The Pathway to Flow with Neuroscientist, Fmr. Dancer DR. JULIA CHRISTENSEN

The Pathway to Flow with Neuroscientist, Fmr. Dancer DR. JULIA CHRISTENSEN

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Neuroscientist · Fmr. Dancer
Author of The Pathway to Flow: The New Science of Harnessing Creativity to Heal and Unwind the Body & Mind

The state of being in flow and seeking out that state, sort of disappearing from the here and now... it must have been something that has been part of human cultures for many millennia. We know that, for example, dancing can bring you into these states. And we know from many anthropological works that people dance themselves into trance, a type of flow. So, there is that flow in this scientific sense of a state of well-being. And we will speak about what that does to our brain and our broader wellbeing, but also the flow in what cues enter into our senses. So that would be a scientific field that looks at brain synchrony, physiology synchrony, these waves that we see that sort of connect with us.

JONATHAN YEO - Celebrated Portrait Artist on the Importance of Connection & Intuitive Intelligence

JONATHAN YEO - Celebrated Portrait Artist on the Importance of Connection & Intuitive Intelligence

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Artist

What are you trying to do with the portrait? On a basic level, you're trying to communicate something about the essence of who someone is. You're trying to figure out who they are, not necessarily who they present themselves as. The two things can quite often be different. And then, you're trying to find ways of showing that through their face, their posture, or any other context. My instinct is always to try to reduce down to the essential elements. We read faces. It's obviously very, very deep in our DNA, really our survival instinct. We are programmed to read faces in a very fine-tuned way.

LEWIS DARTNELL - Author of Origins: How the Earth Made Us & Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History

LEWIS DARTNELL - Author of Origins: How the Earth Made Us & Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History

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Astrobiologist · Science Communicator
Author of Origins: How the Earth Made Us · Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History

The challenges facing our society at the moment effectively are the unintended consequence of a solution we found in the late 1700s when society was running out of energy, we had no more timber, and we realized we could dig underground for ancient fossilized woodland, which is basically what coal is from about 300 million years ago. The consequence of burning all that coal and then oil was a release of carbon dioxide, changing our atmosphere and warming the planet. So, it's a problem born out of our ingenuity and resourcefulness, but I'm confident that we will find the solution out of our ingenuity and resourcefulness.

DR. BARRY SCHWARTZ - Author of The Paradox of Choice & Why We Work

DR. BARRY SCHWARTZ - Author of The Paradox of Choice & Why We Work

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Psychologist · Author of Why We Work
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

In 2004, the internet was just getting started in a major league way, and already the choice overload was a problem. I would say that from the modern perspective, 2004 seems like the 18th century, and as near as I can tell, all of these changes, every single one of them has made the problem substantially worse. The idea that you can get information to help guide you through - well, yeah, but what information do you believe? What's trustworthy? What's being motivated by an opportunity to sell you something? So there is a haze, there is this fog that we're operating in. And I think we just sort of give up in resignation and look at recommendations and hope that they're legitimate because how else do you get through the day?

IAN ROBERTSON - Author of How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-belief - Co-Director of the Global Brain Health Institute

IAN ROBERTSON - Author of How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-belief - Co-Director of the Global Brain Health Institute

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Author of How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-belief
Co-Director of the Global Brain Health Institute · Co-Leader of The BrainHealth Project

The book probes the science and neuroscience behind the idea that confidence can be learned, or whether it is something you inherit. Optimism, hope, and self-esteem are all concepts that are easily confused with confidence. But, as I show, they differ in one fundamental way - confidence empowers action. You can be an optimist who is hopeful that things will work out okay in the end without ever believing that you can play a part in that outcome, or indeed have any realistic grounds for that optimism. And you can have high self-esteem and feel good about yourself without feeling confident that you can achieve a particular goal.

HENRIK FEXEUS - Mentalist, Author & TV Host “The Art of Reading Minds”,“Mind Melt”,“Cult”

HENRIK FEXEUS - Mentalist, Author & TV Host “The Art of Reading Minds”,“Mind Melt”,“Cult”

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Mentalist, Internationally Bestselling Author & TV Host
The Art of Reading Minds · Mind Storm · Cult · BOX

A mentalist is a kind of magician, an illusionist. And a mentalist uses whatever techniques are at that person's disposal to create the illusion of being able to read minds or being able to contact a supernatural presence…The only rule is that that part is fake, but then you can use techniques for magic or from stagecraft or from psychology. A mentalist is really someone who creates this illusion of having an almost supernatural ability. Having said that, today a mentalist sort of has come to mean something else, mainly due to popular culture TV series like The Mentalist and so on. And now there's this understanding of a mentalist as someone being able to read body language and influence behavior. It sort of ties into it all. And I've had a lifelong passion for magic, and it started when I was seven. Because I was always interested in the question: what if there's a color in the sky that we can't see? What if a handkerchief actually can vanish? What does that mean in terms of how the world works?

