Category Archives: science

The beauty of our weapons

Posted on by
Reply

This dagger is radiant with beauty – at least when seen by the one wielding it!

I was playing Daggerfall as a Linguist, probably the most underpowered character class possible to make without hacking the game files. A life on the brink of extinction, running away a lot, progressing slowly.  And then I got my hand on one of the most overpowered items in the whole game, the Dagger of Life Stealing. (Mages Guild, Grayidge, Tulune.)

The surge of elation and confidence was on behalf of my imaginary character, but I still felt it in my physical body. I also noticed just how pretty the thing looked, which was why I took the screenshot. But as the “voice in my heart” pointed out: It probably doesn’t look that good from the other side, that is, for the person it is pointed at. Isn’t that the truth for all weapons?

***

There are also abstract weapons. For instance, here in Norway we talk about the “strike weapon”, when workers go on strike against employers or against some perceived injustice in society. I am sure my friends on the political left see the beauty in this weapon, but it is clear that most people who get stuck at an airport or find their supermarket without milk or their doctor appointment canceled, don’t see the beauty of the weapon so clearly.

Conversely, the members of “Occupy Wall Street” and similar organizations probably fail to see the beauty of a well-ordered troop of policemen coming their way with shields, batons and pepper spray – a beauty that is plain to see for my conservative friends.

So that is the lesson I was told by the Voice in my heart. It would probably have been better if I spent more time with that teacher than with my old flame Daggerfall, but what can I say. This is what happened. Sometimes we forget the obvious: That the beauty of a weapon depends on whether you are behind it or in front of it. Even words can have the power to wound, and I remember the satisfaction of giving a particularly sharp-edged reply. There is a lesson in this for almost everyone, I think.

Big butts, smart babies?

Posted on by
1

Free “are you a scientist” test. (Screenshot Daggerfall – evidently the people of the Alik’r Desert don’t eat much seafood either!)

Scientists are curious people. Evidently they cannot even look at a big butt without thinking. (I know a lot of guys who can look at butts without thinking, but then they never became scientists either.) What they have been thinking is: Why does our species, of all possible species, have this feature?

In most species, sexual selection is a one-way street. Peacocks have those crazy big, colorful tails; the hens are drab and naturally camouflaged for their environment. Male elks have huge antlers, females not. Thus, it seems unlikely that women have big butts because these are sexy. Rather, they are sexy because they are female. Men have adapted to the butts, hips and thighs rather than the other way around. Then why did this feature arise in the first place?

A discovery from back in 2007 may throw some light on this. It seems that the fatty tissues of the lower body contain more of the essential fatty acids, such as omega-3, used to build the baby’s brain. While the fat around the waist and under the skin all around the body contains more omega-6 and others that are mostly used for fuel. When a woman loses weight, she usually lets go of the waist fat first, although there are large genetic differences between ethnic groups and even family lines. Generally speaking, as mother, as daughter. But overall, lower-body fat is quite persistent. During the later parts of pregnancy and during lactation (suckling), the omega-3 fat is dissolved and transferred to the baby. (Of course, in modern societies it is possible to eat enough fat that you can have twins and not lose an ounce. But in the wild, this is harder to achieve.)

I’ll briefly point out that in Japan, where people all over the country eat a diet rich in omega-3 and have done so for a very long time, the vast majority of women have slender hips, almost childlike by western standards. They still have smart babies. Meanwhile the natives of the Kalahari desert, where seafood is about as common as hen’s teeth, are famous for their enormous behinds. Long-standing agricultural societies tend to fall in between these extremes.

Somehow this vaguely interesting discovery caused a brouhaha again this year, after Psychology Today printed an inaccurate and very popularized article about it. Their focus was that men are hardwired to prefer women with a particular waist-to-hip ratio. Evidently this came across as “men know women’s bodies better than women do”, which caused the habitual rage in the hardcore feminist crowd.

And of course socialists generally dislike evolutionary psychology, since it implies that humans are not blank slates on which we can write the gospel of Marx and Lenin and usher in Utopia in our lifetime. Meanwhile, conservatives dislike evolutionary psychology since it implies that humans are some kind of animals and not created in God’s image. Me, I dislike evolutionary psychology because it is usually a thinly veiled attempt to prove that people everywhere and at all times were meant to do whatever is popular in America this decade. But this seems to be an exception, unless Americans have suddenly taken a liking to large hips without telling their supermodels.

