Podcast #65: Elizabeth Ricker on Personalizing Your Creative Process
Sep 21, 2021
Elizabeth Ricker, a neuroscience and education researcher with degrees from MIT and Harvard, dives into the transformative power of personalized neurohacking. She explores the concept of radical individualization, emphasizing that productivity strategies must cater to one's unique needs. Elizabeth shares her journey from academic aspirations to self-experimentation, challenging conventional advice. She highlights the importance of tracking personal data and the surprising efficacy of the placebo effect in boosting learning and creativity.
01:21:52
Horse Obsession Shaped Her Learning
- Elizabeth Ricker was obsessed with horses as a child and taught herself by reading and visualizing lessons nightly.
- That early self-driven learning taught her how to learn and motivated later scientific interests.
Institutions Favor A Mythical Average
- Institutions often optimize for a mythical average person and leave many people behind.
- Radical individualization is necessary to create opportunities that let diverse minds thrive.
A Horse As Academic Motivation
- A promise of a horse motivated Elizabeth to dramatically improve her school performance at age 11.
- Her father's suggestion of MIT and a horse became the turning point for focused study.
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Intro
00:00 • 4min
Growing Up in Cambridge and Boarding School
04:29 • 5min
Early Passion for Horses and Self-Learning
09:09 • 6min
Discovering Neuroscience and Lab Experience
15:27 • 4min
Influential Books and Humanistic Psychology
19:05 • 6min
Career Choices: Academia vs. Startups
24:40 • 4min
A Personal Mission to Help Learners
28:37 • 4min
Shifting the Book's Focus to Self-Experimentation
32:52 • 6min
Why Self-Experimentation Solves Personalization
38:54 • 2min
Practical Self-Tracking: Tools and Metrics
41:01 • 5min
Which Neurohacks She Keeps
45:35 • 4min
Radical Individualization in Productivity
49:44 • 5min
Learning Stages and Changing Needs
55:10 • 3min
Surprising Efficacy of the Placebo Effect
58:20 • 4min
Measuring Benefits: Tests and Biological Markers
01:02:06 • 2min
Organizing Work: Pomodoro, Timers, and Flow Tracking
01:04:35 • 3min
Why Neurohacking Supports Purposeful Living
01:07:25 • 3min
Guest's Goals: Understanding People Different From You
01:10:12 • 4min
Proposed Experiment: Treat Travel as an Intervention
01:13:49 • 5min
Potential Downsides and Future Conversations
01:18:20 • 3min
Outro
01:21:06 • 34sec
#492
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Waitzkin discusses how achievement is a function of a lifestyle that fuels a creative, resilient growth process.
He shares his methods for systematically triggering intuitive breakthroughs, honing techniques, and mastering performance psychology.
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#36041
Smarter Tomorrow
How 15 Minutes of Neurohacking a Day Can Help You Work Better, Think Faster, and Get More Done
Elizabeth Ricker
In 'Smarter Tomorrow', Elizabeth R. Ricker guides readers through the cutting-edge world of neuroscience and biohacking.
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Erich Fromm
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I really enjoyed this conversation with Elizabeth Ricker; it was one of those conversations where I felt as though I'd found a kindred spirit, someone who goes about life in approximately the same way as myself. Elizabeth did her undergraduate in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and her master's in Mind, Brain, and Education at Harvard. She is a creature of enthusiasm: she is driven by what strikes her as interesting, and she has no time for anything that doesn't. This made for a fun conversation. We covered a lot of ground: moving through her own story to uncover how she developed the ideas presented in her new book, Smarter Tomorrow. At first, I was a bit skeptical of her concept of "Neurohacking" — whether, as her book's subtitle claims, 15 minutes of neurohacking a day can help you work better, think faster, and get more done. But Elizabeth convinced me. Her work runs really deep. And at it's core it's driven by a philosophy of radical individualization: that what is most important in finding the "right" process is finding the process that works for you. This isn't something we fully appreciate in our productivity cultures, which often prescribes to everyone the approaches that have worked only for a few successful individuals. As Elizabeth presents it, neurohacking is all about finding the productivity niche that is idiosyncratically yours.
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Subscribe at codykommers.substack.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com