joshlog

7½ Lessons for the Brain, Barrett (2020)

Post author By Josh
Post date December 23, 2020
Post date 4 mins

Study notes for this short, pithy book about the brain, our relationship with it, and the nature of reality.

½ Your Brain is Not for Thinking

Your brain’s most important job is not thinking; it is to control your body – to manage allostasis – ie. predicting and preparing to meet the body’s energy needs (prediction beats reaction in nature) before they arise, so you can efficiently make worthwhile movements and survive. Your brain is the command center that supervises, regulates, and protects the systems and subsystems that comprise your entire body.

1. You Have One Brain (not Three)

Paul MacLean’s three-layered brain – neocortex (rational), limbic (emotional), lizard (survival) – is a modern myth that persists in popular culture because of its accessibility and our ego; the conflict between the rational and the emotional is based on this belief. However, this is not borne out by science – the rational/emotional dichotomy is a false one – there is only one brain, and its rational behavior consists of making a good body-budgeting investment in a given situation.

2. Your Brain is a Network

A network (a tree-like structure of neurons, synapses, dendrites, axons, etc.) is the best scientific description of a brain today – a physical structure that is capable of reconfiguring itself (often very quickly) to integrate vast amounts of information efficiently. The brain is considered a complex system, able to configure itself into an enormous number of distinct neural patterns. It is capable of degeneracy – almost like redundancy, instead of the same set of neurons being responsible for a certain action, different sets of neurons are capable of this task. Complex brains remember more, are more creative and adaptable, and are also more resilient to injury. Note that other species on Earth also have brains with high complexity.

Tags brain, neuroscience, self

books notes social wellness

Mistakes Were Made, Tavris, Aronson, 3rd ed. (2020)

Post author By Josh
Post date December 5, 2020
Post date 4 mins

Study notes for a favorite read this year, a book on cognitive dissonance theory (the rest of the title: But Not By Me) – something all of us will recognize once explained; applications to past and recent history (mostly omitted below); and more rewarding strategies. We live in a world that often seems chaotic and unordered, particularly when it comes to living and dealing with others; an insight like this helps us see order in the chaos, makes it appear less random, and empowers us to contemplate change.

Cognitive Dissonance

There are two kinds of lies, one conscious, where the liar sees the lie for what it is, a deliberate distortion of truth; and the other, made noble through self-justification, so that the lie ceases to become one. The second kind is the result of cognitive dissonance: when someone holds two contradictory views – usually a self-concept, such as “I am a sensible, competent person”, vs a piece of new information, such as “I just spent a lot of time on something worthless and silly”. Because it hurts so much to change our view of ourselves, we resort to ego-preservation, and change the other view instead, and suddenly, the worthless and silly thing rises in our estimation – we justify it by distorting it in some way – actually, it was meaningful to me and I’m glad I did it. Dissonance theory predicts that we ask ourselves: is the new information consonant with my belief?

Tags cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dissonance, tribalism

books essay philosophy

Self as Story

Post author By Josh
Post date March 23, 2020
Post date 2 mins

I recently read Conscious (2019) by Annaka Harris, a delightfully short, fascinating overview of the current state of consciousness research, philosophy and science, a field of inquiry relatively new to me. The following (and in all likelihood, quite unoriginal) random ideas came up.

The exact nature of consciousness is a topic for endless discussion; from my simple vantage point, I’ll just equate it to an awareness of being, which some might call the self. My initial, rather straightforward thought leans towards consciousness as an attribute of our brain, a hack or construct used to build a cohesive narrative (possibly including post-fact rationalization) around events – at their most basic level, sensory stimuli – for the evolutionary purpose of helping us remember and learn. “I” is the first building block of memory, letting us bring literal order to randomness through narrative capture. Stories harness space and time (the mnemonic method of loci comes to mind), and subsequent analysis and rumination, whether real-time or deliberate, facilitates “learning” – the generation of ideas and new behavior in the service of actual self-preservation. At a fundamental level, consciousness lets us process information, translate this into action, and create change.

Over time, the advent of language helped humans shape this vague abstraction, conceptualize a self to construct narratives both individual and collective around, and create culture: inherited behavior. One could argue that language is critical for the very idea of our selves, indeed, for the voice inside our heads to be able to say anything at all. We are predisposed to narratives, convenient templates that wrangle meaning from chaos, a predilection that sometimes gets us in trouble – Tyler Cowen, in fact, cautions us about the unreliability of story – perhaps our propensity to create stories developed as evolutionary advantage and was the original purpose of self. Stories become history and memory, and it’s easy to speculate that beyond learning, memory also grants the self a persistent existence in a reinforcing virtuous cycle of sorts.

All this would imply that physical death is the termination of consciousness, as a property of the physical body. Consciousness as illusion and the role of emotions and our thoughts appear to be orthogonal issues – what matters here is that the presence of consciousness conveys a significant survivability benefit by allowing us to learn from past events.

Tags consciousness, narrative, self

blog productivity technology

Right Size: Keyboards

Post author By Josh
Post date February 28, 2020
Post date 4 mins

We live in a time where avenues for personal exploration and expression have never been greater: in a similar vein to when I was investigating smaller sizing options for pianos, I recently started looking at another kind of keyboard. Computer keyboards are still the default entry device for the digital world we live in, and chances are, you used one today. The mechanical keyboard space has many hobbyist fans and benefits from an innovative, tech-native community; given my experience with the Steinbuhler piano keyboard, I leaned in the direction of smaller form factors and better efficiency. And keyboards have been shrinking over time: the only keyboard I used when working was on the company-issued laptop, while the last full-sized keyboard I can remember seeing on a desktop was an entire decade ago.