Whatever the case may be, there is no reason to despair if you’re pregnant and worried that your thighs are not fat enough. Norway exports affordable cod liver oil to all corners of the world. Order your bottle today! Think of the children! Hubby is encouraged to buy some too, lest the baby absconds with what’s left of wife’s butts. Cod liver oil – rich in essential fatty acids – good for the whole family! ^_^

(Sources? Google “women’s hips contain omega 3”. ^_^)

Too late for Omega-3

Posted on by
Reply

Double duty picture from City of Heroes! According to science, identifying with superheroes can make you stronger. But unfortunately discoveries like these tend to disappear over time, as if Real Life too was a game that gets patched…

I recently bought another box of Omega-3, the super healthy fat. Unfortunately, I was too late. Before I even got started, science had discovered that Omega-3 does not prevent cardiovascular disease after all. I read it on www.forskning.no. (In Norwegian.)

For some years, it has been known that Omega-3 fatty acids have various beneficial effects on blood vessels, and the way it worked was reasonably well understood. Or so we thought. But there is another effect which is poorly understood, a general law that says that a scientific discovery is likely to disappear gradually over time (the Decline Effect).

This is not true for the basics such as gravity or electricity, but more recent (and more complex) discoveries seem to fall under this surprising law. The first independent attempts to replicate the discovery agree that there really is such an effect, and it is surprisingly strong. Theorist then come up with various ways in which the effect can be explained, and new tests are run to pinpoint these. But meanwhile, the effect becomes gradually smaller, and after some years it disappears. This has now happened to the effects of Omega-3 on heart and blood vessels. While we now finally understand how it works, it no longer works, and we don’t understand why. When we didn’t understand how it worked, it worked well enough.

Around the same time, I read that reduced calorie intake did not prolong the lives of rhesus monkeys. Scientists have tested reduced calorie intake (less than 75% of normal) for a wide range of organisms, from nematodes to mice. They stayed youthful longer and exceeded the maximal life expectancy of their species. The monkeys also stayed youthful longer, but died at the normal time anyway. This is bound to be a slap in the face for the people who have gone on a starvation diet to live to see the Singularity. Well, you may want to be youthful longer anyway, but it bears mention in passing that one of the first effects of long-time calorie restriction is that your sex drive goes off and doesn’t get back until you get your fat back. So I guess prayer and fasting really is a good combination for those who want to stay super chaste. But immortality is not so easily achieved.

The most amusing explanation for the fading scientific discoveries is that Real Life is actually a MMRPG (massively multiplayer role playing game) and that the developers patch any unintentional exploits incrementally after they are published. Hey, the developers over on City of Heroes did this with their Mission Architect system. They would patch one exploit, then someone would discover a less powerful exploit, and it was patched too, and so on until the exploits were so mediocre that most people did not really care one way or another. So perhaps the developers of real life are doing the same.

Or perhaps we are just too eager to jump on anything that seems like a loophole in the laws of nature.

Pearls before swine, lots of pearls

Posted on by
Reply

“The poison of jealousy turns even an angel into a devil.” When we go too high above our pray grade, we unleash a universal Constraining Force, which has the power to enrage the swine around us, or even the swine within. This is a fearful thing to unleash.

Recently I have immersed myself in winter and spring of 2010, rereading my first months in Riverview. I sure wrote a lot of worthwhile spiritual and generally good and useful stuff. I received a lot of revelations, and of course I had some from before, so I just kept writing it down. I am not really sure it has been of help to anyone, but perhaps one day it will be. Who knows?

I read a bit in Mouravieff’s Gnosis again. He mentions that those who are trying to break out of the general law – the inertia of the world – should keep silent about spiritual things. It is natural, he says, to want to talk to everyone about the wonderful things you have found. But it will cause the constraining elements of the world to become aware of you and react in various ways, externally and internally. (Resistance from other people, and temptations.) So while you may not need to literally go through your days silent, you should be silent about the spiritual sights you have just seen. He refers then to Christ’s words about not casting pearls before swine or giving to the dogs what is holy. They will just attack you.

