Outworker
Stories of healing, personal development, and inner work. Founded on the idea that the relationship with self is the most important to develop, but the easiest to neglect, Outworker shares conversations aimed at helping you develop that relationship.
Outworker
#097 - Norman Farb - How Your Identity Is Built Through Sensation, Not Thought
Norman Farb breaks down why our identities are built more by sensation than story. We explore how mindfulness reshapes the brain, why chronic pain is often a narrative loop, and how tuning into our internal signals might be the key to better relationships, emotional resilience, and even decision-making. If you've ever felt stuck in your own patterns, this episode challenges the idea that change starts with thought. It starts with what you feel.
Timestamps:
00:00 Studying Human Identity & Emotion
01:37 Releasing From Negative Language
05:13 The Default Mode Network
06:38 Better Understanding Identity Through Mindfulness Neuroimaging
16:03 Sensation, Intuition, & Being In Tune With Your Feelings
30:12 Understanding The Brain As Front vs. Back
35:08 Storytelling & Sensation
42:12 How Storytelling Impacted Me Physically
51:21 Media & Sensation
57:16 Balance Routine & Space For New Feelings
1:02:24 Reading Others' Sensations
1:07:35 What Feels Novel In Norman's Work
1:16:25 Learn More About Norman Farb
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Norman Farb breaks down why our identities are built more by sensation than story. We explore how mindfulness reshapes the brain, why chronic pain is often a narrative loop, and how tuning into our internal signals might be the key to better relationships, emotional resilience, and even decision-making. If you've ever felt stuck in your own patterns, this episode challenges the idea that change starts with thought. It starts with what you feel.
Tim Doyle (00:05.347)
What does it mean to study the neuroscience of human identity and emotion?
Norman Fa (00:10.254)
other than being some somewhat pretentious boilerplate for my website. I've always been interested in how people can go through kind of similar situations and then take different things from it. Growing up, I knew people who no matter what happened, they're stressed and unhappy and other people who maybe objectively had equal or worse situations seem like they were just doing fine in life. And so...
There had to be something internal, not like you want to put all the onus on the internal, but there had to be something internal about our habits of how we relate our experiences to ourselves. That was powerfully determining wellbeing. And that just became this kind of question. I remember even in my teenage years, like, why are people different and how they handle things? aren't things just objectively good or bad? And, know, as you get older and see the shades of grey in life, you realize, not so much. And a lot of that is these sort of filters or interpretive habits we have. So.
became something I got. I just kept asking those questions and as I went through school and it sort of became you know the focus on my research.
Tim Doyle (01:13.233)
Through that self inquiry, how much of your work do you feel like has evolved into helping people release themselves from using jargon, like feeling broken or needing to be fixed?
Norman Fa (01:27.854)
Yeah, it's tricky. I mean, I think the planer you can speak, the better as a sign of like actually understanding things like there's a curve of trying to get concepts and complicated language, but you know, term broken for instance, isn't super complicated. It's a label people might put on themselves. So I think it's really important to be able to verbalize things and put them into language just to able to share experience. But I think being able to
see that our experiences are constantly emerging or being constructed and even though labels themselves have to be continuously constructed sort of undercuts the idea that we are ever just one thing. And so when people fall into a bit of a trap saying like, am this way, it just can't possibly be accurate, right? So I think a lot of my work in the, you know,
and supported by millennia of people studying contemplative science and psychology and philosophy and all these things is how do we get people, you know, direct access to realizing how much of themselves is being constructed just in the moment. And if that's true, like everything can change. So it's important for instance, to be able to say like, I'm depressed or I'm anxious to get recognition and support, but to think that that actually defines you and then predicts who you're gonna be in the future is a trap.
The same even for positive labels when it just doesn't line up. You're like, I'm confident I'm successful while you're failing means you're just gonna keep doing the same stuff and ignoring the fact you're failing. So any rigid label that treats us as just being one thing over time is gonna inevitably be inaccurate.
Tim Doyle (03:09.039)
Do think we always need to bring language to sensation or is part of the beauty of sensation or part of the goal not necessarily needing to bring language to it so you can be fully in that feeling state?
Norman Fa (03:25.771)
it's a, it's like a cycle. a dynamic, right? So to your point, you wouldn't want to start with the label because you're, you're just pretend you're pointing at sensation. You're actually doing it, right? It'd be like someone talking about, you know, running, talking about exercising, talking about all the stuff they learned about diet, but not actually changing how much they exercise, how much they move, however, what they eat. So there's no substitute for actually taking in information, which is what sensation is. Right. and so we.
about accreditation and education and all the things we're going to learn, but to actually learn, you have to sit there and let yourself puzzle over information where you don't really understand it. And then at some point, you'd like to find some patterns, get some insights. I think that's when the labels are useful. They're anchors because the constant changing flow of experience is very hard to pin down and our memories are fragile. So the labels really help us create little anchors or bookmarks.
And the other thing is setting a label or in language, like an intention for the types of things you want to be most sensitive to can also be quite useful. But so both before and afterwards, language is great, but it shouldn't be confused with sensing itself, right? Like pointing at the moon is not the moon is like a old Buddhist proverb. You can mistake the language for the thing.
Tim Doyle (04:48.753)
What do we need to know about the default mode network?
Norman Fa (04:54.307)
Well, default mode network is what our brains do when we're not up to anything in particular. So I think the best way to think about it is it's keeping track of all the things we'd like to make automatic from, you know, making our heart beat a little bit faster when we stand up so you don't pass out. You know, if you get those little dots, sometimes you stand up too fast. That's like something has to be spinning up in your brain saying, you know, get faster now. You need more oxygen. But, you know, like many things in our bodies, it's evolved to handle.
things beyond the initial case of just physiology, physiological regulation habits. So a lot of our mental habits about how to perceive the world and how to respond to it are probably also deeply entrained in the default mode network. So it's the part of the brain that sort of says, this is recognized, it's familiar, I can predict what this is and how to respond. And I can save you a lot of time and energy by just letting me handle it at the risk of anthropomorphizing brain networks.
It's the thing that's letting you run on automatic pilot, which in a lot of situations is great, but not always. And ideally, it's competing for resources against networks where you do have to bring intention and awareness and choice or receptiveness to new information. All these different information processing networks should be kind of constraining each other.
Tim Doyle (06:11.729)
So you completed one of the world's first neuroimaging studies on mindfulness training. Can you walk through what your hypothesis was from that and the unexpected findings that came from it?
Norman Fa (06:19.929)
Mm-hmm.
Norman Fa (06:28.591)
Sure, yeah. So as a grad student, I wanted to learn neuroimaging, fMRIs. You can look at how different parts of the brain are using more or less oxygen to determine, you in this situation, this part of the brain is more active than another. That seemed really cool, especially with these questions about identity and mental habits. And you this chance to research people doing early meditation, mindfulness-based stress reduction course, which is a well-established course that teaches people basic
body and breath awareness practices and tends to have good outcomes in terms of improving mental health. So we already knew all that stuff, but we didn't really know why it worked, right? And it could be a bunch of reasons. And one way of getting at that would be to look at, what's changing in people's brains when they think about themselves? And this comes out as sort of a very lay understanding as someone who didn't have a lot of experience in this field of contemplative research or meditation of, know, meditation is often about getting rid of this sense of self. If we weren't so self-centered,
all the time, then we wouldn't worry about things. We wouldn't be upset about things. We wouldn't have these kind of ego trips or take things personally when we didn't need to. And so we knew that the default mode network was supporting a lot of self-referential judgements. If you ask someone, does this word describe you or not? That would actually activate the default mode network where most other tasks would turn off the default mode network. So the type of...
decision-making that is most deeply ingrained in us tends to be like, how does this relate to me? Is this important to me or not? And so we had this hypothesis going in that if we studied people who did eight weeks of mindfulness training, they meet once a week in a group setting, and then they are supposed to practice for an hour on their own, though, you know, a good student might practice a couple days a week in between classes, but whatever, that's how it goes. Then what we'd see is,
the strength of the default mode network activity when they were thinking about themselves would be weakened, right? So they could still conceptually say, yeah, I'm honest, or I'm not cowardly, make these kind of yes, no judgments. And they see these trait words appear on a screen, but they wouldn't be as deeply habit-driven to make those kinds of judgments. It'd be as though the knowledge that's already present, that's always on about ourselves was being weakened somehow, this idea of no self or lessening the ego.
