Mind Games: Brain Training for Game Developers

[Music] all right well I guess it's go time thank you all for coming I am truly delighted to be here I am not exaggerating when I say that presenting two rooms full of smart creative people like you is what I enjoy doing most presenting at GD C's in the past has been a career highlight for me and hopefully this year I won't trip and fall down hurt myself and have a career low light but anyway thank you for coming for those who don't know me I'm Scott Crabtree my life story in about 30 seconds goes like this I was born and raised in Massachusetts born in Western Mass raised mostly around the town of Andover I went from there to Vassar College in upstate New York where I got a degree in cognitive science this is where I really fell in love with the mind and thinking and what makes brains tick and not tick so well from there I moved long story short to Oregon this is lovely Oregon which I love not only for its beautiful nature but the awesome city of Portland Oregon where I am from

and I decided to stay in Portland even though it's been absolutely terrible for my video game development career as you may know there's a very little game development going on in Portland but there's some games coming out of Portland and New Zealand where I spent a year and these are some of the games that I have shipped in my career most recently the iPhone game middle top and of course probably like you I've worked on some games that haven't shipped as well enough about me I want to learn some things about you and I want to start with a little experiment so please do the following with me when I say go I want you silently in your head to say the alphabet as fast as you can from A to Z and then count from 1 to 26 as fast as you can and then stand up silently in your head alphabet 1 to 26 then stand up ready mark get set go

okay awesome and yes my friend back there with a broken leg you don't need to stand up and I'm not gonna force anyone to stand up but I'm encouraging you all to stand up why because solid neuroscience shows that when your body gets in motion your brain produces what's called BDNF brain-derived neurotropic factor which you can essentially think of as fertilizer for brains I want you to not just hear me but actually learn something today and so that means getting you in motion occasionally thank you you can sit down now we're gonna do it again only I want you to alternate so a1 b2 c3 d4 fast as you can then stand up on your mark get set go okay I'll spare you all the suffering we're now at about 10 seconds when the vast majority of you are standing up

previously that is what multitasking does to your brain and we live in a multitasking society so we feel like we're being more productive and the science is abundantly clear on this when you're talking about paying attention with your prefrontal cortex multitasking is impossible all you can really do is rapidly switch your attention between tasks which is expensive not just for computers but also for brains and in particular this valuable brain real estate you have up here called your prefrontal cortex which is responsible for your executive function so that is why I want you to eliminate or at least minimize multitasking as we go through this talk ok on with learning more about who's here please stand up if you're a programmer awesome thank you many of you sit down QA people of any kind managing QA testing etc thank you sit down artists musicians sound people any kind of artist animator modeler etcetera cool

thank you and production people business people of any kind you're managing production you're running a studio you're suing people for a living whatever it is thank you ok now I want you to think about what you know about the brain none of us know that much it's one of the most complex things there is in the universe you all have 100 billion neurons in your head with an average of many thousand connections to other neurons and the fact that that 2 to 3 pound blob of jelly can make any sense out of my voice and this complex visual scene in front of you is nothing short of miraculous so none of us know everything about the brain but there's been an explosion of information coming out of neuroscience recently so stand up if you've read one or two books watched one or two videos read an article or two about the brain you know some stuff about the brain

awesome thank you and stand up if you've read many more than that or more than that okay so this is the challenge I have some people who know very little about the brain and some people who know a lot about the brain so I'll do my best to strike the middle ground as we go the rest of this talk basically my deal with you is if you pay attention and focus and participate for the next hour I will teach some of you hopefully all of you some stuff about the brain and how it works and in particular about neuroplasticity and you will leave with some information and some tools that will help you rewire your brain for the better the story of this talk is basically the story of your brain you are the lead character in this story and if you went to school any time around when I went to school you were told roughly this about the brain you're born with a gazillion brain cells they die

throughout your lifetime the brain cells set like concrete when you're an adult so suck it up right you're getting stupider and you lose your ability to really grow and change throughout your life that's a problem part of the problem that results and the main problem that I'm here to focus on is that I suggest you all spend a lot of time making your games better and very little time making your brains better at least that's been true with the game companies where I have worked and if this conference is any indication that's true right there are lots and lots of sessions on how to make your game better and as far as I know this is the only session on how to make your brain better but your brain is not only making your current game it will make every game in the future which means investing in your own brain pays enormous dividends as you go through your life so the solution is

