I’ve been on the motivational speaking circuit for over 10 years now. And throughout that period I’ve noticed that the demand for talks that explain how our brains work and how we can get more out of them only increases!

During the first 5 years the demand came mainly from the British mainland. I travelled the length and breadth of the country to speak at schools, science festivals and businesses. But since then I’ve been invited to speak all over central Europe, western Europe and the USA.

Talks in educational institutions used to be primarily aimed at students, helping them to understand how best to get their brains into gear as they prepared for examinations. Yet in more recent times this work has extended into promoting a brain-focused approach to improving well-being at all levels of education. In particular I’ve found it particularly rewarding to help teachers, lecturers and other support staff to understand what they can do, in practical terms, to help students develop greater resilience (i.e. to cope with stress without it spilling over into mental health issues).

Over the first few years, the keynote talks I gave across various industries tended to be focused on increasing productivity at all levels of the business by sharing practical tips (backed by scientific evidence) regarding everything the human brain needs to function at an optimal level. Increasingly these brain optimisation tips (or BOPs) are just used at the beginning and end of each talk, with the main, middle segment focused on a more specialist subject matter developed for the particular audience in question.

While the neuroscience of decision making and science of creativity have been two firm favourites for a decade, clients have increasingly been requesting talks on bespoke subject matters. For example, last year the National Trust asked me to do a talk about unconscious bias and empathy, THRIVE asked me to cover the neuroscience of meditation and run some mindfulness workshops, while Siemens and a couple of other major engineering firms working on huge infrastructure projects asked me to deliver the neuroscience of decision making talk with a specific focus on matters relevant to health and safety.

One utilities company in the north-west of England whose Health and Safety record is very nearly perfect even commissioned me to do some research on strategies that might help them promote better mental health throughout their organisation.

There is a huge amount of insight that neuroscience can provide on a wide variety of topics. It’s always satisfying to find that, in tailoring my talks to the specific needs of a client, I’m constantly stumbling upon new areas of neuroscience and psychology with which I wasn’t previously familiar. No matter what the organisation’s priorities have been in terms of what they want their staff to take away from my talk, a few days of digging around in the neuroscience literature ALWAYS yields some inspiration; shedding an interesting new perspective on virtually any topic.

Another interesting development has been that content from The Science of Sin – a book I wrote in 2018 that looked at modern neuroscience and psychological studies relevant to the concept of the seven deadly sins – has proven to be very useful in talks focused on improving well-being. Warner Brothers asked me to do a talk as a part of their well-being week and my whistle-stop tour of why our brains make us do the things we know we shouldn’t, stimulated a fantastic debate that extended well beyond the 10 mins of Q&A. It seems that everyone struggles to control one temptation or other (humans always have) and grasping the role of psychological pain in bringing out our worst behaviours was deemed as illuminating as understanding the techniques that can help to successfully reduce it in order to improve our self-discipline was deemed useful!

Here’s a list of some of the most popular, “classic” talks that I’m asked to return to again and again.

Talks For Business: Neuroscience of Decision Making

In the last few of years I’ve been working more and more with senior management teams across Europe to help them understand insights from neuroscience that are relevant to their specific business needs. For example, I helped one of Europe’s “Big Four” auditors win a highly lucrative new business contract by sharing with them my Neuroscience of Decision Making talk in the context of reverse engineering the pitch process in light of the flaws in how the human brain evaluates information when making important choices. By exploiting a large corpus of knowledge generated over the past decade or so from neuroeconomic investigations the realities of how risk, uncertainty and benefit are evaluated in the human brain can be explored in order to concoct strategies that improve the likelihood of developing a successful pitch.

Talks for Business: Neuroscience of Creativity

Since the first outing of my Neuroscience of Creativity talk in 2013 it has evolved into a half-day workshop experience. I’ve been rolling this Innovation Workshop out over the course of 2015 with various members of the Senior Leadership Team at one of the world’s biggest broadcasters by sharing with them everything that science has to offer in terms of techniques that work and those that sound good but ultimately don’t. By assisting them to create an environment that genuinely promotes innovative thinking right at the very top of the organisation and convincing them of the worth of approaches in an evidence-based fashion, the idea is to reduce resistance to some of the seemingly unorthodox strategies in order that they might be allowed to permeate freely throughout the rest of the company.

