10 YEARS of Intensive Brain Training: My Dramatic Results

• This video is proudly sponsored by Squarespace.
• Brain training is inherently appealing as it promises smarter and more charismatic individuals.
• Training the brain receives less attention compared to physical training.
• Many brain training tools lack scientific backing and effectiveness.
• The author shares personal experiences and insights on brain training and meditation.
• Emphasizes the importance of focus and deep thinking in enhancing cognitive abilities.

This video is proudly sponsored by Squarespace.

To many people, the idea, the premise of brain training is inherently highly appealing. Theoretically, by exercising your brain, you could become wittier in conversation, you could remember more details, you could become more charming and charismatic. You could solve problems and come up with amazing ideas to take your career to the next level and maybe even advance mankind.

This is why films like Limitless are so popular. And it's something that all of us, I think, have some interest in at least. But compared with training the body, training the brain gets a lot less attention.

And part of the issue here is the narrative surrounding brain training, because unfortunately, it's not highly positive. Most studies find that brain training doesn't really train your brain, doesn't really provide that much useful transfer to the real world. Many of these brain training tools that sell themselves as such, they're not backed by science.

And what we often find is that all you're really training yourself in is that task. So by using the brain training program, you might see yourself get better at doing that program. But that doesn't mean you're necessarily going to be better at solving problems in the real world or paying attention when you're driving.

But this is where I take a little bit of umbrage with a lot of the research and a lot of the narrative surrounding brain training. You see, unlike exercise and physical training, we seem to have this idea that we should be able to train our brains in like 10 minutes a day or less. And all we're going to need is some basic tools that you can get for free online.

If I wrote you a really basic training program and I said do this for five minutes a day and then I studied you in a few weeks time and found you hadn't made huge gains, then I wouldn't just say that physical training or weightlifting doesn't work. And yet this is the kind of approach we see taken to brain training.

We know thanks to brain plasticity that the brain can be changed. And we know that there are many things we can do to cause functional and structural changes within the brain. I have been training my brain for the last 15, 20 years. I've been doing all sorts of things from ambidexterity training to meditation, to using tools like dual NB back and even building my own brain training programs.

I've been working out in a manner that is designed to also train my brain. So in all this time and by giving it significant focus, I guess the question is, have I noticed any difference and has it impacted my life in any big meaningful way?

And whilst it hasn't necessarily gone exactly according to plan or as I expected, I can definitely say that, yes, training my brain has brought about some huge changes to my lifestyle. The way I approach problems, the way I perform. And I don't think I would be here sitting and talking to you right now if it hadn't been for some of the brain training practices that I've been engaging in.

So, yes, brain training, in my experience at least, can be highly effective. So I'm going to tell you my story. I'm going to tell you the tools and the methods I've used, and then you can take from that what you will.

Oh, and we're also going to have a guest appearance from a friend of mine, Janet Rajopaxi, who goes all the way back to university. We live together in halls and whereas I've done a lot of brain training, he's done a lot of meditation and I have been able to see the impact that's had on him and how it's affected him.

He's gone quite deep with it at times. He even went on a meditation retreat, a silent retreat. So, yeah, I'll tell you how brain training has affected me and a bit about how meditation has affected me. But he's also going to have some really interesting insights there because, yeah, he's someone who I think has really benefited from meditation and he's a great example of what it can help you achieve.

You can do shots in your face as well. Yes. So I guess it all began when I started doing my A levels and I decided to take psychology. And then I took this one step further when I went to university and decided to make psychology my undergraduate degree.

So I was already really interested in physical performance. I told people I wanted to be a stuntman. What I really wanted to be was a superhero. I worked out I'd won Teamen Bodybuilder of the month on bodybuilding.com and I was doing martial arts and all sorts of other things.

But I knew that I really wanted to train my brain as well as my body. And that's why I took psychology, so I could learn how to tap into the potential of the brain. You know, just a normal way to choose your career option. Perhaps it shouldn't come as a huge surprise, but what I learned when I started psychology was that most of the curriculum was not geared towards becoming Batman.

Who'd have thought? But there were some things I learned that I was then able to extrapolate and build from. They served as great launching off points where I could then do my own research and get some results.

And one of the first things that I started using and had real impact on my lifestyle was something called CBT. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. This isn't a form of brain training. Rather, it's a psychotherapeutic tool that's using clinical psychology to treat a range of conditions ranging from phobias to depression to whatever else.

It teaches a form of metacognition that is thinking about thinking. It teaches you how to observe your own thoughts and negative thought patterns in particular, and then challenge them using cognitive restructuring tools like thought challenging and hypothesis testing, and then to replace those negative thoughts with positive ones.

