211. Neuroscience Secrets: Attention, Focus and Memory with Dr Sarah McKay

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Hello and welcome to the Exam Study Experts Podcast.
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I've been saving up, I hope it is a will be a really great episode for you for our first interview episode of the new calendar year.
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Today I'm delighted to welcome neuroscientist, international speaker and author, Dr.
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Sarah McKay, who's here to give us a really fantastic overview of some of the most important principles that neuroscience teaches us about how to get the most from our brains as students.
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We've really packed it in for you in today's conversation.
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We're going to be exploring some of the biggest lessons from the last few decades of neuroscience research, helping you with all manner of things from helping you get your sleep and nap habits right to have more energy, helping you overcome procrastination and get stuff done, helping you regulate your emotions through the ups and downs of the academic journey, helping you stay focused and more.
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Ultimately, helping you perform at your best in high pressure situations like the final exam.
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Please do also stick around for a moment after class today, because after the main interview with Sarah, I'd love to just take a minute to very quickly tease what's coming up on the podcast over the next few weeks.
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In essence, what we've tried to do is um hopefully quite a quite a nicely curated season whereby Sarah introduces us to quite, as I suggested, quite a wide range of important ideas: procrastination, focus, medical cognition, high performance, press uh performance under high pressure.
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And then over the coming weeks, we're going to be joined by uh a number of top researchers and experts in many of those fields who will be able to offer us a deep dive into each of those issues in turn.
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So today's conversation should serve as a really nice overview and introduction to the series of deep dive interviews in the different areas that I've got coming up for you on the Exam Study Expert Podcast over the next few weeks.
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So please do make sure you're subscribed or following the show so you don't miss any of the action.
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Now, to my guest today, Dr.
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Sarah McKay is the real deal.
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She has a PhD in neuroscience from Oxford University and has a distinguished career as one of Australia's best known science communicators.
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She's passionate about translating brain science into practical strategies to improve health, well-being, and performance.
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She has presented on ABC Catalyst, which is currently the only science show on primetime TV in Australia, presumably very familiar to many of you who listen to us from Australia, where she explored the brain health and biohacking.
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She's delivered a fascinating TEDx talk on the surprising neuroscience of afternoon naps, which I'm going to ask her about today.
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And she's also then author of a number of books on brain health and is regularly quoted in media around the world.
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A very well respected person, very interesting, lots she's going to share with us today.
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And like all of us, she of course has close personal experience of applying all of these ideas to her own experience studying, both from doing it herself in her own student days, of course, and also more recently as a mother of two ambitious teenagers who have been taking major high school exams themselves.
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And I ask her about her perspective on that too.
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So without further ado, I hope you're really going to enjoy this episode.
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Buckle in, we're going to cover a lot of stuff.
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There's got to be a lot of really useful ideas coming your way today.
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Dr.
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Sarah, a very warm welcome to the Exam Study Expert Podcast.
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Thank you for the invitation.
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I wonder if a good place to dive in would just be: can you give us a simple model to explain how the brain works?
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Let's just take a broad conceptual look at what the what the brain is doing.
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It is processing a lot of information.
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A lot of that information is streaming its way in from our body, and then the brain is kind of figuring out what that means and then applying various signals back to our body to, you know, grow it, maintain it, keep it healthy, keep it in homeostasis.
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A ton of information is also streaming its way in from the outside world, primarily through what we see and what we hear, because we are human.
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So most of our visual, our sensory processing is taken up with visual information, auditory information, but also if you know we can hear, you know, taste something, smell something, feel something if it's close enough to us.
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But then we are human.
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So we also have this, I suppose we could call it variously, people might call it mind, or they might call it our psychology.
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This could include your thoughts, your beliefs, your expectations, your memories, your mind.
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And I call this bottom up, outside in, top down.
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And all the brain is doing at any moment in time, but also across the course of the lifespan is receiving all of this information from the bottom up, the outside in, and the top down, and going, huh, okay, I might do that next.
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So say the information from your body is, you know, signaling body temperature, but you're a little bit hotter than your sort of homeostatic set point.
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Your brain will tell your body to behave in a way to cool you down, which will be to sweat and to vasodilate.
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And then perhaps if it needs a little bit more on board, you will have a conscious sensation of feeling hot.
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So, you know, you might take your blazer off or something to cool down.
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The brain is, you know, perhaps you you you hear a sound.
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I'm doing my podcast now, and you know, a a sound, a loud sound from outside my door distracts me.
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So there's an outside-in signal, and then I'll process that.
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And perhaps I'll go, well, that was one of my teenage boys being far too loud when they know my mother is doing a podcast before they leave the house.
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So, you know, I'll either wait to see if they quieten down, or perhaps I'll storm out the door and shout at them.
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So all the brain is doing is making meaning of all of this information from the bottom-up body, the outside in world, the top down, and figuring out what to do next.
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Sometimes what the brain has done is it's storing this input or this information as a memory.
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Now you may or may not have some kind of conscious recollection of that memory.
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You don't usually remember how to tie your shoelaces or how to type on a computer.
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You might remember learning that, but you're not having to consciously access that memory.
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It's more of an implicit storage.
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Um but some things you might, you know, you might wander through your autobiographical past, you know, remember, I don't know, an exam that you sat a few days ago and kind of ruminate over that in your mind.
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A lot of what the brain is doing is storing information that you've taken on board.
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Some of that might be, cool, that was awesome.
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I will do that next time I encounter this situation.
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Or perhaps the brain's gone, huh, that sucked.
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I don't think I'm going to do that again.
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Next time I'm in this situation, I will avoid that situation.
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And the brain kind of does that moment by moment, but then across sort of the course of our lifespan.
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So in essence, it takes on board information from a number of different sources, makes meaning of that, remembers a lot of it, and then guides our body what to do next in the world.
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So our brain's doing a lot of stuff, it's working quite hard.
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How do we help keep it working optimally?
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What are some of the kind of the big hygiene factors, if you like, that help it keep functioning at its best?
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Well, we'll start, we know, we can look at it from what do we do to keep our body healthy if the brain is receiving information and it's in within our body.
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Our brain isn't some separate being from our body.
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It's an organ in the body like the heart or the lungs or the gut.
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And so the things that we would do that, you know, we we learned at school about keeping our our our bodies healthy, also keep our brain healthy.
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So it's it's very much back to the boring basics, I'm sorry.
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It's things like eating, eating the right kind of food, nourishing, you know, your body and your brain with you know a healthy, broad whole food diet, you know, less junk food, more kind of food that's growing in the ground.
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It is moving your body and exercising your body and moving your body around.
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And if you think about what brains evolve to do, brains and nervous systems only exist in organisms that can move and navigate around.
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Plants don't have a nervous system because they're kind of embedded in the brown in the ground.
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Lichens, seaweeds don't have nervous systems.
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Organisms that can navigate through the world need to be able to react and respond to the world.
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And we think as humans evolved, our brains got more and more complex as we started to navigate through the world.
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And so when we are moving our bodies through the world, if we're even if we're just simply just going for a walk, whether you don't, you know, need to be going to the gym and lifting weights, but any kind of exercise you're doing is exercising your brain in the way that it evolved to interact with your surroundings.
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That's by moving through.
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So diet, exercise.
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And then I think perhaps the foundation on which most of brain health lies is sleep.
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And sleep, depending on who you are and which age and life stage you're at, may be more or less easy to kind of come by.
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I've always been quite a good sleeper.
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I think my teenage boys, remarkably for teenagers, you know, seem to have navigated life's.
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Maybe I just embedded that good habit in them when they were young, but they sleep reasonably well, so they tell me.
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So sleep is fundamentally important.
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And we spend a third of our lives doing that.
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So there's obviously a strong biological mandate to do that.
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If we have one night without sleep, we feel terrible.
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All of our, you know, our our health from our thinking, our cognition, our emotional regulation, all the way through to our metabolism start to kind of go on the decline, even if we skip one night's sleep.
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So there's some basic bottom-up ways we can take care of our body.
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Outside in is very much about, you know, what in the outside world, what information is the brain taking in, which can kind of keep it healthy or at least support us cognitively while we're perhaps navigating a difficult time.
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So there's a number of things in there.
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Social relationships, interactions with other people are kind of probably one of the greatest sources of resilience that we would have out there, but they can also be the greatest source of vulnerability.
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And again, it depends on your age and life stage.
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During adolescence, the social cognition networks in the brain.
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So those are the parts of the brain which are involved with thinking about what other people think and feel and interacting with other people, they're highly plastic, which means they're very hypersensitive to social interactions.
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So we kind of seek them out and desperately need them, but they can also, you know, make us feel incredibly vulnerable and self-conscious at the same time.
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So having good, strong social networks and social supports we know is fundamental for keeping a brain healthy.
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And then I'll give a shout out to this thing, a mobile phone, this device.
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I didn't obviously, I am 50, did not grow up with one of these in my hand.
