And so now, after several years of really focusing on this question, I've come to the following conclusion: that exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain today for the following three reasons.
Now teachers know exactly what the students have been up to, how long they've spent each day, what videos they've watched, when did they pause the videos, what did they stop watching, what exercises are they using, what have they focused on?
There were things that were specific to me, and the more that I focused on those things, the weirder my poetry got, but the more that it felt like mine.
For example, our over-centralized grid is very vulnerable to cascading and potentially economy-shattering blackouts caused by bad space weather or other natural disasters or a terrorist attack.
And Stanford University has been doing research for five years now to document how playing a game with an idealized avatar changes how we think and act in real life, making us more courageous, more ambitious, more committed to our goals.
And there's two things I do: When I go into a gallery, first of all, I go quite fast, and I look at everything, and I pinpoint the ones that make me slow down for some reason or other.
People could say no -- in other words, I'm focused only on my task -- or yes -- I am thinking about something else -- and the topic of those thoughts are pleasant, neutral or unpleasant.
This graph shows happiness on the vertical axis, and you can see that bar there representing how happy people are when they're focused on the present, when they're not mind-wandering.
I know that it could sound pretty weird to speak about mono when the number of possibilities is so huge, but I push you to consider the option of focusing on just one task, or maybe turning your digital senses totally off.
And then the Yemeni military got its act together, and ordinary people rose up against these guys and drove them out, and since then, most of their activities, most of their attacks have been directed at Yemenis.
And so we installed a real-time link between the ambulance and the hospital, just using normal 3G telephony to send that data so that the ambulance became an extra bed in intensive care.
For the first time in history, most people live in cities, and the U.N. estimates that over the next 40 years, the population is going to double on the planet.
These issues of accountability and agency, of opacity and complexity, of the violence and exploitation that inherently results from the concentration of power in a few hands -- these are much, much larger issues.
When I was an assistant D.A., and when I was a federal prosecutor, I looked at the cases in front of me, and I generally made decisions based on my instinct and my experience.
And so I think, for me, I just try to focus on that and say, what is that future really going to be and how do we create it, and how do we cause our organization, to really focus on that and drive that at a really high rate?
I think it's about stopping this notion that you need to plan everything, you need to stock everything, and you need to be so prepared, and focus on being connected, always learning, fully aware, and super present.
And if wealth, power, and income continue to concentrate at the very tippy top, our society will change from a capitalist democracy to a neo-feudalist rentier society like 18th-century France.
So Portia's scores would all be clustered around the four because everybody agrees that she's very beautiful, whereas Sarah Jessica Parker completely divides opinion.
So instead of focusing solely on better and better algorithms, my insight was to give the algorithms the kind of training data that a child was given through experiences in both quantity and quality.
They were so focused on their own individual work, they didn't even know who they were sitting next to, and it was only when I insisted that we stop working and invest time in getting to know each other that we achieved real momentum.
What I mean is, imagine you're in a restaurant, you're having a conversation, there are all kinds of other conversations going on in the restaurant, you want to filter them out, you want to focus on what's important to you.
But if you live in a place where it mainly rains in the winter time and most of the water demand is in the summertime, it's not a very cost-effective way to solve a water problem.
Well, studies show that even when we're really trying to pay attention to something -- like maybe this talk -- at some point, about half of us will drift off into a daydream, or have this urge to check our Twitter feed.
(Music) However, when plankton densities increase, the mantas line up head-to-tail to form these long feeding chains, and any tasty morsel that escapes the first or second manta in line is surely to be gobbled up by the next or the one after.
Back at our lab at ETH Zurich, we often use external cameras to locate objects, which then allows us to focus our efforts on the rapid development of highly dynamic tasks.
These suggest that performance suffers when the mind is preoccupied with worries, doubts, or fears, instead of focusing its attention on performing the task at hand.
A study on competitive golfers compared their performance when instructed to simply focus on putting as accurately as possible, versus when they were primed to be acutely aware of the mechanics of their putting stroke.
Ideas are complex things; you need to slash back your content so that you can focus on the single idea you're most passionate about, and give yourself a chance to explain that one thing properly.
We can maybe aim energy at different parts of the brain in order to help people with Parkinson's or epilepsy or other conditions that affect over a billion people around the world.
Then we do activities designed for improvement, concentrating on what we haven't mastered yet, which means we have to expect to make mistakes, knowing that we will learn from them.
Both of these zones should be part of our lives, but being clear about when we want to be in each of them, with what goal, focus and expectations, helps us better perform and better improve.
The unintended consequence here, which I would like to take credit for and like to think I can think through the experience to that extent, but I can't.
But for our purposes, chief among them was training yourself to separate what you can control from what you cannot control, and then doing exercises to focus exclusively on the former.
I want to live in a society where artists are more valued and have more cultural and financial support so they can focus on creating arts instead of being forced to drive Ubers or take corporate jobs they'd rather not have.
I mean, the power of the city -- we talked about cities as being centralized in space, but what makes them so strong most of the time is they're decentralized in function.
Near the shore, the shallower seafloor constrains the motion of the waves to occur in a more limited region than out at sea, concentrating the wave energy near the surface.
パトリックは 毎日毎日 娘と向き合いました 娘への責任を感じ 一言一言に 一心に集中していたのです
But Patrick showed up every day, facing his daughter, holding himself accountable to her, word by word with intense concentration.
But I can also honestly say that this whole creative process of writing and giving this talk, it's been a huge opportunity for me to focus and really pay attention to something I care a lot about.
Paradoxically, when I let go of these objectives, and worked from a place of compassion and purpose, looking for excellence, rather than the results of it, everything arrived on its own, including fulfillment.
So this motivated me to become an orthopedic surgeon and to see if I couldn't focus on solutions for those problems that would keep me playing sports and not limit me.
So, visualizing information, so that we can see the patterns and connections that matter and then designing that information so it makes more sense, or it tells a story, or allows us to focus only on the information that's important.
When the paper burned, for some reason he turned to me, and he said, "Mashelkar, like this, if you do not diffuse your energies, if you focus your energies, you can achieve anything in the world."
1.2340400218964s
Download our Word Games app for free!
Connect letters, discover words, and challenge your mind at every new level. Ready for the adventure?
And so now, after several years of really focusing on this question, I've come to the following conclusion: that exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain today for the following three reasons. 