318. The Surprising Neuroscience Behind Effective Communication with Rich Carr

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This is happiness solved with America's happiness coach, Sandee Sgarlata.

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Rich Carr, such a pleasure to be having you on my show today. I've been wanting to talk to you for a very long time. We were just talking about this before I hit record that your publicist, who is phenomenal, has sent me your information for months now. And it, like I just said, nothing personal. It's just trying to get everybody on my show.

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And so I've been really wanting to talk about this, and I always feel like, when's the best time? Right now, right? Like it's all perfect timing. So how's it going? No matter where you're at, that's the place to be.

00:01:46
Well, and it's funny because everything happens when it's supposed to, like I just said. And the past few weeks for me, I have been. I don't want to say I've been in a fuck, but I haven't been stimulated, right? Like, I'm one of these peak performers, you know, go, go, go. And I haven't been challenged mentally, so I've started playing games on my phone.

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And the only reason why I hadn't done it is because I was like, I am not going to be one of those people who are on my phone constantly. Well, I don't even want to look at my. My screen time for the past month because I will be very. And I don't like to say this, but I will be ashamed of myself. And that's.

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That's a place I don't want to go to. But I just downloaded an app, and I've only done it a few times because it's hard. It's these brain games. And I'm like, huh? Why is that, like.

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Like, is it an age thing or is it just, you know, I can't do simple math because I'm so used to using my cap calculator, that there's times I'm like, what's seven times four? Oh, geez. What's seven times four? Oh, my gosh. Do you picture the peachy with the little thing in the corner up there?

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Yeah. No. I can tell you why you're picking up games. Yeah. Because gamers, the programmers of game, understand how the brain works.

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They understand how to keep you engaged intrinsically, to surprise you repeatedly, to reward you and hit you up with dopamine, with serotonin, with oxytocin, all the things that make you continue to pick it up. It's not just the game. It's how it's constructed. And every one of these gaming companies have cognitive neuroscientists on staff to make sure the programming is that way. It's just not a game.

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It's also really nice, too, if, like, somebody like yourself, you get so busy with other projects, and maybe you want to shelf a couple projects and. And think about it in the background, per se, with your working memory, you have to keep part of your brain busy, occupied, so that places free, similar to driving a car or a shower, going for a run, however you free those things. Gaming is a. Is a wonderful way to not only keep your brain going, but to think of other things, because you get kind of on an autopilot, because it is structured in a way the brain loves to learn. That's.

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That's the secret to games. There are. Some people are really good at it, you know, and. And people get addicted to it, like I say, and it's not bad for cognition, for actual thinking. They keep you a game.

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Keep somebody, especially of your stature in your prefrontal cortex, where your executive functions happen, where you get to innovate and problem solve and. And strategize and predict, those things are fun for you. And if they're managed in a way that keeps the meal appetizing every couple seconds, because, again, we like novelty. The brain likes novelty. We don't like to sit there and listen to somebody yammer on for an hour.

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We like channel switching. We like seeing new things. It's the same reason why television news will have 40 edits in a 32nd story, because they want all learning lobes of your brain actively involved in whatever it is they're saying. They know what they're doing. It's incredible science.

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Wow. Well, thank you for that, Rich, because I really didn't come here today hoping that you would help me to feel better about myself, but I do feel better about it now. So, for the audience, if you haven't guessed it, Rich Carr is a learning specialist and CEO of Brain Centric, a company that provides 21st century cognitive brain training for innovative professional communicators, coaches, and educators. So, yeah, you're an army veteran, too. Thank you so much.

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A decorated Department of Defense information electronic journalism schools graduate. Wow. Wow. We've got lots to discuss here. Yeah.

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And just because I've been in this mode and, you know, playing these games, and I'm glad that you explained it to me, Rich, because that's kind of what's been happening. You know, when you do what I do as a full time podcaster, I'm about to launch the show on e 360 television. You know, I've been a life coach for 34 years. You're always reinventing yourself constantly in today's market. It's a constant reinvention.

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How can I do this differently? How can I do this better? And I think that's what's been going on lately is because I do notice as I'm playing, I am, all of a sudden, I'll get an idea, and I always have a notepad next to me. Oh, that's great. And I'll write it down.

00:07:04
So I appreciate that explanation very, very much. No, it's just a fascinating world. Thought is such a fascinating world. I mean, and think about this, talked about starting this off with something profound. You've never been taught to think.

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You've only been told to think, and typically what to think about, even though you have no lessons on how to do it. And that was really the impetus of writing the first book, Brain centric design, or the subtitle of that is, if I can remember, the surprising neuroscience behind learning with deep understanding. But brain centric design is literally how the brain accepts new information, I mean, literally the breadcrumbs. And it's a relatively new science, cognitive neuroscience, or specifically what I work in, is the learning sciences in cognitive neuroscience, how new information from the outside gets in and how those thoughts turn into things. And what's amazing is most of this was discovered in the mid fifties with one of the most you've heard of the magical number seven, plus or minus two, Miller's paper and another fellow named Hebb.