I won't go into it in huge detail now because I have made a video on this now. This actually proved instrumental for me. Ever since then, I've used CBT many times to address issues with my own thought and to even improve my performance by changing what I'm focusing on and how it's affecting me.

For example, it can be very effective at improving your adherence to training programs and diets. But right away, I actually used it to treat a kind of phobia I had of peeing in public urinals. I used to find it awkward peeing in public urinals, not because I was shy of, you know, what was down there, but because I thought that if I couldn't urinate in the public urinals, people would think I was just hanging out in there and I was a weirdo.

So I'd get all worked up and that would prevent me from being able to urinate. But then I used CBT techniques in order to teach myself to get over this. And once I learned CBT, I did. I treated this phobia of my own in less than a week. So, yeah, CBT was extremely beneficial for me, and it has been going forwards.

And just the mindfulness that comes with that of knowing your own thoughts, recognizing them, thinking, how are these affecting me? And how could this be better? But this was just scratching the surface of what you can do with brain training and some of the alternative techniques you can use to enhance your cognitive performance.

What I learned about next was really far more profound. So what I learned about next at some psychology that I found very interesting was actually two things that go nicely hand in hand.

Firstly, I learned about brain plasticity, neuroplasticity, the way the brain can reform itself, build new neurons and new connections. But this was very interesting to me, of course, and so was the corpus callosum, the bundle of neurons that cross between the two hemispheres and connect the left and right sides of your brain.

This was really interesting because of course it needs to convey a huge amount of information from the left side of the brain to the right side of the brain. And this of course contributes hugely to global connectivity, things like creativity, etc.

And anecdotally we know that Einstein had a much thicker corpus callosum, which some people have postulated might have helped to explain his ability to visualize these concepts and then understand them in terms of mathematics by combining different brain areas and using them together.

So to me, thickening the corpus callosum via brain plasticity was a no brainer, no pun intended. And so the logical next step for me was to train ambidexterity.

So for a long time I was writing with my left hand, practicing other things with my left hand, and this has brought mixed results. Today I do have slightly better left-handed writing than most people. Not that that has a huge benefit on my lifestyle.

And I'm already a very creative person and I'm good at creative problem solving. I don't know whether the ambidexterity training has enhanced that at all. I would say possibly maybe a little bit. But yeah, I didn't stick with it as religiously over a huge amount of time as I would have liked.

It's something I've done in fits and spurts and I can't say I've drastically noticed any huge changes. So yeah, I would say the ambidexterity training is certainly something interesting to experiment with, but it wasn't one that had a massive impact on my lifestyle.

And there is also the issue of transferability again here, because after all, there are plenty of activities that involve both hands and dexterity in the non-dominant hands, such as playing a guitar. And we don't suddenly see that everyone who plays a guitar is extremely creative and, you know, coming up with the next theory of relativity.

It's something that I'm continuing to research and experiment with. Definitely worth trying, not necessarily groundbreaking.

And it was also about this time that I learned about what's definitely the big kahuna when it comes to brain training and cognitive performance. That being working memory.

And the way we learned about this in psychology, both in sixth form and at university, was as this store for your memory, your most short-term memory that works kind of like RAM does on a computer. So use it to store information that you're manipulating and working with.

The obvious example being if someone tells you your phone number and you go to write it down, you use your working memory to store that number whilst you go to get to pen. You also use working memory to store numbers that you're carrying over when you're performing a long multiplication in your head, for example.

You can increase this capacity through training, it seems, according to some of the studies, from a minimum of about five to a maximum of about nine. And by doing this, of course, you could potentially increase your computational abilities.

Now, I was actually quite down on this originally. I thought, in what way? And again, this is talking practically about brain training. In what way is remembering a couple of numbers going to drastically impact my lifestyle?

Like, I use a calculator for most calculations, and how often do I really need to write down a phone number? It's just not something I thought would have a big impact on my life. Not that I wasn't a little bit interested, but I couldn't have been more wrong about this.

What I would ultimately find is that working memory could be the key to unlocking absolutely huge gains in terms of cognitive performance. And where we see this most, I think, is in visual attention and sports vision.

So essentially, when you're looking around the world around you, you have a narrow focus and you can only pay attention to one or two things at a time. And then you have to stitch these together in your brain to create an idea of where you are, to create a cohesive vision of what's around you.