BROCK BASTIAN - Author of The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living

BROCK BASTIAN - Author of The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living

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Author of The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living
Professor at University of Melbourne’s School of Psychological Sciences

In today's world, feeling happy is no longer simply a state of mind. It's become a marker of mental health and success. On the flip side, pain and sadness are viewed as signals of failure and sickness. If we're not happy, then there is something wrong with us, and we need to fix it. It is no wonder that the painkiller and antidepressant markets, already worth billions of dollars, continue their rapid expansion. We've come to treat even commonplace experiences of pain and sadness as pathological, as things that need to be medicated and eradicated.

ANNA ABRAHAM - Author of “The Neuroscience of Creativity” - Director of Torrance Center for Creativity & Talent Development

ANNA ABRAHAM - Author of “The Neuroscience of Creativity” - Director of Torrance Center for Creativity & Talent Development

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Author of The Neuroscience of Creativity
Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity & Talent Development, University of Georgia

I love podcasts and things like that, if only to listen to people who've done incredible things. We live in a kind of unusual time where we can hear firsthand people talking about their own experiences, and what they went through when they were creating something. And while artists differ greatly from one another in terms of the specifics of their process, what certainly seems to be the case is that they're extraordinarily interested in their own mind, and they have what we would call a metacognitive awareness. They know almost quite precisely, at least what doesn't work for them. They're very cued into what to avoid and how to sort of generate the mental conditions that are necessary in order to be as generative or as creative as they're likely to be in a specific situation. So that is a deep medical awareness that they have about their own process that is really quite something. They know themselves very well.

Todd Kashdan - Award-winning Author of The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively

Todd Kashdan - Award-winning Author of The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively

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APA Award-winning Author of The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively
Curious? · The Upside of Your Dark Side
Leading Authority on Well-being, Curiosity, Courage & Resilience

We're really talking about principled rebels. And when we talk about insubordination, we're talking about most of us live in these social hierarchies, and there's the idea, this started in the military and still goes on, where if someone at a lower rank questions or challenges a command or a norm that someone of a higher rank, that's considered an act of insubordination. And one of the main problems of that, I think anyone who's listening can acknowledge, is it depends on the quality of the idea of the person who's raising the question. I just realized there was this whole body of literature on minority influence that no one had put together into a book for the general public, and considering the racial reckoning that occurred during COVID-19, the extra attention to diversity, to disadvantaged groups, every moment of society, it just feels like it's more and more relevant of what I've been working on.

Philip Fernbach - Co-author of “The Knowledge Illusion” - Cognitive Scientist - Co-Director of Ctr. for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making

Philip Fernbach - Co-author of “The Knowledge Illusion” - Cognitive Scientist - Co-Director of Ctr. for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making

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Co-author of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone
Cognitive Scientist · Co-Director of Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making, CU Boulder

The human mind is both genius and pathetic, brilliant and idiotic. People are capable of the most remarkable feats, achievements that defy the gods. We went from discovering the atomic nucleus in 1911 to megaton nuclear weapons in just over forty years. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and developed genetically modified tomatoes. And yet we are equally capable of the most remarkable demonstrations of hubris and foolhardiness. Each of us is error-prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant… How is it that people can simultaneously bowl us over with their ingenuity and disappoint us with their ignorance? How have we mastered so much despite how limited our understanding often is?

Lars Chittka - Author of "The Mind of a Bee” - Founder, Research Centre for Psychology, QMUL

Lars Chittka - Author of "The Mind of a Bee” - Founder, Research Centre for Psychology, QMUL

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Author of The Mind of a Bee
Founder of the Research Centre for Psychology, Queen Mary University of London

The world of bees is under threat, and that is not because bees are singled out, but because bees live in the environment that we all share and they are a kind of a canary in the coal mine for what's going on more largely in destroying our environment. And in a sense they are, I think, a useful sort of mascot and icon to highlight these troubles, but they are only a signpost of other things that are also under threat. We need the bee for our own food because they pollinate our crops, and they pollinate the flowers that we enjoy, but I think their utility for us is not the only reason to support them and their environment. I think the growing appreciation that the world that surrounds us is full of sophisticated and unique minds places on us a kind of onus and obligation to preserve the diversity of these minds that are out there and make sure that they continue to thrive.

Donald Hoffman - Prof. of Cognitive Sciences, UC Irvine - Author of “The case against reality”

Donald Hoffman - Prof. of Cognitive Sciences, UC Irvine - Author of “The case against reality”

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Professor of Cognitive Sciences, UC Irvine
Author of The case against reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes

This is really what life, I think, is about - learning to not believe your thoughts. Watch your thoughts, see their patterns and learn that you are not at the whim and beck and call of your thoughts. You can watch your thoughts, and you can choose to let go of thoughts and just be present and let go of the complaints. And that then opens up a level of creativity that's surprising. It could be in dance, science, it could be in music, or art. Wherever you have creative expression, letting go of thought and having this balance between thinking and no thinking, going into complete silence and then pulling ideas back for your art, your science, your dance, whatever it might be, is really the dance of life.