Katy-Rose is a well-being teacher and reinvention mentor whose curiosity led her to earn degrees in psychology and neuroscience on her quest to understand everything she can about what makes people tick. She uses neuroscience, coaching and cognitive strategies to help her clients reinvent themselves without burning everything to the ground.
We talk about everything from how awareness and willpower work to the way your brain influences how you perceive how much you’ve eaten to how quantum mechanics may explain energy healing, and a whole lot more.
That sense of understanding and knowing yourself means that you’re able to make better choices, make better decisions.
Katy-Rose
Show links
The Field by Lynne Mctaggart
The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton
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Transcript: Katy-Rose
Please note: This is an unedited transcript, provided as a courtesy, and reflects the actual conversation as closely as possible. Please forgive any typographical or grammatical errors.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:07]:
Hello and welcome to Follow Your Curiosity, where we explore the ups and downs of the creative process and how to keep it moving. I’m your host, Nancy Norbeck. I am a writer, singer, improv comedy newbie, science fiction geek and creativity coach who loves helping right brained folks get unstuck. I am sorry. So excited to be coming to you with interviews and coaching calls to show you the depth and breadth both of creative pursuits and creative people to give you some insight into their experiences and to inspire you. Today I’m talking to Katie Rose,. a well-being teacher and reinvention mentor whose curiosity led her to earn degrees in psychology and neuroscience on her quest to understand everything she can about what makes people tick.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:53]:
She now uses what she’s learned to help her clients reinvent themselves without having to go through a dramatic or even traumatic transition process. Our wide ranging conversation covers everything from how awareness and willpower work to how quantum mechanics may explain energy healing and a whole lot in between. Katy-Rose, thanks so much for joining me today.
Katy-Rose [00:01:16]:
Thanks for having me.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:18]:
So I’m curious because that’s the word of the day here to hear your story because I know you’ve done a lot of different things. So fill me in.
Katy-Rose [00:01:30]:
Where should I start?
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:32]:
Well, how did you get started with what you do now? Let’s start there.
Katy-Rose [00:01:36]:
Okay. So I’m Katy-Rose. I’m a reinvention and well-being teacher is kind of the phrase I tend to use now. And I help sort of fierce men and women to reinvent who they are without burning everything to the ground. That’s a very basically you don’t need to take an eat, pray, love approach to reinvent yourself. And I say that as someone who loved that book but equally found it wasn’t for me in terms of that. So I sort of use neuroscience coaching and cognitive strategies to kind of help people to harness that inner fire to feel inspired, curious and capable of changing their world. So that’s just my little summary of what I do because I’m aware may not know and it’s been quite a long journey in that I actually started trying to help people in 2011.
Katy-Rose [00:02:28]:
I had my first website and my first blog and things like that. And then sort of went into day jobs and things like that and then sort of moved back into running my own business again in 2017. So it’s kind of moved throughout time, but the concept is the same. I believe that all of humans are more capable than we realize. I believe we should be taught certain things in school life skills like Managing our emotions, your curiosity, being able to read that in a compass. So, yeah, basically it started with self help and it’s, well taken me through three degrees and I’m just one of those people who has to know how the world works.
Nancy Norbeck [00:03:11]:
So. So it started with self help. That’s interesting.
Katy-Rose [00:03:16]:
Yeah. So I was 12 when I bought Neuro Linguistic Programming for Dummies with my birthday money. And that was my sort of foray into. I guess I always felt kind of broken. I always felt like there was something missing, something wrong. My family aren’t particularly nerdy and I am. Okay, it’s probably where that really started. But I think it’s quite common these days, particularly my generation, in terms of millennials, to have that sense of not feeling enough and all the things we were taught as children.
Katy-Rose [00:03:49]:
Oh, we’ll have a job, steady job for 40 years and buy a house and get married and do that. Yeah, none of that stability exists anymore. So I think that I just started that nice identity crisis a bit early yet.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:02]:
12 is an interesting age even to have heard of Neuro Linguistic Programming, much less to be buying the book.
Katy-Rose [00:04:08]:
I don’t know if I’d heard of it before the book was before I saw it in the bookshop. But yeah, I practically lived in the bookshops. And then when I was 18, I bought Paul McKenna’s Change youe Life in 7 Days. In fact, I asked for it. My best friend took me into a bookshop and said, I’ll buy you any book for your birthday. What do you want? And that’s the one I picked. And I kind of noticed as I look back, there seems to be this theme going through my life. They don’t feel enough that I want to be a better person, that I want to reach this potential, that thing.
Katy-Rose [00:04:38]:
I’m very much a self improver. So I guess that’s where mine started. And then it just led me to trying to understand the world. So I did a bachelor’s in psychology. I did a master’s in cognitive neuroscience. We were allowed to pick any subject as our kind of filler subject. So I picked quantum mechanics because of course you do. Because I want to understand how the world works.
Katy-Rose [00:05:03]:
I want to understand how atoms and molecules make up energy. That then is the same energy that our brain is made of. So, yeah, I’m just a big nerd, really.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:13]:
I totally understand. So my first question is, did the second book live up to its title? Did it change your life in seven Days?
Katy-Rose [00:05:23]:
No. Although it came with a, like hypnotherapy CD that I did not get very far into.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:29]:
Okay.
Katy-Rose [00:05:29]:
So I feel it’s a disservice to say now in that I didn’t do the work for a lot of it at that point.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:36]:
But.
Katy-Rose [00:05:36]:
Yeah, no, I think it, it just made. What it did do is made me realize that a lot of the self help stuff doesn’t have the quick fix answers that it promises.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:45]:
Yeah.
Katy-Rose [00:05:46]:
And where I come from now I very much meld the kind of spiritual, scientific and self help together. So because I’ve had that experience of self help, I then got the neuroscience psychology. I’m actually trained in cognitive therapy as well, which was all just so I could understand myself and my brain and fix myself using my nice. Using the air quotes.
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:06]:
Right.
Katy-Rose [00:06:08]:
That’s where that kind of drive came from. But actually realizing that through all the books I’ve read, none of them have the answer because they all just take one tiny strand.
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:16]:
Yeah.
Katy-Rose [00:06:18]:
I think we need a much more holistic view, which I guess is why I now do what I do now. That’s why I started rooted reinvention. To be like, you don’t have to completely throw everything away to a better self. And actually you probably have all the tools, you just aren’t using them all.
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:33]:
Together and probably you don’t even know what they are even though you have them.
Katy-Rose [00:06:38]:
Yeah. That’s because we’re not, we’re not taught reflection, we’re not taught discernment, we’re not taught any of these kind of skills. I feel we could be taught in schools to question things and go, do I actually want this? Do I like this? How do I feel when I do this? Like they’re quite basic questions but we don’t ask them.
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:56]:
They are. And yet can you imagine if you asked questions like that in the average school? You know, I mean, I can just having. Having been a teacher, and I say this with great respect for my fellow teachers, but I mean, school is still an institution and the institution wants to be in charge. And as soon as you start asking questions like that, those people get very scared because chaos could ensue.
Katy-Rose [00:07:21]:
Yeah, we. Yeah. If we teach them those kind of skills, they might actually question everything we do. Yes. Everything our society is built on. Yeah. So I completely appreciate that from their point of view. And they’ve got a business to run.
Katy-Rose [00:07:36]:
Obviously I’m in the uk, so it’s a slightly different thing, but we just elected a bunch of new people or same people again. So again we’re going to end up with another five Years of them cutting the education budgets and things like that. So I can’t imagine that that’s going to change anytime soon.