neuroplasticity science is telling us a much better story of your brain now the story coming from science in recent years there was some controversy about this for a while and now there's virtually no controversy left the science about your brain is very clear and telling an awesome story that story goes like this yes you learn more easily as a child but you continue to learn throughout your lifetime you don't just lose neurons throughout your lifetime you also add neurons throughout your lifetime and make and break connections in your in your brain throughout your life we're talking about real physical observable changes to your brain size changes structure changes that you can see in your brain if you do things right which means that you get to write how the story of your brain ends and that's what I want to ask you to do towards the end of this talk those who got a handout there's a space where you're gonna fill

in a little neuroplasticity plan before we're done so as we're going I encourage you to think about how do you want to apply this how do you want to use the fact that you can rewire your brain to be a different brain this is fantastic news it's nothing short of miraculous to me your brain produces your mind your mind arises out of your brain right with your mind can think new thoughts that rewire your brain that is nothing short of miraculous to me this is some of the biggest news we've had about the brain in 400 years because for most of that time again we thought you're basically fixed once you're an adult and we now know that's not true so it means that we all need what Stanford professor Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset she divides people into two categories those who have a fixed mindset say things like you

can't teach an old dog new tricks I am the way I am he's just the way he is she's just the way she is if you have a fixed mindset you beat believe that we're basically all just set now there is some truth to that I don't want to overstate any of this I give separate talks on strengths and how to apply strengths and that's largely because hey guess what everything you've done so far until this moment and your life has rewired your brain so some of you are really good at some things and not so good at other things and you're not going to think your way into a completely new skill overnight I for example play a lot of music and do a lot of programming if I work on growing as a musician or a programmer I'm gonna grow really well I am an absolutely terrible artist I mean I could not draw you a picture to save my life unless it was a stick figure if I invested a lot of time and

energy in growing as an artist I would go from absolutely freakin terrible to just a little bit less terrible so growth does not mean hey just pick whatever you want to be you can grow like crazy I can be a master artist in a matter of weeks if I turn my attention to it No many of us take the philosophy that we can grow the most in our areas of weakness and science suggests no you can grow more in your areas of strength so try this data on for size from the Gallup Organization if you take if you send a group of people random group of people into a speed reading class you give them a pretest on a post the slow readers who go in they all learn the same material in the same class the slow readers improve about 50% the fast readers improves 600 percent so growth doesn't mean pick where you know nothing and have no brain circuits and

focus there it means you can grow strongest where you already have some good circuits where your brain has already wired up to do some things but regardless it means that we all should adopt what Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset which means the opposite of the fixed mindset you can learn and change in significant ways throughout your lifetime this turns out to be extremely important virtually every great person in history if you think of a person in history who you admire according to Dweck that person had a growth mindset it's a consistent attribute of people who achieve greatness in their lives so I want you all to stand up if you as of this moment have a growth mindset and don't feel pressured to stand up if you don't awesome everybody's on board yay okay so now that you believe and

understand that you can substantially change your brain over time how do you do it step one you got to feel safe and relaxed when you're stressed out you can learn facts like don't go there there's a tiger over there but you are not in a space to learn and grow and build new connections now I want to make clear about stress stress is not a bad thing necessarily most of us I in the past think stress bad must avoid stress if you have zero stress you do not get out of bed in the morning we're talking about too much stress excess stress stress you can't control and chronic stress that's the kind of stress that makes your brain work really poorly and in fact kills neurons the opposite of what we're focused on here today the problem here is that your fight-or-flight response is an really

effective part of your brain historically speaking if there is a tiger in your midst your limbic system which is the older part of your brain that looks very much like brains of cats and all other mammals that emotional part of your brain is wired for the fight-or-flight response so that if you feel any threat in fact if there's a mix of things in your environment too good one bad you get stressed out you go into fight or flight mode to wonder agree or another this is not a switch this is a continuum when you go into fight or flight mode your limbic system says I am in charge now because there are three ways to get out of this stressful situation run fight or freeze you hear about that less because it doesn't rhyme but in fact it's your number one option under stress is just freeze don't move don't say anything because maybe Tiger hasn't seen you and you're shut up and don't move you stay alive so you freeze and if that doesn't work you try to fight it off and if that doesn't work you run and we see these in the office

all the time and the problem is they're absolutely terrible for coping with stress really terrible for coping with stress really good for keeping you alive at Tigers and really terrible for helping you make games so the problem is that there seems to be a three to one ratio this is called the Losada line if you want to look it up later and by the way sources for my material are at the in addition to the books I showed are in the tiny print you can't read at the bottom of the slides it's in tiny print you can't read because I don't want to distract you with it as I already told you multitasking sucks but I want you to be able to look into the studies later so if you don't have a handout I can email you one or there are some at the back of the room and I'm happy to email you slides as well so that you can dig into sources I'm trying to give you as little of my opinion as possible basically and as much scientific information as possible so what the science says is that when you go into fight or flight mode you suck oxygen and glucose and dopamine and all the stuff your brain needs to work into your limbic system so that you can focus

