Neuroscientist: These 3 Scripts are Silently Running Your Life - Dr. Anne Laure | Ep. 126

She was about to die and her first instinct was to check her calendar. Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a neuroscientist at King's College London, former Google executive, founder of Ness Labs, and bestselling author of Tiny Experiments. In this conversation we go deep on the hidden scripts running your decisions, why "find your purpose" is doing more harm than good, how your brain is designed to keep you stuck, and the science of using curiosity to actually build a life that feels like yours.

This one changed the way I think about goals, success, and what it actually means to thrive. If you've ever felt lost, stuck on autopilot, or like you're living someone else's version of success, this is the episode.

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⏱️ TIMESTAMPS: 

00:00 – Why most people don't understand their own lives 

02:45 – The blood clot that changed everything 

06:30 – Why external success feels empty 

10:15 – Your brain is designed to survive, not thrive 

14:00 – Tiny experiments: how to override autopilot 

18:20 – Do you need goals or questions? 

22:45 – The 3 cognitive scripts running your life 

30:10 – The sequel script, the crowd-pleaser, and the epic script 

36:40 – Why "find your purpose" is ruining people 

40:15 – Curiosity vs ambition: the experimental mindset 

44:30 – The duality of gratitude and ambition 

48:00 – How curiosity saved her from depression 

📖 GET DR. LE CUNFF'S BOOK: Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World → https://www.amazon.com/Tiny-Experiments-Freely-Goal-Obsessed-World/dp/0593715136

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Website & Newsletter: https://nesslabs.com 

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LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/alecunff 

Threads: https://threads.net/@neuranne 

Personal site: https://anne-laure.net

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Most people think they're making choices, but they're actually running scripts written for them by their own brains fear of the unknown. Today's guest lived her life by the same script until she started to study it. Dr. Anne Laure LeConf is a neuroscientist at King's College London, the founder of Nest Labs, a formal Google executive and the author of the best-selling book, Tiny Experiments. Today we're talking about the hidden programs running your decisions, the science of curiosity, and why purpose may not be as important as you think. Dr. Anne Lore, welcome to the Grateful Podcast.

SPEAKER_02 0:31

Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Thank you so much for being here. Um, the where where I want to start is with our understanding of our own lives. Do you think that most people understand why their life is the way it is?

SPEAKER_02 0:46

Not really. We're not really encouraged to try and understand why we make the decisions we make and why we're going in the direction that we're pursuing. A lot of the decisions we make are made on autopilot. We copy-paste a lot of the things we want based on what other people want, based on that mimetic desire. We feel like if this person wants this form of success, surely I want the same thing. If society is expecting me to succeed in this certain way, surely that's what I'm supposed to do. And so not only we're not encouraged to really look deep down in terms of what we want, but we we don't really make space for it in our lives.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

How did you start to realize that? Because I think that for so many of us, we do live our lives on autopilot, and that autopilot takes us to the end. So was there a moment in your life that you started to realize, like, oh wow, I am living on autopilot and something needs to change?

SPEAKER_02 1:41

Yeah, I wish I could tell you I realized that something was wrong on my own. I um I kind of very much think about my life in terms of two chapters. And for me, the the wake-up moment was a health scare. And it's unfortunately very common for people to need that kind of life quake almost to realize that something is wrong. Um in my case, I was working at Google at the time and I was getting to go to work and I realized that my arm had turned purple. And uh I went to the infirmary at Google because we had that. Um, the nurse had one look and sent me to the hospital, said you have to go get this checked. The doctor looked at it and said, I needed to get surgery straight away because I had a blood clot that was threatening to travel to my lungs. Now for the wake-up call, in that moment when I have the doctor in front of me telling me we need to do surgery as quickly as possible, my response was to say, one second, I need to check my calendar.

SPEAKER_01 2:41

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_02 2:42

And you almost have like this kind of like out-of-body experience seeing yourself doing something absolutely ridiculous. That was for me the beginning of starting to question my priorities, my ambitions, the relationship between who I was, what I wanted, and my work and my life.

SPEAKER_00 3:01

One of the stories I hear the most often is this I had my dream job, my corporate job, and then I was unfulfilled. And that's really why I started this podcast in general. People hear the grateful podcast, they don't quite understand what's underneath it. But I had a similar thing where I was 17 years old. I was living in France at the time, and I had a business, four employees. I was always the top of my class, and I felt unfulfilled. I had everything I was supposed to want, and yet I didn't have the things I truly craved, which were those feelings underneath. Where do you think that most people can actually derive those fear feelings from versus where they think that they're going to derive the feelings from?

SPEAKER_02 3:44

Oh, this is really interesting that you realize so early that something was missing because a lot of people don't. And you're right that a lot of people go to the very end on autopilot. We hear all of these stories about people on their deathbed who finally realize that they didn't spend their time, their energy, their attention in a way that was meaningful to them. So I think yes, the earlier you can realize that something's missing, the better. But the problem is that yes, we're we're trying to derive that sense of meaning from external factors, from the approval of others, from following whatever script we've been given. It's almost as if we had created this artificial leaderboard and we were calculating points. And the more points you have, the better you're doing and the more successful you are. And as if that was what winning at life was. The problem is that if you want to replace that artificial sense of meaning, that externally derived sense of meaning with an internally derived sense of meaning, there's no playbook. You can't copy and paste your sense of meaning and success. And you have to figure it out on your own. It's messier, it's more uncomfortable, which is perhaps part of why people don't really tend to look that way.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

So, what I'm hearing you saying is people can, it's easy to copy someone else's external success. You can learn from someone out there. But if you want to find the internal feelings and the joy that you're looking for that has to come from within. So, what's that look like in the brain? Because I'm super curious. I said I'm a behavioral neuroscience student, and I've heard so many people say that, but I've never heard someone with your background say that. So, in the brain, what do we know about the brain that can also corroborate that conclusion?

