Todd Sampson opens his mind to brain training
Skywalking is just one of the challenges faced by TV personality and businessman Todd Sampson in his quest for a smarter brain.
Todd Sampson, CEO of advertising agency Leo Burnett
Australia, has been giving his mind a workout on ABC TV's 'Redesign Your
Brain 2'.
Chris Hopkins
Todd Sampson is standing on the precipice of a Sydney
office tower, 21 floors off the ground, preparing to step onto a thin
wire cable.
The advertising executive, television personality and
company director is a novice tightrope walker but is attempting
a skywalk across an eight-metre line to an office tower on the other
side.
Sampson hasn't lost his mind. In fact, he's never felt smarter.
The chief executive of ad agency Leo Burnett Australia, who was recently appointed to the boards of Qantas and Fairfax – publisher of The Australian Financial Review – has
been undergoing a radical brain makeover using leading scientists in
brain plasticity to prove that people can be made smarter.
office tower, 21 floors off the ground, preparing to step onto a thin
wire cable.
The advertising executive, television personality and
company director is a novice tightrope walker but is attempting
a skywalk across an eight-metre line to an office tower on the other
side.
Sampson hasn't lost his mind. In fact, he's never felt smarter.
The chief executive of ad agency Leo Burnett Australia, who was recently appointed to the boards of Qantas and Fairfax – publisher of The Australian Financial Review – has
been undergoing a radical brain makeover using leading scientists in
brain plasticity to prove that people can be made smarter.
Todd Sampson: training your brain is as important as physical exercise.
Chris Hopkins
For decades, the
prevailing dogma in neuroscience was that the adult human brain is
essentially immutable and hardwired so that by the time we reach
adulthood, we are stuck with what we have.
But Sampson's brain training has already helped him escape from underwater chains, climb a 150-metre rock face blindfolded and compete in a global safe-cracking competition.
"I
got up there and looked at the wire and I tell you what, I thought, I
don't think this is possible, it looked so exposed, it looked so … out
there," the Canadian-born Sampson tells AFR Weekend about the skywalk that didn't exactly go to plan.
"I
meditated, I calmed myself down, I used the training, I tried to
visualise myself crossing it. I put one foot forward and I remember
thinking, just go for it, don't think too much – I've been trained to do
this."
prevailing dogma in neuroscience was that the adult human brain is
essentially immutable and hardwired so that by the time we reach
adulthood, we are stuck with what we have.
But Sampson's brain training has already helped him escape from underwater chains, climb a 150-metre rock face blindfolded and compete in a global safe-cracking competition.
"I
got up there and looked at the wire and I tell you what, I thought, I
don't think this is possible, it looked so exposed, it looked so … out
there," the Canadian-born Sampson tells AFR Weekend about the skywalk that didn't exactly go to plan.
"I
meditated, I calmed myself down, I used the training, I tried to
visualise myself crossing it. I put one foot forward and I remember
thinking, just go for it, don't think too much – I've been trained to do
this."
Todd Sampson puts his prowess to the test while trying to crack open a safe on ABC TV's Redesign My Brain 2.
ABC
Power of visualisation
The dramatic skywalk is the climax of the latest season of Redesign My Brain,which begins screening on ABC this coming week and takes Sampson "on a
quest to train my mind to better cope with the challenges of modern
life".
In the show, the T-shirt-wearing father of two offers
himself as a scientific guinea pig to improve his hearing, sight,
memory, touch and decision-making skills.
The self-described "science nerd" rose to fame after co-creating the Earth Hour initiative and appearing on ABC's The Gruen Transfer. He is now a regular on Channel Ten's The Project.
Todd Sampson on the cover of Fitness First's magazine.
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But the polymath says
his true passion is the emerging science of brain plasticity – and it so
happens that another major proponent of this discipline, best-selling
author of The Brain that Changes Itself, psychiatrist Norman Doidge, arrives in Australia for the Sydney Writers' Festival on the weekend.
Neuroplasticians
won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2000 by showing that the brain
changes as it works and that as learning occurs, connections among nerve
cells increase. Doidge's latest book, The Brain's Way of Healing,
proposes that the brain's ability for self-repair may even help treat
conditions such as Parkinson's disease and autism or help to heal stroke
damage and head trauma.
To tackle the skywalk, Sampson first had
to conquer his fear of heights, which meant working with psychologist
Dr Todd Farchione at Boston University. Farchione engaged Sampson in
immersion therapy, including spending time at 3D virtual-reality
providers WorldViz to simulate the walk.
"The longer you stay in the situation, the easier it gets," Farchione says.
The theory goes that ifhis true passion is the emerging science of brain plasticity – and it so
happens that another major proponent of this discipline, best-selling
author of The Brain that Changes Itself, psychiatrist Norman Doidge, arrives in Australia for the Sydney Writers' Festival on the weekend.
Neuroplasticians
won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2000 by showing that the brain
changes as it works and that as learning occurs, connections among nerve
cells increase. Doidge's latest book, The Brain's Way of Healing,
proposes that the brain's ability for self-repair may even help treat
conditions such as Parkinson's disease and autism or help to heal stroke
damage and head trauma.
To tackle the skywalk, Sampson first had
to conquer his fear of heights, which meant working with psychologist
Dr Todd Farchione at Boston University. Farchione engaged Sampson in
immersion therapy, including spending time at 3D virtual-reality
providers WorldViz to simulate the walk.
"The longer you stay in the situation, the easier it gets," Farchione says.
we can train the thinking region of our brain to be less reactive to
the amygdala, the brain structure that triggers our fear alarm system,
we can conquer our fears.
"The key to visualisation is, your brain
doesn't really know the difference between what is real and fake," the
fast-talking Sampson says.