on fight or flight and that is not a good way to use or learn in your cortex you're uniquely human layers of brain immediately under your scalp so if you really want to learn and you want to rewire your brain you have to relax first so I want to do a little stress pull stand-up if in the past six months over half of those months I'm going to give you three choices not very stressful moderately stressful very stressful okay so stand up if the past six months for you on average have been not very stressful awesome your peers want to work where you work okay sit down thank you stand up at the past six months on average have been moderately stressful okay thank you sit down and stand up if they have been very stressful yes you people should talk to the first group that stood up anyway thank you okay so I want to teach you

some quick relaxation techniques that you can use in the office why to get your brain working more your brain working more better I was starting to say which I'm very proud of you I want your brain to work more better in the moment and I want you to set the stage for neuroplasticity and long-term learning and growth in your brain so here are a few things you can do and I want you to try them with me as we go the first one is visualization roll your eyes now have the gag reflex because I know some of you are like oh my god spare me the woowoo Oprah BS whatever but the science is clear visualization works in part because visualization is not a healthy response to stress if you have a tiger in your midst picturing a beach in Hawaii whoa you're dead so when you visualize when you picture something it's a signal to your brain that everything must be okay so I want you to try this right now just take about ten

seconds and shut your eyes and in detail picture a happy or safe place for you home beach in Hawaii a hike you went or whatever it is just picture it in detail if you can okay I just went back to Mount Jefferson in Oregon I hope your spot was good for you if you're anything like me you feel just a little bit more relaxed now I don't want to overstate this if somebody's screaming at you a string of George Carlin curses and calling you an idiot and you're trying to visualize it's not going to help you enormous Lee but if you've just come out of a stressful meeting or you're even in a stressful meeting and you can take a few seconds and visualize something again it's a signal to your brain to relax breathing also works really well hopefully most of you are breathing most of the time but deep breaths again your

breathing corresponds to your stress really well when you're stressed out you tend to breathe quickly and shallowly when you're calm you tend to be breathe more slowly and deeply so I want you all to try a breath with me now but not your usual breath we're gonna do a funky weird breath which is we're gonna count in four four and you're gonna breathe in four four as much as you possibly can hold it for four and then out for eight and while you're doing this you're gonna think thoughts like wow this Crabtree guy is even weirder than people said or he's distracting me with his counting or his counting is faster slower try to just put all those thoughts aside and focus on the sensation of your breath you have two circuits in your brain primarily that that you're using in any moment one is the default or narrative circuit this one tells stories I'm at GDC I'm going to this talk this guy's really weird whatever and your direct sensory experience is just feeling your sensations turns out that direct sensory experience although we're in it less is a more relaxing circuit to be in so in

addition to focusing on breathing I want you to get into that direct sensory a circuit that is the alternative to your default narrative circuit so we're gonna go in four four hold for four out for eight here we go in four four hold it out for eight and then as you go back to breathing normally again if you're anything like me you feel a little bit more relaxed than you did before now you got to watch your deep breathing in the office or people think you're total freak but again I'm trying to give you techniques that you can use in the middle of a stressful situation if you just think to breathe into your belly and just feel it for a second or two it refreshes your brain helps you relax which puts you in a state of thinking better and using some of your better brain real estate and also setting the stage for learning and growth in your brain of course has a lot of relaxation

techniques you should do whatever works with you but I want to share one more with you which is touching your lips now this is weird right touching your lips why would this work now the science is that it does work the following is Scott speculation about why it works my speculation is that your lips don't get touched normally unless something good is about to happen if your lips get touched you're usually about to get something to drink mmm or some food or somebody's gonna make out with you in any case it's gonna be good right so again somebody asks you a really difficult question you feel yourself stressing out you go let me think about that for a second and nobody's gonna be like what a freak ease touching his lips you can touch your lips subtly you can even lick your lips the way Kobe Bryant does stand up if you're a basketball fan Wow for a minute I thought we're only gonna have one okay thank you you can sit down okay so as much as it pains me

to show you Kobe Bryant because I'm a Celtics fan and he's about to score on my Celtics here Kobe virtually every time he shoots a foul shot he licks his lips first and I don't think it's because he knows the science of relaxation I think it's because he's just developed a habit he even does it when he's getting interviewed which the people at who made NBA 2k11 know and they have very good attention to detail watch this giant lick lip after he gets fouled and is heading to the foul line so again just try it right now just touch your lips a little bit and you may not feel a dramatic difference again this isn't gonna suddenly make Tigers go away or suddenly make your unbelievably difficult boss go away but it can help get you further along the continuum towards relaxation which is good brain function which sets the stage for neuroplasticity another thing that works

really well is exercise I'm sorry to be the hundredth person to tell you you should get some exercise but you know it's good for your body you may have heard it's good for your brain it's very good for your brain if you go on a walk before a test you score higher on the test exercise adds gray matter to your brain exercise produces BDNF as I mentioned brain-derived neurotropic which you can think of as fertilizer for brain and we're here to talk about growing brains social connections are also really good for brains if you're worried about your parents cognitive decline or your own because you're getting on in years social connections is one of the best thing you can do to keep your brain thriving you can do this in the office with a walking one-on-one all many of us have one-on-one meetings few of us go on a walk for those meetings and it's a fantastic technique for getting your blood pumping building some social connection and learning the meeting better so I want you all to try this

right now pair up if a few of you end up in a group of three that's fine if you have a broken leg you don't need to stand up but generally speaking I want you to pair up and then stand up and at least fidget I can't have you all go on walking one-on-ones or it'll be total chaos for the next 20 minutes but stand up walk in place fidget whatever and talk with your partner what have you heard so far and how do you want to apply this you have about one minute for this walking one-on-one go [Music] I'm just listening I'm sorry never know it's all good

okay a few more seconds if you're walking make your way back to your seats please find your seats take your seats please thank you you are a very cooperative audience and I appreciate it and I hope it helps burn in some of these new circuits of what you're learning now that you're relaxed you're ready to rewire and to rewire I want you to reach this is the acronym I've come up with to summarize some of the key requisites prerequisites for rewiring your brain not everything you do as an adult rewire your brain essentially everything you do up until your early mid-20s does rewire

your brain so this is why for awhile we thought neuroplasticity significant brain changes only happen in children and some things do happen more easily for children many things many brain rewiring things happen more easily for children many of you have probably heard it's much easier to learn a new language as a child that is then as an adult and that's true there are limits to neuroplasticity essentially your neuroplasticity machinery if you will the parts of your brain that are responsible for neuroplasticity those parts of your brain are always on as a kid they are not always on as an adult these are the things you need to do to turn on your neuroplasticity machinery in your brain so that you can rewire your brain and develop new skills and even personality attributes so reach our is for repetition our is for repetition our is for repetition I will stop now and really that's enough set

when you do something repeatedly it's a signal to your brain that you're going to do it again and your brain adds clusters of neurons as opposed to a neuron here or a neuron there are is for repetition E is for effort if you're doing something that is essentially effortless you don't have to try very hard you're not rewiring your brain many of you have probably heard crosswords are really good for your brain and preventing cognitive decline as you age right not if you're really good at crosswords if you're just going through crosswords and like honey this is awesome I'm totally nailing this crossword you're not rewiring your brain you are not building the cognitive reserve the rich networks that protect against cognitive decline as we age the way that works is something like this all of us unfortunately unless the science changes again all of us will develop problem

spots in our brains as we age that are called plaques you can think of these essentially as dead spots so if you have a very sparse network you can picture a few trails through the woods and there's a problem on one of those trails you're screwed you can't get to that part of the woods anymore the woods being a brain obviously here if you have a rich network of neural pathways like a rich network of paths in the forest if there's a problem shows up in one spot I'll just take this other path so we all tend to experience cognitive decline as we age those with rich cognitive reserves are affected less by those problems because they have other ways to get where they're going which is why I think neuroplasticity is so important to all of us you may live a very very long time stand-up if you heard Ray Kurzweil give a keynote speech here a couple of years ago anybody thank you okay so the rest

of you I'll very quickly tell you for those who don't know Ray Kurzweil is basically a genius invented the flatbed scanner the synthesizer 16 honorary doctorates now he's a bit of a freak and a bit controversial in particular in how he's applied this to humans and health but he is a fantastic predictor of technology trends and he ended his talk a couple years ago by saying something like the following we are just a few years adding more than a year of life expectancy for every calendar year that goes by which means if you can live a little while longer you will live forever and he walked off the stage now that's quite a statement right you're going to live forever and I talked to my smartest friends who are doctors and they said I don't buy it you can't apply technology trainer but whether you

believe or not you're gonna live forever I am convinced by Kurzweil stalk and the science that we are going to live a long time if you don't get hit by a bus during GDC or next year you could all easily live to be well over a hundred I'm not guaranteeing that I know that sounds far-fetched to some of you but I think we are all going to live longer than we expect to live which means you want your brain to live and work as least as long as well as your body does which means building cognitive reserve is important which means you want to do things that require effort if you play Tony Hawk or World of Warcraft for the thousandth time it is not going to rewire your brain unless it's more difficult it's a new level it's a new challenge novelty helps effort helps E is for effort you want to be putting some effort into activities if you want them to rewire your brain so R is for

repetition E is for effort and a is for attention stand up if you went to the talk last night on attention of you yes excellent talk okay so for the rest of you you might want to check it out on the vault GDC vault attention turns out to be extremely important for neuroplasticity and not just a little attention but the intense rapt attention that new challenging activities require attention is extremely powerful more powerful than many of you may realize it's also difficult so here is a little attention test for you if you know the answer please don't give it away to your neighbors some of you have seen this video before you are about to see video of two basketball teams one dressed all in white one dressed all in black your job is to count the passes on the team dressed all in white he said reaching for the audio never

mind you don't need the audio the audio says count the passes on the team dressed all in white here we go ready stand up if you got 13 sit down stand up if you saw a moonwalking bear awesome here it comes you can all sit down it's going to come in from the right hand edge right there guy in a bear suit right in the middle and moonwalking out the other side stand

up if you missed the moonwalking bear and this is consistently what happens in studies about half of the participants when told to count the passes on the team dressed all in white miss the moonwalking bear because attention is intensely powerful it doesn't just focus you on something it starts blocking out other things your attention is required for neuroplasticity and not just a little attention a lot of attention and strong attention and if you multitask a lot you're gonna have issues with attention stand up if you are a frequent multitasker don't be shy I know I've already made you feel bad or tried to for multitasking okay sit down right this is the problem I think multitasking is a cultural disease you feel like you're getting done more done but you're not why do you feel like you're getting more done because you're getting challenged and when you're getting challenged because it's impossible by the way remember all you can do is rapidly task switching and you felt at

the beginning how difficult it is to rapidly task switch so when you multitask your IQ essentially drops you make more mistakes and you become what Clifford Nass at Stanford calls a sucker for irrelevance e you lose your ability to filter out the important from the unimportant you lose your ability to focus and sustain attention that attention ability is required to rewire your brain so how do you develop your ability to pay attention one way is with mindfulness and/or meditation you can think of them largely as the same thing stand up if you've ever meditated okay many of you good so you won't think I'm a freak stand up if you've never meditated I know it's the other half of you I'm just trying to get your brains producing BDNF thank you okay those of you who are just standing may think this sounds really weird and freaky don't get your spiritual crap on me Crabtree whatever it is you may have associations whether

it's martial arts or a particular kind of spirituality I want you to try to put all those associations aside because meditation comes in many forms and essentially the kind I'm talking about is simply focusing your attention excellent meditators aren't better at sustaining their attention as much as they're better at noticing when they've lost their attention it's kind of like balance people with great balance you can't see me but I'm standing on one leg now people with great balance it's not that they're just always right perfectly in line it's that they notice sooner that they're getting off line and a little bit left and they shift back right and they notice soon as it a little bit right and go back left and that's what people with good attention skills do as well they notice sooner that their attention is drifted and they more quickly return their attention to the object of focus if you practice doing that you will rewire your brain to add neurons to your prefrontal cortex and improve your ability to sustain attention which is why I want you to try

just 30 seconds of meditation with me just sit comfortably put your hands on your knees in your lap wherever is comfortable for you shut your eyes if you're comfortable doing so if you're not you can just look at the chair or the floor in front of you I'm gonna guide you through this a little bit which means I'm going to talk which is going to drive some of you crazy all you want to do is focus your attention on the sensation of your breath again I want you to get into your direct sensory circuit feel the breath wherever you feel it in your nose and your belly wherever you feel the breath just focus on your breath notice when you're not paying attention and without judgment which is important return your attention to your breath about 30 seconds of this if you're thinking thoughts don't judge them just return to the sensation of

your breath I can just return attention to your breath okay whenever you're ready you can return your attention to everything around you and open your eyes and again if you're anything like me you feel a little refreshed a little more relaxed and you also just started the process of strengthening your inner CEO your prefrontal cortex is sometimes called your inner CEO your prefrontal cortex is this part of your brain right behind the middle of your forehead and it is fantastic brain real estate responsible for executive function like planning decision-making initiation of action inhibition of action wow I really want

