Sanskratio

I mentioned earlier about the similarities to Hawkins's theories I found in the book The i of the vortex by Rodolfo Llinás. Re-reading On Intelligence, I noticed that Jeff himself mentioned Llinás in the book, which is of course not surprising at all in hindsight. But it was funny to notice my enthusiasm compared to the fact that the reference to Llinás was there all along.

I have some free time on my hands and I just spent an hour cleaning up our apartment. An hour might not sound like a big deal, but with two little children those moments of complete solitude are few and far between.

Anyhow, I, in fact, regard this cleaning itself rather pointless. Yeah, one has to clean from time to time and it does bring some sort of satisfaction to have cleaned up. But I might as well have spent the hour doing something completely different, or do nothing at all, and I would have been just as well off. I could have cleaned up later.

So the real reason I devoted that hour to cleaning is that I know that I would have had a little nagging feeling about not cleaning up at all. Maybe I would have cleaned later, who knows, but I sure would have suffered from the nagging voice in my head. Now that I have cleaned, as pointless as the operation itself might have been, I can enjoy doing whatever else I'm going to do without that (irrational) guilty feeling. An hour seems like an appropriate amount to invest to this better feeling in my head.

And it is nice that the apartment is much cleaner now.

There's two instances of myself, the one which I think is my true self which is the ongoing conscious being that's inside my head and the one that leaves traces in written text (and other media), such as in this weblog. I find that the one I think is my true self seems much more intelligent and wise. I'm fine with that, but I feel like it's the intelligence and wisdom of the other me that I should be focusing on. It lags behind on the intelligence and wisdom department, but it's the one that leaves any marks outside of my own brain.

If you know what I mean. (Probably not, because this is the stupider of the two that's actually talking to you.)

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.