Month: July 2020

From the last post:

For the last few days, after noticing the pattern and having done this reading-up [on the purpose of REM
sleep], I’ve become even more conscious about limiting information exposure.

I should have mentioned that there is some limited material available on the possible effects of excessive REM sleep. From Fitbit’s own blog:

Consistently getting too much REM could also create problems. “If you go too much over 25 percent of REM, it might cause too much brain activation, which can leave you angry and irritable and can even potentially exacerbate depression and anxiety symptoms,” says Grandner.

From S+, the sleep aid device and tracking service:

Stress, on the other hand, can extend REM sleep beyond normal levels. Too much REM sleep can actually leave you feeling tired the next day.

So (a) if my share of REM sleep is definitely over normal, putting me at risk for stress, tiredness, irritability and even depression, and if REM seems to have to do with processing the information gathered during the day, it follows that one way of testing this link is to limit information exposure. We have already seen my reflections on the 30 day Reddit and Twitter isolation I tried over the end of June and most of this month. I had said that I would continue to consume Reddit and Twitter in a time-boxed manner, deliberately. That limits causal attention capture.

The other thing I have already begun doing is simply saying no to viewing and reading links and videos that friends and family send me, typically over Whatsapp, unless they’re in an area of interest. Even then I’ll probably queue them in my read later list. If the person that shared asks if I had seen what they had shared, my answer is no.

This may seem excessive and anti-social (and obviously I have been told so), but the cumulative effect of this casual consumption is quite high. I appreciate that someone chose to share something interesting with me, but the cost for me (or anyone) to consume is much more than the cost of tapping share and send. A side effect is that when I do end up viewing or reading those few items that I queue, I can write back to the sharer about it, often leading to a short but usually interesting conversation.

I am not yet a fan of wearables. I’m excited about their ability to provide granular feedback about or health but I remain skpetical about how the manufacturers of consumer wearables will treat data. Data custody is one of the themes we have explored regularly on this site. However, I have been wearing my Fitbit wristband for the last few weeks for help in establishing a minimal level of movement during the day, especially as outdoor movement has been minimal.

The sleep stats are particularly interesting to me. I noticed a couple of weeks ago that my REM sleep had been typically more than even the higher end of what Fitbit considers a normal range for men of my age.

Sometimes that extra REM sleep comes at the cost of light sleep, which from what I understand is not that much of an issue, but sometimes at the cost of deep sleep. This could be a problem.

Now the exact role played by each sleep phase is not yet well understood as of this writing. Most experiments involve depriving humans or other animals of particular kinds of sleep and then observing the impact on particular kinds of cognitive tasks. Regardless, this is what some sources state about the role of REM sleep:

Naiman describes the brain during REM sleep as a sort of “second gut” that digests all of the information gathered that day. “Everything we see, every conversation we have, is chewed on and swallowed and filtered through while we dream, and either excreted or assimilated,” he says.

Several studies in recent years have suggested thatREM sleep can affect how accurately people can read emotions and process external stimuli. Walker’s research, for example, has demonstrated that people who achieved REM sleep during a nap were better able to judge facial expressions afterward than those who’d napped without reaching REM. (source)

Francis Crick (of DNA fame) and Grahame Mitchison suggested that dreams act as an “unlearning” mechanism, whereby certain modes of neural activity are erased by random activation of cortical connections… Michel Jouvet proposed that dreaming reinforces behaviors not commonly encountered during the awake state (aggression, fearful situations) by rehearsing them while dreaming. Yet another hypothesis is that REM sleep and dreams are involved in the transfer of memories between the hippocampus and neocortex. (source)

In plain terms it appears to be about processing information gathered during the day – although perhaps this will be proven incorrectly later. This is not surprising given that the day job is information-heavy, that I read constantly about the topics that make it to this site, and a book or two a month.

For the last few days, after noticing the pattern and having done this reading-up, I’ve become even more conscious about limiting information exposure.

Last week I learnt that the Linkedin account of the writer and investor Aniruddha Malpani had been suspended (the term Linkedin used was permanently restricted). The cause ostensibly seems to be his constant criticism of a couple of online education companies in India. I haven’t read his writing and therefore have no opinion about it. This post about something we have explored for a while now, control over access to your followers, given that your audience is now your capital.

Dr. Malpani has in effect lost his LinkedIn audience. He has a substantial Twitter presence as well, which is where he seems to have shifted his writing. But he has as much control over his Twitter account as his Linkedin one – he’s simply hoping that the former is more tolerant.

The one place he has been able to express his thoughts on the Linkedin suspension is on his own website where he has been writing for about eleven years. He also has a newsletter. It’s not clear what service his newsletter uses (I’m not signed up to it) but it might make sense to use a self-hosted one like the ancient PHPlist. One hopes that he treats his newsletter and his website (via RSS) as canonical.

This tweet in response to the news says it as well as anyone could.

Own your audience – via email – only viable way to build a brand & business.

If you rent your audience from another platform, you’re a serf – a tenant farmer, with no long term assets..

cc: @vivekk

— Prasanna K (@prasanna_says) July 22, 2020

As we saw Gary Vaynerchuk say in his book Crush it!, your blog is your home; treat social media as your vacation homes.

Also see: Building a censorship-resistant website.

Speaking of writing. I am a big fan of the Morning Brew newsletter which describes itself as “a newsletter-first media company that offers young professionals engaging, entertaining business news.” I don’t recall how I discovered it, I have been subscribed to it for about a year now. I had logged that just a couple of weeks ago it introduced me to

• The concept of Linear Commerce, which led to a 4-part post series on the topic.
• The book Doughnut Economics, which I have now queued near the top in my reading list.
• This huge trove of investment resources.

The newsletter has become a huge business, which the founder says is 5 years old, 45 employees, 2 million subscribers and will bring in USD 20 million in revenue in 2020.

It’s one of the newsletters I highly recommend; do check it out. PS if you’re in Asia it’s going to be an evening brew.