Sanskratio

The article from Business 2.0 (I suppose) titled Jeff Hawkins and the Brain contains an inspiring quote from Bill Atkinson —one of the early designers at Apple Computers:

What Numenta is doing is more fundamentally important to society than the personal computer and the rise of the Internet.

Says the article: "Atkinson pulled himself out of semiretirement to become one of the first outside developers of Numenta software."

So after reading William Dement's The Promise of Sleep I've decided to put on a serious effort to sleep more. The main lesson from the book is the simple way sleep debt works: it adds up and you have to pay it back. Say your daily sleep need is eight hours a night. If you sleep less than that, your sleep debt increases, if more, it decreases. You can manage quite a lot of sleep debt, but you will feel fatigured and tired all the time.

The first step in my project was to start tracking my sleep time. My goal was to sleep more than eight hours on average and so far I have not been very successful. Graph below shows my daily sleep time in hours and how much I've been gaining or losing sleep compared to eight hours a day.

Two of the reasons for this are our children who wake up typically at around 7am. But nevertheless, I haven't quite gone to bed early enough. Right now, I'm on a good run with my sleep time and on my way back to the zero level. That's where I started and was determined to start sleeping more than eight hours. It is my goal to sleep over 20 hours extra over eight hours per day until the end of the summer.

The low point in the graph was during the end of the May. At that time, I wasn't following the graph that closely, but I vividly remember complaining about my tiredness. I was texting my wife during the day that I can barely stay awake and I was complaining my tiredness in Facebook updates. All of which shouldn't come as a surprise looking at the graph now.

I'm still tired during the day, but I'm optimistic about getting back to actually sleeping more than eight hours on average. Of course, I don't know if my daily sleep need is just eight hours a day, but with the subjective measures I've done during the two months I've been tracking my sleep, I'm pretty sure that I need at least close to eight hours and probably not a lot more.

If I had to sleep say close to eight and half hours a day, I would have accumulated a significant amount of sleep debt during the two months and wouldn't be close to this energetic that I'm now. That said, I have a better idea of my sleep requirement when I actually get to the point that I awake completely rested and refreshed.

Don't make big decisions. Develop habits instead. Good habits.

I just realized, again, that the function of bookmarking services like delicious.com is not to keep interesting links in store, but to make them disappear. It's always pretty much the same sequence of events: I stumble on an interesting writing or page, I realize that I don't have time or the energy to read the thing. So I click the "to delicious" button and I will quite likely never visit that page again. As soon as I click "save", I feel that the link is there safely and I don't have to worry about it anymore. Which in turn means that I forget about it.

Well, sometimes I do end up visiting the page again and sometimes it might be that the only way to find it is through the backlog of links in delicious.com. But for the vast majority of links, these bookmarking applications only serve as graveyards. Bookmark to forget.

Start writing more.

Note to self:

I don't want to draw too wild conclusions about this yet, but I accidentally skipped two days of taking Omega-3 supplements and I had extreme difficulties to concentrate and a really distracted mind at work. The incident might very well have been just an accident, but the difference in feeling was pretty concrete and significant.

I'm pretty sure I'm not a "real ADHD" insofar as concentration problems haven't been ruining my life or anything. I do feel that my relative inability to focus (at times) has had a negative impact on various aspect of my life, but it's not like I cannot function most of the time or anything. But anyhow, the feeling at work, which I did recognize as a familiar feeling from my past (I've had a leave of absence from work for over a year just recently), was pretty much what I imagine real ADHDs feel.

It's not like I would constantly feel an urge to check if I have new email or if there's anything new on the web. It's more like the whole mind is completely distracted and it feels almost impossible to focus on anything. It's like a buzz inside the head. The idea of starting something feels almost painful. (Luckily there's always something one can do even if some big task seems, at the time, impossible to get started with.)

The strange thing is that this feeling occurred just after couple of days of missing my Omega-3 supplements. After starting taking those supplements, I recall feeling pretty "normal" most of the time I'm working. But like I said, I'm not sure what the real reason was. Sometimes I get distracted by the nature of the work I have to do during the day. For example, a lot of different tasks concurrently usually distracts the mind.

Now, I do track my mood during the workday, but so far I haven't looked at the data. It will take a whole lot more than just couple of days, because my work days are so different that it takes time to eliminate the effect of different types of work days from these measurements.

I've been doing on and off all sorts of small scale self-improvement type of stuff lately. It's funny how it all seems easier when the goal is to improve cognitive performance instead of general health. I'm much more concerned of how my brains work than I'm of my health in general. Whether or not my focus should be on cognitive performance is irrelevant. It's just how it is for me.

Anyhow, the most effective changes are really rather unsurprising. Diet, exercise and sleep. Especially sleep. Just by fixing these three you'd get a clear improvement on your day-to-day life. Taking Omega-3 supplements will probably improve your cognition too.

But it's not enough that I found a better goal. I need to measure the performance of my cognition too. What's been holding me back is that it's difficult to come up with a good metric for this type of elusive goal. The solution, however, is not to find the perfect metric for various aspects of one's cognitive performance but to start measuring something and to fine-tune to process later.

I don't know how to react to these sort of self-questionnaires about ADD. They seem to indicate that I might have some sort of attention problem, but then again I feel like my answers are the only way anyone could feel. But I guess not all feel this way.

Adult Self-Report Scale-V1.1 (ASRS-V1.1) Screener

1. How often do you have trouble wrapping up the final details of a project once the challenging parts have been done?

Always.

2. How often do you have difficulty getting things in order when you have to do a task that requires organization?

Very often.

3. How often do you have problems remembering appointments or obligations?

Often.

4.When you have a task that requires a lot of thought, how often do you avoid or delay getting started?

Almost always.

5. How often do you fidget or squirm with your hands or feet when you have to sit down for a long time?

Somewhat often.

6. How often do you feel overly active and compelled to do things, like you were driven by a motor?

Sometimes, not too often.

An aside: 'HTM' has got to be worst term as far as googlability goes:

Results 1 - 10 of about 2,360,000,000 for HTM. (0.15 seconds)

One thing I find lacking in the Ubiquity Command Editor is that in order to try out a function I've coded I can't just execute it directly. Let's say I've programmed a function called adder, like this:

 function adder(x, y) {
   return x + y;
 }
 

As far as I know, there's no direct way to test whether the function works as intended. So I made this Ubiquity command that I named 'evaly' that eval()s the parameter to the 'evaly' command and prints its result to the output pane.

So now I can fire up Ubiquity and write:

 evaly adder(10, 20) do
 

which outputs:

 The output of your function is: '30'
 

(The 'do' in the end is there so that the command doesn't try to eval () when I'm typing the command.)

Now, it's pretty limited and certainly has bugs, but I found it pleasant that it was this easy to make this sort of command that I find useful in my own development. Pretty cool.

Here's the command (just a ten minute sketch, but there you go):

 CmdUtils.CreateCommand({
   name: "evaly",
   description: "evaly: evaluates arbitrary text",
   help: "eval()s first parameter if last parameter is 'do'",
   takes: {"input": noun_arb_text},
   preview: function( pblock, input ) {
     var args = input.text.split(" ");
     if (args[args.length-1] == 'do') {
       var input_str = "";
       for (i = 0; i < args.length-1; i++) {
         input_str += args[i];
       }
       var s = "var x = " + input_str + ";";
       eval(s);
       pblock.innerHTML = "Output of your command: '" + x + "'";
     }
   },
   execute: function(input) { } 
 });