The Telegraph has an article on Japanese researchers who have come up with a way to show a person’s dreams on a computer screen.

Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week, recently had a pilot episode of his new show, Trial By Fire, appear on the History Channel.  I watched the show to see how Ferriss, a notorious “lifehacker”, used learning strategies  to succeed at a task in 5 days that should take 5 years to learn.  Below is a preview of the show, and my notes on how he was able to accomplish his task in such a short time.

Deconstruct/Streamline/Remap

1) watch the action being performed- preferably by an expert

2) learn the fundamentals first- don’t overly complicate your goals with minutia

3) inventory your current skill set (strengths and weaknesses)

4) generalization- carry over any previously learned skills

5) deconstruct- break the performance into smaller tasks

6) improvise- know your limitations and create workarounds to take them out of the equation

7) ecoute et repete- French to English translation: listen and repeat!  Listen to the teacher, then use repetition to ingrain the new skill  (BEWARE: repeating the wrong way ingrains bad habits)

8- simulation- if you can’t practice the way you will perform exactly, use simulation to recreate it closely

9) set goals

10) define what “success” means- how will you know you have accomplished the task?

11) Pareto’s Law- 80/20 Rule- What’s the 20% that will get you to 80% mastery?

12) don’t be afraid to “fall off the horse” (fail)

13) streamline by eliminating waste, creating fluidity, cadence, and tempo

14) hyperclocking- do task faster (or make it more difficult) in practice to allow for outside influences during performance

15) positive reinforcement- reward yourself upon goal completion

Notes of Interest

* Practice right before sleep- transfers skills from short-term to long-term memory

* set alarm to wake you 4.5 hours after sleep (before next REM cycle)- get up and repeat task to deepen the imprint into memory

* keep track of sleep debt so you can make it up later

* for muscles: 2 minutes ice, then 30 seconds hot water to constrict then hyperdilate blood vessels; this increases melatonin output, decreases inflammation from injury, and clears toxins

* eliminate fear through yelling (kiai)

* perform even more fearful task to overcome fear of less fearful task

* find the discrepancy between textbook and reality

The Chicago Tribune reports on a study published in BMJ, a British medical journal, that our happiness is not only influenced by our immediate environment and the people around us, but that it is influenced by our social network… the people around the people we are with.  The researchers did not look at fleeting happiness, and instead looked at a “happiness set-point” that tends to stay stable over time.

I’ve always argued for the midday nap… why we stop it after Kindergarten, I’ll never know, as other countries seem to understand the benefit to their workers performance.  The New York Times talks about research that shows that a nap is better than caffeine.  The interesting part is that people who took caffeine thought they did better, but really didn’t.  Hmmm…

Behind the Couch has an insightful post about the concept of “Mauvais Foi” and the “hell” (in a Sartre sense) in which many people live because of their concerns about what other’s think and believe about them.