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Well, recently I met, and I'll say recently, ten years ago, I met a fellow named Kieran Omani, who is a cognitive learning neuroscientist at the University of Washington. And they're learning in informal and formal environments. Center. And he had been studying this particular model, brain centric, for 40 years. He was a teacher in Ireland for troubled boys, a school.

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He came to school one day and one of the kids had committed suicide, and it rocked his world. And he left Ireland to come to the US to try to find answers to why this would happen. What's going on up there to make this happen. And as he studied this, he was trying to push this model into academia, which is a very big ship and very buckled down in how it presents curriculum to people based off of, originally off the model t, how the model t was built. President of Stanford when they put all this stuff together, literally moving cattle through levels, but it wasn't necessarily learning.

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And my story, if you don't mind me going into a little bit of a personal piece of how this thing happened. My daughter and I were going to a rodeo. We were on my harley. My son was following us about a mile behind with the truck and the horses. My daughter's a barrel racer.

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I was a team roper. About 2 miles away from the rodeo, a woman was looking at her phone and ran a stop sign and t boned us 45 miles an hour. On your. On your motorcycle? On my motorcycle, yeah.

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The, uh. And it was amazingly destructive. Uh, we both survived, obviously. Well, uh, my daughter, amazingly. You surprised?

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Survived? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I got mangled, honestly. Uh, I had my right arm torn off, my right leg ruined, which they ended up, uh, removing it right around the knee.

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And, yeah, they reattached the arm. My daughter, uh, we broke everything basically on our right sides because that's where we were. So. Do you have a prosthetic on your leg? I do.

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I have a carbon fiber cheetah, the kind you see in the olympics. And now your arm. Sorry for interrupting you, but this is fascinating me. Can you. Do you have full function of your arm?

00:10:50
Yeah, no, I'm pretty much 100%. I don't. I can't throw a football like I used to because when they put it back together, I can't go past that, you know, where the other one, I can. So that's. So there's.

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There was some give and take on that, but it's my arm, so I'm very pleased about that. But the. But the big change in thinking. Well, let me finish up on this. My daughter healed up wonderfully.

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Ended up getting a scholarship to Texas A and M in barrel racing. So she healed wonderfully. Broke her head, shattered her whole right side. Just a mess. And then what happened to me was I was in the arbor view of a cute place up in Seattle hospital for several months.

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And when they finally got me out of my bed. They put me in this room, a support room, with all these other people that were pretty buggered up, some worse than me, some not as bad. And I remember explicitly this was the moment of biggest change in my life. Pretty drugged up, obviously. For a while, about a month of that time, I was out, and my brother was power of attorney over stuff.

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I came out of it, leg was gone, arm was back on, kind of sewn to me because things have to heal. And I remember they put me next to this big fella, and I'm talking big, big, big fella. The kind where those new chairs and hospitals that are super wide. He was in a wheelchair like that, also missing his right leg. And I didn't like being next to him because he was super large.

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Actually kind of smelled. I know that's probably not good to say, but had an odor. He was kind of tucked into his chair with blankets and pads and stuff. And he looked miserable. Just looked inflamed and horrible.

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And there's all these other people in the sad room. And I asked to get out of the room. I wanted out of that room because that was not my room. This was a bad place for me to be. But they left me in there.

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I'm next to this guy, and up on the wall is a tv. And on that tv was a sporting event of some sort. And I look at the tv, and the fellas are running around the track. And then I noticed this guy. This was maybe a 30 year old fella.

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He was running on a prosthetic on his right leg. He was actually running. It was a paralympics is what was on the tv. And I'm looking at this beautiful man running around the track with a prosthetic and this man to my left. We're all missing our left, our right legs.

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And I kept looking like, what is what makes one guy do this and the other guy do that? And it was at that moment I said, it just has to be choice. That's the only thing I got left right now. I'm all buggered up and I have to make a choice to be this guy or that guy. And that's literally where I decided to be that guy.

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That guy. That decision led me to studying how could I walk again? How can I be like the guy on the tv? But it was only YouTube videos of people making their first steps and all these other things, but not how to walk if you lose your leg. I was 50 at the time.

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I'm 61 now. And it was like, oh, my God, what are we going to do? In my bed, I had a surface tablet that had voice commands. And so I was started searching how people think, how people change their minds. And I've always been in social psychology and communications, but I never really went deep into the brain until then.

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By coincidence, my son was dating a gal whose aunt was stalking a neuroscientist. And they were talking about it at a barbecue, and he came to the hospital. He said, ain't you looking for a neuroscientist? Son's 17 at the time, 16 at the time. And I said, I am.

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Can you, can you get us an introduction? So when I got out of the hospital, I met Kieran for coffee. We became quick friends, and I said, you know, and I was working with Nike at the time, not for Nike, but they're a vendor of mine, a client of mine. And I said to Kieran, I says, you know, if we could translate this to where people could understand that there's a recipe for thought, there's a system for facilitating thinking, I think we'd have gold, because I'm looking at it as a marketer, as a salesperson, as an educator, kind of. Gordon Gekko in the year of how I grew up, in the eighties, with school and whatnot, seventies.

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And I thought, well, how could we capitalize on this thing? And the goal at the time was, how could I do the perfect sales call? Because I didn't know how well I was going to heal. But I still had my voice and I still had my brain. So what happened is we wrote this book, and Nike let us do a pilot program in the UK.

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Turned out really good. Then they gave us Asia. That turned out great. And then all these things just started replicating based off of that particular model. And it was interesting because as I learned this deeply into this science, uh, thought is such an amazingly powerful thing.

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And if you know how your brain thinks and where the fences are and where you might get stuck in a bad place and how to get out of it, uh, suddenly life becomes so much more enjoyable. And people say that all the time. It's like, how can you be so happy? It's like, well, my daughter's alive. I'm alive.

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I'm incredibly fit for not only maybe my age, but for the condition I have. And I could either hang a hat on some of those things or not look at the positive, but know the positive and know how to realize it every day, every moment, basically possible, and know how to question those things when I'm in the red, so to speak. So the second book, surprised, was a further dissection of the first one's model in that what the brain loves going back to your game is to be constantly surprised. It loves novelty. It pays attention to those things that are unexpected in your whole body, focuses in on that thing, and if you understand what's happening, you're able to play with that thing and make it a benefit for yourself.

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So we do that for corporations, for the military, for anybody who comes along. And I say that in a weird way, but it's one of those things that, again, you've never been taught to think, well, here's a way to do that. And that's been quite popular. Wow. Well, I'm just amazed at that story.

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And I actually was like, okay, I don't want to forget to ask this question to you. And you, I ended up not even. I don't even have to ask you the question because you went through the whole thing. And all my listeners know I'm always saying, number one, everything is a choice, right? And you made that choice.

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And you've demonstrated by your story that you use that tragic, tragic accident, and instead of it happening to you, you've now turned it into something that happened. For you without it. You know, I love the way you say that, and I'm going to steal that if that's okay. Please, please. Because, you know, people will say, you know, again, they'll be surprised that I'm happy with all this stuff, but it's, to me, it's actually not a surprise where, yes, yes, that was a tragic thing, and horrible things happened, but nobody died.

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That's right. We are both, my daughter and I are so incredibly close now because of it. Because I tell you, there was a moment where I. Well, she always lost her father. Number one.

00:19:14
Well, that was one. Yeah. And we're close, anyway. I mean, we have four children. She's my youngest, and, oh, gosh, she's daddy's little girl.

00:19:23
Well, yes and no. I mean, they all are. I have three daughters and a boy. Uh, and we're all. We're.

00:19:28
It's a wonderful deal. But the. The super interesting thing that occurred out of all of this was, uh, when I was in the ditch, I remember just a couple things because I was lucid. It didn't get. Just clocked.

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Um, I remember noise, like static noise, just intense static noise. No pain. Believe it or not, um, I didn't feel pain. I had a lot of noise. I remember looking down at my leg and going, that's bad because it was, was really bad.

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Um, again, it came 45, I stiff armed it and that's what took the arm off, you know, because I stiff arm in the car and the point of contact was right below the knee and because of the angle I was at. And not only did that just crush everything, but it threw the femur out my backside, uh, and all kinds of details. But I remember looking at that leg going, okay, this isn't bad. This is bad. And through all that static, I started to hear something.

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And it was my leg. My leg. I can't straighten my leg. And I remember at that moment, I just smiled and I thought I died then because I thought, oh, good, she's alive.

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So we had to go to different hospitals because we had different degrees of injuries. Fortunately for her, I was kind of her airbag with the way we hit. And we again, fortunately landed in a giant irrigation ditch, which was about 6ft deep, full of grass. And the bike, she had a little bit of padding. Yeah, I mean, concrete.

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Exactly. Well, we did roll little. We had all that concrete burn stuff they call it. Yeah, yeah. But she started healing really quickly.

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And I remember when I got. She was young. Yeah, she was. She was only 14 at the time. Yeah.

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And she started healing really quickly. And I was thinking at the time, like, oh, I can't let my daughter keep me or pass me up. I can't be a bad dad. So we started doing things. We had a horse ranch and we started doing things together.

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And I just saw that I could do things. I mean, a lot of it. I was heavily drugged because they give you all kinds of stuff at the time. But I eventually got off of all of that. And like I say, she ended up getting back on the horse.

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Still holds all these records in Washington and Oregon, was on a and M's barrel racing team, and now she's a financial account executive for Gartner Research. Kicking it and it's. We have all kinds of fun stories that come out of that because one, we survived, two, we both learned a lot out of it. Three, the first, well, actually, both books came out of it. And then as we started playing with that, suddenly life became so much easier because now we know why certain things happen in the head and what we can do about it.

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Like, she's in sales and part of the book is that it's to really resonate with anybody. To connect with anybody, you have to have effect before effect, emotional connection before business outcome. You can't just put somebody into amygdala hijack and expect to get what you want. The brain really does two things. It keeps you alive.