So most of what you're seeing isn't really out there. It's actually in your head. It's the construct that you've created based on not only what you're seeing, the snapshots that you've darted your eyes around to quickly gather as much information as possible, but also based on things like schemas and ideas of what things look like, memories, and assumptions.

And you use these to this kind of patchwork idea of what's going on. And that's what you used to navigate. And the same goes for sounds and even your body parts in space. You can only focus on so much.

So you have to stitch together this fabricated reality that we live in, and this is powered by your working memory. You use your working memory to hold that information, to glue it together and to understand what's around you.

So the greater your working memory, the more accurate information you can bring in from the world around you and use to stitch together in order to come up with a more cohesive and accurate picture; this can actually increase your vision.

That's why it's called visual attention. If you can see more things and store that information, then you're actually more aware than someone who can see things but immediately forgets them or replaces them with, you know, made-up information.

So what we actually see is that by training and enhancing your working memory, you can increase your whole experience of the world around you. Your subjective experience can become higher resolution, you can gain more insight, and this will also even bleed over into things like creativity and memory, your alertness in a conversation because you can track what people are saying more, you can store the information in your head more easily.

Think about what you're going to say next. This is huge. It can change everything. Just boosting your working memory in this more real-world way.

So one of the biggest ways that we train working memory is with something called dual NBAC training, that's just a test that requires you to store the position and value of different numbers and then add to them over time the amount that you're storing in your brain.

And what we've seen though is that the transfer from this to real-world activities is really quite limited. There are mixed studies, some suggesting that it can be useful, some suggesting that it can't, some suggesting that we need to be able to get to really, really high levels before we see transfer to real-world activities.

But the issue here again is specificity. And if you're interested in functional training, if you watch this channel at all, then you'll know what specificity is. It means choosing an exercise that perfectly matches what it is you're going to do.

So if you want to jump higher, then box jumps are perfect because they're highly specified to that activity. You're emulating the activity you want to utilize.

So if we want to train our working memory in a way that's going to enhance our ability to move through the world, then just storing numbers in our head isn't really going to necessarily do that in the most optimal way. We want to train our working memory in a multimodal, multi-sensory manner in order to train those specific skills that we can then transfer to sports, etc.

Fortunately, there are tools we can use to do this, as I discovered with my research. And I was even lucky enough to try out something that was exclusively normally available to high-level athletes, military personnel.

These are basically tasks that challenge you to follow objects as they move around a screen in three dimensions and to retain that information, where they are and predict where they're going to be, etc. This, of course, is training your working memory, your ability to store that information and divide your attention.

But at the same time, it's doing it in that multi-sensory, visual manner. And you can take this to the next level by using it in virtual reality, where you're actually submerged in that 3D world and you can train your brain in a far more exciting and visceral manner.

I came across a brain training tool like this called React, and this is available on the Oculus Store. I tried it out really early on when I saw it, because I knew it was exactly up my street from the research I'd done, and I started training with it on a fairly regular basis.

I also wrote a review of it on my website and this led to the developers getting in touch with me and saying that they'd like to invite me to use their far more premium option. And that was neer trainer and it had a similar premise. It would fire objects at you and you'd have to react to which kind of object they were, remember where they were in space, and bat them back towards specific places.

And I found this really useful and I trained with it for a while, very excited to be using something that you normally wouldn't be accessible to the public and to give it a proper shot. So I trained with it for several months.

And obviously as well, this had the benefit of being a lot more fun than dual NBAC because it's essentially like playing a computer game. That said, I also did find that it was somewhat limited in scope because it was designed for athletes and for military personnel, which again, isn't what I do for a living.

So it didn't have a massive transfer to me. You know, it's not going to impact on my writing or my presentation skills or even really my training to a huge degree. I didn't notice it improve my verbal fluency, for example, and I didn't get to the point, if I'm honest, where I noticed objects moving in slower motion, which is one of the premises, one of the things that they claimed could eventually happen if you trained with it long enough.

Certainly didn't transfer to then better scores on the dual ENBAC test, which would have been really interesting if it had. So I actually decided to make my own brain training program to target working memory called biomind.

And you can download that for free from the website, it's pay what you like. You will have to put in your details because I couldn't find a way to get that to work without asking for details. But basically you put in your information and you can choose to pay whatever you want, including nothing, and you'll get a link to download Biomind here.

You're flying through a 3D space, a pseudo 3D space, and you have to count the number of objects you see and react once you see a certain number of objects. However, the challenge is that you have to react to different numbers of different types of object.

And then I'm even going to introduce sounds and things. So you're working across different modalities. This is more memory based than the more sports vision focused neer trainer and other 3D tracking tools like it.

