Optimizing Workspace for Productivity, Focus, & Creativity
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and i'm a professor of neurology, gy, and opened ology at stanford school of medicine. Today, we're going to talk all about how to optimize your workspace for maximum productivity.

Indeed, that means to heightened levels of focus, to increase levels of creativity, to improve your ability to task sq. And this could be for sake of school or for work, creative endeavors, personal endeavors. This really extends to everybody. Most often, when we hear about how to focus or how to get the most out of our work sessions, we hear about the biology in the psychology of that, we hear about dopamine and we hear about serotonin, and we hear about caffeine. And indeed, those are topics that i've covered a lot on the huberman lab podcast today.

We will touch on each of those, but we are mainly going to focus on how we arrange our physical environment and indeed, how we arrange ourselves in that physical environment in order to bring out the best in our neurobiology, that is, how to put ourselves into a heightened data focus by virtue of things as simple as where we place our screen relative to our eyes at a given time of day. Believe there are not. There's excEllent research on this.

And there's excEllent research, for instance, on whether not you shouter should not listen to music, whether or not you should use things like by oral beats. And if so, what frequency of by naral beats, we are going to cover all of that. And by the end, you will have a checklist of things that you can do to optimize your workspace on any budget.

I will mention various products and apps that some of you might find useful for optimizing your workspace. But I want to emphasize that the outset that none of those that I mention are any products or apps that we have a financial relationship to. And more importantly, you don't need them.

I'm going to explain how, for zero cost, you can arrange your workspace in ways that makes you maximum productive, maximum ally focus and allows you to adapt your workspace to different environments, whether not you're travelling, working with others, working alone eeta. Just to give you a little hint to where we are going, I will mention a zero cost APP that will deliver by oral beats at a particular frequency that peer reviewed research has shown can enhance certain types of learning and memory. However, peer reviewed research also shows that IT can diminish performance in other types of tasks, so stay tuned will go into all the details so that you can optimize your work space for zero costs and get the most out of your efforts and endeavors.

Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

Our first sponsor is athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is in all in one of vitamin mineral probiotic c drink. I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that they're sponsor. And in the podcast, the reason I started taking athletic Greens and the reason I still take athletic Greens once or twice a day is that IT helps me cover all of my basic nutritional need to make up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, IT has probiotics, which are vital for microbial on health.

I've done a couple of episodes now on the so called gut microbiome, and the ways in which the microbiome interacts with your immune system, with your brain to regulate mood, and essentially with every biological system relevant to health throughout your brain and body. With related Greens, I get the vitals I need, the minerals I need and the probiotic to support my microbes. If you'd like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dotcom flash huberman and claim a special offer.

They will give you five free travel packs plus a year. Supply of vitamin d 3k two are ton of data now showing that vitamin three is essential for various aspects of our brain and body health， even if we're getting a lot of sunshine, many of us are still deficient in vitamin d three. And k two is also important because IT regulates things like vaasa lar function, calcium in the body and so on.

Again, go to athletes ens dot com slag huberman in to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin 3k two。 Today's episode is also brought to us by element. Element is an electoral light drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't.

That means the exact ratio of electrolier ts are an element and those are sodium, magnesium and plastic um but IT has no sugar. I talk many times before in this podcast about the key role of hydration and electoral lights for nerve cell function, neuron function, as well as the function of all the cells and all the tissues in organ systems of the body. If we have sodium anisim in plastic and present in the proper ratio, all of those cells functioned properly in all our bodily systems can be optimized.

If the electronics are not present and a hydration is low, we simply can't think as well as we would otherwise. Our mood is off, hormonal systems go off. Our ability to get in a physical action, to engage in endurance and strength and all sorts of other things is diminished.

So with element, you can make sure that you're staying on top of your hydration and that you're getting proper ratio of electoral lights. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element that's element dot com slash huberman and you'll get a free element sample pack with your purchase. They're all delicious.

So again, if you want to try element, you can go to element. Element t dotcom slash huberman. Today's episode has also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga eda sessions and nsd r non sleep depressed protocols.

I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens, and I started doing yoga eja about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations. And they had a lot of different types of meditations to place, to bring your body into different states, and that he liked IT very much. So I gave the waking up up a try, and I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have few minutes to meditate.

Other times I have ongoing to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up up has lots of different types of yoga eda sessions.

Those who you don't know, yogananda is a process of lying very still, but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations. And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yoga ea, and something similar to IT called non sleep deep breath or nsd r, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy, even which is a short ten minute session.

If you'd like to try the waking up up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial. Again, that's waking up dot com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial. Let's talk about workspace optimization.

This is a topic that intrigued me for a very long time because my undergraduate advisor, my graduate advisor and my postdoc advisor had many things in common, including being great scientists, being kind people in traffic mentors. But they had another thing in common which always perplex me, which is that their offices were a complete disaster. They had mountains of books, mountains of papers, mountains of all sorts of stuff.

And yet all of them were extremely productive and could remain extremely focused in that incredibly cluttered environment. Now i'm somebody who doesn't like clutters. I find a very hard to focus in clutter environment. And indeed, there's tremendous variation among people as to whether not they can remain focus or whether not they struck to focus in physically cluttered environments.

There's no right wrong to this, but the question we should ask ourselves is, why were they all able to be so focused? And IT turns out that the reason they were able to be so focused is that they all captured one single and yet fundamental variable of watch space optimization. And we'll talk about what that variable is.

In fact, we to talk about what all the variables of optimism zing a workplace, things like vision, things like light, things like noise in the room, whether not you listen to music or not, whether you use noise cancelling headphones or not, we're going to talk about all of that. And we're going to do that in a way that you can optimize your workspace regardless of whether not you are at home, whether you're on the road at sea. Because the last thing I would ever want to do is to create a situation where you find the optimal workspace and then you were a slave to that optimal workspace.

That's just not the way the world works. What you want to do, where my goal for you, rather, is that you will have a short checklist of things that you can look to any time you sit down to your work. And you can think about the underlying variables that impact your brain in your body and allow your brain and body to get into the optimal state in order to learn, in order to be productive.

And you need to move through your workout in a very relaxed and pleasure for way while maintaining focus and while pursuing any of the number of things that you're doing. The first variable we want to think about in terms of workspace optimization is vision and light. Now on a previous episode of the human in land pocket devoted all to habits, I talked about the importance of dividing your twenty four hour day into three different faces.

And for those you that haven't heard that episode, i'm just going to briefly summarize what I described from the time you wake up in the morning until about six or seven or eight, sometimes nine hours later, your brain is in a unique state. IT is in a state of high levels of doping, a modulator in high levels of epinephrine. Well, as hormones like court is all and so forth, without going to the biology of those things, they set your brain into a state of high alertness.

And this is true whether or not you indulgin caffeine or not. I know some of you say, oh, I really don't wake up until the afternoon and much more alert, focused in the afternoon. We will talk about that phase of the twenty four our day in a moment.

But that early part of the day is a time of day in which, for sake of workspace optimization. Being in a brightly lit environment can lend itself to optimal work throughout the day, not just drain that early phase and so well. On many episodes this podcast, i've also emphasize the importance of getting morning sunlight in your eyes within thirty to sixty minutes of waking, not as often.

But now, again, I will also mention that is important to light your daytime environment as brightly as you safely can. So if you are going to be doing work in this early, what I call phase one portion of your day, you want to have as much light, and indeed as much overhead light shining on you as safely possible. And of course, you don't want to so bright that it's glaring and you have to squint at sara, but you want as much light as as safely possible.

And you can do that a couple of simple ways. One is, if you do on or you're in, in an environment, we have overhead lights. Turn on those overhead lights.

What special about overhead lights for setting alertness is that the neurons in our eyes, which are called melon ops in gangs, name melon ops in gangland cells, are mainly enriched in the lower half of our redness in our eyes and view the upper visual field. Those neurons send little wires to an area of hypothenuse right above roof, our mouth, that creates a state of alertness. Now, early in the day, we want to be as alert as possible.

And this phase one of our circadian cycle is when we are best at doing analytic detail type work. So we're going to go to other aspects of workplace optimization that are important for phase one. But during phase one, again, within zero, about eight or nine hours after waking, bright lights in your environment, in particular, overhead lights are going to facilitate they're going to facilitate further release of things like dobin and north and american and healthy amounts of court is all.

And we want that to happen early in the day for a variety of reasons. For instance, we don't want that court is all peek to happen too late in the day that actually associated depression and insomnia and a number of things that we just don't want. So one of the things that i've done for my workspace is to make sure that when I wake up in the morning, I do go get my sunlight.

If the sun is in out, I turn on as many bright artificial lights as I can manager tolerate, and then I go get my sunlight exposure. But once I set out to do some work that all the overhead ad lights in that rumor on, as well as lights in front of me, and that, again, to stimulate heightened levels of focus and further release of these Normative layer dimension before dopamine nor in and appeared. Now the way that one could do that could be a very low cost way of having princess a desk clamp in those overhead lights.

If you're somebody that wants to take this to the next level, you can purchase a ring light, which is, I think those are mainly made for people doing cells. I type videos in instagram, post and things of that sort. Ring light can be pretty cost effective and you yet they're very bright and they have the sort of bright blue light that is going to optimates stimulates melon ops and gang england cells.

So some people I know will have a blue light or a bright elite on their desk in front of them. And indeed, I have one of these. I don't use a in light.

I use a light pad, though, particularly light pad. I use a boat on amazon. I can mention the brand, but again, I have no financial filling ation to them.

This is the artois PH light pad is designed for for drawing. And IT says on at nine hundred and thirty locks. Locks is just a measure of brightness.

So I placed on the desk in front of me and I turned IT on essentially throughout this phase. One of the day, even if I walk away from the desk, I tend to keep IT on. IT doesn't consume that mechanic gy.