SPEAKER_02 5:29

The the main thing about the brain that's relevant to this question of success and meaning and living a life that feels like we're doing the right thing, really, is the relationship that the brain has to uncertainty. It's really important to understand that our brain has been designed for one main purpose, which is to ensure our survival. This is really what you can really boil down any function in the brain to that, ensuring your survival, which means reducing uncertainty as quickly as possible. So if you think about our ancestors, the more certain they were, the more certain they felt about who were their friends and enemies in the tribe and where they could find resources, the more likely they were to survive. And our brains haven't really evolved that much in all of that time, right? So we still navigate the world and navigate our lives with this kind of old hardware that's doing everything it can to reduce uncertainty. This is a big part of the challenge here. It means that you have to make a conscious effort to override some of those automatic responses and say, okay, Brain, I know what you're trying to do here. You're trying to protect me, but I don't want to just survive. I want more than that. I want to thrive, I want to grow.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

Yeah. I've heard you talk about this experiment where people would rather have self-inflicted pain than uncertainty of when it will come, even if there's a chance of having zero pain. And we hate uncertainty because that's what we're designed to do, but we're not in an environment where that uncertainty is, or at least for most of us, capable of killing us, right? So how can we rework these mechanisms to help us thrive for fulfillment rather than survival in today's world?

SPEAKER_02 7:16

This is why I recommend people start running what I call tiny experiments. Really, the idea is that instead of trying to force yourself to put yourself into those very, I won't, I don't want to say dangerous situations, but situations that feel dangerous, right? That will trigger that uncertainty response in your brain, starting small, trying new things that feel a little bit different, a little bit uncomfortable, having a little bit of a hypothesis in terms of whether this is going to work or not for you. And have looking at it like a scientist, just saying, okay, let's try this. Let's see how it feels. What can we learn from this? Based on that, you can keep on iterating and you can grow your comfort zone little by little, not by trying to overhaul everything in one go.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

I find it interesting because when you talk about tiny experiments and approaching life as a scientist, you've talked about not quite having the end goal in mind, but approaching it with a question, because that's what scientists do. They have a research question, not an outcome. I think this is so valuable in so many contexts, but I also, I also challenge it because in my life, if I truly do want something, I need to have a clear sense of what that goal is and work backwards from it. Is there a balance for you between the two? Or do you really think that just approaching life from a pure question-based research perspective is the best way?

SPEAKER_02 8:36

I think it's always better to start with curiosity. That being said, once you've run an experiment, you can get to a point where you feel really good about something. And that might become a project, that might become a habit, that might become a routine. And that's completely fine. The problem that I see quite often, think about habits, for example. Isn't that crazy that quite often we decide to commit for a new to a new habit for the rest of our lives, even though we've never tried it before? And we say, from today onwards, I will run three times a week.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

And we do that because we see other people doing that and we envy the results, like we were talking about at the beginning.

SPEAKER_02 9:11

Exactly. Whereas if you start from a place of curiosity rather than wanting to have certainty, you can say, okay, running sounds fun. Let's give it a try. You give it a try for a specific duration, you run your experiment, and then at the end, you can see whether it works for you for not or not. What's completely different also from a goal is that you don't have that binary definition of success. If by the end of the experiment you feel like, I hated this, I don't like running, great. Now you know. And you can try something different.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

I think the best part about that too is uh so many of us compare ourselves to everybody else, right? And by testing something out and figuring out, oh, I don't like this. When we see someone succeeding there, we're not gonna feel jealous, we're not gonna envy them. We're going to say, that's great for them, but that's not for me. Is that a part of the, I guess I'm gonna use the word goal of doing that again. A little contradictory there, but is that a part of the the goal, the purpose of that experiment as well?

SPEAKER_02 10:12

Absolutely. The only goal is learning. Okay. And which means learning about yourself, about your work, about your ambitions, about the world in general. As long as you learn something new by the end of the experiment, that is success, including learning that that thing is not for you.

SPEAKER_00 10:29

Yeah. Process of elimination a little bit. And what how do you go about like scaling an experiment, for example? Because we we just went over what happens if, let's say, you don't like it. But if you say, Oh, this is great, I actually love running. I feel great from this. I want to go from three times a week to five times a week. And then we can start to do that overhaul little little by little. How do you go about that scaling process?

SPEAKER_02 10:56

I love this question because um, can I push back a little bit?

SPEAKER_00 11:00

Oh, 100%, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:02

First, I think we should not assume that because something works, we need to scale it.

SPEAKER_00 11:07

Interesting. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 11:08

And I think this is something we've been taught in our society. You like it, do it more, do it better, do it bigger. So, first, I think you need to ask yourself the question, okay, I love this. Would I still be happy with this if I just kept going the way I'm doing it right now? Because that is an option as well. If you remove the external pressure to always grow, then just running three times a week can be an option. That being said, if you do feel the pull to grow even more in that practice and uh to push the limits of what you can do to get even more out of your comfort zone, yes, you can scale it. And again, I would really encourage anyone to do it in a very progressive way. You want to iterate. And so maybe you could you keep going with three times a week, but you go for longer runs.

