The Brain is deeper than the sea

For hold them Blue to Blue

The one the other will absorb

As sponges Buckets do

— Emily Dickinson

Next week, I’ll be presenting at Stocktoberfest in Coronado, CA and I wanted to give a preview of the presentation here for my subscribers and share a few of the slides.

The presentation is called The Monkey at the Top of Your Tech Stack and the gist goes like this.

We humans are the greatest technology ever invented. Whether you believe it was the hand of God or evolution or whatever that crafted us, it doesn’t matter. 

We are ever so elegantly designed.

We can herd animals, organize societies, build bridges and skyscrapers, create and apply semiconductors, launch AI, and even absorb the sea as Dickinson wrote.

And if we can imagine ourselves as technology, as I am doing here, then, undoubtedly, we sit at the top of our own technology stack, whether we are operating as an individual or as the leader of a business or other organization.

We are the ones who are strategizing, deploying, commandeering, integrating, and decision making all of the other technologies.

In fact, there’s even some biological poetry to this whole thing for if we look at the executive functioning center of the brain it sits at the top front of the brain - the frontal cortex.

Here is another slide…

Executive functioning is not just central to decision making. It is also critical to many other high level functions including problem solving, planning and organization, attention, and cognitive flexibility (changing our minds).

And, as it turns out, there is a strong relationship between our health and the quality of our executive functioning. Here are two levels of proof for this assertion.

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The first level of proof comes from my own experience.

I am a strong proponent of N = 1 and I like to frame it like this:

We are the chief scientist and the sole subject of the most important continuous scientific experiment we will ever be involved with.

If we try something new, like taking a walk most mornings or decreasing the amount of processed foods that we consume, and we observe that we feel better when we are doing these kinds of things, then we have some evidence right there and we know to continue these behaviors.

So the first level of proof is our own experimentation on ourselves.

On this level, I have found without a doubt that my decision making, planning, and attention span have improved significantly as I have improved my health over the last 5 plus years.

The Second Level of Proof backs this up…

The research literature is filled with data suggesting that executive functioning improves as metabolic health improves.

Here is another slide from my presentation deck.

This summarizes just one study with over 37,000 subjects.

By metabolic health I mean a number of health markers including body weight, muscle mass, waist size, triglycerides (fat in the blood), blood pressure, HDL cholesterol etc.

In the study cited on the above slide, notice that metabolic syndrome (or poor metabolic health) is associated with poorer cognitive functioning including executive functioning.

I could go on citing personal experience and academic research regarding multiple other areas of functioning that are critical to performance including stress tolerance, impulse control, resilience, ability to focus, but let’s just leave it at executive functioning for now as it remains the area of functioning running things - the area of functioning operating at the top of our tech stack.

Have a great day everyone and if you are at Stocktoberfest, we are doing a 3 mile beach run Monday morning at 7:30! Definitely join us!!