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And I know that it's feels almost um cliche to tr to discuss now.
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Um, especially if there's any people who are younger listening who grew up in the digital world.
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We have a whole range of we didn't uh we didn't evolve knowing what happened on the other side of the world.
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Whatever kind of horror or excitement or thing that happened to some other person.
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It typically happened beyond the horizon.
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We couldn't see it, we couldn't hear it, we certainly couldn't smell it or taste it.
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We still can't, we can't throw this device.
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Now, everything that happens anywhere in the world is almost happening in the in the palm of our hand, and it is streaming its way in through our senses.
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It's almost kind of one of the most powerful kind of sources of information that is making our way into our brain.
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Now that can be great, that can be useful.
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I mean, people are probably listening to this podcast on one of these devices as well.
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But it has taken on board an incredible salience in our lives.
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And, you know, I don't need to belabor the point everyone knows what it feels like when you haven't got your phone there.
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Um, and it's it's kind of almost taken over a ton of our outside in sensory processing.
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And we can talk a little bit more about what some of the research shows about how much attention it consumes and the consequences that can have in terms of our brains.
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I will just sort of say, broadly speaking, is don't underestimate the outside in kind of, you know, fire hose of information processing that our brains now have to do because of these things in our lives.
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Um, something else to pay attention to in the outside in world, popularized by a colleague of mine, um, Andrew Huberman, who's a neuroscientist, some people may have come across.
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We did our PhDs on the same topic at the same time, is around on visual cortex processing, on processing visual information, is the role of the rising and the setting of the sun and that kind of diurnal rhythm of the day the earth spins on its axis as it goes around the sun, and that means half, you know, half of our lives are spent in night in nighttime.
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And that sort of feeds into understanding that, you know, every cell in our body kind of ebbs and flows in this sort of 24-hour rhythm to the rising and the setting of the sun, and to understand the importance of that signaling, that outside in signaling, which is made a whole lot harder by, you know, our modern lives.
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And then finally, I think top-down is is perhaps the hardest aspect of thinking about how to keep our brains healthy.
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It's the hardest to kind of hold on to because a lot of it is kind of it's almost as if trying to think about our thoughts or control our thoughts using our mind, or I don't know whether you've discussed metacognition, the idea of thinking about what you're thinking and kind of assessing a thought process.
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That's kind of next level, kind of processing.
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And lots of, you know, adults have zero capacity to do that.
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Perhaps they've never learned, they've never been taught.
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But understanding, I suppose the first step in this is awareness to understand, to have to think about your thoughts, to think about your feelings.
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Perhaps not spend too much time as you may have been taught to wallow around in your emotions and constantly be thinking about your feelings, but to understand that you can over time learn to think about what you're thinking and think about what you're feeling and have awareness over your mindset, which I think is perhaps one of the hardest skills to learn and is something that you can kind of practice thinking about where you direct your attention.
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Attention can be driven by an external stimulus or something in your body, something can grab your attention and you can turn towards it, or you can just thoughtfully decide which direction to sort of send your attention.
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I often think about attention as like a flashlight, you know, one of those ones or a torch where you can turn the end and you can make it really broad and diffuse or very narrow and focused.
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And if you're in a very imagine you're in like a dark room and that is your only light source, you can kind of you can decide where to direct that attention, but you can't kind of direct it at two things at once.
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You can, you know, there's two things on the opposite side of the room that you're wanting to look at.
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All you can do is kind of look at one and then the other and then one and then the other.
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And that's determining what information your brain is is taking in and what it's and what it is filtering out.
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And that is then directly correlated to the information processing that your brain can do at any moment in time.
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So there's a lot I've covered off there.
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I talked about how we can take care of our bodies using the basics of sleep and healthy food and exercise, thinking about the social world around us, thinking about the inputs from our phones, thinking about respecting kind of night and day, and then a little bit about thinking about thinking and thinking about attention.
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A great summary, and and so many great uh points in that uh alone.
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There's there's a couple of those I'd love to double-click on if if if you would mind.
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So I mean, such such great advice.
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Um one thing I I came across uh in in your writing which really caught my attention was when we think about the category of eating well, I mean there's a lot of kind of basics in there that you know hopefully many of us should should should know.
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One thing that I read in your work, you you wrote that the brain evolved to work optimally uh or more optimally when you're slightly hungry and looking for food.
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Tell us a little bit about that.
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Yeah, I think that's around the this idea of if you think about the classic scenario would be how kind of alert and motivated and kind of on do you feel when you are you know, you've just had Christmas dinner or Christmas lunch and you've stuffed your face full of food.
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You've been eating for like an hour and a half and you're with the family, you're not then feeling alert and on the ball and engaged and like you could, you know, go and smash out a three-hour calculus exam.
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Typically you're fat, you're full, you're just sleepy, you're kind of your nervous system is uh gone into what we would call colloquially, sometimes known as sort of rest and digest mode.
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So it's kind of dialing down, it's kind of relaxed, and hopefully you're feeling happy.
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It depends on how well we get on with the family.
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And the opposite of that is perhaps when we are, and this is not um, because I have to be very careful because we don't want to talk about fasting and promoting, you know, eating disorders and not eating, but the opposite of that is when you are slightly hungry and you've kind of got that, you're almost sort of in anticipation mode of like, I know that there's a meal coming up, or I'm I'm hungry, and you you're not gonna be able to sort of sit necessarily sit down and focus on the task in front of you.
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You're almost kind of in searching and seeking mode.
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It's almost as if there's this kind of drive within you to go and like look for food.
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And so your nervous system kind of flips more into this kind of search and seek and attention mode of to what to what is kind of out there in the world.
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So, you know, we've got lots of different processes in our, we've got our brain, and then we've got these different branches of our nervous system, and one branch is known as the autonomic nervous system.
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And so it's kind of almost these two branches and then autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic, are kind of seesawing, you know, with each other.
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It's not one's on and the other's off, but sort of when you're when you're full and when you're fed, you're in a much more relaxed state because you don't need to do anything next.
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You just need to rest and digest.
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And the opposite of that is when you are sort of slightly hungry, not starved, not like I haven't eaten for days, but perhaps the next meal is coming, you kind of activated more into more of an alert sort of search and seek mode.
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And if we think again, we'd I mean, you know, evolutionary psychology or thinking about how our brains evolved is just one way to think about brains and how they work.
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But if you think about not living in a house full of food, but say you're, you know, camping alone in the bush, you've got to kind of go and find something to eat right.
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And so lounging around being half asleep isn't gonna isn't going to get you there.
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So it's just a just some ways of kind of thinking about alertness and motivation versus kind of calm and relaxation.
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So maybe don't eat to like 100% totally stuffed society if you've got a bunch of work to do later.
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Yeah, if you've got 80%.
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And maybe not necessarily hacking your attention using food, but perhaps understanding which is the best kind of time and day to work.
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And yeah, perhaps if you're, you know, you've got a big exam or you've got a big study session coming up, then I mean you need to fuel yourself, but you're probably not gonna go and have like a giant roast turkey and loads of dessert and loads of sugary drinks and you know, alcohol if you're drinking alcohol.
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You're not gonna do eat all of those things.
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Because then your brain is going to have to kind of process and digest all of that.
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But similarly, you're not going to go in starving.
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You're not going to like not eat before an exam.
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It's just about perhaps understanding how your body and brain are going to kind of see saw between these different states.
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Based on how much food you've eaten.
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As with so many things in life, there is a sweep spot.
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There's a body between the two extremes.
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Yeah.
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And the brain, the brain often functions in a sweet spot.
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It's known in neuroscience.
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There's a kind of, we call it the Yerkes-Dodson curve.
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So if you kind of think sometimes we can be in a state where just like complete meh, like calm relaxation, just sort of underwhelm boredom.
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It's not really a great state for kind of learning.
00:20:30.480 --> 00:20:39.440
But then we can also become like so stressed and so alert and so hyper-vigilant and so kind of dialed up that we're we're also overwhelmed.
00:20:39.440 --> 00:20:46.720
And that sweet spot is somewhere between the two, kind of alert but calm, not hyped up and not half asleep.
00:20:47.039 --> 00:20:52.559
Does the idea of that sweet spot apply to um one of the other factors you mentioned, uh the importance of getting enough sleep?
00:20:52.559 --> 00:20:57.119
Is there such a thing as you talked about such a thing as too little sleep, is there such a thing as too much?
00:20:57.440 --> 00:21:06.960
I'm not necessarily sure there's that many people on earth who need to worry about getting too much sleep versus not enough, because of course we will naturally wake up.
00:21:06.960 --> 00:21:26.160
I I think if people have gone through periods of sleep debt or that, you know, they've gone through periods of not getting much sleep, then your body and your brain will naturally kind of react and respond by trying to kind of sleep for a little bit longer to make up for that lost, those, those lost hours and and previous nights.
00:21:26.160 --> 00:21:38.079
More so at the the long-term data across the lifespan shows it's not the total number of hours that you sleep, it's more about the regularity of those hours.
