Aaron Brown, on Chat with Traders episode 149, on risk and sleep deprivation.
The other half of risk. In poker at first you can just play quantitatively. You know the numbers, you know the probabilities. At low levels you collected money just by probability. But as you get higher and higher and you start to get some of the best players in the country, you realize there’s a whole other level you gotta get and it’s all done by your unconscious brain. You can’t calculate it, you gotta feel it, and you gotta train your unconscious brain to play poker. It’s a powerful computer up there … but it doesn’t know how to play poker. And your conscious brain is very weak, can’t multiply two three digit numbers together which a computer can do easily. So your conscious brain is relegated tasks like coming up with advertising jingles and wondering which celebrity marriages are in trouble while your unconscious brain handles heartbeat and respiration and whether you’re going to fight or have sex—so you gotta enlist your unconscious brain if you want to be a top level poker player, and that takes a lot of work, and has to be done young I think. You need a lot of sleep deprivation, you need a lot of things where you’re sitting at a table, you’re pushing every penny you have and a lot that you’ve borrowed in the center of the table, and not just without a flicker of emotion that someone might be able to read, but also without blanking out, without letting fear and greed blank out the really small quiet voices you have to hear to tell you what to do, and that’s a real skill, you have to be pretty obsessed to learn it. Once you learn it, you understand the other half of risk. You already knew how to do the math, but you understand the deeper part that you your conscious brain could never understand. Qualitative.
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Sleep deprivation is very powerful. It’s euphoric. It’s very powerful: it stimulates a certain kind of learning that you really can’t do when you’re awake. If you’re playing 72 hours of poker with only a few power naps… and it’s not just sleep deprivation, it’s also operating at a high intensity, you get in touch with your unconscious. At the end of that period you’re much more on speaking terms with your unconscious brain than when you wake up in the morning well-rested after a relaxing day. You need to do that. You really need to know yourself. When I say ‘know yourself’, you gotta know what’s really motivating you to do what you do. We have this neurological research that says almost every, possibly every decision you make, you make before you’re aware of having made it: your conscious brain was not consulted. And yet people think they have reasons for what they do but the fact is, they have to make up those reasons after the fact because their conscious brain didn’t know what they were going to do. Most people who think they know themselves mean they sorta know how they think: they know how their conscious brain explains their actions after the fact, but they really have no idea why they do what they do. Top poker players have to do that. None of this makes any difference in your low-level game with average players, but you wanna play at the top level, you gotta know why you do what you do. And for traders as well, traders you have to know why you do what you do. (Time: 20:16)