SPEAKER_01 11:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:54

Maybe you do it three times a week, but you do it in a terrain that's a little bit more uncomfortable that you've never done before. Or maybe you keep it the same in terms of the practice itself, but do you do it five times a week? And so I think what's really important is to not make any of those decisions in an automatic way. Again, avoiding copy pasting from others and figuring out what works for you.

SPEAKER_00 12:16

I imagine this has gotten harder as social media increases and we're constantly looking into other people's lives as well.

SPEAKER_02 12:23

Absolutely. Anything you want to do, anything you're curious about, there will be someone who has posted about the best way to do it online. And it is really, really hard to resist the temptation to copy and paste that blueprint. And it it makes sense. We're social animals. And so we feel like if someone has done it before, we might be able to take a shortcut by doing it exactly the same way they're doing it. But we're completely ignoring the fact that this person is a different human being in different circumstances. And also the fact that, and we know that, we know that, but we ignore it, that they usually only share half of the story. A lot of people publish their successes online and they don't mention that they have a team helping them or a boyfriend, girlfriend, a spouse that's helping with half of the things happening at home. And so you only look at the result, you try to copy paste what they did, and when you fail, you think that you did something wrong.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

Nick Pollard, who I had on my show, who was also on Chris's show, he said that we look at everybody's everybody else's highlight reel while we're comparing that to our own gag reel. And I think that's so true because we see every moment of our lives, we see the highs and the lows, and we only see the highs of everybody else's. So we're pulled to compare our lows with their highs, which is just unfair, right? I think going back to what we were talking about, where I wanted to say, how are we going to improve that? How are we going to grow that? It's it's interesting because when looking at hedonic adaptation, right? If we don't change something, if we're not introducing variety into a habit or something we're doing, we will eventually come back down to our baseline of happiness. So I think keeping that novelty is important. But it was an interesting point that you made where our instinct in finding novelty is to improve, is to try to make it better. So you say instead we can go in a different place or we can introduce variety in a different way. Uh I wonder why why do you think we've we've been drawn so far toward this automatic thinking of we need to improve the thing rather than introducing variety? Why is that our automatic way of thinking?

SPEAKER_02 14:30

I think it's a fairly new thing in the sense that a few hundred years we live in a very quantitatively, quantitatively minded society now. Um it's all about productivity, how much you produce, and it's all linked to numbers. Our ancestors were a lot better at appreciating things from a qualitative standpoint. How does it feel? How does it look? Beauty, sensations, inspiration, and intuition, right? In our society today, it's really all about numbers, performance. And it's no wonder that when we are in a society that works like that, we start applying the same kind of mental models to our own success and the way we navigate our lives.

SPEAKER_00 15:11

Talk to me about the three scripts that dictate most of our lives, because I think that is going to provide some uh good base for everybody to understand what we're talking about right now.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

Absolutely. So in my book, I talk about cognitive scripts. This is a concept from psychology that shows that a lot of the decisions we make in our everyday lives, but also at a higher level, are made in an automatic way. It's as if we had downloaded a script from society in terms of how we're supposed to behave in a specific situation. They're not necessarily bad. For example, if you go to a restaurant, you know you're supposed to wait at the front, someone's going to come and grab you and say, you sit here. You're not going to start getting up and dancing on the tables.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

Cognitive offloading.

SPEAKER_02 15:53

Yeah, it's part of exactly. You're not going to think about every single small decision that you make. So not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is we follow cognitive scripts in areas of our lives where maybe we don't want to make those decisions in an automatic way. And um, there are so many different ones. They apply for every situation in life. But I created three big buckets that kind of help think about them in your life. The first one is the SQL script. It's the script we follow when we make decisions based on what we did in the past and where we feel like whatever decision we make today needs to make sense based on the decisions we made we made in the past.

SPEAKER_00 16:32

Can I have an example of that?

SPEAKER_02 16:34

Yeah. So for example, if you just graduated from university, you're only going to look for jobs that align with whatever you studied in school.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

Oh, interesting. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 16:43

Um, or in romantic relationships, you might only date people who align with the kind of people you dated in the past. Um, you might only dress in a way that aligns with the way you've been perceived so far. So whatever creates a nice narrative, a nice continuity, a nice story that you can tell yourself and other people. Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 17:03

That's the sequel script. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 17:04

The second type of script is the crowd pleaser script. That's the script you follow when you make decisions based on what you think. And I insist on what you think is going to please other people around you.

SPEAKER_00 17:16

What you think others think of you.

SPEAKER_02 17:17

Exactly. Because sometimes they actually don't care. But you're telling yourself that maybe your parents and your friends and your colleagues will be happier or more proud of you if you make a certain decision. Classic example of that is people who end up working as doctors, lawyers, those kind of things, not because they're passionate about it, but because they think that that's what other people around them are expecting from them. Yeah. So that's the crowd pleaser script. And the last one, which I think is the most insidious one because we celebrate it as a society, is the epic script. And that's the script we follow when, and it is kind of linked to what we talked about earlier, right? This idea of scaling is the script we follow when we believe that whatever we do in life needs to be big, needs to be impressive, we need to be on a mission, we need to change the world. And anything less than that is failure.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

And why is that bad?

SPEAKER_02 18:16

The reason why it's bad is I mean, there are several reasons. One of them is that people who follow the Epic script tend to put all of their eggs in the same basket. And when they drop that basket for a reason or another, we see a terrible impact on their mental health. There are studies showing that founders, for example, startup founders, when their startup failed, there are very high rates of then chronic depression and anxiety because all of a sudden their sense of identity is gone. They had put all of their sense of self-worth into the startup. So that's one reason. The other one is that very often people who follow the epic script don't allow themselves to have a new different passion in life.