00:21:38.079 --> 00:21:42.640
So it's more about the regularity of bed times and the regularity of wake times.
00:21:42.640 --> 00:21:44.559
Not going to bed at 4 a.m.
00:21:44.559 --> 00:21:48.880
one night and sleeping for eight hours and then a couple of nights later going to bed at 10 p.m.
00:21:48.880 --> 00:21:50.799
and then a couple of days later 6 p.m.
00:21:50.799 --> 00:21:52.319
It's not at some students.
00:21:52.480 --> 00:21:55.359
It's more about whether they're in school versus holidays, you know, they'll be able to do that.
00:21:55.359 --> 00:21:56.880
And students do do that.
00:21:57.599 --> 00:21:57.759
Yeah.
00:21:57.759 --> 00:21:59.680
It's about the regularity.
00:21:59.680 --> 00:22:16.079
And it's hard to kind of apply this to, say, high school students or university students, because you do have these periods of like being very, very on and then being very off, and like kind of roller coastering between the school term or university terms and then the holidays.
00:22:16.079 --> 00:22:22.559
And broadly what we see in terms of long-term health outcomes is around the regularity of sleep.
00:22:22.559 --> 00:22:29.119
So if you've gone through a year or two of disrupted sleep, it's not going to have long-term ramifications on brain health.
00:22:29.119 --> 00:22:36.240
It might make you just feel foggier and less able to pay attention and regulate your emotions and cognitively fit during that time.
00:22:36.240 --> 00:22:44.000
The long-term brain health data, when we're kind of casting back across someone's lifespan, we see it's not about the total number of hours slept.
00:22:44.000 --> 00:22:47.680
It's more about the the regularity of that sleep.
00:22:47.680 --> 00:22:50.079
And I mean, I was young once, I know what it was like.
00:22:50.079 --> 00:22:53.680
Now I, you know, love going to bed and I'm always in bed before my boys.
00:22:53.680 --> 00:23:01.920
But that kind of swinging between going to midnight, midnight to you know 10am sleeps at the weekends versus 9 p.m.
00:23:01.920 --> 00:23:02.799
to 6 a.m.
00:23:02.799 --> 00:23:09.920
during the week is not ideal, but also it's perhaps a bit of a rite of passage.
00:23:09.920 --> 00:23:21.680
If you really want to focus in on, you know, optimizing this, you know, your sleep over anything else, then the regularity of bedtimes and wait times is is probably the path to go down.
00:23:21.680 --> 00:23:32.480
I don't I don't want to give people advice whereby they think, oh, they've got to never go and socialise or never go to the parties, never hang out with my mates, never watch that movie instead of sleeping.
00:23:32.480 --> 00:23:35.359
You've got to have you've got to have a you've got to have a good time too.
00:23:35.680 --> 00:23:39.440
That's important for the social connection component that you're another of your factors.
00:23:39.920 --> 00:23:40.480
For sure.
00:23:40.960 --> 00:23:50.799
So sleep and tell us about really cra good practical point about regularity, you know, as far as we can, and you've kind of given it a sensible kind of moderation on that.
00:23:50.799 --> 00:23:52.400
Um what about naps?
00:23:52.400 --> 00:23:54.000
What does the science tell us about naps?
00:23:54.000 --> 00:23:54.960
Good thing, bad thing?
00:23:54.960 --> 00:23:55.440
Do we have a lot of things?
00:23:55.599 --> 00:23:56.720
Yeah, I quite like a nap.
00:23:56.720 --> 00:23:58.319
I've always liked a nap.
00:23:58.319 --> 00:24:09.759
And I r very distinctly remember when I first started wanting naps was when I was in my first year of university, and I would get to about 2.30 in the afternoon and I'd be like, I just want to fall asleep.
00:24:09.759 --> 00:24:18.720
And I always used to think, oh, is it because I've spent all of those years at school when you get to 2.30 and it's nearly the end of the school day, you've got like half an hour left.
00:24:18.720 --> 00:24:25.039
You kind of, you know, you've you've learned over years that it's time to start winding down and it's it's the end of the day.
00:24:25.039 --> 00:24:31.359
But if we look across different cultures in the world, there's, you know, more or less acceptability in terms of of napping.
00:24:31.359 --> 00:24:35.920
And I have learned over the years to become what I call a strategic napper.
00:24:35.920 --> 00:24:41.440
So I used to get to 2:30, 3 in the afternoon and just be like fighting, fighting, fighting.
00:24:41.440 --> 00:24:45.920
I would always felt like I spent two or three hours fighting off that urge to sleep.
00:24:45.920 --> 00:24:47.519
Now I work for myself.
00:24:47.519 --> 00:24:49.920
I don't, I'm not a I don't have a boss.
00:24:49.920 --> 00:24:53.279
I don't have lectures that I have to be at at a certain time of the day.
00:24:53.279 --> 00:25:01.759
So if I do feel that urge, and I more or less, depending on what's going on in my day, um, I have learned to be what I call a strategic napper.
00:25:01.759 --> 00:25:07.519
And a strategic napper is different to someone who feels sleepy in the afternoon and then just sleeps for three hours.
00:25:07.519 --> 00:25:10.720
I would never sleep for more than half an hour.
00:25:10.720 --> 00:25:21.680
And the idea here is you can get the benefits in your brain and in your body of sleep without the downsides of sleeping too long during the day.
00:25:21.680 --> 00:25:31.680
And there's this kind of a there's kind of a sweet spot, again, of about under half an hour whereby you you fall asleep, you don't fall into deep sleep.
00:25:31.680 --> 00:25:35.839
Because if you fall into deep sleep, waking up from deep sleep feels terrible.
00:25:35.839 --> 00:25:39.839
You're like lethargic, you've just, you kind of can't get up and going again.
00:25:39.839 --> 00:25:42.240
You and everyone kind of knows how that feels.
00:25:42.240 --> 00:25:52.079
But the benefits that come from sleeping for just a short amount of time, we've got this, we've got a couple of different drives towards sleep in our brain.
00:25:52.079 --> 00:25:57.599
And one of those is the kind of the 24-hour light-dark cycle, and another is known as sleep drive.
00:25:57.599 --> 00:26:05.359
And it's almost like kind of a molecule drives this kind of urge to sleep that kind of increases during the day, this drive towards sleep.
00:26:05.359 --> 00:26:14.000
And there's a particular molecule in your brain, which is just kind of is is produced by neurons in your brain as they go about their daily tasks.
00:26:14.000 --> 00:26:17.200
And there are receptors for this molecule in the brain.
00:26:17.200 --> 00:26:23.359
And the more molecules latch onto the receptors in the brain, kind of the sleepier and sleepier and sleepier you get.
00:26:23.359 --> 00:26:31.920
Now, one way in which you can block that molecule from bumping onto a receptor is with coffee or is with caffeine.
00:26:31.920 --> 00:26:38.160
And another way you can kind of clear all of the receptors and lower sleep drive is with sleep itself.
00:26:38.160 --> 00:26:52.079
And what we understand from a short bout of sleep, even if it's just 20 minutes of sleep, is all of those receptors get kind of cleared of that molecule, known as adenosine, all those receptors get cleared of that molecule and it kind of lowers sleep drive.
00:26:52.079 --> 00:27:00.319
And we've all got kind of a different biological set point and different kind of, I suppose, cultural acceptance of that kind of afternoon nap or the siester.
00:27:00.319 --> 00:27:07.759
And what just even a short bout, even 20 minutes, 25 minutes of sleep does is it kind of removes that sleep drive.
00:27:07.759 --> 00:27:15.039
So instead of fighting through, as I used to, three, three or so hours of wanting to sleep, 20 minutes will remove that.
00:27:15.039 --> 00:27:21.519
And it has other knock-on benefits as well, particularly around emotional regulation.
00:27:21.519 --> 00:27:30.720
And this is kind of overall ability to kind of regulate your emotions, choose where you're paying attention to, and then focus and concentrate on what you want to.
00:27:30.720 --> 00:27:38.559
Instead of just kind of your your attention being distracted by this need to sleep, you kind of get rid of that urge and refocus.
00:27:38.559 --> 00:27:40.880
So we we see quite a lot of benefits.
00:27:40.880 --> 00:27:43.839
There's also some benefits in terms of memory retention.
00:27:43.839 --> 00:27:48.720
So we know when we've learned something, the best way to consolidate what we have learned is with sleep.
00:27:48.720 --> 00:27:53.200
And we can get a little bit of a benefit with that, even with one of these very, very short naps.
00:27:53.200 --> 00:27:59.759
The absolute key is like what we've said about this sort of sweet spot in the brain, is not to go for longer than half an hour.
00:27:59.759 --> 00:28:07.519
Because if you go for longer than half an hour, you fall into deep sleep, and then you're getting the kind of the downsides of that.
00:28:07.519 --> 00:28:10.559
You just need the benefits of the first, the first part.