And in that way, i'm constantly being bombed with photons that keep my levels of alertness up. Because the early part of the day is when I do the majority of that focused work, again, you don't need the light pad. You can use a ring light or you can simply use any kind of other lights that you might happen to have artificial lights.

For those of you that can place your desk near a window, and even Better to open the window, that would be really fantastic. I don't have access to that. Why would I say open the window? Well, IT turns out that sunlight is going to be the best stimulus for waking up your brain and body through this melon ops into hyper file in the system.

And by looking at sunlight through a window, it's fifty, five, zero times less effective than if that window were to be open, mostly because those windows filter out a lot of the weight lanes of blue light that are essential for stimulating the eyes and this wake up signal. So all of this is rest on the premise that we need to be alert in order to do our work, in particular, focused work. And i've talked about before in the habits episode, and i'm saying again now the first phase of the day, that first seven or eight or nine hours of the day, is really the time in which our neurochemistry is primed for getting the most amount of focused, kind of chAllenging worked done, where a lot of precision in detail is required.

So you want to brightly light your work environment during that first phase, again, from the time you wake up trying get sunlight. But then even if you're going to get exercises to do other things, you want to get as much bright light in your eyes as you safely can. Then you want to light your work environment now in the afternoon, and starting at about nine and continuing until about sixteen hours after week, you want to start timing the lights in that environment.

Now you don't want to make IT dark because you don't want to get sleepy at two o'clock in the afternoon unless you're going to take a brief in APP, which I do, and is perfectly fine as long as IT doesn't interfere with your nighttime sleep. But the idea is, is that in this so called phase two of the twenty four hour cycle, from about nine to sixteen hours after waking, you want to bring the level of lights down a bit. And when I say down, I literally mean down.

Having lights that are in front of you is fine, but overhead lights at that time are not going to be optimal for the sorts of neurochemical states that your brain wants to be in. The states that i'm referring to are shift from the dopamine and north p and american that's highest early in the day to increases in things like serotonin and other neutral modulators that put your brain into a state that's Better for creative endeavors or for more abstract thinking. Now as well soon see, there are other things you can do to improve creative thinking and abstract thinking.

And in fact, there are things you can do to improve analytic thing. We will talk about those things that are distinct from light, but right now, we're just focusing on light. What I recommend doing and what I personally do is I will turn off over headlights in the afternoon.

It's not completely dim, it's not completely dark, but I will start to reduce the amount of overhead light and just simply keep the light pad on and whatever other lamps I happen to be using. Now one thing we haven't talked about is screen brightness. This is highly individual.

People have different retina sensitivities. What I mean by that is everybody differs in terms of how bright they can tolerate their visual environment in their screen. And whether not you are sensitive to light or not will depend on a lot of factors.

Some of IT as eyes color, indeed, people with darker color, eyes generally can tolerate more bright light than others. I have Green ized. I am very, very sensitive to light. If i'm outdoors at a cafe or something in the table has any kind of reflective properties and its a Sunny day, I can barely see the person across the table for me unless i'm wearing sunglasses.

Some people, other members of my family, for instance, have dark Brown eyes, and you just sit there and have a conversation without the need for sunglasses at all so that there's tremendous variation there. One or the other isn't healthy or advantages and necessarily just understand that you never want to be in an environment where it's painful to maintain. Looking at whatever is that you're looking at.

If something's painful to look at, IT could be damaging to your eyes. So you do want to protect your eyes. Now in this second phase of the day, since most of us are working indoors, but even if you're working outdoors, you want to try and get the amount of light reduced overall, but in partial, the overhead light, and you also want to start reducing the amount of blue light that you're being exposed to.

So somewhere around four, five P M, which for me is, you know about twelve hours after i've been awake, or fortune hours after i've been awake, I will turn off that light pad and start to transition the lights in my environment to more yellows and reds. I can't always do this. I have friends that actually have converted their entire homes from blue light early in the day to red light late in the day.

That's really cool and fantastic. I haven't done that. And there's a cost of doing that.

And IT is optimal in terms of optimize zing productivity and sleep and so forth. But it's not feasible for a lot of people. But what I do is I simply switched to using yellow lamps.

I will turn off that L D in the later afternoon, again, around four, five pm. And I tend to wake up around six A, M or so. I'll turn those off.

And what i'll try to do also is are trying dim the screen that i'm working on so that I can still managed to see everything that I need to see. But it's quite a bit dimmer than IT was early in the day. So that's face two of the day, and that's how we want to think about.

And then i'll just mentioned because I know there are people who are working in middle the night. There's face three, which is about seventeen to twenty four hours after weaken. And I realized that for shift workers are for people that are pulling all nighters are for students.

Often times you need to be awake in studying in the midnight. I myself, in somebody who for years would pull anywhere from five to ten all night ters per year. I still pull in all nighter now, again, because of deadlines.

And so worth, I don't recommend IT if you can avoid IT. great. But many people just simply have to do this for sk or shift work, or because of impending deadlines or procrastination or all of the above, if you are going to be doing work.

In that third phase of your circadian cycle, you really want to limit the amount of bright light that you're getting in your eyes to just the amount that allows you to do the work that you're doing. Because if you get light in your eyes that's any brighter than that, you're going to severely deplete your military and levels. You're going to severely shift your circuit in clock, and it's effectively like traveling to another time zone.

So if you stay up from three am until six A M or two am until four A M, working on a term paper or something of that sort, you're getting bright light in your eyes. You are effectively flying six hours to a different time zone. At least that's what your body registered IT is.

And I can really throw your sleep in your metabolism in a number of other things out of wac. Now there's an exception to this, which is, if you really want to be awake, IT can often be beneficial, al, to flipping on all the lights in the room and keeping them really bright. One of the hardest things to do is to stay up all night studying when you're in a dim environment.

So you have to determine the trade off between whether not you want to shift your clock or whether not you want to get the work done. And I would say the ideal situation is to sleep at night and to do your work during the day and in the afternoon. But if you do have to be awake in the midnight, you understand that you want to dim those lights.

Overall, you would not want to use that. L, D, you would not want to have overheads lights on unless you're really strugling to stay awake, in which case you want to get as many bright lights on as possible. So there are a couple tricks, all nighters.

I don't really want people pulling all nightdress unless they have to. But there are a few things that you can do without taking stimulants in order to stay up all night that can be beneficial, that maximize on your biology. One of them that a little less a commonly known, is you can drink thirty two ounces of water and commit to not going to the bathroom for ninety minutes at least.

Turns out that there is a circuit that goes from your blood, literally, neurons, that go from your bladder to your brain stem. And when you have to urinate, IT makes you very alert. As many of you have probably experience, this is actually what wakes up in middle the night when we have to use the bathroom is the circuit for alertness that goes from full batter.

It's signal by the bladder being full to the brain stem. And this is the circuit that is disrupted in kids that have bedwetting ding issues. And there are a number of coding of behavioral approaches to that.

Sometimes bedwetting ding in very Young kids is because the circuit hasn't developed yet. Most adults, fortunately or not bad wedding, but you can increase the amount of alertness in your system and remain wake in the middle night by drinking a little bit more water than a you Normally, woods. And then we're frain from going to the restaurant.

That certainly will lend itself to alertness. You know how a difficult that is to fall asleep when you have to use the restaurant, for instance. So that's one to all.

The other thing is, again, to flip on as many bright lights in the environment is possible. And then, of course, people will rely on stimulants like caffeine or even more aggressive stimulus. That's not something I necessarily recommend you, I chef, to determine that for you.

But if you do, in fact, have to use all nighters for any reason, you can maximize ze this batter to brain approach and the bright light approach. Okay, so that more less covers how bright to keep your overall environment and how bright to keep your screen. If you really want to get nerdy about this, there is a free APP called light meter, where you can start measuring how many locks, how many photons are in a given environment.

It's actually measuring reflective ts of photons and so on. If you can look up what a lux meter does, if you like, I don't necessarily recommend doing that. I I don't want to set a critical thresh by which you know, for instance, we say once your environment is more than fifteen hundred locks than its too brighter, not bright enough, it's said everyone is different reti sensitivities.

Everyone will find that different levels of brightness will cause them to be alert. Different levels of dimness, if you will, in the room, will cause them to feel sleepy. You really wanted just modulate across the twenty four hour cycle where it's very bright as bis safely can be early in the day so that you are alert.

You can do your focus, detailed work in that first phase and then in the afternoon, as you move in to more creative types, works or abstract thinking or working with other people in kind of a brainstorming mode that you would shift to demolish ts yellow lights, eliminate the blue ghz as much as possible. Now that's light. But there's another aspect of vision that has been shown to be critically important for how alert we are going to be and how well we can maintain that alertness.

And that has to do with where our visual focus is in a given environment. So not about overall brightness. What i'm referring to now is simply where you place your phone or your tablet or computer screen or book, whatever is that you happen to be looking at.

There's a very underappreciated and yet incredible aspect of our neurology that has to do with the relationship between where we look at our level of alertness and IT works in a very logical way. We have clusters of neurons in our brain stem, and those clusters of neurons control our eyelid muscles and they control our eye movements up and down into the sides. And indeed, if you were to look at an eyeball, a lot of eyeballs in my lab, my teaching or anatomy.

So we do this from time to time. We would see that there are six muscles attached to your I ball now, four of them are located at the top of the bottom in the two sides of your eyeball. So that day, twelve o'clock, six o'clock, three o'clock and nine o'clock of your eyeball, and those muscles can move your eye in the socket from side to decide to and up and down.

And then we also have some muscles that can actually pull the eyeballs at angles. okay? So there is, we have different muscles that can move the eyes at different angles as well. That's why we can look up into the sider, down into the side, not just from side decider, up or down.