That may be so, but if no one ever mentioned the spiritual things, then it would die with them, is that not so?

Well, that is so, but by and large it should be left to those who have achieved lift-off, I guess. Those who have so little to lose, the constraining forces can do little about them except revile them and kill them, which is not enough at that stage. Christ said at the end of his life that the prince of this world was coming “and he has nothing in me”. That is not the case for us newbies. Whether we think so or not, there is actually a lot in us that can be activated by the constraining force of the ordinary world.

But I keep having this notion that if I throw enough pearls before the swine, sooner or later they will lose their footing and fall flat. Since there seems to be an endless supply of pearls – for when you have been given an internal companion from Heaven, no matter how undeserved, there is no end to what could be said – it seemed reasonable to me that I must say all the words that should be spoken, before they are lost forever.

On the internet, nobody can see if you are a dog. Or a swine. I like to think that there are a few out there who are neither. But if I were to think of myself, and what is best for me, then I should probably keep a lower profile. The more we speak up, the more the constraining force will focus upon us, what the ancients called demons and Satan, which attacks both within through temptations and wild emotions, and without through slander and hostility. In one story written down in the gospel, Jesus Christ drove out unclean spirits from a man, and at once they went into a flock of swine. This is unfortunately so even spiritually speaking, that the swine are always receptive to the negative spiritual influences. The more pearls you throw at them, the angrier they get, unaware that what they are being pelted with is supposed to be valuable. We are not talking cuddly piglets here, a crowd of enraged swine is a fearsome thing indeed.

For a beginner such as I – and this is tragic in itself, to be a beginner after all these years and with all this insight – for a beginner, the constraining force may well completely extinguish the spiritual life if I go too high. This is a fact deeply enshrined in all serious spiritual traditions, and also mentioned in Christianity of course: “and not a new convert, so that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation incurred by the devil.” The Devil is the personification of the constraining force, according to Mouravieff. I don’t think it matters here whether you think of the Devil as a person as such, regardless the point stands that it is not something we should mess with just for the hell of it. If we go too far above our pray grade, we become “inflated” as some translations put it, and the constraining force will cause us to fall into damnable actions.

This is not unlike what I experience when I play Go, actually.  See, at the start of a match, it is customary to place stones at strategic spots on the board, with the unspoken intention of declaring the surrounding are one’s own, or to occupy it if you will. But if I start out reaching far into the other side of the board early on, the opponent will react by invading my home territory and cut it apart, and I end up with nothing. Since I am a beginner and don’t have the skill to follow up on bold moves, the best I can do at my present level is to secure a smaller part of the board and wall it off from enemy incursion.

While I believe that my Invisible Friend could easily reveal to me innumerable books of Heavenly wisdom, it is unlikely that I would fail to make a fuss about it, and subsequently be cut to pieces by the constraining force, “an anti-dromedary” as I call it. (Enantiodromia.) When someone who has made a sustained and earnest beginning in spiritual work is gutted like that, the result is usually terrifying. An utter ruin, a destruction on a far more massive scale than the setbacks that anyone can experience in life. I have lived a charmed life so far. Long may it last – but that means not playing Buddha on the Internet.

Butt, meet ice

Posted on by
Reply

“Since I was small I have played hours of Go everyday, no matter how painful, I played Go.” Why would anyone play painful games? Why do people get butthurt several times a day, year out and year in?

Geoff Colvin, in his book Talent is Overrated, has calculated that before you become an Olympic figure-skater, you will have fallen on your butt on the cold hard ice at least 20 000 times, probably much more. No matter how talented you are, there are things the human body can only gradually be shaped into doing, through relentless effort day after day, month after month, for years. I hope those skaters have some kind of pillow on their butt the first 10 000 times at least, because there sure isn’t much protection when they actually perform.

No, I have not suddenly taken an interest in figure skating. I have suddenly taken an interest in the ancient board game of Go, and could not help but compare my situation. I have been reading several tutorials, watched numerous live games at different levels, read up on strategies and solved problems. And when I play against my Galaxy Tab at the easiest level, it cuts me to pieces. I once managed to secure about a third of the board by defending tightly, but it took the rest. If I try for more, it slices me to pieces. That hurts.

