Walking and Thinking !

What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.

The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa. Psychologists who specialize in exercise music have quantified what many of us already know: listening to songs with high tempos motivates us to run faster, and the swifter we move, the quicker we prefer our music. Likewise, when drivers hear loud, fast music, they unconsciously step a bit harder on the gas pedal. Walking at our own pace creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state that we cannot experience as easily when we’re jogging at the gym, steering a car, biking, or during any other kind of locomotion. When we stroll, the pace of our feet naturally vacillates with our moods and the cadence of our inner speech; at the same time, we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down.

Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre. This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight. Earlier this year, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford published what is likely the first set of studies that directly measure the way walking changes creativity in the moment. They got the idea for the studies while on a walk. “My doctoral advisor had the habit of going for walks with his students to brainstorm,” Oppezzo says of Schwartz. “One day we got kind of meta.”

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.

Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really.

You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.

There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter.

At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don’t think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don’t think, “Hey, I did sixteen miles today,” any more than you think, “Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today.” It’s just what you do.

- Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

Wisdom of the Week

The neocortex had turned humans into magicians. Not only had he made the human head a wondrous internal ocean of complex thoughts, his latest breakthrough had found a way to translate those thoughts into a symbolic set of sounds and send them vibrating through the air into the heads of other humans, who could then decode the sounds and absorb the embedded idea into their own internal thought oceans. The human neocortex had been thinking about things for a long time—and he finally had someone to talk about it all with.

A neocortex party ensued. Neocortexes—fine—neocortices shared everything with each other—stories from their past, funny jokes they had thought of, opinions they had formed, plans for the future.

But most useful was sharing what they had learned. If one human learned through trial and error that a certain type of berry led to 48 hours of your life being run by diarrhea, they could use language to share the hard-earned lesson with the rest of their tribe, like photocopying the lesson and handing it to everyone else. Tribe members would then use language to pass along that lesson to their children, and their children would pass it to their own children. Rather than the same mistake being made again and again by many different people, one person’s “stay away from that berry” wisdom could travel through space and time to protect everyone else from having their bad experience.

The same thing would happen when one human figured out a new clever trick. One unusually-intelligent hunter particularly attuned to both star constellations and the annual migration patterns of wildebeest1 herds could share a system he devised that used the night sky to determine exactly how many days remained until the herd would return. Even though very few hunters would have been able to come up with that system on their own, through word-of-mouth, all future hunters in the tribe would now benefit from the ingenuity of one ancestor, with that one hunter’s crowning discovery serving as every future hunter’s starting point of knowledge.

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Another professor, Jeff Lichtman, is even harsher. He starts off his courses by asking his students the question, “If everything you need to know about the brain is a mile, how far have we walked in this mile?” He says students give answers like three-quarters of a mile, half a mile, a quarter of a mile, etc.—but that he believes the real answer is “about three inches.”

A third professor, neuroscientist Moran Cerf, shared with me an old neuroscience saying that points out why trying to master the brain is a bit of a catch-22: “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”

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BMIs won’t sweep the world as long as you need to go in for skull-opening surgery to get involved.

This is a major topic at Neuralink. I think the word “non-invasive” or “non-invasively” came out of someone’s mouth like 42 times in my discussions with the team.

On top of being both a major barrier to entry and a major safety issue, invasive brain surgery is expensive and in limited supply. Elon talked about an eventual BMI-implantation process that could be automated: “The machine to accomplish this would need to be something like Lasik, an automated process—because otherwise you just get constrained by the limited number of neural surgeons, and the costs are very high. You’d need a Lasik-like machine ultimately to be able to do this at scale.”

Making BMIs high-bandwidth alone would be a huge deal, as would developing a way to non-invasively implant devices. But doing both would start a revolution.

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Often, the battle in our heads between our prefrontal cortex and limbic system comes down to the fact that both parties are trying to do what’s best for us—it’s just that our limbic system is wrong about what it thinks is best for us because it thinks we live in a tribe 50,000 years ago.