to punch Paul in the face right now he's such an dat's all when you don't punch Paul in the face in the office that's your prefrontal cortex helping you out helping you keep your job so your prefrontal cortex is awesome brain real estate and in addition to all that other inner CEO stuff it helps you focus attention and return attention and when you practice being mindful or meditating you add neurons to your prefrontal cortex and you even studies suggest remove neurons from your amygdala and your limbic system that gets you upset and irritated with people so I encourage moments of mindfulness or meditation if meditation feels weird for you try just being mindful moment-to-moment which goes like something like this as you walk to your meeting don't think anything just try to feel how the feet how your feet feel as they hit the ground as you're walking or when you're driving turn off the music and just focus completely on driving how does the steering wheel feel in your hands or when your phone rings instead of

immediately cadion I can't take that now or I gotta talk to Jim listen to the sound of your phone ringing all the way until the sound is gone and then answer little moments of mindfulness like that re-enforce refresh your brain with that direct sensory circuit and again improve your ability to pay attention so a is for attention in reach and attention is awesome and an important prerequisite for rewiring your brain c is for complexity why complexity because the more complex the activity you're doing the more you're gonna rewire your brain the more benefits you're gonna get which is why neuroplasticity experts recommend if you want to empower this neuroplasticity machinery in your brain you want to do something very complex that uses as much of your brain as possible if you're going to play a game a game that uses your body as a controller is better than a brain than a game that doesn't hear

neuroplasticity experts often talk about things like learning a language or even better playing a musical instrument why because when you play a musical instrument you're activating so much of your brain visual systems are going to read the chords or the notes or pay it or visually see what the other musicians you're playing with are doing your auditory cortex is obviously heavily involved when you're playing music your cerebellum is involved with timing and keeping the beat for you and your muscular cortex controlling your fingers as you play guitar or drums or whatever it is when you're learning a musical instrument you're activating a lot of different parts of your brain which brings you richer cognitive reserve which helps you prevent against cognitive decline and strengthens your neuroplasticity machinery as neuroplasticity pioneer Mike Marisnick calls it so C is for complexity if you you can rewire your brain with something simple but you'll get more benefits if

you rewrite your brain with something complex so R is for repetition E is for effort a is for attention c is for complexity and H is for health I'm gonna let you in on a shocking revelation from the world of science your brain is in your body I know it's weird isn't it not only that but it's a huge part of your body recess resource speaking speaking resource wise your brain is about 2 or 3 pounds but it takes 20 to 25 percent of the nutrients blood sugar and everything else that you consume because it is it is an intense machine as I described earlier so I'm sorry to tell you to be healthy at a confer it's like GDC where many of us are not so healthy but this starts with eating right basically any healthy food is good for your brain in particular things with

vitamin B C D or E and antioxidants like omega-3 acids are good for your brain which means you should eat things like fish drink things like tea eat berries walnuts and perhaps the best news of the whole talk chocolate I've already mentioned exercise I don't mean to dwell on this but again exercise is fantastic for your brain and as disappointing and problematic as it may here be to here at GDC when there's so many good parties going on you need to sleep well to learn well and think well so in studies if you teach a rat a maze during the day and during the day it learns left left right right left to find the cheese when you watch that rat brain sleep at certain stages of sleep it is running that maze back and forth way faster than it could

in reality learning that pathway during the night as it sleeps that rat brain is going left left left left left right right left left left right left left left right right left your brain will do the same thing when you sleep so if you want to learn more and add more circuits to your brain sleep well so H is for health reach to rewire with repetition effort attention complexity and health again because circuits get burned in when you talk out loud about something and circuits get burned in when you physically move I want you to do one more walking one-on-one with your partner or partners just for one minute stand up talk about what have you heard so far how can you apply this to your brain and your games go

okay make your way back to your seats please walk back to your seats if you went on a walk which I appreciate take a seat again thank you I'm sorry I'm not giving you more time I would if I had it but I want to encourage you to continue this stuff after the talk talk about this stuff over lunch and you'll learn it and burn it better so reach two we will rewire once you've rewired your brain this is a use-it-or-lose-it situation circuits in your brain that you don't lose gradually wither away

