Mind-Manual

Stuck on a Problem? Take a Nap!

Sleeping and napping help integrate new information into your brain. For example, if you are studying something and take a nap afterwards, your recall of the material is much higher. This principle also applies to exercise where the actual growth takes place after the workout when you’re resting. Similarly when learning a new physical skill, you can often notice a marked improvement the next day. You might also notice a worse effect if you keep at it too long, and might notice better results from short periods of intense learning alternating with lots of rest.

The lay-theory that I’m aware of is that dreams help understand the day’s work. Another interesting theory for dreaming is that it is a testing and improvement of our ability to model the world. In any case, this is a fairly robust finding. I’ve personally experienced this many times when I didn’t understand something before I went to bed but did when I woke up. Recently, I’ve been learning Dvorak, a new keyboard layout, and every day there is a marked improvement overnight. For example, yesterday I was typing at 12 words per minute, today I’m upto 21, overnight.

This seems weird if you think about it because our mental model of our minds is that it’s like a computer (a consequence of the cognitive revolution in psychology) but we don’t and we have to learn how to work with our minds to get the best results.

Here’s an XKCD comic for you:

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Breast Cancer has the Best Marketing

I know of women who are worried about getting breast cancer. Not for any specific reason that relate to their odds, such as having a family member with it, just worried about it. Knowing that human beings suck at probabilities, I decided to look up the actual odds of getting breast cancer and try to create a “rational” scale of fear of possibilities. Turns out breast cancer is around 35th of killers, behind people voluntarily taking their own lives and road traffic accidents. The highest (other than old age) is heart disease. So, if you’re more worried about dying from something, worry about everything on the list until you reach that thing. So, for example, if I had a “rational” model of fear, and I was afraid of say respiratory diseases, I have to be afraid of cardiovascular diseases (almost 30% of all deaths), infections and parasites (~19%), Ischemic heart disease(~12.5%), cancers in general (~12.5%), and strokes(~10%). Adding all those up, I’m already 84% scared for my life. Breast cancer accounts for about 0.84% of killers globally.

Now, I don’t really want to suggest that women are more afraid of breast cancer because breast cancer has better marketing (which it does), but I believe that, ironically, though, the pervasive fear with breast cancer (unless you’re actively facing it) seems to be not that you will die, but that a mastectomy will be required. This is particularly scary for a few reasons: our sense of identity tends to include all our body parts, but gender-specific body parts more so and this applies for both men and women. This may well be presumptious but I believe it is a loss of something fundamental to your identity that causes this fear.

Then again, I may be wrong about all this. I am indeed way out of my depth and feel a little like perhaps Steven Levitt the economist felt when trying to tell people that after 2 years of age, a seat belt is just about as safe as a complicated and expensive car seat in saving kid’s lives and injuries at TED.

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