SPEAKER_01 18:56

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 18:57

If you have, if you're supposed to find your life mission, then you're not going to change life missions every year or two years, right?

SPEAKER_01 19:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:04

But there's nothing wrong with changing your mission or your passion, right? And so you close all of those doors. You might need someone who has a really interesting project that doesn't feel aligned with this big passion or mission that you have, and you're not going to pursue it because of that.

SPEAKER_00 19:19

Right. Interesting. When I was looking at the hero script, I was thinking about how I agree that it doesn't work for some people, but I also think it really works for some people. And I was trying to think about what the differentiating factor was. And I think it all goes down to goals and purpose, which we can get into in a second as well. And I think that most people, uh are you familiar with who Bob Proctor is or was? No. Okay. He was like one of the original personal development speakers, authors, and he was like friends, he he knew Napoleon Hill, who wrote Think and Grow Rich, and he talked about A, B, and C goals. All right. And so an A goal is something you already know how to do. If someone's saying, Oh, my goal is to buy a car, and they already have a car, right? Same model, whatever. That's an A goal. It's not really uh it doesn't take a lot, right? And then a B-goal is something that you do because you think you can succeed at it. So it's kind of the thing where, all right, I'm good at math. I think I'd be a good engineer, but they're not really emotionally involved with that. And my theory, and obviously I have so much to learn, but it's just what I'm thinking about, and I'm interested to get your perspective, is that the the founders that burn out, they're doing that because they're not really emotionally involved with it. It's something that they think they can do. They think they can succeed, they think that they can achieve the feeling like I did and like you did through Google, right? Uh, by doing this certain thing. And then the third type of goal is a C goal, and it's the type of goal that you're really emotionally involved with that really drives you. It's something beyond you, right? It's it's service-based. And I think that the hero script for someone like that really works. And uh, you look at someone like Martin Luther King, who had uh a goal that was beyond himself, and it drove him to that purpose. And I mean, he had a lot of issues in his personal life, but uh maybe not the best example. But I think that I think that it works for some people. What what do you think about that?

SPEAKER_02 21:26

I a hundred percent agree with you. And I think we're saying the same thing. I'm so glad you touched upon this. So the very important part when I talk about scripts is the script part. And if someone, for example, wants to be a doctor or a lawyer because they really want to be a doctor or a lawyer, that is not that script.

SPEAKER_01 21:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:44

If you ask yourself the question and you figure out that you want to be a startup founder, that you actually want to work on this big mission, not because you're following this script, but because this is truly what you feel like is calling you right now.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

Right.

SPEAKER_02 21:58

Then this is not a script.

SPEAKER_00 21:59

Interesting.

SPEAKER_02 22:00

And so that's the big part. That's what's really important. And so I I'm glad that you're talking about being emotionally invested and really caring about it. Are you doing it because you're following a script or are you doing it because you actually care? And that's the question with cognitive scripts that you should be asking yourself, why? Why am I doing this? Why am I pursuing this?

SPEAKER_00 22:17

Right. And that's the curiosity part, right? And so it's still leading with curiosity in a different way. And I do I resonate with your work so deeply because I think that so many of us do just jump into something because we're told to do it. And I really want to touch on uh Marcia, who was uh an old psychologist, his idea of identity. And you also had uh have an idea of uh where where you have a matrix, right? And so I'm gonna read off this real quick where Marcia has uh talks about identity, and he has four different types of identity dependent on two inputs, which are commitment and exploration. So the x-axis is exploration, the y-axis is commitment. Uh when someone has neither of those, they're in what he calls identity diffusion, where you're kind of lost, right? And then where I think the people that just follow, they become a doctor or a lawyer because that's what their parents want them to do. They have commitment. They're committed to that thing, but they don't have any exploration. They haven't gotten curious, and a lot of people fall into that. That's what he calls identity foreclosure. And then you have uh exploration without any commitment. So you've been exploring, and that's what he calls moratorium, which I find a lot of younger kids, a lot of uh teenagers are in because they're constantly jumping around, but they're not really committing to anything. They're not saying, this is what I'm gonna do. Uh they're they're never satisfied with an idea. And then when you have both of them, that's what's called identity achievement. And obviously they're fluid, right? So you can go out of identity achievement. And then with yours, you have ambition and you have curiosity. And in the bottom, neither of those, you have cynical. With ambition and no curiosity, you have the perfectionist, which I was in that for a long time. I think that's what you were before as well, right? And then we have uh curiosity with no ambition, which is escapist, and then with both ambition and curiosity, you have experimental. Now, the thing that I'm really interested in here is in your like kind of holy grail, it's experimental, which is what Marcia called moratorium, which was not the main goal. So where does commitment lie in your idea of what makes uh a great curious life? And do you think that sometimes curiosity alone is not enough?

SPEAKER_02 24:40

Yeah, I think the main difference in between those two frameworks is that in his, it's about looking at those two variables together. Whereas for me, when I'm thinking about curiosity and ambition, I'm thinking about being able to alternate fluidly between the two. So if you're cynical, you're not able to unlock any of them. You're neither able to be curious nor to be ambitious. If you're a perfectionist, you're fully capable of ambition, but you can't really tap in your curiosity because you're too scared of making mistakes or looking like a fool, of trying things that might not work. If you are in the uh wait, I'm having a experimental, experimental, cynical escapist. Escapist, thank you. If you are in in an escapist mode, then that means that you're you're very curious. You're allowing yourself to explore, but you might have a little bit of the shiny toy syndrome.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:36

And you're not really able to tap into that ambition, which is kind of linked to commitment, committing to working hard towards something so you can have an impact. Someone who has an experimental mindset, you're able to almost do it. It's almost like a little dance, right? You're able to be fully curious and let go of trying to achieve anything for a while and just explore and try to learn as much as possible, make mistakes, look like a fool. That's completely fine.