I used to always be the smartest guy in my class. Once I moved away from my second cousins, I used to be the smartest student in my class. From high school onward, I used to at least sometimes be the smartest person in my class, teacher included. I was somewhere between the smartest of a hundred and the smartest of a thousand, back in the days. I have not got Alzheimer’s yet, and not slipped on a banana peel and hit my head. The younger generation has crept up on me, that is true; they are smarter than mine was. But I am still not stupid, I like to think. And then this happens. Over and over again. I just can’t learn Go, it seems. Even if I read it from different angles and think I understand it, the moment white invades my territory, I have no idea what to do next. Or if I have, it does not work. My butt meets the cold, hard ice of reality and it hurts.

As I implied in my recent entry about GURPS and real life, I am used to following this principle: “If at first you don’t succeed, try something else; there are lots of things you’ll succeed at right away.” That’s how I’ve lived my life, for the most part. I am used to picking up things easily. It worked before. But this time, I try again – and I still don’t get it. I hope this is not how my life is going to be from now on out. I feel like an ordinary human. It is not a good feeling. Ordinary humans have my sympathy. An abstract and remote sympathy, for the most part. Until now, at least.

Now I wonder: If I try, try, try again – if I do my best and still lose 20 000 times – will I really become a master? Or is talent underrated, and you either got it or not? Am I simply too old? One thing is pretty sure: By the time I have lost 20 000 times, the processing power of the average Android tablet will have risen tenfold. So there is a pretty good chance I’ll still be limping off the scene rubbing my hurting butt, ten years from now.

Or I could do something more meaningful, I guess. If at first you don’t succeed, ask yourself whether it is really worth it…

Chunks of memory

Posted on by
Reply

Your personality doesn’t matter. This is a skill you can learn.

Extreme feats of memory are possible when we remember large quantities of information as one unit, because we have spent so much time with it. We all do this.

I know I have written about this before, already back in the original Chaos Node, where I read about it in an issue of Scientific American. Recently I read about the same thing in the book Talent is overrated. For instance, chess grandmasters could glance at a chess board and later reconstruct it exactly, something no normal person could do. From another ancient board game, Go (or Igo), I know that high-level players not only remember every move of a match, but can often guess how a match has progressed even if they arrive late into it, possibly even at the end. For someone unfamiliar with the game, this seems like magic. And yet we all do the same thing.

Neurotypical humans store incredible amounts of information about the people around them. Not only can they recognize a friend at a glance after several years, they can also keep track of the relationships between everyone in a village: Who are second cousins with who, who are friends, who are enemies, who are in love with who and who were in love with their current enemies years ago. Nobody finds this remarkable in the least, but it is really amazing.

Likewise we are very good at categorizing things. Or dogegorizing, I guees: Even children can usually tell cats and dogs apart, although small children have trouble with really small dogs which may be labeled cats. Even though there are so many different dogs and breeds of dogs, people have this internal concept “dog” which kind sums up the essential elements of doghood and which they remember as a unit, even after many years.

In the same way, if you grew up with your mother, when you think “my mother” you actually remember thousands of things, from how she looked at various ages to details of her behavior and relationships. You don’t consciously think of all these details every time you see her name, but if someone were to say something untrue about her, you would recognize it immediately.

In other words, all of us have the ability to remember very complex things as 1 unit.

Our short term memory is very limited, usually we are able to remember around 7 units of information at the same time. The actual number may vary from 5 to 9 and can be increased with rigorous training. It is the number of digits you can remember while walking from one room to another without repeating them in your mind. But if those digits are familiar, the number suddenly increases dramatically. For instance, to me the 6 digits 271258 count as 1 unit of information: It is my date of birth in the format used in this part of the world, ddmmyy. So I would be able to remember 6 more digits while leaving the room. Yes, strange as this may seem, I have an average short-term memory. I have tested this.

***

The computer language Forth caught my attention toward the end of high school. It was little more than a rumor back then, some new-fangled invention from the States. Personal computers were something hobbyists built themselves, and pitifully weak. A corporate mainframe at that time was perhaps a match for a smartphone today. OK, perhaps a little more. Let’s say a smartphone next year. But only a few years later, I had my own personal computer, weak though it was, and was programming in Forth.

