Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

And now for my discussion with Dr. Emily Belchettis.

Well, thanks for being here.

That's my pleasure. Yeah. I've been looking forward to this for a long time because as a vision scientist who is also very interested in real life tools and goal setting and motivation,

your work lands squarely in the middle of those interests. Just to kick things off, you could tell us just a little bit about goal setting and goal retrieval. What's the deal with vision and motivation? How do those two things link up?

Totally. When psychologists ask people, like, how are you, what are you doing to help make progress on your goals? They say all kinds of things. A couple of things always pop to the top, which is, you know, self-pep talks, or I remind myself of how important it is to do this job or put up post-it notes around to like constantly be nagging me about what I need to do. All of that takes a lot of time and effort and commitment. And so what a surprise that people burn out. Right. It's exciting to work on a goal.

When you first set it, you might make some initial progress. But then eventually we get, you know,

not even to the halfway point, but before things get real. Things are challenging and we fall by the wayside.

So then I, you know, with my team, I was trying to think of like, well, what are strategies that don't require as much effort, that we can automate, that we can take advantage of what's already happening within ourselves, within our body, within our mind, that might overcome one of those challenges. And that's when we started to land on the idea of vision. And we thought, you know what, there are strategies that we can use to look at the world in a different way and that we can automate that might help us to overcome some obstacles, to make progress on our goals, to maybe literally see opportunities that we hadn't been able to see before.

You've published a number of studies in this area, but maybe you could highlight some of the more

important findings in the area of how people can adjust their vision in order to meet goals

more quickly and more efficiently.

So, you know, we started thinking about what are the goals that are most important to people

that they struggle with the most? And regardless of where you look or who you ask or when you ask it,

people's number one goal is something related to their health. Right. So one of the first things that I did

was go over to Brooklyn. There's a couple armories all around the boroughs here around New York City.

And the one in Brooklyn in particular is now YMCA. You know, somebody had invited me a physical therapist said, hey, you should come out and check out what's happening here with your interest in exercise and trying to find new ways of helping people, new tactics that they can add to their tool belt. I think you're going to find some interesting people that are working out there. Who, as it turns out, are some of the fastest runners in the world. Like, you know, one of the people that was in

the last Olympics before I showed up on the gold medal for the 400 meter. I thought when these

people are running, I bet they are like hyper aware of everything that's going on in their surroundings.

Where are they relative to the competition? What's happening in their peripheral vision? What's

going on on the side,

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