SPEAKER_01 26:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:04

When the time comes, you're also able to take everything you learned to extract all of the knowledge from that phase of exploration and then say, okay, let's do it. Let's commit. And so it is a very maybe nuanced difference, but that that's also why they don't really map one to one. And that's also why I don't feel like they contract contradict each other.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

Interesting. I love that I asked that question. That that explanation really makes a lot of sense, I think, where they they're not they're not after the same thing, right? They serve two different purposes. On top of that, I want to go over the framework that I have created, um, which I call the duality of gratitude and ambition. And we talked about it uh kind of a bit earlier without really naming it, where when I was in France and when I was uh when I was running that script of what would have been the uh it was kind of the heroic script, um, I I was very burnt out, right? And I was the perfectionist, and I didn't have any real connection to what was now because uh everything was based on achieving the goal, right? And so that's why I have gratitude as my x-axis because I believe that in order to really live the most fulfilled life, I call it resonance up in the top right in the first quadrant. You need to be able to be grateful for what you have right now enough to the point where you're not attached to the goal bringing you everything you want, but you still have the desire to work and move forward. Because I think that that desire in progress is something that we all crave so much. What do you think about that?

SPEAKER_02 27:39

Yeah, I mean, first, uh, and then we can talk about the framework, but I love that you're focusing on gratitude because there is there are very few things in psychology that have so much research that is backing the fact that it is incredibly helpful for our mental health or well-being in general, our sense of purpose, belonging, so many different factors can be impacted positively by just a little bit of gratitude and it's completely free. Yes. You can do it anytime. You don't need anyone's permission to experience and to feel a little bit of gratitude. So I absolutely love that this is one of the key factors in the framework that you're exploring. And um I didn't personally focus on that because curiosity was the main factor that I was looking at. But I do think that they work in tandem almost.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:28

And you can actually be curious about the things that bring you gratitude in your life.

SPEAKER_01 28:33

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 28:34

And I'm personally also very grateful for the fact that I have all of those opportunities to express my curiosity in my life. So you can almost think of them as a part of all of those tools that you actually need in order to flourish as a human being.

SPEAKER_00 28:49

Right. Yeah, I do think that being curious about the things that make you grateful is is such a good line right there. I'm running this podcast, I'm running a business, and I'm also a full-time neuroscience student. Sometimes, no matter how grateful and ambitious I am, my brain just doesn't want to keep up. And I know that you know the feeling of having all these things you value so much that you just don't feel like you have the time or the focus to get done. And that's exactly why I take Magic Mind every single morning. It's a mental performance shot. It's got the adaptogens, the nootropics, and the time release caffeine so that you don't get the jitters or the 3 p.m. crash, but you get all the energy, all the clarity, and all the focus to accomplish your goals. And I've been taking it every single morning because of those exact things. You guys know that I would never promote a brand that I didn't fully trust would get you the results that you're looking for. So if you're looking for more performance, more clarity, more focus, then go to magicmind.com slash wagoner20, put Wagoner20 in at checkout and get 20% off a package of these shots, or 48% off a subscription. Go try it and let me know what you think. Let's get back into this awesome episode. Why curiosity? Why because there are so many things and we just went over multiple frameworks and they all work, right? But why is curiosity the thing that fascinates you?

SPEAKER_02 30:15

At a personal level, curiosity has always been a lifeline for me. I've struggled with depression in the past, and I've noticed that anytime I could manage to bring myself to be a little bit curious about something that could give me enough motivation to just have one more day where because I wanted the answer.

SPEAKER_01 30:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:36

And so whether that was starting to read a book, starting to listen to a show, starting a conversation with a friend that I knew we would have to finish the week after and wanting to finish to hear the end of their story, just a little bit of curiosity. I definitely I think that curiosity can be the antidote to many of the ailments and the struggles that we face as human beings.

SPEAKER_01 31:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:02

I also think that it can be incredibly powerful in terms of connecting with others. I think a lot of the conflicts that we're facing and misunderstandings that we're facing could be solved if everybody was a little bit curious, a bit more curious about each other.

SPEAKER_00 31:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:17

And so, yeah, that's that's why I decided to focus my work on curiosity.

SPEAKER_00 31:21

I love that. And what you said about we could solve so much if we just did have curiosity for each other. That's so true. I mean, we see that at every level of the world right now. But people are so much more similar than than we may think. And when we get curious with each other, that can solve so much. I love that you were able to get curious and use that as a tool to not combat, I don't like that word, but overcome depression. At what point was that the strongest for you?

SPEAKER_02 31:50

As a teenager, I would say in between 15 and 22, 23, I think this is a very difficult age for a lot of people because there's a lot of doubt, there's a lot of uncertainty. And a lot of the things that people who are a bit older than you tell you just don't feel like they apply or they make sense. And a lot of it really usually is, oh, you'll see, like just wait. It will be fine.

SPEAKER_00 32:14

100%.