Now the neurons that control those muscles have a very interesting feature, which is that when we are looking down toward the ground or anywhere below, basically the the central region of our face, the neurons that control that eye movement are intimately related to areas of the brain stem that released certain types of modulators in neurotransmitters, ors. And they activate areas of the brain that are associated with calm, and indeed even with sleepiness. And there's an active inhibition or prevention of neurons, the increased alertness.

Now the opposite is also true. We have neurons that place our eyes into an upward gaze above the sort level of our nose and up above our forehead, literally looking up while keeping the head stationary. Or if you told your head back and you look up, these neurons are still active.

Those neurons don't just control the position of the eyes and caused them to move up. They also trigger the activation of brain circuits that are associated with alertness. Now this is a fundamental feature of the way that our eyes and brain are wired together and how they relate to what we call automation ic rosal.

And there are bunch of details that we will actually have a guest in a few weeks who has learned to exploit these neurons in the fact that they control these different states of calm or ert ness, in order to generate hiphop states to place people into very eight typical states in which they are both very alert and very calm. Save that for a future episode. But the important thing to understand is when you are looking down below the level of your nose, you are essentially decelerating your alerts.

You're reducing your amount of alertness. IT might be subbed, but it's happening where as when you look straight head, or in particular when you look up, you are increasing your level of alertness. Now this has some obvious implications.

When we get sleepy, our allies tend to cloth and we tend to not down. When we're wide awake, we tend to be wide eed. We don't tend to blink is often, and we tend to be chin up and kind of on violence and alertness. So this has an evolutionary, or at least an adaptive component to IT. This can be exploited, and indeed, it's been researched in terms of how I can be used to optimize work environments, contrary to what most people do, which is to look down at their laptop, tablet or phone.

If you want to be alert and you want to maintain the maximum amount of focus for whatever is that you're reading are doing, you want that screen or whatever is that you're looking at to at least be at eye level and ideally slightly above IT. Now I haven't seen many workspaces that take advantage of this very hardwired neurobiological fact. So what should you do with this information? Well, if you're somebody who sits down to do you work and start to feel sleepy or simply unfocused, unable to attend to whatever is that you're doing, I highly recommend that you take your laptop or tablet.

I do hope that most people aren't doing serious work on their phones because it's such a small visual window. We can talk about why that's an issue later. And the idea would be to place that screen of your tablet or your laptop or other computer and try and get IT elevated at least to nose level, your nose level, or even higher.

I realized that can be complicated to do. I've long just used a stack of books or all, sometimes take a box and turn upside down and set IT there. I do use a mix, standing, seated desktop k about that in a few minutes.

There are number different ways that you could do this. You could wall, mount a monitor. I think many people are working with laptops is a little bit harder to to do that with a laptop.

Some people, though, will configure a second screen. You have to decide what's right for you in your budget. But again, in addition, having a brightly little room to be able to focus and attend to whatever is you're working on, you want to have that screen position high in your visual environment.

Now you wouldn't want IT on the ceiling necessarily. All that would be pretty cool you, but you do want to above you. Now there are couple solutions to this that don't involve a wall mount or stacking books or boxes, for instance.

You could be one of those people that likes to lie in bed or on the sofa and get your screen up above you by putting pillows on your knees. I used to actually do a lot of my writing and work in the middle the night. I don't do this anymore.

I don't recommend IT, but I used to do a lot of work from bed. Now I no longer bring electronics for work into the bedroom. I just really trying to keep the bedroom for sleeping or whatever else.

But in terms of lying down on the couch, IT is somewhat easier to get that screen up above. You can have to slide into that screen and get typing. But there's a problem with that.

And we'll talk about this a little bit more in a moment. But IT turns out that you are posture, literally, the position of your body relative to gravity also has important implications for how alert you are. So ideally you would be standing or seated.

I would say the idea would be standing. Second best would be seated, and your screen will be either directly in front of you or slightly above you. Or if you wanted to get really fancy, you could create a situation where IT was above you and slightly tilted ted toward you, that you actually had to maintain kind of proper neck posture.

This accomplishes the number of things. In addition to making you more alert, you will also get away from the so called text neck. You know, people are starting to look more like seas, and now is the shape of the letter sea, because we're constantly looking down.

I do everyone's anywhere. I sees somebody who's texting in public with IT at eye level. IT always looks a little odd that they're doing that, but I always admire their posture at the same time, so we shouldn't give them a hard time. So this is another feature that you can arrange into your physical workspace again, whether or not you're seated or or you're standing throughout the day trying get that screen elevated.

Now with reference to posture, they're beautiful data illustrating that when we are standing up those same neurons in our brain stem lock rulest neurons, which release, I should mention, things like no up and f an and up, and those neurons become active. When we are standing, they become even more active. When we are ambulatory.

When we are moving, and we will talk about tread milling and cycling at your desk and so forth and a little bit, but when you sit, they become a little less active. And when you lie down, and indeed, any time that you start to get your feet up above your waste or your head tilted back, those neurons fire less, and neurons in your brain that are involved in coming and indeed putting you to a sleep, start increasing their level of fire. It's a really beautiful system.

So beautiful, in fact, that there are studies that show that as you adjust the angle of the body back, you actually get a sort of dose dependent increase in sleeping ess and commonness, and IT does dependent decrease in alertness. And so as we were all told to sit up straight, or even Better, to stand up straight, and now i'm also telling you to get that visual thing that you're attending to the screen or otherwise up in front of you or ideally above you, those things combine to generate maximum alertness. So you can think about how you might work this in various aspects of your homework environment or office work environment.

But as I described this, many of you are probably thinking what I think, which is cash, most of what we do is in complete opposite direction to all of this new biologically grounded advice. Most of us are looking down at our laptop while seated, or we are lying down, which is going to make us more sleepy, or we are positioning our computers in front of us. But we really aren't environment that's bright enough and so on and so forth.

So as you can tell, we're trying to layer in the various things that you can do. First, brightness in the room. Second, get that screen up and trying put yourself into a posture for work that lends itself or promote alertness.

If indeed you want to be alert for that work, if you goal is to take a nap, get your feet elevated about ten to fifteen degrees above your head, may be put pillow into any that lie down and take a nap. But that's not what we're talking about today. We're talking about workspace optimization.

And I suppose you could also exploit that. All nighter trick that i'd talked about earlier actually did this when I was an undergraduate, was a little bit massacre stic. In this way, I would drink coffee and water at fairly high volume.

I wasn't force drinking or anything like that, but I actually wouldn't allow myself to get up and use the bathroom except on a timer. So I think that long as ever went three and a half hours IT was kind of extreme, actually. Don't think that in a silly healthy advice, but again, you can use slight, I imagine, slide over consumption of fluids in order generate alertness.

That was just me really trying to get as much work done as I could. I had a very, very demanding class schedule, and IT was just the only way that I could get work done if I was getting up every few minutes, use the restaurant. I found IT hard to reengage in that work and maintain focus, which is what I just want to briefly mention.

now. I talked about this in the episode on focus, but one thing that is completely unreasonable and that you should never ask yourself to do is to sit down or stand up and immediately focus on something unless you are stressed about what you're looking at or you're very, very excited by IT. If you're very stressed about some sort of information or a deadline or you're very, very excited about something, you will find that you can focus instantly just within a moment.

And that's because of the deployment of neurochemicals like dopamine in in order and everything that bring about our levels alertness. However, most of us, including myself, will go to begin to work out, and we'll find that our mind doesn't quite engage at the level of depth and focus that we would like red off about. I've timeless, and other studies have timeless in a more rigorous way.

Mind is just what we call anecdo. But so I time to for myself, but their studies that have looked at this and the data point to the fact that even that are most heightened levels of focus, most people can only maintain focus before switching tasks for about three minutes, which is depressingly short period of time. However, you can extend that period of time.

And i've talked about that in the episode on focus. But more importantly, when you sit down to start a workout of any kind, any kind, expect that you would take about six minutes for you to engage these neural circuits, wouldn't expect yourself to walk into the gym and do A P, R. Left, or start running and do your best spring, or just head out the door without warming up at all.

You a little walk, jog at first, or you a few warm upsets. I mean that we expect that we we are not surprised that we need that. And yet, we sort of expect that our brain should be able to lock on and do work in a very focused way immediately.

And that's just a ridiculous assumption, is not fair assumption, I should say. So assume that you will take about six minutes to engage in your workout and that those newer chemical systems will take some time to rev up and and engage the other things that I am describing about lighting and screen positioning and posture. Those will also help maximize your focus and will limit that ramp up time into a focus state. And I think what you'll find is that as you maximize your workspace, the time the latency is, we say to get into that focus will start to shorten IT, especially starts a shorting.

If you use tools to limit distraction, we will talk about distraction, but things like freedom, which is an an apa free APP that allows you to lock yourself out of the internet or turning off your phone, for instance, or but even if you're doing work on your phone or that involves your phone or the internet, as many of us, including myself, do expect there to be a ramp up time for you to focus. There's another aspect of our vision that's absolutely critical for optimizing our workspace. And they asked to do with this really interesting feature of our visual pathways in that IT has two major channels.

Those two major channels have names, although you don't after remember the names. The first one is the so called parvo cellular channel, which is involved in looking at things at specific points in space and at high resolution or detail. And then there's this so called magnet lr channel that's involved in looking at big swifts of visual space and at lower resolution.

So you can think of a parvo seller system as kind of a high pixel density, think about your most modern smartphone, the recent smart phone with the best, best camera, and think about the magellan system as being lower resolution, kind of an older smartphone, lower pixel at at a. You might ask, why would you want a system that's low resolution? Well, the low resolution system is Better at things like detecting motion, and not so much at detail, and vice versa.

Again, you don't have to remember the names. What you do have to remember, however, is that you're going to create the maximum amount of alertness in your system, the maximum t of ability to focus when your system is in that parvo cellular mode, when you're bringing your eyes to a common point, what we call a virgins I movement, V E R G E N C E. I ve said this before in the podcast, and people said a virgin I movement, no vergine I movement.