I like the freezing work it or waste it a little better again because it goes back to that effort if you're putting effort into something it's a signal to your brain you need this let's build this up video games can help which is great news I'm sure you all don't need to be convinced this but video games don't just rewire your brains in evil ways the way that some of the general population thinks and the media certainly seems to think more and more studies are showing that when you play video games you build beneficial circuits in your brains recent article in The Wall Street Journal I think just a few days ago described some of these studies any game will rewire your brain these games or these sites are designed in particular to rewire your brain for the better I do not claim to have done an industry-wide thorough survey of all braining training software out there but these are some of the options available

to you and basically the higher on the screen the more the activities seem to be research-based so resources for you to consider using to rewire your brain include the games you're already playing and maybe some of these we're gonna go towards making plans in just a minute but I have a couple of minutes here for QA which I want to do before you all make your neuroplasticity plans so for the sake of the recording hi everybody watching on GDC vault please walk up to a microphone if you have a question and I will do my best to answer yes sir actually it wasn't a question I just wanted to reinforce two things that you said that I knew intuitively but I didn't understand the reason for it number one my wife who like a lot of people is under a lot of stress we have two teenage sons she uses a lot of lip balm it never occurred to me that maybe

there's like a real-ass self-medicating relaxation thing that's going on there the second thing is I don't know how many of you watched I used to watch a show called The West Wing I'm a politics junkie I loved it if there's one thing they do in that show it's walk and talk and they worked in a high-stress environment yeah in the White House so maybe there was intuitively something going on there awesome comments and thank you I think a lot of us know some of this stuff intuitively and part of what I want to do is give you scientific backing to ground and instill more motivation into some of the things you're probably already doing yes sir some of the changes that I make sometimes take 5-10 minutes to compile run implement stuff like that and I find myself going off and responding to messages writing emails and stuff like that and it's a problem I've been trying to address but I can't find a good solution because I have to come back to the original problem I can't do anything yeah are you looking for a suggestion

I'm looking for a suggestion yes so I feel your pain first of all I come from a programming background and despite all my former colleagues at Intel making processors faster and faster compiles still take a while because we keep writing more and more code so what comes to mind is the concept of flow stand-up if you're familiar with flow mic csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow okay many of you very quickly for the rest of you if you sustained attention on something that is challenging high level of challenge and you have a high level of skill to do it and you stay focused for about 20 minutes you get in to what is called a flow channel where neurologically speaking all the right gates are open and closed in your brain essentially after about 20 minutes of this you you get in the zone everything is clicking if you've ever looked up at your watch and been like what was at that time already I got to go I had no idea then you've been in flow flow is an

awesome productive and happy state to be in peak experience is what Csikszentmihalyi wanted to study and he came up with this concept of flow so the difficulty about flow is that it takes about 20 minutes to get into it and guess how long to get out of it maybe not as bad as you think it's one or two minutes to get out of it which means a five minute compile takes you out of it so if you ever have a disruption of more than two minutes and you go back to what you were doing where you were in flow what do you think and feel where was I right where was I is the loss of flow and it's killing your productivity and your happiness so the suggestion is this not easily done but the suggestion is this you're writing code you hit compile stay mentally on the code look at object design do some inspecting think about which assertions you're going to put into which functions next think about how you're going to test the code you've still you've just written if you can

stay on the same subject during that interruption then when your compiles done you're right back in the flow not easily done but I hope that helps a few more minutes I may not get to all of you I'm just going to warn you now next please this all sounds great and I'd love to try it but when I get home I have a husband children company and when I get back home it becomes I need to get the kids out the door because they have to go to kindergarten and she needs her backpack and she needs her shoes and this one has a tummy ache and my mom is on the phone and she needs to find out what day she's coming and you know you get caught up with your life and what can you do can you do this in small doses what do you what suggestions do you have you can do this in small doses in fact I would recommend you're about to write neuroplasticity plans for yourself in your plan I suggest you write down at most one thing you want to work on because what many of us ambitious people do is write down eight

things we want to work on then we fail at all eight we get frustrating we give up if you pick one thing and you focus on it repeatedly for a month you will rewire your brain studies have shown physical changes in brain in as short as two weeks so the other thing to try to do is to pick a goal that is intrinsically valued it's important to you not your family or your kids or your husband or anyone else and an approach goal something you want to do as opposed to I want to stop doing this all of that helps you succeed with your goals then try to lower the hurdles to doing it and integrate it into your life so here's an example as some people may know who saw me talk last year the year before I'm very into the science of happiness gratitude is extremely important for happiness easy to do if you make a habit of feeling and expressing gratitude you end up being a more happy person so I got into the rhythm of with my wife and three-year-old child every time we sit down at home at dinner we hold hands I know cheesy whatever we hold hands and