Sort Your Brain Out

Sadly many people proclaim that their busy lives simply leave no time to read books. Adrian Webster and I have turned our best-selling book Sort Your Brain Out into a live event. Since our first booking late last year we have been enjoying a steady increase in demand for our motivational speaking duet over the past few months and very much hope that this trend continues in the years to come. We are both represented by Gordon Poole Agency and our speaking agent James Poole is always on hand to discuss booking enquiries.

Talks for Schools

Over the years I’ve been invited to speak at many schools across the UK. The aim is usually to engage young learners, usually in the build up to their big exams, with an upbeat neuroscience narrative that brings to life what exactly is going on inside their brains as they learn. Once students grasp that all their efforts are leading directly to huge changes in the wiring of their brains, how memory works and adaptations that brains undertake to support new skills acquisition, motivation levels invariably rise.

I give them insights into straight-forward techniques to get brains working better: whether memorising information more thoroughly, managing exam stress more effectively and simply encouraging them to see school as the only viable way (currently) of sculpting young brains in preparation for dealing with whatever adult life might throw at them.

If you’d like me to do a talk for you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

All forms of exercise do not yield equivalent benefits. While brains do profit from taking any kind of exercise on a regular basis, getting your heart rate up to triple digits is not enough, on its own, to get the full spectrum of possible brain benefits. To gain the greatest neural benefit from aerobic exercise, running cross country is better than plodding along on a treadmill, pounding a cross trainer or even hitting the track. And it’s not just that our brains benefit from spending plenty of time each week in the great outdoors. Exercising at the athletics track shares with gym based exercise the absence of another important factor that would otherwise yield an additional cognitive benefit: having to choose stable footing on an uneven terrain at a glance. Running on uneven surfaces, i.e. natural terrains not man-made ones, can supercharges the brain benefits of a workout.

For some years now we’ve known that mice and rats that exercise regularly create more new neurons in the part of the brain important for navigation and memories than those who don’t. This increase in hippocampal neurogenesis is entirely logical if you think about it. A mouse who exercises more is likely to cover more ground and so have a larger territory to neurally map in order to later remember where the food is (F), where the dangers are (D) and how to navigate from A to F avoiding D.

However humans are not mice. For one thing we stand up on two legs rather than four, and so locomotion is a tougher computational challenge which requires a handful of brain modifications to support it. Furthermore our methods of acquiring enough food for everyone to eat is more cognitively demanding. Our ancestors had to make up for their relative lack of speed and agility by tracking their prey across many tens of kilometres if they wanted to get their hands on the larger quarry that promised to provide many weeks worth of food for the homestead. This meant that they had to become masters of multitasking.

Walking on two legs is more cognitively demanding than
walking on four legs. If you trip on a branch with four legs, you’ve got three
others to catch you before you fall. If you trip on a branch with two legs,
you’ve got fewer options available to stay upright. Accelerate from walking to
running and the computational problem of staying upright after a trip, rather
than potentially smashing your skull on a rock, is much harder still; there’s
simply much less time available to move a limb in time to break your fall. Add
into the mix the need to process the visual world at great speed to choose a
stable footing while traversing an uneven terrain, scanning for obstacles in
the near distance, monitoring dangers in the immediate periphery AND verbally
communicating with other members of the party, and the challenge of staying
upright becomes even harder still.

