Metacognition 1: understanding and controlling your mind

metacognition is kind of my field and it's in popular media so this is some crime show where they talk about metac cognition it's getting out there just so you know this is not some obscure

academic thing met cognition it's like um your awareness of your ability to think yeah just stopped in to whip up a metac cognition scanner so when something has pierced Rick and Morty

it's uh yeah it's it's getting big so metac cognition the ability to direct your own mind to be aware of it if you're aware of something you naturally find interesting if you aware that you're a little tired today or you have

a lot of energy today because you just had a double mocha latte whatever um and you're expressing it then using meta knowledge you're saying I feel really buzzed from my caffeine you're noticing

some mental state if you feel I feel tired you're noticing a mental state you're just aware of a mental state and if you're expressing it then we can use very high flute in academic language to

say you are meta representing you're representing your own mental States and we talked about this earlier the idea of metan knowledge

representing um a cognitive State people throughout history have sort of just been going about the cognitive processes implicitly thinking without knowing their thinking human intelligence going back to the earliest

primates have just been intelligent and semi-intelligent beings going about the processes Without Really knowing what their intelligence is doing and so now we're able to do what we're doing now we're able to be one of the first Generations able to think about their

own thinking represent their own cognition not be a half asleep intelligence you be you'll be one of the first Generations in history to actually have meta knowledge about your own mind so you're not just going about your

mental processes in a half awake state being driven by them automatically you'll be able to recognize your thoughts recognize your feelings recognize how to direct them in a beneficial way instead of just being driven by them you can drive them you

get in the driver's seat by understanding that what requires is meta knowledge and metan knowledge in some ways is self-re representational so just like this sentence as I said has this

sentence has 22 letters it's a sentence that refers to its own attributes it's referring to itself if I said this is a symbol I'm making symbols that refer to their own attributes also it can be a

cognitive attribute your cognition can be referring to itself I learn better in the morning I'm too tired to drive if anybody ever raises their hand and says I know they're representing they're meta

representing their own awareness that they know something if someone goes I don't no they're still meta representing a knowledge state so you're using verbal sing signals verbal symbols rather to uh

represent some internal state so it's everything you already know we use this idea of self-representing shapes so you can have a square and when it becomes self-representing it has implicit sorry

fractal States within it that become more self-representing so every state within it has a square that represents the whole same with triangles you have a triangle not self-representing sort of like SLE sleeping human intelligence

going about its own processes but once we start to self-represent we have aspects of our own cognition represent itself for the first time and we can represent ourselves more and now we're talking about metacognition we're we're in this third order state where we're

talking about the fact that we can represent our own mental States this is how human intelligence starts to wake up instead of just being driven by implicit processes we don't understand sort of

like being in that dark Forest humans evolved in we can actually be aware and be of those things that are going on inside of

us metan knowledge represents cognition simple as I feel curious or I agree with that I get that I don't understand so just mapping this on to your own experience you all had meta cognitive

experience your whole lives so we talked about these levels neural level algorithmic level knowledge level and we can think of this almost like

a a fourth level or just a meta representing knowledge level or you have procedural knowledge here implicit then knowledge about the world and now we have knowledge about its own

self and like I said nobody in your family's history on both sides going back through all your Bloodlines since the beginning of time

has ever known this about itself your neurons produce computational processes with knowledge and not metan knowledge

can direct the whole so you're the first and anybody who has the ability to met represent their own thoughts and their own mental processes can drive their own

intelligence better you can harness your own abilities and yeah improve so how do we do this well we represent our own mental stage just like everything else

symbols a certain format of representation we have conceptual Concepts in the mind they represent the pathway towards achieving any goal and

any goal we want to achieve has to be represented first you have to represent the goals first why didn't why couldn't humans fly we didn't have the concepts it's not like we're genetically

different than people who couldn't fly we just now we have the concepts so now we can fly why couldn't humans get into space we didn't have the concepts now we can get into space why couldn't we solve hunger on the scale we are now we didn't

have the concepts we didn't understand what fertilizer was we didn't understand what uh genetic engineering of plants was we didn't understand a lot of things why didn't we understand how to solve diseases

like we do now in a lot of ways we didn't have the concept so humans have been lacking the knowledge the representation of all the goals we want to achieve and anything we want to achieve individually or as a species as

a civilization will be achieved simply by representing the means to do it that's it that's the whole goal all the goals we want to achieve all the goodness all the happiness all

the harmonious civilizational processes will be achieved simply by building Concepts that allow us to to do

that of course it requires that most of us have those Concepts if some people don't they think war is good they think hunger is good exploitation is

good well that's not going to work for everybody so understanding the causal Pathway to something is the means to do it we just need to represent it that's it and external

goals driving a car everyone knows how to drive a car even if you don't drive a car right now you could probably get in a car even if you've never driven before and have a way of doing it you know that there's certain operations and you press

the gas pedal you see people doing movies enough so it's external things but it's also internal things if there's internal States you want to achieve if you're in some non-perfect state right