It's supposed to be a kind of halfway house between the two and something fun that you can do wherever on the phone. Because that's the other issue with, you know, virtual reality brain training. You need space and you need time. You can't really just do it on the toilet.

And as you guys know, I like my incidental training. I trained with Biomind and I found it fairly effective. I was improving, but then if I'm honest, I have fallen off the wagon with that one.

And the reason being that I've switched to iOS and I'm learning to port it to iOS, but at the moment it's only available on Android or PC or I'm also about to offer it on Mac. It wasn't as beneficial as what I'm about to discuss, which was the biggest game changer in terms of my working memory.

But we'll get to that in a moment because first, I want to talk about one of the underlying principles of working memory, that being focus. If you can train your focus sufficiently, then you can immediately massively upgrade your working memory and many other aspects of your performance.

This is the underlying trait. If we were to use my AT NSP hierarchy system that powers so many other brain functions. If we think that working memory is a truly potent aspect of cognitive performance, then perhaps focus is the true underlying trait, the true global trait that powers everything.

So there are some theories as to how working memory works, and again, I've made a whole video on this, delving into the kind of underlying mechanics of working memory in more detail.

However, one of the biggest theories and something that makes a lot of sense to me is the notion that working memory is effectively tantamount to focus. In other words, your ability to store information in your brain and to keep it there is powered by your ability to focus on that information.

As long as you're focusing on that semicolon, on that, you know, subject, that idea, that number, whatever it is, then you can keep it active in your brain and not forget it. You can then manipulate it if your focus is divided, if it's skitting around, you will forget that information and you won't be able to manipulate it in the same way.

So by training focus, we can theoretically not only focus on our work better and get all the benefits that come from focus, but actually increase our cognitive processing skill by being able to manipulate more information at once.

So perhaps this is what we should really be focusing on, no pun intended, if you want to boost our working memory. So how do we focus on focus?

Well, the most powerful method is through meditation. Through meditation we can train our brain to focus, to quiet itself, to do essentially what we want it to do.

So far I've been making some sweeping statements. Perhaps in this video I'm telling you that working memory is focus. And I'm telling you that meditation essentially boils down to focus as well. And these might seem like left field ideas, but if you watch again, I've got a video on meditation. If you watch these videos, you can see how I've reached this point in my thinking.

But suffice to say that when you're quieting your mind, what you're actually doing is just focusing it so that it doesn't drift and wander and you don't have these distracting thoughts. Instead of what you're doing is you're focusing on one point, whether it's your breath, whether it's a point in space, a visualization, or whether it's nothing at all.

It's essentially your ability to direct your attention wherever you want and to avoid distractions. And by using meditation, we can do this in an extremely powerful way.

And some anecdotal reports I've read talk about things like tasting wine with more richness and detail and seeing individual raindrops as they walk and seeing the particles of smoke that they never noticed before. Unfortunately, I haven't had the best of experiences with meditation.

I use meditation and body scan meditation in particular as a way to relax. I use it prior to workout sometimes to increase my mind-muscle connection. And I talk about that in this superfunctional training program, both types.

And I've attempted to use it, you know, in this manner over and over, but I haven't really had huge amounts of success with it. And again, there's issues with adherence here. But also, even when I have been strict with it, I haven't noticed huge benefits.

If I'm completely honest, it's always led to me seeing people talking about how meditation changed their life. And if I'm honest, being a little bit skeptical, like, I mean, are you really all that different than before you started?

This is why I wanted to bring my friend Janick on the show because I've known him for an extremely long time. He's one of my best friends. We went to university together, we lived together. You know, I know him pretty darn well, and in the time that I've known him, I've seen a change in him and I think meditation was a big part of that.

He is interested in self-development and self-improvement, just like I am. But I think that the meditation had a big impact. And in particular, when he went on his meditation retreat, his silent retreat, I do think he came back and seemed calmer.

And I guess that comes from focus, ability to block out distractions or even anxious thoughts. And this is what he described as well, so yeah, I thought that was interesting because he's someone who I've seen tangible benefits from the meditation and he's a, you know, he's an advert for it.

So I thought I'd bring him on and ask him some questions.

And here he is. I found that meditation has given me sort of a breathing space in the world and allowed me to sort of see things more clearly. I feel stress as less of an impact on me.

We've known each other for a long time. I would say that I have noticed that in you, which is a unique position because you hear and see so many people advocating for meditation. But then you're like, you're just the normal dude. Like, what's so good about it? You know, it's not like fitness. We can see someone's butt load of muscle.

