About EXPAND YOUR PERCEPTION WITH DR. BEAU LOTTO: The neuroscience of how creativity, resilience and adaptability will enable you to thrive in uncertainty
Welcome to the Expand Your Perception Podcast … This podcast is an ever expanding STORY of the neuroscience of uncertainty … a story of exploration and expansion … and at times of a personal story into uncertainty. My name is Beau Lotto and I’m a Neuroscientist and Founder of the Lab of Misfits. My hope is that you’ll walk away knowing less since nothing interesting begins with knowing. It begins with not knowing. My second hope is that going to the very place your brain evolved to avoid: Uncertainty, you’ll understand more about how and why you see what you do. Since it’s only by increasing your perceptual intelligence that you’ll be able to take agency in your own brain’s process of making sense of yourself, of others of the world around you .
Otherwise everything you do will continue to be a reflex grounded in someone else’s biases.
Come with me! At least for a while. I’ve no idea where it will end, or how long it’ll take to get there … as is the want of a Vagabond.
We will be exploring the power of vibration ... and how and why your brain and body are literally impacted by it … and evolved to be so. But also how your vibrations affect the life and lives of those around you.
It will be an interactive journey … if you want it to be.
This episode focuses on reliability and the importance of reliability in relationships as the foundation of trust, friendship and love.
To read the blog that accompanies this podcast, CLICK HERE.
7 Oct 2022
EPISODE 18: ADVENTURE REQUIRES TRUST
Dr Beau Lotto explains how we’re wired to trust and how remarkable it is that most of us are unaware of how omnipresent it is in our lives.
Right now, while reading this, you are probably sitting in a chair of one form or another. Before sitting, did you check to make sure it’d take your weight? Why not? Because your brain trusted it would.
If you’ve never considered this before, then pause and consider the hundreds … if not thousands of actions and situations that you experience every single day in which your physical and emotional well-being … indeed your life … is placed in the hands of others. In the hands of the person who built your chair, your gas heating system, your home, the grower of your food, the provider of your water. Your doctor. Your lover.
Trust fosters gratitude and optimism. When you trust another, and that trust is matched with action (and not just words), your brain receives an intrinsic reward. A brief moment of pleasure induced by the release of specific neurotransmitters that increases the bond between you and that person (or object). So we’re wired to trust.
Trust is not something that you gain. It’s something you lose. And when you lose it, you lose more than trust. You gain fear, anxiety and suspicion.
TO READ THE BLOG, CLICK HERE.
13 Sept 2022
EPISODE 17: MAKE THE IMPLICIT EXPLICIT
Dr beau Lotto discusses how inspiring people not only express themselves in words, they manifest those words in action.
How we respond to a situation is our own making.
When you find yourself in a challenging context … ask yourself these questions:
“Do my actions increase or decrease the effort I have to make, or am I transferring my effort onto others?”
“Do my actions increase or decrease my personal responsibility for the context that was created, or am I transferring my responsibility onto others?”
“Do my actions take ownership of their result, or am I transferring the consequence (blame) of those results onto others?” (... and yet taking credit when all goes well?)
Which is why great leaders look away from what is for their benefit if it is not serving all the people / institutions / structures they lead.
We are often blind to ourselves. Which is why the best person to reveal you to you is usually not you. It’s someone else. Hence the importance of pursuing self-honesty, not simply on one’s own.
It could even require questioning the identity that you define yourself by. Which is why true care, friendship, support, love is a risk.
So making the implicit explicit is generous. It’s a risk since honesty of self can create vulnerability. But it’s also how you create life.
TO READ THE BLOG, CLICK HERE.
28 Jul 2022
EPISODE 16: LEADING OTHERS INTO THE DARK
Dr beau Lotto explains how what defines a good leader is how she/he leads others into uncertainty … into the dark.
Good leaders … powerful leaders … empower.
It’s how one uses power that matters (for good and evil) ... toward a lover, towards friends and family ... towards those in one’s institutions … and, yes, towards yourself. Do you use it to protect, care and enable or disable, dominate and control?
Are the qualities of leadership the ones that you’d like to be ‘normal’ in the future, as they will become the way-of-being from which future perceptions will be created?
Leadership is not restricted to leaders of countries or institutions. Nor is leadership a person. It’s an embodiment of principles and ideals. A thing we become. And each of us leads within our larger families, our children, our friends … our romantic relationships. We lead those who rely upon us practically and/or emotionally. And each of us is simultaneously led by the very same family members, children, friends and lovers … i.e., those who effect us emotionally and practically … including the different yous that are inside you.