This particular computer language had a peculiar structure. The basic language was very simple, consisting of a stack for data and a set of basic “words” that were coded in machine language, either directly or with an assembler. These were very simple commands which would be defined differently from computer to computer because of the hardware, but which (ideally) had the same names and function on all computers. But this was not what fascinated me. Rather, you could define new words by combining the old ones. The new words could be used in the same way to combine into more words. By keeping the definitions short and simple, the risk of errors was greatly diminished, and it was easy to test the new words right away. Yet there was no obvious limit to what you could do. There was very little overhead in having many levels of definitions.

The reason this appealed to me is that I am a verbal person. I think in a very similar way to this computer language, building new concept from existing concept. As long as I keep it simple, I can trust the knowledge I build from basic, and I can test it.

***

When you spend a lot of time doing something, whether it is programming or chess or surgery, you acquire what is called “domain knowledge” within that area. And when this knowledge becomes a part of you, something as natural to you as cats and dogs and family and friends, you begin to be able to think of it in chunks. The chess player can remember every piece on the board because not only the pieces are familiar to him, but the possible configurations too. He has seen them many times: When this particular group of pieces appear on this part of the board, it means certain risks and opportunities that are very real to him. He has no need to memorize this particular picture: He has seen it before, repeatedly, and it has meaning to him.

When I learned to read, I had to learn the alphabet like people did for generations before me. I hear that this is no longer considered very important, people start looking at words as pictures right away. But words still consists of letters, and sentences consist of words, paragraphs of sentences and so on. When you remember a poem or a particularly moving passage from a book, you don’t try to recall each individual letter in turn. Like the programming language, the “primitives” – the basic components – soon become buried in higher-level structures. Reading and writing are themselves everyday examples of structured knowledge. And as with the programming language, there is no obvious upper limit. Scholars will hold entire books conceptually in their mind – not word by word probably, but still in a very real sense whole books – and compare them to arrive at a higher meaning from the way the books agree or disagree. If we were wiser and lived longer lives, who knows what we could achieve?

Humans, it seems to me, are not proportionate to the savanna or the shores from which the “naked ape” emerged, but rather proportionate to the infinite. As better men than I have noticed, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe may be that it is so comprehensible. At least now we know a little bit more about ourselves as well.

Deliberately reading a book

Posted on by
2

Of this, I approve. One should show respect for the gate that leads to the hidden truths! If high school kids had to perform a reverent invocation to be allowed through the school gates, they might learn more. Well, better late than never!

Still reading Talent is overrated by Geoff Colvin. It is not hard to read, at least for me. Obviously this varies, and I want to talk about this first.

Mortimer Adler writes in his (no longer so famous) book How to Read a Book that you won’t learn much from a book that is easy to read. That means you already know most of what the author knows, and already think the same way the author does. But if the book is hard to read, there may be two reasons for this: Either the author writes badly, or he is so far above you in knowledge or understanding that you have to struggle to get up to his level.

This, ironically, equates with what Colvin writes about one aspect of “deliberate practice”: It must be in the “learning zone” between the comfort zone and the panic zone. If you stay down in the comfort zone where you already know how to do things, you may have a good time, but you don’t grow. If you go too far above your current skill level, you enter the panic zone where you don’t even know where to begin. You must stay between these to make progress.

Back to Mortimer Adler, who I hope will become more relevant now that Kindle and its competitors have caused a great renaissance of the book. If an author writes badly and you are already on his level, you should be able to see through the bad writing and judge his skill, at which point you may just as well give up on the book (unless you are tasked to review it, I suppose).

But if you are below the author’s level (in that particular field), you have to read the book systematically to extract not only the factual information but the way of thinking which separates the teacher from the student – the book is the teacher, in this case. Most of Adler’s book consists of detailed descriptions of how to go about this. It is systematic, it is a lot of work, and it is not particularly fun. Yes, that means it is a “deliberate practice” as defined by Colvin and (more importantly) the scientists he popularizes, notably Anders Ericsson. In this case, a deliberate practice of thinking.