Norman Fa (08:47.193)
So we recruited a bunch of people who had signed up to take mindfulness-based stress reduction, and half of them we scanned before they actually did the course and half after the course. So they were at least equally weird in being willing to meditate, half the people had actually gone through this eight-week somewhat rigorous training program. And we really expected to see the medial prefrontal cortex, which is part of the default mode.
network, the area that's most associated with these self-referential judgments, would stop being so active when people saw these words on a screen, thought, this describe me or not? But to push it a little further, when they were in the scanner, we asked them to handle the words in two different ways. So we'd ask them in a kind of more normal style just to make yes-no conceptual judgments, like, I honest, am I cowardly, just by pressing a button for yes, another button for no.
or we'd ask them to, okay, when you see this word, I want you to respond to it differently. I want you just to notice, like to sense the feelings, the body sensations and the thoughts and judgments that pop up and arise and pass in each moment in response to seeing these words. And we thought maybe the mindfulness training would help people move more into this momentary sensory state. And that again, would be associated with even less default mode network activation. So we were...
right a little bit in that when people try to move from just judging themselves into this more sensory experiential state that almost everyone turns off the default mode network a little bit, right? They stop relying as much on habit. They start sort of being open to reflecting. And so whenever you start effortfully reflecting on your experience, you get a bit less of the habit network firing. But the training didn't really seem to make that any stronger. And in subsequent research, we found that
the ability to turn off the default mode network when you're making these judgments didn't really relate that much to a sense of happiness or wellbeing. And so I spent quite a few months at my supervisor's behest, know, reanalyzing the data, being like, what went wrong? know, meditation's about getting rid of the self. These people are saying that they're less depressed, less anxious, better able to cope with chronic pain. So we know from a subjective perspective, it's working. How can this theory be wrong?
Norman Fa (10:58.581)
And it was only sort of at the point of giving up on the breaking of the default mode network self idea that I was able myself to break out of my own interpretive perceptual habits and notice that although that network wasn't really getting turned off anymore, my meditation training, other parts of the brain were actually turning on more when we asked them to be in the moment. And a lot of these areas were responsible for our sensation of what's happening on the surface and inside of our bodies, which isn't
that startling given that we're asking people to notice feelings and body sensations in response to the words, but that's actually what the training was targeting. It was learning to more stably enter into a state where those sensations and feelings mattered enough to activate the brain to the point where we could record it in an fMRI. And so that kind of changed what we thought about what meditation was doing. It might be reducing the...
the centrality or the gravity of the ego, but not by breaking up conceptual knowledge about the self, but rather by making that conceptual knowledge sit in a landscape that also includes dynamically changing sensations and feelings. And when you have access to all this other kind of chaotic information, it's also about the self. It's still like what I'm feeling inside, it's still how my body's responding. It gives you more than one route for interpreting, you know, who am I in this situation? And so, you know,
spent a lot of time building theory based on the results, but the data really pushed back against this idea of just like, we're just going to obliterate the sense of identity instead. What if we enriched it to the point where it was almost confusing, like where you actually had choices to make about who you are in the moment by giving you more information that wasn't all just a conceptual label or well-rehearsed story. And so that was a really major finding that kind of changed how we thought about what a lot of these contemplative practices were doing.
Tim Doyle (12:52.847)
that notion about it being the expansion of self rather than the getting rid of the self was that when you have that epiphany and that realization, is that something that felt getting into the senses? Did that feel enlightening at the time? Did it feel more confusing and stressful?
Norman Fa (13:15.215)
well, I think the most stressful part was being told like, go reanalyze stuff, find the thing, like make it, make your initial idea work. That's stressful, right? Cause the reality is it's not working. The data doesn't say that. You're not going to, I was never in a lab, thankfully, where there was any session of faking the data, but you're just like, there's nothing I can do. Like we looked at what happened with these people and it's not matching what we want to have happen. And maybe I may, you we wrote some line of code wrong, but after you do it over and over again, you're like, no, it really isn't saying that.
meaning it to be different than it was was very stressful. I think it was kind of confusing to then think, well, maybe the story is wrong and what are these other patterns, but it was also very freeing, right? Like there's this sort of freedom in not knowing and then being able to be like, hey, wait, but there's other things that are statistically robust that we think would replicate if we ran the study again, that are more about turning on parts of the brain and what are these parts of the brain doing and people have written about these brain regions and...
you know, as being related to the self, but a different kind of self. And so it really felt like more of a, an unfolding or opening. And then of course, at that point you start thinking, well, has anyone talked about that self as dynamically constructed and, and plastic and changeable and flexible and that being healthy? Yeah, lots of people have written out that it just weren't, weren't ready to listen to them. So it was a more of like a healthy kind of stress at that point of like, okay, there's some
explanatory work to be done here, but there's a way forward as opposed to just like, there's nothing you can do when you're just like, I don't like the way reality is, I need it to change. And it's about something that's already happened, it can't change, it's already locked in the past. I think that's a much yuckier place to be.
Tim Doyle (14:59.587)
Not sure if you're familiar with the work of Steven Kotler from Flow Research Collective, but one of the main points that he made when I was having a conversation with him that has stuck with me is about frustration and how frustration is actually a positive sign that you're onto something and you need to continue going down that path. So props to you for being able to, guess.
Norman Fa (15:05.655)
Mm-hmm.
Tim Doyle (15:26.193)
except the fluidity and not getting into that narrative story based of like, okay, I need to find the data that is trying to, you know, align with the hypothesis that we have and getting deeper into, I guess, bringing language to our experiences. I'm curious to know what's the relationship between sensation and personal intuition.
Norman Fa (15:55.339)
personal intuition? Well, yeah, it's interesting. think intuition, a lot of people would say is a type of feeling. It is just like a sensor, something you sense, you just have this sort of like, like, it feels like this is what I should be doing. And you're almost sort of be watching yourself approach one course of action rather than another. You know, at the same time, intuition has to be about something, right? You have to have a kind of conceptual framework around like what the problem space is, and what's possible and a sense of even like what your
what's afforded you, what your choices are. And then what intuition, I guess, is doing is like letting you know, this feels like the right way to go, right? This feels like a more attractive option than others. And part of it almost by definition is like, and you don't really know why. Like if you had a good set of reasons, you wouldn't be like, this is my intuition. You'd be like, here's my argument or here's my logic. So being open to that kind of body-borne approach signal.
