Todd Sampson is back with a second series of Redesign My Brain. Series 2 brings Todd some extraordinary challenges where he uses science and adventure to demonstrate what the human brain is capable of. Also added to the equation is stress. Anyone who has seen the ads on ABC TV will know that Todd pushes himself to the limit this time around. Sean Sennett caught up with Todd just before the first episode went to air.

Sean: Before we started rolling the tape you were talking about how this new series saw you put your body in a fearful state and the effect meditation had on you.

Todd: The intent was to genuinely put me in a state where I was having to manage fear, anxiety, and stress at a full-on level. For that to be genuine, I put myself in the most stressful, fearful, situation I think I’ve ever been in, in my life. The idea was could we use brain training, and in this case, visualisation, meditation, and exposure therapy to help me overcome that. That was the experiment. It was full on. That was the absolute edge, as you saw, of my ability.

Did you sit around and spit ball with a few people some ideas of what would be the most extreme situation you could realistically put yourself into? (The ad shows Todd looking down the barrel of a very long tightrope quite a few floors up). 

It didn’t work like that. It’s interesting looking back. It worked from the science out. We said what are the major challenges that people are facing in the world today. We know people are struggling to adapt to change, with rigid thinking as they age, with fear and anxiety. Their senses are declining, their sight is going, their hearing is going, their touch is going.

We thought those are some of the biggest, and there are many more, but they’re some of the biggest challenges we face in modern living. What does brain science say about that?

We found out there’s people with cutting-edge brain science saying how can we improve, only then did we go ‘when it comes to adaptability, who in the world is doing that at an amazing level?’ We were looking at Nick Walinda on TV in America (he tightrope walked across the Grand Canyon) with seventy-million people watching him. We thought that guy’s managing fear at another level.

That’s how it came about. It wasn’t about trying to find challenges. It was trying to find science that overcomes things we all face. I think it’s really important to note the most important thing is the brain-science scaffolding underneath the challenges, not the challenges themselves. I’m not trying to get people to learn to skywalk, but I am saying science will help you manage fear.

Three weeks before [the finale] I had fallen on a training walk at six metres up. I had taken a fall on a tether and  I got a level-2 tear on my upper abdominals, and I tore my left rotator cuff and my right biceps. I could not do any more tether training for the rest of the time.

That’s interesting. I know you weight train. You have a rotor cuff injury. Has that stopped you training or has your mind been able to overcome that?

I’ve had to learn to train around it. The rotator cuff was no problem. That was easy to train around. What was hard was the abdominal. I couldn’t get up from lying flat. It was so painful to get up from lying flat and then my worry was it would move from a level-2 tear to worse. Worse is surgery, so I knew that, and the doctor told me that. He said the next level of tear is surgery, so do you want that? I said no, I don’t want that, and walked away. Then continued my training.

The show took four months to shoot. You’re a busy guy (Todd is CEO at Leo Burnett). You’re a dad. You’ve got a job. Did you literally take four months off or make it work in your schedule?

No, I did three overseas trips which I took holidays for. They were only like two weeks at a time. Then the rest was filmed on weekends. The crew hated me. I trained all those four months. It was filmed over a six-month period.

What’s your average working day like? What do you do when you get out of bed?

I get out of bed at 5:30am, roughly. I meditate for half an hour, and I go straight to the gym. Then I train for an hour, hit the steam room, and I’m at work by 8 o’clock, sometimes just before 8. Then I work all day in my office. I have 200 people that work for me. I work with clients, work on business. I work like everyone else works.

Then at night I’m home with the kids and my family. The only difference is when I was training for the show. I would get up at 5:30, would meditate and visualise the walk.  I had a wire set up in my backyard that was one foot off the ground. I walked on that wire back and forth, back and forth, and back and forth for an hour. Because I was injured I couldn’t train in the gym, so I went to work. Then at night, at 7:30pm I went to the high wire, six-metre wire, and I walked an hour.

The reason I was asking about the working day is there’s so much clutter in modern living. I wanted to ask you about social media as well, how that affects you, and what your direction is. It seems like you’re very good at having a clear brain so you can achieve the things you want to do, like fulfilling the show’s obligation.

