>> This week we're talking about self-affirmation, about purpose in life and about being purposeful. We'll get more to purposeful in week two. But for right now, I really want to focus more attention on this idea of self-affirmation. How do we reflect on what matters most? We've been talking about what's on your smart phone wallpaper. We've been talking about seven special questions. We've even been talking about the Grim Reaper. All these things, mortality, salience, thinking about what matters most is really important to your purpose in life. So let's put this into some type of framework that makes some sense. So these are the things that matter most to me and I'm going to start reflecting on them, and that would called self-affirmation. So for one, I want to be a family man. I care a lot about that. I want to be a truth seeker. I'm a scientist. I also want to be a good teacher. I want to be a supporter of the arts. I want to be a visionary leader in the company that I built called Kimono. I want to be a friend, a good friend to the people that I know. I want to be fun-loving. Like I said, I love dancing, I want to get people out on the dance floor, and I want to be very globally engaged. So these are the things that matter most to me. There will be other things that matter most to you. All of us are different and it makes perfect sense for all of us to have a different model of these things working together. I call these things though, my be goals, because I want to be a family man. I want to be a truth seeker. I want to be a visionary leader, etc. These are central. These are my be goals and these be goals for my purpose in life. So this is my purpose. I can assemble these be goals and put them together to form a purpose in my life. This is my purpose in life. To be a family man. To be a visionary leader. To be a friend and teacher. To be a seeker and supporter of truth and beauty. In other words, I want to be a scientist but at the same time, I want to seek beauty too. And so some of that is kind of hedonic, hedonistic. It's selfish in other words. I want to seek out beautiful things. That's great. But other things are more transcending, like being a teacher. I want to teach every one of my students as if they're my daughter, Julia. It's not that I'm going to be able to do that all the time. It's not that I am that way all the time. It's not that my students think of me that way all the time. But it's a goal, an aspiration, a purpose in life that I set up for myself that I can apply my best self to, hopefully. And then finally, to help the world become more purposeful and to get people out onto the dance floor, metaphorically. So this is my purpose in life. It's the most important statement I have in my entire life. And as I said in the very first piece in the introduction to this class, purposes change over time. This has changed over time. It's a very fluid thing, it doesn't mean that this has to stick with me for the rest of my life. It also doesn't mean that I have to achieve all of these things or somehow I'm a failure. What it means is that I have a focus or set of focuses in my life that are incredibly important to me. So, my be goals form my purpose in life. But by the way, if you're using the app, this is what's on my app. This exact purpose in life. And in addition, I have my grand daughter, Madeline Julia because she matters so much to me. Just like the wallpaper on my smartphone, I want a photo of what really matters a great deal to me in the purposeful application. By the way, if driving home from the studio today, I was hit by a bus and I died, this is what I would hopefully have in my headstone. So by the way, if I do die, actually, please make sure this is on my headstone. That if I die today, I would want, he was a family man. He was a visionary leader, a friend and a teacher. An enthusiastic seeker of truth and beauty. He helped the world become more purposeful and he got us on the dance floor. If that were on my headstone, I would consider my life a success. I'd consider my life to be big. That's what I want. That's what a purpose in life is all about. So Dexter Gordon, I'm a big jazz fan and I'm big fan of Dexter Gordon the saxophonist. This was his be goal, to be the tenor saxophonist, an amazing saxophone player. And this was his purpose in life. This is the purpose in life of Samuel Barber, a composer whose work I love. And when he was 9 years old, he wrote down this purpose and gave this purpose to his mother, to be a composer. And by the way, he added in another sentence, and don't ask me to play football, please. This is the purpose of Jason Gaes when he was 6 years old. Jason had cancer at the time and he was bald and he said, I'd like to write a book for kids who have cancer. And this is what he said he wanted to be, to be a doctor who takes care of kids with cancer. So when they say Dr Jason, sometimes I get so scared I'm going to die. Or you don't know how weird it is to be the only bald kid in your whole school. I can say yes, I do. When I was a little boy, I had cancer too. And look at all my hair now. Someday your hair will grow back too. That was Jason Gaes' purpose when he was 6 years old. And it makes me emotional thinking about because it is so powerful, and hopefully, it got him through cancer. By