SPEAKER_02 32:14

Which is not very helpful. And uh it really took me a while, and it did take, you know, more experience and and more opportunities to really live and experience what life has to offer for me to be able to overcome my depression. But curiosity in the meantime, all over all of these years, was generally the reason why I stayed here and I was like, okay, one foot in front of the other. Let's wait until we get the answer to that new question.

SPEAKER_00 32:44

A lot of my listeners and viewers are in that age of uh, I'd say teenager, young adult. And I I do hear that all the time, where someone older will say something that makes so much sense to them, to someone younger, and they can understand it here, but it's really, really hard to understand something without going through an experience that teaches you that. Have you found in your life there's any way to and I think everyone in the world wants to know the answer to this question, but is there any way to really teach someone something without them going through an experience that teaches it to them?

SPEAKER_02 33:21

I personally don't think that that's the case. I think everybody's looking for shortcuts.

SPEAKER_01 33:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:26

And there are no shortcuts for living life. That's also the beauty of it, right? You actually have to do it. You have to find out for yourself. And it's going to be quite uncomfortable sometimes. You might not always find what you want on the other side. I feel like every single experience can be identity-shattering sometimes, you know? You have all of those preconceptions about who you are and what you want, and then you actually do the thing and you see that I'm not the person I thought I was. Yeah. But this is how you grow and figure out who you are. So, no, there's I think the only thing you can do for someone else who's in the middle of a bit of a crisis in the liminal space where they feel a little bit lost, is maybe giving them the encouragement and the support to go and try something and say, you know, I'll be here and I can help. Yeah. But you'll still have to do it yourself.

SPEAKER_00 34:15

That's that's great advice. What it I want to go more into the brain side of things because I think you're especially qualified to talk about it. Um when you're looking at this thing uh at depression, especially among young, young people. I know it's not necessarily your expertise in neuroscientists, but I imagine you have some background in learning about it. What is going on in here? And why is it on important, or do you think it's important for us to understand what's going on in here to help solve it out here?

SPEAKER_02 34:48

The part that's difficult is that researchers don't really agree. And I would say that some people who are more from the neuroscientific school say that it might be an imbalance in the brain that creates that. So at a very neurophysiological level, those might be the kind of researchers that would say that medication can help with depression. Whereas there's another school of thought that is more about the psychological aspect of it. And that could be childhood trauma, that could be any kind of experiences that you have internalized in a way that has, and again, obviously the line is very fine in the sense that any experience that you have at a psychological level is encoded at a neurophysiological level, right? But those people might say that interventions that are might be more around therapy, around maybe reliving and experiencing those moments and maybe entangling your current identity from those experiences in the past can be effective. I personally don't have a good answer for this. This is not my field of expertise, but I generally think that this is again another area where nobody should just do whatever everybody is telling them to do. And it's okay to try different things. Yeah. It's okay to try medication and then say maybe that's not for you and you might want to try another modality. In my case, psychedelics have been incredibly helpful. If I had just gone to the doctor, nobody would have prescribed that for me. And it's because I was curious enough to do a little bit more research and to try and figure out other modalities that I discovered that there might be another way to go about it.

SPEAKER_00 36:21

What's so helpful about psychedelics? I'm so curious because I I've never tried it, but I've listened to a lot of podcasts from neuroscientists talking about the benefits. And I've heard so many people uh speak personally on their benefits. What have you found is so different from other medication or other approaches of mindfulness, for example, that make psychedelics so beneficial?

SPEAKER_02 36:45

So at a scientific level, we're still very early in terms of the research, but most of it seems to point to neuroplasticity and how it recreates a window of plasticity after a psychedelic experience. It's almost as if if you were visualizing trauma as knots in your brain, it unnots them.

SPEAKER_01 37:03

Really?

SPEAKER_02 37:04

Yeah. It's it's basically that's where the research seems to be pointing right now. And you can almost kind of rewrite those connections metaphorically if you use that window of integration properly.

SPEAKER_00 37:16

The window being during the trip itself?

SPEAKER_02 37:19

So the the trip is the the moment that kind of, let's say, you know, again, a knot, like those knots. And then the the period of integration can be a few weeks after. And the length is not the same depending on the type of psychedelic that you take.

SPEAKER_01 37:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:34

This is the moment where you have to actually create new knots, new patterns, new connections. And this is why every psychedelic practitioner will tell you that the integration phase is the most important one. You could take mushrooms every week. And if you're not doing any kind of work for the integration, you could do more harm than good.

SPEAKER_00 37:55

Aaron Powell So it's up to the person after they take it to take action in a way that's going to rewire the brain in a positive way, right?

SPEAKER_02 38:03

Aaron Powell Yes. Reflection and action. So reflecting on the experience and then deciding what you want to extract from that psychedelic experience and what you want to bring into your daily life, what you want to change about yourself and the way you show up.

SPEAKER_00 38:16

Because I've always wondered, like when when you're high, I feel like the experience won't necessarily translate to the real world and when when you're not anymore, but it sounds like it really can. And it you can have a lasting, a permanent impact from something that uh is so short. Is it like one and done? Can it can it be like that? Where you literally have it happen one time and you're good for the rest of your life?

SPEAKER_02 38:42

It can be one and done. It can. Uh in my case, it took a couple. And I remember a year after my first ayahuasca experience, feeling like something was wrong, that I was going back to, I had intrusive thoughts again.

SPEAKER_01 38:56

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 38:57

And so I went back and then it was completely gone. And that was years ago. So I do feel like it might be permanent now, but I also feel very comfortable if at some point I have to go back. Because when you think about it, instead of having to take medication all the time, it's like you go. And even if you have to go once a year, in terms of treatment plan, that's really good.