I think is really important if you want to have that kind of intuitive response and, you know, people differ on how much they value logical reasoning versus this kind of in the moment intuition. And I guess what I would say is in situations where the signal you're looking for, like the value actually is an emotional value, like so it happens often in like
understanding like if we feel good in relationships or we feel good in a certain work situation, then reasons don't really matter. This is a place where intuition really, really probably is going to lead you in a better direction than a set of reasons because you can make reasons for or against staying in relationship or staying in a job or things like that. At the end of the day, what you care about is like, am I happy? And so your intuition is going to help you move away.
from things that are making you unhappy and more towards the things that make you happy if that's the kind of problem you have in your head. But there's some good research suggesting that people who really focus on body sensation are more often moved by reactions in their body, but in some situations that doesn't make them more skillful. So if you're at a casino, the casino is designed to provoke intuitive approach responses to essentially bad decisions, right? Like they say, the house always wins.
Norman Fa (18:12.399)
And so you're like, oh, know, it's so if I just do it one more time, you know, I'm to strike the jackpot. You know, I so close last time I just need to bet a bit more money like these kind of things. That's still an intuitive response. You're like, oh, I like this. And maybe at a higher level, you start getting a bit of a dread or something that pulls you away. But everything is structured to kind of co-opt your intuition. We see that people who are more in tune with that feeling of their body, you can guess you can so you can predict when they're going to take risks in a gambling situation more based on their body response than someone.
doesn't describe themselves as intuitive, but they don't do better on those gambling tasks. It just explains when they're gonna take a risk. times when they're probably, we're like just doing math, like card counting is better than intuition for blackjack or something like that. Like times when there really is expert knowledge and there are correct, like real right, objectively right or wrong answers where different people could follow that same process and say, no, this is the right thing, this is the wrong thing. You probably don't wanna just lead intuition.
there, but a lot of things that really makes life meaningful, which like, what should I be doing? Who are the people I should be around? And are these good or bad environments for me? There is no higher, you know, currency or ground truth. So these are places where having that context of wanting to listen to your intuition is probably going to be a lot better than being the kind of person who distrusts signals. And we can see clear correlates with broader mental health with people who
really value what we call the interoceptive awareness, that felt sense of the body compared to people who mistrust or just ignore those kind of signals.
Tim Doyle (19:45.113)
what exactly is interoception?
Norman Fa (19:48.715)
Yeah, there's lots of virtual anchored in on it, but the quick definition is it's just the representation of the body's internal state. So how we carry information from our bodies to our minds. And some of that's conscious. A lot of it's unconscious for good reason. You don't want to be titrating your heart rate every second. be very distracting. So a lot of it actually we learn to suppress while it becomes automatic, right? Part of that default.
process. So interception can be any sort of information that tells us about what's going on inside of our body. And then interoceptive awareness is the extent to which some of that information breaks through into consciousness influences our feelings, our perceptions and our actions.
Tim Doyle (20:31.825)
So if we aren't being aware of that, or if we either on an unconscious state or either consciously we're trying to block and avoid those emotions, how does that change our experience from something that we feel naturally versus something that we're starting to try to manipulate and control and start thinking more about and analyzing?
Norman Fa (21:03.959)
Um, well, again, I don't want to come off as saying like, don't want to eventually analyze and make judgements conceptually, but a lot of times we, we are always just trying to, our brain's trying to predict, you know, what to do based on what it's already seen. Right. Um, and so it's trying to sort of pattern match. Um, okay. In this situation, I think so I feel see someone's being aggressive to me. This is how you respond to, know, attack or withdraw a lot of times are free. So you didn't get into this kind of, these sort of a million responses. Um,
And so at that point, as soon as we get into a point of like predicting like what's happening, what should I do about it, we're not really taking in information anymore. And often our feeling states act as cues that there's an urgency to know how to respond. So it's even more likely in higher stress, like high emotion situations that we're going to feel like knowing I really need to make an action right away. And to the extent that we're really
properly modeling the situation and have a good set of responses, that's fine. I think where interoception is really critical is when we know that we either have no idea what to do or what happens more often actually is we do have a set of behaviors, responses that are just in our toolbox and we just keep enacting them and they're not getting us what we want. That's a sign that the way we're kind of conditioned to respond to a brief moment of interceptive awareness, like a feeling state inside.
actually isn't adaptive, it's not a good fit for the situation. And trying to figure out, you know, well, I should do this.
differently than I did before is sort of, you can say that to yourself, but where is that choice gonna kind of come from? You're just gonna feel the thing and then do the thing. The first you're feeling tired and the person bothers you, you see irritable and you snap at them, right? You hope for recognition and you don't get it from someone, so you avoid, you withdraw. Like whatever it is, we all have our patterns of things to do. And so what intraceptive awareness does, much the same way I was talking about the self earlier, is you say, well, okay, I have this initial feeling state that prompts an action, but what else is going?
Norman Fa (23:06.403)
Is that really all there is to the story? Have I sort of jumped to deciding I needed to know what to do too soon? Or are things more nuanced? Are there more options here? And the way that we change our sense of what's needed is really to take in more information that gives us more things to respond to.
If we take in enough information about like, I feel hurt but also confused, but also still wistful or there's still some positive connection here, these are all different things that can happen in the complexity of relationship. You have a lot of choices to, so what element do I want to attend to? So to make it more concrete, let's say you have a persistent set of conflicts with a family member.
And you think, every time I talk to this person, it always goes this way. They say something, I get triggered. I say something, we both leave hurt. And you know, like, this isn't working for me. And then, you know, you go on the internet, they're like, go, go, no contact. You're like, OK, great. So you burn all your bridge at night. You're alive. So like, OK, you're like, OK, so maybe the internet advice isn't like, it's easy for them to say, but I don't want to just like leave every time there's conflict. But I always have conflict with this person and what's happening. Interceptive awareness would be, well, can I stay with?
the complexity of all the different things I feel when I'm in communication with this person. And oh, there they go. They say the critical thing again. And here I go, I feel anger and resentment. And I also feel like hurt. And I also feel longing like to maybe have that connection. And part of me, like, there's still some warmth there, like where I remember what it's like when we do get along. And it's all there and it's rising and it's bubbling up and these feelings are chaotic and it's messy and it's a lot of work. Like you have to be kind of like courageous to feel like you're gonna sit with this.
as opposed to just like trying to protect myself with what I already know. Because you know the pattern you have leaves you both, you You think, well, OK, going into like anger gets me. I know what that gets me. I haven't actually tried to like go into connection. It's kind of it's what I want. But the dominant thing to do is to is to I know the anger will protect me. What if I what if I stayed with the connection and stayed longer? What would happen?
Norman Fa (25:22.511)
Because the same thing's probably happening for the person, right? And so you really want to break cycles to do it just from like the top, from the outside in and say, like, just act a different way. It doesn't, it's good in theory, it doesn't really work in practice. In practice, you have to really feel something that motivates you to act differently. So being able to say like, yeah, I'm feeling like, I'm feeling, you know, a bit upset right now. And I want us to be closer than we've been is a weird thing to say when you're starting to fight with someone.
But it's so much less likely that they're going to keep being aggressive when you say something like that, than when you're like, well, you did this, or like, screw you, or whatever it normally is. And it comes from this awareness that there's more than the initial reaction. So we get to, as I know, been a winner of my answer. it can't be conceptual. You have to really feel like there's more to our relationship than this stereotyped habitual way that we deal with each other.
Again, there's nothing wrong with that if it's working or it's a service level kind of relationship, that's all you want. But for the important relationships in our lives, we need to be able to go deeper to get past all the protective layers to the things that really matter to us, which are very often like connection, recognition, acceptance, having someone you can be vulnerable with. And you need to be able to feel that directly to behave differently. You need to take in a different type of input to produce a different output.
