I'm an occasional listener of Andrew Huberman's podcast, usually when it crosses over into one of my areas of interest. It's so dense with information and runs so long every episode that I usually have to listen a couple of times to get all of the marrow out of the bone.
I'll be chewing over the latest episode, an interview with Cal Newport, author of 'Deep Work', my all-time favourite book about how to get shit done, for at least a month.
The interview runs for nearly three hours and starts off with a drolly amusing meet cute.
"Doctor Newport."
"Doctor Huberman."
…
… Okay. I guess you had to be there.
You can get a flavour of the whole thing from the following discussion early on about Newport's writing room, which includes a fireplace. I included it here because although it's interesting in and of itself, it's also the first time I've used a transcription service to which I scored a beta invite. The software, web-based for now, is called StorySpeak and it's specifically designed by writers for writers. It’s not designed for this sort of back-and-forth shit, but it did really well.
I haven't actually used it for work yet, because my dictation routine is pretty well sorted out. But I will get around to experimenting with it after it spat out this scary accurate transcript.
Scary because it’s so accurate. And because it reminds us that no matter how smart we are, we all sound like Valley Girls when we’re just riffing on our thoughts.
Huberman: I have this theory based on my understanding of visual neuroscience and the fact that when we’re looking at visual scenes that have some degree of predictability to them, we get into a mode of anticipation, our thinking is at least somewhat linear, and so forth.
When we are looking at, say, ocean waves or in a skyscraper, we’re staring down at the street of, say, New York City, cars are moving in obviously not random fashion, but at least to our visual perception, pseudo-random, you’re not tracking any one thing, the mind goes into this sort of state where our thoughts become non-linear, they’re not anchored to any kind of if-then, kind of what I call DPO, duration path outcome, kind of trajectory. There’s not a lot of neuroscience on this, but there’s a little bit.
Same thing happens when you’re looking at an aquarium, by the way. So I wonder whether or not staring at the fire, which is something that humans have been doing for many, many, many thousands of years, because it has that random aspect to it, does it tend to spark creativity, linear thinking, at what point in your writing do you turn to the fire and stare at it?
Newport: That’s interesting, actually, that there’s a neurological explanation. When I use the fire, it’s actually when I read, right? So I’ve had chairs by the fire, but I think for exactly this reason, right? Because when I’m reading, I’m looking to spark ideas, right?
Like, okay, what’s my takeaway from this? What’s the connection you’re making between this thing you’re reading here and this idea over there? That type of connection-making is a lot of my brainstorming. And I read by the fire when the weather allows it. I also walk a lot, so I wonder if there’s something similar going on. Like when I’m trying to work through an idea for an article or a math proof or something like this, almost always I’m going to do that on foot.
And there might be something similar going on there, where you’re encountering, it’s not entirely exotic stimuli, right? So it’s not, oh my God, my attention’s being drawn, but you don’t quite know what you’re going to see. And you also have that circuit quieting effect of the walkings. Your motor neurons are going, you can tell if I’m getting this right or not. The motor neurons are going and you get some inhibition going on in some of these key networks, which allows you to actually maintain the internal focus on a concept a little bit better.