However, with you, I would say it's not necessarily something I can easily verbalize. But you do seem more confident, calmer.

I would say I can acknowledge that having seen how long would you say it took for those sorts of benefits to materialize. It's interesting. I think you certainly notice the benefits internally before the rest of the world might see it. You can pretty much in one session you can actually start feeling better off the back of it. But just like weight training or exercise, it takes a while and consistency for the benefits to come through and certainly to start feeling them on a more everyday level.

Yeah. For me personally, I'd say it took me about six weeks of sort of consistent daily attempts at meditation. And I use the word attempts because I know it's not easy and I was the kind of person that would sit down and be distracted within 3, 4 seconds. My mind was just shooting all over the place and thoughts were going everywhere. But if you just keep coming back to it, you start realizing how much more easily you can settle into it. And it brought greater focus in my life, I'm able to focus on things a bit better without tuning into the distractions around me. It's left me feeling a lot calmer as a result.

And certainly meditation comes in so many different forms or so many ways you can attempt it. It's not just about focusing on the breath. You can do things like gratitude meditation, you can do things like body scans. And all these things bring a form of greater awareness. And fundamentally, if we can have sort of a greater awareness of ourselves, we can probably operate better in the world.

Would you say there's been any benefits in terms of maybe your memory, your working memory, your ability to be creative or to juggle information? Because there are some definite parallels between those things.

I definitely say there has been an improvement in those areas. I bring it back to the idea of focus, which then probably is a byproduct means I'm able to remember things better. But I think if you're able to work without distraction, a lot of other areas are going to come through and start improving as well. You can delve deeper into. When you talk about creativity in particular, I think having this ability to quieten the mind and then see what comes up has informed my creative sort of outputs much more as an actor as well.

Now, if you found that interesting, I do have a much longer version of that interview that discussion over on the Patreon page. If you're one of the brain trust tier members, you'll get access to that. So yeah, check it out there if you like.

But something else interesting that came up in our discussion and something I've talked about in the past is the difference between focused meditation and non-directive meditation. So non-directive meditation incorporates some of the lesser-known forms of meditation where the idea is not to focus on your breathing or to try and quiet your mind, but rather to allow it to wander and to just practice kind of thinking.

And this is something that I have had experience with and that I am naturally inclined to do. And I have developed my own form of this called big idea meditation, where what I will do is I'll set myself a brain challenge and then sit there and just muse on it for 5, 10, 20 minutes or I'll do it on a walk.

I do this with issues that I'm facing or problems I want to solve or looking for creative solutions. I come up with video ideas, I come up with book ideas, app ideas. At the same time, I sometimes just reflect on, like, the nature of the universe.

I have thought deeply on, you know, my own theory of Everything and big questions like, you know, what is the uncertainty principle? How could we describe this mechanistically? If you're interested, I might share some of these thoughts. They are a bit crazy, of course, and I'm NOT necessarily what I believe. It's just an interesting logic puzzle.

And I love thinking deeply about things like this, but, yeah, and then at the other end of the spectrum, I'll think about far more mundane things. Like, I often like to think about what I would do if I was writing the next issue of Iron Man. It involves him having a drone, which I think, you know, they should have done.

And instead of being inside his bones, he'd carry his armor as a rucksack. I think that makes a whole load of sense and would be really cool.

In other words, just practicing thinking. So, like I said, I call this big idea meditation. And I've been doing it in a structured and, you know, regular manner now for years, years and years.

And I actually think that this has had the biggest and most direct impact on my life because it's led to some massive breakthroughs. I think as you practice this creative problem-solving and this daydreaming and this thinking, you become better at doing it.

And so as a result, I've come up with all kinds of ideas, I've taught myself to program, much of which was just done in my own head. From there, I've built apps. My big hit was multi-screen multitasking.

You know, back in the day when you couldn't use split screen on an Android device, I had the idea of having one app that contained windows within it. And each window was essentially mini-apps.

So you'd be able to manipulate them just as you would do on a Windows desktop. And then you'd be able to browse the web and write documents, even browse your files. And the way it got around the limit of not being able to multitask was the fact that this was actually one app with multiple apps within it.

You just had the ability to manipulate them. This was before any of these other similar apps existed on the market. Mine was the first one, and it took off in a big way. Sold over 10,000 copies in the first year.

And for a time being changed my life. You know, I became an app developer. And it was huge. And I remember just the excitement of seeing those sales numbers go up. I was at a party, it was incredible.

And I was just so amazed that all this had come from just an idea. I'd learned to program, come up with this idea and released it on the store once I built it. And there were so many small challenges within that, but all of them I solved just in my head, you know, just big idea thinking.