So the awareness is sort of like this kind of, yeah, sometimes it seems purposeless. It's often very chaotic. It can be even more upsetting because you're coming into contact with all the stuff that's happening. And again, there's this freedom there because now you can say, but there's a thing that I've been missing. It's still there. If I can tune into that, a lot of this other stuff, I don't need to respond to it. I've just got used to responding to the most negative parts of my experience. And if I stop.
being the person so tuned to that type of response, I don't know what would happen, right? So it's not guaranteed to get better, you do know what's gonna happen if you keep responding in the way that isn't working. So it's just an approach where you really try to come from your own internal experience to find where the value is, the thing that you care about, and then let your intuition guide you as opposed to your intuition when the thing that it's responding to is like threat, because then most of us aren't gonna...
Norman Fa (27:45.973)
act in ways that are going to bring us closer together, be constructive.
Tim Doyle (27:51.139)
Yeah, that's really fascinating. It's almost like a trickling effect where it's like, if you can facilitate new sensations, then the new sensations could potentially facilitate new thoughts and then facilitate new actions and then facilitate new interactions with that other person.
Norman Fa (28:10.465)
Yeah, totally. mean, it's just trying on the idea that even if you don't think it's 100 % one way versus another, but sometimes like what's happening in our bodies and our feeling precedes what happens in our minds. And yeah, there's a back and forth, but always trying to make the mind have to just control and decide what's gonna happen next. If it was that easy, like we wouldn't get stuck in these kind of like these ruts, these cycles. It's all, it's the...
theories, there's almost always some sort of feeling state that we're used to tuning into and responding to, to the exclusion of all the other things that are available. And there's so much available, like an overwhelming amount. So there's a skillfulness in learning like how much to open into titrate and figure out what you want to really look for. That's why having some of that intention at a time is also really useful as you don't just get like washed and overwhelmed and can't respond at all, which also isn't, isn't that great. And it can happen too, right? It's human, that's life.
Tim Doyle (29:05.379)
It's become common to understand the brain as left brain versus right brain. Why do you make the distinction that we need to understand it as front versus back?
Norman Fa (29:18.671)
Yeah, you know, a of things that are super popular in pop psych have their place in their kernel of truth, but get sort of overemphasized. So people walk around thinking like, I'm a left brain, I'm a logical person, right? Like I'm a rotator, right? And you're like a language feeling person, even though language is also a lot of us left brain, but you're like an emotional person. I'm a logical person. But almost all of us have both of those tendencies and a lot of that.
research came from people who had brain injury, right? So like, something happens on the left side of their brain, they can't produce grammatical speech anymore. Something happens on the right side of their brain, they can't put proper emotional inflection. So, so it's not that that's there's nothing to that. But there's no evidence that people switch into a purely right versus left brain mode, even. Right? Or as we know, that the brain tends to be organized across almost everyone.
with most of our sensation happening in the back of the brain and then most of the responses happening as information flows from the back end of the brain to the front of the brain. And we don't think so much about whether that system is balanced. I mean, yes, logic versus emotion might be important to think a little bit about whether that, what the balance is there, but almost all of our formal education is just.
pushing us more to the front of the brain, like respond in more sophisticated ways, learn different types of responses, learn more advanced, like, you know, expert responses. And there's very little education unless you're like an artist doing art training about like learning to also develop your ability to perceive differently, right? How you're going to take in information differently because the types of responses you make, no matter how elegant, are always going to be constrained by what you're
perceiving. And so to think that we're spending so much time trying to just curate and develop the front of our brains in formal education and almost nothing, nothing once you get past, you know, the early elementary school nursery, finger painting, stuff like that, we move, we just like, we're done with that. We're not going to work on that whole backside of our brain when it's very clearly dedicated towards building up sensory percepts into things that we can recognize as objects and experiences.
Norman Fa (31:39.097)
seems kind of silly because it's so available to us, right? And there's so many historically cultural practices that are about also enriching that sort of backside of the brain, like listening to music, going, taking art, like doing things with your body and looking at how you feel. But we don't really have a pop psych concept of, I need to tone the back of my brain a little bit. Whereas if you're always doing, I don't know,
bicep curls and be like, you're just doing pulling exercises. You're never doing pushing exercises. That's, you know, you get big, big fronts of your arms, but that's not really like ideal, right? It would be ideal to do the counter move as well. Sometimes, sometimes, some these have to be push days, not just pull days, right? You want to use like weightlifting. So I think there's an equivalent to that in terms of how our brains are set up that most of our exercises are respond exercises, not perceive exercise.
And you see very successful people who are just like, they're called like, they're just really stubborn or closed minded. You can't get through to them once they have an idea about things because they don't have the same, they have this really advanced ability to coordinate responses and almost like no ability to reflect on how they're perceiving the situation. They just take what their first perception as the ground truth. When of course that itself is also mutable if you're able to.
take time to be like, well, what if I looked at it from this angle? What if I took another information? Am I really sure I'm seeing things the right way? Or could I be inspired if I saw things in a different way or have different emotional responses if I saw things a different way? The ways that you respond are a downstream product of the way you've set up your perception. So it behooves us to spend some time also thinking about the idea that we couldn't cultivate perceptual skills.
Tim Doyle (33:29.017)
Yeah, I find it really interesting. Going back to what you were saying, almost like a cultural or media understanding of the brain when it comes to left and right versus right. And just like creating that cultural narrative where people I feel like tend to be like, whether they're good at something or bad at something, they're able to create the story around like, well, you know, I'm a left brain individual or I'm a right brain individual.
And we just go deeper and deeper into that narrative. And something that I find really fascinating about your work and your writing is this relationship between storytelling and sensation. And there's this passage from your book that really stood out to me that I want to read. say, while attention could freely roam across a broad range of experience.
What happens is we fixate on only one or two elements of experience because most of our attention is spent integrating these elements into a narrative. We can't help but create a story that makes sense of some salient thought, feeling or sensation. But the consequence of such storytelling is that there isn't any attention left to notice the many other elements present in any given moment. Why are humans, all of us, why are we so driven to
create narratives out of sensations and experiences.
Norman Fa (34:56.847)
Yeah, mean, again, there's this gap between these universes each of us inhabit and our ability to connect to each other, right? So language is this beautiful bridge that allows us to try to cross those gaps and the people who...
you know, are the most inspiring, the most influential, are able to, are able to often to share their experiences through language and the best, the most influential people do that through storytelling. There's something about being able to simulate what it would be like to be a person going through things that helps us have those kind of emotional responses, not just like the conceptual, you know, this happened and this happened, this happened kind of ordering, but to really immerse ourselves in like this kind of autobiographical episode, right? So,
You know, I think the ability to tell stories and to place ourselves across our own personal timelines, like we're all the main character, there's main character syndrome, but we're all the main characters of our own stories, rightfully so, is really important just so we have a sense of, you know, who we are in the world, how to relate to other people, the idea that we can be.
responsible or accountable to each other is based on having a sense of like the person in the past is still me moving forward into the future. So there's all these really critical reasons like that to have any kind of social structure, you need to be able to have both individual and kind of collective stories that make sense of the chaos. It's providing a scaffolding for order in chaos. it's
It's, and that's also why it wouldn't have been great, you know, going back to this idea of like, with meditations, but breaking away, breaking down, destroying the central story wouldn't be great. There's disorders of depersonalization and derealization where people lose that automatic storytelling and they have, there's a drift, right? They don't know how to respond to the environment. They lose all the sense of motivation or self, self care. So we can see it, it's just totally integral.
Norman Fa (37:07.377)
to who we are. And, you know, it would be nice if the story is also changed as we have new experiences. it's not, life doesn't become more and more an effort to protect some story you made up about yourself when you're like 12 or six or 18 or whatever it was. And like now, like everything that could alter that story is a threat and it needs to be, I mean, needs to be kept away.
And like it or not, most of us are going to experience places where the story that we thought we're going to tell be telling what ourselves just doesn't match the situation. If not due to some sort of major world event or accident earlier in life, at least later in life as we age, most of us don't tell stories about, you know, deterioration of the body, deterioration of the mind, loss of roles, loss of status. But those things are inevitable.
Right? And so the idea of even aging gracefully and still being the kind of person who can experience happiness and be there for others and even receive love from others requires us to be able to adapt our stories to say like, I'm not the 20 year olds anymore. Right? Like what's happened since? Like I don't even have to rewrite my past, but like, am I continuing to write? Or if I just, and you hear people say, I looked in the mirror and like, who's that old guy or something like that. it's that's like, now you haven't updated your story for like three decades.
And that can lead into problems like midlife crises and these crises of meaning where you're like, well, it made sense when I was going through school, but now that I'm an adult, there's nothing. And it's like, well, have you been continuing to write that story for yourself? you even trying to take these experiences and make sense of them and see what that means for you and the people around you and where there's a value there? Or are you just now waiting for the story to end? And then it becomes this life.
quiet desperation, I'm just here until something happens. And you hear people in their 30s or 40s even saying, I'm just putting in my time now. it's like, you could still be authoring that next chapter. And so I think the insight that I'm hoping as part of my work and my colleagues work to get across is it's still available to keep contributing to these stories. If the storytelling is the fundamental backbone of our identity, there are...
Norman Fa (39:24.443)
technologies like of self, there are skills, there are practices that allow us to continue to enrich and expand and grow and sometimes change and revise these stories. But they come from being in contact with our sensed lived experience. They don't come just from thoughts and ideas about someone else that we heard or someone telling us that something should be different. Only when we actually experience things happening differently to do it.
do we actually have an authentic ability to add something to the story? And I think we believe falsely that we could just will the story to be different or we just tell ourselves the story is different, but the story comes from the integration of experience. So if we can get good at going back into experience, we can keep updating the story. Otherwise...
we'll just slowly start to see the story become less and less connected to what's happening around us. And that's where meaninglessness comes from. Like all this stuff is happening, but it doesn't relate to my story. So it's meaningless. Like everything's only meaningful to the idea that it connects to that central narrative. So do you have any skills to connect your current experience to that narrative? And if not, there's going to be a problem. And these are just things where we don't really have great language around and don't have a lot of formal education around.
like how to manage currently, but it's eminently available. just takes some time and effort to go back into sensation and be like, what's available for me now where it wouldn't make a difference to my story. It's not just about validating the expectations I already have or resenting when they're not.
Tim Doyle (41:06.459)
So I have an interesting personal anecdote when it comes to at this intersection of sensation and storytelling. So I dealt with bad chronic pain and bad chronic back pain about five years ago and
Part of the reason why it persisted for so long in my eyes is because of the story that got wrapped into that sensation where like those moments when I would feel pain, it went straight into narrative and story as to why I'm feeling this pain and why it's so bad. And I feel like what helped me finally heal that pain
was unraveling that story. And it wasn't necessarily a story that I had naturally created for myself, but it was more so what had been told to me by medical professionals of like, this is exactly why you're feeling this pain. Like this is really bad. This is why it's dangerous. And like, so in those moments when I would feel those sensations, I wouldn't actually be feeling the sensation. I would just be fixated.
Norman Fa (42:12.527)
Hmm.
Tim Doyle (42:19.843)
on that narrative and on that story. And like I said, it was the breaking of that story and creating a new one that truly helped me heal in my opinion. I'm curious to know when it comes to chronic pain and understanding it within the confines of this conversation, I feel like we can view chronic pain as like unwilling sensation or a sensation that we're trying to get rid of.
Any hypotheses because I mean, know chronic pain is on the rise and you know, a massive problem within society. Any hypotheses as to why there's been such a rise in chronic pain?
Norman Fa (43:02.761)
yeah, mean, first, thanks for sharing with me, your story. And I'm glad you've been able to, you know, for that to advance. So I just always getting stuck in what seemed like a fate that was told to you. that's, that's really encouraging, inspiring. you know, I don't want to be waxed too rosy about the past and say, well, no, people never suffered from chronic pain in the past. But the idea that it's becoming this endemic, know, widespread
issue I think has a lot to do with how good we are at distracting ourselves away from sensation, right? So if sensation is the way that things change and when sensations are negative or even just not even flat out negative but confusing or intense.
we find ways of getting away from it. And now we're like amazing at getting away, getting out of sensation out of our bodies, attentionally, you know, through media. And then also it's so easy. It's easier than it's ever been to get drugs that block sensation, know, the opioid epidemic that started in the nineties is still raging today.
So then we never really have to change that sort of deeply conditioned, well-known set of interpretive habits. And so the first glimmer, I think, as you're saying of that pain, it just treated as confirmation of the story we already have that we desperately don't want to be true. And so there's a bit of like a, it's a bit ironic there, right? We really want the story to not have to be that way, but we take any...
thing that reminds us of the story is confirmation that it's there and then just trying to like, we try not to be there. Like I'll just absorb myself in, you whatever this media is, or I'll take this painkiller or whatever it is, because then I don't have to be in the story anymore. And we don't know, that's the sort of thing we don't have a well, like a culturally really well developed understanding that we actually could be engaging with.
Norman Fa (45:05.115)
that with how the story is going to play out, we don't really know, right? And then it's just because someone has an MD or whatever it is and tells you, here's the prognosis, like no one really knows, it's all just probabilistic, right? so, and we'd rather, we'd almost rather, although it's not an explicit conscious decision, and we'd rather just let that story be true and then try not to have to encounter it to deal with it than we would with the murky hard work of, well, what if it
it is kind of true, but there might be room for it to turn out differently than I expect, right? Because a lot of times with chronic pain, it's not, the way out isn't that the pain goes away completely, right? Like that's the only way the story can be okay. It's like, oh, there just won't be pain. And then you're like, well, that's definitely not gonna happen. You're like, well, then I'm screwed. And so then, right? And then in between is like, this huge amount of your life where the pain isn't controlling.
Tim Doyle (45:54.139)
Yeah.
Norman Fa (46:02.363)
that you could still be doing things. And it would be part of your story that, yeah, it's not fair. Some people don't have to deal with the pain and you do, right? And I know this is someone who's, you know, I've developed some stuff with my hip after doing too many different sports and things like that too. Like it's just not gonna, it's not gonna get better, right? And it's, you know, it's not the end of the world. And there's like, so in between those, and it's easy to say that about someone else, but when it's like your own life, it's like,
there's this huge space in between. It's not gonna get better and it's not the end of the world where like, well then what's rest of your life gonna look like? Like, I don't know, it could be amazing, right? Like, you're not like, this historical figure, yeah, no, like all the stuff they did, it was useless because they got headaches or they had a bum knee or something like that. Like, it's not, that doesn't have to define the person. But when all of your effort is about avoiding a story that casts you as someone who's always gonna be the kind of person who has the pain.
there isn't room for all of that other stuff to occupy your attention because it's like a full-time job staying away from that story. And so, and, and even the availability of pursuing surgeries or things like that, like sometimes it helps. A lot of times it doesn't, right? Like from my hip, I looked up the surgical success rate. It's like 98 % if they do something to clean up your hip. And then you look up the patient satisfaction rate, like a year later, and it's like below 50%.