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That's all that animal brain everybody talks about, the lizard brain or what have you, uh, and the other thing it does is help you thrive. We have the biggest prefrontal cortex, where your executive functions happen in the, in the world, in the animal kingdom. That's why we're at the top of the food chain. And now there's a recipe that really started in the fifties, as I said, in the nineties. It became kind of the decade of the brain.

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And my, my old boss, Paul Allen from Microsoft, worked for him in Portland. He started the Seattle brain center. And suddenly we have fMRI, and we could start seeing thoughts travel through the brain. And so, in the early two thousands, brain became a really big deal. And now it's something that we can navigate, I won't say with ease.

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But when you narrow it down to a very, very, very small niche like the learning brain, not all the brain, but just the learning brain, it's literally a breadcrumb trail from new stimuli to active thought. And you can manage that with yourself and with other people if you know how that's done. Wow. So, in your bio, you talk about it says, you say, by aligning communications with how the brain processes information. Your profound understanding of cognitive learning, neuroscience, and applying that to communications within the workplace has yielded consistent and predictable jaw drop, draw, jaw dropping outcomes.

00:24:17
Yes. What are some of the outcomes? Can you just explain that a little bit? Yeah.

00:24:25
It's such a desired state where basically most communicators, and that's, again, educators, salespeople, anybody communicating, they, they imitate how they were taught. And most of us were taught by sitting down, shutting up, listening for an hour, and then being quizzed. That's memory. That has nothing to do with understanding. That's just recall.

00:24:51
And learning never took into consideration the fact that your dog got ran over that morning, or your parents are on fire, or the IR's called you all these things that occupy what's called working memory. And working memory is small. I mean, small if the brain was the Milky Way. The working memory is about the cubic inch. It's amazingly small.

00:25:16
And we simplify that in the model by saying, by using Miller's law, which is at seven plus or minus two, you can only manage seven plus or minus two thoughts at any given time. But that was when it was done in 1956. They redid the study with a much larger sample size in the early two thousands. And the number we use now is four. Plus or minus two, meaning on a good day, six new thoughts will.

00:25:44
Will anchor on a bad day, too. This model presupposes that everybody is thinking of something else before you start talking. So, yeah, I mean, you're thinking of whatever, you know, a messy office, ir's your dog, sick, all those things. So we predicate any kind of communication on two thoughts, and then we scaffold all the information under those two thoughts to reach a big idea. So what communicators don't do, they're usually subject, subject matter experts.

00:26:20
That's why they're in position of communicating. Subject matter experts are not always the best communicators. They get lost in their own weeds. They can't see the whole picture because they've forgotten more than most people will know. And so this model, again, has a new wrinkle to it in that the communicator needs to know what their big idea is.

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And the big idea is what people will leave understanding from your talk. Not something as simple as mindfulness, but a real, deliverable something like, I'll wake up in the morning and do this thing, and they'll start doing this because I showed them what two things must they know to understand that peace. And then everything is scaffold under that thought. I'm oversimplifying it, but it really comes down to planning your communication with what they'll walk away with. And before you even start building that communication, you need to know.

00:27:21
Like, if you were building it, Sandy, you would need to know what your measurement of success is. Then when you use this model, everything that you say aligns with one of those thoughts, which aligns with that big idea and your successful outcome. So an example would be speaking to your kids about driving drunk. That's not the big idea. That's the subject matter.

00:27:45
The big idea of talking to your kids about driving drunk is that they will never drive drunk. Simple enough. You would measure that by them calling you after they've had one too many beers at a kegger and saying, dad, pick me up, or they don't get drunk at all, or some kind of behavior that says, I'm not driving drunk. So now I know what to talk about. And what two things must my child know to not drive drunk?

00:28:15
Well, they need to know the effects it's going to have on their body and maybe the effects on somebody else. And you can put together an entire lesson plan based off the priority of things brought underneath that if you challenge that person before you start talking. And so an example would be in this model. Hey, Sandy, I don't want you driving drunk. You know, driving drunk is literally like me blindfolding you and telling you to navigate the house.

00:28:42
And if you do drive drunk, you could kill yourself or one of your friends or a bunch of people. So before I start talking to you, Sandy, how can not driving drunk benefit you in the future?

00:28:56
It's an interesting topic because my ex husband was driving drunk and hit a motorcycle and killed two people and served seven years in prison.

00:29:11
I did not know that. So, yeah, so for me personally and my child, who was 13 at the time when it happened, him and all of his friends had that massive thing happen to our community. Right? Because it doesn't just affect the tragedy, just doesn't affect the people who passed away. It affected us, it affected my son, it affected everybody in the neighborhood.

00:29:38
You bet. Oh, my gosh, that could happen to me. So. Yeah, well, I forgot about what you were even saying. Sorry, Rich.

00:29:47
No, no problem. I was like, oh, is he going to go there? Oh, boy. However, let me just say before that, before that, when I. Because I'm a visual person.