we say that's what's one thing we reach grateful for before we eat dinner because we have done that for more than a month it is now a habit habit equals brain circuit essentially habit equals brain circuit that you don't have to decide to do with your prefrontal cortex your basal ganglia deep in the middle of your brain says time to do this I am habituated to do this which means that even when my wife and I are running around stressed out and like oh my god crab just quit what are we gonna do about health insurance we're massively stressed out are you really gonna be able to make people happy for a living this is insane we're gonna be pouring on the street in no time let's eat my three-year-old says hey we didn't say what we were grateful for awesome so if you can wire those habits in just one small change at a time it's less effort and it integrates with your life again more easily said than done but does that help good I apologize this is gonna be the last question and I'm happy to stick around for the rest of you but

next please so one thank you for at least trying to bring this to this this audience culturally speaking you know working in game development everybody wants to collaborate all the time and so you know I work on a team for myself you know trying to get into that flow state I'm an artist it's important but I am interrupted about every 15 minutes yeah to discuss something or deal with something you know is there you have any ideas about that again easier said than done seems to be the theme here on how do you how do you apply this which is really again why I'm asking all of you in a minute how are you going to apply this but what I've suggested to people and some have applied is to communicate about flow and getting into flow I presented this material for years not this exact material but related material including flow at Intel for years which led to me sitting in my open cube environment and people walking up and I swear to God first words out of their mouth are you and flow awesome because I

could say yeah I'm really I'm could I can it wait or is it less than a minute and if it is less than a minute you can do it and right back where you were and if it's longer it's that most people say oh I can send an email it's fine a group I presented to you a couple of weeks ago a person sent me a picture a few days later of their flow flag they made a little took a little dowel and cut out just a piece of paper and in small writing it said can it wait I'm in giant letters flow and they stick it up on their cubicle when they're in flow no you're not always going to be in flow and for many of you it's your job to get interrupted right so you can't just say don't talk to me but you can give signals to people and if nothing else turn off your automatic interruption machines the little Outlook thing that pops up and says you got an email you want to be distracted with this I'll show you the first few words just to just to suck you in right turn it off turn off I am put yourself on do not

disturb go to a coffee shop work from home whatever it is try to block out times where you don't get interrupted and then allow times when it's like yeah green flag is up interrupt me all you want again easier said than done but I hope that helps ok time for you to make a plan this is a plan about who you want to be this is nothing short of miraculous to me you and think or even just imagine things and rewire your brain because for your brain the difference between doing something and imagining something is very slight if I had half of you practice shooting foul shots on a basketball court and the other half just imagine doing so the imaginers would improve almost as much as those who practiced so you can literally think your way into it being a new person if you do something repeatedly and reach to rewire over the next month you will rewire your brain so now the question is

to you who do you want to be what do you want to do take a minute or two write down a plan then I'm gonna have you talk about it and I'm gonna summarize and we'll end so about a minute and a half or so who do you want to be what one thing do you want to do repeatedly over the next month

hopefully your goal is something where you can notice small progress don't be over ambitious with this don't necessarily focus on something you're terrible at think about something you can make progress on pretty quickly which reinforces the progress you're making okay now because studies show that when you publicly share a plan you are much more likely to follow through on that plan I want you all to publicly share your plans with your walking one-on-one partner and later I encourage you to post this on Facebook Twitter wherever you want if you publicly share your intention your must more likely to follow through so one last walking one-on-one for about 30 seconds stand up talk to your partner what are you gonna do

alright about 10 seconds left make your way back to your seats if you can please all right wrap up and sit down please I'm sorry I'm not giving you more time but again I encourage you to continue these conversations later but I have to

get you out of here on time by wrapping up as follows you have every bit of potential for growth that this little baby has if you make your plan and follow through on your plan for the next month you will physically rewire your brain for the better so the problem I came here to address is that I think you all focus so much on improving your games that you don't put enough focus on improving your brains science gives us a truly miraculous solution neuroplasticity the ability to rewire your brain in ways that you want to and neuroplasticity can rewire your brain in ways that you don't want to so you have to be careful about what's your what you're doing and thinking and rewiring your brain which is why I want you to be intentional about rewiring your brain who do you want to be remember that

neuroplasticity requires reach repetition effort attention complexity and health reach to rewire I would love to hear from you all about how this works or doesn't work questions I can help with here are various ways to get in touch with me and some of my business cards are up here on the corners of the stage and by that video camera in the back I would love to hear from you how all this works reach to rewire thank you so much for coming [Applause]