TO READ THE BLOG, CLICK HERE.
4 May 2022
EPISODE 15: THE RISK OF THE RETURN
Dr beau Lotto explores the risk of possible self honesty created by returning from an adventure.
‘The Return’ is a critical part - if not the most essential part - of adventure. When you return, your brain can experience the cognitive dissonance between the newer, nascent, questioning self and the more familiar, more established self who was left. What’s fascinating is that the older self - who seems to have all the answers, waits for your arrival with open arms like a loyal friend ... keen to reestablish its place in the hierarchy of things.
In my return there is the opportunity to not ignore that way of being … that self … that was waiting for me. But to expand upon it by laying a foundation of understanding that enabled me to see what was unseen before … in a never-ending attempt to pursue self-honesty.
TO READ THE BLOG, CLICK HERE.
22 Mar 2022
EPISODE 14: THE POWER OF A REASON
Adventure, as in life, needs a reason and so essential is ‘the reason’ for our vitality that the human brain is perceptually sensitive to its authenticity in yourself and in others.
So essential is ‘the reason’ for our vitality that the human brain is keenly perceptually sensitive to its authenticity in yourself and in others. When perceiving it in yourself, the more authentic you feel (with true honesty) the stronger will be your self-esteem, even more so than your perception of power. So it’s not power that empowers you. It’s your authenticity.
10 Feb 2022
EPISODE 13: ADVENTURES REQUIRE A SANDBAR
Adventures are not like a holiday.
Holidays are planned to minimise risk. We consider the different possible destinations. We choose. We go. We stay. We return. By actively choosing to create a context of uncertainty, you are choosing to disrupt the old ecologies of the past and in doing so create the true freedom of choice. This is what an adventure does. It shepherds you into a new state of being.
Sandbars are bridges into that risk.
They enable the risk to be taken … and in doing so allows someone to embrace the uncertainty of themselves with courage and agency.
Each of us can be a sandbar in another person’s life. You too can be the place from which another person feels certain enough to take a risk in order to expand their perception. In doing so, you too will expand.
15 Dec 2021
EPISODE 12: EVERY ADVENTURE BEGINS IN THE SAME WAY
All adventures begin in the same way: They begin with leaving.
Looking back is why leaving is hard … because we know that it will require letting go.
We can often experience the fear, uncertainty and confusion when considering ‘letting go’ … but also clarity and expansion on the other side of it. And why we need a certainty from which to bridge into Not-A.
What can be that bridge?
Love. Love helps us leave.
To read the blog that accompanies this podcast, click here.
24 Nov 2021
EPISODE 11: LIVING IS AN EXERCISE OF LIVING
We don’t train and then live. We train by living.
We don’t overcome our fear of uncertainty and then step into it. We don’t first overcome our pain before stepping forward. We get in shape along the way through the exercise of living. Adventures are hard and at times we get sore and lost in mind, spirit and body.
In this time of COVID we’ve all seen - and indeed throughout history we are here because of … those who stepped forward … first. Into the fire … first. Into the protest for the freedom and dignity of others … first. Into compassion within conflict … first. Today we call some of these people ‘first responders’, who risk themselves every day for an anonymous other in a time of pandemic. Others we call parents, teachers, friends and lovers (at least when done beautifully).
We know from neuroscience that we will all go further if it’s for the benefit of another. The Lab of Misfits has shown that you’ll even endure more pain if the endurance benefits another brain more than your own.
To read the blog that accompanies this podcast, click here
28 Oct 2021
EPISODE 10: THE SECRET TO SUCCESSFUL ADVENTURES IS LISTENING
How you listen and what you listen to is what will define your adventure. Not just now, but in life, in love and in yourself.
To truly listen, is not to listen without assumptions - that’s impossible. It’s to listen with ‘perceptual awareness’: The awareness that you have assumptions, and that they will shape what you hear (and see, feel and do). Hence why true listening i.e., the kind of listening that will expand you and deepen your relationship to the world, requires humility combined with the desire (if not need) to understand the world … whether 'that' world is the world of another person or the natural world itself from which we all extend.
To read the blog that accompanies this podcast, click here.
1 Oct 2021
EPISODE 9: HONESTY CREATES THE OPPORTUNITY FOR ADVENTURE
At the moment, many of us are experiencing the consequences of uncertainty in the form of disrupted sleep, awkward dreams, possibly negative realisations about one’s beloved, parent, child, friend, work, experiences of illness or the devastation of finances … or all of the above. Grinning in the face of it will not make these realities go away.