00:28:10.559 --> 00:28:15.759
If you also go into deep sleep, then it makes it harder to sleep that night.
00:28:15.759 --> 00:28:22.400
Now, over the years, I have spoken to so many people about napping, and I often talk to people who'll go, Well, well, I'm a regular napper.
00:28:22.400 --> 00:28:25.359
I, you know, what I call a regular strategic napper.
00:28:25.359 --> 00:28:42.880
They've got a protocol, you know, they they know how to do it and why they're doing it, and they've got that, and people will have like I've spoken to someone who was a veterinarian and they had a a sofa in their veterinary practice where and they used to block out a couple of appointments, and that was where they had their kind of little nap in the afternoon.
00:28:42.880 --> 00:28:50.880
I know I spoke to a real estate agent once who said he had a camping mattress in his office and he would roll that out and he would sleep on there.
00:28:50.880 --> 00:28:54.559
These are people who strategically nap and have a protocol around it.
00:28:54.559 --> 00:28:57.119
And I'll always say to them, how do you sleep at night?
00:28:57.119 --> 00:28:59.200
And they'll be like, I best sleeper in the world.
00:28:59.200 --> 00:29:00.400
Sleep like a log.
00:29:00.400 --> 00:29:09.920
People who strategically nap are also very good night sleepers, which is really interesting, that they have a very strong positive association with sleep.
00:29:09.920 --> 00:29:14.000
So it will not ruin your night's sleep if you do it strategically and carefully.
00:29:14.000 --> 00:29:16.079
And you know how to sleep for a short amount of time?
00:29:16.400 --> 00:29:16.960
Set an alarm.
00:29:17.119 --> 00:29:17.680
It's not imaginable.
00:29:17.920 --> 00:29:19.119
Have a coffee before you go to sleep.
00:29:19.279 --> 00:29:24.319
Well, you can have a coffee first, because then you get the double up of getting clearing the receptors out.
00:29:24.319 --> 00:29:29.279
But not if it's in the afternoon, because then that coffee will still be in your system like that evening when you want to go to sleep.
00:29:29.279 --> 00:29:30.319
Just set an alarm.
00:29:30.319 --> 00:29:32.960
People go, Oh, how would I wake up after 20 minutes?
00:29:32.960 --> 00:29:35.839
Just put your alarm on your phone.
00:29:35.839 --> 00:29:37.039
And so I'll do that.
00:29:37.039 --> 00:29:39.599
I'll set an alarm on my phone for like 25 minutes.
00:29:39.599 --> 00:29:41.839
I'll be like, oh my god, I need to go to sleep.
00:29:41.839 --> 00:29:45.200
Alarm on the phone, wake up 25 minutes later and I'll and I'm ready to go.
00:29:45.200 --> 00:29:48.000
And I can like almost within five minutes, I'm smashing out some work.
00:29:48.319 --> 00:29:48.880
Nice, nice.
00:29:48.880 --> 00:29:51.359
I wanted to ask you about the memory consolidation point.
00:29:51.359 --> 00:30:00.799
Something I have come across a few times now, and I don't know where this advice is coming from, but someone's putting it out there, obviously, is is linked to this idea of memory consolidation when we sleep.
00:30:00.799 --> 00:30:06.000
And so the idea is we want to be kind of looking through our stuff immediately before we go to sleep.
00:30:06.000 --> 00:30:14.400
So so in that final like 20 minutes before you actually fall asleep at night, you're kind of going through your material that you're trying to memorize from that day as a like a final thing.
00:30:14.400 --> 00:30:16.319
So freshen your brain before you go to bed.
00:30:16.319 --> 00:30:20.400
My big problem with that is we may be neglecting the sort of emotional dimension to that.
00:30:20.400 --> 00:30:36.640
And and you know, many of us there's an element of Yeah, you know, some element at least of of maybe slight tension or pressure associated with kind of academic performance, and doing that then means we don't fall asleep so easily and we're a little bit stressed and when we should be kind of winding down and calming down ahead of bed in order to prioritize sleep quality.
00:30:36.880 --> 00:30:37.039
Yeah.
00:30:37.440 --> 00:30:38.640
What's what's your take on this?
00:30:39.119 --> 00:30:50.480
I'm not sure if anyone has looked because I haven't looked at this research, it may be out there on how much time you should have before you've learned something and then and then sleep.
00:30:50.480 --> 00:30:59.039
But we know that sleep processes and embeds the memories of what we've experienced during the that day when we've been awake.
00:30:59.039 --> 00:31:12.640
I'm not sure whether smashing out some, you know, flashcards in those 20 minutes before you fall asleep means you're more likely to remember them than if you looked through those flashcards at one in the afternoon.
00:31:12.640 --> 00:31:13.599
I doubt it.
00:31:13.599 --> 00:31:26.880
Like you say, I think hyping yourself up and engaging your brain, you would be better off getting into kind of dial-out mode, dimming the lights, doing something calm and relaxing to facilitate good sleep, good deep sleep.
00:31:26.880 --> 00:31:29.440
Um, I think would be more beneficial.
00:31:29.440 --> 00:31:34.319
Your brain will be processing information from throughout the course of that day.
00:31:34.319 --> 00:31:43.599
I would be interested though in taking a look, and I would have to look that up and check it to see if there's an optimal time between when you finish learning and when and when you sleep.
00:31:43.599 --> 00:31:49.119
But like you say, the the last minute shuffle isn't going to optimize the consolidation.
00:31:49.119 --> 00:31:52.799
It's the sleep itself that's going to optimise everything that you did throughout that day.
00:31:52.799 --> 00:32:09.359
And I often think we, you know, we can zoom on in and take a look all the way at in at individual neurons and networks and connections between neurons or synapses and see this, see this kind of happening whereby we can see the activation of a circuit or synapses in the brain.
00:32:09.359 --> 00:32:19.119
It's almost as if, kind of like during the day, you're kind of sculpting them with clay, and then when you're sleeping, it's kind of firing that and consolidating that memory in there.
00:32:19.119 --> 00:32:28.160
We know if you are kept awake after you've learned something, you know, we've we can do a clinical trial, half the people are kept awake, half the people are allowed to sleep.
00:32:28.160 --> 00:32:31.440
The people who sleep will have a far better memory of what they've learned.
00:32:31.440 --> 00:32:37.119
We can see that even with the studies that have been done of napping as well in the research lab.
00:32:37.119 --> 00:32:41.440
So, you know, learn how to navigate through this maze, have a 20-minute nap.
00:32:41.440 --> 00:32:44.640
You'll have a better memory than the people who didn't nap afterwards.
00:32:44.640 --> 00:32:48.400
But the gap between learning and sleep, I'm not sure about.
00:32:48.400 --> 00:32:57.359
I think you would be better off before sleep, getting ready to go to sleep and following best sleep hygiene practice versus cramming.
00:32:57.759 --> 00:33:04.799
One of the important sleep hygiene practices we we all talk about is trying to reduce screen time on a lot of people's radar.
00:33:04.799 --> 00:33:20.880
You you mentioned the impact of tech distraction more generally through through the day, and and and that's uh you know, when I particularly when I talk to to parents of of today's generation of students, that is perhaps more than anything else the number one concern I think a lot of parents have about their students' habits.
00:33:20.880 --> 00:33:35.920
You mentioned this earlier, but but but maybe just could could you maybe just expand a little bit on you know what are what are some of the big kind of drawbacks when we are creating these kind of distractions for our brain and we're having to, as you described it, shine our attentional torchlight from one thing back to the other and back again.
00:33:36.400 --> 00:33:38.480
It's it's it's a quagma.
00:33:38.480 --> 00:33:43.359
We luckily here in Australia we're about to embark on a nationwide experiment.
00:33:43.359 --> 00:33:45.039
So it's gonna be very interesting.
00:33:45.039 --> 00:33:54.960
I think under 16s have got perhaps about five more weeks before the country turns off social media for them all, exactly how that's gonna roll out.
00:33:54.960 --> 00:33:59.359
And there's some detractors um who think, well, the kids will find a way around it.
00:33:59.359 --> 00:34:04.079
I think it's a little bit like having a speed limit on the road or a or a drinking age.
00:34:04.079 --> 00:34:10.639
You know, sure some people speed and some people will buy alcohol underage and drink, but it's let's put a safeguard in.
00:34:10.639 --> 00:34:17.119
We don't know what the outcome is going to be here in Australia, but we've got a big experiment that's that's about to happen.
00:34:17.119 --> 00:34:21.920
I personally think perhaps we're gonna see more upsides than we see downsides.
00:34:21.920 --> 00:34:25.599
People argue that it's not an evidence-based intervention.
00:34:25.599 --> 00:34:27.840
We'll be getting the evidence for that.
00:34:27.840 --> 00:34:39.039
That is specifically around lots of different types of social media that the government is saying you have to, you know, have age validation to be able to access various um kind of apps, everything from Facebook to Twitter to YouTube, etc.
