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Why Don't You Sleep On It?
thefirelane wrote to mention a New Scientist study that indicates your subconscious mind is a better decision maker than you are. From the article: "The research suggests the conscious mind should be trusted only with simple decisions, such as selecting a brand of oven glove. Sleeping on a big decision, such as buying a car or house, is more likely to produce a result people remain happy with than consciously weighing up the pros and cons of the problem, the researchers say. Thinking hard about a complex decision that rests on multiple factors appears to bamboozle the conscious mind so that people only consider a subset of information, which they weight inappropriately, resulting in an unsatisfactory choice. In contrast, the unconscious mind appears able to ponder over all the information and produce a decision that most people remain satisfied with."
I was going to post a rebuttal to this article, but I think I'll have a nap first.
So the famous step:
2. ???
Should actually be
2. Sleep
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Is this really due to the brain "working on" problems in your sleep? Or is this because the hours after waking are when the brain is at its operational best and it is easier to process large amounts of information at that time?
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Honest Boss, I wasn't sleeping on the job... actually I was, but it was helping me figure out how to tackle this project. Can't argue with science!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Wait for my +5 insightful post tomorrow.
The conscious mind tends to miss details. We spend so much time on the big issues that we don't notice little things. The problem is that we control our thoughts a little too well...if we don't see immediate relevance in something, we drop it. Our subconscious can take everything into account.
I'm quite fond of telling people that they think too much, or are overthinking a problem. They spend so much time fretting about how difficult the problem is that they don't actually devote any time to solving it.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
"In contrast, the unconscious mind appears able to ponder over all the information and produce a decision that most people remain satisfied with."
Ya, riiiight.
Acutally all you are doing is giving the subliminal programming messages more time to take effect on your mind. Once the unconscious takeover is complete the "sheep" no longer complain.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
This fits in nicely with another finding that seems amazing when you first hear about it, but is obviously true:
People spend more conscious thinking time on a choice when it doesn't really matter.
Hard to believe, right? You'd think we would think long and hard about things that matter (in the sense that one or the other of the choices will be far better or worse than the other) and not waste time on choices where the outcome is pretty much the same regardless of what we decided. But that's not, in fact, how we operate.
If you give people a choice between, say, being paid a dollar or getting hit with a stick, they make up their minds much quicker than if (to choose an example at the other end of the spectrum) you let them pick a candy out of a box of identical chocolates. You can even induce the effect; people will eat potato chips out of a bag one after another without even looking at them, but if you spread the same chips out on the table and ask "which chip do you want to eat next?" so that it becomes something they have to decide they will generally slow to a crawl.
--MarkusQ
The real conclusion is that if you give someone all the information they need to make a complex decision, then you tell them they're going to have to make a decision after you make them run through a set of distractions... They'll make the right decision.
If they don't know they're going to have to make a choice after their distraction, their subconscious won't do anything special.
This is just the same old story where if you have a problem, go think about something else & your subconscious will work it out for you. It's nice to see scientific proof for something that I've always considered anecdotal.
My last thought: Some people are better at making snap decisions and some people only think they are good at it. It takes a real man to be able to admit he needs to mull things over... which is why high-pressure sales tactics often work.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I've seen this happen on more than one occasion. Mostly I notice it with video games. I'll try for 2 hours to complete a task and not even complete it. Then, the next day I'll get it first try. My opinion is that your brain works through a lot of stuff when you're sleeping. I think this is why babies need a lot of sleep. Everything is new to them, and their brain needs a lot of time to process all that new information. I also find it easier to learn something new if I do it over a longer period, than trying to cram everything in at once. Instead of working 3 hours, you work on something in 1 hour sessions for 3 days. You retain the information a lot better.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Happy Friday.
"the conscious mind should be trusted only with simple decisions, such as selecting a brand of oven glove."
Yes but just think how good a job you could do picking out the right oven glove if you slept on it? The mind boggles.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
That isn't to say you can't figure stuff out while asleep. I'm still glad my brain decided to solve a differential equation while sleeping. I sure wasted enough time working on it awake.
So who know. Maybe it's a constantly changing mix of solving and acceptance.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
A scientific proof that "never do today what can be procrastinated until tomorrow" is the right way of doing things.
I had a psychology teacher who pointed out that the term ``subconscious'' is pretty much a Hollywood popularized word. You're either talking about being conscious or not being conscious, that is, unconscious. The writer of the article seems to agree with her because they don't use the term subconscious. Sorry to nitpick, but the word unconscious communicates the idea more clearly, while the subconscious is vague. Besides, I think it's safe to say that if you're asleep, you're unconscious.
Chuck Norris doesn't sleep -- he waits.
Synchronize your calendar and mobile phone via text messaging.
Marketers have known this for years. Marketing departments spend huge amounts of money exploring ways to nudge people into making the 'impulse buy' and trick them into unwise decisions. Grocery stores line their queues with trinkets and small items. Best buy is even worse- forcing people to wind their way through a twisty aisle made of boxes of small, inexpensive items to get to the checkout counter. Once, when shopping for a car, the salesman asked me 'What would it take for you to buy this car today?'. The list goes on... and, it seems to me, we are making worse and less informed decisions as time goes on.
Trying to find real information on a product is sometimes very difficult. Instead of making better products, companies make a cheaper product and spend a little more on marketing to promote it.
blah blah blah... im getting offtopic...
