The Keys to Learning New Skills as an Adult

If you're a child, the things you hear and see and do are shaping you. Kids come home saying things they've never even heard before. It's amazing. Right. And as an adult, you have to crack into that neural circuitry and reshape it. Yeah, but why is that? What is it about adults? Because I have my own theory, and this is just a martial arts based theory. Young kids learn so fast. They learn so fast. But I always feel like it's because they don't have jobs. They don't have a family to take care of. They don't have a girlfriend who's on their back. They don't have bills and the IRS breathing down their neck. They don't have anything. So they can just think about it and their mind, like if they have a hard drive, right, and they have a one terabyte hard drive, they got like 100 gigs full. They have all this space. You could fill that space up with technique and movement and it becomes their whole life because it's thrilling and it's exciting to learn and their body heals quicker. So they can force themselves into situations. With adults, it's extremely difficult to find the bandwidth, to find the amount of time to really completely focus on something because you have so many distractions. Does that make sense? Oh, absolutely. What you just described is a beautiful description of the top contour and below that what's happening is in childhood, the whole brain is literally more plastic because there's more space for the neurons to move around and make new connections. The whole environment, the chemicals that are swirling around in there are set for plasticity because we were basically designed to come into the world and be customized to our experience. I mean, if the human animal is exceptionally good at any one thing, it's that. So if you're an adult, say if you're a 35 year old man with a family or a 35 year old woman with a family and a job and you want to learn a new skill, what is the best way to force your brain to accept these new patterns and learn this quickly? By attacking two separate parts of a process. Neuroplasticity is not an event, it's a process and it has two parts. The first one is if you want to learn and change your brain as an adult, there has to be a high level of focus and engagement. There's absolutely no way around this because so focus and intensity and that kind of the Goggins phenotype, right? I think Goggins is now a noun, a verb and a pronoun, right? It's like, it's amazing. So if you're going to Goggins this process, what you need to do is you need to, regardless of how agitated you feel, you have to lean in and focus extremely hard. Now, the reason for that is that there's a neurochemical norepinephrine, also called adrenaline, same thing that's released in the brain and body. Most people back off at that point because they feel this agitation, but we have to remember that that noradrenaline was designed to get us into movement. That's the purpose of noradrenaline, to take us out of stillness and into movement. And then the other thing we have to do is we have to take that elevated level of alertness and we have to focus it. And there's a second neuromodulator called acetylcholine, which is secreted from this little structure in the base of the forebrain when we visually focus on something. Or in the case of maybe if you're doing auditory learning, when you focus with your auditory attention. Can I pause you there for a second? Yeah. Acetylcholine, you could take in a supplement and norepinephrine, you can actually get from float ice tanks. You can get it from cryo chambers, you can get it from cryotherapy. So using those strategies of taking like acetylcholine is actually an alpha brain. You want to supplement my company cells. When you take that along with float tanks and doing, or excuse me, cryo chambers and do some intense exercise or whatever you're trying to get good at with intense focus, can those things accelerate that process? Almost certainly increases the plasticity, the rate of plasticity. So you would recommend if someone was trying to get better at something, like a cryo chamber would actually accelerate the process of learning? Yeah. So, yes. So the reason for that though, but you don't necessarily need a cryo chamber. What you need are, so we have these requirements. We need urgency and focus to trigger plasticity. That's one part of the process. I haven't mentioned the second part yet. Neuroplasticity is triggered when urgency and focus combine. Acetylcholine is released for the aficionados out there. It's called the nucleus basalis, but that doesn't matter. There's a little compartment of neurons in the base of your forebrain that doesn't like to release acetylcholine on a regular basis. It's greedy. It's greedy. And it doesn't want to use that. With your child, it'll drain your brain with acetylcholine. But as an adult, 30, 40, up to... Why is that? Because Mother Nature designed us to learn what we need to learn and then do that, reproduce and die. I mean, not to be... How rude. ...dark about it. But I would say evolution is now about us. It's about the offspring, right? Yes. 100%. And then it's not even about them. It's about their offspring. Exactly. Never ends. We are being manipulated from the inside. Yes. I mean, that's what kind of drew me into our biology is that all these complex things you see in the world, it's all internal. So if you get urgency, it can come from... Let's use David as a... He's a shining example of this, right? You can sit there and just ramp up your level of urgency through purely psychological means. You could take an ice bath. You could do high intensity breathing. Anything that brings your level of alertness up. Can I ask you this? If you were going to try to improve your ability to get better at something, when would you use that ice bath or the cryotherapy? Would you use it before? Would you use it afterwards? Definitely before. Before. Before the learning... What we're talking about is a two-part process. The first part is the learning trigger. The learning trigger is gated by two things, adrenaline, which is also norepinephrine, same thing, and acetylcholine. And so you need that level of alertness up and you need acetylcholine released at the location in the brain that corresponds to what you're trying to learn. So things like supplements and certain nutrition regimens can assist the process for sure. There's no question about that. Things like alpha GPC, caffeine will bring up the adrenaline and kind of anything to raise that alertness.