00:34:39.039 --> 00:34:40.719
So that's gonna be interesting.
00:34:40.719 --> 00:34:45.599
We'll come back in a year and see what Aussie, see how Aussie kids are doing versus the rest of the world.
00:34:45.599 --> 00:34:52.960
I mean, I suppose there's the social media apps, but there's also just even the presence of this phone.
00:34:52.960 --> 00:35:11.840
And what I have started to do, and I I I think perhaps based on what I understand, I'll talk about what I've been doing, my experience recently, because it's kind of nicer to talk in in real-world terms versus sort of theoretically, because I think we all understand how incredibly salient um this device has been.
00:35:11.840 --> 00:35:25.119
I do a lot of research and work and teaching around women's brain health and been talking for a number of years about this concept of baby brain, whereby when you have a new baby, lots of women report that they feel like their brain isn't functioning properly.
00:35:25.119 --> 00:35:28.800
You know, they've got brain fog, they can't pay attention, they're forgetful.
00:35:28.800 --> 00:35:41.360
And part of that is what our brains are doing is during the course of pregnancy and then parenting, it's almost as if our entire attention is biologically zoomed into focus on the baby.
00:35:41.360 --> 00:35:49.119
And when you focus solely on kind of one thing, your flashlight is tune, you know, focused solely on the baby, you're filtering a lot of information out.
00:35:49.119 --> 00:35:52.559
And what you remember depends on what information you take in and what you filter out.
00:35:52.559 --> 00:35:59.360
So there's nothing neurologically wrong with mothers' brains, it is just that their attention is kind of consumed by the baby.
00:35:59.360 --> 00:36:12.320
I'm starting to feel a little bit like we're carrying phones around in our hands and our arms as if they are like this precious little baby that we possibly couldn't put down because something terrible might happen to us.
00:36:12.320 --> 00:36:22.559
By virtue of constantly consuming information that's just streaming in from our phones, where and I even see, and I see this in adults.
00:36:22.559 --> 00:36:27.599
I go to my gym class, I purposefully leave my phone in my locker, and I go in.
00:36:27.599 --> 00:36:41.039
And before the gym class, people used to kind of, and you know, there's just loads of parents, you know, people my age in the gym class, and I'll be like there doing my stretches, like trying to catch someone's eye for a chat, and every, even every adult in the room is just sitting looking at their phone.
00:36:41.039 --> 00:36:42.159
I'm like, leave them behind.
00:36:42.159 --> 00:36:47.360
So our attention is consumed by these devices like a baby.
00:36:47.360 --> 00:36:58.480
And by virtue of tuning our information into what is here and tuning information, all of the other information out, we can only process that information that we take in.
00:36:58.480 --> 00:37:07.119
What I had started to notice over the last year or so was I would have a conversation, say, with one of my boys, and then a few weeks later I might ask them a question.
00:37:07.119 --> 00:37:11.039
They'll be like, we just it'll be like, bruh, mum, we talked about that.
00:37:11.039 --> 00:37:14.000
Or I remember one of them recently, I said, Oh, I haven't seen those shoes.
00:37:14.000 --> 00:37:17.199
And he was like, I showed you them when I bought them home from the shop.
00:37:17.199 --> 00:37:19.440
And I was like, oh yeah, I completely forgot.
00:37:19.440 --> 00:37:22.079
I felt, and I thought, am I losing my mind?
00:37:22.079 --> 00:37:23.679
Why am I forgetting everything?
00:37:23.679 --> 00:37:30.880
And then I realized so much of my time during the day, I was listening to podcasts.
00:37:30.880 --> 00:37:42.480
Now I'm listening, I'm not even, I'm it's not like I'm watching YouTube, but so much of my attention was being consumed by this information that was streaming in from my phone.
00:37:42.480 --> 00:37:48.239
One, I was thinking I was paying attention to my kids or a conversation I had.
00:37:48.239 --> 00:37:51.119
But then as soon as I'd stopped that conversation, I was going back.
00:37:51.119 --> 00:37:54.400
And my brain was not even processing any of the conversations I had.
00:37:54.400 --> 00:37:59.199
It was almost as if all of my attention was being consumed by this digital media.
00:37:59.199 --> 00:38:06.000
And we can only process the information we take in, and we can't process the information that we filter out.
00:38:06.000 --> 00:38:20.960
And so I started thinking perhaps it's not something wrong with my brain, perhaps it's a little bit like baby brain, whereby I'm focusing all my attention on this silly little device and whatever podcast I'm listening to, and I'm not paying attention to the rest of the world around me.
00:38:20.960 --> 00:38:35.519
So I have started to do, I I heard this kind of this idea recently that when you're at home in the house to plug your phone in and treat it like an old-fashioned phone that used to be attached to a wall, which is what I've been doing.
00:38:35.519 --> 00:38:38.559
I don't need to walk around with it in my pocket the whole time and panic.
00:38:38.559 --> 00:38:47.840
I plug it in, I leave it plugged in, and if someone really wants to get hold of me, they'll ring and then I'll walk over to it and answer it like it's an old-fashioned phone in the wall.
00:38:47.840 --> 00:39:11.679
And I've tried to just have more downtime where I'm not constantly bombarding myself with information to see if that frees me up to one, have more conversations and in real-world interactions and two process those after they've happened, instead of it's going directly back to listening to whoever's yapping in my ear with a podcast.
00:39:11.679 --> 00:39:13.360
So I've started to do that.
00:39:13.360 --> 00:39:19.840
I had also read an article, uh, a a a couple of research studies that had been done.
00:39:19.840 --> 00:39:32.159
One was an individual research study and one was a meta-analysis looking at multiple research studies of this, looking at the role of mobile phones and distraction and where our attention goes and working memory.
00:39:32.159 --> 00:39:41.440
And you've probably talked about working memory before on on this podcast, which is just the kind of the processing of the information that's kind of in your mind's eye at any moment in time.
00:39:41.440 --> 00:39:52.400
It's the the processing of information of a conversation, or perhaps, you know, running through a shopping list in your mind, or doing some mental maths, or just kind of processing information that's on top of mind.
00:39:52.400 --> 00:39:58.000
And working memory is very much determined by the funnel of information we take and by our attention.
00:39:58.000 --> 00:39:59.760
And this study was doing tests of working.
00:39:59.760 --> 00:40:04.239
Working memory in the presence or absence of someone's mobile phone.
00:40:04.239 --> 00:40:12.000
And they found that even if someone had a mobile phone on the desk next to them, and people, you know how people like turn them face down?
00:40:12.000 --> 00:40:23.760
Even if it was off and face down on the desk next to them, their working memory dropped versus it being in another room where it was, you know, out of sight, out of mind type thing.
00:40:23.760 --> 00:40:42.320
Mobile phones have become so incredibly salient to our brains, no matter who we are, that even when they are next to us turned off, our attention is we've kind of almost got these kind of our attention goes towards our phone and then we go, oh no, it didn't need to, it's off, come back here, and then goes towards our phone, and then it and then it comes back.
00:40:42.320 --> 00:40:52.480
And even that kind of micro distraction of knowing the phone is there and could potentially say hello to us, drops our working memory capacity.
00:40:52.480 --> 00:40:55.760
And that's solely due to attention.
00:40:55.760 --> 00:41:04.800
And so I've kind of tried to take on board, you know, my my personal experiences with what I felt was some problem with memory, but I think was just attention.
00:41:04.800 --> 00:41:06.639
I'm turning the phone in.
00:41:06.639 --> 00:41:07.199
Yeah.
00:41:07.599 --> 00:41:08.320
It's really interesting.
00:41:08.320 --> 00:41:23.920
I I hear quite a lot of conversation about the like importance of avoiding distraction when you're trying to work and and and you know, best practice if you're trying to clear working memory, maximise thinking capacity, get your work done faster and with fewer mistakes, you know, phone goes off, it's out of the room, and then we get it done efficiently.
00:41:23.920 --> 00:41:26.960
I think it's a really interesting, I mean it's a really, really important point.
00:41:26.960 --> 00:41:29.039
And you know, you you've got such a great take on it.
00:41:29.039 --> 00:41:34.719
I love the idea of the phone being like a human baby, and as a fairly recent father, I can I can relate to that.
00:41:35.119 --> 00:41:43.519
Yes, I feel like we pathologise ourselves when it's not it's not something wrong with our brain.
00:41:43.519 --> 00:41:44.480
It's a total of it.
00:41:44.639 --> 00:41:54.719
And I think that this I think this idea of of kind of carving out some silent space for your brain to just think and process in other parts of the day is so interesting.
00:41:54.719 --> 00:42:12.000
And you know, I think I I firmly believe that when if you've got some kind of if if you're kind of trying to come up with ideas, if you're trying to be creative, if you've got any form of writing to do, even if it's like an application for a university or a job, like you have writing to do, like you come up with ideas, you create things, and it's so often in that white space in the day.