As in convergence, bringing your eyes to a single point in space will create a narrower capture of a visual window, meaning your visual world actually shrinks, at least perceptually. We're as when you relax your eyes and dilute your gays, you can do this now by whatever environ you're in trying to see without moving your head off the side above, below you as broadly as possible. Maybe you can dilate your guys so much.

You can see yourself, your body in that visual environment. You'll notice that your resolution of vision isn't nearly as eyes. When you do that virgin side movement, virgin eye movements are incredibly powerful for creating heightened states of alertness and focus, and indeed, they create heightened states of cognition of thinking.

And that's because your brain follows your vision in terms of focus. When we say I can't focus, what we often our experiences is inability and inability, excuse me, to not focus visually where as when we are in a very focus state. We are in a state often where we can focus visually.

Now we can also do this with our auditory system or to torch IT that. But right now we're just talking about the visual system. Now in terms of workspace optimization, what this means is we never really want to be looking at a square or rectangle or target area for our work that is too far beyond our ears.

How far is too far? really? You want to try and keep the blinders on, or I should say, the invisible blinders, so that whatever they're looking at, false within the region of visual space in front of you, that is present if you were to cup your hands and put them right next to your eyes.

Now this is a rough estimation, but i'm doing this now for those of you they are watching on youtube. I'm doing this now. I'm trying to simulate like a horse with blinders on. For those who are listening, just imagine me looking silly with my hands cut near my eyes.

But if we are to, for instance, look at a screen that's very, very big and we're too close to IT or even if for standing back from IT, it's going to be hard for us to attend to everything within that screen space. So this is actually support for the idea of using a phone or a tablet or a laptop. My laptop is about fifteen inches in diameter, I think, is the one that I have.

Some are thirteen, some are seventeen. Some of you like to use big monitors, make sure that whatever is that you're looking at, if you want to remain focus IT doesn't extend too far beyond where your eyes are, the size of your head, that is. So just think blinders on a horse.

And actually that's the reason they put the linders on a horse so that they are not looking off into the prophet. Horses, unlike humans, don't have the same shaped people. They don't have a visual system that organizing quite the same way.

They mostly see in panorama, in magno solar vision. And so those blinders are designed to keep their visual focus strait ahead. So they physically restrict IT.

Now some people will actually go to length to further restrict their visual focus. They will do things like putting on a hoody or wearing a hat, for instance, to restrict their visual window. And indeed, that works quite well.

But as we'll talk about in a moment, when you really restrict your visual window down to a very, very narrow portion of visual space, that actually changes the types of information that you are best at processing. And we'll talk about that in terms of something that's called the cathedral effect in a few moments. But for now, here's the principal.

Make sure that whatever you're looking at is directly in front of you and doesn't extend too far out to the side. Once you get out to say six or twelve or certainly eighteen inches on either side of your eyes, you are dilating your gaze. By definition, you're dilatation your gaze. It's completely so conscious and IT becomes very hard to maintain attention.

Now the covet to this is that if you are going to look at a narrow space, a narrow window for any period of time, whether not it's a book or a laptop or a tablet or a phone, those virgins eye movements not only create alertness, but they also require energy, and they also can fatigue the eyes, because there's a process called accommodation weren. The shape of your eye literally has to change so that the lens can move, that you can focus to that location. Accommodation is incredible process, but IT is a demanding one.

And that's the reason that your eyes get tired when you focus on something for too long. So here's a principal extracted from the open ology in neuroscience literature that you can adopt for every forty five minutes, in which you are focusing on something like a phone or a tablet or a book page or your computer. You want to get into magnet lr panama vision for at least five minutes.

And the way that I suggest to do this is actually to take a walk, ideally outside, we're going to talk about ambulation, about movement, about how that can maintain alertness throughout the day. So for every forty five minutes or so, trying get five minutes of relaxing your eyes, this is something that's not often done, especially in today's home schooling and where people are, where kids are going to school by zoom, and adults are working by zoom. This is a serious problem.

People are getting I fatigue. They're getting headaches. Indeed, some people are getting migrants. They're having all sorts of issues, neck pain.

Much of that, if not all of that, in some cases, can be alleviated by this forty five to five for every forty five minutes of focused work that you do get, five minutes where you get outside, or if you have to be indoors, where you can dilate your gaze. Now some of you may be saying, well, that spits in the face of your ninety minute. Well, you're trying to you've told us before that we should focus for ninety minutes.

I would still want you to take breaks within those ninety minutes if you're looking at a narrow piece of visual world, meaning at a phone or a laptop or so forth. And again, the best way do this would be to go outside, just relaxing ized. Look off into the distance.

Looking at a horizon will automatically triggered this panoramic gaze, which is very relaxing to the eyes and will allow you to go back into a focus workout. The one thing you absolutely do not want to do is to go outside and check your phone. Because if you're outside checking your phone or you're taking a break and checking your phone, you're still in that virgins eyes movement.

okay? So this is very, very important because virginie movements increase focus and attention, and you can exploit that to increase focus on attention when you want to. But you absolutely need to relax the system again.

For every forty five minutes in which you've been in that focus mode, you want to get at least five minutes of panoramic vision if you can take a fifteen minute walk even Better. Next, i'd like to talk about an aspect of workspace optimization that can actually buy us whether not our brain and nervous system are Better suited for detailed analytic work or more abstract work. In fact, there is a way that you can arrange your work environment.

Or I should say, there's a way that you can place yourself into certain environments that will allow abstract thinking, creative thinking and indeed expensive thinking to emerge. There are other environments that you can put yourself in that will make your brain shift towards more analytic work, towards more detailed and precise types of work. Now I just briefly want to mention something that was covered again on the habits episode that I did a few weeks ago.

But again, you don't need to see that episode in order digest this information. IT goes back to this issue of three phases within the cryan twenty four hour cycle. Face one, which has I M, is about zero to eight hours after waking.

Face two, nine to six teen hours after waking, and face three, seventeen to twenty four hours after waking. Face one, the ideal for analytic, precise, detailed types of work. Face to Better suited for most people, for creative kind of abstract thinking, expensive thinking, brainstorming, etcetera. There are some exceptions to that, but most people follow that pattern because of the different neutral modulators and hormones and so forth that are released into the brain body at those different phases. What i'm about to tell you is a way in which you can use your physical environment to further shift your brain and nervous system into a mode that's either prime for analytic or abstract and creative thinking.

What i'm about to describe, as called the cathedral of the cathedral effect, has been discussed well, really, for many, many decades, maybe even hundreds of years, but formally has been discussed the early two thousands, in which IT seemed that people who were in high ceiling environments, hence the phrase cathedral, would shift their thinking and their ideas to more abstract and creative, lofty type thinking. So literally, higher ceiling loft your thinking, higher aspirations, that this was observed in terms of the language that they use, but also of the sort of ideas that they would generate. And conversely, that people that were in lower ceiling environments would be more oriented toward using language that was more restricted, literally more detailed analytic about things in their immediate space.

Now this seems kind of wild on on the one hand. But actually, if we go back to our understanding of the neurobiology, the visual system, in the way that our brains and bodies evolved in different environments, IT actually makes a lot of sense. We don't have time to go into a long lecture about evolutionary neurobiology, but we have to remember that our nervous system has a number of features that are adapted to different environments.

And indeed, we are able to go from big open praises or mountain tops or large cathedrals or concert holes into small environments. And everything scales with IT, right? When we're outdoors in a big, expansive space, our vision tends to go long. We tend to be in panoramic c magnesia vision.

Our hearing tends to extend long, even if for having a conversation with somebody, we tend to also be attending somewhat to the on the screech of of hawks off in the distance, or to the rush of a river, whether when we were in small spaces, everything our vision are hearing, and indeed even our physical movements become more restrained, even if we can still extend our hands out as far as we want. What do I mean by that? Let's say you're in an elevator that's a small space compared to outside on a field.

This has been measured over over, again, people's, that these implicit of people's tanee movements actually scales down in small alarm environments, even if they aren't completely restricted from extending their limbs all the way well as when we are outdoors. We feel in a natural impulse to move further away from our our body, our torso with our limb. S this is just feels like more appropriate behavior.

And when I say appropriate, I don't mean in any kind of social context necessarily. There's actually a reason for that. The visual system and the so called the stimulate motor system are intimately linked.

And I can just tell you briefly, one way in which you can test this and observe this and even use this is a little off topic from today's episode. But let's say you have a certain amount of flexibility. You can extend your arms off like wings is what i'm doing for those if they are listening, not watching, off to your sides with the arms straight.

And you can you reach a maximum positioning of flexibility. You can do a quick experiment where you sit still, you would bring arms in for a moment. You could put them on your needs if you like her of you. And you can move your eyes very far off into the profit of your visual field.

So you actually, i'm going to do this now, looks kind of sly, but moving my eyes without moving my head off into the prophet, all the way to the right, then, all the way left, all the way up, all the way down, but especially all the way they left, almost looking over my shoulder. Without turning my head all the way to my right, and you will find that you actually can extend your arms further back subsequent to that. And that's not magic.

What has to do with the ways in which your sera belm, which actually means mini brain, and your and your eyes, your visual system, are connected in the way in which your cereBellar controls some of the spindles and other aspects of the neural muscular architecture of your nervous system, because your nerves control your muscles and allow those muscles to move further out. So for those of you that lack flexibility, you can actually exploit your visual system for this. Now that's again a bit of attention, but it's a fun one that relates back to this so called cathedral effect.

The cathedral effect is a way in which our thinking becomes more restricted and restrained in tighter, smaller, more confined visual environments. Or if the ceiling is higher, we are in expensive space with a lot of distance above us or space above us, and out to the sides may be been out on a field. Our thinking goes into these more broad, abstract and lofty future thinking.