From there it led to writing books on programming, working for [insert name] and becoming a tech journalist. So yeah, it's been huge for me, this big idea thinking. And this channel is powered by it.

I'm not sure if you deem it meditation, but it certainly could be classed as a form of meditation. But sometimes I would do things like free writing, and that's as simple as sitting down with a blank piece of paper and a pen and just writing and seeing what comes up.

That to me could be a form of meditation. I've done things like walking meditations. That's as simple as if you're out of nature in particular.

That's a really nice thing to do, which is sort of just being very focused or intentional with each step or observant around you. You don't have to be focusing on your breath or your body. Sometimes you can put the focus outside as well, but sort of being intentional with it is the most important thing.

So one of the reasons that I think I've struggled with things like dual ENBAC training and traditional forms of meditation is that I do think I have a significant cognitive deficit when it comes to working memory and elements of focus.

I think I have got ADHD or inattentive ADD. At least now I know this is a very trendy diagnosis at the moment and everybody is saying that they've got ADD and that's understandably garnered some skepticism. However, I do think that I might be a genuine case here.

For example, I can't lay my table in the morning without setting at least one thing in the wrong place, probably multiple. Like every morning I'll give my wife like the kid bowl of cereal or I'll give my one-year-old son a cup of coffee and just put everything in the wrong place.

And I mean, that's weird. I mean, I do it every single morning and I make the same mistakes regularly. You know, I'll go around the wrong side of the car, I turn on the TV, I normally sit there staring at it for a minute before I work out which app I need or where to go.

You can't take your own. I mean you can, but you can't even. And they see the chess table because they'll be like, what did you say? Just move a paw. Let's just move a paw. Keep it.

Leave another paw there actually goes all the way back to my childhood where I was in the, you know, learning assisted classes for a time because I was so disorganized.

You know, I did well academically, but I was known as this kind of absent-minded kid who forgot all this stuff. And yeah, I think I probably have some form of ADD and I'm seeking a diagnosis now.

This largely held me back and I think in many ways it's been advantageous. But what I've been doing by doing big idea meditation and steering away from, you know, focused meditation is, you know, training what I'm already good at.

It's like going to the gym and I've got strong pecs, for example, whereas I don't have very strong glutes doing nothing but bench press. That's essentially what I've been doing. I've been enhancing and enhancing the thing that I'm good at, which is creative problem solving, creative thinking, deep thinking and not really doing what I should be doing, which is training my focus, my ability to be witty and present.

I can be witty in conversation once I get deep into it, but if someone speaks to me in the street and I'm not expecting it, it takes me a good minute to think of a response by which time they've usually left.

So yeah, this has been the sticking point. So I think what I really need to do is combine the non-directive forms of meditation with something more traditional like Transcendental Meditation or CBT and then I'll get the best of both worlds.

And in my discussion with Janet, it was actually a little bit that recorded off-camera, which is annoying. But he said how he goes for nature walks and things, which I also highly recommend for creative problem solving.

But he thinks that his practice in more focused forms of meditation allows him to then get more from the creative and non-directive meditation because he has that ability to focus and to manipulate that information.

So I think just as in fitness, it's not good enough to say, you know, lift weight. In my opinion, you should be lifting weights and doing cardio and doing mobility. And I think it's the same with brain training.

It's not enough just to train focus; you need to train creativity, but you can’t also just focus on the creativity. So I need to do more for my focus and I need to really double down on the dual ENBAC stuff.

I've made myself another app which is designed to train focus in the same way that meditation does, but in a manner that someone like me can cope with better. So what it essentially does is shows you a timer on the screen.

It counts up only seconds and every now and then it misses a second. So you have to stay focused and you have to hit space or tap the screen. When that happens, I'm going to make that available to you guys on Patreon in the lowest tier ($1). You can always just sign up and then cancel again at the end of the month.

So it's $1. But much appreciated if you want to try it out. But there are other ways you could do something similar. But I did also say that there was another area that I'd been using that had improved my working memory to a huge degree, more so than any of these other things.

So I think it's time that I talk about that. And it's actually a bit of a surprise to me as well. So the thing that's made the biggest impact to my working memory, whether or not I’ve got ADHD, it has addressed some of those scattered brain qualities.

And my family, my wife has said they've seen an improvement in me in the time since I've been doing this more is movement training and skills training. And this is quite surprising to me because I know on paper that skills training is good for working memory.

