[TT 023] sleep & learning, psychomagic, psychedelic studies, fallen fruit, carving mountains
Hi there Thrivers,
It's been an eventful week as I've fully moved in to my space and visited with family. And to mark the beginning of an epic year, I went to an epic jazz concert. Zakir Hussain on tablas is a sight to behold (and each of the other quartet members were exceptional musicians as well).
No time to spare, so let's get right to Thriving Thursday.
On the Thriving branch of sleep (& learning)
Back in TT 012 I mentioned a project I was working on with Joel Chan, a professor at the University of Maryland. Using his synthesis model, we filleted 10 top academic articles regarding COVID transmission rates for children and synthesized a coherent narrative from the best available research. He has young kids and was trying to weigh the risk of putting them back into school, so we used his personal question to validate his theoretical workflow. The academic knowledge synthesis model worked beautifully.
For round 2, Joel has graciously allowed me to take point ... so, of course, I pointed our working group to the Thriving path. I offered the physiological branch of sleep and in our kickoff call we landed on synthesizing academic literature around sleep and learning. I expect we'll look at research relating to children, adults, and geriatrics.
Given my focus on UTT and GIFT, we have 3 project deliverables:
- A publicly published version of our knowledge synthesis to share openly
- A mechanism to iterate and scale this process to more domains (read: more Thrive branches)
- Testing monetization with a lean methodology (would you pay $1?)
Quick ask for you - are there any questions you have about sleep (and learning) for yourself, your children, or your parents?
One of my tasks for the next week is to source actionable questions relating to sleep. These are questions that may take the form of, "I have a decision to make about sleep, and this decision would be easier / more straightforward if I knew ..."
As a quick primer, here are just a few of the questions that come up for me:
- Where does the 8 hours / night number come from? Is that real, or is it like the bogus 8 cups / day number?
- What is the decay curve for learning / cognitive performance for every hour less than the ideal amount?
- How does sleep training impact a child's emotional regulation and learning?
- Will I hurt my cognition / learning / memory if I go to bed 2 hours later and wake up 2 hours later? Still 8 hours, just offset.
- If I fall asleep easily, do I need to go to bed at roughly the same time?
Now it's your turn - are there any sleep questions you wish you could ask "science"?
On the psycho of psychomagic
In an unexpected turn of Existential Movie Night, we watched Psychomagic - a pseudo-documentary commercial by Alejandro Jodorowsky for his modality of healing psychological trauma.
Jodorowsky is a stunningly prolific creator and artist as a writer, comic book creator, playwright, mime, director, and much more. Fun fact: one of his cult classic movies was financed by the Beatles.
Psychomagic itself is painful to watch, but it reminded me about the depth of meaning and healing that is possible when working with curated space and attuned ritual.
I don't know enough about Alejandro's methods to have an opinion though his fundamental question is interesting: is it possible to interact with the subconscious directly through acts? And what becomes possible when we fine-tune the toolkit of that contact?
On the perilous path of psychedelics
It's amazing to witness the image of psychedelics transforming from a destructive drug (it's definitely possible) to a (when used wisely) tool for health and wellbeing. A well-regarded observational study on ayahuasca from ICEERS used respected, internationally standardized measures to highlight the efficacy of Shipibo-lineage ceremony in enhancing wellbeing for Westerners. A different, smaller study came to the same conclusion and even looked at changes in gene expression. Could something in this plant be impacting us on an epigenetic level?
Of course, studies aren't enough on paving the path to acceptance. The DEA recently denied Soul Quest, an organization claiming a religious exemption to serve a schedule drug. In 2006, the Supreme Court upheld the right for UDV, another religious organization using ayahuasca for their ceremonies. I'm no legal expert, but it's clear the two cases are very different.
In any case, as we learn more about the effective, safe ways to harness the beneficial powers of psychedelics we'll need new legal, medical, and mental health frameworks to adapt to a new reality. I'm cautiously optimistic and intend to keep a close eye on the commercialization and growth of the psychedelic industrial complex.
On sustainability in the dining hall
At my last university, I was definitely spoiled with exceptional dining hall food. But, at that time, I didn't have an awareness of the tremendous waste and externalized costs that come from large-scale food supply chains.
At Stanford, apparently they have an award-winning program to address some of these challenges. As someone not steeped in this world, I'm skeptical about caveated phrases like "whenever possible, we source from ..." without any accountability metrics to back up the claims. How much do these initiatives actually move the needle?
As a consumer in the dining hall, I'm shocked by the amount of plastic. Then again, John Oliver would probably say I've fallen prey to the plastics propaganda. There is a compost bin near my on-campus apartment, and that's pretty awesome.
Overall, the slick brochure is laudable in spirit and I wish I could see some proof of the changes or impact these practices are having.
That did remind me that Stanford has a bunch of fruit trees sprinkled around campus that I found on Fallen Fruit. Apparently, they are free game whenever they are in season, and now that I'm back in California I'm looking forward to loquat season.
On a (sculpted) home of the gods
Peruvian artist Michael de Titan has carved massive sculptures of Incan gods directly into a mountainside. This reminds me of some of the large stone sculptures carved back in the Egyptian days (less the tourist attraction back then).
Pretty phenomenal work that'll be around for a long time to come.
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Until next time,
~Henry