There is one same circuit to pursue all goals

All forms of learning involve neuroplasticity → Errors as a good thing → What is the rate of errors? How hard does something need to be in order to learn?

85% Success rate is good enough and 15% failiure rate [Source]

It’ not about so high it’s impossible but neither so low that you make barely any progress

Other creatures set goals too and they also have the same goal circuits

Humans are unique setting:

• Short term
• Medium term
• Long term

We also struggle to juggle different goal settings

Circuits that are active between any type of goal:

[Anxiety and fear] Amygdala → Fear, a lot of goal-oriented behavior is about avoiding punishments

[Action/Inaction] Ventral Striatum (Part of the basal ganglia) → Initiating/Preventing action

Cortex:

[Planing and thinking] Lateral prefrontal cortex → Excecutive function, different timescales

[Emotionality difference] Orbitofrontal cortex → Meshing emotionality of our current state of progress and comparing that emotionality when we are closer to the goal

What do these circuits do?

• Value information → Is something really worth pursuing or not? **Very important**
• Which actions take/not take → Given the value of a particular goal

Dopamine asseses progress + value of our pursuits

Common elements between ABC method, SMART method, SMARTER method: (Overlapping goals)

• Specificity → Very specific goal, thinking about the end in mind
• Inspirational
• Action-oriented

Distinct neuromodulators:

If we are to set goals effectively we need to have a clear understanding of the inside/present and external space, first of the peripersonal and then to the extrapersonal

Peripersonal space:

All the space withing the surface of your skin → Consumatory behaviour → Serotonin

Extrapersonal space:

Some other location outside my body → Dopamine

Multitasking → Epinephrine (Adrenaline) Doing a bit of multitasking before jumping into some form of focus-requiring activity can be hepful because it gets us into action

For how long can people focus? 3 minutes before shifting their attention

Narrow Visual focus → Contracting the aperture to a very fine point can increase clarity of goal seeking and likelyhood of you pursuing your goals → Most of our cognition follows visual perception

Focusing on something for some 30-60s shifts your attention to exterocept and goal move forward [Very short term]

Experiment [Source]:

15 pound anckle weight run

Group that visually focused on the goal line: 17% less effort + 23 % quicker

<aside> ⚠️ Setting a goal line is very important! And is also possible to set **incremental** goals

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Physiological reason for this to happen:

Autonomic nervous system: (Readyness and action - Resting and relaxing)

First Information comes in eyes

A) Parvocellular pathway → Detailed camera and very restricted, a bit more arousal

B) Magnocellular pathway → Global information , relaxation of alertness and attention, reduction in goal-oriented behaviour, reduction in systalic blood pressure (Peripersonal space is sufficent)

There’s a connection to increase in blood pressure, when heart beat

(Top) Systole → Heart contracts → 90-120 millimiters of mercury (pressure)

(Bottom) Diastolic→ Heart expands - 60-80 millimiters of mercury

Example measurement : 120/80 (top measure/bottom measure)

Neural correlate:

When focusing attention, systalic blood pressure goes up, release low amounts of adrenaline, readies the body for actionYou can’t just think about the goal, you also need to feel the activation energy

Actionable

• [ ] Hold visual attention for 40-60sBlink is ok but no moving head around, mind might wander cognitively but the visual attention has to be set on that particular point

Visualization

<aside> 💡 **Delay discounting:** Goals become less rewarding the further in the future they might be

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Experiment: People saw themselves 30-40 years into the future and have set aside more money into their retirement

Experiment: People are more likely to excercise and make healthy decisions if seeing themselves as healthy beings

• Does end-goal (big win) visualization work? (Ideal partnership, ideal body, olympics, graduation)✅ Effective in getting the goal started❌Lousy/Counterproductive for keeping the actions towards the goalWhen measured, Siastelic blood pressure, raises but quickly decays
• How to maintain ongoing action?Not about visualizing sucess but visualizing faliureViusalizing all the ways they could fail en route of that goalThe brain is a lot more effective to avoid bad things that look for good thingsNear doubling probability of reaching a goal if you focus on ways things could fail

Goal-settings

[Significant, inspirational, agressive yet realistic] ?? So inspiring that i can’t sleep tonight? What’s the quantitative approach?

Probability of achieving a goal varies whether

❌ Easier: If it’s so easy then people might be more likely to do it? It doesn’t recuruit enough of the autonomic nervous system to follow trough

Measuring blood pressure was so low the nervous and vascular systems didn’t activate enough

✅ Moderate: Just outside of inmediate abiltiy, yeah it might take a bunch of effort but is doable (Truly challenging)

Near doubling of the systalic blood pressure

Near doubling/more of the likelyhood of engaging on the ongoing pursuit of the goal

❌Hard: Can have unhealthy amount’s of stress that could facilitate predisposition towards a crisis that could shutdown the nervous system, associate that activity with the freezing and cause a lot of invisible problems down the road that could also cause pschosomatic symptoms like tummyache and headaches

Goal-strategies

1. Limit options: Setting one or two major goal for a year, make sure not to contaminate your cognitive/visual space[Stores have found that when you overwhelm people with options they buy more stuff, so make sure not to contaminate the objective/loss of objective]
2. Ensure specificity:Experiment: Measure how people recycle moreGroup A) Recycling = A bit of improventGroup B) Recycling + concrete plan (Concrete and action steps) = 2x improvement in recycling that lasted for months to comeConclussion: Exquisite detail on action steps is beneficial, what does the objective look like and how do I get there?How often do we asess progress? Weekly