In particular, this has actually been measured. There's a really nice paper. I will post a link to this.

The authors are jone, mires, levi and rui. And then panthea is Juliet zoo. I'm going to assume that they go by Juliet. The title, the paper is the influence of ceiling height, the effect of priming on the type of processing that people use.

And I won't go into all the details in this paper, but what's really cool about this paper is they looked with very rigorous statistics, and they have a fair number of subjects, and everything about this paper looks solid to me. The difference in cognitive processing, an abstract thinking and detailed analytic work that people are able to perform in environments that have a ten foot ceiling versus and eight foot ceiling, which is not that much of a difference, is just difference there. And what they found were significant effects.

Wear by high ceilings, activate concepts related to abstraction, where as low ceilings, prime confinement related concepts, but or promote the kind of detail thinking that that lends itself well to sort of a spread sheet type work or accounting type work, where as abstract creative work was supported by these higher ceilings. And the way they analyze this was really interesting. Again, we don't have time to go into all the details, but they ask people to so generate word sets of relayed to particular topics like sports.

And, you know, so people talk about soccer, football, baseball, goal insider, and talk about some of the equipment and other things. And then they had a kind of a chAllenge of cognizance ge to rely. People had to link different concepts along different dimensions so that you depart from the dimension of sports and you start thinking about, you know, sports that involve teams are sports that involve a ball, it's set a.

And so in the same conditions, you can, except for the fact of the ceiling height is different, eight feet or ten feet. What one finds is that the kinds of language and the kinds of associations that people start to create are vastly different. And they're actually two experiments in this study.

You're welcome to go look at IT. So wasn't just about sports. There were some other things. They were analyzed as well. And in the references of this paper, IT also points to other examples now of the cathedral effect, which I find very interesting, because as a vision scientists and someone who spends life thinking about, and indeed talking about the nervous system, we know that our cognition an follows our vision for low vision or blind people that IT will follow their, mostly their hearing, to some extent, their touch. But for most people who are cited, most people are cited, our cognition an follows our visual environment.

So what does this mean for workspace optimization? Well, most of us have a fixed ceiling level in our in our home, but you might have room in which the ceiling is higher, in room in which the ceiling lower, if that were the case. I recommend if you wanted to creative works ing phase to the ninety sixteen hours of uh your circadian cycle, nine to sixty hours after waking.

That is that you do that in the high ceiling room or maybe even outdoors out on a deck or on a patio because the higher ceiling, of course, is the sky. Whereas if you're going to do detailed in lidia work in, I would suggest doing that during phase one of the day. But even if you're going to do a during phase two of the day, for whatever reason, scheduling or other sorts of constraint that you do that in the lower ceiling environment.

Now if you are interested in controlling your the height of your visual world, but you don't have control of your the ceiling height of the environment that you're in, there is another way to do that. And I I used to observe this in the cafe and around stanford in the area where you would see somebody who um despite the weather would be in a hoddy maybe with a baseball cap or other form of hat or some sort of blinder above their eyebrows, which is actually another way of just lowering the ceiling. Hyde, very, very low.

And we're touching your visual field, not unlike blinders that we talk about before that one would put on a horse or one would put on them themselves by restricting their visual angle of focus to directly in front of them, but not too far out beyond the sides of their head. So these cathedral effects, I think, can be leveraged toward doing particular types of work best. And again, the lower the ceiling or the lower your visual environment, the more that one tends to do, or I should say, performance detailed analytic work accurately, and the more that once thinking is oriented towards detailed sort of correct answer type work, whether when the ceiling is higher or there's no ceiling, the more that the brain in the rest of the processing that we call coding, ary processing, is related to abstract reasoning, brainstorming, and indeed can pull from broader swath of memory resources.

Because really what abstract reasoning is, is it's taking existing elements and a maneuvering them are arranging them into novel ways. So you can think about like notes on a piano playing a particular song, learning scales. That's very analytics.

There's a correct answer that you're trying to arrive that or generate or as writing music or um writing poetry or generating a new material of any kind involves taking existing elements, right? You're not can use words that you don't have committed to your memorial that you're not aware of and arranging them in novel ways. So I think the kadidal fact can be leveraged.

And again, you don't need to move into a different home or build a slanted roof and work at one side of the the room at one part of the day and in the other side, the room of the other, if that's the way you wanna swing IT, that's great. Most of us don't have that flexibility, but it's very clear that the height of the ceiling of the visual environment that we in has a profound effect on the types of cognitive processes that we are able to engage. Now i'd like to shift our attention to the auditory environment, or the noise in the room, or the music in the room, or the music or noise in the headphones, because IT turns out that there is a lot of quality scientific data out there that speaks to whether or not listening to particular sounds can enhance our cognition.

And indeed, the answer is yes. But there are very particular types of things to listen to under very particular types of conditions that allow them to do that. First off, I want to say that people, very tremendously, the extent to which they can tolerate background noise for work.

In fact, individuals will vary tremendously from one day to the next year, even within the same day, extent to which they can tolerate background noise. I've experiences this myself. There are many times in which i've been working at home, and I felt like, for whatever reason, I just could not engage in focus.

And what worked to generate more focus for me was to go to a cafe or to a library, or some place where there is actually more commotion, more people moving about, maybe even more noise, maybe in music in the room. And we have to all be in touch with when we want more background noise, or when we want less background noise, there is no harden fast rule. If you look across the literature for studies that involve complete silence, or White noise, or by oral beats, or music, or classical music, or rocks and role, you can find results to support any type of environment as being more beneficial.

However, as we talk about in the moment, there are a few type of environments to really avoid and a few types of sounds that really can enhance the cognition and your ability to focus in your workspace environment across the board that really seem to work for all people. Let's talk about background noise to avoid. And here we're talking about background noise to avoid because I actually can cause pretty severe deficits in cognition.

There's a paper, first author Jordan love cool name, last author eggs under Francis the the title of the paper has to do with psychophysical logical responses to potentially annoying heating, ventilation and air conditioning noise during mentally demanding work, which is a mouthful. But basically what this paper identifies is a large data set in which workplace in environmental noise, most of the hummer of air conditioners that's very loud and the hummer of Peters that's very loud in ongoing, just incessant, doesn't let up, can really increase mental fatigue and can vastly decrease cognitive performance. And if you're are interested in, look at the cognitive formal data that authors are ban berry and bury two thousand and five.

That paper is the one that supports the fact that cognitive performance is worse when there's just the hum of an air conditioner in the background or the hum of a heater. And otherwise complete silence. There is also evidence, which I discussed on the episode about hearing, which is that in Young children, White noise can cause some impairments in the development of the auditory system.

Now I don't want parents to free out. And if you're exposed to White noise as as a sleep aid as a child, which I know many of you were, uh, don't freak out. But IT turns out that White noise, especially if its loud White noise, can cause some disruption in the auditor's maps, the representation of different frequencies of sound in the brain that can lead to some deficits in auditory and even language processing.

So we really have to be careful about long term exposure, extended exposure to White noise or of the air conditioning noise. That's really at a high level. I wouldn't ry, if it's in the background and shutting off and i'm turning on again as the thermostat kicks often on, but really trying avoid work in loud, fan filled or ventilation, a generating or heat generating environments because I really can cause damage to the auditory system long term.

and. As we described, that can impair cardinal performance in overall increase fatigue. I think we ve all experiences that when you're in a room and there's some ongoing background noise and obvious that stops and you just feel this enormous relief.

And the reason for this is that our auditory system has a parallel l to our visual system. In our visual system, that light entering the eyes trigger the activation of those melon ops and cells, which trigger activation of the hypothermia ticula area of the hythe's, which generates alertness, generates the release. Even of court is all a stress hormone in the auditory system when there's ongoing sound, your auditory system, here's that even if you're not paying attention to IT, if you're paying attention to something else, it's still registers.

Those little hair cells, as they're called in your interview, are flooding ing. The year drumm is beating in concert to that um to that sound frequency. And there's a brainstem mechanism that generates alertness and a kind of vigiLance. So when you have a sound that's ongoing in the background, IT shuts off.

Also you experience that peace, which is the turning off of those brain stem circuits that associate with vigiLance, the local cerealia, which we talked about earlier, which release open ein and nor epinephrine, generate that heighten state of alertness in your brain body. Those neurones land can turn off, and you experience that is relaxation. So does that mean that we shouldn't listen to White noise or pink noise or Brown noise while we're working? Certainly, a lot of people do.

In fact, if you want to know what White noise, pink noise and Brown noise are, they're just different conStellations of auditory frequencies that are played together. Most of us think of White noise as that on a screen, and all the black and White pixel going all around like they got visual snow. Um but pink noise has certain sound frequencies nocht out taking out.

Brown noise has others has different frequencies that are that are included at higher amplitude. You can look that stuff up on youtube if you want. You just put Brown noise.

None of IT sounds terrific. IT doesn't sound like music. It's literally just noise. Mixed frequencies in no particular arrangement. There is some evidence that playing White noise in the background or on headphones or pink noise or Brown noise can facilitate cognition, but it's mainly throw an increase in this overall alertness as a consequence of areas like locus russia and other brain team areas that are associated with automatic alisal from that noise.

So it's a lot like the air conditioner effect, and I think done in a restricted way, meaning not for hours and hours, but maybe if your focuses winning and you're having a hard time engaging in work, you might put on some Brown noise or White noise or pink noise and work that way for forty five minutes. So before you go to your panic c vision, walk and get some sunlight, that should be fine. There's really no reason to suspect, however, that those particular patterns of noise are going to optimize particular mental functions.

So what i'd like to turn to next, or particular patterns of sounds that indeed have been shown in pure reviewed studies to optimize certain types of mental processing because you can incorporate these into or optimized workspace environment through headphones or through speakers, whatever mechanism that you want, in order to get more out of your work efforts. If you were to search for apps or go online and try and find sounds that can improve thinking or change your emotions, you are generally going to find three types want to called ice cchr onic tones. These are tones usually of a common frequency, so IT might be a beep and then a pause and then be of the same frequency.