00:30:00
So my question for you is, does it matter how you learn? Is how you learn affected in this? Because I know when I was in high school, there were times before I had even had my driver's license where multiple friends of mine were in severe car accidents from drinking and driving. And I saw one of my friends, a car was on top of her and they lifted the car up and her face was stuck to it. And I was standing on the side of the road and watched this and watched her body come up with the car and then she fell back.

00:30:34
And so that had a big profound effect on me because it was a visual thing. Well, and I would put that, and not to skirt any emotions that are now in this conversation. It's been a while. It's been over ten. It's been like ten years now.

00:30:52
Well, but emotions are everything. What you just brought up was what's called disequilibrium. This is your subject matter, your big idea in its most unstable state, and it's necessary. In fact, without disequilibrium, you learn nothing. Learning doesn't happen unless it becomes a connection.

00:31:15
And the example that I gave you was part of the structure of brain centric design called initial thoughts, or the setup to prime the learner's brain to get ready to want to hear what you're going to say after that, and I'll break it down. The first was, hey, Sandy, I don't want you to drive drunk. That is the introduction of the topic. There's no funny joke to get you involved. There's nothing like that.

00:31:39
Hey, Sandy, we're talking about this. The next thing was an analogy anchoring it in something that you can understand, because this is new information. The analogy was blindfolding yourself and saying, navigate the house. The third thing was disequilibrium. Hey, if this happens, bad thing happens.

00:31:59
And it got very personal for you at that point. Then I asked a question, a challenge question, because the mind loves a challenge. We love challenges. That's why we have hobbies. That's why you have games.

00:32:11
There's a lot of reasons for challenges, but it's called the challenge question, and it is the topic made a benefit for the receiver. In this case, Sandy, how can not driving drunk benefit you in the future? And then I, as the speaker, shut up. So how. Yeah, you'll think about it.

00:32:34
Now you are totally primed. I have set your reticular activating system on everything that forthcoming because you're thinking of your answer to the challenge question. Oh, life would be great. You know, I wouldn't have these memories or whatever the things are. And then you said you were a visual person.

00:32:52
That's your preference. But you have four learning lobes. You've got the occipital lobe, which is in the back of your head. That's the visual part. That's the part that you love, that your preference is.

00:33:03
But you also have the temporal lobes on either side of the brain. That's primarily for understanding sound, interpreting sound. On top of your brain, you've got the parietal lobe, which is both smell and small motor movement. So if I had you take your fingers and do this or pretend to drive a car, I'm exciting that learning lobe of your brain. That's a hands on learner.

00:33:27
And then the fourth one is your prefrontal cortex, which is where the actual thinking happens. So if I can present a subject that I tell you what it is, I've anchored it in something. You know, I've hit an emotional piece. Again, I did not know the steps of this conversation with this one, but you hit emotional piece to say, to show what your big idea is in its most unstable state, and then you follow that up with a challenge question. So knowing that we're going to talk about this, how would it benefit you?

00:34:01
That's kind of what the challenge question is. Depending on the environment, I'll do a pregnant pause, like in a speaking thing. If I'm in a learning environment, I'll literally give somebody 60 seconds to write down their private thoughts, and I make them write it down. Not to show to anybody else, but I make them write it down, because writing is your brain's way of showing you how messy your thinking is, and you really have to figure it out to write it out. So you're actively in your PFC, you're actively thinking about it.

00:34:31
So once I've got your brain set up primed to hear what's coming next, I will present my conversation on drunk driving to my child in four different ways. Visually, tactically, audibly, and where they have to use an executive function. And at the end, rather than, what did you get out of this talk? Sandy, I will ask you the best question in the world for everybody. I mean, this is the best nugget in this conversation.

00:35:03
After I present all this stuff, I ask you, Sandy, what was surprising?

00:35:10
Wow. Well, if I went through all of that, I would say what would be surprising would be putting a blindfold on me and walking around the house. Trying to navigate around the house like that would be surprising for me. Yeah. And the beautiful thing about that question is that it is the one question that will make everybody bypass their amygdala.

00:35:32
So the amygdala, if you. If you think. And I didn't even know how to spell amygdala when I started studying. And even though I do speak italian, the. The interesting thing is most of the parts of the brain are either latin or italian, named after something simple.

00:35:49
Amygdala is latin for almond. It's shaped like an almond. You have amygdala. You have two of them on. On both hemispheres of the brain.

00:35:57
And a fun way to think about the amygdala is like the bouncer to club brain. And to not say amygdala, I actually renamed her in my brain Amy G. Dalla, which is how amygdala is spelt. But Amy is the bouncer of my brain. If it's bad, she kicks it down to the animal brain, where I react, where you, me, and everybody listening spends 80% of their time reacting.

00:36:23
The amygdala protects you. So, again, remember, the brain keeps you alive and helps you thrive, and amygdala is in charge of keeping you alive. Like, is this good for me? No. Okay, react.

00:36:33
Is it good for me? Okay, I'll let you in my brain, and it'll start kicking around. So Amy is the bouncer of club brain. What was surprising gets you past Amy, because even if nothing was surprising, that's not a bad thing. It does make you think, because you have to go, what was surprising?