If you are above the author’s level, you should be able to understand it handily even if the writing is less than perfect. Of course, horrible writing can make even the simplest thought obscure, as Esaias Tegner famously remarks: “The obscurely spoken is the obscurely thought” (“Det dunkelt sagda är det dunktelt tänkta”). However, as mentioned above, the converse is also true: Something may sound obscure to you because your thinking is obscure. So if you are an expert, people need to be really obscure for you not to understand them.

Since I am not an expert in the science of skill development, I think we can safely say that Geoff Colvin writes quite clearly. Since I don’t have a problem following the text when written clearly, he writes at a level close to my current understanding. (He probably has to “dumb down” to do so, of course.) So if you can read me, you should easily be able to read Colvin.

Adler is another matter entirely. He’s so high, high above me. Despite the clarity of his writing, I need to work deliberately to absorb his book. Perhaps I should give it another go, now that I have seen the same thing from a different angle.

GURPS skills and real life

Posted on by
Reply

“Right now, he is he only thing on my mind.” No, he is (probably) not gay, he is talking about his rival in the ancient board game of Go. But some of us find it impossible to only have one thing on our mind… we are a natural born flutterby.

Still winding my way through the friendly, readable and inspirational book Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. Another thought that struck me was comparing it to GURPS – Steve Jackson’s Generic Universal Role Playing System, originally developed for pen & paper roleplaying games.

In GURPS, a high intelligence will give you a flying start on all mental skills. Then again, it costs a lot of character creation points to get that genius IQ in the first place. You still have to put half a point into any skill you want to learn. This corresponds to learning the rules of chess, for instance. Basically you need a passing familiarity with something, and from there on you can wing it, if you are smart. You won’t be really good at it, but you have a decent chance of success as long as the odds are not stacked against you.

This approach naturally lends itself to a “jack of all trades, master of none”. If you have a character point to invest, you could use it to get somewhat better at a skill you are already winging. Or you could pick up two new. It is hard to stop such a person from winging like a butterfly (or flutterby, as I like to call them) from one skill to the next.

In contrast, someone of average intelligence (or barely even that) will face a completely different choice when he has a point to spend. If he wastes it on picking up new skills, he will still not be competent enough to use them except on a good day with the wind and the sun at his back. Better to invest it in a skill he already knows. Even when he has invested enough in one skill that he is unlikely to fail except the most challenging tasks, the alternative value of spending points on something else is so low, he may just as well go on to become a master even if he only needs it once in a blue moon.

I think this is a pretty realistic portrayal, given that I used to have a high IQ myself when I was young. (It has probably declined somewhat since then.) I did exactly this same thing, fluttered by one skill after another. I picked up some German, a little French, bits and pieces of Esperanto, Icelandic and Finnish. But I never really learned enough to have a meaningful conversation in any foreign language except English, which was my third language.  It was the same with games, musical instruments, cooking, Earth sciences etc. I can bluff my way through a lot of things, but anyone who has studied a skill seriously would see right through me.

I think this is a major reason why talent plays so little role in mastery. Talent rarely is that specific. Rather, you are probably talented in several things if you are in one, and when you are as better than the other newbies, you think you are going to excel without effort, and so you start spreading yourself. By the time you realize that is not how it works, the desperately diligent are far ahead of you, even though they started behind you. Because they are single-minded in their effort.

Well, that is how I see it today. But at this stage of my life, I am not really interested in excellence in anything less than life itself. Not that I am doing too well with that either. But even if I have 30 years left before I start to unravel – and that is if I can dodge cancer and random accidents – I cannot really think of anything worth pursuing singlemindedly except the betterment of the soul. And I don’t think IQ helps much in that regard.

Talent is misunderstood

Posted on by
Reply

The secret to Hikaru’s success is that he learns something regardless of whether he wins or loses. If he loses a game, the important thing to him is that he got stronger – that he learned something he can use in the future. Is this talent?

I’ve bought the Kindle version of the book Talent is overrated by Geoff Colvin. It is liked and quoted by Farnam Street, the wisdom-seeking blog, which is a pretty good recommendation. Even Bjørn Stærk has been known to retweet Farnam Street occasionally.