So you're like, this is the surgeries. It's like the surgery is successful. Like mechanically you can do things, but it's actually not dealing with underlying issue that the person is just not okay with not being the way they were before this stuff was happening. Some people are, it's not like a 0%. So I'm not trying to say don't take painkillers, don't pursue surgery, don't look for ways to help relieve the pain. And there's definitely skillfulness around knowing like how to take care of yourself if you don't trigger things. But at the heart of it, there's...
Tim Doyle (47:30.244)
Wow.
Norman Fa (47:58.801)
Like it's an interesting question is like, could you have a great day on a day when the pain is there? And for a lot of people, kind of pain, they're like, what are you talking, like, how dare you? Like, they're like, no, of course not. And you're like, well, why? Like, what would make your day, what makes your day good or bad? it, is it that the only barometer? If you only have one dial about quality of life and as just as the pain there or not. And if it's there, it's like quality of life is zero. Yeah, you are screwed. But that's, that's like, uh, who decided that that was how you decide?
know about your quality of life, right? It's like, well, is there anything else you value other than no pain? like, yeah, of course there's other things I value. I like delicious food, right? It doesn't have to be something like noble. It's like, like, you know, I have activities I enjoy that I can still do if there's pain around, right? I people I enjoy talking to. I just like being by myself and doing my hobbies or whatever it is.
Tim Doyle (48:28.72)
Mm-hmm.
Norman Fa (48:49.775)
And if I do all those things, also contributed things. Like, well, have you been looking in each of those, on each of those dials on those days when there's pain? You're like, no, no, because the pain's there, so I don't even look at the other dials. Like, OK, well then, yeah, of course it adds up to zero. Yeah.
Tim Doyle (49:03.761)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's the it's the common line. What resists what you resist persists. And I think you're 100 % correct where, you know, pain doesn't go away just because it goes away a lot of the time, but it's more so about, okay, how am I recalibrating my experience with this in the way that I understand it is
this breakdown or this duality between feeling pain and dealing with it. I see like feeling pain is, okay, let me become face to face with this and actually allow myself to feel the sensation. Whereas, you know, dealing with it is going into that narrative and story based about what the, you know, what the sensation means, what the pain means, you know, why it's, you know, having such a hold over you.
and completely agree with you that I feel like we've become so addicted to artificial sensation to try to numb ourselves from the real sensations within our lives. And I'd love to talk more about the, role of media within that and the relationship between media and sensation, especially because there are terms like sensationalism, you know, within
media that exists.
Norman Fa (50:33.489)
Yeah, I mean, I think I'm less upset than most people about, you know, social media and everyone on their phones and things like that. Because, you know, I grew up like in the 80s and 90s and people are still like always on TV or like chasing sweet foods or things like that. It's not like only now the most it's easy to for like older generations like the new generation. There's so much worse because they do these things like you guys did that too. Right. So like the idea that, you know,
the ability for attention to be captured and to provide quick, know, pleasurable experiences has got more sophisticated, right? So it is maybe a more challenging response than, you know, watching television in the early 90s or something like that. But that tendency to want to use distraction as a way of coping with things that are overwhelming is not new, right? And...
I think the issue is that not all of the time are things so overwhelming that distraction is the only course, right? It's just the easiest course. So.
So that's just sort of as a boundary for what I'm about to say. Like at times when things are just completely overwhelming, finding some relief or distraction is fine, it's necessary. And lots of researchers suggest that people can have all kinds of other motion regulation techniques and they're really, really upset. They just need something that's gonna help them sort of break away and calm down a little bit. So cool. But then what about the rest of the time? And then it's like, okay, something happened I didn't like a little bit. So now I'm also gonna distract. And it's like, well, there's an opportunity cost to that because you're,
Even if it's not intrinsically harmful, you're also not learning or growing or changing at all. It's a distraction. It's just pumping the brakes on change. For fear, often, that, well, the change is negative. I'm being overwhelmed. There's something really bad happening. But it also means you're now blind to anything positive happening, or even just something neutral happening after something negative. So whenever we distract, we stop ourselves from
Norman Fa (52:46.513)
learning something about the situation. And we also reward ourselves for distracting. So we learn to become more easily distracted. So it's called negative reinforcement. You take away a negative thing and that itself produces learning in the same way as offering a reward produces learning. So with your negative reinforcement, through successfully avoiding an uncomfortable experience, we become more likely to avoid in the future. And the media...
essentially runs on our attention right now because attention means now you can throw in ads and ads is how media companies make money. mean, maybe there's other things happen. This is the main way it works. So as media gets more sophisticated, the more it can grab your attention and help you build that reward from avoiding into something that's like meaningless, but, you know, pleasurable distraction, the more money that they'll make. they're not your, there's a
conflict of interest and then doing anything else, right? Because that's literally like their bread and butter. And so I guess the question just is, is there a point in most people's lives when they think about like, well, what am I up to? Like, what do I want in life? And where in my calendar am I going to go do those things? And so as a somewhat silly example, it's like if I want my kids to
take a shower, I've got like two tweens. They can be like, can you take a shower today? And they're like, yeah, sure. Because it's just like abstract. Like, yeah, yeah, in principle, I guess I could take a shower. And then if I just leave it, like the day will end and they won't have done it, right? Because like distraction, distraction, distraction. So at some point you have to be like, well, when, when are you going to do this thing? You're just like, I want to have love in my life. When are you going to put work in to develop a relationship where there's love in your life? I want to develop skills to help my career. I want to write that.
novel, I want to start a garden, whatever it is, like when is this going to happen when distraction is always available, the distraction just kicks the can down the road. And again, these are like mental technologies to think like if I care about something, it needs to become a, there needs to be a concrete place in time where I'm not going to let myself be distracted or else it's just not going to happen. And there's also a need for
Norman Fa (55:07.195)
know, self-compassion or just understanding human nature that most of the time I am gonna get distracted. Right? So it's not like, I'll never be able to do it just because I failed a bunch of times, but there has to be a kind of stubborn persistence of like, I'm gonna keep trying to break time out of just full-time distraction into doing the things I actually care about. Because there's no other life where this can happen. It's only now and every time I'm distracted, it's time I couldn't be.
towards these goals, which means I could be failing, but I'm guaranteed to fail if I never try to move toward them. So it can be daunting. And often we just suggest you pick something small that's achievable, like showering is probably easier than achieving world peace or harmony with nature or becoming number one at anything. So pick stuff and then become the kind of person who gets used to breaking away from distraction and getting something done. And over time, you can start.
playing bigger and bigger games with what you're gonna do in those times when you're actually doing things on purpose, which is probably not gonna be the majority of time for all of us.
Tim Doyle (56:12.387)
I'm someone who's very disciplined, very systems and routine oriented, especially when it comes from, especially when it comes to work, how do we balance, I guess, having that discipline and having that routine, but also the spontaneity of allowing yourself to experience those new sensations, especially there's another great quote from your book when you say,
Norman Fa (56:18.331)
Mm-hmm.
Tim Doyle (56:41.999)
It's only when we go beyond exploiting what we know that we can find the freedom to create something new. So just like not falling into that daily routine.