And that’s why I do a 10km cross-country run at least once a month with my old mate Nathan Flutebox Lee…

In addition to these monthly blogs I tweet interesting, accessible articles about neuroscience research on a daily basis (@drjacklewis) and post a new virtual reality review every week (http://bit.ly/BrainManVR)

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• 21-25th May (now fully booked)
• Airport Transfers
• Luxury accommodation
• Vegetarian breakfast and lunch
• Twice daily yoga and meditation practices
• Either a treatment at a local day-spa or an in-room massage

• Daily brain talks from Dr Jack on:
  • Changing Your Brain
  • Neuroscience of Creativity
  • Neuroscience of Meditation
  • Neuroscience of Temptation

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What a year 2014 has been! On a personal level I have passed a few major career milestones (those are the firsts). So I thought I’d use my December blog post to briefly reflect upon my highlights of 2014.

FIRST BOOK

My first book Sort Your Brain Out surpassed all expectations (well, mine anyway) by staying in the top ten of the W H Smith’s Travel outlet Non-Fiction Chart throughout 2014. This is despite the fact it was only ever supposed to be displayed on the Business Chart shelves.

Never in a million years did I expect my first pop at writing for the general public to sell 25,000 copies in the first nine months!! My heartfelt thanks go out to Adrian Webster (@polarbearpirate) for putting up with me as we went through the process of co-authoring together. We have already started to be booked for joint speaking engagements (to find out more, just click here) and I’m very much looking forward to spending more time in his genuinely energizing company over the coming years.

I would also like to offer huge thanks to everyone who has supported us by buying a copy and particularly those who took the time to write us a review or get in touch with us on Twitter to say how useful they found it / how much they enjoyed it. It really does make it all worthwhile to know that it is making a difference in people’s lives!

FIRST PODCAST

This all started in January 2014 with a regular science spot on Lliana Bird’s  (@XFM_Lliana) weekly XFM radio show. Over the course of nine months spent diligently investing every Sunday morning into researching and then memorising the best of the week’s quirky science stories, by September it had evolved into a fully-fledged podcast (you can download it for free by clicking here).

Birdy and I were thrilled to find ourselves immediately rocketing towards the top of the iTunes Natural Science Podcast Chart, in the most excellent company of the likes of The Infinite Monkey Cage, The Naked Scientists, Radio Lab and various offerings from the BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4. It felt like Christmas had come early when iTunes told us that we’d made it into their “Highlights of 2014” list.

None of this would have been possible without Lliana’s determination to constantly push and experiment with different ideas (so much so that I’ve nicknamed her ‘Dynama’) and our sound producer Richard Boffin’s (@Boffintosh) diligence in finding great sound tracks, clips and effects to lift the whole production week in week out.

FIRST PRIME-TIME APPEARANCE ON BBC1

I’ve been talking neuroscience on the box since 2007. I started out on BBC2 with People Watchers, hit my first primetime audience on Sky One with How To Get What You Want and started reaching a global audience through various Discovery series such as The Tech Show. However although back in 2008 I did do a couple of experiments on the BBC1 Breakfast sofa with Bill Turnbull and company to promote the launch of People Watchers and had appeared in shows with huge viewing figures on ITV (This Morning) and Channel 4 (The Secret Life of Buildings), an appearance on a primetime BBC show has always, frustratingly, eluded me. Until now!

I’m thrilled to announce that I have finally been invited to contribute to a primetime BBC1 show. If you switch over to the “How To Save £1,000” Watchdog Special at 8pm on Thurs 15th January you will find me, early on in the programme, re-enacting the classic Walter Mischel’s Marshmellow Test with some very cute 4-year-olds and describing how this can explain difficulties that most of us encounter when trying to save money.

If you’ve ever found yourself struggling to resist the temptation of squandering cash on things you want but don’t really need then you may well find this show very interesting. Our brains don’t make it easy for us to forego immediate gratification in favour of greater rewards in the long term but it IS possible. My role in this show is to frame the basic problem. I’m led to believe that it is chock full of practical suggestions on how to circumvent it.

Wishing you all a fantastic end to 2013 and a Happy New Year.

If you’d like to follow me on Twitter please click here: @drjacklewis

If you’d like to see my latest showreel then please click here: Showreel 2014

If you’d like to purchase a copy of my book please click here: Sort Your Brain Out

If you’d like to download my podcasts for free please click here: Geek Chic’s Weird Science

What Does Caffeine Do To Your Brain?