And then beef, forgive my terrible beaming um I don't know what good beaming would sound like but um contrast ice cronic tones with tomorrow beats monaro beats would be repetitive, almost percussive, like beats IT delivered to just one year to do do do do this kind of thing OK. You can find apps that can deliver monitor beats you can find other apps that deliver so called binney al beats can also find youtube scripts that or channels that will deliver by arrows at by arrobas. Says the name suggests our beds delivered to the two years, one pattern of kind of percussive beat to one year, and a different pattern, or at least a pattern that's out of phase that's not synchronised delivered to the other year.

So on one year, you here do, do, do, do, do, do, do. And in the other year you've got do, doing, done. And what happens is because of the way that the auditory system converges in the brain stem and generates what are called intra oral time differences. Playing with that means, in a moment, interrogate time differences. The difference between the two patterns of beats that are heard by the each of the two different years leads to a third pattern that the brain in trains to and kind of maps onto, and generates particular types of brain waves.

Okay, so without going to a lot of detail after time differences are the ways in which, if you were to hear something off to your right, like I just snapped my finger just to the right of my right ear, that a signal arrives in my right year before that sound signal, those sound ways arrive in my left year. So there's an intro, al, between years time difference. And there's a brainstem area in which signals from one year and signals from the other year converge.

And there is literally a math done by your nervous system that says this signal arrived before the other signal. And the difference between those signals is the intro al time different. So if I were to snap my fingers on both sides, on my left end, on my right side of the exact same time, and they arrive at the same time, the internal time difference is zero, where as if one goes first on the right and then the left, i'm terrible snappy on the left it's a weak snapped.

But IT was there. Then there's a delay in the interview time difference has a particular value. Okay, you get IT. It's almost ridiculous ly simple by oral beats have been generated in ways that create a particular pattern of interview time differences that then cascades up to the rest of the brain and puts the four brain and other areas of the brain that are involved in cognition in action into a particular rythm.

And some of the rythm were waves of brain activity, are ones that you may have heard of, things like alpha waves or theat waves or gamma waves. Now I don't like to get to attached to particular brain waves as excEllent for particular kinds of thinking. This is something that was really popular in the nineties and two thousands when ways of measuring brain activity noninvasively um with electrodes on the outside are enabled, people to identify the indeed alpha brain waves are associated with alertness states and summer other brain waves that are kind of larger implicated slow waves like delta waves are sociate with kind of sleeping ess or relaxation.

But in general, the way that the brain works is that different brain waves are generated in different structures at different times. In those combine to give us a sense of happiness or give us a sense of focus, or give us a sense of creativity. None's, if you look across the board at the studies of by neural beats, and you ask, what sorts of by oral beats appear to be useful for people to enhance their brain function?

For particularly tins of tasks, we arrive at some very interesting answers, so we'll review what those are now. The frequency of minor beats that appears to bring about improved cognitive functioning at the level of memory, improved reaction times and improved verbal recall seems to be forty hurts. Now is IT exactly forty hurts? We don't know, but if one wants to look up a great reference on this, the reference called zao COL8TO at all two thousand and seventeen describes in here I am quoting。 So there's a direct quote.

The present findings are in line with those of a recent study, which also found faster reaction times in participants that listen to barrett of forty hurts. And you can find many examples of this in the literature where bo beats of about forty hurts were exactly forty hurts, in some cases, somehow brought the brain into a state that made IT optimal for learning, for memory and for certain types of recall, including verbal recall, math learning, eeta. So for those you that are interested in binary beats, there are a number of free apps out there.

I'm not going to recommend any in particular. Just have to search for one that that you happen. Like one thing that you will find is that many of those apps superimposed by neural beats onto raindrops or ocean sound, or the rather they superimpose ocean sound and rain drops onto the final beat.

That does not appear to be as effective as pure by moral beats. There has been an exploration of lower frequency by neural beats, for instance, seven hurts, which is data by neural beats done for thirty minutes with an overlay of rain sound or rain sounds only that's been analyzed. And believe or not, that showed immediate recall memory was significantly decreased.

okay. So that's a negative effective mineral beats on memory. So the idea that mineral beats are just great for us across the board, I think, is wrong.

IT does appear that the higher frequency by neural beats as one moves up toward forty hurts are going to be the most beneficial. There are instances in which, for instance, fifteen hurts by neural beat increased response to accuracy on a verbal memory task. This is a complicated working memory task.

Working memory is the kind of memory of remembering a phone number. If I say, for instance, four thousand, three, two, one thousand, one. And you have to remember that number, keeping IT online is what we call your working memory. It's likely that you would forget that two or three days later, you can get improvements in working memory with fifteen hurts by neural beats, whereas the other control conditions, five hurts and ten hurts by narrow beat, all decreased accuracy of working memory.

However, when I look at the literature and I examined a number of different studies, what I always seem to come back to was that forty hurts or so, plus or minus five hurts seem to be optimal for generating improvements in cognate cian, in math performance, and even in a various types of memory recall. And even in musical performance. You might want to, how can people do musical performance that are listened to by neural beats? Here's another surprise.

Many of the studies that I looked at didn't have people listening to buy noral beats while they were doing the task, the memory task or the music learning at that. They would do IT beforehand for thirty minutes. There were instances in which people were listening to borrow bites during the task.

But if you decide to employ by norroway. Tes, I recommend this forty hurts as a great place to start. I don't recommend doing IT for all of your workouts. Ts, I think there's a good reason to believe that you can attenuate to IT.

But if you are going to try, you might try at both wait, you might try, listen to by nal beats for about thirty minutes while doing something else and then maybe eating lunch or something in that sort or taking a walk and then going into the workout. Because, remember, the moment that you start listening to these bio bites, the brain doesn't immediately switch into a particular pattern of oslo tion or brain waves. IT takes some time.

Neural circuits, again, take time to engage. The only neural circuits that are going to engage instantly are going to be the ones that have a sort of reflective sort, like you step on a sharp object and you have to retract your limb, or you suddenly are stressed by a distressing text message, you're suddenly delighted about a delightful text message. But when IT comes to shifting your whole brain state toward optimizing work, IT takes a little bit of time.

So again, forty hurts by neural. Beats many, many apps, many youtube scripts out there, probably other resources for brand arrow beats, hopefully zero costs. You can access those without any need to shout out any money.

If you find one that you particularly like may be put in the comment section so other people can find IT, youtube would be the best place to do that. Feel free to put a link or or just a description that will be wonderful. And again, you don't need to listen the binary be at the exact same time that you're doing the work, although that could also enhance your prevail vi.

Some of you out there might be craving a little bit more mechanism by which boral beat can influence things like focus or reduced reaction time. This has actually been explored. This forty hurts mineral beats pattern seems to have an effect on what's called straight doping. We have dob.

A modulator course involved many things in motivation that he involved in adaptation to light in the retina, something that most people don't know, but it's involved in movement, which is why people with parkinson, who have a depletion of dopy neurons, actually have movement deficits and so on. But trial dopamine is closely related to motivation and focus. And forty hurts by oral beats appears to increase, ditto doping release.

And this has actually been measured indirectly by what we call spontaneous blink rate. Now i've been accused of various instagram post, even on this podcast, of being nona blinker, let's call IT, or a minimal blinker. And as an important aside, there is no evidence whatsoever that people that don't blame very much are sociopaths lie.

Also, you will hear that people who drink a lot, our social ens in our line, there is absolutely no evidence that blink frequency correlates with anything except alertness. Now, longer blinks are associated with less alertness. As we get tired, we tend to blink longer and longer until we take the longer blink that is sleep.

I guess the long blink would be death, but the long ish blank would be sleep. But IT turns out that the more firing austral dupine neurons that's occurring, the more frequently we blink. And so IT is associated with a resetting of our visual window.

That's what happens when we blink. And there is a whole relationship between blinking and time perception that we covered in the episode time perception. But here's the bottom line for sake of this discussion.

Forty hurt spinal abets appears to increase spontaneous blinks rates because IT increases dopamine e transmission in the brain stem and in the striem in several locations, in fact. And so the way in which these by naral beats set rhythm in the brain recruits doping release that dopamine released leads the heightened levels of motivation in focus. Why motivation in focus? Well, dopamine is actually the substrate by which epa is made.

Dopamine, the molecule is actually converted into epinephrine in. And they work together, like close cousins dobin evenement, in order to put us on a path of movement, or if we are doing work of mental movement, toward a goal. So that's a little bit of mechanistic meat to explain.

At least part of the reason why forty hurts by oral beat can enhance our focus, reduce our reaction times and improve, indeed, learning and memory. Next, i'd like to talk about the role of movement in optimizing our workspace and whether or not standing, sitting, lying down, tread, milling or even believe IT or not cycling can enhance our work output in performance. Before we do that, I want to touch on two aspects of optimizing workspace that will come up at some point in your work or school life.

Alas, there isn't a lot of science around this, but I think they are worth mentioning. And I think I can offer a little bit of advice in terms of had to navigate these in a way that would be beneficial to you. The first one is interruptions.

If you you go online and you ask about, you know how to avoid interruptions, people say, okay, well, if you have kids at home or even if you don't, you're at work, you have a light like a recording, like recording is on where we're busy now or have a sign on the door that says bother only in the this of emergency or fine to knock or don't knock at all. I've used a different policy throughout the years. I and somebody who works pretty hard to control my time and focus.

But of course, as a laboratory director, I have people coming by and who wants to talk about things. And of course, we have phones and we have computers and people's opportunity to reach us. Interruptions really are deadly to our ability to generate focus.