00:36:53
And you have to go, huh? And you're literally now in your limbic system, your memories, your thoughts, your emotions, this is all heavily emotionally related. And you're bouncing around like, okay, what was surprising? And so now I've got you thinking about something that was surprising to you. The next question I'll ask is, what did you already know but now see differently.

00:37:21
I'm still keeping you in that limbic system. You're going through all your memories going, what did I know? And now see differently. And then the final thing is, what do you still need help with? Now I've got you purely in your PFc where you're looking at everything I just said and said, well, you know, everybody at schools drinks, and, you know, I want to, too.

00:37:42
It's like, all right, hoist a jar. You know, call me afterwards, whatever your answer is going to be. But what was the third one, the last one? What do you still need help with? What do you still, because I'm just, I'm just taking notes here.

00:37:55
No, this is called the cognitive three r's. It's in both books because it's, it's so important. I mean, literally, in every conversation with all my employers or people I work with, especially if they're on a rant, you know, something's going on. I'll let them rant. I'm a good active listener.

00:38:12
After they've got to maybe an ellipses or two, I'll ask what was surprising. And it's kind of fun because it liberates them rather than what did you learn from that? Or some tectonic if then equals type of question. Yeah, it liberates them and say, well, you know, what was surprising was when I spoke to Johnny last week, and they'll actually say, what's surprising? Out of everything.

00:38:39
And now the learning, now it's become super personal. Now it's intrinsic. It's been personal since the challenge question the perspectives gave them. It excited their whole brain. Rather than just a monologic speaker talking to you.

00:38:56
That's just what we lived through in school. That's teachers temporal lobe. The teacher, you know, everyone has their favorite teacher. Chances are that teacher did more than talk. They did something personally.

00:39:08
They had you do some things. They had you. It wasn't normal. And that's why they're your favorite teacher, because your brain is, is built for novelty. And if I'm just talking, you're going to lose me quick.

00:39:22
In fact, a recent Microsoft study shows our attention span is less than a goldfish, which isn't, you know, which goes back to games. You, you've got a lot of things going on, and you've got to keep the brain active and maybe just solitaire or candy crush or whatever the thing is, but you're going through that game and you know the modes of the game, but you're actively thinking all the time. In fact, that's another fallacy of the brain. People think, you know, uh uh. And we use this all the time in classes, but I'll just tell you because it's fun.

00:39:54
What we'd have a quiz. How much percent? What? What percentage of your brain do you use? The choices are 20%, 40%, 80%, or 100%.

00:40:07
Every time we ask a group of people this, the majority of them say 20%. And that's because somewhere back in school that was said to us. And what that was based off was a study where they took out parts of mouse's brain until it died, and it ended up that past 20%. The animal brain, which keeps you alive, blood pressure, breathing, heartbeat, all that you take out that body doesn't work. But if you take out memories and thought and all this other stuff, you can still operate.

00:40:36
You use 100% of your brain all the time. So if I asked you to wiggle your toe in your shoe right now, or sandals or sock or floor, whatever your foot might be, you wiggle your toe. That feeling was there before. The feeling of the sock or the sole or the shoe or the floor underneath you that was there before. You just weren't thinking about it.

00:40:57
If I call your attention to it, well, suddenly it's there. If I develop any kind of communication to call the attention to where you're facilitating your own thinking, and it's enjoyable because it's full of novelty and it's talking to every lobe of your brain, because that is like lighting up a Christmas tree. You don't light a Christmas tree one bulb at a time. You plug it in, boom, you're Clark Griswold. And in this case, you want people on any kind of thing where you're trying to get them to not only understand something new, but internalize it and act on it accordingly.

00:41:35
You should do that every time you speak. And that was the goal of this particular model. Originally, it was to have the perfect sales call back to my Gordon Gecko comment. But as I matured in this model, I realized that wasn't the right question. The right question was, how do I communicate every time to where people understand it and act as they should.

00:41:57
And so that's how this model came together. And again, the really innovative companies, at first it started with internal people, like school teachers, but now it's wonderful that the C suites coming in saying, hey, we have to quit giving these things lip service and be this, rather than, say, do this. And that's all happened just because the brain is maturing and we're knowing more about it every single day. Well, it's another part of, you know, mindset is such a huge thing that most people don't feel they need assistance with, and yet success is 80% mindset and 20% tactics. And so this is.

00:42:39
I'm so fascinated by this conversation and could talk to you for two more hours, but this is not Joe Rogan, so we're not going to have a three hour show. Um, but, like, I'm so fascinated by this because I'm just fascinated with the mind. And it's. It's one of those areas that I haven't done a lot of research in, because on a daily basis, as my audience knows, I'm just trying to stay as positive as I can because I have so many negative thoughts that creep in constantly and, you know, finding new ways to deal with this stinking thinking, you know? Well, you know, and that's.

00:43:17
That's actually why the second book was. Was written, is for that. Now, stay with me here. You've. You've heard of the emotion, the emotions wheel, right?