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:52]:
Yeah, it’s not probably going to help, but. Yeah, I’m reminded of a. It was probably just an intro to a Robert Fulghum book. You know, the guy who wrote All I really need to Know, I learned in kindergarten where he talked about how he liked to wear buttons that said opposing things. And one of the pairings was, trust me, I’m a teacher and question authority before authority questions you. So, yeah, I think with that one. I know. I think he.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:20]:
He would have been an interesting person to talk to because I think actually it, you know, fits into what you’re saying. I think he would have appreciated all of that. So as you were, you know, going through all of the degree programs and everything, what did, what did you put together that was unexpected? Because I just know there has to be something, probably more than one something.
Katy-Rose [00:08:43]:
For me, it was very much that we. This idea of holistic, this idea of treating things as the whole and how we don’t do it. So the psychology degree was very much based around theories that came about in the 1950s. So they were still teaching kind of attached Bolby’s attachments, like attachment as they need their mother. It can’t be any other caregiver for there to be a strong attachment. And we now know that’s not the case. We’ve. But we’re still being taught it in 2000 and tens.
Katy-Rose [00:09:13]:
We were still being taught it in university, which I always thought was interesting. And then moving on to the neuroscience is a very medical model of where you treat this kind of neurological brain condition with medication that does this or this cognitive therapy that’s evidence based or the two together and actually looking at what we really know, if we actually look into the studies. So I am someone who reads quite a few kind of scientific journals and that is my spare time, because why not?
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:44]:
Sure.
Katy-Rose [00:09:46]:
And we know things like the amount of movement and exercise we get per day can minimize our chances of depression and anxiety. We know that our diet has a massive impact. We know that actually adverse childhood experiences can predict things like heart disease 50 years down the line, which is amazing. Like, there’s so many. I mean, that particular study is quite reductionist and I have a lot of issues with it. But the general gist of it is, I guess that we know so much and we’re not. It’s not getting out into the public domain. It’s not getting out.
Katy-Rose [00:10:16]:
I keep hearing the word resilience these days. I first started studying resilience in 28,008 and the idea that suddenly a buzzword. I keep hearing epigenetics, which is the idea that our genetics, our genes get switched on and off based on our environment. So if you’re particularly tall and you get picked with a basketball team, then that’s very different from, you know, you could have this, you could have identical twins in terms of the genes, but actually the environment plays a part in that. And again, I’m hearing all this sort of vaguely being mentioned in like staff trainings at my day job and stuff now. And they don’t really understand people giving the talk, giving the training, don’t really understand that bit, but they’ve been told to put it in and they’re saying it’s this brand new thing. And I’m like, epigenetics was discovered in the 90s. Like we’re coming up to 2020 now, it’s like 30 years old.
Katy-Rose [00:11:06]:
So I think for me the studying was very much no one knows this and we don’t know how to put it together and we don’t know how to use it. Those are I guess, my three kind of steps I took as I was learning.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:20]:
So how did it, did it come together for you in terms of figuring out how to understand yourself since that was your goal?
Katy-Rose [00:11:28]:
I think I could probably write a couple of books on that. So I guess for me, for me it was that understanding of where the thoughts about needing to be fixed came from. Whether this drive that I have, this curiosity, I guess is something wrong with me? Because some of the messages I was given were children seem not heard and don’t ask questions and all that kind of stuff was still around when I was young. And I think undoing a lot of things or even just being aware. So the first step, I always say, is awareness. So if you know that, oh, the reason I do this or the reason I freeze up at this or the reason I’m triggered by this is because of, this is how I was brought up. Because I associate it as a threat, because the fight or flight response kicks in. I think knowing all the different kind of ways that humanity has existed, has evolved, and the way that our brains and bodies work.
Katy-Rose [00:12:25]:
And then look at what I’ve tried in terms of the self help books and the techniques and seeing what did and didn’t work for me, I’m able to know why things didn’t work. So I’m trying to think of like one simple example. But it all does kind of amalgamate after a while, but it is that sense of understanding and knowing yourself means that you’re able to make better choices, make better decisions. And I say better. I’m not saying perfect. Like, I had biscuits after dinner tonight because I wanted chocolate. But I also know that eating healthily and will have an impact on things. I know that if I look at how many calories are in that biscuit, I will feel more full than if I didn’t.
Katy-Rose [00:13:09]:
Because studies have shown us that if we think something is low fat, we feel less full afterwards, even if the thing is the same. So you literally need to. They did a study with milk. I think it was milkshakes or something. And they called one, like low fat light milkshake and the other one delicious deluxe creamy thing. They were exactly the same thing. And they did it with hundreds of people. And then they asked people to rate how full they felt and how much more they wanted some more of it.
Katy-Rose [00:13:37]:
And things like soup bowls, if they thought it was the light soup, and then they silent, like, secretly refilled the bowls, they ate 50% more.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:44]:
Wow.
Katy-Rose [00:13:45]:
And it’s literally, if you know that if you tell your brain, this is 500 calories, this is a quarter of my daily consumption, you are more likely to feel fuller afterwards than if you just eat that chocolate bar, thinking, oh, it’s a chocolate bar.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:01]:
That’s amazing.
Katy-Rose [00:14:03]:
So I wish I could say that for every little. Well, I think over time, eventually we’ll have something like that for every little concepts and habit building there is. But. Yeah, so I think it’s, it’s. There’s so much we don’t know that is simple, that is easy to understand, that is something we can share. And yeah, I mean, I, I don’t see why they couldn’t share that one in schools. That one doesn’t get you to question the authority.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:28]:
Really? Really? That’s. That’s just amazing to me. And yet it makes sense to me, you know, I mean, having. Having gone through all of, you know, the, the low fat craze in the 90s and, and you know, where it’s like, sugar it up but don’t have any fat, you know, which is. Seems completely insane to me now. It’s like, yeah, you know, because everybody just sits down with, you know, a giant bag of whatever and says, but there’s no fat in it, so it’s okay, I can eat the whole thing and it’s not a problem. And there’s nothing in this. And ooh.
Katy-Rose [00:15:00]:
And particularly Things like, obviously advertising is based on psychology. So even I have even done a little bit of research around advertising because that allows me to help understand how they’re tricking us, how they’re getting through to us. You know, as I say, I still eat my chocolate biscuits, even though shouldn’t. Whatever. But yeah, so if it’s, if it’s no added sugar, then it just means they’ve, they’ve put more things in. They’ve got enough ingredients in there that they. There’s no added sugar. But honey is included because it’s not added.
Katy-Rose [00:15:28]:
The sugar is part of the honey. We haven’t added the sugar.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:31]:
Oh, that is so sneaky.
Katy-Rose [00:15:34]:
And low fat usually means they’ve added more sugar. So if it just says low fat, you can bet that the full fat version will have less sugar in it because that’s how they manage to get the consistency to work, is that they just down the fat and up the sugar. Oh.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:53]:
I feel like we can just have an entire conversation about this if we’re not careful.
Katy-Rose [00:15:57]:
Yeah. Because I don’t normally talk about diets and it’s not something I feel like I’ve studied particularly, but I have tried to be healthy. I’ve also had mental health difficulties in the past and had therapy and things like that, which is another side of it. And that’s partly why I’ve. In fact, I only very recently saw a TED talk that talked about how our diet impacts mental health to the point where they’ve done preliminary studies of giving people supplements that are way higher than you’d ever get over the counter and reducing symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. And like quite. Things that are quite. Seen as quite high up, need medicating, need a lot of therapy and reducing those in children just in eight weeks from supplements, from food supplements.