I talked about this in my book Functional Training and Beyond and Adaptive Training and in Superfunctional Training 1 and 2, the studies are there and if you extrapolate them, you can see that it has a big impact. Things like balancing on beams, balancing in trees, handstands, martial arts, all of them can boost our working memory.

And the reason for this is partly because it utilizes the cerebellum, which is also used in other important tasks. But it's also because you actually do need to focus on multiple things at once in order to perform these skills.

So, for example, when I'm hand balancing, I need to focus on the sensation of balance. I need to feel the balance and find the balance and hold it, which involves contracting tenacity, lots of tiny muscles.

But at the same, I need to be focused on my technique. I need to think about maintaining my balance over the right part of my hand, spreading my fingers, having the right distance. I need to contract the glutes and keep my core straight.

All these things at once. I'm not going to be able to do a handstand properly keeping my legs together, not letting them just flail around at the top there. And this requires working memory.

And so it also trains working memory in a way that I do find fun and engaging. And doing martial arts when I'm throwing a punch, I need to think about relaxing the body, retracting the hand as quickly as I throw it out, keeping my guard up, rotating at the hip, pushing off the foot, etc, etc.

This is working memory in action. And there are studies that show that a greater working memory enhances skill acquisition for things like throwing hoops.

And again, I knew this on paper, I knew that this connection existed and I believed in it. But I didn't think I'd feel it because like I say, I knew that dual ENBAC training can improve your working memory.

I know that meditation can improve your working memory. But none of them were effective for me. I didn't feel them in the everyday. You know, maybe there was some benefit there, but it wasn't huge.

But this has been huge. And I have been training skills as well. But lately I've been focusing on it much more. I've been really focusing on the calisthenic skills as you guys know. I've been doing more of the martial arts again and focusing on my technique in particular.

And it's also just the way I've changed how I'm thinking about it, how I am thinking more about the technique and the form. You might not see it, but I'm working on it. And that's had tangible benefits on my working memory, on my focus, on my ability to manipulate information.

Hopefully this continues and I'm going to up it. But it's great news for me because it means that the thing that I enjoyed doing, the thing I was doing anyways, is also benefiting my brain more so than many of the, you know, more focused, more specifically brain training related things.

And the really exciting thing is that this is even actually transferred to improvements in my dual ENBAC performance and my Biomind performance.

Oh, one other thing worth mentioning is that what for me solved the issue of lethargy, which I think is an issue a lot of us have. Many of us feel sluggish and brain foggy a lot of the time.

Unfortunately, I found an actual solution to this. It was the training throughout the day, the modular training, the incidental training, being constantly active with multiple micro workouts.

This severely energized my brain. And since I've been doing this, even if I'm tired, I don't feel sluggish; I never feel like I've got brain fog. It's actually been pretty transformative for me.

And yeah, tiredness as far as it affects cognitive performance simply isn't an issue since I've been doing this. So I've been visiting W.F. Howes here in Leicester and I'm recording the audiobook version of my most recent print book, Adaptive Training.

This is a long full day session of speaking and trying to have good verbal fluency, not stumble over my words. I have to read ahead and get my mouth around the words and I'm exhausted and I've got a headache and it reminds me that things like this are also brain training and the same goes whatever you do for a living.

Someone who did this for a living, read this amount of words every single day, would have fantastic verbal fluency and this would be a form of brain training for me. I write a lot and I used to write a huge amount and I program and this has had a massive impact on the way I think and the way I use my brain.

So you can do brain training and that can involve 10 minutes a day of dual ENBAC or whatever, but what you do for your living and your main hobbies and habits, they're going to have a much bigger impact on changing your brain.

For example, this is why a lot of people are now concerned about the amount of time we spend doom scrolling or on TikTok because they think we're melting our own attention spans by getting so used to getting these short bursts of information.

For me, something that's had a huge impact on the way I think is my writing. Writing books. Yeah, and writing for this channel. But prior to this, I was a copywriter, a freelance copywriter and I got paid by the word.

So the more words I could write in a shorter amount of time, the more I could get paid for doing so. So the incentive was there to write huge amounts of volume, and I would do this whilst charging a small amount of money. And that's how I beat the competition.

So I'd write 10,000 words a day, sometimes 20,000. My record ever was 35,000 words a day. And I did this for years, years and years, writing this much every single day.

As a result, I think it's transformed the way I think. I think it's really helped me to manipulate ideas and to think deeply on a topic, to think critically, all things I was already somewhat prone to doing.

These were all the kind of natural advantages I had, but then I really doubled down on them by practicing like this and I think it's one of the reasons that now I can work so quickly.