Dopamine

Motivation molecule [Rat/Human studies] No dopamine = No motivation but still able to feel pleasure

Reward prediction error:

[Greatest amount when positive and novel]

No anticipation + Something positive = A lot of dopamine [Highest]

Anticipate good + Something positive = Dopamine before reward [Medium] + Reward [Medium]

Anticipate good + Something negative = Drop below inicial baseline [Lowest]

The WHY of doing something affects how motivated the body is to act

Can’t move forward with the finish line in mind (Maybe within inmediate goals)

Robert Sapolsky Experiment [Same effects in humans?] [Also take this podcast]

Rats who liked to run ⇒ Healthier

Rats who were forced to run ⇒ Stress hormones up, blood pressure went up, blood lipids got worse

<aside> ✅ Knowing why you do something has profound implications since the reward system is highy suceptible to subjective effects (top-down) effects

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Right track feeling:

Motivating yourself by understanding how things could fail and acting on it is different from thinking that things will simply fail

Reward schedule:

We can decide any reward schedule that we want for any milestone

Pick a particular interval for asessing progress, and if making progress we reward ourselves with all-cognitive reward

Goal: [Example: 150-200 minutes of zone cardio per week]

Reward: Checking a box and knowing you’re in the right track

At an interval that can be maintained

Daily or weekly asessments, assessing how good was the week, how many hours did you study etc.

Self-amplifying system

Dopamine is used to manufacture epinephrine and norepinephrine, they increase systolic blood pressure that puts us in a state of readyness

Only works following a consistent reward schedule

Also sets yourself up for unexpected dopamine boosts that further amplify the system

Too much dopamine?

Not really unless using pharmacology (suplements, ilicit drugs)

Cold showers = 2.5x increase in dopamine [Investigate more?]

Caffeine = Increase in dopamine receptors so that whatever dopamine we have floating around can be more effective in activating this motivational states

You want your own self percieved behaviour to be the one that’s causing the motivational waves to ocur

Visual system + Dopamine

⬆️Normal dopamine = Capacity for focusing specifically on certain

⬇️Low dopamine = Losing capacity for focusing visually on one specific objective, depleted eye movement, and not such focus on the horizons

[Study on restoring capacity on parkinson’s patients]

(Procedure) Space-time bridging

Using visual system to focus on intoreception and gradually focus on extraperosnal space and back to peripersonal space searching for control

Introreception → Extrareception → Introreception

3-10 breaths

Daily, semi-daily

1. Close your eyes and focus most of your attention on your intorreception, imagine your inner landscape (The goal is to eliminate external perception)
2. Open your eyes, focus attention on a part of the surface of our body (90% internal, 10% external)
3. Station: 5-15 ft away (90% external, 10% introrreception)
4. Horizon station as far away as possible (99% external, 1% internal)
5. Expand vision and cognition to a more magnocellular vision-focused , as broadly as possible
6. Return inmediatly to intenral landscape

<aside> 💡 The visual system is not only about analysing space but also time, when focusing on a very narrow point close to our body-inmediate experience, we slice time very finely. *[How?]*

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Benefits:

• Engaging dopamine system
• Carving time finelyUseful because it allows our brain to focus on different locations in space and time, essencially making our brain compatible with the different time-bound activities that we normaly set for ourselves
• Thinking about what you want
• Reaching Milestones?
• Updating goals
• Enormously confusing for the brain, the ability to deliberately move between stations maps onto the ability to concieve goals in different moments trough time

Random thoughts:

• Placebo and ‘how mind is body’ and the topdown control
• Quantitative mindset
• The way multitasking actually had a good impact, brother’s
• The way the marriage movie represented an ego block and how that is similar to your brother’s way
• Delay discounding and autism?
• Deep dive on depression and suicide
• Menciona el workspace que puede ser optimo/proyecto mely/eudaimonia
• How does this visualization of faliure have affected you trough your life?
• How does this relate to your article on change and communicating change?
• Write an article about psychosis?
• What are all the elements about this notion of balance?
• Basal ganglia → Go,no-go circuit
• Systalic blood pressure
• Autonomic nervous system
• Flow
• How does this relate to habituation?
• How does this relate to ultradian rythms? [Info?]
• That could be the reason why simply listening to elon musk explain his vision of the future does not generalize or completely transmit the scheme of his life, we are profoundly perceptual creatures for example, the further away thigs are the further it is able to comprehend the depht of things, and also a natural question that arises is who si more prone to these forms of motivations and are htese peope the most motivated to follow trough? Well it seems like the case, in my personal experience, most motivated people have some form of aversion loss that operates at the truly unconscious level, for eexample navid says i rather die of thirst than drink of the cup of mediocrity,, and truth be told is that that is a somewhat strong statement in the saemnese that it carries a heavy emotional weight that doesn’t simply originate from a twitter post or a motivationa instagram tweet, there’s more to the fac that it resonated with him that it would with other people, in my opinion, there is certain predisposition fo rassociations that could form anywhere in life, but the heaviest ones originate in earlu childhood, troug critical periods of neurodeeveopment and otherc cultural weights, for example if you grow in a household that has a value hierarchy oriuented towards meritocracy then tthat can be implanted into your subsystem, however childhood is not the only point of critical development, but teenage years are also fundamental, essencially there is a strong psychological insertion, whether it’s towards a family dynamic, social dynamic or experiencial dynamic things can insert this loss aversion, and generate time-sustainable achievment,
• What happens when death becomes an option? No aversion motivation (which would be the normally-most effective option) can get you out, and in fact some things that are naturally stressfull to think about you get motivated to lose that stress by simply dying