Katy-Rose [00:16:43]:
And again, they, they haven’t said which supplements because they’re still really preliminarily out. But it made me really consider whether or not I wanted to have that chocolate biscuit or take a multivitamin or have some spirit spinach with my dinner. Like it just made me have that consideration. But yeah, I guess my curiosity is always based on trying to be the best self I can and help others do the same. I don’t know why that drive is there, but it’s always been there. But that’s what drives it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:17:14]:
And it’s interesting because you said before that, you know, you got a lot of childhood messages around your curiosity, so could you talk a little bit more about that?
Katy-Rose [00:17:25]:
Yeah. So again, it’s One of those things I suppose I don’t really think about logically, but obviously you can’t when it’s your own childhood necessarily easily. But I was definitely. I was encouraged to read, but I was discouraged, I guess I was. My parents very much wanted me to do things that kept me quiet. So my mum would always say, I’ll go look it up in dictionary. But she’d never go and look it up in the dictionary with me. And, you know, no worries, Mum.
Katy-Rose [00:17:57]:
But there is that sense of. So when I met my partner, he said, oh, my mum would always just go and let’s look that up, shall we? So he was taught to be curious through action. I was still allowed to be curious, but it was very much. It had to be led by me. And again, just things about the way where we lived and sort of safety and things like that. Oh, don’t touch that. Or kind of a little bit, kind of coddled and kept in cotton wool and was very much based on things being academic. And if it wasn’t academically relevant, don’t bother.
Katy-Rose [00:18:31]:
So I still very much remember telling my granddad when I was 12, 13, 14, I’m gonna PhD one day, and him saying, oh, okay, what do you want to do that? Then I said, I don’t know, but I’ll have one. I might be 85 when I finish it, but I’m gonna do one. And he said, what’s the point in that? Why would you do a PhD at 85? You’re not going to get anything out of it then. And me not understanding, because to me, I want to know that I know stuff and I want to feel that I understand how the world works and I love studying.
Nancy Norbeck [00:19:03]:
And, you know, it’s so indicative to me of the fact that we see education as a transaction. You know, you put in the effort and that’s what you’re paying, not on top of whatever financial cost there is. And then you need to get some kind of return on that investment. When there’s something to be said for the joy of learning, for the sake of learning, and if it happens to pay off somehow, great. And if not, the payoff may just be. I learned a lot. I was really fascinated by that. Now I know this thing and it may lead me to something else and it might not.
Nancy Norbeck [00:19:40]:
But, you know, I did the work, I got the degree, I wanted to do it, and I was curious about that. Yeah, we, we, we downgrade curiosity a whole lot, don’t we?
Katy-Rose [00:19:50]:
We don’t. We don’t pay for joy either. So that’s. I hadn’t quite thought of it like this, but when I think about my business, I’ve bought business training and it was only when I became a business owner that I invested in life coaching for myself. Because even coaches need coaches, right? Because I felt like I would get a return on investment because I’m being like, you know, this is so that I can build my business up, then I’ll get in return on that. And it’s only just now that I’ve thought, oh, yeah, before I had a business, I didn’t do like life coaching, I’d do like a 20 quid online course for something, you know, But I wouldn’t proper, what I’d call proper money in because there would be no return, like I’d have no monetary return on it. So I guess, yeah, that’s very, very true in terms of. That’s how we see it.
Katy-Rose [00:20:31]:
And again, I still remember my dad saying, oh, how much were you when I got my first job? How much will it be earning? Oh, that’s okay because you’ve got about with your degree. That makes sense sort of thing.
Nancy Norbeck [00:20:40]:
I, I did something like that too.
Katy-Rose [00:20:44]:
And I did my, my master’s in neuroscience. When I applied. It was so that I could stay in the place I was living because it was in a student town in Brighton in the UK and I loved living there and I had friends living there and I had a spiritual community there and I didn’t want to go home to, you know, we lived pretty much in the middle of nowhere. There was a bus an hour you had to walk to get the bus anyway, like it was. I didn’t live particularly close to anything. And so for me, I loved living in the city and having a bus outside my doorstep every three minutes and wanted to stay and I was told that if I, they would help me with the financial stuff if I did something like a master’s, that would be considered appropriate.
Nancy Norbeck [00:21:23]:
So.
Katy-Rose [00:21:24]:
Air quotes again. So I did that and they said, why have you picked neuroscience? I said, I’m just interested in the brain. And they said, what can you do with a neuroscience degree? And they said, well, research. I could do research. I can do brain injury or I can do dementia. They’re pretty much the three kind of job paths that you could do. And the research would not be the kind of research that I wanted to do. It’d be focused a lot on MRI scanners and TMRI and things like that.
Katy-Rose [00:21:50]:
Some of the like, medical esque side, which is not my calling, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s not for me. And I’m a bit squeamish as well, which doesn’t help. So. So. But they sort of said, why are you doing that? And actually, I find that my neuroscience stuff is pretty much what I use every day in my life, because I’m able to say to people, this is why your habit isn’t sticking. This is why you’re struggling so much to reinvent yourself, because you’re trying to change this, this and this. And your brain has this much of this chemical and this is your willpower. And this is.
Katy-Rose [00:22:15]:
So I use it every day. I think it’s more useful than my psychology degree, to be honest. But on paper, it’s useless. It’s not accredited by any of the fancy people, it’s not considered part of a medicine trajectory, it’s not officially official by the British Psychological Society, like.
Nancy Norbeck [00:22:33]:
And yet neuroscience is such a hot thing now? Yeah, to a degree that scares me a little bit.
Katy-Rose [00:22:42]:
I think it’s that sense that we have the tools inside us and none of us know how to use them.
Nancy Norbeck [00:22:47]:
Right.
Katy-Rose [00:22:48]:
Suddenly clicked that actually if we knew what our brain was doing when we’re doing stuff, when we’re thinking stuff, when we’re feeling stuff, we could actually harness this power a lot easier. And that’s pretty much what I now do. So my training is in cognitive behavioral therapy and we look at thoughts, feelings and behaviors and physical sensations, and they’re the four strands, as it were, that make up any situation. And actually knowing how the brain controls impacts, affects all of those things because of what you do, what you eat, when you meditate, what you write. Writing by hand versus typing, and the impact, different parts of your brain light up and the impact and the different ways that it strengthens and prunes different parts of your brain matter. It’s incredible that we don’t know this stuff and we’ve been able to know it for so long. We’ve had the technology.
Nancy Norbeck [00:23:43]:
Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that difference, writing by hand versus typing? Because now I’m curious and I’m sure I won’t be the only one.
Katy-Rose [00:23:50]:
Yeah, I’m trying to think now because again, I’m just putting these random. This is the thing, I’m like a pub quiz of knowledge, random studies, because they’re the ones that I’ve remembered and used and used as examples. But so if you write something by hand, it actually. So when you do any action or think anything, it basically activates, lights up, puts chemicals into certain parts of your brain. And your brain is split up into different areas and different areas light up when you handwrite something versus you typing it, Even though you’re using the same. Even if you’re using the same hand, you’re typing the same sentence, you’re thinking the same thing, it actually lights up completely separate. There’s a couple that overlap, like the language part, like Varia, the language reading and understanding parts. But a lot of it’s very different.
