Dmitry Matskevich, Dbrain (part 2): on neurobiology, internal freedom, “cheap dopamine” and intuition

The second part of the conversation between Alexey Ivanov and Dmitry Matskevich , CEO and cofounder of Dbrain and a popularizer of neuroscience. This is the eleventh interview in a series of conversations with top experts in their fields about the product approach, entrepreneurship, psychology and behavior change. The first part of the interview is here .

About inner freedom

I want to throw the topic of inner freedom. Is it possible to be completely free from the system?

It depends on which “system”. At the beginning of the journey, you do not really understand yourself, what your motivations are and what are your external ones. Something the parents brought in, something the cultural code and society, and something left over from millions of years of evolution of the reptilian brain.

For example, you may want to do something not because it motivates you from the inside, but because you want recognition in a party of entrepreneurs, you want to prove your importance to your parents, to like the opposite sex. At first it’s hard to distinguish what is present, yours and for a long time, and what is pretend, dictated by unclosed complexes or ego. This is such a permanent way, a session of psychotherapy with yourself: to be able to hear yourself better, take off the outer layers to be yourself and make decisions that are right for you personally.

Good question: what is right and wrong?

I will offer my wording. The right decisions are those that make you happy long-term and give you more energy to make new decisions. It turns out such a positive spiral. Wrong decisions seem beneficial short-term, but long-term lead you into a negative cycle.

For example, for me, eating sugar is wrong. Yes, short-term effects of sugar are a cool effect, similar to euphoria. But this effect is short, and the long-term habit of eating sweets makes me less happy: my mood starts to jump, I want more sugar, I’m more likely to get depressed, my cognitive abilities decrease, and as a result I die 10 years earlier. So-so scenario, to be honest.

It’s the same with alcohol. The first 1-3 hours may well give a positive effect, but on the horizon it is already negative. With experience, you are increasingly learning to see the long-term effect of what only seems an intuitively good solution in a short cycle, and to train your intuition for longer cycles of happiness. As a result, you understand that true self-love is long-term self-love.

To be free of such triggers is my freedom. If a person starts a project with the only motivation “for Forbes to write about me,” he makes decisions that are irrational for the business, he optimizes external recognition, the desire to make a large sum of money. In the process, a person suffers for the sake of this future goal, and then either achieves it and immediately falls into depression, because the effect of achieving it is very short, or it does not achieve it — and suffers already in this regard. Here he is not free. He is hostage to these external motivations, which ultimately make him unhappy.

The right decisions are those that make you happy long term. Wrong decisions seem beneficial short-term, but long-term lead you into a negative cycle. To be outside the system means to be able to listen to your body. Be yourself. This is an endless way of recognizing yourself. This allows you to make better decisions and make choices that both in the moment and in the long run help you realize yourself fully and be happy.

It’s like a bulb: it has many layers of husk, and learning to be ourselves and listen to ourselves, we sort of wade through them and remove layer by layer external motivation, desire to correspond, automatism, reflexes. Gradually remove the excess in order to invest our creative energy only in the most juicy. There, a lot of energy is hidden inside the bulb for your life, and it is important to find it.

What do you recommend to people who want to work on their bulb?

Start listening to yourself, notice where the motivation and energy come from, what they spend on. It is best to do this, in my opinion, during morning meditation - just train to notice your emotions, conditions, observe, but not react.

It is also helpful to note this all throughout the day. The longer we do this, the better we train our brain to take information from our sensors and find the internal processes that the energy takes. It is necessary to isolate each such brick, each clamp. Hear him. And then think about using what new habits you can systematically do something with it. Relax further, so as not to waste cognitive resources on it - both computational and emotional.