And it's not just about the distraction that occurs of, say, a minute or two minutes or five minutes when we were interrupted. It's also about the additional time to get those brain circuit its reengaged to a mode of focus. So it's really of a double vali.

Now none of us, including myself, want to be harsh or cruel or shut off from the world. And often times interruptions bring incredible insights, and people are providing support and very useful things that are essential to my workday and presumedly to your work day in school day as well. But there's a simple method that I learned from my graduate advisor that works very, very well.

Again, no peer review data to support that. This is just my experience. But this is somebody who had immense powers of focus, had a very, very demanding life, a long commute to children, sensitive laboratory, etta.

And what he would do was if I came back and asked a question, if anyone came by and asked a question, SHE would acknowledge their presence, but would not shift her body toward them. So SHE previously did not position her computer facing the door, which I think is a deadly, uh or SHE deadly, to focus a way positioning your workspace. So our computer was faced in the wall.

The door was ur, particularly to that. And I will combine, I have a question. SHE would say yes, so SHE acknowledge my presence, but SHE wouldn't.

Actually only her body told me, which told me that this conversation was not going to last very long. And no matter how long I stood there, what I asked you never orient toward me. Generally keep these conversations very, very short.

We had other design meetings where we would be face to face the other approach, which I confess, college of mine have used before, necessarily stanford, but elsewhere, is to simply say no to everything that somebody request 点 comes by。 So if someone knock on the door, they would just shout no through the door. Or if someone say, can I bother you for a second? They would say no.

Or if someone say, I have something I want to tell you, they would just say no. And they would just continue doing this until the person went away. That was actually very effective. These were some of the most productive people I know not always the kindness st. People, but some of them were very kind.

The other approach that i've seen and actually this is an approach um that was used by someone who has been a guest on the huberman lab podcast, someone who is immensely productive, was that he am constraining the who this might be by saying he he actually, despite having the option, have a very large office, would place himself in a workspace that was literally a coat closet cleared out with a desk small lamp, completely dark so this violate everything that i've talked about before or prior to this. Everything about high ceilings, bright light at sea, and would work, still works underneath a desk lamp in a completely dark closet, minimal ventilation. This is my definition of hell, and yet is one of the most productive people on the planet.

Also, very, very hard to find, actually know where his closet isn't, turns that he has several of them that he migrate from in order to avoid distractions. So I mention these, these kind of extremes. I think that most of us exist on the other extreme.

And that's why I mention IT, which is that most of us like some social engagement and a welcome, or at least set our environment in a way that welcomes interruption. We have to be very, very careful about this. Now in the digital realm, I already mentioned a few of the things that we can do as practical tools to limit interruptions.

One is used the program freedom. The other would be to simply turn off the wifi. If you do need to be online and navigating, you're doing research of any kind, that's not going to be possible.

Turning off one's phone. I've at times put my phone phone on airplane mode. If that didn't work, i've locked in a safe. I've done that. I've left in the car outside IT.

All depends on one's levels of self discipline, which, as you probably know from your own experience, tends to kind of wax and wait. Sometimes we are Better at avoiding these distractions than others. So if you find yourself in a place where it's very hard to reduce those distractions, you may need to go to more elaborate length.

I will say that a graduate student in my lab who was immensely productive and focus, had the habit of coming in each day. SHE would take her phone, I don't know, SHE turned IT on off or not. And you just place in the door IT excuse me, in a drawer, and then go start doing experiments with experiments all day, attend courses, engaging discussions avidly with the rest of us, and then would take her phone out at the end of the day and leave.

And I don't think that behavior was not correlated with her immense productivity. I think the ability to untether ourselves from the phone is going to be the way in which many of us are either going to succeed or fail in our various pursuits. I'm somebody who engages them with the phone on a regular basis throughout today for various reasons, but I do try and have large swash of the day in which is either on airplane mode or it's completely physically separated from me when I mean large sash, I might do every other hour with the phone on airplane mode or even a two or three hour about where I just simply not engaged with the phone at all.

So is IT Better to sit, or is IT Better to stand when doing work, at least as IT relates to focus on productivity? And the answer is both. There have been a number of systematic studies expLoring what are called sit stand desks.

So these are desks that can be set to hide that make standing the best practice. And then they can be lowered to a height that makes sitting the best practice, or the easiest practice, I should say. And IT turns out that just sitting is terrible for us OK. And there is an enormous number of studies out there that point to the fact that people who sit for five or six or seven hours a day doing work have all sorts of issues, like to sleep, neck pain, cognition, an suffers the number, cardio, accused effects, even digestion. There may even actually be some almost pressure effects on the pelvic floor and things of that sort depending on the chairs that one uses.

But that people who stand are in a slightly Better situation where many of those health metrics improve, but that people that do a combination of sitting and standing at the same desk out today or move from one death to another, if they don't have a combination stand desk, that's going to be best. The good news is it's very easy to convert a desk into a stand desk, and just stacks and boxes have done this at times or stack books. There are also some pedestals and things that you can purchase if that's um your preference in order to set your computer go high.

Of course there are desks that have motors and their ones that have cranks and they're all sorts of variations both um in terms of the types and whether not they have motorist as well as the cost to these things. So they can go from very low cost of placing boxes or books as a create a standing desk to very high cost in some cases. Now what's interesting, if you look at the scientific nature, is that people who decreased their sitting time by about half each day, so they took, let's say, they were working for seven hours a day, three and half hours of that day, they decide to stand.

And it's not even clear that that matters that they do all those three hours in one bought or they divide that up into shorter boult of a half an hour and then sit for half an hour at set. Altering back in fourth showed incredibly significant effects on reduced neck, shoulder pain, increasing subjective health, vitality and work related environments and perhaps most importantly for sake of today's discussion, improvement in cognitive conditioning and the ability to embrace new tasks and cognitive performance. There are several studies that if one wanted to explore, they could um explore this in more detail.

I'll put a link to this as well. Um the article that i'm referring to is called effect of workplace system dest intervention on health and productivity. And I like this paper because many of the papers out there focus on the effects of system desks on health and trying to get people to burn more calories, improve their posture, relieve neck pain, slumped over at ta, but not on productivity.

And this particular paper focuses also on the metrics of productivity, has its own study, and also references the number of important studies. What does this mean for you and me? Well, i've long used a standing desk or some variation there of what this means is that we should probably spend about half of our workplace standing in about half of the sitting, but not all sitting or not all standing.

If you had to do all one or the other, standing is going to be Better than sitting. What happens if we just stand? Well, that can also generate some postal issues in terms of stabilization and fatigue.

I have a good friend um who's in the movement and physical rehabilitation and physiology spaces and is Kelly star these very impressive in all those omens and he always says, you know, we weren't designed to sit all day, but we also weren't designed to stand all day. And I think that's true. If we want to look back at our species over tensor or hundreds of thousands of years, we would find that indeed, we did sit down.

We did lie down. IT wasn't that we were standing all day long. That said, most everybody, at least in the U. S, is not getting sufficient cardiovascular exercises and movement throughout the day.

And standing at one's desk can improve some of those health metrics and again, can improve productivity, probably because of those postal effects that I talked about earlier, that when we lie down, there tends to be less alertness in our in our brain stem, if you will, there's less activation of those brain stem circuits involved in alert. And indeed, that circuits that involve a kind of a coming effect on the body get activated. And as we become upright, standing or or sitting, but especially standing, then those brainstem circuits for alert inss kick on, which are going to make IT easier to remain focused.

If you are going to start standing for half of your working time, you will notice that IT takes a few days to adapt. You'll know a lot of shifting from side to decide you definite want to wear comfortable shoes. Some people do this on a woodden floor.

Other people feel uncomfortable less than on carpet. You have to figure out what works for you. But I can take a little bit of time to adapt after, to say after now, about ten years of working at a sit, stand desk, I find I can't sit for too long before I want to stand.

And my standing belts can be anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours, although two hours will be a little bit long. Catch my self kind of leaning on the desk off to the side. So again, the ideas to stand, but not be leaning on the desk, obviously, your typing or your writing theyll be some leaning involved, but that's what the literature support.

There is also a literature on whether not physical movement under your desk, meaning tread milling, or in fact, there are now bicycles that allow people to pedal, is kind of a una cycle like thing, although not a una cycle under the desk can be beneficial for workplace performance. So let's take a look at what those data say. The study that i'm referring to has a first author, fraud sham F R O D S H A M, fraud ham at all.

This is a research article published in plus one. And the title of the article is, does that type of active workstation matter? A randomised comparison of cognitive and typing performance between rest cycling and red mill active work stations.

Amazing that people do this science. I think it's great. Where else would we get peer review data on these types of questions?

First things first, there were no significant differences between cycling or treat mill work stations on any cognitive or typing outcomes. So IT does not seem to matter whether not people are tread milling under the desk. So these will be stationary trend mills.

It's like a little convey that people are walking on, sometimes very slowly. I am guessing someone to walk more quickly. The new yorker is probably tried more, quicker. The california probably had no slower, a california.

So I can make that quote, quote joke, but none there's there were no significant differences between that and a cycling station where people are sitting and peddling as they type away or as they work as they are on phone calls at sea. So I really doesn't seem to matter. So you are going to embrace these active workstations as they're called, just decide what you would prefer to use.

IT doesn't seem to matter in terms of outcomes. Now this study involved looking at one hundred and thirty seven Young adults. They had a multiple sessions where they at first, completed cognitive and typing tests at the excess of different names.

And you're welcome to look those up, if you like, um as well as flanker tasks. So these are tasks of attention and things of that sort. And then they either engaged in tread mill or cycling.

And then there was a comparison, and the statistics were run. And basically what they found was there was a statistically significant improvement in attention and cognitive control scores during any kind of active session as opposed to just a mere seated session OK. So they compared seeded to cycling to tread milling.