Katy-Rose [00:24:38]:
And even the. What they’ve done is they found that if they compare people who only type and only write in like recall, in memory, in even like physical dexterity, they find differences.
Nancy Norbeck [00:24:52]:
So is it because I can hear the question now, is there one that’s better than another, or are they just different enough that there’s no, you know, ranking them? It’s just that they do different things in terms of.
Katy-Rose [00:25:05]:
If you are trying to get your right brain, your creativity, your curiosity, their handwriting is better.
Nancy Norbeck [00:25:11]:
Hmm, interesting.
Katy-Rose [00:25:13]:
I couldn’t tell you the exact why of that, nor could any of the papers tell me the exact why of that, because again, a lot of the studies are, we notice this correlation, we notice this difference, but they can’t go through every possible hypothesis. I think if you want to be more logical, typing is that more methodical. I think partly because you have a map of. Which is my theory, because you have a map of a keyboard in your head and things like that, it’s a little bit more logical when you’re actually translating, exposing it, I suppose, whereas handwriting is, again, it’s a very physical movement. It gets you into your body. But again, this is just me theorizing, but for sort of creativity, I don’t think. I think if you’re doing maths puzzles on both, I think you’d probably get the same result. But I do remember there being something about if there’s that kind of left brain, right brain sort of wanting to be logical versus wanting to be creative.
Nancy Norbeck [00:26:06]:
Well, and there are exercises too that I’ve seen. I can’t remember the context off the top of my head now, but where it’s like, write this in your non dominant hand. So I’m sure that that factors into that too.
Katy-Rose [00:26:20]:
Yep. So the different. So you’ve got two hemispheres, so you’ve got two halves of your brain, and they are connected in the middle via a load of wires, basically, that connect left to right, and that’s known as the corpus callosum. And the more wires, the more connected they are, the more you can multitask essentially like you’ve got more channels for the signals to get through from left to right. So if you’ve only got like three bridges to cross a river versus seven, you get more traffic going. If you’ve got. And women tend to have thicker corpus callosums, which is why they tend to be better stereotypically at multitasking.
Nancy Norbeck [00:26:57]:
Okay.
Katy-Rose [00:26:58]:
So if you’re writing in your non dominant hand, which for most people, because I think there’s still quite a stagger of right handed versus left handed, I think left hand is still less common. So your language sides of your brain is in your left hemisphere, which corresponds to your right hand and leg. So the right side of your body, your right eye, your right legs, your right hands are on the left side of your brain. And the left side of your body corresponds to a section on the right side of your brain. So you can open someone’s head up and touch the bit on the right hand side and find the bit that would be their hand and it makes their left hand twitch, it sends that impulse through. So if you are a right handed person, it will connect specifically to your left side, left side of your brain, which is the more logical. It has all the language center in there. So if you’re writing with a non dominant hand, you will be lighting up parts of the right hemisphere that you wouldn’t otherwise be lighting up.
Katy-Rose [00:28:01]:
Again, it’s seen to be more creative and less logical as well. So I guess if you were looking for that creativity, intuition side, it would make sense. Again, I don’t know if there’s any science behind that specifically, but it would at least make sense.
Nancy Norbeck [00:28:15]:
Yeah, because I thought that I had heard a couple years ago that that whole left brain, logical, right brain, more creative thing was not as, not as well thought of anymore as it used to be.
Katy-Rose [00:28:26]:
It’s certainly not as clear cut. I am definitely oversimplifying some of it. You’re right. I will put my hands up to that. Yes. So that is definitely not as clear cut as it used to be. Partly because we have the connections between the two and we know more about that now. So actually there isn’t.
Katy-Rose [00:28:44]:
It’s not like one side works and the other doesn’t hear about. Right. We’ve got the two sides that always communicate with each other. That’s how we breathe, that’s how we, that’s how we kind of keep alive. What I will say is that in most people the language is only in the left side. So you have two areas called Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. And they are. One is for comprehension and understanding of words and the other is for like reading and writing of words, if I remember correctly.
Katy-Rose [00:29:11]:
And they are generally only in the left side of the brain. And where you have people who learn a second language, there is a very similar part is created in the right side. So people who have got bilingual or multilingual I think are fascinating because their brains are actually physically different in structure because they are generally speaking apart from those people who might have a brain abnormality of having it on the other side. Generally speaking, your language is always on the left side of the language areas.
Nancy Norbeck [00:29:44]:
Oh, that’s really interesting. I would not have guessed that that would be the case.
Katy-Rose [00:29:49]:
But I think that’s also partly where the left logical came in is because there are bits that are only in the left side and only in the right side. So I think that’s partly where that’s come from anyway. But yes. No, it’s definitely not as clear cut as. Yeah. That you can’t be creative if you’re using your left side of your brain at all.
Nancy Norbeck [00:30:05]:
Right. Wow. That. You’re making me want to go haul out all of my high school French textbooks now.
Katy-Rose [00:30:17]:
I can’t comment. I took German.
Nancy Norbeck [00:30:19]:
Must go get it back because I want that part. Isn’t that crazy?
Katy-Rose [00:30:24]:
Well, it’s never too late as well. That’s the other thing we know about. So the way that our brain works. So I’m now 30 and it’s coming. It’s basically when you hit about 25 to 30, you have lost over half of the neurons that you were born with.
Nancy Norbeck [00:30:41]:
Oh, lordy.
Katy-Rose [00:30:42]:
Or the half. I think it goes up and then it goes back down. And I’m now at half. I’ve now lost half of them. And it will stay like this till I’m about 65, and then it will start to drop off again. Like it’ll drop a tiny bit before then, but not by half again. And it will pretty much go. And it will never reach zero.
Nancy Norbeck [00:31:00]:
Okay, well, that’s comforting.
Katy-Rose [00:31:02]:
So there’s that sense of you can be 95 and you can learn a new language. It will be harder for you. Your concentration and other things are going to be more difficult. But you can still physically do it. Your brain will grow. So I think the other thing is about when you’re choosing what you’re doing in your life, when you’re being curious, when you’re fueled by that curiosity, is actually you are physically changing your brain.
Nancy Norbeck [00:31:22]:
Wow. Okay. I’m Liking this. I’m telling myself right now that that means every time I do one of these podcasts, I’m changing my brain. I like that.
Katy-Rose [00:31:36]:
Yeah, technically, I mean, anytime that you’re mixing modalities as well. So like if I dance while I sing to music, I’m using the language part, I’m using the physical part, and if I don’t know, I’m counting the steps. Like, I’m literally making new connections between three areas of my brain.
Nancy Norbeck [00:31:59]:
And so that means that you end up being able to use those areas more effectively or. Yeah, the basic idea.
Katy-Rose [00:32:08]:
Yep. So the basic idea is that cells that fire together wire together. So the idea is that anything that we do together will sort of almost make a little bond, but it’s going to do it together. So then you can, I don’t know if you know, Pavlov’s dog with the bell and the salivation. So he rang a bell every time they were fed and then when he rang the bell, they just salivated, even though there was no food. It’s kind of like that. So you basically pair two things together and then when one happens, the other will automatically do it. So if you’re trying to start a habit where you floss after you brush your teeth, doing them together will mean that actually eventually you’ll do your teeth and you’ll floss without thinking about it and things like that.