I have only read 19% yet, but it strikes me how similar the impact is to the Japanese manga and animeHikaru no Go, which I have been rewatching lately. (It is no coincidence: One of the Farnam Street quotes got me to start watching it once more.) The book of course is more scholarly than the fiction, although the book is also very accessible at least for us who are used to reading non-fiction.

As the name of the book signals, the author believes that talent either does not exist or is unimportant. The great masters throughout history became great because they started early, were schooled by experts and continued practicing for a long time. For instance, Mozart’s father was a composer and teacher who trained his son from early childhood. Even so, the early works are unremarkable. It was only as a young adult that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart came into his amazing abilities. And even after that, people did not realize how amazing these were until later – in other words, his semi-divine status is a later addition. In his own time, he was just one of the greats.

There are various such anecdotes and scientific studies quoted, all of them implying that being “gifted” (intelligent, in general or in some specific category) only matters in the beginning. After years of practice, only the practice matters. Those who did the right type of practice and lots of it, they are the ones who become grand masters. Those who practiced less or stayed in their comfort zone during practice, they become the also-ran.

This may be so. But I don’t think we should underestimate talent either. I think so based on my own experience, but also an interesting detail that I picked up elsewhere. It turns out that a disproportionate number of athletes are born in January. Now you may think this is proof of astrology, but even astrology does not claim this. Besides, the number of successful athletes continue to drop over the months, to a minimum in December. The explanation is of course that kids start school depending on the year they were born. And they do so at a young age, where months of lifetime still count. So the ones born in January are nearly a year older than those born in December. Naturally they are better at sports. They are bigger, stronger and have better control of their bodies. If there is a competition, they win, and if not, they still get more praise and encouragement. This causes them tolikesports, and do more of it, and over the course of growing up this makes them athletes.

This is my model of how talent works. Talent is when you can practice something so intensely that you make progress, and like it. I know I did with programming. I rarely left my “comfort zone” in the sense that I always did it for fun. Sure it took some thinking, but I enjoyed it. My intelligence and particular talent for programming was the equivalent of being born on January 1st for an athlete. Because it came easier to me, I did more of it; and the more I did, the easier it became. I did not even need to be praised, the feeling of accomplishment, the feeling of succeeding was enough for me. And so it became possible for me to create the debt collection software that my best friend’s father made a living from selling for some years, and which helped Norwegian companies save millions.

Of course, the mysterious entities that projected solutions to programming problems into my brain telepathically also deserve credit. But I am told that such muses are common in many arts. You may call them a form of talent too, I suppose?

Back to the anime Hikaru no Go. The secondary character Touya Akira is the son of one of Japan’s best Go players (a board game played with white and black stones) and the son (an only child, it seems) is trained from he is little more than a toddler. This is exactly the recipe for creating super “talented” people according to Geoff Colvin’s book. The main character Shindou Hikaru has a more peculiar origin, as the ghost of an ancient Go player attaches itself to him toward the end of junior high school. His original success is as a medium for the ghost, which causes Touya to blink him out as his rival. This becomes Shindou’s motivation for practicing day and night once it is him and not the ghost that plays. He learns first from spending every day of the summer vacation watching the game, and later from playing every day. He plays against ever harder opponent, getting out of his comfort zone, exactly as recommended by the book. And he gets timely feedback, another crucial factor. From the book, it is not hard to guess that these two boys are going to go far.

So, the anime is a great way to learn what talent really is. But if you want to go outside your comfort zone, by all means buy Colvin’s book. ^_^

Brainwave entrainment and sleep, again

Posted on by
2

Open your mind and let the New Age of Technology in! Messing around with your brain waves may sound scary, but that’s what they thought about flying too. And before that, running faster than horses. If God wanted us to go beyond our limitations, He would have given us the ability to create!

An online friend complained about insomnia again, so I hurried to recommend delta brainwave entrainment. This little masterpiece of modern science can replace up to 2 hours of sleep with half an hour of entrainment. Beyond that, you run into rapidly diminishing returns – it is not possible to replace sleep entirely, not even if you use several different frequencies of brainwave entrainment. Still, it is pretty impressive.

