The Neuroscience Of Unlocking Human Potential | Dr Josh Turknett

Benjamin Hopkins (0:04)

Welcome back, everyone. We have the pleasure of diving into all things, the brain, the brain's potential, how we limit the brain's potential today with the wonderful Josh Turknett. Josh, thank you so much for the time you've had.

Josh Turknett (0:16)

It is a pleasure to be here.

Benjamin Hopkins (0:19)

I recently read your book, The Genius and the Impostor, and it was really illuminating for me because it's something I've been trying to piece together for my adult life as someone who maybe didn't take school as seriously as they should have. My learning started after school and I believed that I had this very set window of plasticity where I'm making up for lost time here. I read as much as I could for the best part of four or five years with the knowledge that my brain would be turned off in terms of change at 25

That's false, but I think it speaks to this narrative around how much our own narratives limit our potential. How do our upbringings of the stories we get told about our own brain's potential in turn shape our brain's potential?

Josh Turknett (1:06)

Yeah. I think that the big picture there is recognizing just how much stories and mindset drive so much of our lives.

This is something I've learned countless times as a clinician, and working with people, and trying to help with whatever types of behavior changes they might want to implement. I know that if I don't start with the mindsets or beliefs and what is possible, and if I don't address those first, nothing else will matter.

I know from my adult life experience, just the role of stories.

But we know in a variety of different ways, you can demonstrate how much that matters. Stories are what drive the placebo effect. Believing that something will help you makes it help you.

Stories drive the nocebo effect. Believing that something won't help you won't help you. Then if you move that into the world of education, there's something known as the Pygmalion effect. Where, and this was in from educational research like in the 70s, where they had an experience where they told teachers, randomly selected some students and said, these students were high potential. Then by the end of the school year, those students were testing higher. It was completely random. The same thing also can happen in the other direction, just like the nocebo effect in education. Tell them that there's certain students that are low potential, and guess what happens? The opposite, and it's called the Gollum effect. This is nothing but the stories that we're telling, either to ourselves or that we're getting from somewhere else, shaping what happens to us.

That is the role of our expectations, and we're still scratching the surface in terms of understanding the mechanisms for how all that works. But in a very straightforward sense, you know that what you think is possible is going to shape what you do. I mean, that's why, in some respects, it helps you when you were in your early 20s because you thought, oh, I have this narrowing window, right? So that story made you get more serious about learning in a compressed period of time. So we know that's what drives so much of our behaviors. And so the story alone, right? Regardless of what it's grounded in will shape us, right? And then for me, part of writing this book is that the stories that we tell around intelligence, around potential and so forth are inaccurate. And so not only are we typically telling a less empowering story, but it's also not grounded in what I would consider the underlying reality. And that's kind of the main story. The book itself is addressing, is what I refer to as the special brain story, which is this idea that we are born with a brain of a certain type, and it's a math brain or a music brain or an art brain or a science brain or whatever, right? And sort of our job growing up is to figure out which one we got. And then we also get this sort of fixed quantity of intelligence or smart juice. And that smart juice is what determines what we're capable of, right? So those are the ideas that we, you know, that I think many of us encounter very young, and I think are still heavily reinforced in our society still. And that's kind of the nocebo effect. For everyone who doesn't feel like they got the special brain, it's the nocebo effect at scale, right? Or the Gollum effect. So, for me, that was the main motivation for free, for writing this book is to, because the stories are so powerful, and because that story that we told about what our brain can do and what its potential is, is not, for me, after a life in neuroscience, not what I, not the model at all that I have.