 As a neuroscientist who spends much of his working life giving brain talks at events all around the country (at schools, conferences and science festivals) I’ve noticed that one theme catches public imagination over and over again: How does caffeine work? What does it do to my brain? How long does it stay in my system? Is it really that bad for me? This is one reason why it became one of the key topics in the “Smart” Drugs chapter of my book: Sort Your Brain Out. In this blog I’ll cover some of the most regularly asked questions.

How long caffeine takes to leave your system?

It depends what other drugs you’re on. If you’re on the contraceptive pill it can take up to twice as long for your liver to remove caffeine from your system. So people “on the pill” can find themselves particularly sensitive to its effects because consecutive doses stack up and are not cleared out as swiftly as in everyone else. But if you’re a smoker it is the other way around. Caffeine is removed from your system at double the speed of a non-smoker.
If you’re neither a smoker nor on the contraceptive pill the concentration of caffeine in your bloodstream is halved every 5-6 hours, but it really does depend on the individual as this “half-life” varies greatly from person-to-person.

Is it beneficial to have caffeine before a meeting / presentation / to improve concentration?

Caffeine blocks the receptors of an inhibitory neurotransmitter called adenosine, which under normal circumstances reduces overall activity across the brain. By blocking these receptors and removing the dampening influence on brain activity, caffeine increases activity across brain pathways involved in alertness, focusing attention and initiating body movements. This why people dosed up on caffeine can get quite jittery.
Whether or not caffeine is beneficial for you in a meeting / presentation or to improve concentration whilst working depends on how much you’ve already had. There’s a sweet spot where you will feel more alert and switched on at moderate levels, but beyond that you can become so wound up that it has effects that are deleterious to performance (see description of caffeinism below).
However the increase in feelings of alertness and ability to focus attention only gets regular coffee drinkers up to levels enjoyed by non-caffeine drinkers everyday. This is because once you’re a caffeine addict the brain tends to increase the numbers of adenosine receptors to compensate for the fact that there’s loads of caffeine swimming around in your brain on a daily basis. This means that your average coffee drinker has more inhibitory receptors in their brain dampening activity levels to a greater degree – so they will feel more sluggish whenever they don’t have caffeine in their system.

Is caffeine good or bad for you in the long run?

There seem to be some long-term benefits to drinking caffeine even if the short-term benefits don’t amount to a whole hill of (coffee) beans. It has been observed that regular drinkers of moderate amounts of caffeine (3 cups / day) have a lower incidence of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, liver and heart diseases. This may be due to the increased numbers of inhibitory receptors triggered by ever-present levels of caffeine dampening activity levels in body and brain. The decreased activity levels across the brain caused by the larger numbers of inhibitory receptors in the caffeine drinkers’ brains may relieve the pressure on dopamine neurons that are compromised in Parkinson’s disease and the acetyl choline neurons that get clogged up with various proteins in Alzheimer’s disease. In other words caffeine seems to slow down the process of cell death so that symptoms of these diseases kick in several years later than in your average non-caffeine drinker. At the moment this mechanism is purely speculative. The jury’s still out on the precise mechanism that might account for these observations, but the evidence supporting the concept of moderate amounts of caffeine having a neuroprotective influence on the brain is steadily increasing.

Is it important to control and monitor your caffeine intake?

A dose of 10g is deadly – 100 cups and a human may well find themselves popping their clogs as a typical cup of brewed coffee contains 100mg of caffeine. (NB you may notice that in the above video from the lovely people at ASAPscience they say 1 cup of coffee has 150mg – presumably they brew it stronger over in Canada 🙂 For the non-coffee drinkers out there here are some average caffeine contents of some other popular drinks. There are 80mg in a can of Red Bull, 75mg in a cup of instant coffee, 50mg in a cup of tea, 30mg in a can of Coca Cola.