However, verbal memory scores actually got worse during active sessions. So i'll repeat that tread milling or the cycling work stations improved attention in cognitive control scores as compared to people that were just seated in working. However, verbal memory scores got worse during the active sessions. And again, just to repeat, there was no difference between cycling and trade mal work stations. So this is interesting.

I suggest that as the author say, the active work stations, whether walking or cycling, are not only useful to improve coLoring output in physical activity, circulation and so on, but particularly when completing task like cognitive ask or task that require focus that do not require verbal memory recall. Now why verbal memory recall was negatively impacted, we don't know, could be because people are breathing a little bit harder, could be that there's something about walking and talking that seems incompatible in the nervous system. Although i'm not aware of that, I know a number people who can walk and talk at the same time.

But if you are going to explore these tread mills, are you're going to explore these cycling stations. You probably wouldn't want to do that for highly verbal work, maybe more for mathematical work, for analytic work or even creative work. But anything involves very precise or detailed verbal recall.

Sitting or standing seems to be the Better option. And if you're wondering why cycling or tread, milling wood in hands, various aspects of cognition, we can speculate, i've talked before about this. But any time we are generating forward movement through our own actions, our own efforts, typically, if we are outside, we're not on a trade mill or we're on a bicycle or we're running or even on a motorcycle in a car we have, which called opposite flow.

And that optic flow is known to quiet certain areas of the brain that are associated with vigiLance and indeed, fear. This is the basis of things like E M D R. I movement to sensitive ation reprocessing. However, the mere act of engaging what to call our central pattern generators, the neurons in our brain stem in in our spinal cord that engage repetitive movements also can reduce some of the areas the brain are associated with anxiety and vigilant. So one pure speculation, but none's grounded speculation, would be that tread milling or cycling in a desk would reducing xiety that would allow performance to improve the other.

What I think is more likely explanation is that any time we are in ambulation, we recruit the the release of neo modulators like up and after shop mean, and things that sort that further increase overall levels of alertness. I think that's the more likely explanation because it's hard to imagine how just a reduction and anxiety could lead to these improvements in cognition in a direct way, whether the subjects in the study I just mentioned. On average, experienced an increase in cognitive performance merely by movement.

okay? And this does not include any optic flow because its stationary, the tread mill or the cyclist stationary. And so we can rule out that optic flow.

And that points to the idea that when we are in movement, we recruit our modulators associate with the so called particular activating system, destroy ado system and so forth, that would place the brain into some pattern. We don't know. We only can speculate some pattern, perhaps its game, a waves or some other wave pattern that would engage heightened levels of focus on attention.

None the less. Trade milling, cycling at a desk doesn't prove cognition. So we've been discussing workspace optimization with the understanding that you're not always going to work in the same place every day. What i've tried to do is give you a set of hypotension y tools that can improve your focus on cognition and to place that within a framework for particular kinds of work. Let's just review some of the basic elements of what we covered today.

First of all, in the first part of your day, that zero to nine hours after waking, you want bright lights, especially overhead lights, as bright as you can keep them without feeling uncomfortable, or certainly not without feeling any pain in your eyes or elsewhere in your body. Bright lights make for the maximum state of alertness. In addition, try in place whatever is that you're focusing on directly in front of you but not have IT extend too far out to either side of your eyes.

Try to generate a fairly restricted visual window as we call IT. And if you can try and place whatever is you're focusing on, at least that nose level or above, that might take some engineering or some engineering and creativity in order to figure out how to do that. But that's going to be most beneficial.

Try and avoid reclining, trying avoid sitting. Try and stand for at least half of your workday. That's a good goal, and IT may take some time to work up to that goal. In addition, if you're going to use sound as a stimulus for increasing focus and alertness, trying avoid exposure to White noise, pink noise of Brown nose for extended periods of time for more than an hour or so, that might actually be damaging to the auditory system, and at the very least, is of stressful, even though you might not notice that is of a background level of vanities distress that is not going to serve you well, rather if you're going to pursue particular types of sound frequencies, consider using forty hearts of by oral beats, not monaro beats, but forty hurts of by moral beats done during a particular work about or for thirty minutes prior to that workout. I would not rely on borrow beats all the time, every day.

I think that could cause them to lose their potency just because of the way the auditory system attenuate and actually have experiences that a tannian, the mere fact that you can go into an environment where there's an air condition or blowing, blowing, blowing and IT stops and you feel that relaxation, but you weren't thinking about the air conditioner before, tells you that your auditory system had kind of attenuated to IT, and yet IT was still impacting your system. You are sensing IT, we would say, but not perceiving IT. There are other things that you can do to improve your workspace optimization, such as standing for half today, as I mentioned before.

But if you're interested in this or you feel like IT suits you to tread mill, find a stationary tread mill that you can walk on. I've never tried this before, maybe after this episode, given what i've read in the p reviewed research. And it's pretty compelling that tread milling seems like an interesting way to a increase alertness and cognitive forming.

I'm not sure that I would do the cycling method because I can't imagine you're cycling and typing the same time. That sort feels like you like I actually can do the robby, tell me pat your top, your head kind of thing but he still feels like a little bit of A A sort of a cognitive motor collision for me for whatever reason. But that's just my bias.

You know how to ride a bicycle, but anyway, you pick your preference. Some other things that you could do in order to improve your workplace performance would be to consider the cathedral effect. If you're going to do analytic work for any part of the day, face one or face two, as I described them, but really in any time of day, that detailed analytics work for which there is a correct answer, learning scales of music, learning mathematics, trying to figure out a solution to a problem, whether is indeed a solution that could be an interpersonal problem as well.

Then try get into an environment with a relatively low ceiling. If you don't have access to a low ceiling environment, you might consider using a brim hat, or even a hoodie, or even just facing down, or even putting your hand above, above your eyes, as you will, as at the level of your of your eyebrows. In other words, lower the ceiling.

That's the basis of the cathedral facts of on analytic performance. In contrast, if you're interested in doing brainstorming creative work, you're writing new things. You're creating new things of any kind artwork.

Consider getting into a high ceiling or no ceiling environment. Or if you're wearing a brim hat or you wearing a oddy, maybe peel that back again. The data within the period literature are there to support these sorts of practices.

And if you'd like to start clearing these protocols, by all means, please do that. There is no reason why you couldn't do one or just two of these protocols. There is no reason why, for instance, you couldn't use by neural beats and trying get into a low ceiling environment to do detailed work a couple times as a week, but you could also employ all of these.

Now, of course, there are an enormous number of other things that you can do to improve work performance and productivity. And i've talked about those in previous episodes, in particularly in the episode on focus and the episode on motivation. There are supplements you can take that can increase diploma in, for instance.

There are tools that you can use to increase your focus, for instance, focusing your visual attention on one location for thirty to sixty seconds prior to entering a focused workout. This has been shown again and again to work from Emily bell, citizen and why you. In the episode on focus, I cited a number of studies where this has actually been tested and deployed in various schools.

Having kids do a focus task where they look at a particular visual target for thirty, sixty seconds, then doing some mathematics and seeing pretty impressive improvement in focus on attention, even in people to have attention deficit hyacinthe ity disorder and so on. So there's no reason why you can't and shouldn't combine the sort of practical workspace optimization solutions that we talk about today with the kind of neural optimization solutions that we talk about in the episode on focus and the epo de on adhd in the episode on motivation. By all means, layer those together.

That's how you are going to achieve the optimal focus bouts. That's how you are going to achieve the optimal creativity about I do want to acknowledge again the fact that realized people are showing up to this chAllenge of workspace optimization with different budgets, with different constraints. Somebody love kids at homes.

There are a lot of interruptions. Some people do not none's. I hope that the information I was able to provide today will allow you to make subtle or maybe even arrangements in your workspace environment.

There's one other point related to that, that I did not cover and that i'd like to cover just briefly, which is that there's nothing to say that you have to always work in the same location all the time. You can move from house to cafe if that works for you. You can move from office to home.

You can also move from different locations within your home. I have a brief anecdote about this. I still attend a lot of science fc meetings when a lot of scientific meetings were in person.

And there are always a few individuals that seem to stay engaged throughout these very long meetings. And we're talking seven, eight hour days, sometimes evening sessions, and sometimes these meetings will go on for, you know, four, five, even six days. These were a long meetings and the quality of talks very tremendously.

And I was notice the individuals that measures engage in awake for the entire meeting. And I notice that people that could maintain high levels of alertness in this one conference room had a habit of moving to a different seat after each session, sometimes even between talks. And I actually discusses with one my colleagues who was doing this.

I said, is this conscious? Or you always moving from place to place? And I said, yeah, I just stay in one place.

And I just look from this one particular visual angle at the screen. I find after one or two talks, regardless of how interesting the talks are, that I started and have drift. My mind is, in this engaging indeed, sometimes can fall asleep. And so I started this practice of moving from space to space, or I should sit to sit within an author. And IT works quite well.

And I think IT works quite well because, again, of the relationship between our visual system driving the majority of our cognition, right, our visual system drives are thinking in that novel visual environments are going to lend themselves to heightened levels of alertness. You don't want things to be so novel and scary, or threatening or anxiety provoking or love that they draw your attention away from your work. But I think this is part of the reason why turning on music, or moving to an office, or a cafe, or an outdoor environment from an indoor environment, or vice versa, even within a single day, can bring about more heightened levels of productivity.

I'd also like to acknowledge that what I covered today is most certainly not exhausted for all the types of workspace optimization tools that one could create. For that reason, i'd love for you to suggest any of your workspace optimization tools that you found useful. Please put us in the comments section on youtube.

That would be the best place that other people can see them also read through those. And perhaps in a future episode, i'll call about some of the ones that i've tried on the basis of your suggestions. If you're learning from nor enjoying this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel.

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Once again, thank you for joining me for this discussion about the science and p review literature on workspace optimization. I hope some, if not all, of the tools will be beneficial for you. And as always, thank you for your interested in science.