☕️ saturday mornings #19
☕️ saturday mornings #19
being unreasonable, superheroes and supercharging memory
Hi all,
I hope you’re having a lovely start to your Saturday.
Below is your edition of “saturday mornings”, a weekly recap of what I’ve been testing, learning and exploring over the past few days. Thanks for being here.
✍️Quote I’ve been thinking about:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw
📕Book passage I loved:
The superheroes you have in your mind (idols, icons, elite athletes, billionaires, etc.) are nearly all walking flaws who’ve maximized one or two strengths. Humans are imperfect creatures. You don’t “succeed” because you have no weaknesses; you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them… Everyone is fighting a battle [and has fought battles] you know nothing about… Everyone struggles.
— Tim Ferriss, Tools of Titans
The main idea I took away was that the “successful” people that I look up to probably aren’t as bulletproof as they seem. Just because I don’t know about their failures or shortcomings, doesn’t mean they don’t exist (evidence of absence is not absence of evidence).
And I think that realization can help to ease the pressure or lower the stakes a bit to fail or be imperfect. No one is perfect, but you don’t have to be to still end up alright.
To take that to an extreme, some of the most successful people are also some of the most flawed. A lot of “successful” people in society’s eye are some of the unhappiest. Extreme strengths are often compensated by extreme weaknesses (for example, Nikola Tesla was in love with a pigeon).
In a different vein, I still remember my science teacher in Grade 10 telling me that he always tries to be kind to everyone he interacts with because you never know what someone is going through in their life on any given day. “Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about.”
💡Idea I’m exploring:
Sleep and memory consolidation
With midterms around the corner for a lot of students, I came across some interesting research on sleep’s relationship with memory formation that may be helpful.
Matthew Walker, PhD conducted a series of experiments with the simple question: how does sleep, or a lack of sleep, impact the brain’s ability to learn?
As you go about your day, your brain takes in a ton of information (from interactions with people, reading, thinking etc.). Fact based information is stored in a region of the brain called the hippocampus, which provides a place for temporary information storage (to accumulate new memories). However, the hippocampus has limited storage capacity.
When you sleep, your brain is hard at work interpreting the day’s events and all the information it collected, and shifts short-term memories from the hippocampus into longer-term storage in the brain. Effectively clearing out the hippocampus and providing a refreshed capacity to absorb new information.
In this study, a group of people who took a 30 minute nap in the middle of the day had a 20% learning advantage in retaining “textbook information” versus a control group that did not sleep.
Additionally, sleeping after learning protects newly acquired information as improves the brain’s ability to consolidate memories. The morning after learning, the group that slept 8 hours versus a group that slept 6 hours had a memory retention benefit of 20-40%.
In short, “sleep six hours or less and you are short changing the brain of it’s ability to learn”.
❓Question for reflection:
What if I did the opposite for 48 hours?
This question is deceptively simple but packs a lot of punch.
At its core, it prompts me to question my underlying assumptions. I’ve come to realize a lot of the assumptions I make about how the world works are often inaccurate or just plain wrong.
Through asking yourself this question, you can put those assumptions to the test. Create short and low risk experiments, see what’s actually true and refine my assumptions accordingly. As far as I can tell, that iterative process is how breakthroughs or life improvement occurs.
To make myself sound a little less crazy, I’ll give a topical example.
In my first few years of university I made the subconscious assumption that the more I studied the better I would do. Time and effort = results. It makes sense, right? That’s the way I thought the world worked, or should work, and I never questioned it.
But last exam period, I asked myself “what if I did the opposite for 48 hours?” What if I studied hard for 4 hours a day (scientifically proven maximum time period for critical thinking) and got adequate sleep, exercise and social interaction? Testing the assumption that hard work and time = better results.
And, it turned out my initial assumption was wrong. I had some of the best results of any set of exams I’d written, while having more time left over and having a lot more fun.
Better results don’t always mean harder work and more effort.
That’s all for this week’s edition of “saturday mornings”.
And, as always, please give me feedback by replying to this email or give me a shout on Twitter. Which topic above is your favourite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know.
Thank you for reading, I really appreciate the support. Have a great weekend.
Much love to you and yours,
Thomas