#007 Dr. Clifford Saunders | Reprogramming your brain

Clifford Saunders, guest · [05:46]And at the age of nineteen, a friend of mine suggested that I start yoga, Raja yoga, to see if I could do something at least to clean, at least to relax more, because it was just horrendous. You don't even realize you're running a chronic panic attack. I had to do something, so I took my undergraduate in electrical engineering. And electrical engineering is a far cry from theater, as you can guess, and I railed at this whole thing. But I found out that I was pretty damn good at engineering. I got a first. And the company that I was working with, British Aircraft Corporation, for those of us that got firsts in, in our year, they offered us a master's in, say, applied psych. I took a master's in applied psych. Because they were interested in the human-machine interface. How can we streamline the interface between a human with intentions and the machine to carry it out? So my master's is in applied psych, and the interesting thing here is when I'd finished my undergraduate, I now knew how information flows within healthy and unhealthy circuits. I'd worked with them, I'd debugged them, I'd tuned them. And now I've got the chance to actually work with whole humans, and we had to stick the EEG electrodes on, on patients' heads, if you like, for the epilepsy clinic. And so now I got the chance to see information actually flowing within healthy and unhealthy brains. And now I'm putting two and two together because now I'm saying, maybe I wonder if something like that's happening with me, where I've got some circuit that's not working properly. My PhD is in cybernetics. I've always been interested in different cultures. That's, you know, I lived in Singapore as a kid. I had a fantastic time when I came out to South Africa. I love the world. I love to live all over. Over the world. I think the world is amazing. It's just the most amazing. What a bit of luck. You know, the next nearest planet is 250 million light years away, and there's no bus for some time. So I just think this is an amazing planet. Along the way, as I was studying yoga, I was introduced to a fellow in the West Coast of the States who talked about dehypnosis. And when I say to him, what do you mean by dehypnosis? He would say, well, Clifford, you've done a wonderful job of hypnotizing yourself into believing what it is you believe you believe. You don't need more hypnosis, Clifford. You need to interrupt those hypnotic patterns. You need to dehypnotize yourself. Well, by the time I finished all of that, 25 years ago, I realized that my skin had got better, and I no longer had it. And so what I've assembled over the years are many, many, many different techniques. Nowadays, we have them under the rubric of neuroplasticity, but they're techniques that allow our brain Which, by the way, listening to what I'm saying, the consequences that our brains are capable of reprogramming themselves, reprogramming themselves while we sleep.

Clifford Saunders, guest · [10:40]And so what we do is we just realize for a minute that in order for you to be able to understand what it is that I'm saying, it is your brain that is decoding the words, deriving the meaning, and then presenting them to you consciously. That's a trick, and it takes about 250 milliseconds from the moment, the instant of now, for you to become aware of the implications of what it is I'm saying. We don't normally see the 250 milliseconds that it's there. So what we want to do is we want to be respectful of this fact. It's not an it. It's three pound of liver, as I like to call it. I do that just to see if it'll twist me on, right? But very respectfully, this is my brain. This is me. This is creating me. It's amazing, and it turns out to be very simple to be able to set up that communication pattern. The first thing is, is let it come to your mind that this is even possible. And that's, if you think about it, a gift that your brain will give you or not. If it occurs to you, you know, I think I'd like to talk to my brain, you're already on that bit of the path. The next thing you want to do is, is I like to anchor myself. If you're lying on bed, you can't do it with your feet, but if you're sitting on a chair, or as I'm doing at the minute, standing, become aware of your feet and ground yourself. Grounding is important. So once you've grounded yourself, you now need to calm yourself. The quickest way of calming yourself that I know are three very long, deep breaths where you pay attention to the exhale reflex. Okay? So let's do it together. Let's do it together.

Petro du Pisani, host · [12:15]Okay.

Clifford Saunders, guest · [12:16]So just settle yourself down. That's it. Beautiful. And now we're just going to take three deep breaths. You know this routine. Let's do it. First deep breath. Nice deep breath. Excellent, Pet. Very good. And if you haven't already closed your eyes, please close them. And with your eyelids closed, just roll your eyes up to the top of your head till you feel a bit of eye strain, and relax your eyes, and keep your eyes closed. Now that's quite a ritual. I think I'd like to talk to my brain. Ground myself. Three deep breaths. Close my eyes, roll my eyes up to the top of my head till I feel a bit of eye strain, relax my eyes, and keep my eyes closed. It can only mean one thing, and that is, you'd like to have a chat with your brain. So sometimes it's handy just to be there with yourself for a few minutes. In this case, it's not appropriate. That if you wanted to be talking to your brain at this moment, you would glance at some notes you'd made, perhaps a sketch or a little model or a doodle, whatever it is your brain knows because it's created the question for you to ask it to ask itself.

Clifford Saunders, guest · [21:33]So just to paint the picture for the audience, because you're kind of a few steps ahead, let's start off with the idea of a simulation. So part of my education was working for British Aircraft Corporation, in the guided weapons division, so I worked in, all sorts of GW tasks. One of the things that we, British Aircraft Corporation with the Ministry of Defense, very interested in, in is shortening the time to train someone to do something. Especially something on a very expensive piece of equipment. You don't want people to go out and learn by doing on a great big tank, right? That's very inefficient. It breaks the tank. What you need to do in that environment then is to create a simulation. And what you want to be doing is you want to be how well we're going to learn that task. Generally speaking, you want it, realistic up to a point beyond which you don't need to make it more realistic. Simulations tend to be single user environments, or they tend to be played through as, you know, in terms of, say, mind change, you run a simulation, you will run a series and you'll see how an instance plays out. So that's a simulation. Now, an emulation is different in some respects. You asked me a bit earlier who my favorite cartoon character is, and out popped Popeye, my surprise. So we're able to recognize that Popeye is a character, even though we're never confused for a minute. To think it's a real person. Nevertheless, we can learn a lot from, from Popeye and Bluto and Olive Oil, can't we? Cartoon sketch. So I want you to think for a minute that an emulation is a cartoon sketch of, let's say, a business, but a cartoon sketch designed in such a way that many people can interact with that sketch at the same time, and that if we play some tricks and we scale it right, we can actually speed time up so that our brains get to see the cause-effect nature of the decisions that they're making almost in real time, sufficiently close for our brain to be able to make the connection to, if I cut down the amount of money I spend in maintenance, My next quarter looks great, and then I go out of business in the back end of the year. Now, as you, all of your friends, now to play with, say, an emulation of, let's say, and emulations can be of all sizes. It depends on what the non-negotiable business goal is, like where are we taking this? And that might take a little bit of time. It might be iterative, but assuming you know what your, you know, steady profitability, regardless of gold price between these two parameters, now you get your team to be able to play with this cartoon emulation sketch in real time and get more or less immediate feedback. Which then has the power, it begins now immediately to affect the premotor cortex, the prefrontal, that part of our brains that contains our belief systems of what we must do to get things done. And so I hope that's not too wordy for you. They're both in the same category of learning environment, a simulation and an emulation. They're both training environments. One's generally one-on-one for a single type of task, and emulation is a broader, rougher sketch that has a massive effect on the, on belief systems.

Clifford Saunders, guest · [27:59]From there, I moved into steel, and there's a company now that's been bought by the, by the French, and now the French by the, by the Indians called Dofasco. And Dofasco In its day was the most profitable and innovative, steel manufacturing companies in North America, if not the world. So they saw the things that I was doing and said, would I come and help them think about their next generation? What would, what needs to happen next? And at that time, this is in the early nineties, they'd gone through a very large downsizing, and they'd gone from fifteen thousand to seventy-five hundred people, and their morale was in the, in the gutter. It was terrible. And I was brought in as part of the team. They did a tremendous amount of wonderful team building work and so on, and essentially my job was to work with the executive team and get them to think, okay, Where is the steel industry going to next? They hadn't realized that they'd fall into a commodity trap because when they asked them, why do people buy steel from you? They said, well, it's price delivery and quality. So why do they drive, buy steel from your competitor over the road? That's price delivery and quality. What about US steel? It's price delivery and quality. So if all of you are competing on price delivery and quality, you're bound to be driving yourselves out of business due to competitive convergence. What is the fourth invisible buyer criteria that isn't on the table and no one thinks about at the minute except for this PDQ? It's not going to be as important as PDQ, but it'll become a point of difference. And out of that Discovery, they then discovered what I call the door in the wall. They discovered that the way that they had been looking at the problem looked as if you couldn't get through it, but as soon as you added this invisible component, well, what's the fourth buyer criteria? Suddenly it's like, well, wait a minute, there's lots of things we can do for the fourth buyer criteria. And what they did, just to finish the story in its famous case study, they deployed into Toyota, Ford, Chrysler, and all the other car manufacturers at their own expense, the top-end metallurgists and engineers in the design team so that they knew in advance what chemistries they would need and already have the process working. You get that by squeezing your thinking.

Petro du Pisani, host · [30:12]With the rise of artificial intelligence and all of those things that are happening in our world at the moment, do you think we're going to get to a point where machines are going to make all our decisions for us, or are we still going to be using our brains?

Clifford Saunders, guest · [30:25]Oh, that's such a super question. Let's just talk a little bit about number and Number theory. When we say the machine is thinking, it is following a series of algorithms that it has learnt. So now I'm picking up a brain cap. The front part of the brain, the frontal lobe, is where we make decisions. A robot can make decisions. The side portion of our brain contains our temporal lobes, where our hearing happens. That's very funny. Stop it, Frank. And a robot can hear. And we're able to see. We have an occipital lobe and see things, and a robot can see things too. But there's one huge difference between a human and a robot, and that is the parietal lobe. We are capable of taking the bit stream, the data, because we are alive, through some sort of magic we don't understand, and turn it into feelings. If we didn't feel our feelings, then we would be robots, and we would need to be frightened of the damn things taking over, because we'd have no point of difference. Robots can outthink us, decide us, hear us, and see us, but we outfeel them always, infinitely. And so from my perspective, they're tools, they're friends, get on the same side of them. They have no intention, they don't have a life cycle. If you said it that in such a way that they now start to make your life miserable, pay attention to that. I mean, I will absolutely guarantee artificial intelligence will squeeze us whether we like it or not to the next stage of our, quote, evolution or involution, no doubt about it. But we're up for the challenge, and we are alive, and we feel.

Clifford Saunders, guest · [32:19]A little bit earlier, I took Petra, and I hope you tailgated, on this idea of talking to your brain. Now, this is not a theoretical thing. Let's ask ourselves, and those of you that are interested that would like my Society of Economic Geology paper on the use of neuroplasticity in mining from 2011, happy to send it to you. But during that experiment, the experiment The neuroscientists that were part of the team, business neuroscientists in the States, we were able to set up a rough and ready experiment to quantify the size of the neuroplastic effect. Roughly speaking. And so what we discovered was we were able to set up some metrics, and this is where you need to be sitting down. Your brain has the capacity to reprogram itself, reconceptualize itself, reappraise itself, rewire itself, the equivalent of two years' worth of unique business experience within two days. That's the size of the effect. The fact that we don't utilize it hardly at all is irrelevant. The fact is our brains are very, very fluid. From this point forward, we can be assured that if we're not getting what we want, it's not to do with the inherent capacity of our brains to be able to change themselves. It has to be something like, I don't know, our imagination or some other boundary condition you don't know about, but that's not going to be the asymptote. So I live this stuff every day. I know this stuff works. So when you ask me, how many sleep cycles ago did you ask me to do this, Petra, roughly?

Petro du Pisani, host · [33:55]Probably about a week ago.

Clifford Saunders, guest · [33:57]Okay, so seven sleep cycles to go. So the first thing I want the audience to realize is, I don't want you to take sleep for granted anymore. It is a hugely important thing. The English say fortnight for a reason. Once upon a time, we counted nights, not days. In the olden days, there were groups of people that realized the magic was happening at night. So the sleep cycle now becomes important. Then when Petra asked me, I then had, let's say, seven sleep cycles between then and now to ask my brain to dig through, find stuff, and make it just as kick-ass and interesting as I could possibly do every night. That's what I do.