In 2013 I gave a presentation at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Pensacola, Florida. Ken Ford, the CEO and Founder of IHMC, is a remarkable person and I could not wait to meet his team and see their research. IHMC does cutting edge work, primarily for the Department of Defense (DoD). I had an exhilarating day which culminated with a presentation I gave to the team and also the public.
Want more content like this? Check out our interviews with Kristin Neff on the power of self-compassion and Esther Perel on the effects of trauma.
The talk I gave was a first timer. (Usually the first two or three times I give a talk it’s not very good, as I need to work out some kinks.) However, since the talk was recorded I’ll set my perfectionist tendencies aside and share it, below. The talk is about an hour, and the Q&A session was also recorded.
A month or so before the talk, I asked Ken what he wanted me to talk about and he suggested I speak about human performance and resilience – both topics of importance for the DoD. I don’t consider myself an expert in either of these topics, but I certainly appreciate the need to maximize, or least optimize, both. Rather than give a highly technical talk, I chose to give a slightly technical talk that focused more on my own journey in this space and some of the experiments I’ve done on myself, specifically those around energy utilization. This talk does not present all of the data on my self-experiments, of course, but hopefully it gives you a sense of what kind of data can be gathered for studying energy utilization. In subsequent posts I’ll likely delve further into the data that support these findings and expand on a few of the tangents not fully explored here. For “regular” readers of this blog, the first half of this presentation is pretty basic, but the second half should offer novel info. For new readers, hopefully the entire talk will be informative.
For those reading via email, here is the presentation:
