The Creativity Elixir: Is Genius On-Demand Possible?

After much experimentation, I figured out my personal recipe for creativity on-demand: circadian scheduling, altered states, and white noise. Huh? It’s actually simple…

1. Time it: Determine your most prolific creative period during a normal 24-hour period. It took me a long time to accept 1-5am as my best hours, which was the only timing that provided consistent progress. I also distinguish between idea generation and idea “creation” (combination into a meaningful whole). 1-3pm was spent brainstorming fragmented concepts and anecdotes, as well as interviewing and note taking. I would circle the best ideas and then put them in order at 1am for an attempt at synthesis.

I don’t believe that it is possible to do more than 4 hours of good creative work per waking cycle. This can be extended only slightly by caffeine power naps (down a cup of espresso and then take a 20-minute nap) or “ultra-naps” that are multiples of the 90-minute ultradian cycle (I prefer 90 minutes or 3 hours).

2. Biochemically Fine-Tune. I found by accident that my best sessions all followed a specific ratio: 3 cups of yerba mate tea for each glass of wine consumed. 3:1. I also like adding a little theobromine with a few E. Guittard 72% cacao chocolate cooking chips every 20 minutes or so.

{ Tim Ferris | Continue reading }

{ Why Summer Begins Monday | Artwork: Richard Prince, Untitled (Sunset), 1981 }

Children with Tourette’s Syndrome, the neurodevelopmental condition characterised by involuntary motor and verbal tics, have superior timing abilities compared with their healthy age-matched peers, a new study suggests.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

If you have an imagination, you don’t have to be the protagonist in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine to travel through time. If you’ve ever eagerly awaited (or painfully dreaded) an upcoming birthday, recalled winning the lottery (don’t you wish), or fantasized about eating lunch while listening to your teacher drone on about why the river in the novel symbolizes the birth of modern civilization, you’ve mentally traveled through time.

Mental time travel is what got me through some of my postdoctoral days; watching spots (proteins) move across a computer screen was usually less than riveting. Besides alleviating boredom, the ability to use past experience (retrospection) to predict future scenarios (prospection) is extremely useful; you’ll be far more careful about when and where you leave your bicycle outside if it gets stolen.

{ National Association of Science Writers | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Kalvar }

Why human lifespan is rapidly increasing: solving “longevity riddle” with “revealed-slow-aging” hypothesis.

Healthy life span is rapidly increasing and human aging seems to be postponed. … To explain current increase in longevity, I discuss that certain genetic variants such as hyper-active mTOR (mTarget of Rapamycin) may increase survival early in life at the expense of accelerated aging. In other words, robustness and fast aging may be associated and slow-aging individuals died prematurely in the past. Therefore, until recently, mostly fast-aging individuals managed to survive into old age. The progress of civilization (especially 60 years ago) allowed slow-aging individuals to survive until old age, emerging as healthy centenarians now.

{ fightaging | Continue reading }

An ‘immortal’ jellyfish is swarming through the world’s oceans, according to scientists.

Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span. Scientists say the hydrozoan jellyfish is the only known animal that can repeatedly turn back the hands of time and revert to its polyp state (its first stage of life).

{ Yahoo Green | Continue reading | Telegraph }

photo { Jackson Eaton }

{ A beam of light is depicted travelling between the Earth and the Moon in the same time it takes light to scale the distance between them: 1.255 seconds at its mean orbital (surface to surface) distance. The relative sizes and separation of the Earth–Moon system are shown to scale. | Wikipedia | Related: Where is the best clock in the universe? The widespread belief that pulsars are the best clocks in the universe is wrong, say physicists. }

it always makes me perplexed when people refuse eternal youth. […] ulysses: ‘i’m glad someone invented death.’

When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.

But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion. (…)

These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. (…)

Updating your mesofacts can change how you think about the world. Do you know the percentage of people in the world who use mobile phones? In 1997, the answer was 4 percent. By 2007, it was nearly 50 percent.

{ The Boston Globe | Continue reading }

photo { Daemian and Christine }

By setting the microwave timer I’m watching two minutes pass. That’s insufficient time for me to make my bed. That takes about three minutes: to pull up the covers, to turn the sheet down over the blankets, to smooth the sheets and blankets, to fluff the pillows and arrange them over the sheets. I’m not taking into consideration fixing the bedspread under the pillows.

Assuming I make the bed six days a week (changing the linens on the seventh), that’s 18 minutes a week: three hours in 10 weeks; in a year (with two weeks’ vacation), 15 hours — almost two days of work. In 10 years, that’s 150 hours. I figure I’ve spent 900 hours making my bed so far. If I’m awake 16 hours in an average day, that’s equivalent to at least 56 days of my conscious life.

{ Life is like a microwave… | M.N. Kotzin /The Smart Set | Continue reading }

photo { Sandy Kim }

The theory of relativity showed us that time and space are intertwined. To which our smarty-pants body might well reply: Tell me something I didn’t already know, Einstein.

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time. (…)

The new study, published in January in the journal Psychological Science, is part of the immensely popular field called embodied cognition, the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own.

{ Natalie Angier/NY Times | Continue reading }

The Feb. 27 magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile may have shortened the length of each Earth day.

JPL research scientist Richard Gross computed how Earth’s rotation should have changed as a result of the Feb. 27 quake. Using a complex model, he and fellow scientists came up with a preliminary calculation that the quake should have shortened the length of an Earth day by about 1.26 microseconds (a microsecond is one millionth of a second).

Perhaps more impressive is how much the quake shifted Earth’s axis. Gross calculates the quake should have moved Earth’s figure axis (the axis about which Earth’s mass is balanced) by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters, or 3 inches). Earth’s figure axis is not the same as its north-south axis; they are offset by about 10 meters (about 33 feet).

By comparison, Gross said the same model estimated the 2004 magnitude 9.1 Sumatran earthquake should have shortened the length of day by 6.8 microseconds and shifted Earth’s axis by 2.32 milliarcseconds (about 7 centimeters, or 2.76 inches).

{ Nasa.gov | Continue reading }

What’s your permanent age?

I’ve observed that everyone has a permanent age that appears to be set at birth. For example, I’ve always been 42-years old. I was ill-suited for being a little kid, and didn’t enjoy most kid activities. By first grade I knew I wanted to be an adult, with an established career, car, house and a decent tennis game. I didn’t care for my awkward and unsettled twenties. And I’m not looking forward to the rocking chair. If I could be one age forever, it would be 42.

When I ask people about their permanent age, they usually beg it off by saying they don’t have one. But if you press, you always get an answer. And the age they pick won’t surprise you. Some people are kids all their lives. They will admit they are 12-years old. Other people have always had senior citizen interests and perspectives. If you’re 30-years old in nominal terms, but you love bingo and you think kids should stop wearing those big baggy pants and listening to hip-hop music, your permanent age might be 60.

Another way to divide people is by asking if they live in the present or the future. I live in the future. I don’t dwell on the past. I’m always thinking about what’s next. (….) Some people are locked in the past; it sneaks into all of their conversations and colors their perceptions more than it should. They spend their lives either consciously or unconsciously trying to turn the future into the past. They tend to be unhappy.

{ Scott Adams | Continue reading }

photo { Steve Buscemi by Abbey Drucker }

What is nostalgia good for? A Standard Life study suggests 28 to 40-year-olds don’t plan for the future because they prefer to reminisce about past times. (…)

In recent years, psychologists have been trying to analyse the powerful and enduring appeal of our own past - what Mr Routledge calls the “psychological underpinnings of nostalgia”.

“Why does it matter? Why would a 40-year-old man care about a car he drove when he was 18?” he asks. It matters, quite simply, because nostalgia makes us feel good.

Once nostalgia was considered a sickness - the word derives from the Greek “nostos” (return) and “algos” (pain), suggesting suffering due to a desire to return to a place of origin. (…)

“Nostalgia is a way for us to tap into the past experiences that we have that are quite meaningful - to remind us that our lives are worthwhile, that we are people of value, that we have good relationships, that we are happy and that life has some sense of purpose or meaning.” (…)

Nostalgia is usually involuntary and triggered by negative feelings - most commonly loneliness - against which it acts as a sort of natural anti-depressant by countering those feelings.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

I once tried setting my watch ahead a few minutes to help me make it to appointments on time. At first it worked, but not because I was fooled. I would glance at the watch, get worried that I was late, then remember that the watch is fast. But that brief flash acted as a sort of preview of how it feels to be late. And the feeling is a better motivator than the thought in the abstract.

But that didn’t last very long. The surprise wore off. I wonder if there are ways to maintain the surprise. For example, instead of setting the watch a fixed time ahead, I could set it to run too fast so that it gained an extra minute every week or month. Then if I have adaptive expectations I could consistently fool myself.

{ Cheap Talk | Continue reading }

“When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour,” said Albert Einstein, “it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute, and it’s longer than any hour.” Einstein was describing one of the most profound implications of his Theory of General Relativity - that the perception of time is subjective. This is something we all know from experience: time flies when we are enjoying ourselves, but seems to drag on when we are doing something tedious.

The subjective experience of time can also be manipulated experimentally. Visual stimuli which appear to be approaching are perceived to be longer in duration than when viewed as static or moving away. Similarly, participants presented with a stream of otherwise identical stimuli, but including one oddball (or “deviant”) stimulus, tend to perceive the deviant stimulus as lasting longer than the others. The underlying neural mechanisms of this are unknown, but now the first neuroimaging study of this phenomenon implicates the involvement of brain structures which are thought to be required for cognitive control and subjective awareness.