Yeah, meditation. It’s covered in the series. You saw it. Non-denominational, there’s so much science now behind meditation. If you ask me for the one thing that’s helped me it’s meditation and Naomi my wife. Without those two things I would not be able to do half of what I do. Because I’ve learned to meditate and I have a very supportive family, I get better balance.

I prioritize. My fitness and my mental physical fitness is my top priority. That’s why it happens before anyone wakes up. There’s no excuse then. There are no meetings at 5:30 in the morning. If there are they’re pretty important meetings.

I really enjoyed the first series as much as the second one. When you threw those darts left-handed and did it better than with the right hand. In fact, the kid next door to me has a basketball hoop like many metres from my back deck, so I applied your thing, then shot a hoop from the back deck. I’m not a basketball player. It was quite incredible to follow your series and then try to apply it to something. It was quite amazing.

Visualizing is quite remarkable. What you visualise your brain actually happens. They did the study I think at Berkeley where they had two people learn the piano. They had one person sit at the piano, all hooked up, measuring their muscle response, brain response, everything. They had both of them hooked up to a machine. One person played the piano for a week, and the other person sat at the piano and visualized.

What you think is actually what happens in your brain. That’s why it is important. I visualized that walk, dozens and dozens of times. When I looked at that wire, even though I was very scared, in many ways I had been there 200 times.

I was going to ask you about the skills you aquire. For example, I thought attempting to crack the safe was amazing. That was a great scene in the series. When you’re working towards an objective, you’re obviously polishing your skills. Do those kind of things like your ‘seeing’ and your ‘hearing’ stay with you once you’ve finished?

Yes, but like physical fitness, mental fitness is about training. If you want to improve your mind, you need to treat it like you would the fitness of your body. You need to regularly practice. That doesn’t mean you need to sit down at brain games or computer games. It means you need to practice using your brain in ways you may not use it normally. You can increase your processing speed. You’re not changing the ability of your eyes. You’re changing the ability of your brain to process what it sees.

It’s interesting. Malcolm Gladwell did that book Outliers and it’s an arbitrary figure, but they talk about the 10,000 hours of learning something. I guess your show kind of suggests it doesn’t have to be 10,000 hours, but whatever hours you have, have to be used in the right way. Would that be correct?

That’s right, and science makes that more efficient. I do agree with Malcolm. His point was 10,000 hours to become an expert. I would not consider myself an expert wire walker, but I would consider myself a wire walker.

What this show is proving hopefully to everyone is that when your brain, mind, and body is faced with a task, if you spend the time to work through the adaptations that need to happen in your mind, the adaptations that need to happen in your body, you can adapt to overcome that challenge. That doesn’t mean you’re an expert. But it does mean you can do it.

For many people, that’s incredibly empowering. It means not that you can do anything, because that’s silly, but you can do a lot more than you think.

You’re obviously a creative guy, and you’re a science guy. I’m sort of wondering with the techniques you’re learning and where it can go; could you unlock your brain to become a painter, or a song writer, or a novelist?

The answer to that is yes, of course you can. But that doesn’t mean you could become Picasso. I think there’s a limit. Yeah, of course you could. In fact, one of the best things for the brain is to learn an instrument, a musical instrument, because you’re forcing the brain to adapt to language, forcing your brain to rewire basically, to cope with that instrument, and all that’s required to play it.

Of course you could, but I think you need to separate. I don’t want to fall into the role of over claiming when it comes to brain science. It’s all about improving, being better than where you were. It’s not about creating geniuses, or super heroes, or people that can do extraordinary things. They exist, and they have trained their brains, and have done amazing things. This is about everyone, mums, dads, kids, people at university, high school, to say whatever level you’re at now there’s science out there that says you could be better.

We didn’t want to spill the beans on some of Todd’s challenges, so we’ll run a follow up interview with Todd when the series wraps. Redesign My Brain is on ABC and iView from Thursday May 28, 2015. It’s a three parter so tune in.