00:42:12.000 --> 00:42:14.239
It's the classic thing, you know, you have a great idea in the shower.
00:42:14.239 --> 00:42:15.119
Why do you have it in the shower?
00:42:15.119 --> 00:42:18.000
Because it's the only time when you're like listening to something.
00:42:18.320 --> 00:42:21.440
You take your phone into the shower, and I know my boys will take the phone into their shower.
00:42:21.440 --> 00:42:25.440
Sometimes I can hear I hear my like older son will be having conversations with his mate.
00:42:25.440 --> 00:42:29.920
The shower's going, you know, he's in there for half an hour and he's chatting away to everyone.
00:42:29.920 --> 00:42:32.639
I also started doing when I'm driving as well.
00:42:32.639 --> 00:42:42.079
Like if I've because my boys are, you know, in the middle of exams and I'm like full mum mode, driving them to and fro, just like doing everything, doing all of the things.
00:42:42.079 --> 00:42:44.000
I'm spending a bit of time in the car.
00:42:44.000 --> 00:42:49.119
And I used to be like, I'll put a podcast on, like, you know, they'd get out of the car and I'd have a podcast on.
00:42:49.119 --> 00:42:51.519
And now I'm like, I'm not even turning the radio on in the car.
00:42:51.519 --> 00:43:03.440
I'm trying to also use that as like quiet just to like get rid of the white noise and just see if I feel like I'm thinking better and I'm having better memories of the conversations we had.
00:43:03.440 --> 00:43:06.480
Because I was feeling like I was blanking on conversations.
00:43:06.480 --> 00:43:12.239
And I'm and I feel like I'm noticing a difference, but I it's hard that's not objective, that's subjective.
00:43:12.559 --> 00:43:13.199
A good study to do.
00:43:13.199 --> 00:43:13.920
It's a good study to do.
00:43:13.920 --> 00:43:14.559
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:43:14.559 --> 00:43:16.320
I think it'd be fascinating.
00:43:16.320 --> 00:43:17.119
Well, I'm curious.
00:43:17.119 --> 00:43:19.440
So you mentioned your your your your boys a couple of times.
00:43:19.440 --> 00:43:19.760
Yeah.
00:43:19.760 --> 00:43:32.400
Sarah, what what perhaps some of the things we've talked about already, but is is there anything else a uh neuroscientist mum tells her children that you uh you know, messages you've tried to get across that um that might be interesting to share?
00:43:33.039 --> 00:43:39.599
I don't think it matters what kind of descriptor you put in front of mum, they will not pay any attention.
00:43:39.599 --> 00:43:43.199
So no neuroscience has been absorbed from my sons.
00:43:43.199 --> 00:43:51.119
And what I have tried to do is modulate my own parenting behaviour based on my understanding of their of their brains.
00:43:51.119 --> 00:43:54.239
So I know a classic example I often give.
00:43:54.239 --> 00:43:57.840
This is for the parents out there who have perhaps absorbed a bit of neuroscience.
00:43:57.840 --> 00:44:06.480
I remember, you know, my and I've always said to them, and my oldest one's driving now, but I would be like, no matter where, when, any time of the day, you call me, I'll come and pick you up.
00:44:06.480 --> 00:44:07.599
No questions asked.
00:44:07.599 --> 00:44:10.400
And that started, he was on the bus on the way home.
00:44:10.400 --> 00:44:11.360
I'd get a phone call.
00:44:11.360 --> 00:44:12.880
Can you come pick me up from the bus stop?
00:44:12.880 --> 00:44:14.639
It's only like about a kilometre walk.
00:44:14.639 --> 00:44:16.159
But it'd be like, I'm just too tired.
00:44:16.159 --> 00:44:18.000
I just, can you just come and get me?
00:44:18.000 --> 00:44:24.800
And then, you know, I'd come home, drive him home, he'd smash out some wheat bicks, go upstairs, come back down, grab his surfboard, and be like, Oh, I'm off.
00:44:24.800 --> 00:44:26.239
I'm going for a surf with my mates.
00:44:26.239 --> 00:44:27.679
And I'm like, Well, do you want me to drive you?
00:44:27.679 --> 00:44:30.880
And it's like, no, no, I'm fine.
00:44:30.880 --> 00:44:47.119
And that my neuroscience understanding isn't that he's selfish and he's using me, is that I know what's driving him is he's tired at the end of the day, but the drive and the motivation has come from, you know, going and hanging out with the friends, and you know, you kind of become re-energized.
00:44:47.119 --> 00:44:53.760
And so just understanding that this is a natural part of being human and it's not selfishness on his part.
00:44:53.760 --> 00:44:56.400
It's just, I just observe and watch.
00:44:56.400 --> 00:45:08.159
That said, I feel like over the years I've drip fed perhaps surreptitiously or implicitly information about how to do exams and how to study.
00:45:08.159 --> 00:45:14.960
And particularly my oldest son, who is very focused, appears to have been pulling that off very, very well.
00:45:14.960 --> 00:45:18.719
And I also think the messaging has come through his his school.
00:45:18.719 --> 00:45:20.079
Their school is amazing.
00:45:20.079 --> 00:45:22.559
They've taught the kids, they've taught the kids well.
00:45:22.559 --> 00:45:28.880
So I know that uh what a couple of things that my oldest son has told me that he's he has done over the course of the year.
00:45:28.880 --> 00:45:31.840
One, he started using, I don't know what that you call them anki cards.
00:45:31.840 --> 00:45:35.519
It's like an online flashcard program, and you you might be more familiar with that.
00:45:35.760 --> 00:45:39.519
It's one of the big three that our listeners use along with Rainscape and Quizlet.
00:45:39.840 --> 00:45:43.119
Yeah, and he said to me, Oh, it's because it facilitates spaced learning.
00:45:43.119 --> 00:45:46.239
And I was like, I know what spaced learning is because I'm a neuroscientist.
00:45:46.239 --> 00:45:50.719
I didn't say that, I just thought that, because you don't say things like that to your son if you're a their mother.
00:45:50.719 --> 00:45:58.000
But essentially he has used space learning and he said he has streak, his his ankey streak has has lasted all year.
00:45:58.000 --> 00:46:02.320
He was he was runner up to the ducks in his high school, so it's clearly paid off.
00:46:02.320 --> 00:46:10.480
So he's used anke cards and has used that space learning, and I think there's an algorithm in it that figures out how spaced out the gap will be.
00:46:10.480 --> 00:46:12.239
I don't know exactly how it runs.
00:46:12.239 --> 00:46:14.079
And then practice exams.
00:46:14.079 --> 00:46:20.880
And we know both of these are just basic neuroscience principles, spaced learning and then practice and repetition.
00:46:20.880 --> 00:46:22.800
Nothing new under the sun.
00:46:22.800 --> 00:46:26.559
This is 100% validated by neuroscience and it and it pays off.
00:46:26.559 --> 00:46:29.039
And so he does a lot of practice.
00:46:29.039 --> 00:46:31.440
He probably does more practice exams than most people.
00:46:31.760 --> 00:46:38.400
You dropped a nice little nugget when we were chatting a couple of weeks ago about training with a battery on your pen, which I've never thought of before.
00:46:38.400 --> 00:46:38.880
I loved that.
00:46:39.119 --> 00:46:39.440
Yeah.
00:46:39.440 --> 00:46:45.599
Yeah, because you know, you you you learned, you know, it's you need to work the muscle, you know, in your arms.
00:46:45.599 --> 00:46:53.599
And so him and his friends tape, and I and I guess batteries because they're like small and heavy and long, so it's not weighing one end of the pen down.
00:46:53.599 --> 00:46:55.280
And so you've got a really, really heavy pen.
00:46:55.280 --> 00:46:58.480
So all of the practice writing is done with a very, very heavy pen.
00:46:58.480 --> 00:47:01.039
And then when you go into the exam, it's a much lighter weight.
00:47:01.039 --> 00:47:02.880
So they do, so they do that.
00:47:02.880 --> 00:47:06.480
So he has done a lot, a lot, a lot of practice exams.
00:47:06.480 --> 00:47:11.440
And for the longer written exams, maths is pretty easy to mark yourself, right?
00:47:11.440 --> 00:47:15.519
Um, and he has a whole spreadsheet of the exams.
00:47:15.519 --> 00:47:22.239
There's a metacognition column in there, thinking about before he's marked it, what did I think about this exam?
00:47:22.239 --> 00:47:23.679
What was my kind of vibe?
00:47:23.679 --> 00:47:26.239
I think he's called the column vibe, to be honest.
00:47:26.239 --> 00:47:32.800
You know, thinking about thinking, thinking about feeling, what and then and then a mark and then another, and then another reflection.
00:47:32.800 --> 00:47:39.199
So he's kind of going through that process of not just practice but self-reflection.
00:47:39.199 --> 00:47:53.360
The exams, which are the longer written form where it's a bit harder to mark yourself, he gets feedback from the teachers, but he also uses Chat GPT and AI and has trained that up over the course of the last year.
00:47:53.360 --> 00:47:56.480
Um, and we've got a shared family paid account.
00:47:56.480 --> 00:48:03.840
Um, and he'll put exam, put essays in that and then ask it based on this, these marking criteria, which it's been trained up on.
00:48:03.840 --> 00:48:08.239
Mark this, tell me, you know, where I could improve, etc.
00:48:08.239 --> 00:48:14.000
And he's kind of getting that that feedback that way with that form of learning.
00:48:14.000 --> 00:48:34.719
And so all of those are those so sort of those skills, the space repetition, the practice, practice, practice, and then the iteration with the feedback and then self-reflection without flagellation, without I'm terrible, you know, he's also very, very, very emotionally regulated and very cool and very calm.
00:48:34.719 --> 00:48:39.119
And and and I guess that's a nervous, he's been like that since he was born.
00:48:39.119 --> 00:48:49.039
He's very regulated, which I think means that you can have good, strong cognitive control, you can eliminate the distractions, you can choose where to focus attention.
00:48:49.039 --> 00:48:55.920
Different, different kids, different people are going to have different kinds of levels of that ability to cognitively control.
00:48:55.920 --> 00:48:59.119
And I'm just focusing on this now and ignoring other things.
00:48:59.119 --> 00:49:24.480
And so I think putting if that is a harder task for you, to put the frameworks in place, and that may be putting the phone in another room in the house, you know, telling your friends I'm offline now for a while, just leave me alone, don't distract me, or going into a library or a public space as well, where there's a social pressure to not be talking and yapping and on a phone the whole time.
00:49:24.480 --> 00:49:27.119
You're surrounded by other people who are doing the same thing as you.
00:49:27.440 --> 00:49:27.760
Fantastic.
00:49:27.760 --> 00:49:29.199
Well, that's great, great examples.
00:49:29.199 --> 00:49:35.280
And uh yeah, lots lots of uh lots of I mean, particularly the the metacognition and self-reflection, I think, actually.
00:49:35.280 --> 00:49:45.440
That's that's that's um you know, we we've talked a lot about the the science of learning and the the the spaced learning, the the the retrieval practice, uh which of course anchor's combining.
00:49:45.440 --> 00:49:50.480
But I really like that uh that sort of self-reflection, that metacognition album as well.
00:49:50.480 --> 00:49:54.320
I think that's uh it's a really real kind of maturity as a nice, nice, nice twist.
00:49:54.320 --> 00:49:55.039
I I like that a lot.
00:49:55.119 --> 00:49:56.800
That's the vibe.
00:49:56.800 --> 00:49:58.000
What was the vibe and why?
00:49:58.000 --> 00:49:59.119
What was the vibe?
00:49:59.119 --> 00:50:00.159
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:50:00.320 --> 00:50:01.119
Yeah, I like it.
00:50:01.119 --> 00:50:01.599
I like it.
00:50:01.599 --> 00:50:03.360
Um and no judgment on that, you know?
00:50:03.360 --> 00:50:06.400
Like some days the vibe might be good and some days it might be a bit of a struggle.
00:50:06.400 --> 00:50:07.039
And that's okay.
00:50:07.039 --> 00:50:13.840
And like you're just, you know, it's it's the same idea with the kind of the the meditation, you know, you're just observing the thought and not sort of chasing the thought again.
00:50:13.840 --> 00:50:14.320
Yeah.
00:50:14.800 --> 00:50:24.159
So learning, if you're reflecting on that process, then when you're in the actual exam, you can keep control of your emotions.
00:50:24.159 --> 00:50:26.880
Because you've kind of practiced that too.
00:50:26.880 --> 00:50:30.000
I think we think we can't practice our emotions in advance.
00:50:30.000 --> 00:50:37.360
We can practice how to do calculus, we can practice physics, we can practice an English essay, we can reread Macbeth or whatever.
00:50:37.360 --> 00:50:42.320
But learning and practicing emotional regulation in advance too.
00:50:42.320 --> 00:50:54.320
Even if you're visualizing being in an exam, you know, you'll visualize that you're kind of rehearsing, you've rehearsed how to do the exam, but you can rehearse your emotional response in advance as well.
00:50:54.320 --> 00:50:58.639
What happens if question 13 is much harder than what I thought it would be?
00:50:58.639 --> 00:51:02.559
Am I just going to crash out, freak out, run out of the exam?
00:51:02.559 --> 00:51:12.559
Or am I going to have an emotional strategy that I can deploy to keep me calm so I can, you know, carry on with the next few questions?
00:51:12.559 --> 00:51:21.599
So I think rehearsing your emotional regulation as an exam strategy is as important as just learning the content.
00:51:21.920 --> 00:51:26.480
Yeah, that's a really, really important thing to think about and I think underthought about.
00:51:26.480 --> 00:51:28.960
So, so definitely important thing.
00:51:28.960 --> 00:51:35.920
So it's been so, so fascinating to talk, and you've shared so many fascinating and practical nuggets with us today.
00:51:35.920 --> 00:51:37.360
Really, really interesting stuff.
00:51:37.360 --> 00:51:37.920
Thank you.
00:51:37.920 --> 00:51:40.719
Uh, we've we've covered so many different things.
00:51:40.719 --> 00:51:42.639
I hope it's a memory attention.
00:51:42.880 --> 00:51:43.760
I hope it's been useful.
00:51:44.079 --> 00:51:45.920
Emotions, medical ignition, it's been wonderful.
00:51:45.920 --> 00:51:46.960
It's been really, really good.
00:51:46.960 --> 00:51:55.599
Listen, uh, but just before we we we head off, I just wondered if there's like one thing that you wish you had figured out a little bit sooner in your own student journey.
00:51:55.599 --> 00:51:56.880
I know you were a student for quite a while.
00:51:56.880 --> 00:51:58.880
Well, you know, PhDs and postdocs.
00:51:58.880 --> 00:52:10.880
You know, if there's one thing that you think you would have benefited from figuring out earlier in your academic journey as a student yourself, even back to sort of high school undergraduate level, you know, what would that what would that be?
00:52:11.360 --> 00:52:22.480
I completely crashed out in my final high school biology exam, so much so that I had a panic attack and I ran out of the exam and didn't sit it, which was very melodramatic.
00:52:22.480 --> 00:52:32.480
Because back in the 90s, we didn't get taught how to learn, we didn't get taught how to regulate our emotions, we didn't get taught how to manage stress.
00:52:32.480 --> 00:52:35.440
We weren't even taught to do practice exams.
00:52:35.440 --> 00:52:38.880
It was just go away and learn the content and then you were just kind of winging it.
00:52:38.880 --> 00:52:46.400
There's a lot of benefits and upsides to drowning out all of the a lot of the noise and just focusing in on what to do.
00:52:46.400 --> 00:52:51.679
But I was one of those sort of type A overachieving girls.
00:52:51.679 --> 00:53:04.639
For some re I I think I just overworked myself and just placed far too much importance on how to um that that my marks would define my entire life and and that was kind of it.
00:53:04.639 --> 00:53:09.119
So I had a terrible end of high school, what you I suppose you would say A levels.
00:53:09.119 --> 00:53:10.159
We did five subjects.
00:53:10.159 --> 00:53:16.320
I did English calculus, maths or calculus, chemistry, biology, and art.
00:53:16.320 --> 00:53:18.079
I did terribly in art.
00:53:18.079 --> 00:53:19.840
I'd always done really well in art.
00:53:19.840 --> 00:53:23.599
I did terribly in my final portfolio.
00:53:23.599 --> 00:53:26.000
We got it reassessed, it was still terrible.
00:53:26.000 --> 00:53:29.840
Um, it took me years to recover from that bad mark.
00:53:29.840 --> 00:53:34.000
Final exam out of the other four that I sat was biology.
00:53:34.000 --> 00:53:42.320
And I sat down in the exam and started flicking through the paper and started feeling like I was having a panic attack.
00:53:42.320 --> 00:53:47.280
And I had no tools, no skills, no understanding of what was happening.
00:53:47.280 --> 00:53:49.519
And so I stood up and ran out of the room.
00:53:49.519 --> 00:53:54.559
And then we had to go to the doctor and get, you know, assessed and get a compensation mark, etc.
00:53:54.559 --> 00:53:54.960
etc.
00:53:54.960 --> 00:54:02.079
Luckily, I was coming first in the class, so I just got whoever was coming second, they gave me a mark slightly above his or something.
00:54:02.079 --> 00:54:17.199
And I think now that wouldn't have happened because that was the 90s and now it's 2025, and we understand so much more about just that sort of mental not me, and I don't think it was a mental health problem, it was just a panic attack.
00:54:17.199 --> 00:54:19.519
Um, but we understand a whole a whole lot more.
00:54:19.519 --> 00:54:21.199
I literally crashed out.