00:43:27
Yeah. Plitchucks emotion wheel, which is really neat because it shows emotions and how they're. Yeah. And it kind of helps you to dive in, like, okay, what is this really? What's really going on with this emotion?

00:43:38
And. Yeah, well, and I'll share this with you. I'll share a chapter of the book with you on PDF so people could download it. You can have it, all this other stuff. But there's this thing.

00:43:47
We added neuroscience to the emotions wheel, so there's eight. Eight basic emotions. And when you break them down, emotions are hard to see. Like, I could be mad at the world right now and you wouldn't know it, you know, because I could hide it or something to that effect. Emotions are hard to see.

00:44:06
Moods, you can see. So what we did is we took those seven basic items, emotions, and we turned them into moods. And the moods are.

00:44:19
The moods are boredom, stress, worry, concern, and entrapment. Plus surprise and joy. Sorry, I'm laughing because I can see your dog stretching right there. That's buddha. Sorry we're boring you, buddy, but boredom, stress, worry, entrapment, and fiat concern are what we call red emotions.

00:44:46
And by red, I mean you cannot actively internalize all the information. If you're humiliated or depressed or angry, stuff can't get in because Amy, the bouncer of club brain, says, oh, that, that's not for me. So I'm going to react, I'm going to recoil. I'm going to shut up, I'm going to shut down, I'm going to turn off, I'm going to get depressed. I'm going to do all the things that reaction happens.

00:45:12
The only way to get to joy or happiness, which is a green emotion and all its related emotions is through surprise. So if you are in a red emotion, you need to be surprised to get into green. Or if you're into green, sometimes you'll be surprised and be put into red. But that transition is surprised. And that's what that entire book was about.

00:45:39
Because if you want people engaged, they can't be in the red. So you surprise them by putting them in the green. And I gave you an example with the introduction, analogy, disequilibrium challenge question matrix of setting up somebody's intrinsic thought. Okay, so one of the things that I always practice and talk about a lot is, like, the quickest way to shift from negative to positive is start to focus on everything that you're grateful for. So would that be an example of how you're surprising your brain?

00:46:12
Because some days I can tell you, you know, I'm one of the most grateful people on the planet, and there are days when I have a hard time figuring out what I'm grateful for and have to go, okay, I'm grateful that I have two legs to walk on. Right. Like, sometimes, right, like, you can relate to that. Like, or I'm grateful that my heart is beating, yeah. Today.

00:46:31
And I don't have to think about it because there are days where I feel like that, where I'm just like, oh, so is that similar? Yeah, absolutely. That's a, that's a positive personal surprise, because if you have the skill to even ask yourself that question and actually answer it rather than shut up, sandy, you're just trying to motivate yourself or something like that. It's like, no, it doesn't take too much effort to say, what am I grateful for? And then just stop and think, oh, I can walk.

00:47:02
You know, most people don't know I have one leg, or, you know, whatever I'm grateful for at the moment. You know, I'm happy my dog was stretching. There and made you giggle. You know, those, those things are wonderful little surprises. And it doesn't take big surprise.

00:47:15
It's not boo or happy birthday or anything like that. It could be something as, as novel is saying. I was reading National Geographic last night and they were still excavating around Vesuvius and they found a 3000 year old Vat or jar of honey. And you can actually eat the honey 3000 years later. It's still no way.

00:47:40
Yeah, I mean, that's a surprise. No, it's. It's just a general or what we call a neutral surprise. But it's enough to go, well, I'll be damned. Which will take you out of a mindset, you know, because you've got fixed mindsets.

00:47:55
People just refuse to say, well, I'm going to be here. I'm going to be in a bad mood because that's what I'm going to be. And then you have growth mindsets. And of course, we're talking about Carol Dweck's work. But a growth mindset is saying, oh, you know, we can get better.

00:48:09
And I always facilitate that personally by thinking that anybody in any room at any time, regardless of who I'm teaching or speaking to or with, knows something I don't know. Guaranteed, you know, and happiness is not easily defined. It's kind of like a bowl of chili. Like if you and I were to invite all your listeners and we'd have a chili contest, you know, we got 100,000 different bowls of chili. We would call every bowl chili, but they're all unique.

00:48:43
So people just need to realize, hey, we're all humans and we can unify, so to speak, without uniformity because we all have different thoughts and experiences related to a bowl of chili. And if you start expanding your world that way rather than it's always beans and it's always hamburger or whatever your recipe is, then you realize, like, oh, yeah, how wonderful is this? And when you're in a psychologically safe space, or like within this model, we call it a greenhoused environment because we preface this entire model off of Boyces work. Have you heard of the dandelion in the orchid? I believe so, but go ahead and explain.

00:49:28
It's relatively new, but it talks about autonomic nervous system reactivity, or ans reactivity, how somebody perceives an environment. And I'll make it really simple. Uh, dandelions and orchids are the analogy here. Like the flower, the, the dandelion, you know, grows anywhere. It's resilient, grows in the cracks, grows in snow, doesn't matter.

