I wonder how many brain hacks become awesome if you just lean on them hard enough. Could we all increase our effective waking hours by a factor of 1.2 by learning to lucid dream consistently, for instance?
I don’t believe you can. REM sleep is intrinsically fragmented into multiple short episodes, and you generally get little more than an hour all told anyway. (And time is distorted in dreams, so these are upper bounds...)
That really depends on the person… many people have several hours of REM each night in fairly long blocks.
I average 2.5 hours of REM/night (measured via ZEO), and apparently 2 hours/night is average for demographic of men aged 17-29 (per ZEOs user stats).
I typically have at least one solid non-fragmented hour long block, and a second block of at least 30 minutes with the remaining hour from small blocks.
Mindfulness meditation seems like another good example, especially since the required time investment for you to start seeing benefits seems to be pretty large.
My experience with mindfulness meditation differs from the standard narrative. Once I had practiced long enough to be able to meditate for 15 min. with no problems, I found meditation much more useful for inducing a concentrated state or taming bouts of internal turbulence than any longer-term effects.
Second this anecdote, and also the parent. I think depending on how you intend to apply it, you may be more or less observant of the short term effects of meditation, esp. mindfulness.
Anecdotally, sitting shikantaza style (just sitting, subtle attention to posture, returning from daydreaming or distraction when you’re aware it’s happening) has so far had two effects—short term I’ve found some immediate benefit in terms of being able to apply attention (which was a goal for me), over the span of 1-2 years I’ve (subjectively) noticed changes in how I react and make decisions which have been re-enforced by other peoples observations.
Further to this I’ve noticed it’s easier to apply some learnings, for example techniques from less wrong. Internally it feels as if there’s a longer period after an event happens to internalise and construct a response, instead of an immediate / knee jerk reaction.
I wonder how many brain hacks become awesome if you just lean on them hard enough. Could we all increase our effective waking hours by a factor of 1.2 by learning to lucid dream consistently, for instance?
I don’t believe you can. REM sleep is intrinsically fragmented into multiple short episodes, and you generally get little more than an hour all told anyway. (And time is distorted in dreams, so these are upper bounds...)
That really depends on the person… many people have several hours of REM each night in fairly long blocks.
I average 2.5 hours of REM/night (measured via ZEO), and apparently 2 hours/night is average for demographic of men aged 17-29 (per ZEOs user stats).
I typically have at least one solid non-fragmented hour long block, and a second block of at least 30 minutes with the remaining hour from small blocks.
Mindfulness meditation seems like another good example, especially since the required time investment for you to start seeing benefits seems to be pretty large.
My experience with mindfulness meditation differs from the standard narrative. Once I had practiced long enough to be able to meditate for 15 min. with no problems, I found meditation much more useful for inducing a concentrated state or taming bouts of internal turbulence than any longer-term effects.
Second this anecdote, and also the parent. I think depending on how you intend to apply it, you may be more or less observant of the short term effects of meditation, esp. mindfulness.
Anecdotally, sitting shikantaza style (just sitting, subtle attention to posture, returning from daydreaming or distraction when you’re aware it’s happening) has so far had two effects—short term I’ve found some immediate benefit in terms of being able to apply attention (which was a goal for me), over the span of 1-2 years I’ve (subjectively) noticed changes in how I react and make decisions which have been re-enforced by other peoples observations.
Further to this I’ve noticed it’s easier to apply some learnings, for example techniques from less wrong. Internally it feels as if there’s a longer period after an event happens to internalise and construct a response, instead of an immediate / knee jerk reaction.