00:54:21.199 --> 00:54:25.679
I tell my sons about it now, and they often like to laugh at me about it.
00:54:25.679 --> 00:54:29.519
But I don't think that would have happened now because I would have known what to do in advance.
00:54:29.519 --> 00:54:30.400
And that's what I say.
00:54:30.400 --> 00:54:36.000
You can rehearse and practice strategies in advance of if you think that that's going to happen to you.
00:54:36.000 --> 00:54:45.280
It took me a very, very, very long time to recover emotionally from the memory of that because I was so shamed.
00:54:45.280 --> 00:54:47.360
I was so shameful and so embarrassing.
00:54:47.360 --> 00:54:49.360
Um, it was very cringe.
00:54:49.360 --> 00:54:51.679
But, you know, it happened and it was fine.
00:54:51.679 --> 00:54:54.000
I still ended up getting a scholarship to Oxford.
00:54:54.000 --> 00:55:06.159
Um, so you know, I recovered, but I think having the stress reduction tools, the emotional understanding, the metacognition, just the ability to be self-aware, which we didn't have in the 90s.
00:55:06.159 --> 00:55:08.559
I don't know what we were doing in the 90s, honestly.
00:55:08.559 --> 00:55:09.760
Not a lot.
00:55:09.760 --> 00:55:14.320
So just my experience, word of advice.
00:55:14.320 --> 00:55:19.599
Pay, you know, self-awareness and have some tools in your tool belt if you start to panic.
00:55:19.840 --> 00:55:20.960
Great advice, Sarah.
00:55:20.960 --> 00:55:22.000
Thank you so much.
00:55:22.000 --> 00:55:28.960
And if anyone is interested in learning more about your your world and your your work, um, where can we find out more?
00:55:29.199 --> 00:55:34.400
Yeah, well, it's dr sarahmakai.com is probably the best place to go.
00:55:34.400 --> 00:55:40.320
And I've got I do I run professional development training courses in neuroscience and brain health.
00:55:40.320 --> 00:55:43.599
I've got some books, I've got I go on lots of podcasts.
00:55:43.599 --> 00:55:46.239
So that's kind of like the window in, the portal in.
00:55:46.239 --> 00:55:47.920
And um come and say hi.
00:55:48.320 --> 00:55:49.440
Oh, well, thank you so much.
00:55:49.440 --> 00:55:50.960
It's been really fun to chat.
00:55:50.960 --> 00:55:53.920
Uh, and thank you for sharing so many fascinating and interesting things with us today.
00:55:53.920 --> 00:55:58.480
And I'll I'll I'll conclude today by wishing your boys every success with their academic journey from here.
00:55:58.639 --> 00:55:59.360
Um Thank you.
00:55:59.599 --> 00:56:00.079
Thank you so much.
00:56:00.079 --> 00:56:01.679
Um, we'll look forward to talking soon.
00:56:01.679 --> 00:56:07.199
Well, thanks again, Sarah, for such a wide-ranging, fascinating and very practical conversation.
00:56:07.199 --> 00:56:13.119
Please do do as always see the links in the show notes if you'd like to explore any of Sarah's work.
00:56:13.119 --> 00:56:15.840
Give a copy of her books and so forth.
00:56:15.840 --> 00:56:18.639
We'll link all that up so it's nice and easy for you to find.
00:56:18.639 --> 00:56:24.559
And as always, I'd encourage you to take a moment to reflect on what you're gonna take from today's episode.
00:56:24.559 --> 00:56:26.079
What are you gonna take from all this?
00:56:26.079 --> 00:56:27.360
What are you gonna apply?
00:56:27.360 --> 00:56:33.679
If there's just one idea, might be a brand new idea, it might be a nudge to get back into something you've been doing before.
00:56:33.679 --> 00:56:41.840
You know, one practical point from today's conversation that you want to start applying, you know, right away, today, this week, what would that thing be?
00:56:41.840 --> 00:56:52.320
And why not take a moment, once you've decided what that thing is, to drop it in the comments section if you've got access to a comment section, you know, particularly if you're listening, for example, on Spotify or on YouTube.
00:56:52.320 --> 00:57:03.679
It's a great way if you if you have that comment, it's a great way to make sure that you can get the most value yourself and are taking action on the big ideas that you learn here on the podcast.
00:57:03.679 --> 00:57:05.519
And also looking at those responses.
00:57:05.519 --> 00:57:14.800
This is also really useful feedback for me, helps me understand the areas that people find most useful, and also helps me plan future content for you all accordingly.
00:57:14.800 --> 00:57:25.360
Speaking of future content, as promised, I'll just close today with a very brief tease on a little of what's to come through the season over the next few weeks here on the podcast.
00:57:25.360 --> 00:57:37.599
So, as I mentioned back in the intro, this interview with Sarah, in essence, forms uh effectively a bit of an introduction and an overview to the next several weeks of interview episodes here on the podcast.
00:57:37.599 --> 00:57:47.039
And we've got a range of excellent, really top-tier guests lined up to dive deeper into many of the key issues we have explored in today's overview.
00:57:47.039 --> 00:57:53.760
So, to give you a little bit of a taste of what's to come, they're going to include a top researcher and author on emotional regulation.
00:57:53.760 --> 00:58:01.039
We've got a former stunt man and US Army advisor who's become a leading expert on performance under high pressure.
00:58:01.039 --> 00:58:01.840
We've got Dr.
00:58:01.840 --> 00:58:07.360
Piers Steele, who is one of the top top academics in the world of procrastination research.
00:58:07.360 --> 00:58:25.519
He's amassed over 29,000 academic citations, so he's sort of a super respected academic, uh, and has also written very lucidly, uh, writes very entertainingly and has become very respected for his sort of groundbreaking research and uh advice on procrastination, particularly the book The Procrastination Equation.
00:58:25.519 --> 00:58:28.559
I think you're all really going to enjoy that particular episode.
00:58:28.559 --> 00:58:36.960
Uh so I'm going to continue a pattern I've used in the past of alternating those longer form interviews with our guests over the next few weeks.
00:58:36.960 --> 00:58:55.119
Uh, and then in the alternate weeks, I'll do a short solo mini episode, uh, just a little bite-sized tip or idea from me that you can apply right away, or perhaps a little pep talk uh to help you stay the course and either get motivated or stay calm or stay consistent and ultimately achieve your goals.
00:58:55.119 --> 00:58:58.000
So I really hope you enjoy what's to come.
00:58:58.000 --> 00:59:04.480
And I'm always trying to step up the quality of both the content and the production that we're offering you here on the podcast.
00:59:04.480 --> 00:59:10.159
And I've been working very hard over the last six months or so to line up the season that's coming up over the next few weeks.
00:59:10.159 --> 00:59:13.519
And I really hope you like the sound of what's uh in store for you.
00:59:13.519 --> 00:59:21.039
I just wanted to say that uh, you know, very, very grateful to those who have been financially supporting the show through our Patreon since we launched it last summer.
00:59:21.039 --> 00:59:23.920
You are helping to make all of this possible.
00:59:23.920 --> 00:59:26.239
So thank you if you are already supporting the show.
00:59:26.239 --> 00:59:37.119
If you are not yet and you get value from the show and would like to join those who help contribute to keeping the show running, we offer some nice supporter perks through our Patreon as well.
00:59:37.119 --> 00:59:42.000
Please do check it out, examstudyexpert.com forward slash Patreon.
00:59:42.000 --> 00:59:46.719
And there you can become a supporter and help us to continue to make the show you love.
00:59:46.719 --> 00:59:53.039
Uh so thanks in advance, and I really look forward to welcoming you as one of our valued supporters, if you're able.
00:59:53.039 --> 00:59:59.760
I do understand, of course, not everyone is in a position to support us financially, and many of you do an awful lot to support the show in other ways.
00:59:59.760 --> 01:00:07.440
Too, like telling your friends, liking, sharing, rating, commenting, that is all hugely appreciated, too, and thank you for that.
01:00:07.440 --> 01:00:11.679
And with that, I just wanted to say thank you once again for tuning in today.
01:00:11.679 --> 01:00:13.840
It's been a joy to have your company as always.
01:00:13.840 --> 01:00:18.639
I hope you found today's episode useful, and I will look forward to seeing you again next week.
01:00:18.639 --> 01:00:21.440
Wishing you every success, as always, in your studies.
01:00:21.440 --> 01:00:23.679
Until then, very best of luck, everyone.
01:00:23.679 --> 01:00:24.639
You've got this.
01:00:25.440 --> 01:00:27.280
Well, that was good, wasn't it?
01:00:27.280 --> 01:00:30.320
I found myself taking notes.
01:00:30.320 --> 01:00:40.719
If you need a reminder of anything from today, head to the website for a write up of this episode, as well as lots more top notch advice and resources.
01:00:40.719 --> 01:00:44.239
That's uh examstudyexpert.com.
01:00:44.239 --> 01:00:46.559
See you next time.