Very high but not deadly doses can lead to a quite severe psychiatric condition known as caffeinism: “which is characterised by restlessness, agitation, excitement, rambling thought and speech, and insomnia.” (Winston et al, 2005). It is important to control and monitor caffeine intake because too much can interfere with appetite, make people anxious or depressed, not to mention the fact that anything that interferes with sleep will have a deleterious effect on the brain. Everyone’s sensitivity to caffeine is slightly different, but if you have trouble sleeping then you’d be well advised to avoid caffeine at least 5-6 hours before bedtime – for your brain’s sake.

3 cups of coffee per day is considered a “moderate dose” for most people. Get these in early enough to avoid any potential for them to interfere with sleep and you should get the apparent long-term brain benefits without the negative consequences associated with excessive consumption (DISCLAIMER: this should not be interpreted as medical advice – it is just the science-based opinion of the author who has a Ph.D. in neurobiology i.e. not a medical degree!).

I don’t like tea or coffee, are there any other sources of caffeine?

Caffeine is also found in kola nut (one of the original ingredients of coca cola) and guarana – a wonder berry from the Brazilian rainforest; it’s also found in low quantities in chocolate. Caffeine is also included as a stimulant in many cold and flu remedies – so beware what you reach for when you wake up in the middle of the night with a bunged up nose!

By the way: if you study the picture on the left very carefully you’ll find a face amongst the coffee beans – can you find it?

Keep looking… he’s definitely there and you’ll kick yourself for doubting me when you find him!!

If you liked this you’ll love my daily brain tweets so please follow me on Twitter by clicking here.

Figuring out what I should write about in my blog this month really was a no brainer. It’s not every month that I have a new book about to hit the shelves (Friday 28^th March 2014). So from April onwards, if you happen to be passing a WHSmith’s then please do consider popping in. You should find Sort Your Brain Out prominently displayed in the Non-Fiction and Business charts. If you can’t find it then please drop me a line!

Although we have specifically targeted the business market in the first instance, primarily due to their familiarity with my co-author’s previous work, this truly is a book for everyone. We hope that business professionals will decide that other members of their family would also benefit from reading it and pass it on; whether the recipients are their children – to help them get the most out of their brains to achieve more in their education, or their own parents – to help them get the most out of their brain during the post-retirement years. In fact, the book has been carefully put together to ensure that readers of all ages will be able to get something out of it. Happily we’ve already had some feedback that suggests we have been successful in achieving this goal. If you fancy flicking through a few select pages, or perhaps even pre-order a copy with a 30% discount, then please click here to see it on Amazon.

We are encouraging people to tweet photos of Sort Your Brain Out when they find it in the wild with the hashtag #SortYourBrainOut or #SYBO for short – we’ve been made aware of sightings all over the UK and the world – from Jamaica to Hong Kong and Cornwall to Edinburgh.

This is my first foray into the world of publishing. Strictly speaking it’s the second book I’ve ever written, if you count my Ph.D. thesis. However I doubt whether more than a handful of people have ever pulled it out of the vaults of the University of London library in Senate House. For most readers it would be pretty incomprehensible anyway what with being laden with complex scientific terminology. The whole point of Sort Your Brain Out is to make the latest neuroscience accessible for everyone, not just the science enthusiasts. So with this in mind, for my first published book, it only seemed appropriate to co-author it with someone who has extensive experience in writing books that everyone can get something out of. And a few years back, thanks to a fortunate twist of fate, I met the perfect collaborator.

Adrian Webster and I both contributed as motivational speakers at a conference in Tenerife in 2011,  presenting me with the perfect opportunity to forge an alliance with a truly exceptional individual. An internationally best-selling author, his first book Polar Bear Pirates was a massive hit. It is very unusual to see a business book packed full of cartoon characters, yet this unorthodox approach may well be precisely what made it resonate with such a broad audience. We’ve tried to reproduce this effect with a handful of illustrations commissioned for Sort Your Brain Out. For a sneak preview: click here.