00:49:51
They grow. The orchid has to be greenhouse, perfect water, perfect sun, perfect soil, perfect ph, perfect neighbors, perfect everything. When you're speaking to people, you have to realize, you have to know that a dandelion can take on anything. So your kids, a quick example. You tell your kids you have two kids, you tell them to clean up the room when you come back from work.

00:50:18
You come back from work, neither one of them clean their room. So you send them to the room, some sort of punishment. Dandelion goes to the room and says, meh, mom's a jerk. Goes about their day, orchid goes to the room, goes, mom hates me, teacher hates me. I'm no good at anything I got to see today.

00:50:35
I can't even clean my room. That's an orchid. Just reacts to the environment differently, not worse. Your most brilliant people are typically orchids because they're thinkers. They think of the world a little bit differently.

00:50:50
They see things that other people don't see. And in this model, every time we present it, we present for the orchid, because the dandelion doesn't care. The orchid, it needs predictability, consistency, kindness, predictable, consistent, and kind. They need to know that before they open their mouth, they're not going to be ridiculed or they're not going to be attacked, or they're not going to be this, that, or the other thing. And I'm oversimplifying the dandelion and the orchid piece, but autonomic nervous system reactivity, or how people perceive the argument, is why we have the Kieran principle, which is effect before effect.

00:51:35
If you want to win the hearts of people, you have to win the hearts of people before you start shoving something down their throat. If they see it's good for me right here, right now, I'm in. If they don't, they're out. So how we present this model is so you, the listener, the learner, the whatever, sees that there is a benefit for you at that very moment and that it's safe to partake in. So the structure of how things are communicated are as important as the words you choose.

00:52:06
And the environment is typically in their head. So if you can make it a greenhoused environment. That's why we use that analogy, because dandelions do great in a greenhouse. Orchids do, too. But take them out of the greenhouse and the orchids will wilt.

00:52:20
Dandelions will be fine. Put them in the greenhouse. Everybody's Jake. So that's the preface is the model where it's psychological safety, which is just you being free enough to be yourself. And then in a model, the learning model, the pedagogic model, or actually a neurogogic model is to where they can now think freely and not be ridiculed for their thoughts.

00:52:44
Those three questions, the cognitive three r's, they don't ever put me on the spot. I will never look dumb with any of the answers I say there, especially if I then get to take those thoughts and collaborate with you. Like, hey, I was surprised that chili could be braved elk. It's like, well, I never heard that. I'm going to try that now.

00:53:04
I'm learning. Now I'm taking all these perspectives and putting them together only on those three questions because we just discussed those. We don't say, that's stupid. We don't use elk in Wisconsin or whatever their argument is. So it's a very, very complete model from before.

00:53:24
They do it while they're in it, how they collaborate, how they revise their thinking and what they take away. Because with the chili model, like I said, my chili's not your chili, and I'm not going to degrade you because you don't use elk or whatever. It's just that we got to discuss it. And I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. That is surprising.

00:53:43
That's neat. So it's, there's a lot of things that go into it, but the idea is to keep people in the happy, joy, mood, emotion, and to keep them out of the red and to consistently surprise them back to your game. Like, oh, I hit level three, you know, boom, you got dopamine and you were born. You know what I mean? So, I mean, they, they surprise you.

00:54:08
You know, watch the news tonight and see how many edits take place in a 1 minute story, and you just see that the world around you is full of novelty. Teachers, communicators, educators mostly, aren't. They lecture, then they ask for recall. That's memory. We go for understanding.

00:54:26
Memory is flawed. Understanding is not. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Oh, my gosh, Rich, this has been such an amazing conversation, and I would love to keep going, but we've been talking for almost an hour now, which is all good. All good.

00:54:42
And I loved your chili analogy because that's the whole premise of this podcast. Happiness solved. Happiness looks different for every single person. It's not a destination. It's a journey.

00:54:56
Happiness is a bowl of chili. Happiness is a bow. Well, for sure.

00:55:04
I thank you for the time, I mean, and the opportunity to even be on your platform. I mean, I was I was thrilled when I got the call, and I'm even more thrilled now because I feel like it's been about ten minutes. Oh, well, no, this is amazing. And I can't wait to read your book because this is something that I can really dive into. And so, yeah.

00:55:25
So, everyone, his new book is called the Science of Art and Engagement. And you're the co author of Brain Centric Design. And I love this. The surprising neuroscience behind learning with deep understanding. And what this does is using this knowledge to create clear, concise, engaging communications, training, certifications, consultations and curriculum.

00:55:47
So for any educators out there, sounds like it's something you really want to dive into to just improve your performance with what you do. The educators vaulted that up to communicators. So it's all been wonderful. Thank you so much. I look forward to talking to you again and again for the opportunity of being here in the first place.

00:56:09
It's been wonderful. Absolutely. We'll definitely do a part two because this was a really great conversation. All right, thank you so much, Rich. Take care.

00:56:17
Thank you. Bye bye. Thanks everyone.

00:56:29
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00:56:56
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00:57:46
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00:58:04
Again, I am so grateful for you and I hope that you and your family are healthy and safe and that your lives are filled with peace, joy and happiness. Take care, everyone.