Unfortunately, it turns out my friend had experimented with brainwave entrainment in the past, on my recommendation, but experienced side effects that were worse than her lack of sleep. Even 10 minutes of delta entrainment caused blurred vision, sometimes migraine, and once she even experienced a seizure afterwards (although it is unclear whether this actually came from the entrainment). Unsurprisingly, she then gave up on the project, despite observing the almost magical effects of the technology.

It is more the rule than the exception that you will experience something when you first start using brainwave entrainment, especially if you start with delta, which is the slowest brainwave frequencies and only dominates naturally during our deepest sleep. So yeah, expect the unexpected. But for most people, the side effects are pleasant or just plain weird. Pain or neurological distortions like blurred vision or temporary loss of short-term memory are rare and typically symptoms of excessive use. The only permanent damage I have heard of is one user who got tinnitus, ringing in the ears. Given the thousands of users of brainwave entrainment, it is as likely as not that the fellow would have developed the problem during the same time period regardless. But who knows. Still, the odds are pretty good that you will benefit, and it is very unlikely that you will malefit, as it were.

Still, I recommend the LifeFlow approach of starting with a more accessible frequency. The LifeFlow program starts at 10 Hz, which is similar to a beginner’s meditation, or the relaxed feeling of lounging in a Stressless chair. It is recommended to use this for 40 minutes a day for two months before moving on to 9 Hz, a slightly deeper form of alpha wave, similar to what you experience the last few minutes before falling asleep. It continues this way down to 1 Hz, which is solid delta and comparable to deep sleep. During a night of sleep, you are unlikely to have delta after the first two sleep cycles unless you are a child. A sleep cycle is 90 minutes, and consists of several phases, so few adults and virtually no elderly get as much as 30 minutes of it naturally. Children do, however, and I don’t think delta entrainment is useful for them. They should get the opportunity to sleep naturally.

As I mentioned, the value of delta entrainment in connection with sleep is that it provides a type of brainwave that we need but which we don’t get much of as we grow older. Sleep consists of four phases, but two of them are particularly important. Deep sleep with delta waves is one of them. The other is REM sleep, or intense lifelike dreaming. Delta occurs naturally only at the beginning of the night, while REM increases gradually with each cycle through the night. Again, children have more of both, elderly less. In fact, elderly often go nights without delta at all, but also have less REM. Their dreams are often so prosaic that they wake up thinking they have not slept at all, despite snoring loudly!  When humans – and even animals – are kept awake for a long time, they catch up by having more delta and REM sleep the first night they are allowed to sleep again. This is a pretty good hint that these sleep phases are particularly important.

We don’t know any way to induce REM electronically. Sex will do it in rabbits, or so I have read. But delta waves we can create with precise sound patterns. All you need to do is close your eyes. You don’t even have to think about England. As long as you refrain from intense, primal emotions – fear, anger, lust or disgust – the entrainment will work its magic. You can even worry a little, if you feel the urge, just don’t panic.

But to reduce the risk of creepy side effects, I recommend starting with lighter frequencies (alpha or at least theta) and perhaps even shorter time spans in the beginning. Notice that most side effects are actually either pleasant or just psychedelic, but they are still distracting. The less you think about the experience, the better really. Just close your eyes, relax and let the sound wash over you.

I have an MP3 player with delta tracks beside me on my bed. That way, if I go to bed early enough to not fall asleep instantly, I can spend the time relaxing with delta waves. It is pretty nifty. I am a lot more awake at work than I used to be – I used to need to nap twice or thrice during most workdays, although my naps were brief – and I can now work full days instead of 90%. I still have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome and perhaps I will for the rest of my life, but at least now I can do something to reduce the impact on my life.

I should admit that I am not sure it all comes from the brainwave entrainment, I made other changes in my life too. I learned laws of the mind from Happy Science and started to read esoteric books of timeless wisdom by Christian and near-Christian philosophers during the same time frame. It may even be a combination of several of these. Perhaps the passing of a couple years count as well, midlife changes and all that. But from a scientific point of view, when it comes to the effect on daytime sleepiness, brainwave entrainment is the main suspect.

A bit more enthusiastic than me, this fellow LifeFlow user escaped psychiatric hell by the power of brainwave entrainment. There are a number of such stories among the LifeFlow regulars.  His review is here at MeditationStars.