The apparent prolonged duration of a looming or deviant stimulus is referred to as the time dilation illusion, and three possible, but not mutually exclusive, explanations for why it might occur have been put forward. First, the stimulus might be perceived as lasting longer because it has unusual properties which require an increased amount of attention to be devoted to it. Alternatively, the perceived duration of the stimulus might reflect the amount of energy expended in generating its neural representation (that is, duration is a function of coding efficiency). Finally, the effect might be due to the intrinsic dynamic properties of the stimulus, such that the brain estimates time based on the number of changes in an event.

{ Neurophilosophy/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

From: Richard Matthews

Date: Tuesday 6 May 2008 8.17pm
To: David Thorne

Subject: Re: Re: Rove



Fuck you coksucker you should be ashamed of what you wrote that was wrong ad you know it How wud you feel if you were rove? why dont you fuck off.

…………………………………………………………………………………….

From: David Thorne
Date: Tuesday 6 May 2008 8.42pm
To: Richard Matthews
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Rove

You’re correct Dick, my statements were uncalled for and unquantifiable in any manner. I apologise without reserve and ask for nothing but your understanding. I hope, in time, you can come to forgive me for such contemptible statements. If I could retract my statements I would but I do not have a time machine. I wish that I did have a time machine, I would take my Macbook Pro back to 1984 and visit Steve Jobs. After selling my laptop to him for millions I would return to the present. I could do this several times as each time the present technologies would have changed. It is a flawless plan, I am sure you will agree, lacking only the availability of time/dimension manipulation technologies.


{ 27b/6 | Continue reading }

artwork { Jay DeFeo, The Eyes, 1958 | graphite on paper }

previously { Party in apartment 3 }

There are 46 days left in 2009, which means it is just about time to commence the beloved and enduring parlor game known as “Name That Decade.”

You know the rules — coin a pithy, reductive phrase that somehow encapsulates the multitude of events, trends, triumphs and calamities of the past 10 years. If you can also rope in some of the big personalities and consumer obsessions, that’s a bonus.

For the ’00s, it seems the trick will be finding a small package sturdy and flexible enough to capture so much upheaval and change. And worry — although in hindsight, it sure seems like we kept worrying about the wrong menace.

The decade began with a frenzy of fear about the Y2k millennium bug, which many technology experts said would sunder computers, crash jets and wreak havoc in every corner of the globe. As that non-emergency passed, a genuine threat quietly gathered in the form of a plot to fell the twin towers.

Later, we scoured Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, which we did not find. As we searched, we built weapons of financial chaos right here at home, with home mortgages, leverage and something called Collateralized Debt Obligations.

Fortunes and a staggering number of jobs have vanished, inflicting misery in this country and others on a scale that would surely have exceeded the most garish of Saddam’s fantasies.

So: The Era of Misplaced Anxiety?

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

{ The Year 2038 Problem: Example showing how the date would reset at 03:14:08 UTC on 19 January 2038. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Humanity has long struggled over the nature of time. In the last century, physicists were shocked to discover that the arrow of time cannot be derived from the laws of physics which appear perfectly symmetric. For every solution for t, there seems to be an equally valid solution for -t (except in a few cases involving the weak force in which case the symmetry is more complex, involving charge, parity and time).

At first glance that looks puzzling. But after a few years reflection, most physicists agreed that it’s perfectly possible for symmetric laws to give rise to asymmetric phenomena. Physicists have identified a number of such asymmetric phenomena that represent “arrows of time”, says Claus Kiefer at the Institut fur Theoretische Physik in Cologne, Germany.

Perhaps the most famous is the thermodynamic arrow of time in which the entropy of a closed system must always increase. But there is also a quantum mechanical arrow of time in which a preferred direction of time is determined by decoherence and a gravitational arrow of time in which the preferred direction is determined by gravitational collapse.

“What is peculiar is the fact that the time direction of the phenomena is always the same,” says Kiefer. It’s almost as if the arrow of time were predetermined in some way. “The question raised by the presence of all these arrows is whether a common master arrow of time is behind all of them,” he asks.

What master law might be responsible? Kiefer’s conjecture is that the direction of time arises when quantum mechanics is applied to the universe as a whole, a branch of science known as quantum cosmology.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

In the natural sciences, arrow of time, or time’s arrow, is a term coined in 1927 by British astronomer Arthur Eddington used to distinguish a direction of time on a four-dimensional relativistic map of the world, which, according to Eddington, can be determined by a study of organizations of atoms, molecules, and bodies.

Physical processes at the microscopic level are believed to be either entirely or mostly time symmetric, meaning that the theoretical statements that describe them remain true if the direction of time is reversed; yet when we describe things at the macroscopic level it often appears that this is not the case: there is an obvious direction (or flow) of time. An arrow of time is anything that exhibits such time-asymmetry.

The symmetry of time (T-symmetry) can be understood by a simple analogy: if time were perfectly symmetric then it would be possible to watch a movie taken of real events and everything that happens in the movie would seem realistic whether it was played forwards or backwards.

An obvious objection to this assertion is gravity: after all, things fall down, not up.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }