JOURNAL | Reaction to ‘5 Ways to Hack Your Brains into Awesomeness’

Reaction to ‘5 Ways to Hack Your Brains into Awesomeness’

These days I find writing personal journals quite cumbersome that I’d rather stay in bed and doze off. But that is really lazy and I seriously want to change that habit so I’ll try to write my thoughts down as often as possible. It’s just that whenever I open my laptop, instead of writing I just watch porn. I sometimes curse the makers of these porns. They simply distract me from doing what I should be doing. Anyway, today I will try to write down as much as I can.  

To start off, I chanced upon this article from the Internet talking about how people can use the hidden capabilities of the human mind. It talked about how we can control dreams, rhythm of sleep, and so on. Well, I was kind of intrigued by this since I can really control dreams sometimes. But I find doing just that quite difficult these days because of my hectic schedule. Wow, what an excuse. In this blog[1] entry, I’ll jot down some of these intriguing mental facts/fiction.  

1. The Uberman Sleep Schedule To get a maximum amount of essential sleep for body, one needs six (6) 20-30 minute power naps every four hours during the day.  

(I had a good time jotting down the slangs in this article, makes me think how fucked[2] slang is though this is the most natural one could get)
 
For example, you can sleep at 8pm and wake up at 8:30. Do something during those waking hours and at 12 midnight sleep again until 12:30 and so on. Your brain will hate you for this, and I would assume that you’ll feel quite restless since the brain can’t get enough and proper sleep (I’m afraid this might even cause cancer), but this is no reason to quit. After 3 days, the brain will get used to this pattern and you’ll feel like you’ve had a complete rest.  

Explanation according to the article is that, when people sleep we only get an hour and a half of REM sleep, the stage that makes the brain sharp. The other stages makes the body heal and grow but REM makes the brain rested. Since the brain does not have enough time for other stages, it dives directly to REM every time you sleep to compensate for the deprivation. So that makes it 2 hours of REM while others have only an hour an a half. I think one of the consequence of this sleeping pattern is failure of the immune system and invitation to more serious illnesses since taking the healing and growing stages for granted are necessary in this kind of sleep pattern. The question now is whether this is all worth it. If one needs to keep awake say for a month or so, well this can be good but definitely not long-term since you’ll practically kill yourself.
  

2. The Ganzfel Effect (Hallucination) (but I don’t want to talk about it. Pretty senseless if you ask me. According to the article, you can avoid LSD and have an alternative to it but why take LSD in the first place. Seriously, that is stupid.)

3. Lucid Dreaming  
Basically, this is controlling one’s dream. When people sleep and dream, sometimes you realize that you are dreaming and can pretty much do whatever you want in your dream (This often happens to me, and I always try to fly as much as I can when I have lucid dreaming). 

There are a number of ways one can do this and let me restate some tips from the article:
A. Keep a Dream Journal Write down all you have dreamt right after you wake up in the morning.

B. Think exactly what you want to happen before you sleep (This really works for me).

C. The best time to have lucid dreaming is right before you wake up (uhm, this is difficult) or right after waking up (huh, so will that count as a dream when you’re already awake). 

Well, that’s when you take a nap after waking up. (This is very easy to do, but also tiring. When you do lucid dreaming at this period, it’s like all the energy you gained after sleeping is spent here. At least that’s what I feel when I do this).  

4. Learn more while sleeping  
Study 24 hours before and sleep on it. So, in this part of the article, we are told that if we want to remember a big bunch of information, we can opt not to study until 24 hours before the exam and sleep on it (not sleep on the exam but I guess it’s better this way- 24-hour sleep before the exam). According to the article, the brain functions in three ways acquisition, consolidation, and recall. The first and last occur when we’re awake while the middle when we’re asleep. So sleeping, enough sleep that is still required to get excellent neurological functions which I think negates #1. Sleeping actually enables the neurons in the brain to regrow.  

5. Believe something happened that didn’t  
We can fool our memories by believing in things which are not actually true about ourselves. Well, talk about deception, and that is exactly what we can do to our brains. According to the article, memory is a speedy process because the brain stores up general information which is necessary for us and forgets the details. The problem is, because the process is really fast, the brain cannot distinguish what real ones are from fake. There are things about our memories that we just can’t remember, but somebody can make us believe something which didn’t really happen. The only thing is this is quite difficult since somebody else should do this for you and you should not be aware of it. But I have been doing this even before. I try to make a story, and then tell it to other people and it spreads and even if it’s not true it sometimes become accepted and people start believing it. Or you can just simply make yourself believe into something that is really not true.


[1] Blog, whoever coined this term. Makes me really wonder. This entry is purely my thoughts so expect me talking about the most trivial of things.  

[2] Fuck, well that’s one of the slangs in this article which sounds really natural… at least to an average native speaker.