Casey Watts

The human brain is buggy. Sometimes your mind distorts reality, gets frustrated with shortcomings, and spirals out of control. With practice, you can debug your brain. Catch those distortions of reality, transform those frustrations into insight, and short-circuit those downward spirals.

This talk is full of practical techniques, explained via programming metaphors. Each technique is condensed to its core idea, accompanied by just enough story to make it memorable. Specifically: Modeling The Brain, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Introspection, Identifying Inputs, Experience Processing, Experience Validation, and Cognitive Restructuring.

This talk brings together two parts of Casey’s background: psychology and software development. Casey studied neurobiology at Yale University, and he is a co-author on several neurobiology papers. He has worked in software development for 10 years, including at Heroku.