Because it is incredibly difficult to contain what you want to say

in 18 minutes, but it's for me anyway.

So we kind of showed you earlier on what goes wrong under pressure.

The human brain is constantly getting a signal from all the bodily systems,

but particularly the heart, the vagus nerve,

which, as we showed you is sort of erratic and under pressure,

super chaos causes that DIY lobotomy.

You're all built that way, and you've all had the experience

when somebody kind of puts a challenge to you

and it doesn't really matter as you saw how small that challenge is.

It can be any type of challenge.

A challenge to your point of view, a challenge to your ego,

a challenge to your relationships,

any type of challenge causes the physiology to go chaotic,

causes the frontal lobe to be inhibited, and you become suboptimal straight away.

What's kind of interesting about that is when the brain is inhibited;

it also inhibits your perceptual awareness,

so you don't realize it's happened.

So you can come out of a meeting and think, "Oh, that went well."

And everyone,s going, "What do you mean it went well? You were rubbish."

Because your awareness is inhibited, you don't realize how rubbish you were.

So it's a bit of a catch-22.

This is the phenomena that underpins lots of different things

that you've seen and experienced yourself or seen on telly:

Stage-fright, people get stage fright and can't remember their words;

Kids go blank in an exam.

It's the same phenomena.

Or my personal favorite - Family Fortunes, if you've ever watched that show -

the two people sit at the front.

We've asked 100 people on the street

to name something you put in a jacket potato.

(Bzz) "Jam!"

(Laughter)

It's hysterical.

When your frontal lobe's inhibited you say anything, and it's really funny.

Anne Robinson, The Weakest Link,

she throws you a simple question, then stares at you.

You blurt out any all sort of rubbish.

So when you're up with your boss, he might be the nicest boss in the world.

If you're feeling a little under pressure,

you suddenly discover you're talking rubbish.

Sometimes you even have that awareness.

You almost see yourself coming out with the most ridiculous nonsense.

You think, "Why is this happening?" It's because you're built that way.

The human system is built that way is that under pressure,

physiological chaos, the brain shuts down.

You're designed that way.

You think, "Why are we designed that way?"

And the only reason you have anything in your physiology is survival.

There are survival advantages to having brain shut down,

and it goes back 200,000 years.

So when you were wandering across the prairie,

and a big grizzly bear comes out from behind the rocks and says,

"Oh, human being! There's my lunch."

You don't need clever thinking.

In fact, if you stood going to be clever,

"Is that the brown bear, or the lesser-spotted gray bear?"

(Laughter)

He will eat you, right?

So you need brain shut down.

Your thinking has to become very unsophisticated,

in fact, it has to become binary.

So you either have fight-flight or play dead. Two choices.

You either just drop to the ground in a faint,

or you're prepared to slug it out or run.

It's binary.

Anything more sophisticated you don't need, it will kill you.

So here we are, 200,000 years later,

we still have the same biological mechanism.

We've basically got a 200,000-year-old software,

and we've never had the upgrade, right?

We don't meet a bear today; we meet each other.

But in meeting each other, the same phenomenon goes on.

We showed you how that chaos

can cause somebody who's even good at math, like Neil is,

"Uh ... 200 ... Uh ... Shut up, you're putting me off! 200 ... Uh ..."

It becomes impossible, a simple task like that.

I can tell you, I did this in the office of the chief exec,

one of the leading retailers in the UK,

and his first answer was 298.

(Laughter)

And, he went, "Oh. No, that's wrong!"

He was so embarrassed that he got the first one wrong,

he couldn't think of the second one.

It literally sounds like, "Ah ..." a rabbit in the headlights.

He just couldn't come up with anything.

So as I said, you're all at the mercy of that.

The point being, until you've got control of this physiology,

anybody can make you look like an idiot.

And what's worse?

You're doing it to yourself an awful lot of the time.

Your own anxiety about your own performance

is actually causing the chaos, so you're lobotomizing yourself.

A lot of people around you can trigger you into a lobotomy,

but most of the time, you're just lobotomizing yourself.

So until you've got control of that absolutely, fundamental basic -

you might be brilliant one day, you might be poor,

and who knows what's going to show up that day.

So right about fundamental, the cleverness of your thinking,

or your ability to read the line on a golf putt,

or your ability to come up with a great idea,

or how to innovate that sales process, or any of that stuff.

The quality of your thought, in fact, the very things that you think,

and how well you think them is hugely influenced by your biology.

I'll give a couple of live examples, then get Neil back up,

and we'll show you how to control your physiology.

So if you haven't yet clocked

that your biology is controlling your brain function.

If we held you and locked the doors and filled you up with coffee,

what happens is your bladder gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

It starts to send alarm messages to your brain,

and you're getting one of these pee.

"I've got to pee ... I've got to pee."

If you've ever had that experience

when you can't get out, but your bladder is sending alarm signals,

and all of that - you haven't got Pampers on -

(Laughter)

what you'll discover is you go deaf.

You ever notice that? You can't hear people.

You're so internally focused, "My bladder is going to burst..."

You go deaf.

You can see people's mouths moving, but you can't hear what they're saying.

Then beads of sweat start to break out,

you're trying to pee urine out through your forehead.

(Laughter)

Literally, your consciousness is completely eradicated.

So that's the biology disrupting your consciousness.

Well, I was in a meeting recently with an eight-month-pregnant woman.

We were chatting away,

and you saw the baby visibly ripple across, went like that,

and you could see the ripple go across her abdomen,

and she was chatting, then ..."Ooh ..."

For about 20 seconds she was gone, completely kind of left the room, "Oh ..."

and then she went, "Oh, hello!"

(Laughter)

Back in the room again.

It was like her consciousness disappeared for 20 seconds.

So these are live examples.

You think you just think, right?

But what do you think, and why do you think it?

I was talking to a senior exec, he was from a government think tank.

I said, "Oh, government think tank, that's interesting!

You probably sit around with loads of clever people

debating the issues of the day

and trying to come up with some clever answers."

He said, "Yes, pretty much what we do."

I said, "Have you ever thought

about why those answers are not these other answers?

Have you ever thought about your own thinking?"

He said, "I never thought about that."

"Spotted it! You're a think-tank; you've never thought about thinking.

What's that about?"

So we just think,

but we don't realize that what we think and how well we think it,

is actually influenced by something else.

Thought is really an emergent property within your system.

The very things that you think,

you will think different things if you're happy than if you're depressed.

And how well you think them will depend a lot on the biology.

So if you want to step-change thinking,

if you want to really double or treble the quality of your thinking,

you can't do it by thinking about it.

Wouldn't that be nice if I said,

"Look, I've spotted the problem for you in your life,

you're not thinking smart enough.

So I want you to go away over the weekend,

come back 25 percent smarter on Monday morning, alright?"

That will be nice, wouldn't it?

"Oh, I haven't thought to do that,

I'll go away, and I'll think about my thinking over the weekend,

25 percent better on Monday, here I am!"

It doesn't work that way.

That's what Einstein said, "We can not solve our problems

with the same level of thinking that created them."

You don't get a new level of thinking just by thinking about it.

You've got to change the context in which thoughts emerge.

It's the context, in human terms, is the biology.

What is the biological context from which thought emerges?

What is the emotional state from which thought emerges?

You change that context, the biological and emotional context,

and you can change the quality of the thought,

and the actual thought itself.

That is the source.

I suggest we get Chris back up

and I'll show you how Chris can learn with no training before,

how to control his physiology.

You do not need to be - sorry, Neil - a yogic master.

(Laughter)

Neil: What happens to short term memory?

(Laughter)

Here we go.

Which ear are we on? Neil: This one.

If you just hold that, change chair around a bit if you like.

Turn your chair around, so you can see the screen more easily.

So exactly as before, is he still alive? Yeah.

So we'll start recording.

So again, just picking up each heartbeat,

the software is measuring the distance between each heart beat

and calculating his heart rate.

Because he walked up the stage out of the audience,

he's going about 90 miles an hour.

Just the excitement about being the front here.

So if you want to control your physiology,

this isn't years and years and months and months of practice.

You don't have to be a yogic master to control your physiology.

You just have to know exactly what to do, right?

So we're now going to show Chris, sorry, Neil exactly what to do.

(Laughter)

Mental block.

Over here is a breath pacer,

so when that goes up, I want you to breathe in ... (Inhales)

when that goes down, I want you to breathe out. (Exhales)

At the bottom, there's a hold. So wait for it. Don't go too soon, ready?

(Inhales)

And a long, slow ... (Exhales) Okay?

Wait for it.

(Inhales) A long, slow ... (Exhales)

You can follow this in the room, if you want,

just breathe in this rhythmic fashion.

It's a nice rhythmic breathing.

So a long breath in, and a long, slow breath out.

I'll leave Neil to do that, and I'll carry on talking to you guys.

So of all the things that you can do to get your physiology under control,

there are many things.

But the start point is to do something that you can get conscious control over,

and you can get conscious control over your breathing.

Now, there are 12 different aspects of your breath that you can regulate.

12 different aspects.

So when you go to classes,