I can list a few examples of such energy-consuming mental cycles that I find in my home:

• Resentment . Someone offended you, someone did not forgive - you hold a grudge, get angry, fixated on this. This drains a lot of cognitive resources. The practice of forgiveness helps a lot here. Imagine a person mentally, sincerely try to understand his motives, empathize, add a context in which you would do the same, mentally embrace, send gratitude. With a bonus, you remove the so-called “fundamental attribution error” - this is, when, conditionally, “you were cut, because the other driver is a moron, and when you cut, it is because you are late to your wife in the hospital . ” You invest a little more empathy - without cognitive distortions of perception. Foreign acts become more understandable and cause more acceptance.
• Guilt. In fact, this is the same insult, only to oneself. Love yourself, accept - it's not easy, but you can start trying. There are a lot of studies that show that guilty feelings decrease cognitive abilities, motivation and impair the quality of life. That sounds, in principle, obvious. But after you have drawn conclusions, you can gradually make this feeling unconstructive for yourself and abandon it.
• Anxiety about the future. During evolutionary adaptation, we got a great advantage in the form of long-term memory and the ability to model the future. Together with this ability, we learned to worry about all the possible negative scenarios of this future. Who am I, why am I worried, and am I going there and going at all. The answer with anxiety is this: you can never be completely sure whether you go there. We live in an increasingly unpredictable world, in a universe that we do not control. A thousand years ago, the world changed little throughout the life of a person, and, of course, the human psyche did not learn how to adapt well to what is happening now. But you can learn how to create safe containers for yourself in which there is no anxiety. For example, you can think of a “disturbing Sunday" - all week we thoughtlessly believe that what we are doing is the most correct and right direction without a doubt, because in the end such confidence gives a ton of energy to just figate. However, one day a week on Sunday, one can properly suffer about the meaning of being.
• Switch between contexts. There are a lot of so-called “switching costs” during the working day. It’s cool when you can afford to have only one context due to hyper focus. But in reality, I never succeeded. Each moment of deciding what to do and what to switch to is cognitively costly. Therefore, you can introduce the practice of devoting the day to one thing. For example, today you are only recording an interview. Or today you only deal with one part of your product. It also helps to make safe slots on the calendar, in which it is clear in advance what you will do. This is a simple thing, but it frees up a lot of energy.

It’s like a bulb: it has many layers of husk, and learning to be ourselves and listen to ourselves, we sort of wade through them and remove layer by layer external motivation, desire to correspond, automatism, reflexes.

It is important to note that it is not necessary to experience negative feelings. Sometimes you notice that your creative energy begins to be spent on choosing delicious gourmet restaurants or watching TV shows. In this case, it is important to understand whether this makes you happier in the long run. If the answer is “no,” then I personally twist this “tap”. In my “vessel” there remains more energy that I can direct to my beloved business and those close to me.

These are just a few examples of the infinite Universe of what can happen in each of us in the head. I also like the analogy with an old Windows laptop. You have not rebooted it from the purchase for several years. I haven’t started anything serious there yet, I just decided to open a browser, and it’s already slowing down. You go into process analytics and see that 100% of the processor is occupied by some old processes that no one has long been aware of. They probably were once needed, but now they are simply eating away part of the processor capacities. It's time to restart them. And then you understand that in fact you have a super-fast computer, and it can launch not only the browser.

Just as you work with understanding where the computing resources of the brain go, you learn to structure your internal motivation, to understand what gives you the energy to think and do something.

It is useful for yourself to collect such a portfolio of energies and motivations that charge you. This may be serving your team, with which it’s fun to solve complex problems, falling in love with your business, relationships with loved ones, etc.

It’s just as useful every day to deal with sources that give you energy. For example, every morning I start by raising my feeling of falling in love with my current tasks, with the team and with the close people who surround me. Love is important to regularly cultivate in yourself and cultivate. It is very possible. An excellent book on this topic, "The Art of Love" by Erich From.

Before, I constantly considered how many countries I traveled, I tried to maximize this number. It was width without depth. The picture just changed: cities, mountains, the ocean, forests - the same thing. Now every year I try to go to Bali, to the same place, with almost the same circle of people. Everything is the same, I just know better what and where, I get a guaranteed optimal environment to shift my focus. We get deep joint brainstorms, conversations and experiences.

It turns out such a mental kung fu. Through this prism, you are gradually learning to work with your perception, focus energy and enjoy yourself, interacting with other people and with life in general.

Integrated approach

You must have figured out how to think and feel a person to combine intelligence, emotions and intuition. Tell me a few words about this.

A complicated thing, I often return to it. I take a more rational, less esoteric approach. I believe that intuition works, but not always.

Intuition is well trained where there is a quick feedback loop, a more or less repeatable medium, and the ability to teach this intuition.

For example, the car you drive is mostly intuitive. Driving has a very short feedback loop - turned the steering wheel, and immediately you feel how you change direction. And if you make decisions that you need in life once or twice, then instead of intuition it is better to use the process, principles and rules.

For example, finding people to join your team. Thousands of years ago there were no technology companies with complex processes and roles. Evolutionarily, we learned to quickly recognize in a person whether he is a friend or an enemy, whether or not to trust him. If when hiring employees to use only intuition without processes, you will get a lot of nice people in the team. This is already good, but not enough for a successful business.

At the same time, I believe in focusing the subconscious on some goal. For example, during meditation you can “remember” some of your global plans. If you are in love with your goal, then intuition at a subconscious level begins to help you, perception filters appear that notice the possibilities on the way to this goal. People interact with you differently: they feel passionate and want to support you on the way to your goal.

As a result, you understand that true self-love is long-term self-love.

Therefore, I am very drowning in order to understand first what you really like and what not. When you find this, everything else begins to take shape by itself.> The brain is so arranged that most of the cognitive resources are controlled by the subconscious, and telling your subconscious what to do is not so simple, it does what you love deep down. There is an excellent book on this topic about focused and defocused modes. Called "A Mind for Numbers" by Barbara Oakley.

If you do what you don’t insert, you will always spend a lot of energy forcing yourself, you won’t be thrilled by the process and you won’t be able to make decisions intuitively.

Here in some such context, I believe in intuition.

What about emotions and what the heart says, not the brain?

Emotions are like evolutionary code that is needed to motivate you to do something. Either be afraid and run away, or desire and achieve. It might seem that this code is primitive, it’s better to hammer it at all and make all decisions purely rational. But this code is flashed very deeply and it’s better to try to be in harmony with it. It is very important to hear your emotions, learn to observe them without resistance, and only then choose: to surrender to these emotions in the moment or not.

I just want to correct you: emotions are not about the heart, it's all about the brain.

Take an example with strong emotions. Marriage is a long-term union between people, implying trust in a partner. But over time, emotions do not become so vivid, and people begin to walk to the left to get strong emotions. What do you think about this?

With relationships, I think you can go anywhere if it makes you both happier. But often going to the left is an impulsive desire, like with sugar, which makes you less happy in a long cycle.

In my picture of the world, the most important thing is to find emotional contact. He is born of trust and openness. Of course, if you are fully synchronized with a partner, and you can talk empathetically that going to the left is normal, then everything is okay.

If walking to the left creates closed areas in you, then this disrupts so many processes in the pair. You cannot be completely open, share everything that you have, it destroys a deep emotional connection and reduces the ability to charge from each other. A deep emotional contact is created gradually, through living a bunch of different joint moments, such moments when you are vulnerable or, conversely, at the peak - and this is the most valuable thing in a relationship.

In my opinion, the dopamine corridor can be obtained by moving in depth. This is much more effective than moving wide.

I had such an example with travels. Before, I constantly considered how many countries I traveled, I tried to maximize this number. It was width without depth. The picture just changed: cities, mountains, the ocean, forests - the same thing. Now every year I try to go to Bali, to the same place, with almost the same circle of people. Everything is the same, I just know better what and where, I get a guaranteed optimal environment to shift my focus. We get deep joint brainstorms, conversations and experiences.

In general, I mean that the constant change of sexual partners sounds like a bad strategy. With a regular partner, you are more likely to receive really strong and deep emotions. I am a big fan of long-term relationships both in a team and in my personal life. I tried different things, made a lot of mistakes, often went on about momentary impulses, and through experiments and scientific facts I came to this conclusion. Depth is better than variability.

For those who want to try on a math-bore hat on this subject, there is still a good book, Algorithms to Live By. It describes such a mathematical problem, explore or exploit - in essence, the problem is conceptualized when it is worth stopping at an endless choice and starting to enjoy what you have. Different models are calculated such as “how many partners need to be sorted out in order to choose the best one”. It sounds funny, as if life is some kind of game where you need to find all the best.



But it does not take into account the fact that enjoying something is your subjective sensation of interpreting external signals, and you can easily control this without changing the external context.

Someone may be dissatisfied with the most exquisite dinner at the best Michelin-starred restaurant, and someone may genuinely enjoy the bucket from ordinary buckwheat on the water without sugar and salt - this is a matter of your perception filter. Someone can constantly look for new meanings of life and find flaws everywhere, but someone can understand that everything is pointless anyway and you can learn to fall in love with any current meaning - create this meaning in what you are doing right now. About this cool book "Man in Search of Meaning" by Victor Frankl.

And when it comes to interpersonal relationships, everything becomes even more interesting, because now your filter of your perception of another person affects this person, how he behaves and what he becomes. This is like a self-fulfilling prediction - if you relate to a person, for example, through a filter of trust and faith in his successes and abilities, he actually becomes someone you can trust and shows objective successes. About this, there is also a cool study conducted by Robert Rosenthal about the expectation effect. At a California school, he conducted a test to identify children with the strongest potential, and gave lists to teachers. A year later, these students passed the test and really became the best on the lists. The nuance is that the results of the first tests were fabricated by him absolutely randomly. The fact that teachers expected certain students to be cool, ultimately influenced their ability to adapt to these expectations.

Neuroscience

Many know you as a person who is one of the best in Moscow versed in neurobiology. Where does this interest come from?

I do not think that I am one of the best, of course, but I really like this area. About 10-15 years ago, I began to understand neuroscience, began to cling to any opportunity to understand how the brain works.

I have already said that I am a keen person. Always researched some things, read a lot of books, scientific articles on absolutely different topics. There was such a jerked generalist - and ballet, and physics, and finance. As a result, he could maintain a conversation on any topic, but everywhere superficially, it was frustrating. At some point, I realized that in addition to the pleasure of sticking in and sorting out something new, there is still very great pleasure in having something sorted out very deeply.

New Year's promises are also cheap dopamine. Your brain thought about a promise to itself, and as if it had already done everything in half. You have a feeling of achievement. But essentially nothing happened. And then you are lazy and scored.

I decided to read articles and books only within the framework of a single topic. He began to sort out topics that were already close to me. I chose “brain science”, that is, a set of sciences on how the brain works, how a person thinks and makes decisions. To me then this direction seemed as fundamental as physics. Technology, the environment are changing, and the human brain has not changed much over the past ten thousand years. It will not change for another hundred years, until they begin to change it with bioengineering. Technologies come and go super-fast, if you fell for a year, you are behind.

It’s much easier to live when the brain itself sticks into something, and you just get on the carriage.

I didn’t see this right away, but then I realized that neuroscience can be used in almost any field to better understand the ongoing processes: product development, company culture, personal motivation, social trends. Everywhere where there is a person in the decision-making system, there is his brain, which acts irrationally, but nevertheless according to some laws that can be studied.

I have a lot of dopamine from this area. The more I understand how the principles of neurobiology work in different areas of life, the more some kind of inner light comes on, the picture of the world converges, and the cumulative effect grows. Therefore, I have such an interest in applied psychology and the science of the brain.

This is also a cool tool to be useful to people. What sphere you would not talk about, you can always look at it through the prism of neurobiology and help create new filters. Everyone is interested in psychology: with whom it did not happen that he cannot fall asleep due to anxiety, there is no motivation in the morning, or some behavioral problem is not solved in the product. This all charges me very much.

What are one or two things from neuroscience that hit you the most?

Neuroplasticity is most striking. The brain is such a versatile black box in which a set of neurons somehow adapts to any changes. There are studies in which a person puts on glasses that turn the world 180 degrees. The first day he tries to do something, vomits from a loss of coordination and cannot even cook fried eggs. And after a couple of days he adapts, and does everything fine: he cooks, walks, interacts with others. Imagine, your world is turned upside down, and you only need a couple of days for the brain to adapt!