Tags keyboards, keychron, ortholinear, planck, pok3r

blog music productivity

Right Size: Pianos

Post author By Josh
Post date February 21, 2020
Post date 2 mins
2 Comments on Right Size: Pianos

There is no one size fits all when it comes to shoes: no one would pay for shoes that don’t fit, and compared with only having to cater for shoes in only one size, creating shoes in a range of sizes costs manufacturers a good deal more. They do this because having one size means only a small group of people is able to enjoy and use the product the way it was intended, and as a result, fewer shoes would be sold.

This doesn’t apply to pianos though – keyboards only come in one size, and if your hand doesn’t happen to fit, you’re out of luck. This state of affairs discriminates against those with smaller hands, and the struggle against ergonomics these pianists persevere through to play the instrument they love is something those with larger hands don’t experience. You were simply out of luck – until relatively recently.

I was grateful to discover David Steinbuhler’s smaller keyboards four years ago – in keeping with his philosophy, he offers not just one, but four alternate sizes with increasingly narrower keys – and when I first received my upright, I never enjoyed playing music so much. Everything was unprecedented: I was doing things on the piano I’d never been able to do before – in particular, playing previously impossible chords cleanly – and doing the things I’d done before felt more effortless and natural.

DS5.5 keyboard on my Walter studio upright – note the large empty blocks on either side, space which would normally be taken up by keys on a bigger, regulation-size keyboard. Steinbuhler partners with Walter to produce upright pianos with his keyboards you can order from his website, which I’m incredibly thankful for, and how I got mine.

Over time, you accept that the world is a certain way, but in the age we’re fortunate to live in, suddenly Lasik comes around and changes your perception of life forever – or a piano that fits your hands arrives, and profoundly transforms your ability to create and enjoy music.

Update: David tells me their company became a non-profit a couple of years ago, and is dedicated to furthering awareness and adoption of alternative keyboards; in addition, the growing movement and community has a website, which is a comprehensive resource for anyone wanting to find out more, including information on piano manufacturers and technicians.

Tags keyboards, pianos, steinbuhler

books notes wellness

The Obesity Code (2016), Jason Fung

Post author By Josh
Post date February 17, 2020
Post date 10 mins

I read this at the end of 2018, and it galvanized me on a path of personal change and continual learning about health and wellness. That space has exploded in recent years, especially in the age of podcasts and social media we’re in, and there’s been more research since, but this book was my trailblazer, and what follows are some notes – by a non-physician and neophyte to the material, so keep that caveat in mind – I made for myself back then.

Just educating myself a little more about how our bodies – the most important thing we have – function, felt empowering, and it was also surprising, given what I thought I knew already. I still find it somewhat shocking that fasting, something that barely crosses our minds, so simple as to be banal, can be so transformative. The Diabetes Code, by the same author, is similarly excellent.

Obesity as an epidemic is recent, only materializing in the last generation. It began in the 1950’s, as a function of increased life expectancy: the average age of the first heart attack is 66 years, and more people were reaching this age. Cholesterol was thought to cause heart disease, and dietary fat was thought to increase cholesterol, so physicians advocated lower-fat diets, which in turn increased carbohydrate intake. In 1977, a government committee (not a committee of physicians) introduced the Food Pyramid, advocating less fat and more carbohydrates, and the rates of obesity started increasing from that very year. Because refined carbohydrates couldn’t be both good (low in fat) and bad (fattening), it was decided that they weren’t fattening, and instead, excess calories were to blame.

books essay notes social

The Meritocracy Trap (2019), Daniel Markovits

Post author By Josh
Post date February 15, 2020
Post date 3 mins

I read Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All over the holidays, which I enjoyed immensely. This led me to Daniel Markovits’ The Meritocracy Trap in the new year, which delves in the same broad pasture, but adopts a more academic bent and broader brush, surveying history, social science and economics. I’ve tried to summarize what I think the main ideas are, mingling a paraphrasing of the book with a few of my own thoughts, along with some ideas from the first book. Both are well worth your time, imho.

I was recently thinking about why I do what I do, and inevitably, the idea of money crossed my mind. Money incentivizes activity, all kinds of activity – it motivates us collectively and as individuals, to move and then stay in motion. Perhaps much of this activity is not broadly meaningful, but a small percentage probably is, and that is enough to move civilization forward, step by step or large leaps at a time – inventions, ideas, scientific discoveries, processes, systems. As a catalyst for progress at scale, it’s hard to beat. Money is the reason that capitalism, an economic system where production exists to generate profit for the owners of capital, and the basis for the most powerful economy on earth, can exist – it establishes a direct conduit between incentives, action, and reward.

Capitalism in turn, drives the culture of meritocracy that is the foundation for so much of our economy today. My reading of meritocracy: a culture where individuals are explicitly compensated according to actual “value”, or impact on a firm’s bottom line. In a capitalist system based on production, it is contribution to profit and productivity that ultimately accrues the highest rewards, and this explains the extravagant pay of CEOs compared to other employees, made possible by how much technology has amplified the leverage of management within a company. Technology enables scale in many facets of production, and when used with capitalist intent, becomes a key component of today’s meritocracy and an enabler for wealth concentration. In my view, capitalism (money as incentive), technology (and education), and the meritocratic culture amplify and feed each other, a “virtuous” cycle of sorts.