Over more than a decade Adrian has been one of Europe’s most popular and influential motivational speakers. His uncanny ability to spin a yarn in an entertaining yet impactful way, leaving audiences not just spellbound by his performances but also much wiser about how to get the best out of themselves at work is unparalleled. He distils many years of experience in the workplace into witty/moving anecdotes and wise observations about how best to motivate ourselves and those around us. Here’s a quick taste of his speaking style brilliantly animated by some young and very talented animators.

Our book Sort Your Brain Out aims to make what modern neuroscience has discovered about the strengths and weaknesses of human brain function accessible to the broadest possible market. We wanted to provide some powerful insights into how to get the most out of your brain, whoever the reader happens to be. After all, every one of us has a brain, but it doesn’t come with a user guide. So we thought we’d pen a book that illuminates what’s going on within our skulls and what brains need to function optimally. The Sunday Express kindly published an article we wrote to support the launch of the book and the following Monday we got a mention in the Daily Express. We also penned a short article on how to stoke the fires of creativity which you can also read online.

We asked a few kind souls to read the final version before it went to print and were overwhelmed by the positive feedback. Below you’ll find just a small selection of the endorsements we received:

This truly inspiring and fascinating book leaves you never wanting to waste a single second ever again. Everything you need to know about how your brain works and how to maximize it is contained in an easy-to-read way. The book proves you really can do anything and there are lots of simple ways to help ensure you too can make the most of your biggest asset – your brain! Without doubt, a book you cannot be without!”

Dame Sarah Storey, DBE

 

For all the debate about governments nudging people to make better decisions or to adopt better behaviours, it is easy to overlook the fact that we can actually nudge ourselves. This book is a wonderful guide to how to do just that.”

Rory Sutherland

Executive Creative Director and

Vice Chairman, OgilvyOne London

 

I thought it was accessible, thought-provoking and full of useful, easy-to-follow tips about improving your everyday life through a better understanding of the brain.”


Killian Fox

Writer for The Observer and other publications

This book explores the kind of topics we all think and talk about: Is the internet making us stupid? What do alcohol and caffeine really do to our brains? It provides you with kind of fascinating nuggets of information you end up reading out to whoever you happen to be with, as well as practical tips on how to maximise what we all have between our ears. Forget brainstorming, it’s all about brainshaking and dunking now. Neuroscience demystified and simplified without being patronising; a must-read.”

Olivia Walmsley

Mail Online

A really great book that explains in layman’s terms how the brain works and how you can then translate that knowledge to enhance your own performance. Thought-provoking and insightful, it will add considerable value to anyone still willing to learn, irrespective of which rung of the success ladder they are on. It’s an enjoyable and extremely useful read.”


Mark Hussain

HSBC

Sort Your Brain Out is a must-read for everyone. It is a clever and thoughtful book designed to help the lay reader understand more about the brain’s most intimate workings but most importantly it provides erudite yet easily consumed bite-sized gobbets of information on how to improve one’s lobar lot. The fascinating examples are eminently readable and marvellously memorable; the reading of this book will stretch the brain in exactly the way the authors have devised. This is mental stimulation at its best.”


Chantal Rickards

Head of Programming and Branded Content

MEC

As someone who has spent their life reviewing neuroscience material, I was struck by how the overview on offer contextualises some aspects of brain function in a novel and refreshing way. In short, this is a delightful and illuminating read – it is the book that I would (will) give my family, when they ask searching questions about neuroscience – and what it means for them.”

Professor Karl Friston FRS

Scientific Director

Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging

University College London

Sort Your Brain Out is has clarity of purpose and many features that puts it ahead of its competitors in an expanding area of interest. Making the best use of the amazing brains we all inherit, even though they are destined to operate in a world far removed from the environment that shaped their evolution, is crucial. There probably is no more important a task for us as individuals or for the groups we live and work in than this. Help and the chance to expand our insight is at hand.”

Ian Edwards

Head of Strategy

Advertising Planning firm Vizeum

Engaging, accessible, demystifying.”

Dr Daniel Glaser

Director

Science Gallery London

If you do decide to purchase a copy we’d be really grateful if you’d find time to review it on Amazon.