the way, did he become a doctor? No, he became a golf pro. But you know what? Purposes change over time, and that's so cool. It's perfectly fine if he wanted to be a doctor when he is 6 and be a model, a role model for other kids. And it probably helped him get through cancer. So when I think about my purpose or Jason Geas' purpose or Dexter Gordon's purpose, I think about how all of these things that mattered most formed his be goals, formed his why. On the other hand, once you have that why, then you want to start living purposefully. You want to engage your best self. Remember those best-self words we were using? Being kind, being generous, being communitarian, all of those things, being eco-friendly, whatever those best-self ideas are, how do you apply your best self to your purpose? Then you become purposeful. And when you become purposeful, then you're starting to really live a big life. So the way I think about this is that self-affirmation, your reflection on what matters most in your life, leads to a purpose in your life. This central, self-organizing life aim. And once you have a purpose, then you can apply your best self, you can engage your best self to this life purpose and become purposeful. When you have those three things going for you, I would say you're living a pretty big life no matter who you are. Now, this course is centrally about purpose in life. That's what we're dealing with. But I wanted to make sure that you understood these other areas, these other concepts that are really, really closely related because we're going to talk about all three throughout the class. When we put people into functional magnetic resonance imaging, let me unpack that for a second. So you're familiar with MRI. Maybe you've broken a leg or had some issue where you needed to go and do an MRI, magnetic resonance imaging machine. This is a big heavy giant room-size tube that you end up getting rolled into, it's very claustrophobic and you're sitting in there while there's really loud bunking noises for 15 or 20 minutes usually, and then they roll you out. And they've created this amazing, almost magical image of your broken leg or whatever it is that was bothering you that led you to getting an MRI. And functional MRI, what we do is clamp people's heads down, this is really nice of us. We clamp people's heads down and then we put them into MRI and we start scanning their brains. And we're looking at activation of different parts of the brain now, especially oxygen going into different parts of the brain. So we're looking at, what parts of the brain are getting more oxygen at a particular time when we prompt the person while they're in MRI? So literally, when they're laying in MRI with their heads clamp down, we start asking them to think about something and we compare what they're thinking about at that time with another time when we ask them to think about something else. So when we asked these people in MRI, and we're scanning their brain during this time, we ask them, how about if you think about who you are right now? Answer the question, who am I or what do I value? What we find is more oxygenated blood flow goes into a particular part of the brain that is really magical. It's called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex or vmPFC, ventromedial prefrontal cortex. It's right here in this front part of the brain. If you kind of took your finger and put it right here, just a little bit north of your eyebrows, walk back about half an inch, you would hit the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. It's part of this bigger structure in the front part of your brain called your prefrontal cortex. Primates have more prefrontal cortex than any other animal on the planet and humans have far more ventromedial prefrontal cortex here than any other animal on the planet. In fact, we have more prefrontal cortex. But the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is just magic. It is very, very special. I like to call it the guru part of your brain. And again, when we ask people to think about, who am I and what do I value, it overlaps in this part of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. And I'm showing you an actual image that we published recently in some research we had done. The person who ran this study, her name is Yuna Khang and she's at the University of Pennsylvania, and she works in the laboratory of Emily Falk at the University of Pennsylvania. We'll talk about Emily later and we'll be talking about Yuna a lot later because both of them are doing this amazing neuroscience work on this philosophical concept of purpose in life and self-affirmation. And what they have found and what we've published recently is there's part of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex that gets more active when you're just thinking about the self, another part when it's just thinking about, what do I value? But there's a big part where they overlap and that overlapping part, that self and value in this greenish yellowish part of the vmPFC, when we activate that part, real magic happens. We see much bigger behavior change. And we'll talk about that in later weeks of this class, but that's a really important part of our brain. We're going to be talking about the vmPFC quite a bit in the class overall.