American skywalker Nik Wallenda, the first person to high-wire walk across the Grand Canyon, also emphasises the power of visualisation.
"I
spent time on the edge of the Grand Canyon before I walked, I would sit
there for hours at a time just visualising myself … I encourage you to
do the same."
Sampson was also tested by the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology's decision-making department, which revealed an
"extreme optimism bias", meaning the advertising executive too easily
dismisses bad news. He is not alone – experts claim up to 80 per cent of
us suffer from an optimism bias.
"When I made the decision to
climb Mount Everest, I remember the stat that one in six [people] die
and I remember thinking, those are brilliant odds," he recalls.
Sampson
says he tackled his decision-making skills by training with Fire Rescue
NSW, where he led a team of firefighters into a burning building to
rescue six dummies.
And he spent time walking barefoot each week
to improve his sensation of touch. "Humans have been on the earth for
about 200,000 years but shoes have only shown up in about the last
8000," neuroscientist Dr David Blake says.
Lastly, Sampson learnt
mindfulness meditation to tackle his anxiety,
with neuroscientists Dr Fadel Zeidan and Dr David Vago – including
remaining Zen while having the back of his calf scalded by a hot iron
and being struck on the back of his neck with a bamboo stick.
Pay attention
The neuroscientists saythat meditation strengthens the regions of the brain that regulate our
feelings – the insula, anterior cingulate cortex and limbic system – to
calm our emotional responses and reduce the sensation of stress.
"You
have to continually practise to develop and strengthen your mind, just
like you would go to the gym to strengthen your muscles," Zeidan says.
The skywalk taught Sampson that we can train our brains to manage fear, rather than suppress it.
"Whether
you're scared of heights, public speaking or failure, you can face that
and overcome it. It never goes away. The clarification is that brave
people are not without fear, they just deal with it differently – it's
the fear that makes them brave," Sampson tells AFR Weekend.
The
intense and determined family man, who left his Canadian home at 16 and
worked in advertising in South Africa before immigrating to Sydney with
"nothing", thinks about his brain training in the same way as physical
fitness.
"You just have to continuously practise. You don't need
super experts or technology to do it, just in your life practise things
like memorising the names of people in the room. Learn to juggle, or
play table tennis," Sampson says.
"I trained every day, I woke up
in the morning at 6am in my backyard, one foot off the ground, and
trained at night after work. I would go to the six-metre high wire ... I
had a lot on during that filming period in addition to my other
responsibilities in life," he smiles wryly.
Meditation and
visualisation were the two most useful techniques he learnt but he lists
focused attention, active listening and practising memory as the most
important skills he gained.
"The biggest gift you can give is
attention," Sampson says. "The major issue with learning and memory is
attention. The last stat I heard is, we only pay attention to a third of
the things around us. If we were to pay more attention, we would
improve across the board. You think the brain is recording everything,
but you only remember the things that you pay attention to."
Our
lack of attention is being exacerbated by smartphones – a trend he
sees with his two young daughters – or as Sampson calls the devices,
"our substitute brains".
"The numbers are saying that with
technology our IQs have gone up but our EQs [emotional intelligence]
have gone down, so we are doing better on these tests because we have
more information at our fingertips but our ability to relate is dropping
because we have more virtual friends than real friends," he says. "If
someone asked me which I would focus on as a predictor for success,
hands down it's EQ."
Stand and deliver
Sampson's practical tip to exercise your brain is to learn to juggle."Multi-object
tracking is very good for your brain – for focus, for attention, for
calming yourself down. It's good to do before presentations. If you want
to focus your mind and eliminate distractions, when you've got three
balls flying in front of you, you're not thinking about other things. I
do it before [ABC television show] Gruen Transfer," he says.
The
45-year-old also recommends standing in the office and says he stands
during meetings, a practice that must raise a few eyebrows around the
Fairfax and Qantas boardrooms.
"Standing is good because it
creates a sense of energy and urgency because people get tired standing
and also a lot of people think better on their feet," he says. "I stand
in my meetings, even if other people are sitting."
The perennially busy advertising executive likes to limit his meetings to 20 minutes.
"They
say brainstorming time is roughly 20 minutes, so it makes sense to use a
technique called 'chunking': chunking or hitting problems in 20-minute
intervals," Sampson says.
One of his favourite problem-solving techniques is to "rent-a-head" – borrow other people's perspectives.
"Ask
yourself, how would someone like Richard Branson solve this problem?
Once you've done that, you look at the problem through the eyes of
someone at Apple – how would they solve it?" Sampson says.
"One of
the defining factors of creative people is the ability to switch
perspectives. As we age, we become functionally fixed, we narrow our
perspectives and actions. Really good creative people have the ability
to switch. If you follow the same people on Twitter and subscribe to the
same magazines, then your perspective stays the same because you're
pretty much getting self-selected information."
The brain training
is paying dividends for Sampson – both Fairfax and Qantas sought his
unique perspective for their boards, despite his unusual credentials.
"Both
Roger Corbett and Leigh Clifford see their boards not just as
governance boards but as strategy, advisory boards," he says. "They want
diverse, eclectic minds across all disciplines. Obviously they saw in
me someone who understands marketing and communication, digital
transformation, but I think the skill they wanted most was strategy."
Sampson's
"extreme optimism bias" and confidence tend to polarise opinions – such
as his recent decision to pose with his shirt off for the house
magazine of gym chain Fitness First, a publicity stunt that could be
seen as surprising by the conservative company director community.
He
says that because people know him "from television and not from
business, you expose yourself to criticism. There's a lot of people who
have no idea that I actually run a company with 200 people across four
businesses".
Redesign My Brain 2 with Todd Sampson will premiere on Thursday, May 28, at 8.30pm on ABC TV.