now and there's a goal you want to have inside of you like happiness you want to get out of some discomfort you want to get out of some mild dysphoria anxiety unhappiness you can it's possible for

everybody to reach well whatever their higher potential is as a state of inner peace happiness joy the ability to find fulfillment and

meaning in life all the good stuff also requires that we represent how to do it I mean a baby in the woods doesn't have the concepts to achieve any

external goals will perish pretty quickly doesn't have the state to achieve any internal goals will perish pretty quickly now humans if we have

external con Concepts like food warmth shelter well even if people are rich I mean everybody knows the stories of people who are rich they have all the external goals they want but they're

miserable they're unhappy alcoholics suicidal drug addicts everybody heard stories of people who have gone that way because they don't understand their inner causality and they're trying to

achieve it outside of them drugs partying booze whatever the internal goals you want are a different type but it's the same thing

over and over the brain does the same thing over and over it represents its internal goals it represents external goals and how to do it so if you try to focus everybody knows what it's like to try to seize your own mind you it's the

last day before an assignment's do and you have exactly 10% done of it and everybody knows what it's like to try to squeeze their awareness and they go okay brain I need you to do this for me and

you get that anxiety that last minute anxiety everybody knows what that's like and you say okay I need to I'm aware of my distraction I'm aware of my desire to do

other things I'm also aware of my anxiety and that anxiety is taking precedence and I am directing my attention towards this task this thing that is due tomorrow and there's going

to be big trouble for me if I don't and that anxiety allows you to direct your own internal Focus so I'm just mapping this on to your own internal experience focusing directing your own

mental state it's it's how we get all the good stuff so a little hot in here okay William James one of the creators of modern psychology said the greatest weapon we have towards stress

or anything else is to choose one thought over another just choose one thought over another it's not entirely that simple but everybody knows what it's

like to see laughing happy children children aren't born depressed you become that way even if you your people are happy

when they're 10 or 20 when they're 30 they can be or 40 or 50 they can be unhappy everybody knows miserable older people who have just disintegrated mentally over time and they're just angry and you just don't want to go

around them they didn't start off that way they became that way over time by negative thoughts starting to feed in on themselves until they just started to become this black hole collapsing in on

itself this could happen to all of us so choosing our own mental States is how you get to those mental states you have to choose it you have to understand the right path the right

causality it's hard but what other option is there nobody wants to be one of those miserable grumpy adults I mean everybody knows miserable grumpy famous people who are

rich your happiness is what matters the most happiness of all and So Meta cognition is crucial towards achieving that there is an art to directing your own mental states there

is an art to building your own soul if you want to put it that way but I try to clarify this is just a fancy way of explaining something we all

do a hundred times a day babies do it children do it teenagers do it 20 year olds there everybody does all the time the first thing you aware of in the morning when you open your eyes is I'm

awake I'm aware that I'm awake the last you think at night probably is I'm sleepy I need to go to sleep I need to direct a mental state I'm aware of a mental state I need a coffee to change my mental state I need

a drink to change my mental state maybe you need food I got low blood sugar I need to improve my mood change a mental state everything you're doing is trying to change a mental state focusing your attention

controlling your emotion everyone knows it's like to be at sitting at at a dinner table with your family and you're trying to pretend you're heavy trying to pretend

don't don't fight with your brothers or sisters don't show your parents you're irritated for some reason you're aware of some emotion and you're trying to direct it because you're aware that it's better off in the long run if you just

kind of pretend everything's okay knows what it's like or you're stressed from school how was school was fine you don't want to talk about it so just saying fine is the easiest way to to just to

move on but we're all grappling with our own mental States if you're rubbing your eyes and tired you're aware of your own mental state or if you're distracted so recognizing and

controlling mental States is pretty much the whole game in life you can achieve anything if you can do that so metac cognition is big fancy word for the higher processes that

involve the awareness and control of our own mind Focus emotion memory it's often called thinking about thinking not quite I mean you're all conscious of your own

Consciousness now you're aware of your own awareness and when I tell you to be aware of your own awareness suddenly pops into a slightly more vividness doesn't it it's called meta awareness you're aware of your awareness and you

can be aware that you're aware that you're aware meta awareness now it's super Lucid right now isn't it this is all things we all share as human beings so it's not exactly thinking

about thinking that's symbolic thinking is usually symbolic processes so it usually involves just your mind directing its own processes EXP itly or implicitly so

you can direct your own feelings your own perceptions if you're aware that the stick half in and half out of water is Just an Illusion then you're aware that your perception is false that's also

metac cognition so the higher order abilities that humans have come from thinking about thinking so there's been decades worth of research they people think that it's some other form of

cognition it's not babies do it animals do it primates do it dolphins do it don't believe me so you can give math tests to monkeys and

dolphins they I'm going to give you a treat if you get this math test it's like simple like 2 plus three and they know they're going to get a fish if they get it right so you show them a math

test and they get really excited if they know it they know they're going to get that fish they know they know and a monkey will get really excited if he knows he knows something cuz he's going to get the treat but if he he knows he

doesn't know he's not going to get excited he's going to be angry dolphin's going to be upset or the monkey will start asking the researcher for a hint me a hint can I have a hint

they know they know so this is something that humans animals we all do it allows us to get sort of higher order processing but there's two aspects of it one thing I showed you awareness meta

awareness you're aware of your own mental States you're aware you're super interested or a little sleepy or you're aware of any mental State

emotions it's also controlling it controlling it to get to some better state so monitoring you're just aware of your mental States you're aware of your feelings you really want to watch that

show you want to say something mean but you realize as an adult you can't do that especially in public you're aware you are offended by something or you

like a something in the news monitoring you can monitor your internal environment and you can control your external environment monitoring and control so

you're aware and you can control awareness and control so monitoring everybody knows just you're monitoring your environment you when you're walking

through this down the street you got your eyes open so you don't trip over everything or bump into anybody then you have monitoring your internal mental States okay what's my next thought

what's my next feeling what's my feeling right now just wait play the game with yourself what's my next thought it's one way to meditate by the way just try to be aware

of your next thought instead of it sneaking up on you from behind you can just wait for it you find that it actually doesn't sneak up on you so easily if you just look for it this is one way of developing higher meta

awareness which is what they do in therapy what they do in meditation attentional training metacognitive training so monitoring the ability to be aware of mental States you can be aware

of your you're certain I got this I'm sure I got this you're where you're happy this is a really good day or I know something good is going to happen

today or tonight or you're distracted or really can't focus and you can control you're controlling the external World your

brain can act on the world outside of there it can pick up things and talk about bonus points you can control the world and you can

control your own mental States you can steer your focus okay that's can't watch a movie right now it's 2:00 and 2 p.m.

and I got to do something for school tomorrow so you steer your mind away from things that aren't in your benefit and you steer your mind towards things that are in your benefit if you're angry at a f friend

steer your emotions away from saying something mean because you know it'll push them away or cause a fight so steering your mind mind monitoring your own mind I'm trying to show you that the

Mind acts on different levels metacognition is not some other external alien form of cognition is your mind doing what it always does just on a different level so you have the object

level objects objects right and then you have the meta level object

level meta level so you can be aware of things outside of you and then you can be aware of your own mental

States that's the meta level it's metto meta there we go and the more you can be aware of your own mental States and control them the

better off you are so controlling our mental States regulation of processes controlling Focus pushing away anger trying to remember things

better realizing that what you do now matters what you focus on now matters whatever you're doing for schooling

matters how you treat people matters so try to be as nice as you can and you can improve your well-being with therapeutic strategies so most therapeutic strategies are about metacognitive control though a lot of

them don't call them that it's increasingly being called that but it's about being aware of your own mental States being aware of your own emotions people have anger problems they'll tell you okay be aware of your anger don't

just act them out just be aware okay I'm feeling let's see rate it okay I'm at a five out of 10 okay how about now four out of 10 okay how about now seven out of 10 okay people can become aware of

their own emotions and control them better they don't automatically act them out it gives you a meta awareness and therefore met of control over them if you have negative emotions they can say

okay what is emotion feel like rate it how strong is it and you have better grip as a result so monitoring controlling

environment monitoring controlling your internal States again and again it's abstract but I go over it

and uh try to really clarify with pictures and with images I mean I wasn't given images so I hope you appreciate that I'm not just giving you verbal definitions

I was given a lot of verbal definitions I did a master's thesis on metac cognition trying to computationally model metac cognition I think it took me about two years to get my head around all the

depth of it and I said you know probably go a lot faster if there were pictures so here's some pictures uh now what's the purpose of

all this because understanding your mind helps you direct it better and that's the video you'll see on bright space understanding your mind helps you direct it better if you're in some negative emotional state if you

want to get to some better emotional state if you don't understand how to do that you're not going to reach it you're just waiting for better emotional states to fall in your lap hate to break it to you but people usually get more unhappy

over time if you just let things go people usually get more angry over time if you just let things go people usually get more dispirited over time and in this culture the modern world just

letting your emotions go just letting all your desires go whatever you want to do just do it is the quickest path to unhappiness get short-term pleasure long-term

unhappiness and the world is out to just sort of make you an addict to Simple Pleasures we all kind of know

that and it will if you don't direct your mind in an Artful intelligent way so this is exactly what the world would needs right now so here's just sort of

an example of how understanding any system is one of those special properties of intelligence so the our own bodies for example people have been going through and this is just a

metaphor people have been having immune systems their whole their whole life on Earth so millions of years all animals all humans have implicitly been getting cuts and the immune system just heals it

antibodies get released from certain glands and the an army of Fighters goes through our blood and attacks white blood cells go out and attack all the bad guys trying to invade us nobody's

ever known this again we're one of the first Generations in history to understand that we have this Army inside of us that's constantly fighting off Intruders and if our immune system shuts

down the world will literally eat Us Alive within a day it's gross to think about but there's an army of things keeping the world from trying to you know outside viruses bacteria but we

never knew that and so we've sort of been going about it implicitly not very well and so people would get cut most of the time it'd be fine the immune system

would heal it some of the times I mean think of caveman 50,000 years ago people would get cut be red and sore and then they'd try to wash it off probably be

fine but once in a while it would just get out of control and children would die adults would die for simple Cuts or big cuts or diseases nobody understood but we understood the immune system when

we understood what was going on children didn't have to die from simple things adults didn't have to die from simple things anymore people would get a cold people would get an infection people would get

measles mums rebella typhoid influenza all kinds of things and then we know what's going on inside of us and then we can then interact with their immune system better

we can eradicate diseases I mean polio was something that would just make people die and or just you know

not be able to move around very well Rosa Roosevelt who had Polio one of the presidents spent his life in a wheelchair did very well

but understanding what's going on inside of us allows you to engage with it expertly so now this started with fellow at

Stanford John Flavel who coined the term metacognition when he was doing work in memory he was this was in the

70s you see a picture of him he has beautiful Olive 70s suit 70s fabric but he was doing work in metam memory and he was

noticing just doing work in memory that people can actually be aware of their own memory well how is that I mean you know if you known something before the knowledge even reaches you so you have a

feeling that you know something before you even have the concept of what you're trying to retrieve so you can have things in your declarative memory down deep so for example we all know what this is like the tip of the tongue

phenomenon you know the like you're like who's that actor in that movie who's the lead female actress in Titanic I know I got a feeling that I know and this is what Flav realize people would have this

feeling and they'd be tormented by this feeling oh but they couldn't access the symbol we all know what that's like not being able to access the symbol but the feeling is saying like a green light you

know this you know this you know this and that makes us reach down and try to pull up the symbol more so who is the lead female actress

in Titanic most people know but you kind of have a feeling you've heard of it okay how about the M lead male

actor this is a different generation isn't it okay there we go and but you know what it's like to be like ah who's that oh man I know the

face I know the face I have and you just be tormented by it there's something in human cognition where feelings are attached to our deep memory like there's a string attached to

our feelings that goes down deep into our memory and then we when somebody asks us something there's a feeling that comes up and says you know this even if you the symbol doesn't come up yet

there's a feeling saying it's down there or a feeling saying it's not there so if I asked you what was the seventh dinosaur ever discovered you have no

feeling no you like I don't I I I know I don't know I don't even have to try I know I don't know it's very useful for a cognitive system to have that for you to know you don't know why because if I

asked you things and you didn't know you'd have to reach through your entire memory every single little box of memory you'd have to open up and go no not there no not there spending

hours instead of instead of doing that you can just have a feeling say I know what's in the boxes in your memory the answer's not there don't even bother looking for it and so this is how feelings can give us

an understanding what's going on inside of us not all the time but in memory this is what John FAL was noticing feelings are attached to our memory and they tell us whether we know or we don't

know something it's a timesaver because if you know something but you can't access the symbol well how do you even know it's down there you might not even bother looking if the feeling is saying it's

there it's there green light green light then you will spend more time rumaging around yep is that feeling like is that always true though not always okay explain it more and then the picture will kind of become clear in my head

yeah yeah yeah so we're not perfect you're right also if you know more about a certain area that Association will give you a feeling that you know more about it so if you're an expert on dinosaurs and you're like ah it's a kid

I knew all the dinosaurs I knew T-Rex I knew stegosaurus I knew d d and then I said okay what's the seventh dinosaur ever discovered you'd say oh I got a feeling I got a do I know this I got a feeling that you don't know this but the

feeling is coming from all the other knowled you know about the area so it can deceive you but most of the time it's it's dead on so yeah now you're having meta knowledge of what's been going on inside

of you everybody knows this but you've never actually conceptualized this experience of having feelings of knowing that tell you what's in your deep memory or feelings of knowing that tell you that there's nothing there I don't have

to look I don't have to open the boxes in my memory I know they're not there okay so people are getting fascinated with this right now especially in a world where people are Bec more and more

helpless addicts to entertainment booze drugs addiction crisis alcohol crisis this crisis that crisis wouldn't it be great if there was one thing that United

them all well there is metan know unites it all because whatever problems there are in the world it starts in human cognition and if there are people

suffering from some problem it's likely that it's because they don't have the causal knowledge to achieve whatever state they want to not addicted in the first place to get out of addiction to

not be an alcoholic to get out of alcoholism to not eat too much to get out of eating too much to not watch shows all the time to get out of it to achieve some higher state for yourself

whatever it is people like well that seems to be the the common principle the ability for human intelligence to understand and direct its own process it seems to be the Magic Bullet the

unifying principle that will raise human beings up from an automatic Happy State to a better state it allows you to do reasoning Better Learning

better problem solving better your emotional states self-regulation whatever better you there's a better you possible in every single way we just don't all know how to

open that door do we but the door exists well it's a mental door and all you got to do is open up the right level understand how

to train that level and then all that stuff comes out of it so we can improve our over all cognitive processing not only that but it seems to improve physical skills as well

so uh Olympic athletes top MMA fighters I don't know how many of you watch MMA I don't but boxing coaches it seems that the physical level of human beings can only

get so good and they meet and they box or Olympic athletes compete against each other for gold

medals and it seems that the final ability to get that gold medal or to win physical things seems to come from people what coaches call getting your mind right you got to get your mind in

the game you got to get your head in the boxing match you got to get your head straight get your mind right and then they reach that upper level that extra percentage of

excellence and their physical ability is fully realized by them metacognitively being able to direct their own mental States in a way that releases their actual their their greater physical ability as

well so there's a lot of metacognitive training going on in in sports as well also entrepreneurs it seems that people who excel in business are the ones who are able to harness internal States

harness their internal motivation they don't succumb to discouragement they know what they don't know and they can hire the right people to fill in that Gap they can uh they they know when they're overly excited about an idea

that doesn't have a lot of evidence for it they have courage for going and trying to you know risk all their money or their livelihood or go to that meeting with that very intimidating millionaire who they need venture

capitalist funds from so it seems that human abilities all over the board come from people who are just better at directing our mental States this is a universal principle of

intelligence again this class is about unifying ideas there seems to be unifying ideas here if you can understand any realm you

can control it better if we understand our immune system we can control it better if we understand aerodynamics now we can fly if we understand space travel

now we can go into space if we understand how to cure hunger now we can cure hunger if we understand cancer then we can cure cancer and we're slowly getting there all the things we want to

achieve come from just understanding that realm and then we can reach into that realm and turn it in a way that benefits us same with our own mental States humans have been in a black box humans have been in a dark room since

the beginning of our species and we're just slowly starting to turn the lights on there was our mental realm now we're starting to flict the lights on well it's not a okay it's not a switch it's a dimmer switch and we're slowly turning

up the knob so we're starting to illuminate principles processes the rooms of the mind and we're able to then direct it better as a result we don't have to be a slaved to

unhappiness to depression to anxiety no matter how permanent it feels you can release it and release it forever to a point where you even forget about it looking through old diary like oh wow

that was a mess yep you can more than that science is metacognitive now what is science it means directing thoughts

according to certain principles you know we have feelings like oh my family told me this the priests told me this the gods the Oracle of dely the people on Mount Olympus told

me this but science says okay yes you feel those things tradition culture whatever says things but you should base your

thoughts on on the evidence there is to actually to ground them so you should have beliefs to the extent there's evidence and so science is about getting into a metacognitive State pushing your

feelings aside and building up evidence for your ideas making uh experiments saying we don't know I know I don't know but if we have an

experiment and we say we have a certain kind of medicine and we need to see if it works well okay our culture has said it works everyone seems to really jazzed up about this

medicine I need to separate that out now you're in a metacognitive space now you put all that aside you say that actually is not a good evidence for whether something's true so scientific thinking

is about being Artful being deliberate and being mindful of your own thinking and

so our greater abilities have come through history you're wondering how did we go from mud Huts to skyscrapers how did we go from thinking Pottery was a pretty neat trick

to space stations well humans started to think about thinking itself thought itself became the object of focus instead of just going about our processes implicitly we started to think about our

own thoughts and started to met represent our own thoughts and this allowed us to go about what's called the the Hallmark of the human species

the ability for an intelligence to meta represent its own thoughts and people have said that anywhere in the universe maybe humans are not alone probably we're not most scientists say that it's

statistically impossible that humans not alone not only that but it's probably the galaxies are probably teeming like a petri dish with intelligent species and anywhere there is species all over the

universe at some point say this is the just the just the Milky Way terrible Milky Way but you get the idea and we're here and we're starting to meta

represent and at some point there's going to be a species somewhere over here that's going to start to represent its own mental States this species is going to destroy itself before it can

this one over here will start to meta represent but at some point species anywhere in the universe will go about the same process they'll start off sort of in the darkness they'll represent the world around them

and then at some point they'll start to met represent their own minds they reach their meta stage that's where we are we're just starting to go about our species metacognitive stage

where we don't just go about our processes implicitly we start to do them explicitly we reach that higher level we break out of receive tradition we get

out of negative patterns of thinking and feeling we get out of needless violence based on Ancient principles that haven't

been questioned and so we have have history of this culture came from this fellow who started to think about thinking started to take a turn he said

maybe the universe and all the the wind and the rain and the ocean storms are not Supernatural and more than that maybe our own thinking and knowledge of

reality isn't Supernatural maybe it's just us alone in the universe and either we understand reality or we don't whether we learn to understand our own

minds or we don't and so this was how things got to be this way this is all part of the The Narrative where knowledge human

knowledge started to represent itself direct itself formal reasoning was metacognition logic epistemology thinking about thinking now

that's thinking about thinking symbols representing other symbols and directing symbols intelligently instead of just blindly going about its processes like a chain of

dominoes probably that I pause and take a breath thoughts random comments and so if you're wondering how

this story got started how did humans go from pottery and Wooden Ships things we can do without really understanding our own thinking that's fine people can realize mud can be put into a certain

shape and then baked and we can hold stuff in it neat you can take wood and you can kind of tie it together and you can get these floating things

nice what is the universe made out of is reality dependent on our minds is the world round or flat well there are things we there's a there's a

there's a a very low ceiling that's why human beings didn't get Beyond understanding very simple things about reality for hundreds of thousands

of years object level thinking is a very low ceiling you can only reach a certain amount of Technology a certain amount of thinking a certain amount of Social Development once you reach the next

stage within 300 years these guys had steam engines they thought it was a scientific trick but the first steam engine was ancient Greece they had tools

for measuring you know barometric pressure temperature um they had principles of buoyance they they started to unlock the principles of nature simply by thinking about thinking and so

we went from the object level low ceiling to The Meta level where there was there's no ceiling the sky is the limit the universe is the limit and so what are some of those

principles well they're hard but one of those principles don't base your thoughts on emotions they're not your friend they're not they're not hooked into reality we

all like to think that our feelings are especially hooked into reality that they're a whisper from the cosmos mine are special everybody's feelings whisper to them as if they're

special cosmically hooked in they're not sorry it kind of hurts wipe a tear and you go okay well fine we need to base

our understanding of reality on thoughts on symbols on Concepts that have evidence base our conclusions on that beware of logical fallacies test our theories just because because we have a

received idea doesn't mean it's true believe things to the extent there's evidence to believe them these are tough this is about intelligence representing its own processes and starting to go about the art of

thinking the art of being an intelligence that's intelligent about itself instead of our thinking just being a

blind infinite train trail of dominoes in the dark we can start to think about our own processes and lift oursel up above the object level into the The

Horizon and you can train your mind now there's this all the signs of well how do we get better what are the different categories of getting better at our own mental States well if you can't direct

your attention for more than 10 seconds you can't do anything just you know retire but you can increase your attention if you you realize your mind wanders every two seconds you can do

intentional training meditation training whatever you want that can stabilize it and you can hold your focus on something 5 Seconds 10 seconds 20

seconds you get better and better and then you can direct your mind through that portal of awareness towards achieving anything so awareness you can increase your awareness emotional

training not just not being controlled by your emotions but also learning how to direct your own behavior more

artfully learning how to to release negative emotions there's ways of of turning the mechanism of your mind backwards so instead of your mind

creating more and more negative feelings over time you know how to lift the lever make the train abdominal go the other way so you actually release negative feelings cycles of thought and feeling

that would otherwise haunt you forever memory training you can get better at remembering things so there are techniques going back thousands of years

if anybody's ever watched Sherlock Holmes with the Mind po okay I see a few nodding anybody else see Sherlock holmes' mind Palace he has this

meticulously structured mental Palace for remembering things so it's uh actually start with Cicero even earlier than that people notice that if

they just remember things as pictures they would stay longer Cicero for example way back in the day had

this thing called the method of Loki which is ways of going from you know 5% memory to 95% memory where you said okay so imagine you have a mental

room it can be your childh at home it can be the bedroom you have now and if you have a list of things you can put the things in the list on the different pieces of furniture in your

home the different drawers and then you can close it all up and then later on you can mentally go back into it start opening the drawers and the pictures of the things on the list are all there

100% so you have a grocery list this is just an example you can you know have a list but you can actually start to put things in the your

mental house take some time and you can actually get better at it so there's people who have actually gone about memory you know Guinness Book of World Records we're memorizing cards I don't

know why but they are people who memorize cards in a row what do you think the champion for

memorizing cards in a row is 10,000 20,000 30,000 now if you think you just memorized a bunch of cards in a row Ace

of Spades three of Hearts Jack of clubs 30,000 of them how did he do it well he said it's impossible if you just try to memorize the cards he turned them into

pictures and I'm going to say what is that noise CU we've all been it's been our awareness is that just all

right so anyway this fellow who and people who go into memory championships so they turn all the cards into pictures so a club they see as an actual club now

there's two of them Spades they think of handcuffs and it's hooked into the club Hearts is easy you can put the handcuffs through the heart and they start to chain the pictures together instead of numbers they think

of pictures and they chain pictures together and then they notice that they can actually look down mentally the chain of pictures 10,000 20,000 30,000 and they

just notice they remember it's just something that the human brain does so here's a scene from Sherlock Holmes talking about his mine Palace

just two minutes you see I'm trying to solve a mystery using his technique it's perfectly all right but

maybe it's not a drug no it has to be a drug how did it get into our systems how there must be something

something something something buried deep get out what get out I need to go to my mine Palace

what he's not going to be doing much talking for a while we made vgo his what oh his mind Palace it's a Memory technique it's sort of mental map

you plot a a map with a location doesn't have to be a real place and then you deposit memories there theoretically you can never forget anything all you have to do is find your way back to it so this imaginary location could be

anything a house or a street yeah it's a palace he said it was a palace yeah it would wouldn't it [Music] h

[Music] [Music] [Music] you pound so the actually scientific papers

on this to see if it actually works and yeah it works I mean my memories pretty fine so I'm not going to devote a lot of time to it but yeah so we just notice there are certain

ways you can train your brain to get better at all the different aspects attention memory emotion whatever you can become more courageous

you can have less anxiety you're not locked into whatever state you're presently in and there's neural evidence for this

it seems that the people who have gone about meta memory training and then had their brain scanned the world champions U have had their brain scanned

it seems that the world champions of memory their their training what their secret is says that it's not that they have better memory brains like they're hippocampus and all the

different areas of the brain that engage in memory they're not larger they have these techniques these strategies these these instructions for unlocking the

brain's greater power they've got a metacognitive key and they're able to open up their memories greater abilities as a

result so this is good neural evidence for that anybody here done any metacognitive training meditation training no meditation some meditation

yes what like I was really into for a while and so like memory cards thing yeah for like numbers they don't actually do like that sort of thing Comm in like medicine to use it here's a question do you know how many cards

somebody can memorize if they have no meta memory techniques um like nine like five like it's a very low ceiling right yeah it's not that many I

think like probably between like 10 and 20 20 would be great so 20 versus 20,000 yeah so that's what I'm

talking about the brain has a very low seal feeling for things they can do automatically on the object level but on the metal level you don't just double the power of the brain not even just 10 times you know that whole we use 10% of

our brain thing well that's not true I mean we use all our brain largely all the time but we use 0.1% of our

abilities and we can unlock that with the right the right training and so people are saying the future education will be less facts and people will just be trained

how to direct their minds beneficially and they can point it towards anything Gabby is there a limit to neurons f is there a limit to how faster neurons can

fire yeah yeah I mean um you you get better at your brain firing in general because instead of a whole region firing it gets condensed into small little regions after practice or

cognitive skillfulness and how you go from symbols that direct your minds meta instructions that direct your mind in some way and whole regions of your brain have to be activated but once you get better at it it proceduralized and so

all you need is a small little portion that gets that fires very quickly and automatically and so if you're directing your attention initially if anybody's ever tried meditation it takes your all

your will and you're very not good at it and then as slowly over time you can direct your mind like a laser as a result of just building up the right procedural knowledge or men memory

knowledge or emotional control knowledge or whatever scientific thinking Sherlock Holmes is a fellow who started off thinking rationally as a

boy looking open books of logic and he had so proceduralized logical thinking that he can just go into a crime scene and just he

sees and can logically deduce things that you know the police in the 1800s standing around are just kind of baffled you don't understand but somebody with proceduralized logical thinking can

unlock the case as a result and then of course you blurts out things and then says how do you not see this but anyway neural evidence shows that you can really proceduralized metacognitive

skills and get better at it so that your higher qualities are unlocked and uh yeah greater abilities and so again we take this back to a visual

diagram instead of a fourth layer we can just have a third layer but the metacognitive layer think of blue think of self-representing

shapes object level say you're driving your car meta level is if you're you know trying to focus you're recognizing that you've been in class for an hour at least the mind is

starting to wander but he's saying things about the Mind unlocking its own abilities by getting better at understanding itself this could be useful this could be the most useful thing I ever

learned you're you're right So Meta knowledge allows cognition to direct itself to wake up from sleeping automatic half awake processes everybody knows what it's like to be in a dream

and only know you were in a dream after you woke up could you control the dream state no you were controlled by the dream state and all the drama in the

dream state was so convincing oh so convincing then you wake up it was never true it was never necessary a lot of the drama we have in

our own lives all the dysphoric emotions that can haunt people are unnecessary that're the result of

automatic sleeping mental processes that hold us captive that there is a key to unlock the right metacognitive training

you turn the key you unlock negative emotions takes time but what's the other choice in the future children will be raised with this metan knowledge from birth and they'll never get into these negative patterns of feeling in the

first place but right now since we memorized all these useless facts our whole life and what good were they especially when we have the

internet um they're saying that education needs to move towards people not memorizing facts but learning how to direct their mind intelligently so they can direct it anywhere to become meta

Learners so this is even the uh college or no education Ministry of Ontario has said this is the vital competency of the 21st century not memorizing things

that's how the old system was set up object level knowledge hey kids memorize all this object level knowledge that isn't useful you're going to forget after the test but it was set up in the

1800s and people didn't have a lot of books so you had to go somewhere and memorize things because there was no other choice now we have phones in our pockets with the entirety of human

knowledge but waiting through an ocean of knowledge takes that you're Artful about how to Wade through that ocean of information how to actually

engage in a sea of data requires people to have knowledge over their own knowledge how to actually Wade and classify data how

to not be consumed by your desire for entertainment on the Internet or whatever and not become addicts to whatever superficial meaningless

pleasurable thing will help you escape from whatever momentary unpleasant feelings you have so that's pretty much the whole game if you

can metacognitively overcome your mind's entertainment superficial pleasure seeking ability you can achieve anything and that's really

what people need these days since I mean that's why the modern world is being called an addiction creating machine we need meta thinkers okay well don't worry about this this is why you should come to

class so you know what you don't have to study this is just something I did during my masters this was just a literature review of the different categories by which meta instructions

can classify how to get better at whatever so reasoning you have science logic mathematical training and physical even Navy Seals now and people in martial arts are learning metacognitive training because they're better Fighters

better I mean I don't particularly like that idea but it just seems that wherever the human mind is is active you can unlock its greater abilities as a result cognitive behavior training self

regulation meditation pneumonic devices and it works like everything else it's not some some some other form of cognition this used to be

green object level knowledge meta level knowledge it's still a symbol these are still symbols my language didn't change it's some meta level different language it moves into your working memory and it

directs your production system your procedural knowledge so if you get better at directing your own awareness better attentional knowledge better procedural knowledge just fires

automatically but it's the same thing it connects like Lego pieces meta knowledge moves into your working memory it starts to build up procedural knowledge then runs automatically and that's how you get better at directing your own mind

but if you don't have meta knowledge we're locked out of those greater abilities we're locked out of scientific knowledge and all its benefits we're locked out of all the medical knowledge we're locked out of the ability to fly we're locked out of the ability to even

understand the the Earth is around we're locked out of the ability to build anything higher than read baskets and clay pottery you're locked into your whatever pattern of thinking and feeling you

don't want to stay in for the rest of your life without meta knowledge your mind is trapped in some very low ceiling of society civilization technological

progress and your own mental States we don't want to be trapped in that low ceiling forever we want to have a sky limit that's why talking about

metacognition itself is so essential because everybody wants to to be boundless Limitless to reach that higher you that

you have to hope is there and it is but it's not going to come about on its own you have to try you have to have the right type of knowledge and the right type of effort civilization itself doesn't build

itself scientific knowledge doesn't build itself flying machines the internet communication satellites don't build themselves it takes people putting meta knowledge into their

working memory and thinking about thinking itself to build scientific devices and studies that create new technologies better medicine whatever we

want so that's the that's the gold level so in terms of this dual system process you know we have system one just automatic dominoes just firing procedural knowledge is automatically

firing outside of our awareness and you can have system two you can have knowledge come up from working memory and this can be in the form of facts or instructions but comes into our working memory that low cealing of object level

knowledge but then engages with the rest of our system and then acts it out driving a car for example but then you can have the the higher level

of metacognitive process is system three in system three you have metan knowledge arise in working memory work go into your working memory as a result drives those processes that interact with your

mind itself till the right type of symbols meta level symbols symbols that refer to your own mental states have the right key to

unlock your mind's greater abilities that's where we want to engage so this type of knowledge meta instruction meta knowledge whatever is

essential it's everything it's the whole game otherwise we're going to live at the sleeping implicit level or moderate knowledge level but we'll never get to the higher abilities and the higher States we

want the gold States higher civilizational technological medical progress and our own higher abilities and happiness as people so

this is why everybody's talking about metac cognition at least way I look at it because we're wondering what was that thing we've been missing throughout all of history well when the mind can't

represent itself when it's in the darkness about itself it doesn't know what it's missing humans didn't know know throughout all of human history that we've been missing meta knowledge that represents our own minds no

idea no idea it's sort of like the serinsky triangle there's a mathematical trick where fractal shapes just sort of arise out of the Universe on their own but

through history humans have been building points of data bits of knowledge not really knowing what's been going

on and over time these points of data start to connect to build well it starts to build this

emergent shape this self-representing triangle so to speak where our mind starts to become aware of its own processes and we think

oh actually now we realize what we've been missing our whole lives knowledge that represent its own processes these self-representing conceptual ideas that we needed

trillions and trillions and hundreds of thousands of years of of uh data collection thinking about thinking till

we have the second order ability to think and so here's some animations again where you can understand say you have object level knowledge where you have say water you're thirsty knowledge

comes up object level knowledge and the instruction says pour water in a cup okay well it interacts with procedural knowledge and your motor activity starts to act out whatever the instructions are

so this is just object level instructions very simple knowledge comes into working memory object level knowledge and it directs your physical external abilities so now your eyes

close you're on the meta level you have metacognitive knowledge so or or feeling state of feeling distracted I have a feeling of distraction and knowledge comes into your memory saying working memory saying

I'm distracted and then you can have the instruction acted out to focus as a result this is just a simple ability to sort of recognize how working memory you

recognize when you're distracted you have knowledge come up and then you have the ability to focus as a result of metan knowledge but this is why I saved cognitive therapy till two weeks

from now because I'm giving you the meta level first and you see how all the actual therapy and all the cognitive psychology fits into this category where

humans are representing their own mental States and being able to then Direct our deep down processes by self-representing

our own processes and that's what these therapeutic instructions are that allow people to unlock feelings and anxiety and processes that would not otherwise

unlock so metacognitive instructions are part of cognitive behavior therapy oh man actually I just realized the time let's let's wait till later got carried away we got one minute

and I thought maybe we should just this is a good place place to stop okay meta level object level think about that take a photo if you want otherwise I'll see you on Thursday and I'll be here any questions