SPEAKER_01 39:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:17

And um, yeah, to your point about how it translates, it definitely doesn't translate one-to-one. It's very common if you go and read papers and you read interviews of people who have worked with psychedelics, yeah, that they very often can't find the words to describe the actual psychedelic experience. So it is beyond words, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't translate to change, that you can actually see visible change in the way you feel and the way you behave.

SPEAKER_00 39:42

Can they find the words when they're uh in the in the different state of consciousness? Can they describe it then?

SPEAKER_02 39:49

Yes, and no. It is really it is really people describe it sometimes as beyond cognition.

SPEAKER_01 39:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:58

Where we don't have the words to describe it. It's really an ultra state of consciousness where very often we don't have the vocabulary to do it. Some researchers, what they've done is give participants uh paper and um and pens to draw, yeah. Which apparently is a little bit more helpful already than trying to find words.

SPEAKER_00 40:16

Is there no worry about dependence upon these drugs? Because let's say, like, for example, it sounds like you're obviously very healthy in the way that you approach it, but I imagine it can be like another any other drug where now someone can become addicted or attached to this altered state of consciousness and the change that they feel during it. Or like we talked about with goals earlier, where you never feel like you're quite reaching enough, right? And so even though they've improved so much, they feel like, oh, if I keep taking this more consistently, I might be able to feel even greater. Uh is there worry about that?

SPEAKER_02 40:51

So from a physiological standpoint, what's fascinating is that there is virtually no addiction whatsoever. Really? People don't get addicted to psychedelics. Wow. And really, I guarantee you, when you're done with the psychedelic experience, you feel like, okay, good. I'm going to process this, but you definitely don't want to go back. Um, so at a physiological standpoint, it is really not a worry from the current research literature and from really thousands of testimonials from people who have gone through it. The psychologic aspect, psychological aspect is interesting. And I don't know exactly what the answer is to this, but in general, I have noticed some conversations. I haven't read any research about this, but some conversations in some circles that might point to people feeling like they have to, you know, personal development almost as an addiction, right? Yes. In general, which I would not necessarily link to psychedelics. Right. And then psychedelics might be one of the tools as part of that, right? But where people feel like they have to always keep on on growing, on bettering themselves in a way that maybe might become unhealthy at some point. So it is an interesting question.

SPEAKER_00 42:04

Right. But that's not the psychedelics itself. That's a separate addiction, right? It's an addiction to improvement that we see a lot. And it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. Um on that note, why does purpose do so much harm to people?

SPEAKER_02 42:21

Did you see the graph in my book where uh if you read the paper version, so I have a graph that shows the number of times the phrase find your purpose is mentioned in books over the past hundred years. It's gone up by 700%.

SPEAKER_00 42:36

That's insane. Yes. And in what in how many years was it again?

SPEAKER_02 42:41

Over the past hundred years. Uh but I think if you look at the graph, that exponential graph is only over the maybe the past 20, 30 years.

SPEAKER_01 42:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 42:49

Yeah. So there is currently a cultural obsession with purpose. Everybody wants to find their purpose. So the main problem with that, I think, is that if you look around and you ask people and they're honest, most people haven't found their purpose.

SPEAKER_01 43:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:07

Which is completely okay. Right. But because we have this cultural obsession, people who haven't found their purpose, which again is most people, feel like something's wrong in their lives, something's missing. And surely their life doesn't have the same sense of meaning that it should have if they're missing this big purpose, right? So it has an impact on your sense of self-worth, your self of identity, your sense of meaning in life in general. For me, that's the biggest thing about purpose.

SPEAKER_00 43:33

Interesting. Yeah, it goes back to the comparison of others where we see people online, maybe, or we see the way they interact with us and we think they found their purpose. Inside, they're feeling the same way that we do, but we we're confused because we don't have our purpose and we think they do. And they think we found our purpose and that they're in the wrong because they haven't found theirs. So I imagine it it really confuses people.

SPEAKER_02 43:56

Aaron Powell But to your point, it's because there's an incentive to tell others. Is that you found your purpose? It gives you such a nice story to tell. A lot of success in life is based on demonstrating a kind of sense of leadership, showing that you can lead people. It is a lot easier to lead people if you tell them you know where you're going.

SPEAKER_00 44:14

Yeah. But it goes to authenticity. And it reminds me of a point you talked about on Modern Wisdom, where you said that your Google job, you'd find the people that got promoted faster were doing much less work than everyone else, but they were talking about the work that they did so much more. And it it's a weird culture we live in where you can do much less work, you can be much less successful than so many people, but you can have so much more influence just because of the way that you frame it and the way that you talk about it. I I think about people talk about AI and what AI is going to do so much, but I really think that it'll never be able to replace human influence and the way that we get people to follow us and the way that we can persuade, because forever it's been a pattern in humans, if you study it, where we just have to convince people that we we're good at something and they don't really dig too deep. They they believe us at face value.

SPEAKER_02 45:09

Absolutely. This is really, again, thinking from an evolutionary perspective. In the past, if you the way to survive the main way to survive was to belong in a tribe. And the main way to belong in a tribe to show that you belong there was to show what you were contributing.

SPEAKER_01 45:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:25

So you just had to have a nice story that said, I'm the one who cuts the wood. I'm the one who does that. You need me. If I'm gone, you're going to notice that I'm not gone, I'm I'm not here anymore. And that's why we're all telling each other those stories.

SPEAKER_01 45:39

Right.