I think it's an issue of context. I don't think it's that you're sleeping on it, but rather you are thinking about the issue outside the context of marketing and environmental pressures. Removing something from context generally allows you to see that thing more clearly.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
Somehow this strikes me as seeming really true, even if just from my own experience.
:-)
My first reaction was, "Hell, I could have told them that!"
I thought it was common knowledge that one of the best ways to attack a problem is to review the materials, give it a rest, then come back with a fresh perspective? I've always attributed the bursts of inspiration that come from this to the "unconcious processor." Many people refer to it as "letting it churn in the back of your head." One way or another, most of the people I know seem to be cognizant of the fact that their unconcious is an excellent place to work problems out.
What really convinced me of the true power of unconcious thought was a puzzle someone gave me when I was a teen. The puzzle consisted of an 8 cell grid drawn on a piece of paper. You had to fill each cell with a number from 1 through 8. The challenge was to place the numbers such that no consecutive numbers were adjacent to each other in the horizontal, vertical, or diagonal directions. The guy who showed me the puzzle had supposedly known it for 20 years, but had never solved it. I tried my hand at it quite a bit before bed that night. Finally I just let it go for the moment so I could get some sleep. As I started to drift off, I saw the puzzle in my head. As I watched in my mind, all the numbers dropped into place one by one.
I popped out of bed, grabbed a piece of paper, and replicated what I had just visualized. Sure enough, it was the solution to the puzzle! My unconcious mind had solved a problem that my concious mind hadn't been able to tackle after hours of trying! After that, I learned to rely more on shoving a problem back into my unconcious, then waiting for a solution to work its way forward.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I recall reading somewhere (back in the day) that in some ancient tribal culture (Bedouin?), when dealing with something important, the parties would first negotiate in a social situation in the evening around the campfire (IIRC smoking something was involved, but maybe that was just me!), and make the decision. But no decision was not final until the next day, when the question was reviewed thoroughly in the "cold light of day".
In this way, a person could get to know the potential business partner or in-law, learn how they do things when their guard was down at least a bit, and find out whether they can get along as people; and get the basic facts and factors of the decision.
Then, after sleeping on it and 'digesting' the information, they could use their more analytical daytime-brain to go over what they might not have thought of the night before. In the end, one might say that each side of their brain had the chance to contribute to the decision. (Since the two hemispheres of male brains as a generality are be less well connected than those of females, I would argue that this strategy may be especially useful for men.
I wish I recalled more detail but it was just a page or so of a book or article, and I don't even recall what the book was about.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Well, sort of.
.01 (death from falling) + .99 (fun) .99 (small number)
A complex decision is a whole bunch of trade-offs, profit-and-loss variables. Each variable has a probability associated with it, and they can cascade together. I use a system of "expected value" summations, and it works pretty well.
For instance, in buying a car there is the price (and the 100% likelihood that you'll have to pay it), a set of features, and a set of unknown costs (maintenance), and a set of emotional value points (prestige, convenience, dependability). Each of the costs has a probability that you'll incur it, and each of the values has a probability that you'll receive it. Some of them are related, and may need to be refactored to make the math work out for you.
You multiply each of the costs and outcomes (positive and negative) with their value to you (on some scale of your choosing) and their probability of occurring, and sum them all up. That choice gets a score.
Compare the score from all of the other choices you could make, and your decision is made.
The nice thing about this system is that by breaking down the fuzzy-factor "value" for each outcome and pairing it with a probability, you see the real cost for each while simultaneously hiding the answer from yourself. Subconciously you will tend to favor the choice you want to make, but be careful that you don't fudge the probabilities.
As a simple example, consider recreational sky-diving. The value you get from jumping -- a rush, some prestige, and maybe some sex out of it somehow -- compares with a (call it) 99% probability of landing safely and a (call it) 1% probability of landing with a splat.
For me, I assign a pretty high value to keeping my skin intact. How much would I pay someone not to flatten my skull?
stay on ground = free + 0 (death from falling) + 0 (fun)
= 0
skydiving = -$50 +
= -$50 - 1/100 (very big number) +
= (probably something negative, and I have to pay 50 bucks).
As a side note, you can see that the resultant costs of a decision and the cost to make it happen are just two labels for the same thing. That is, whether something is a cost or benefit is just the sign on the term.
sigs, as if you care.
Instead of working 3 hours, you work on something in 1 hour sessions for 3 days. You retain the information a lot better.
There's a big trade-off to this, though. One has to be careful in defining what you mean by "work on".
I'm in graduate school. Lots of maths, physics, etc. It's really easy to get bogged down in complicated problems. I've found that if I go to sleep after working *for a long time* on a problem, then it becomes easier to solve. However, I have to have REALLY worked on the problem. A couple of hours doesn't cut it; you have to really dig in, ignore slashdot (gasp!), get some Zeppelin on the radio, and maybe only take breaks for the bathroom. Only after several hours (at least 4, for me) of that does the "sleeping on it" do any good.
I forget which book i was reading, probably "The Tao of Personal Leadership" which maintained that the proper way to accomplish any weighty task is to familiarize yourself with it. Dig in deep. Then do nothing. At a later time, reproach it and the task will go far more smoothly. Once I read that I realized that in the past several years of profesional development, I had done just that. I don't just sit down and code as if I were running a marathon. I think about it all, then I "mull it over". This mulling really involves little. Just a little directed consciousness and everything falls into place without deliverate thought. As the years slip under my belt, I do less and less directed thinking and the results are always better than the last.
This is the way of the Tao.
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