Porn is a very cheap dopamine as part of a powerful evolutionary breeding program. Getting to know the opposite sex, meeting, talking, having sex is a very big investment of cognitive and emotional resources for the brain. Porn is a super-small investment: just opened a site, sex with yourself and the job is done.

It is amazing and gives hope. If the visual cortex can do so, then your perception filters, your beliefs and your habits can also change. This is super news! For example, you have been convinced all your life that you don’t have to take anything, because it still won’t work out and this has stopped you from truly realizing yourself. It turns out you can change this throughout your life. Neuroplasticity gives hope for the success of psychotherapy, for the possibility of self-knowledge, for long-term changes.

Is it like in The Brain That Changes Itself ?

Yes, I recommend this book about neuroplasticity. And “The Brain,” by David Eagleman, has a book and a series. It seems that in him he vomits from an inverted world.

After meeting you, the phrase “cheap dopamine” has firmly entered my vocabulary. Tell me about this model.

I have not come across the phrase “cheap dopamine” beyond my vocabulary, but I won’t say that I came up with it.

First, I will make a small digression. The word "dopamine" should not be taken literally as a neurotransmitter, rather it is such a model to describe the type of behavior when you want something, there is a variability of the award, and so on. When you are bored at home and you go checking the refrigerator, “what if there is something there” - this is dopamine. You seem to have variability, intrigue: is there something tasty or not there, as if you forgot. Or when you upload a photo on Instagram and after 5 minutes you go in to check how many likes there are - this is also dopamine.

The story is this: I began to figure out what to spend energy on, where to focus my focus. After all, it’s much easier to live when the brain itself sticks into something, and you just get on the carriage.

Imagine a model that the focus of your attention is controlled by some part of the brain in which there are dopamine receptors and they respond to dopamine levels. The more dopamine, the more fun the lesson. The smaller the more boring it is. At every moment in time, the brain analyzes where to get more dopamine for the least investment of energy: both physical and cognitive.

Take, for example, boring work - from it dopamine gradually falls. The brain begins to look for where there is a little more dopamine, preferably with less investment of cognitive resources. Such a "dopamine is cheaper." You don’t notice how you slide into Facebook or Instagram, which are optimized for delivering the maximum amount of dopamine without cognitive effort. It turns out that all companies are competing for your attention, trying to give as much dopamine as possible for less of your cognitive resources, so such dopamine is becoming cheaper and cheaper. We get the formula for the modern economy of attention: price = investment of cognitive energy / amount of dopamine.

Take porn. Porn is a very cheap dopamine as part of a powerful evolutionary breeding program. Getting to know the opposite sex, meeting, talking, having sex is a very big investment of cognitive and emotional resources for the brain. Porn is a super-small investment: just opened a site, sex with yourself and the job is done. The evolutionary program is complete, your genes can sleep peacefully for a while. When there is a lot of cheap dopamine, it is dangerous: the brain is not interested in doing more complex things. According to many studies, long-term motivation and the ability to focus greatly suffer from systematic viewing of porn.

What to do with it?

• Train your attention muscle: the ability to focus, to be in the flow with the help of various practices such as meditation.
• Learning to create dopamine in your work: in fact, falling in love with your business.
• Remove cheap dopamine from your life so that the brain learns from such activities as conditional sweet or fast food, so that the taste returns to normal “food”.

It is extremely difficult for many people to take and change behavior. I recall the New Year's promises , which for most people do not work.

Yes, habits are hard to change. By the way, I realized that New Year's promises are also cheap dopamine. Your brain thought about a promise to itself, and as if it had already done everything in half. You have a feeling of achievement. But essentially nothing happened. And then you are lazy and scored.

Author and entrepreneur Derek Sievers even has a TED about it, “ Keep Your Goals To Yourself ” ...

Exactly. Any habit is a neural path. Some deep as a ski track. It is not an easy task to change the topology of neurons in the brain. For example, if you were suddenly blown up to go in for sports after lying on the couch your whole life, it will be super-difficult for you. And if you add a couple more changes: stop drinking, smoke and eat sweets, then in a couple of days you just send everything and say that it is not for me.

There are a series of recommendations for changing behavior, given recent research.

• Starting a habit is easier on external motivation.
• To do everything slowly, gradually.
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