Undoubtedly, neuroplasticity has meant that this has caused physical changes to my brain and the way I think. I've talked in the past about studies that show how different careers and different activities can alter the brain areas we use when solving problems.

How certain athletes, like wrestlers, use the more kinesthetic areas of their brain to solve 3D rotation problems, for example, as compared with others that might use their visuospatial brain areas. This has also worsened in some ways my sort of scatter-brained, absent-minded professor persona because I just get locked onto these ideas and I can't switch away from them.

So how much of this is genetics versus unintentional brain training? I don't know because now I'm able to work really quickly to churn out videos, write books and articles, and make apps in a very short amount of time compared to the competition.

Likewise, programming, I think has been instrumental for me because programming teaches you how to think using a set of tools, using a framework, and this can actually encourage more creativity and problem-solving because you have to use the tools available to you.

I do most of my programming, just as I do most of my writing in my head, and then sit down and execute on that. Clearly, what I have done for a living and what others have done for a living has profoundly changed our brains.

And so this shows us that training and interventions are capable of changing the way we think. And this has the potential to be profoundly impactful because brain training could help us to avoid accidents on the road and to focus more on our job. Very important for someone like a surgeon.

And perhaps it could help us to think better and to come up with better solutions. Brain training, I still think, has potential to be absolutely massive. And I think I've felt some of the implications of this myself.

To conclude then, what has actually worked for me for brain training? What do I recommend to you guys? What results should you see?

Well, as we discussed at the beginning, CBT was big for me. Metacognition, learning to think about thinking has been huge.

On top of that, ambidexterity, meditation, dual ENBAC training, all might have had a small effect, but it was just that it was a small effect. Big idea meditation, on the other hand, has been instrumental to me.

And it's something that I don't hear a lot of other people doing. Make deep thinking a focus of your day. Set aside time for deep thinking. If you have a problem or one issue, focus on that.

But alternatively, just think about what you think created the universe, killed the dinosaurs, how you'd write the next James Bond movie, whatever it is, practice your creativity, practice your deep thinking, because that is what will lead to breakthroughs in your life.

You know, being a bit more focused is important and useful and like I say, it could save your life. But if you want to make big progress in your life, then it's the deep thinking, it's the big ideas, it's the breakthroughs and paradigm shifts that can really accomplish that.

This is what can change things. So practice big idea meditation, I highly recommend it. But combine this with some form of focus meditation so you don't end up like me and actually exacerbate your absent-mindedness. That to me is why I need to do this.

And in terms of working memory, the thing that had the biggest impact on me was movement training and skills training and that was huge.

So I highly recommend that anyways, but this is just an extra reason to do that. Now there is another side of the story and that's the use of nootropics.

These are supplements and pills that are designed to enhance brain function. And as many of you know, I have experimented with them quite significantly, extensively in the past and some have been effective.

I know on paper that things like creatine can be beneficial, but more so for me, things like phosphatidylserine have helped me to cope with things like burnout.

However, I'm not going to go into that, into a lot of detail here and the reason for that is that there have been some nootropics that I've utilized that have had a profound impact on my brain function.

For better or for worse. I don't want to talk about them here because A: YouTube doesn't love talking about nootropics, B: this video is definitely long enough already and C: whatever I say, if it sounds interesting, I know I'm going to encourage some people to try it and I don't necessarily want to do that.

My ethos for this channel has always been that I won't ever recommend anything to you that I wouldn't recommend to my daughter or my sister. And so that goes for nootropics. I do not recommend them.

The negatives outweigh the positives and whilst they improve your cognitive function in some areas, it always comes with drawbacks, it always comes with a price. However, it is interesting and if you want to hear me talk about my experiences with them, then head over to the Patreon again and you'll see the longer uncut version of this and you can watch that.

That's available to everyone in the second and third tier. So if you head over there now, you'll get the Focus app, you'll get the full discussion with Yannick and you'll get the extra bit, the After Dark director's cut of this video, which also comes with our adverts and it always arrives early, so check that out.

A huge thank you to my patrons who are there already. The brain trust tier also has access to an exclusive Discord server. I hugely appreciate the support; it's allowing me to buy the second camera, so I now have two angles to film. But to everyone who watched this, a gigantic thank you.

Whatever the case, I massively appreciate it, especially if you made it all the way through to the end. This is a long one. I'd love to know your experiences with brain training down below.

Is it something you're interested in? What has been useful for you and what would you like me to focus a video on in future? In that regard, let me know.

Thanks a ton for watching this one guys, and I'll see you next time. Bye for now.

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