Ship of Theseus, Sleep Misperception, and Art of Breathing
Three interesting discoveries from last week:
I finally managed to watch this movie — The Ship of Theseus — that had been on my list for a while. But the length of the movie, at 2.5 hours, had kept me at bay. So far, that is. The movie is inspired by the ship of Theseus conundrum, which is that if you remove all the planks of a ship called Theseus and replace with new planks, would the old ship still be Theseus? If you make a new ship with the removed planks, wouldn’t that be Theseus? The plot intelligently explores this thought experiment when applied to humans. This is done through three very different stories that are sieved through a common masterful thread, the seeds of which are routed in the conundrum. The movie is available for free on Youtube and here’s the link.
Breath is perhaps the most powerful tool for removing toxins from our bodies. We breath more molecules than what we get through our food. However, over the years we have lost our lung capacity, our mouth and nose passage has shrunk, and also we have lost the ability to correctly breathe. Moreover, as we age we further lose our breathing capacity as well (approx. 12%). This essay in WSJ elaborates why breathing has substantial impact on our health and why we must attempt to get it right. There are several techniques available and the essay covers a few of them (slow rhythmic breathing for few minutes). An alternative is pranamaya breathing, something which I learnt 10 years back and practice to date.
Yet again on my favourite topic of sleep. My wife brought to my attention this old piece written in The Cut which came out two years back. Though the piece is old, the points made in it are still relevant. It’s on why we sometimes feel that we haven’t slept at all during the night, however, that’s not quite so. Broadly, the article states that new research indicates that despite the feeling of sleeplessness on such nights, we might actually be getting more sleep than we think we are. This discrepancy is referred to as ‘sleep misperception’ as some brain regions may feel awake, the rest are actually getting sleep. So if we experience this pattern of sleeplessness on some nights, we should seek relief in the fact that most likely a major part of our brains got rest. One major culprit for this feeling of sleep misperception is actually caffeine, especially late in the day.
A mental model that I learnt about:
Anti-fragile. According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who coined this term, “some things benefit from shocks, they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility…”. The application of this concept is that if our thinking is anti-fragile, then it gets better with time and the mistakes that we make. Feedback, taken constructively, should improve us.