SPEAKER_02 45:39

And obviously, I'm not going to poke into yours because I don't want you to start poking into my story.

SPEAKER_00 45:44

Interesting. So we have incentive, we have common incentive to live up here in the story world instead of uh at the plane that we all really want to be at. Wow. I haven't thought about that before. That's amazing. So speaking of stories and speaking of uh talking about what you're doing, tell me what you're working toward most right now.

SPEAKER_02 46:04

Yeah, so this is very new. I don't think I have mentioned it on a podcast actually.

SPEAKER_00 46:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 46:09

I am working on my next book.

SPEAKER_00 46:11

Congratulations.

SPEAKER_02 46:12

Well, don't congratulate me yet. It's so early. I'm thinking about the concept. I'm working on the actual research.

SPEAKER_01 46:21

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 46:22

So for me, the challenge with the next book, which is really, really exciting and I'm really curious to explore, is that Tiny Experiments is very much about distilling the research of a lot of other researchers over the years into a framework that people can use. The next book is going to be based on my own research that I'm conducting at King's College London. Very new, very different, very exciting, a bit scary, but in a good way.

SPEAKER_00 46:46

Yeah, a hundred percent. Do you know what it's about yet? Can you can you share any of that?

SPEAKER_02 46:50

Uh yes, it's going to be about ADHD and curiosity.

SPEAKER_00 46:54

Which you struggle with ADHD. I don't like the word struggle. You have ADHD as well.

SPEAKER_02 46:59

Yes, I was diagnosed a year into my PhD in neuroscience.

SPEAKER_00 47:04

At what age?

SPEAKER_02 47:05

I was 32.

SPEAKER_00 47:07

Wow. Yeah. Interesting. And could you, looking back, did you know that you had it when you were younger?

SPEAKER_02 47:13

Absolutely not, because I was function functioning, quote unquote. I thought, you know, I have a good career, good job. I mostly handle a lot of the what I know now are symptoms of ADHD, I was managing coping with in very unhealthy ways. I was smoking like a chimney. I was drinking a lot of alcohol to just manage the restlessness, to be able to sleep at night. Yeah. But a lot of these things, they were so normal around me that I never really associated them with me trying to cope. And uh after I had the diagnosis, you almost kind of look back on your life and your behaviors, and something clicks. You finally understand why you were behaving in all of those weird ways. And I consider myself extremely, extremely fortunate. And this is why I want to work on this next book. The reason why I think I didn't struggle so much with my ADHD symptoms, although I did, was that I unwittingly designed a career where it's completely okay for me to be nonlinear, to have five different projects at the same time, to get a little bit bored with something, distracted, and move on to the next project and to have this kind of creative way of thinking about things that doesn't make sense sometimes from the outside and can look a little bit messy. But a lot of people are not so fortunate and they find themselves in jobs that really don't fit the way their brain works. So this is why I want to work on this next.

SPEAKER_00 48:43

That's amazing. I can't wait to I can't wait to see that. A lot of my best friends have ADHD, and I I see I I mean, yeah, I don't really agree with how it's treated and uh worked around in in the world right now. So I really look forward to seeing the impact your research has and reading your next book. I'd love to get you back on the podcast for that.

SPEAKER_02 49:02

Perfect. Let's do it.

SPEAKER_00 49:04

Amazing. So I I've really, really enjoyed this conversation. I think before we leave off, I want to leave everybody with action to take. Um so let's say someone's listening to this, and they're my age, so they're 19, they're around that age, and they they're confused. Where do they start with curiosity? What's one thing they can do to start to get curious with themselves so that they can understand more, just they don't have to feel so lost. They don't have to feel so uh so much lower than everybody else, and they don't have to compare their gag reels to everybody else's highlight reels anymore.

SPEAKER_02 49:41

I have a little exercise that I recommend that people listening to this or watching us can do. I call it self-anthropology.

SPEAKER_01 49:50

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 49:50

The idea is that you're going to pretend for 24 hours that you're an anthropologist and you know nothing about your life. Okay. And you're going to study it as if you were discovering a new culture. And you can just open a note on your phone and throughout the day take little notes. Ooh, I love that conversation. Or anytime I'm hanging out with this friend, I have a lot of energy. Anytime I need to work on that kind of thing, I want to go and cry in the corner. Anytime I'm exercising, I'm feeling good. Anytime, et cetera. Just take little notes. Just notice, no judgment. You're an anthropologist. You're just taking notes and observing. I guarantee you that if you do that for 24 hours, you will start noticing things that you've been doing automatically. Not because you really want to do them, not because they give you any sense of meaning or joy, but because maybe you saw other people do them or your parents told you to do it like that, and that's it. Those things you've been doing automatically, those automatic behaviors, you can turn them into an experiment. You can say, okay, for the next week, let me try and do this thing differently. Let's see what happens. I'm just giving it a try. That's it. This is going to open new doors for you to figure out what works for you, not based on expectations from others, but based on what actually works for you.

SPEAKER_00 51:05

That's incredible. I love that. I have to do that myself. I think that's a great way of objectively looking at your life. Amazing. Thank you. This has been so incredible. Uh let my audience know where they can find you, where they can get ready to see your next book when it's coming out.

SPEAKER_02 51:19

So you can go to nestlabs.com where I have a weekly newsletter, or on Instagram and most socials. I'm at Nuran, N-E-U-R-A-N-N-E. And my book is called Tiny Experiments.

SPEAKER_00 51:31

Amazing. Thank you so much. This has been the Grateful Podcast. Free audio post-production. Biophonic.com.