Norman Fa (56:54.305)
Yeah, well, I mean, the paradoxical answer is like, you do want to fall into daily routine. You just want to have chosen that routine, I guess, is what I would say. Right. And I think other people have said this thing, you had Judd Brewer on your show at one point, he talks about anxiety as a set of habits, right. And by crawlery, like not being anxious, being confident is a set of habits. So you don't want to reinvent the system. Cause like I said, most of the time we are just falling into the default mode, but we inherited most of the content.
in that mode. you can like, I'm disciplined, I do everything on routine and schedule and things like that. And it's like, okay, how many of those things did you pick? Like if you could do calendar arm again and erase that routine and rewrite it, how many of those things would you write back in? And the answer is like almost all of it. You're like, great. And then like, just follow your habit. What I would say is like, there is a felt sense when that routine is just like wearying rather than...
value generating. And not everything you're going to do is value generating, right? Though a lot of things surprisingly can be, right? Like you can find even like the simplicity of folding laundry or cooking a meal or something like that is providing a sense of like getting something concrete, concrete done in the world. But that feeling of like resignation and burnout and never having like this feeling like I need to be selfish because there's nothing for me in my daily routine. These are like
like this kind of languishing, there's all these words, the first world problem words for it. It's this, that's like this intuition that the habits aren't the types of things that you would choose. They're just the things that you've been programmed with. And the more you start to feel that, the more it's important to be able to be weird and break out of your habits for a while. And it doesn't mean like go off and live on a mountain for a year, but like, I don't know how many people take scheduled two hours to just do something.
random. You know what I mean? Like it's like, okay, in my week, I'm just going to go to a part of my city I don't normally go to, and I'm going to just act on instinct. I'm going to walk into a random store or park or do something, you know, and I don't even necessarily know what it is just because I want there to be a space in the routine. Right. And I wonder what I'll choose in that space. And then in that space, I'm like, there's all these
Norman Fa (59:19.759)
you start that's like, sometimes I find only if I travel and I'm stuck in airport, do I actually reflect on like what I've been doing for the past four months. I mean, and you're like, oh, of course, no, but of course everyone stops and thinks about it. It's like, no, they don't. Like if we give undergrad students, we incentivize them for like a course credit or something, we say, I want you to just to spend two minutes a day reflecting on how you're feeling and whether you did anything to take care of yourself today. They're like 33 % less stressed.
than people who don't because, you're like, but it's so obvious, like, yeah, but you don't, you just, the routine, routine, routine, routine, like doom scroll pass out and then start again. So like, so that feeling of like on we languishing, whatever you want to call it of just like, it's not working for me. I'm just, there's nothing for me in this routine. The stronger you feel that the more that can become like a source of like, I need to do something purposely not constructive where there's just space for something different to happen.
And if you find something in that space that you really hear like, that's the kind of thing I like to do. That's where you can start feeling like, okay, how am going to make a habit out of that instead? And that can be mental or, but it can also be behavioral that people you spend time with the activities you do, but it can also be mental. It's like, what, I want to spend some time thinking about good stuff, right? I want to spend some time thinking about the future. Can I, can that be a routine for me too? So moving into a place that seems like on purpose, purposeless, right?
as a way where I'm just going to be open and just notice like what it feels like to be in the world and what feels like right for me when I don't have something next on the calendar, I think is critical for people where their routines aren't, you know, aren't what they would choose.
Tim Doyle (01:00:58.693)
And what I like so much about your work and something that I reflected on, I think because it gets back to the sensory and sensations where it's like, yes, it's like, okay, I need new activities, but I feel like at the root of it is I need to feel something different. Like I need a new sensation that I haven't felt before. So, mean, so far we've talked a lot about sensing just from like on a individual internal level.
I'd love to hear more about sensation when it comes to communicating with other people's and in relation with other people. Like, how do we learn to read the, I guess, the emotional and energetic cues of others without, I guess, getting into that narrative and story type component of
I guess always just trying to read other people or misread people.
Norman Fa (01:02:05.839)
Yeah, well, I mean, they're not the best example because you asked me a 20 second question. I'll talk for six minutes. But there are people where you can meet with them and they just never come up for air. Like you have a friend you meet with and you meet with them for like an hour and it never gets around to them asking like, how are you doing? So part of it is just realizing like output is important, telling people sharing your experience is important, but taking in and like the other person's experience is equally as important. And it doesn't have to be
50-50, like you get exactly 30 minutes, I get 30 minutes every time there's a give and take in any relationship, but not valuing, having like a simulation, a sense of that other person's experience means like you're never really gonna connect, right? Like they say, know, like not to get too idealistic or romantic about it, but like love is about really knowing another person.
If you really understood exactly where they were coming from, you would know everything they did would make sense to you, it'd be, there'd be no separation kind of in that. that would be sort of some ideal and you don't want to get into the place where like there's no difference between you and I with every single person you meet. But not having some desire to almost like inhabit their experience a little bit when you're in relationship with someone, it means inevitably you're
you're just treating them as some abstract other, right? And you don't actually seeing them as a person. And you will be wrong, right? But trying to get cues around how someone is responding, like are they hearing what you're saying? How are they reacting? Because you're interested in, even if it's in almost a bit of a vein sort of way, I wanna see how they're seeing you right now. Like having that kind of...
intention and then again, practicing it so it becomes a habit where like you say something but then you pause and you try to notice like what's going on for this other person. It helps you form a simulation that's not just based on stereotypes or prior expectations like base rate information and all that stuff. It's informed by what's happening in the interaction, which means kind of have to let go a little bit of the agenda of
Norman Fa (01:04:25.647)
I need to get all these points of information across. Sometimes you have an idea of something you want to say and someone else says something different and then you just bludgeon forward as though they didn't say it. You're like, oh, they've now introduced some other idea. Like, okay, that's where we are now. Let's go off of that. Even that is kind of basic dynamic. So I think it comes from this idea of really treating the information the other person is putting out through language but also through lot of nonverbal cues as really important sensory information.
And if you're both doing that to each other, it's really hard not to get a sense of connection. Like this person really is trying to see me and they can tell that I'm really trying to see them. And then what we specifically talk about, it doesn't matter. I mean, if there's problems to solve or something, yeah, it matters, but it doesn't matter that much. And from the point of relatedness and often the times, what I would say this is a practical tip is if what you're working for is that sense of relatedness, like
to tune into that almost as though it were like a baseline to that conversation, right? Like what is the feeling of relatedness as we talk? And for me, like if I start monologuing at people and I touch into that, I'll sort of feel it like drifting off because I have no idea. Like there's been nothing. It's a signal that comes from both of us interacting together, right? So can you keep that sense of relatedness that's waxing and weaning?
throughout the conversation as just, is that important enough to hold in your mind with everything else that's happening in social interactions? And if you can, you can notice when you're doing things to maybe sabotage that unintentionally, you can speak to it if they say something that really hurts it for you. And you can check in with them if you feel like something has dropped out as well, like, sorry, like, it seems like you don't agree. Like that, that, that.
tells them like, I'm paying attention to you and I want to know what's happening for you. So asking open-ended questions about their experience. So all of this sounds like social etiquette 101, but it comes from an intention to engage with that sensation of connection. And by doing that, what you're doing, not just thinking about, is showing that you value that connection.
Tim Doyle (01:06:34.577)
What continues to feel novel or alive for you and your work moving forward?