Your limbic system isn’t making you eat your ninth Starburst candy in a row because it’s a dick—it’s making you eat it because it thinks that A) any fruit that sweet and densely chewy must be super rich in calories and B) you might not find food again for the next four days so it’s a good idea to load up on a high-calorie food whenever the opportunity arises.

Meanwhile, your prefrontal cortex is just watching in horror like “WHY ARE WE DOING THIS.”

But Moran believes that a good brain interface could fix this problem.

Consider eating a chocolate cake. While eating, we feed data to our cognitive apparatus. These data provide the enjoyment of the cake. The enjoyment isn’t in the cake, per se, but in our neural experience of it. Decoupling our sensory desire (the experience of cake) from the underlying survival purpose (nutrition) will soon be within our reach.

This concept of “sensory decoupling” would make so much sense if we could pull it off. You could get the enjoyment of eating like shit without actually putting shit in your body. Instead, Moran says, what would go in your body would be “nutrition inputs customized for each person based on genomes, microbiomes or other factors. Physical diets released from the tyranny of desire.”

The same principle could apply to things like sex, drugs, alcohol, and other pleasures that get people into trouble, healthwise or otherwise.

Ramez Naam talks about how a brain interface could also help us win the discipline battle when it comes to time.

We know that stimulating the right centers in the brain can induce sleep or alertness, hunger or satiation, ease or stimulation, as quick as the flip of a switch. Or, if you’re running code, on a schedule. (Siri: Put me to sleep until 7:30, high priority interruptions only. And let’s get hungry for lunch around noon. Turn down the sugar cravings, though.)Want to hear what a dog hears? That’s easy. The pitch range we can hear is limited by the dimensions of our cochlea—but pitches out of the ear’s range can be sent straight into our auditory nerve.[---]

Or maybe you want a new sense. You love bird watching and want to be able to sense when there’s a bird nearby. So you buy an infrared camera that can detect bird locations by their heat signals and you link it to your brain interface, which stimulates neurons in a certain way to alert you to the presence of a bird and tell you its location. I can’t describe what you’d experience when it alerts you, because I’ll just say words like “feel” or “see,” because I can only imagine the five senses we have. But in the future, there will be more words for new, useful types of senses.

You could also dim or shut off parts of a sense, like pain perhaps. Pain is the body’s way of telling us we need to address something, but in the future, we’ll elect to get that information in much less unpleasant formats.

- Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future by Tim Urban

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

- C.G. Jung

Quote of the Day

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

- Rudyard Kipling

Philosophers @ Silicon Valley

But Scott Berkun, a former Microsoft manager and philosophy major who has written multiple business books on the subject, says philosophy’s lessons are lost on most in Silicon Valley. Many focus on aggrandizing the self, rather than pursuing a well-examined purpose. “If you put Socrates in a room during a pitch session, I think he’d be dismayed at so many young people investing their time in ways that do not make the world or themselves any better,” he said.

Silicon Valley’s strivers might find happiness by rethinking their definition of “success.” Stoics had something to say about this. Far from being emotionless scolds as the name suggest today, says Irvine, Stoics were early psychologists who sought to rid us of illusions that bring misery. By refocusing on what truly matters, people can find joy and purpose in their daily lives. As Irvine puts it, why “spend your life in an affluent form of misery when it’s possible to have a much simpler life that would be much more rewarding?”

- More Here

Quote of the Day

What is needed, however, isn't just that people working together be nice to each other. It is discipline.
Discipline is hard--harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can't even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.

- Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

What I've Been Reading

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger.

What a book !! Sebastain has hit the bull's eye distilling the human condition in this small book. He takes Charles Murray's Blowing Alone to the next level.

For a former soldier to miss the clarity and importance of his wartime duty is one thing, but for civilians to is quite another. 'Whatever I say about war, I still hate it, " one survivor, Nidzara Ahmentasevic made sure to tell me after I'd interviewed her about the nostalgia of her generation. "I do miss something from the war.  But I also believe that the world we are living in - and the peace that we have - is very fucked up if somebody is missing war. And many people do. 

Quote of the Day

Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.

-  Richard Carlson