Katy-Rose [00:32:45]:
So it’s really good for like habit formation. But generally speaking, the more you use any of those neural pathways, anytime you do an action, you think a thought. So this is really interesting in like mental health and well being and thought challenging. Anytime you think it’s a thought, it will strengthen whatever wire it is that is used, whichever connection for that. And the more something the wire is used, the more efficient it becomes. So it gets a little bit thicker, which again kind of almost means that more signal can get through and it becomes coated in something called myelin sheath, which is. I kind of like thinking about it, like rather than going down the steps, it’s like putting it on a slide. So it just makes it more efficient and quicker.
Katy-Rose [00:33:26]:
And then it does mean that when you stop doing that, it takes longer for that to erode. It takes longer for that habit to unform because it’s been formed so thoroughly and it has this myelin sheath around it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:33:41]:
So that seems like it works both ways.
Katy-Rose [00:33:43]:
Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:33:43]:
So the bad habits that you formed are hard to get rid of for that reason, just as you might want to form a good one so that you have that extra advantage 100%.
Katy-Rose [00:33:53]:
And I do have a bit of a bug there about the 30 days to a habit, 40 days to a habit, 28 days to a new habit thing. I think it’s 21 currently, because one habit is not one wire. So if you have a habit that is smoking, there will be so many different areas of your brain that will have the receptors in it that nicotine will go into. If you want to quit eating chocolate and you’ve got that sweet tooth and your body is telling you you’re hungry and you’re craving and your stomach might be crazy, you know, there’s so many different things that we cannot say that one habit is the same as another. It’s not the same to quit smoking as it is to start a daily journaling practice for three minutes.
Nancy Norbeck [00:34:36]:
Yeah.
Katy-Rose [00:34:38]:
And again, thinking about the brain areas, but also thinking about the amount of willpower it takes, how thoroughly sort of myelinated those wires are, how long you’ve been smoking, versus, again, someone who’s been smoking for 30 years versus someone who’s only been smoking three weeks. The way the wires are going to be different and how different it’s going to be for them. And equally, we do know that some people have more receptors than others of certain types. So one of the theories with sort of depression and anxiety is there aren’t as many serotonin receptors, or if the brain doesn’t make enough serotonin to fill the receptors. Serotonin is your happy, happy hormone, as it were. So it could be that actually someone who’s smoked 30 years has 500 receptors, as it were, little docking stations for the. For the drug to go into and make it feel happier and someone else only has seven. So again, that’s going to completely change how they change a habit.
Katy-Rose [00:35:35]:
So when they talk about, oh, it takes 21 days to start a habit or stop a habit, or it’s never. I don’t think it’s ever that simple. Equally knowing that we can be kind to ourselves when we don’t make 21 days and it’s done.
Nancy Norbeck [00:35:50]:
Yeah. And I think that’s the key thing with the whole awareness piece, because awareness is a tool that I use too. And it definitely makes such a huge difference because if you don’t know that and you’re looking at the book that says, stop smoking in 21 days, and it’s been 31 days and you still are smoking a couple cigarettes every day, and you’re just going to beat up on yourself, you’re not going to get it you’re going to think there’s something horribly wrong with you and it’s just going to make things worse rather than better.
Katy-Rose [00:36:18]:
Yeah. And I think our quick fix culture that we. I think we’ve certainly had it all the time I’ve been alive, but I think it’s been getting worse and worse. And social media is definitely anything we want. We can have instant gratification. Amazon can deliver the next morning, sometimes the same evening. We live in this world where things happen so fast that if anything takes time. And again, all the success stories say I lost eight pounds in a week.
Katy-Rose [00:36:46]:
Like all the success stories, everything that we are told and shown that is supposed to be proof of success or of doing well or of managing something, it’s all quick. So when we do something that feels slow, when we feel like we’re not making as much progress as we want. When I used to work in mental health, so I used to teach cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to people who were depressed and anxious. We would talk about lapses versus relapses, which is this idea that if you have a bad day, it doesn’t mean your depression’s come back. Like, there’s this idea of progress being this perfect straight line and very quick. And actually progress is an up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, that’s slowly going up. If you like, take the average and step back, it is going the right direction. But you, you can have depression for 30 years and then have three weeks of feeling good and then one bad morning.
Katy-Rose [00:37:37]:
That does not mean your depression is back, because we all have a bad morning here and there. And again, that’s about understanding. It’s about awareness. It’s about being, knowing yourself, knowing. Is this just a bad day? Is this how I felt before I had the depression when it was a bad day? Or is this something else? Or has something happened? Do I know why this happened? Again, that kind of curiosity that we’re not taught to ask the questions about?
Nancy Norbeck [00:38:01]:
Not at all. Not at all. And I’m curious too, because you’ve mentioned this word twice now, and I would love to know what you think about willpower.
Katy-Rose [00:38:14]:
So willpower is one that I’ve actually just started researching just for my own interest, because I’ve noticed that I’m thinking about it a lot, but I certainly don’t have all the answers at this point. But my understanding of willpower, particularly with ideas like decision fatigue. So the idea that the more decisions we have to make, it basically runs down our willpower. It’s like we get a set Amount. Again, I’m not fully sure of the science on this one, but my understanding, certainly from the summaries I’ve read, is that we do to some extent have a set amount of willpower per day. And every time that we have to make a decision, it’s drained. Every time we make a decision with more options, it’s drained. So if you have to choose between two serials or eight serials, you’re going to use more willpower, choosing one serial out of eight than one out of two.
Katy-Rose [00:39:00]:
So the idea that a lot of the sort of successful again air quotes people, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, they all have one uniform. They all just have an entire wardrobe of eight white shirts and eight pairs of trousers and eight pairs of black socks or whatever. And that’s. That is their thing. And they just get up and get dressed because it’s one less decision for them to make so that they can make decisions on important things. It’s one of the reasons why batch cooking is something that is recommended so often. Because again, you don’t need to worry about. You can meal prep and batch cook and then you can know that Wednesday you’re having pizza and you don’t have to think, you don’t have to consider it.
Katy-Rose [00:39:37]:
And it does sound like from the research there is this idea that willpower is a finite resource. Now what I want to know is how we restore that. Because I certainly can think of things in my day to day. So I think of energy and myself as a bit of a battery and what things drain my battery and what things recharge it. So you might have heard, when I talk about this, I get a little bit faster, I speak a little bit louder, I get really energized. Talking and teaching and sharing information and nerding out, that’s just something that gives me energy. I will be a lot more energized after this conversation than I was before it. For me, I would think that would give me more willpower because I equate when I make the bad decisions, it’s when I’m tired, right? Like mentally tired, energetically tired.
Katy-Rose [00:40:29]:
So for me, my theory I suppose is that what things in my day can improve and increase and re top up that willpower. Because yes, if I’m trying to eat healthy, if I’m trying to go for a walk, but it’s not very nice outside, there are certainly habits. If I try and meditate. I’ve done a meditation for today and it’s coming up to 9pm there’s that sense of all the things that we want to do in our day to lead a healthy life, as it were. Then I would like to understand willpower a little bit more. Again, when I think about the books I could read and the studies I could read, they’re all just snippets. So again, I know that only by reading all of them am I going to get a clear, holistic picture. And I’m not sure how much we know about willpower, because willpower itself is.
Katy-Rose [00:41:16]:
Is an abstract concept. It doesn’t exist. It’s like love or joy. It’s not a thing you can hold, you can touch. It’s not necessarily something you can measure. So I’m certainly intrigued to find out about it. And. Yeah, it’s certainly on my list.
Katy-Rose [00:41:32]:
But, yeah, not sure just yet.
Nancy Norbeck [00:41:34]:
Yeah. And we have so many cultural things around willpower. It’s like all you need is some willpower and you can leap that tall building in a single bound or you can stop smoking tomorrow or whatever. And so I’m kind of fascinated by that, too. I feel like the actual thing, to whatever degree it exists, could be so different than what we’ve been told it is.
Katy-Rose [00:41:57]:
Yeah. So I know that in a lot of theories and even sort of when people are trying to explain studies and why they think they found motivation is linked to dopamine. So dopamine is our reward pathway anytime we get an accomplishment, anytime we are. It’s one of the reasons people think that we need to praise our kids just for trying anything and everything, which I’m not 100% against, but I do think there are certain ways of doing it. But again, it’s about getting that dopamine going. It’s the same thing that happens when drug users use, when anyone who’s addicted to anything has that addiction, be that social media, be that alcohol. Dopamine is the thing is that kind of reward pathway. And there is that sense of.
Katy-Rose [00:42:39]:
In the scientific community, that there is a link between motivation and dopamine. So I guess very much like people who are depressed don’t have enough serotonin going around their body or their brain, then I presume that people who are out of willpower may have lower dopamine. But again, that’s just me theorizing rather than.
Nancy Norbeck [00:42:57]:
Right.
Katy-Rose [00:42:57]:
Official studies.
Nancy Norbeck [00:42:59]:
It’s so interesting to think of it in terms of chemical reactions, though, because we don’t usually do that.
Katy-Rose [00:43:04]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:43:05]:
Because we’re not taught it in school.
Katy-Rose [00:43:07]:
Yeah. Yep, pretty much. And that’s, again, it’s just these things that you don’t need to have a neuroscience degree in order to understand this stuff. Because I can literally say to you, well, if you’re going to calorie count, which some people won’t do because of their own stuff, I completely get that. But if you want to particularly feel fuller after meals, make a note of any calories you’ve had and work out how many calories you need and watch it go up and you will feel fuller. You don’t need to have a neuroscience degree to understand that concept. It’s only because I’ve done the degrees and I read the papers that I’m then able to go, oh, that’s a lesson that could be applied to what is normal people or normal situations. But again, the people who are doing the studies aren’t being paid to show share this infant or can’t be paid to do the research so that they can tell someone how to have a diet better.
Katy-Rose [00:43:55]:
Maybe they are in advertising, I guess, but.
Nancy Norbeck [00:43:57]:
Well, yeah, that’s a whole other thing.
Katy-Rose [00:44:00]:
The priority isn’t to teach the general public how to use their body and mind efficiently.
Nancy Norbeck [00:44:07]:
No.
Katy-Rose [00:44:07]:
So that’s why I’m here, apparently.
Nancy Norbeck [00:44:11]:
And you just used another word that can be so charged for people, which is normal.
Katy-Rose [00:44:17]:
I did air quote that one. I appreciate. Yes. So, yes, I would usually use the phrase typical or standard, but again, they’re all full of the same thing. And I think, yeah, there’s no such thing as normal in that particular instance. What I mean is people who don’t have a neuroscience degree, people who aren’t academically curious, purely for academic people who want to use this to actually make their life physically, mentally better. It’s probably what I should have said, but normal is just much quicker.
Nancy Norbeck [00:44:51]:
Oh, yeah, but it’s also, it’s a word we all get hung up on so easily, you know, I mean, just like I was saying before, if you don’t have the awareness to know that your 21 day habit thing may not actually be 21, you’re gonna look at it and be like, what’s wrong with me? I’m a weirdo, I’m a freak. I didn’t manage to do this right. I’m not normal. There’s something wrong. And I’m not saying normal really exists all that much.
Katy-Rose [00:45:15]:
It doesn’t. And our culture very much lists on that. And I think again, advertising is very much the way that we are spoken to and about is very much about. You need to do that. That’s not normal. My other half actually is a pediatrician, so He’s a child doctor. And the amount of times that people will say to him, oh, is what my child doing normal? And it’s like, I read all the books and by two they should be jumping or whatever. That’s.
Katy-Rose [00:45:39]:
I don’t know anything about pediatrics, so if that’s wrong, sorry. But actually, what the doctors all know is that between 18 months and 24 months is the time that that happens. Because every single human being on earth develops differently. Some talk before they walk, some walk before they talk. I swear, my niece was almost standing up on my legs at about seven days old. I don’t know how much strength in her legs. Oh, my goodness. But, yeah, there isn’t.
Katy-Rose [00:46:07]:
There isn’t anything that we can say is normal. And as I say, like, there are women out there with thinner corpus callosum than men. It doesn’t mean they’re not a woman. It doesn’t mean.
Nancy Norbeck [00:46:16]:
Right.
Katy-Rose [00:46:17]:
I think we are so caught up in black and white things, and the world has never been black and white. And again, we’re not taught how to deal with gray in school. The maths question is right or it’s wrong. That philosophy question, you either got the points you needed to say or you didn’t. Even things like English essays, you either got the points or you didn’t. Like even things that could be construed as, oh, there’s no right or wrong. It’s philosophy essay, you still get marks on it as to how good it is.
Nancy Norbeck [00:46:47]:
Right. And you know, it’s because I want to say two things at the same time here. The first one is, I feel like we get stuck in all this black and white because what we’re taught to do is put labels on everything.
Katy-Rose [00:47:00]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:47:01]:
Which is why we’re saying, does this make you not a woman? Does this make you not normal? Does it. Does it make you Whatever. But also, you know, I used to teach writing classes for English as a Second language students. And I. I loved teaching, I loved working with my kids. And I went off and got my MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College, which does not give number grades. You either had a successful semester or you had an unsuccessful semester. And the determination for that is that you create your study plan at the beginning of the semester with your advisor.
Nancy Norbeck [00:47:37]:
You decide what you want to learn and how you’re going to learn it. And then you go off and you do the work and you send it in to your advisor through the course of the semester, and you have, like, this ongoing written dialogue about what’s happening and is this working and you know, this book. I’m not quite sure I’m getting what I wanted out of this book. Is there something else you would recommend? You know, something like that. And then at the end of the semester you do a self evaluation and your advisor evaluates you and then that’s the determination of whether or not you had a successful semester or not. And the longer I was in this program, which was only a two year program, so it was four semesters, the harder it got for me to give grades to my kids because my whole concept of, you know, how much did you learn? You know, didn’t make sense in the regular numerical structure to me anymore because it was like I could give you, I could give you a 95 on this paper. But what am I saying is the 5%, that’s, that’s wrong. What’s wrong with it? If, you know, if you always are an A student and you write brilliant papers and you waited until the last minute and you wrote another brilliant paper at 10 o’ clock the night before it was due, do you deserve an A as much as the kid who slaved over his paper who usually gets a C and managed to do something better than what he normally does, should that kid get the A instead? And it, I just, I could not make my brain fit around all of that anymore.
Nancy Norbeck [00:49:07]:
It did just did not make any sense to me. It was just like, I don’t, I don’t know what this means because it’s a completely subjective thing. It’s not like grading a math test where you can say you got eight out of ten problems, right, therefore you got an 80%. That’s a B. Yeah, and, and it just, it, it forever shifted how I think about it. Which makes the idea of ever teaching again kind of daunting because how do I grade a kid?
Katy-Rose [00:49:31]:
But I love that I, I love the idea that that even exists. The fact that that’s how your MFA did it. So firstly I’m like, oh, I want to do that.
Nancy Norbeck [00:49:38]:
Yeah, right.
Katy-Rose [00:49:40]:
And actually, yeah, so when I was at secondary school, we were, when they had parents, even whatever, we were graded in two columns. We got a one to four for attainment and an A to D for effort. And I distinctly remember standing at my parents evening one year and my dad spoke to the teacher who was opposite and the teacher went, well, she’s got a 3A or a 2A. Like I see she’s trying, but she’s not really attaining. And my dad went, well, she’s trying, she’s trying her Best like it’s not good enough. Like, is there any point her even being in this class and then going to another table where I got a one whatever the opposite is a one C she’s attaining fine, but you can see she’s not trying. My dad went, well, why should we bother trying? She’s getting a one out of, she’s getting top marks and who gives a toss how much effort she’s putting in? And the teacher just looked gobsmacked because that clearly wasn’t the point of that exercise. But that’s how my dad saw it because again, I was growing up in a very academically, this is how success works.
Katy-Rose [00:50:43]:
It doesn’t matter how much effort you put in as long as you’re a achieve. And made me think about actually when I review books. So I remember when I first started reading books and just reviewing them on Goodreads and stuff like that, thinking about it as well. If this is a four out of five, what would be that one thing that would have made it a five out of five? So nowadays when I grade books, I grade them down, not up because the idea of giving one star to a book doesn’t make sense to me. When someone puts some effort into it, they’ve clearly thought about it. I clearly picked up a book because I have an interest in it. So why should they get anything less than a 3, even if it was poorly delivered and it didn’t get what I wanted out of it and they could have done something. So the idea of grading down instead of up is something that I learned with like reviewing books and things.
Katy-Rose [00:51:27]:
So yeah, it’s definitely something I hadn’t really thought about in terms of how much we, how we dictate that kind of success.
Nancy Norbeck [00:51:34]:
Yeah, it’s such a complicated thing because there are so many factors and I’ve thought, you know, oh, I could come up with a rubric and I’m going to grade you on this point and here’s what three points is and two points is and one point. But even that doesn’t cover everything.
Katy-Rose [00:51:48]:
And actually I do remember another either a study or like a story that was about someone saying, right, okay, you’ll all get the same grade. I’m going to grade you all the same. And at the beginning they were all getting Bs because the A students were kind of keeping it afloat. And by the end they all got Fs because actually the will to try had dropped. So that was one of the reasons that they said that we need in society people who are Higher and lower socioeconomic background and things like that. That. But thinking about it in terms of if there weren’t any grades, what would we do and what would this look like? Yeah. I don’t know.
Katy-Rose [00:52:26]:
Because again, you’d say, well, how much have you learned this semester? But again, you’d have to know exactly how much each child learned, how much time they put into it, how much they got the concepts, whether they were someone like me who could get a concept quickly, or someone like my friend who really couldn’t get a concept quickly. She needed a bit longer to learn the foundations. Didn’t mean she was any less smart than me.
Nancy Norbeck [00:52:46]:
Right. And she probably was better than you at something else.
Katy-Rose [00:52:51]:
Yeah. So I guess if you’ve got a semester and you’re trying to grade me and her on the same thing, that’s not fair.
Nancy Norbeck [00:52:56]:
Right. Which is part of what I loved about how Goddard does this. It’s like, did you accomplish what you set out to do? If you did, then well done. You move along to the next semester. If you didn’t, then, oh, but yeah. And I mean, it doesn’t scale easily to a large school or something like that. So I don’t know. But it does make me wonder, just as we’re talking, we’re so trained by grades to assess ourselves.
Nancy Norbeck [00:53:31]:
Maybe that’s where some of this obsession with normal and all the other labels comes from. It’s like, I have to. I have to get, you know, straight A’s because my parents want me to get straight A’s in school. And it’s not good enough if I don’t get a straight A. But. But then once you get out of school, what does that mean? What does that. What does that do to you? As opposed to, ah, you know, I got three A’s and a B. And that’s cool.
Katy-Rose [00:53:55]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:53:56]:
And what you’re told about that when.
Katy-Rose [00:53:58]:
People hear that I’ve got a master’s in cognitive neuroscience, they go, oh, you must be so smart. And I’m like, no, I’m a B to C student. I was a B to C student. I got four Bs, three Cs and two as. Like, I’m very much a B student in terms of my grading. I’m not, like, the smartest. I mean, I’ve married a doctor, he got A’s in everything. And I still look at him and go, how nice do you do that? You’re weird.
Katy-Rose [00:54:23]:
Love him, really. But there’s that sense of, yeah, like what it. And I see, I’m 30. And I still. Did you hear me sit. I just realized that I sat there and went, I’m a B student. I haven’t been a B student. I haven’t been graded in terms of B since I was in like college.
Katy-Rose [00:54:39]:
That was like three degrees ago.
Nancy Norbeck [00:54:41]:
Right.
Katy-Rose [00:54:42]:
But I still think of myself as a B student. So that’s interesting. I haven’t noticed that until just now. But yeah, so that’s, I think it has a massive impact in terms of what we think is capable. We’re capable of.
Nancy Norbeck [00:54:54]:
Right, right. And it can be a self fulfilling prophecy one way or another too, which is one of the first things you learn as a teacher. It’s a terrible kind of power.
Katy-Rose [00:55:03]:
Yes. But I do think the, the idea of the self fulfilling prophecy, once we know a little bit more about it and it can be a positive in terms of once you know that that’s how the human brain works, we can actually do the opposite.
Nancy Norbeck [00:55:17]:
Right.
Katy-Rose [00:55:18]:
So in terms of I suppose myself thinking of May as a B student when I got a C and being like a B student versus when I got an A, but I’m a B student, there’s that, there’s that kind of, there’s both sides of it a little bit. And I do think that harnessing what we want to be, like you said, there’s that awareness, there’s also that kind of idea of who am I and what do I do and what’s my identity and what do I want to embrace and then making that my self fulfilling prophecy.
Nancy Norbeck [00:55:44]:
Right, right. And teachers and parents have so much more power than they realize. You know, I mean they can, they can enact the self fulfilling prophecy that does make the kid an A straight A student or you know, you, you tell a kid that they’re stupid, they’re going to believe you.
Katy-Rose [00:56:00]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:56:01]:
You know, but the same thing happens if you tell them they’re smart.
Katy-Rose [00:56:05]:
Yeah. And again, in this day and age, I think particularly having watched the last 20 years or so where we’ve gone from almost people getting badges for being the loser, like they get like the award for coming last participation badges when they, you kind of degrade what an award is.
Nancy Norbeck [00:56:26]:
Right.
Katy-Rose [00:56:26]:
Then it actually makes the people at the top suffer. And I think that we’re starting to come back down from that again in terms of certainly in England and the education culture. So I’ve worked with children and families since 2012 in my day job as a support worker. So I’ve certainly seen some of the fulfilling prophecies, some of the ways that Parents aren’t equipped with to know what they’re saying out loud. That’s another thing I’m quite big on is language and how we word things in terms of our self talk and talking about what we can do. So like you say, like calling your kid stupid is never going to benefit anyone.
Nancy Norbeck [00:57:00]:
Nope.
Katy-Rose [00:57:02]:
And I completely appreciate that. If you’re having a bad day and you’re annoyed and you’re trying to express that annoyance and you don’t understand why your kid just did something that really was quite silly, equally saying that out loud to them and the impact that has. Again, we’re not taught how much we shape our world and how much our perception. So I use the phrase redefinition. But there’s a sense of you can look at the same truth through two lenses and if one lens, if the only thing that changes is that in one lens I’m really annoyed and in the other I’m quite okay, why don’t I pick the one that makes me okay? Like I’m never gonna get the truth, you know, so particularly like in road rage. So I always, if someone cuts me up or something, I will do the oh my God, I nearly died or whatever and then I will do. Maybe they were driving to the hospital because someone they love is dying. Now the chance of every single driver who cut me up last week going on that road having in being in that situation, it’s quite slim.
Nancy Norbeck [00:58:07]:
Right.
Katy-Rose [00:58:07]:
You know what? The only thing that changed is I wasn’t angry and upset anymore. So I do that every single time because I have the power to change that. And then I come through the door after work and I’m not in a bad mood and I’m not ranting and raving about that person who nearly killed me and ruining my partner’s day on top of it. So I think sometimes it’s about actually thinking about how much power we have. Again, we’re not taught this in school about actually you can control some of it. You can’t control everything. I’m not one of those people who says, oh, you brought this on yourself. We make our reality like to that extent, but there are certainly some things we can do around.
Katy-Rose [00:58:44]:
Can I make myself feel better in this five minutes? Does this matter?
Nancy Norbeck [00:58:47]:
Right, Right. So we don’t have a whole lot of time left. But I do want to ask about the quantum mechanics part of the work you did because I’m just fascinated to hear what you discovered. And I don’t know why, but I have this feeling that there’s probably Spiritual. Something involved with it. I could be wrong, but I’m. I’m so curious. I just have to ask.
Katy-Rose [00:59:13]:
I love that you’ve just said that because you have set it up perfectly. So although the course was quite generic, we did a project like a little like essay and I focused on what the evidence from the theories of quantum mechanics and quantum particles show us about energy healing. Oh, so when you mentioned spiritual, I was like, well, there is some of. So I’m actually attuned in Reiki, which is an energy healing art. I guess I can’t say how much I believe in it with my own scientific brain, but I can say that when my friend used it on me when I was ill, I felt something. Something happened and I went and got attuned and I feel like there’s something. I don’t know how it works. It’s magic as far as I’m concerned.
Katy-Rose [01:00:01]:
But I basically then tried to look up the information of. Well, if people are saying there’s all these different like ideas that energy healing is real. Some people go as far back as they. Jesus’s miracles, things like that. Like there’s all these kind of stories all over the world, all different cultures of healing arts through just people and laying on of hands is a common one. And when considering how energy is part of every single atom or every single even quarks, which. So in each atom you’ve got protons, neutrons in the middle and then electrons around the outside and inside your protons and neutrons, your quarks. So they are like the fundamental particles, as it were.
Katy-Rose [01:00:45]:
So two ups and a down makes a proton and two downs and up makes a neutron. You don’t need to know this, this is just me wobbling, but essentially the energy that you have in that and the, the in the atoms of this table are the same as the energy in the atom of that little signal going along a wire in my head.
Nancy Norbeck [01:01:05]:
Okay?
Katy-Rose [01:01:06]:
So if I have a brain made of atoms that has a consciousness, I’m conscious, I think, I don’t. I see the world, I perceive it, I have thoughts. Why do we think that tables and trees and the air we breathe doesn’t have a consciousness?
Nancy Norbeck [01:01:29]:
Okay.
Katy-Rose [01:01:30]:
And the idea. So it’s known as the field. There’s a book by Lynn McTaggart, who wrote the Field, that talks about how all atoms technically could have a joined consciousness. And apparently this is what a lot of theories say that we, when we, if, if energy healing is real, it is our, the atoms of us, us interacting with the atoms of the air and the world and, and making it some kind of connection that will with. With intention to heal because the body heals itself. The whole point of our body, you know, if you get a cut over time, your skin will heal, it will scab. Like our body is meant to heal. Like that’s, that’s what it does if it’s injured.
Katy-Rose [01:02:11]:
And the idea is that by using things like laying on of hands is that you can almost speed that up with your intention, moving these, these atoms next to those atoms because. And again, it’s not something scientifically proven, it’s not something. But looking at the amount of different ideas and thinking about things like the placebo effect. So that is a mental, purely conscious idea that this will help me and feeling better afterwards. Even if proof is it was water or a sugar pill or if the placebo effect is something. And I use the placebo effect a lot with my own thing. I think you know what this is. I don’t know if this is going to help me, but I’m going to take it anyway and say that it does.
Katy-Rose [01:02:50]:
There’s no harm in me trying that.
Nancy Norbeck [01:02:52]:
Right.
Katy-Rose [01:02:54]:
So I think. And so a couple of the resources I use. So Bruce Lipton wrote something called the Biology of Belief, which again talks about it. So there’s a lot of these theories that come together and I think I was trying to. I can’t say I found a very clear answer, but I was trying to understand that if we’re all connected, if the world does work in this way, then what other things don’t we know about?
Nancy Norbeck [01:03:15]:
Yeah.
Katy-Rose [01:03:15]:
And what we’ve essentially learned about atoms and about quantum level is that there’s more. So it used to be so an atom. The idea is that you can’t split it. The word automatous or automius or whatever means can’t split, I think. And then we found that there are protons and neutrons inside it. And now we go inside protons and neutrons and find quarks and there are six different types of quark so that make up different things. So there’s this sense of, of there’s so much we don’t know. Magnetism used to be seen as magic and then we got the science behind it.
Katy-Rose [01:03:52]:
So I think with quantum mechanics, what I saw was that idea of in time we may actually understand so many things that we don’t now. And the way that like MRI scanners in hospitals work is through the things we’ve discovered through quantum mechanics and CAT scanners and things like that. They’re from some of the things we’ve discovered. So it’s all just part of that curiosity about the world and how everything works.
Nancy Norbeck [01:04:16]:
Well, we’ve come full circle then, because that’s pretty much where we started here, which is great. But I’m fascinated by that. I’m thinking of that Arthur C. Clarke quote about how any significantly advanced technology sufficiently, I think, is indistinguishable from magic. And I think that’s right where that is. Wow. Well, thank you. This has been such a fun time.
Nancy Norbeck [01:04:40]:
This is such interesting stuff.
Katy-Rose [01:04:43]:
I just love nerding out about it and particularly with education and stuff. I think that’s the heart of it, really.
Nancy Norbeck [01:04:50]:
Yeah. Well, thank you.
Katy-Rose [01:04:52]:
Thank you.
Nancy Norbeck [01:04:54]:
That’s our show for this week. Thanks so much for listening and thanks again to Katy-Rose. Check out the show notes for this episode@fycuriosity.com and please do leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps me reach new listeners. Thanks. You can find show notes, the six creative beliefs that are screwing you up and more@fycuriosity.com I’d also love for you to join the conversation on Instagram. You’ll find me at fycuriosity. Follow Your Curiosity is produced by me, Nancy Norbeck, with music by Joseph McDadee.
Nancy Norbeck [01:05:26]:
If you like Follow Your Curiosity, please subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And don’t forget, forget to tell your friends. It really helps me reach new listeners. See you next time.