The aim of this podcast is to demystify adventure. ‘De-grandize’ it. Democratize and humanize it… in order to lower its bar of entry for all of us. 'Moving through life with a tilt’ is first and foremost ... movement. More deeply, it’s being tilted in that movement: To use the fears, sadnesses and losses to propel you forward… and in doing so proactively create the possibility of new perceptions.
To read the blog that accompanies this podcast, click here.
15 Sept 2021
EPISODE 8: THE POWER OF ADVENTURE
This is the first podcast in Beau’s Adventures in Uncertainty series that documents the time he packed up his home in New York, traveled across America (twice) eventually finding himself on a island in the Mediterranean.
This podcast explores the distinction between uncertainty, adventure and exploration... and how adventure is about embracing the uncertainty that already exists in one's life and reframing it as an opportunity to discover.
18 Aug 2021
EPISODE 7: A PLACE WE CAN FIND COURAGE
Our society focuses a great deal on confidence. Schools try to teach it, parents reward it, coaches punish you if you don’t have it, businesses pay you more if you fake it.
The logic is that confidence engenders success. But does it?
Ironically, research has shown that confidence can engender exactly the opposite: Poorly considered decisions and thoughtless actions that can create harm. Because when we’re confident we often forget to ask questions ...
22 Jul 2021
EPISODE 6: THE GREATEST GIFT WE CAN GIVE IS FEEDBACK.
Dr Beau Lotto considers what is core to all of our existence? Is it food, shelter and water as Maslow suggests? Or is it something else that transcends these? Something that ‘makes sense’ of our physiology.
He discusses how it is feedback that creates life. Without it, we literally perish. With plenty of food, water and warmth, when one’s perception of existence is malnourished, it can result in destructive behaviours.
Therefore the greatest gift we can give to another, is the gift of existence by the simple act of listening in the pursuit of understanding and providing feedback.
4 Apr 2021
EPISODE 5: ACTIVATE YOUR PREFRONTAL CORTEX
What’s required to thrive in the unknown?
TO ACTIVATE YOUR PREFRONTAL
The prefrontal cortex is the most recent innovation of our brain’s evolution. It evolved to help us deviate away from the more automatic, reactionary perceptions of panic, denial and anger to more thoughtful and considered behaviours.
4 Apr 2021
EPISODE 4: PANIC IS A NATURAL RESPONSE, AND IT'S CONTAGIOUS
Feeling disempowered in the face of uncertainty is a deeply natural response. When disempowered, which many of our brains are feeling now in the face of COVID-19, our brain-state is similar to our ancestors’ brain-state when they faced a moment of imminent death. You inherited this response. We all did. Each of us is seeing the world through their brains, and all the millions of brains that came afterward. These brains and their evolved responses are deep inside you - and everyone one around you.
We are now collectively hearing the predator’s roar. We know it’s out there. Except this ‘predator’ is invisible to the naked eye, which makes it all the more frightening.
4 Apr 2021
EPISODE 3: YOUR FEAR OF UNCERTAINTY CAN DISEMPOWER YOU
The need to be in control of one’s fate is profound. When we feel in control, our brain feels ‘empowered’. Whether in a social, behavioural, psychological or economic context, to be empowered is to feel certainty in our lives.
COVID-19 is challenging that sense of control. As a result, hundreds of millions - if not billions - of brains around the world are feeling collectively disempowered. And that sense of disempowerment is likely to be stronger for those who strongly identified with being ‘an individual’, ‘self-made’, or ‘a lone wolf’ - a common archetype in the USA (and the West in general).
Why?
4 Apr 2021
EPISODE 2 - DARKNESS: THE FEAR THAT ARISES FROM UNCERTAINTY
The darkness of night embodies a fundamental, existential threat of many of the fears that we carry in our brains from living life, including the viral pandemic we are currently experiencing.
4 Apr 2021
EPISODE 1 - WHAT IS YOUR BRAIN’S GREATEST FEAR?
If you didn’t know before COVID-19, you do now.
And if you don’t know it consciously, your body is feeling it.
The source of your greatest fear lies at the heart of every one of your brain’s thoughts, emotions and beliefs. It is the basis of our evolution. It underpins every behaviour you have ever done or will ever do in the future.
TO READ THE BLOG, CLICK HERE
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