So in order to learn something, you need to be paying attention to it, right? You can't be distracted. You've got to give it your attention, then you'll learn. You've got to be alert.
You know, if you're tired and sleepy, then it's going to be hard to pay attention. You need to keep repeating the thing that you're doing because basically the brain doesn't want to change. And in order for you to learn, your brain is physically changing. It's making these brand new little connections called synapses between neurons when you're learning. right?
And the brain isn't going to want to put all of that energy into making these new connections if it's something that you've only done once. And so when you're repeating something, it's basically flagging to your brain and saying, hey, this is important because it keeps coming up over and over again. So let's actually physically change and make that process easier and more efficient.
So repetition is really critical when it comes to learning. Sleep is important too. So, you know, we used to think that sleep was a bit of a waste of time. You know, we're spending a third of our lives in suspended animation, just like chilling. But that's how I want to live.
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Chapter 7: What is popcorn brain and how does it relate to attention?
Okay. Let's up that. Let's bring that percentage up a little bit.
Yeah. And it's like, it's like actually critical for learning. So when we're doing things throughout the course of the day, we're putting things into a short-term memory storage. So part of our brain called the hippocampus is really just keeping track of what we're doing and what's sort of important.
Chapter 8: How does stress affect our brain and memory?
So if I was to ask you what you were doing this morning or what you had for breakfast, you're using your hippocampus to recall that information. And when we go to sleep, basically all of those important things throughout the course of the day get flitted off into other parts of our long-term memory storage.
so if you don't sleep the short-term stuff doesn't get converted into long-term memory so you know that's why it's so important to sleep you have to think of sleep almost as is really the time when your brain is changing and actually doing the consolidation the actual learning yeah it's doing its file story yeah yeah um we often feel bad when we make a mistake and we kind of
know feel a bit anxious and it's not a nice feeling yeah but really mistakes are really important when it comes to learning so when we make a mistake and we feel a bit anxious and you know we're feeling uncomfortable what's actually happening is our brain is releasing all of these neurochemicals that are actually helping us to pay attention that's where the agitation comes from it's actually creating these neurochemicals to make us focus on the thing that we just did wrong yeah and
I guess the next part of that is it's also opening up this little window of neuroplasticity. So whatever we do next, the brain's much more likely to be a bit of a sponge and take up. So we make a mistake, we feel a bit anxious, but it's our brain's way of preparing us to pay attention. And then... We do it again and hopefully get it right.
And when we get it right, our brain releases other chemicals like dopamine and it makes that memory stick into place. So when you're trying to learn something, don't just wait until you're ready to test your knowledge. Just keep testing yourself as you go. Like if you're trying to play a sport,
get it wrong you know make it difficult let's say you're trying to play basketball take a weird shot at a weird angle and test yourself allow yourself to make that mistake because that way yes you might get it wrong at first but also you're making your brain remember how to do it right a lot better and it becomes a lot more efficient let's say you're trying to learn
a speech or something, don't wait until you think you've memorised it all to actually say it all out loud. Just actually say it when you don't know it. You'll actually have a much better chance of consolidating that information. I think we often tell ourselves that when we make a mistake, it's a bad thing, but actually it's the best thing we can do for learning.
We really need to embrace that discomfort and that feeling and lean into it.
Yeah. Do you have any hacks for anybody who, especially like in a corporate workplace kind of or any sort of workplace scenario when you make a mistake, what should be the next step to really take advantage of some of those chemical reactions that are happening in your brain?
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