Visualize Failure to Double Goal Achievement Probability

Key Quotes

"one of the brain areas is the so called amygdala the amygdala is most often associated with fear so you might say wow how is that involved in goal directed behavior well a lot of our goal directed behavior is to avoid punishments including things like embarrassment or financial ruin or things of that sort and so the amygdala and some sense of anxiety or fear is actually built into the circuits that generate goal seeking and our motivation to pursue goals"

Andrew Huberman explains that the amygdala, typically linked to fear, plays a crucial role in goal-directed behavior. This is because many goals are motivated by the desire to avoid negative consequences such as embarrassment or financial loss. Huberman highlights that this inherent anxiety or fear is a fundamental part of the brain's circuitry for pursuing goals.

"dopamine is often thought of as the molecule of pleasure and reward but actually it is the molecule of motivation this is best illustrated by a classic set of studies that have been carried out in both animals and in humans the animal study can be described the following way two rats each in a separate cage you can provide those rats with the opportunity to indulge in something that they like like food or mating or heat if it's cold in the environment or a cool spot in the cage if it's warm in the environment and so forth and what you find is that rats will very readily approach the rewarding thing they will mate they will eat they will pursue something that is of pleasure"

Andrew Huberman clarifies that dopamine's primary role is not pleasure but motivation, as demonstrated by studies with rats. Huberman explains that while dopamine-depleted rats can still experience pleasure, their drive to pursue rewarding activities like food or mating is significantly reduced. This illustrates that dopamine is essential for initiating and sustaining the actions needed to achieve goals.

"the long and short of these studies is that when people have to focus their attention on one location like a goal line they are much more effective in reaching those goals and they achieve them with the perception that they expended less effort and what they did is they had a group of people exercise wearing 15 pound ankle weights and they had to basically move a certain distance or run a certain distance to reach a goal line one group was focused on the goal line visually focused on the goal line the other group was not told to visually focus on the goal line and what they found was that the group that focused on the goal line was able to achieve reaching that goal with 17 less effort and it got there 23 quicker simply by looking at the goal line does something to the psychology and the physiology of these people that allows them to move forward with less perceived effort and to do it more quickly"

Andrew Huberman presents research showing the impact of visual focus on goal achievement. Huberman describes a study where participants wearing ankle weights who visually focused on a goal line expended less perceived effort and reached their goal faster. This suggests that directing visual attention to a specific target enhances both the efficiency and the subjective experience of pursuing a goal.

"it turns out that visualization of the big win the end goal so the super bowl win or eight gold medals in the olympics or graduation from the university of your choice or making a certain amount of money or finding the partner of your choice etc that visualization is effective in getting the goal pursuit process started but it actually is a pretty lousy and maybe even counterproductive way of maintaining pursuit of that goal in fact there's a much better way to maintain ongoing action toward a goal that also involves visualization but it turns out it's not about visualizing success it's about visualizing failure"

Andrew Huberman contrasts the effectiveness of visualizing success versus failure for goal pursuit. Huberman explains that while visualizing the ultimate win can initiate the goal-seeking process, it is less effective for sustained effort. He proposes that visualizing potential failures and their negative consequences is a more potent strategy for maintaining ongoing action toward a goal.

"what you first do is you would close your eyes and you would focus as much of your attention including your visual attention on your inner landscape on your interoception so that would be your breathing your heart rate maybe even the surface of your skin but really focusing internally and you would do that for a duration of approximately three slow breaths then you would open your eyes and you would focus your visual attention on some area on the surface of your body so for me the way that i typically do this will be to focus on say the palm of my hand so i'll focus my visual attention on the palm of my hand and i then do three breaths again focusing on my internal state but now i'm splitting out a little bit of my attention from interoception to exteroception i'm focusing on something outside me the ratio or the split of attention is about 90 10 about 90 of my attention is focused internally but i'm also focusing some of my attention externally"

Andrew Huberman introduces the "space-time bridging" tool, which involves deliberately shifting visual and cognitive attention. Huberman details the initial steps of this practice, which include focusing on internal bodily sensations (interoception) for three breaths, then opening the eyes to focus on a part of the body, and gradually shifting attention outward. This process aims to train the ability to move between internal and external focus.

"the reason i call it space time bridging is that the visual system is not just about analyzing space it's actually how we batch time it's how we carve up time and the simple way to state this is that when we focus our visual attention on a very narrow point that's close to our body and our immediate experience we tend to slice up time very finely we're focused on our breathing we're focused on our heartbeats in fact our breathing and our internal landscape and our heartbeats become the sort of second's hand if you will on our experience we are carving up time according to our immediate physiological experience whereas when we focus our visual attention outside our body not only do we engage that exteroseptive extrapersonal space system and we start to engage the dopamine system the goal directed system but we also start batching time differently when we focus our visual system into a broader sphere of space or into a space beyond the confines of our skin we start carving up time our frame rate changes"

Andrew Huberman explains the rationale behind the "space-time bridging" technique, linking visual focus to temporal perception. Huberman states that focusing narrowly on close-up, internal experiences leads to a fine-grained perception of time, akin to a clock's second hand. Conversely, he explains that shifting visual attention outward to broader or more distant spaces alters how time is perceived, changing the brain's "frame rate."