Thinking Outside Your Brain Box

It's about eight in the morning, and I hear the front door of our office open. I hear the click-clack sound of the derailleur of a co-worker's bicycle, and then the bean grinder in the office kitchen, and then sound of the cofee mahcine itself warming up. And then a face appears in the doorway of my office. we've got about five minutes before the coffee is ready.

Idle small talk (how was your evening, good, how was yours, good, did you see the game, etc) for a few seconds until a key word is hit upon. Today, it's happens to be "cat." We begin to discuss how cats are, more or less, pointless. And yet, so essential to the human experience. That thing about strapping a piece of buttered toast to the back of a cat comes up- the idea that, since cat's always land on their feet, and buttered toast always lands butter-side down, you can break the laws of physics by creating a floating, spinning, cat-toast machine.

From there we consider Schroedinger's box, the thought experiment where a cat is placed in a box along with a poison that is triggered by a randomly decaying isotope. So long as the box stays closed and unobserved, that cat is both alive and dead. We, my coworker and I, decided this is not a silly metaphor, and that if we trap out floating cat-bread machine in such a box, the cat will be both alive and dead and right side up and upside down at the same time.

Then we start talking about USB plugs, and how there should be a fifty-fifty chance of getting them plugged in correctly on the first try, but it always takes three tries. We realize that if we were to attach such a cat to a USB plug, since it would be at all times both right-side up and upside down, it would balance out the three-times plug phenomena, and the order of the universe would be restored.

Because things are always in the last place you look for them, simply because once you find them, you stop looking. If you start making a practice of still looking for something after you find it, the law of averages would start to swing towards your eventually finding things in the first place you look. You'd have to keep looking, but you wouldn't have so much anxiety.

By hooking up a Schroedinger's cat-bread-box to a usb plug, we'd be essentially tipping the law of averages back to getting the plug right the first time— the cat would do the spinning we'd have to do to ensure the average was always on our side.

Then the coffee machine went ding, and we were ready for work. Had an incredibly productive day. Socializing, Creativity, Caffeine: all are excellent ingredients to a super-productive brain.

Caffeine and Sleep and the Brain, a Terrible Lover’s Triangle

You’re tossing and turning. You just can’t get to sleep, but you’re exhausted.… to borrow a phrase from the kids today, double-you tee eff?

Research reported on by Scientific American and My Healthy Daily News suggests that if you’re a night person, you can drink all the coffee you want. Well, not all the coffee you want. But if you’re inclined to have a double-tall in the middle of the afternoon, go ahead.

But if you’re a morning person, best to avoid caffeine later in the day. It all has to do with your so-called chronotype (the fancy word for whether you’re a “day” person or a “night” person). Which begs the question: why do night people need caffeine later in the day at all?

As a nation, we’re all more or less sleep-deprived. While science says about eight hours is best, the average adult only gets six and half on the weekdays. Caffeine helps us get through until the weekend, when we try to pay back some of this sleep debt. 

But it’s no good if, even during your inadequate six and half, you’re not getting good sleep.

According to researchers, most people are neither “larks” nor “owls” and as such, should consider careful use of stimulants: a cup of coffee in the morning as part of a meal, not as a quick sleepiness eradicator. Remember: if you’re not awake 30 minutes after getting out of bed, you’re probably sleep deprived, and caffeine addresses the symptom, not the cause, if your ailment.

When in doubt, just eschew caffeine altogether and try to go to bed an hour early. Boring, yes, but you may find that, with enough sleep, you’re a morning person after all.