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This is the first podcast in Beau’s Adventures in Uncertainty series that documents the time he packed up his home in New York, traveled across America (twice) eventually finding himself on a island in the Mediterranean.
This podcast explores the distinction between uncertainty, adventure and exploration... and how adventure is about embracing the uncertainty that already exists in one's life and reframing it as an opportunity to discover.
Our society focuses a great deal on confidence. Schools try to teach it, parents reward it, coaches punish you if you don’t have it, businesses pay you more if you fake it.
The logic is that confidence engenders success. But does it?
Ironically, research has shown that confidence can engender exactly the opposite: Poorly considered decisions and thoughtless actions that can create harm. Because when we’re confident we often forget to ask questions ...
Dr Beau Lotto considers what is core to all of our existence? Is it food, shelter and water as Maslow suggests? Or is it something else that transcends these? Something that ‘makes sense’ of our physiology.
He discusses how it is feedback that creates life. Without it, we literally perish. With plenty of food, water and warmth, when one’s perception of existence is malnourished, it can result in destructive behaviours.
Therefore the greatest gift we can give to another, is the gift of existence by the simple act of listening in the pursuit of understanding and providing feedback.
Our society focuses a great deal on confidence. Schools try to teach it, parents reward it, coaches punish you if you don’t have it, businesses pay you more if you fake it.
The logic is that confidence engenders success. But does it?
Ironically, research has shown that confidence can engender exactly the opposite: Poorly considered decisions and thoughtless actions that can create harm. Because when we’re confident we often forget to ask questions ...
Whether you agree or disagree with the anger that is currently expressing itself in our cities, an individual and society can only thrive in uncertainty when the brains of that society perceive hope. Here, I discuss the neuroscience behind why we are witnessing the result of the 'ghosts of society' trying to get feedback in order to feel more hopeful.
The process of discovery is nothing other than iterating, not to answers, to better questions. But to do this well, you must identify the usually invisible biases and assumptions that shaped your actions, for it is these assumptions and biases that define your identity. Which is why questioning them can often be scary, and even risky. Hence the evolution of consciousness ...
What’s required to thrive in the unknown?
TO ACTIVATE YOUR PREFRONTAL
The prefrontal cortex is the most recent innovation of our brain’s evolution. It evolved to help us deviate away from the more automatic, reactionary perceptions of panic, denial and anger to more thoughtful and considered behaviours.
Feeling disempowered in the face of uncertainty is a deeply natural response. When disempowered, which many of our brains are feeling now in the face of COVID-19, our brain-state is similar to our ancestors’ brain-state when they faced a moment of imminent death. You inherited this response. We all did. Each of us is seeing the world through their brains, and all the millions of brains that came afterward. These brains and their evolved responses are deep inside you - and everyone one around you.
We are now collectively hearing the predator’s roar. We know it’s out there. Except this ‘predator’ is invisible to the naked eye, which makes it all the more frightening.
The need to be in control of one’s fate is profound. When we feel in control, our brain feels ‘empowered’. Whether in a social, behavioural, psychological or economic context, to be empowered is to feel certainty in our lives.
COVID-19 is challenging that sense of control. As a result, hundreds of millions - if not billions - of brains around the world are feeling collectively disempowered. And that sense of disempowerment is likely to be stronger for those who strongly identified with being ‘an individual’, ‘self-made’, or ‘a lone wolf’ - a common archetype in the USA (and the West in general).
Why?
From the publisher's feed