Norman Fa (01:06:43.919)
Increasingly, as I'm sort of in the middle age of my career, I think we have a lot of really good information around things that would make people feel physically and mentally better and more connected. I'm less obsessed now with like, can we just discover things that people should do that would be good for them? And much more obsessed with this thing of like, what if we already have all this information and the thing that we're missing is like how to get people to want to do any of those things.
or to be able to do any of those things. So the stuff that I'm really excited about is like, how do we make things that are good for people palatable or engaging to compete with all the things that are, I'm not even saying necessarily harmful, but are just like filler. How do you compete with the filler to have people do things that are maybe, that's maybe a little more effortful, but ultimately more meaningful or.
or wholesome for them. So, you know, for instance, I do a lot of stuff with meditation and the breath. So couldn't we create games that are about breath awareness? And I think, you know, there's all these like wearables that people can use to measure like their heart rate variability during like rowing workout. So we're trying to in the lab, for instance, take some of those wearables, which are much cheaper than research grade. Like they're not nothing, but like, you know, for a hundred dollars, you can get a heart rate monitor belt.
Can we make games out of like commercial things like that where people actually didn't start enjoying noticing like what it's like to speed up or slow down their breathing and how that affects their emotions and gamify that in a way as opposed to saying like, go take this eight week meditation course. It's going to be super hard and take a lot of your time. Like this generation, I would say people are like, yeah, no. So right, or of course I'm about to start teaching a upper year university course. We're going to spend part of the course.
people writing papers around evidence-based practices to support mental health, but they're sort of caps from a project is they're gonna have to transform that into like a page out of like a magic spell book. And like all the things they write as like the components and rituals in the spell book have to have a separate paper that shows that it's evidence-based, but that no one needs to see that. Like the average person doesn't wanna see that stuff. So they might be like, I've discovered a spell for connectedness or gratitude or relaxation.
Norman Fa (01:09:05.199)
And it's just more playing this game of like, can we be playful and fun about things? Because we know that that's what people will voluntarily spend their time on. The challenge isn't like, we don't know any of this stuff that would make people happy. We just don't know how to compete to get people to do it in a lot of ways. So how do we start to rebuild, you know, that kind of cultural knowledge? So I find that stuff super exciting. And part of the fun is not knowing what that next thing will look like. yeah, Breath Games.
wellness practice spell books, games that reveal people's self-sabotaging habit. have like a task where people consult anagrams, like mixed up letters to figure out what the word is, but some of the words have no solution. so we can, but they can skip. So we can actually show people when they refuse to skip and they end up with the worst score than someone who skips. And then it's like, yeah, that's perfectionism. So like what are games that also help reveal
things that are sort of unconscious but running people as well. It'd be really something I'm interested in. So yeah, I'm at that sort of nerdy tech to drive insights or drive, you know, purposeful behavior kind of intersection. That's the stuff I'm most interested in.
Tim Doyle (01:10:22.843)
To build off of that, you mentioned Kenneth Cooper in your book and how him being a pioneer of cardiovascular training was once seen as dangerous. In today's society, there's obviously no debate about seeing cardio as good or bad. I'm just curious to know, are there any practices either within the work that you're doing personally or just within our society as a whole that you think are currently in that
Norman Fa (01:10:33.828)
Right.
Tim Doyle (01:10:52.751)
early misunderstood phase.
Norman Fa (01:10:56.143)
Yeah, think that I don't know people see it as dangerous, but they see it as pointless. Like a lot of the sensory activities, the feeling you get doing something new that sensory is like you're wasting your time because you don't know, it doesn't connect to an outcome. So I don't know if people are worried it's gonna like erode society, but the ability to like...
do something that seems pointless when you're really stressed out and like doubling down on your habits. think there's still like a communication challenge that we're still working on there. your point like that, that's the potential is at this point people realize like there are things I can do around, you know, stress at a physical level and heart health and things like that through, you know, typically unpleasant exercises like doing cardio, right?
So there is probably, and I really believe there are, if we can, you can make an effort also to do that at a mental side, to preserve your ability to be mentally flexible, to toggle between, you know, explaining the knowledge you have, but also to open yourself up, to allow yourself to be changed. And the fear that if we let ourselves be changed, we'll just be changed for the worse. You know, that would be the closest analog. It would be, I think it's like almost like the, with like hippie movement in the sixties, you're like, it's gonna...
undercut society, but you know, one concept of the hippie movement was people were like, I don't want to go to like state funded wars. Like in other places, like it doesn't make sense to me. Like they start thinking about like how it feels to be asked to do something that isn't, doesn't seem right. You know, so we don't really know what will happen to people to start turning, tuning in to this feeling and wanting something more for themselves.
but it doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna start rioting and flipping over cars. They might just start pursuing different types of work or they might stop buying into things that are quick, like sugar rush, detention, dopamine hits, and that will damage certain sectors of the economy, but it will create other activity that I think will look like a return to things that were sort of older sources of value. And the book, at end, we talk about these kinds of access points like,
Norman Fa (01:13:10.147)
being in your body, doing physical activity, art, like music, time in nature. Like there's a reason why like all humans benefit from these things. And it's just like, how do you find for yourself that that's something that's valuable for you? Yeah, you would start acting different if you started pursuing these things instead of always doing the same thing. And what is that turning point we realize like, if we can be responsible for our cardiovascular health,
with practices that we have a similar type of obligation for our mental health to keep ourselves flexible because there are clear paths to it. think that's sort of a bit of the work that's being done in the current generation, given that so much of the things that can take our attention are, again, may not be harmful outright, but are also just taking up all the time. Like you're just stopping us from doing the things that would keep us mentally healthy. So we end up just sort of...
It's almost like a diminishment where all of us are being less than we could be, as opposed to like, we're all going to become violent or have strokes or something like that. It's like, no, it's more just like we just all, we just all be, we just aren't anywhere close to doing the things that would really make us feel like fully actualized, fully engaged. And that's the sort of, that's the real threat right now. None of us have to be 100 % on all the time, but it'd be nice if
we had some say in how much we were up to in the world instead of just sort of like lapsing into like keeping our heads down and aging and then something goes wrong and that's it.
Tim Doyle (01:14:46.767)
Yeah, it's not so much of a needing to find new things, but it's a return to self.
Norman Fa (01:14:53.711)
Yeah, and what that looks like for each of us is like that's our that is our life's purpose is to sort of figure out what that looks like. But if someone told you like, but you know, you might get so distracted that you never get to that. Like, that seems sort of like, not great, right? Like, so think that's the challenge for time is like, how do we how do we make time to we have to take care of ourselves and keep regulated and, and, and, but at some point, like, we have to stand up.
for something in our lives, otherwise the sand will just run out. That's just the way it is.
Tim Doyle (01:15:28.689)
Norm, I think that's a great place to stop. Where can people go to learn more about you and your work and anything else you'd like to share?
Norman Fa (01:15:38.063)
Yeah, so I mean we have the book that I wrote with Professor Zendulil Siegel, a clinical psychologist, called Better in Every Sense. And I think that's what you've been quoting from today. So that's available on Amazon and a lot of different bookstores all around the world. There's translations. That would probably be really good intro. If you just Google, you know, our fake research engine of choice, there's lots of podcasts and lectures and things like that. And then my website at the University of Toronto gets a bit more into the tech.
research and papers, but I'm assuming most people don't want to read those. So yeah, start with the recorded media or check with a book or there's some excerpts published and that could be the start of getting into this kind of conversation a bit.
Tim Doyle (01:16:20.057)
Awesome. Great talking with you today.
Norman Fa (01:16:21.807)
Yeah, thanks so much, Tim. I appreciate your time and interest. Thanks so much.
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