Better living through Better Thinking

Well, here’s a good way to use a holiday weekend:  Let’s gather some data!

Let’s see what polyphasic schedules people like best, and then also which ones people actually use most often.

Feel free to add comments / critiques / fake fireworks noises / whatever in the comments, as well.  ;)

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…After the weekend, I’ll put these polls in the Polyphasic Sleep Portal.

Have a great Extra Day Off, Americans!  You earned it (well, two hundred years ago, but still, earned time off is earned time off, right?).

First, they’re cool.  And if you know a physical art that you like, then by necessity you’ve made yourself cooler in your own estimation.  Woot for self-esteem.

(Oh, and by “physical art” I mean the set of physical skills that would include–to different degrees–kungfu, playing an instrument, skateboarding, calligraphy, and dance.)

Secondly, the experience of going from poorly or fairly physically fit to being physically fit is one of the most amazing things this world offers.  To notice new strength, pulsing new energy, new physical *and* mental abilities on a regular basis is…superherolike, even!

Thirdly, they do fantastic things to your vocabulary.  Often you get to learn all these archaic and/or foreign terms, and moreover you really learn them, complete with the somatic (moving, living) meanings.  Or if the art is more humble, maybe you still get to learn what’s really meant by “fakey pop shove-it”, which is also pretty darn cool.

[That "cool" (for your chosen hypothetical definitions thereof) is an inherent good is a given, by the way.  It must be, due to its being a direct descendant of Fun, and the inviolate Eighties Movie Theory of the Inarguable Superiority of Fun.  ...I'm only partially kidding.  In a sense the EM Theory is simply pointing out how we know in our guts that fun and cool -- interesting and enjoyable -- things are good, and how we lose touch with this intuition as we age.  When I'm up on one foot like Jet Li I know what it is to feel cool, and I know it's a wonderful thing.]

The fourth awesome thing about a physical art is that it makes you really aware of how much you could lose if you were injured.  This in turn makes you more careful about dumb shit (like wearing seatbelts), and also more grateful for how you’re able to enjoy your body now.

And that’s the fifth thing, in a sense:  You get to enjoy your body.  This is a particularly profound thing for a lot of women, I think.  For many women the body is a burden in one or more ways — whether or not it’s popularly perceived as “nice”.  But regardless of gender, I’m beginning to realize how little many people — even healthy people in generally good shape who have decent sex lives — really get to enjoy being in their bodies and using them really well. The experience of feeling like you’ve attained some mastery with your body is…well, it’s just as awesome as it looks in the movies, I think.

So there you have it!  Five darn good reasons to get into a physical art.  Here’s how:

1. Pick one you think is cool — seriously, that’s how I chose mine (in fact it’s how a lot of the high-up students in our Temple did), and I couldn’t have chosen better.
2. Then grab hold of your Art and don’t let it go.
3. Profit!  ;)

Hey there!  My BFF from college and “buddy system” partner for the original Uberman Sleep Schedule experiment has been experimenting herself lately, working to get back on a polyphasic sleep schedule in spite of a pretty tight work / commute schedule to maneuver around.  (She’s also my “human alarm”, and I hers.  Awwww, right?  ;)

Anyway, recently she posted some useful things she’s learned in this latest attempt, and I thought some of you might also benefit from hearing:

First and foremost that was pounded into my head - once a month (or every other month at least) I need a day, or two, of not being on schedule. …[Note:  This is a good thing to know about yourself.  But remember that you'll need to adjust first, before taking any days off!]

I’ve also noticed that while a core sleep polyphasic is more flexible than Uberman, it is not that flexible…certainly not while adapting. And adapting can take a surprisingly long time if one does not stick to a fairly rigid schedule in the beginning (for, say, the first month). This can, of course, be really difficult to stick with if you have any kind of social life…but treat it like NaNoWriMo (if you do that). For one month you are off limits to anything other than an emergency.  [GOOD ADVICE!]

Another tidbit I’ve picked up is that whatever activity it is you want to include in your extra time should be started right away. Even if the quality, or whatever, won’t be the best. Or even passable. Habits established at the beginning have a tendency to linger - especially since they’ll be going to the pre-conscious part of the brain, making it that much harder to get rid of them at a later date.

Thus, if at all possible, avoid giving into the sneaky excuse “I’ll start once I’m adjusted and am more awake at this hour.” That could be quite awhile depending on the adjustment period and by then you might have a seriously entrenched bad habit. …[Also darn good advice!]

THANKS to Psuke for letting me repost these!

You probably know how I feel about change:  I love it.  It may be hard sometimes, but it’s also the source of all the Going Forward.  Tolle even said it — Even making a mistake is better than doing nothing, if you’re stuck.

So, are you feeling stuck, and not sure what change or changes to make?  Here are five EASY changes that I know of which are always a good idea. Pick one or two (don’t go overboard or you won’t follow through, yeah?) and make a commitment to it today!

1. Meditate Regularly and/or More Often. Just today I read in a fantastic book that “you can’t expect help from the Higher Power if you don’t make an offering of your stillness and mindfulness first”.  When nothing else seems right, or sounds both possible and enjoyable, go for this one.  The benefits to physical and mental health alone make it worth it, and on top of that, meditation is often an excellent catalyst in itself, and helps bring further good change.  Also, even in really bad times when everything seems impossible to accomplish, “sitting quietly and breathing deeply for five minutes a day” is hardly decathalon material.  You can do that.  And you should.
2. Drink More Water. Yes, you’ve heard it a thousand times, but chances are you still don’t really get enough.  And enough water is the difference between a fully-functioning brain/body and one that’s struggling to operate at capacity, which can have a huge impact on your abilities and performance.  Give yourself a physical and mental edge by getting a good-sized water-bottle, calculating how many times you need to empty it per day to get enough water, and then do it.
3. Denounce Negativity. We all take comfort in negativity sometimes — and I say that as a Bona Fide Queen of Sarcasm myself.  But that comfort always comes at a price…and the price is steep.  On top of that, negativity is contagious, both within yourself and between yourself and others, so once you start indulging in it, it’s hard to stop.  DO stop.  Make a commitment to recognize negative thoughts when you have them, and to let them go whenever possible.  Don’t fight them — just let them go, like letting the string on a helium balloon go; let the idea just float away.  Tell yourself that if you want to think about that topic further, you’ll have to come up with a non-negative way to do so.
4. Make a “Got A Minute List”. If you don’t have one, make a list of things you can work on for just a few minutes at a time.  They can be small tasks, or big tasks that will benefit from a little work here and there (some examples: “write a postcard to someone”, “practice piano for 5 minutes”, “file ten pieces of paperwork”, “do stretches”).  This will help you feel less overwhelmed in the long run, and give you something new to do with your spare minutes in the short term.  Plus, by knocking off some of the small things-to-do that’d been occupying your time and energy before, you’ll make room for newer and better things.
5. Think Beautiful Thoughts. Hey, your mind is your Holodeck, and we all know that the guy who goes into the Holodeck to romp with unicorns is in better mental health than the guy who goes there to do obscene medical experiments.  Use your mindspace wisely, and commit to thinking at least one deliberately beautiful thought every day.  It can be anything, but make sure it’s actually beautiful to you — it should make you smile, not feel grumpy or envious.  Take a few minutes and get the details right.  If you can, write your beautiful thoughts down — they’ll be useful later, to someone, for something, I promise!

…And by that I mean “mostly related to polyphasic sleep”, not “mostly occuring in several chunks”.  …Though come to think of it, I guess both are true!

Just a few things too good for Twitter and too small to stand on their own:

• There are some new polyphasic articles out there, for those who are in the “researching” phase:
  • Long-time polyphaser Aximilation answers an attempted rebuttal of polyphasic sleep called “Why you Can’t Hack Sleep” — both are worthy reads if you haven’t made up your mind yet.
  • There’s a new “overview” article out there on polyphasic sleep, by one Dustin Curtis.  New polyphasers will like its simplicity and descriptive graphics, and everybody will probably like the cool layout.  ;)
• There’ve also been a ton of new visitors to this site, probably having something to do with new polyphasic articles I suppose — Hi and Welcome, New People! Please don’t take my repeated references to neophilia as a come-on.  If you’re looking for the most possible polyphasic info that involves wading through the least possible unrelated babble by me, you want the Polyphasic Sleep Information Portal.  Enjoy, and if you have any comments or suggestions, I’d love to hear ‘em.
• It’s now been several weeks for me of having a “human alarm” — my friend Psuke (the other original Ubersleeper!) is polyphasic again, and we’ve been calling each other to help her transition and me stay on-schedule in spite of a rather ridiculous recent spate of stresses and nap-busting events outside of my control.  It’s been awesome. I can’t recommend “human alarms” enough if you’re adapting or struggling to keep to your schedule. There’s almost always one time when it’s especially easy to oversleep, and the human alarm has an effect that, IMO, no robot-alarm can match.  Your brain is programmed to turn on at the presence of other people, I’m sure.  On top of the obvious benefit that I’ve been up on time nearly every single morning, no matter how fluxord my naps were the day before, I also get to talk to my long-distance BFF every day!  *woot!*
• If you meditate, consider meditating right before your naps:  It’s a good way to a) practice often, and b) increase your likelihood of a good nap!  (It’s really helped me meet my twice-a-day-or-the-Shaolin-order-gets-mad goal, and I know I’ve been able to sleep for some naps that I wouldn’t have otherwise, due to external stresses or stretched schedules.  Yay!)
• Can anybody help me find the best thing to heal sore knees after too much exercise?  I’m afraid my kitchen-remedies-for-darn-near-everything skillz don’t really go into sports medicine (yet), and wow did I overdo it this week.  Ye olde Flying Tiger Cub Balm isn’t enough, and MSM/glucosamine only seems to be helping a little…rrrgh!  (HINT:  If you don’t know anything about these things, you could just remind me to do the 108 more often.  That would probably help too.  ;)

There.  That oughtta hold back the flood of babble for…um…another day or so.

Happy Weekend, world!  Wish me luck; mine is fraught with fraughtedness.

PD

It’s strange.  As a person who naturally seems able to put the occasional tricky thing into words that real people can grok — the basis of my talents, such as they are, in both science fiction and philosophy, I suppose — and as someone whose youth and sexual identity was framed, to a degree, by sexual assault, I feel obligated to talk about it sometimes, to cast my dice and see if I can lend a hand to the overall clarification of a ridiculously sticky topic.

But I quite often do a terrible job — a far terribler job than I usually do with subjects that seem like the ought to be harder.

But I’m coming to realize, it’s a HARD topic.  And not because it’s “touchy”; I can handle touchy.  It’s hard because almost everything about human history and the development of our language(s) is colored by not just misogynistic ideas, but also racist and classist and all these other unhelpful ideas, ideas that are dug so deep and go back so far that it’s almost impossible to avoid stepping in them or mixing them in with your otherwise-quite-reasonable arguments.  Even if you’re trying your hardest to say something rational and humanistic and helpful about (say) rape, very often you realize (often thanks to the anger of someone listening) that you’ve somehow excluded poor or colored or GLBT or third-world women from benefiting from your conclusions; or conversely, that you’ve spent so much time framing your argument in terms of the plight of Congoese women that you’ve said something that completely cuts off the white middle-class women who’re suffering too.

Anyway, I say all that, not because I have anything profound to say myself today, but because I wanted to properly introduce and compliment LJ user “shewhohashope” for her sterling ability to navigate this ridiculous morass of prejudices and systematic control and emotional backlash and all of it.  I read her article “On Rape Culture and Civilization” today, and though it wasn’t exactly free from “feminist-studies jargon” (not that *I* can write something relevant that is), it certainly was clear and it addressed a lot of what makes the whole topic so difficult very well.  Here’s an awesome little exerpt:

If rape is about power, then the way rape is framed in the dominant discourse works to maintain the already present paradigmatic model of femininity/masculinty, enforcing the already present structure. Thus we see advice on how to avoid rape is primarily (almost entirely) weighted towards what women do, rather than what men do. Then, (the threat of) rape is used to regulate (primarily) women’s sexual behaviour, as well as to punish those who step outside appropriate patterns of behaviour and/or do not fit into the standard model of what a woman should be like.

WOOT.  Damn nicely put.  And maybe knowing that, and knowing that concepts like power and behavior and civilization are thus useful, will help me say a little more, a little better, in the future.

Also, if you’re into a little more not-so-light but very enlightening reading, also don’t miss this article about the effects of everyone’s tendency to “worship virgins” and its effect on the virgins themselves.  (It’s looking at this primarily from the context of african-american women, but I can say from experience that that’s not where this problem ends.)  Another Exerpt Of Niftiness:

We need to talk to them about healthy, guilt-free sex—when I read that teenagers who take chastity pledges are less likely to use birth control methods, it made perfect sense. Birth control requires forethought, an admission that you plan to have sex, something many teenagers who have simply been told “don’t have it,” can’t do.

We need to tell them that no matter how many times they’ve “been touched,” or how many partners they’ve had, they still have bodily autonomy, the right to say yes or no. That the language used to fetishize virginity—”saving it” or “giving it” to someone—is not accurate. Their sexuality, their bodies are their own.

Damn right.  As a mom, and someone for whom an early assault led to years of ridiculously low self-esteem in all things, you’d better believe I’m memorizing that passage.

And on that cheery note, I bid you kungfu.  ;)

.

(That doesn’t mean anything particular; it’s just a more fun construction of “bid you adieu”; apologies if I confused you!)

Lifehacker - Improve Your Sleep Posture

Neat article from Lifehacker, which actually references several other relevant articles; but I always find reading LH’s posts useful, especially since their commenters are pretty top-notch.  (Am I one of them, you ask?  Certainly!  But you know my thing with names…  ;)

Sleep posture is important, though I’ve found that polyphasic sleeping makes it less important to sleep right every time – since you’re not doing it for eight hours straight, you’ll suffer less from bad posture.  Chiropractic problems due to tossing around in my sleep and ending up in odd positions used to be a huge problem for me, before I tried polyphasic sleep.  Another benefit of the naps, though, is that I’m also a less “mobile” sleeper now, in the sense that I don’t toss and turn.  In fact, it’s pretty much a given that I’ll wake up in exactly the position I fell asleep…unless I fell asleep reading in bed before my core-nap.  If that happens I won’t wake up with a book on my face, because my dearest will remove it for me (and usually my glasses too)!

I used to suffer horrible neck and shoulder pain from bad sleep posture, and if I were still sleeping 8 hours in a chunk, I probably still would.  Thanks to my schedule, though, I can take a single nap on my face, in a car, up against a tree, or whatever, and maybe end up a little stiff, but fine.  Twenty minutes in a funny posture isn’t really anything, and even my core is more forgiving than a monophasic chunk.

But it should be noted that, even though I don’t suffer if I sleep weird, my body definitely prefers to lie flat, with something roll-shaped under my neck and occasionally my knees too.  So it’s worth reading up on sleep posture, and making sure yours is good for you as often as possible.

When learning to nap, or when troubleshooting bad sleep habits, it can also be helpful to try and use the same posture every time. Body position can become a “trigger” that reminds your brain that it’s time to sleep, so I do tend to recommend that people adapting to polyphasic schedules try to sleep in the same position, if not for every nap, then for every “same nap” (i.e. if you take your 3pm nap in a car, try to always take it in a car).

Nap on,

PD

The point of living is to be awake for it.

That’s true no matter what the Big Picture turns out to be — we could reincarnate; we could all be dreaming right now; we could be a biological accident that disappears with the death of our physical bodies — it doesn’t matter.  Any way you look at it, life is pointless if you’re not paying attention.

And let’s face it, sleeping less is the easy way to address the necessity of Awakeness (which could just as easily be called Awareness); and it’s also, in that sense, a cheat.  The point of living is not to be physically awake for more hours — that’s a useful and cool thing if you ask people like me, but it’s not IT.  IT is being more aware while you ARE awake.

Does anybody try this?  Does anybody pause during an average day and marvel at how much of it you’ve managed to barely pay attention to?  I do, and it’s a bit scary.

Moreover, it’s actually sometimes scary to be awake. Have you tried it?  Have you focused as much as you can on the moment you’re in, mental-eyes wide open, judgment suspended, all senses as live as you can get them?  Granted, I think it’s only scary because it’s such a smashing of the psychological status quo; it’s a type of experience few people have, so as an unknown, it’s scary.

It’s funny, because Awakeness, deliberately cultivated, can feel really good — especially when you are scared or panicking, getting your emotional feet on the ground makes you realize that you actually only have to “handle” this moment, this tiny slice of time, and that’s a big relief when your brain is screaming about how it “can’t handle” whatever horrors and scenarios it’s imagining.  The feeling of Awakeness brings into focus that those things are imaginings, and not actually worth freaking out about at all.  Awakeness can also feel awesome when coupled with being in contact with nature — it seems to allow you to share the state of consciousness much of nature happens in — and I’ve certainly heard nothing but good things about it in most other circumstances, too.

In fact the single best, clearest, most evolved mental states I’ve ever achieved — what I’d have to call Samadhi — have been a result of forcing my attention onto a single moment as much as I possibly could.   Awakeness, when it’s allowed to become the defining characteristic of your presence, feels an awful lot like…what?  Immortality maybe.  Infinity.  Like being everything.

On the other hand — and if you’ve never done this, pardon me for how odd it probably sounds — being Awake, aware of the moment, also makes Time seem totally bottomless. And this, while it sounds awesome in theory (oh, the ideas I’ve had, about eternity, immortality, spacetime, dimensions–!), trust me, it can be unbelievably uncomfortable in practice.

Let me back up a little.  Grant me that we stay distracted, stay away from Awakeness/Awareness, because we’re avoiding Pain, where “Pain” is the undifferentiated totality of unconsciousness-qua-negativity.  I realize we’ll all fill in the details, and define these broad nouns, differently; but for now that doesn’t matter.  Everyone has a few forms their Pain generally takes most often…examples are anger, anxiety, depression, dissatisfaction, etc.  A very big one for me is boredom.  I learned to hate boredom early in my life, and since then it’s become a trip-switch for negativity — both a cause and an indicator.  (I know, I totally just made a big chunk of my psychology make sense to you, did I?  ;)

Awakeness means you experience that moments aren’t narrow tunnels that shoot off into the distance; rather, they’re deep landscapes filled with a literally infinite amount of information and experience, waiting to be paid attention to. Normally, we experience them shallowly, or not at all, or only as memories of themselves.  But given the effort, one of the things that becomes immediately apparent is that there’s so much there in every moment — and also that, if you hold your awareness to one moment, it doesn’t “tick over” into another, but rather changes smoothly, becoming a single moment literally filled with (potentially) everything.  The “tick over”, the sensation that life is composed of discrete moments, is actually caused by us losing track of moments and then noticing them again — usually shallowly or as memories of themselves, as I said — giving the impression of a flicker of tiny things, rather than a vast cosmic stream that it’s easy to imagine has no beginning and no ending.

One of the quotes I have on the “random quote” section of the site is this one, which I put there precisely because it speaks to this oddness so well:  I do not cut my life up into days but my days into lives, each day, each hour, an entire life. –Juan Ramon Jimenez. That’s *exactly* what it feels like to have one’s attention on the moment; to be Awake.  The more Awake you get, the more experience fits in a smaller slice of “time” (insofar as time can still be understood to function the same way in that state).

Is anybody reminded of the Upload Your Own Skillz aspect of the Matrix story?  You could learn anything in that world, because technology had found a way to shrink the amount of time you needed to spend with it.  …HMMM, godlike powers from accessing more of the experience available in a moment, anyone??

But now, go forward again.  Imagine what my unconscious reaction against boredom does with the memory and anticipation of that feeling…it sounds something like, OMG EACH MINUTE IS A LIFETIME LONG!  OMG THERE’S ENOUGH INFORMATION BETWEEN HERE AND WALKING DOWN THESE STAIRS TO FILL UP A WHOLE DAY!  OMG I CAN’T STAND IT IT WOULD TAKE A MILLION YEARS JUST TO GET TO DINNERTIME!

Awakeness isn’t really boredom-inducing — in fact, far from it; you don’t get bored when every single thing is full of a lifetime’s worth of information — but from the outside, it looks horrendously boring, and I know for a fact that I’ve shied away from being more Awake at times because I felt that I couldn’t stand the boredom if I was.  Even though I actually, physically know better.  (Gotta love Psychologies.)

Of course, “boredom” as a form of Pain isn’t actually the desire for more information or richer experience; I know that.  It’s the desire for motion, to be dragged along and distracted by stimulus — and focusing deeply on reality doesn’t give you that; in fact it tends to smooth motion out, which is probably why your Zen-master types could ride out ridiculously stressful events with nary a nervous breakdown.  So my reaction against boredom isn’t appropriate here; it’s not really an argument against Awakeness — just one excuse I have for not pursuing it as much as I should.

(Of course, how do you pursue something that can’t happen in the future?  Damn yooooou English Language!  ;)

Some of you may have noticed my Three Recent Principles as they made their way over Twitter (which was really me being totally impressed with myself that I managed to create Principles so short!).  Those are renewals of a methodology I need in order to keep myself on a right path — I needed to re-work them and I’m happy that I did.

(They look like this:  1) Find the truth in silence; 2) Face the truths you find with courage; 3) speak the truths you know without compromise. I might write more about them later, I suppose.)

The necessity of Awakeness as a central part of any meaningful life was one of the very first truths that slapped me upside the head, after I first applied that method.  And I should stress again that Awakeness isn’t thinking, judging, contemplating, examining, reviewing, or being extra-aware of the past or the future:  It’s being willing to experience right now as fully as possible, without succumbing to any of the zillion excuses (Now sucks!  It’s boring!  It’s scary!  It’s unknown!) for letting life — actual in-the-moment life — pass us by.

So I’m going to be working a lot more on Awakeness.  Since I’ve had these initial revelations, I have managed to spend some time at least once a day “getting there”, which so far is an achingly slow and mentally difficult process.  But shit, if I can learn kungfu I can learn this, and it’ll get easier.

I’ll keep you posted, and if you learn anything profound about Awakeness, you keep me in the loop too, eh?

Just the other day I was pondering the adage “Thieves always think they’re being stolen from; liars always think they’re being lied to” — a psychological truism I obtained courtesy of my mom.  (Thanks, mom!)

It leads to an interesting conclusion about “consumers”.  What are they?  Well, in a simplistic sense, they’re lazy.  It’s not that they don’t work, but rather that they’re afraid of work, so they’ll end up working far harder (in the long run) to avoid work than they would have worked to do it in the first place.  But for simplicity’s sake we’ll call this odd relationship to effort “laziness”.

I suggest this extension to Mom’s wisdom:  Lazy consumers think that corporations are lazy too. As evidence for this claim, I present food.  How many average people in Western countries do you think believe that food manufacturers are conducting all kinds of extensive research into what ingredients in what combinations will sell the most food?  In my experience, most people believe the opposite:  That corporations are just making things and selling them, and how much they sell (and how much we eat) is “up to us”.  Because consumers aren’t doing the work to police the ingredients and marketing of the food we’re being sold, I think those consumers assume that corporations aren’t paying much attention either.  But as anybody who understands capitalism will tell you, those corporations have a very powerful incentive to do exactly the opposite — and on a long enough timeline, in a competitive business climate, it’s the corporations that are most successful at getting people to buy more food that will push the others out of business.

So what do we have now?  Now we have a book written by the former head of the FDA, showing that corporations have indeed been working their tushes off for years, experimenting to find just the right combination of sugars, fats, salts, and flavorings to make consumers buy and eat more food.

Surprised?  If so, ask yourself why.  And even if you’re not surprised, ask yourself why this book is seen as espousing a relatively radical idea, and why its conclusions will make a lot of people uncomfortable.  Think about how many people seem to really want the obesity epidemic to be the fault of the consumers.  What are they really saying?  They’re saying “I don’t want to believe that corporations have really been working, and succeeding, at finding ways to coerce people into buying and eating more food.”

And hey, that’s understandable; nobody wants to feel coerced.  And people who want to remain lazy — who recoil at the idea of producing even some of their own food from scratch, but who don’t see a problem paying ten times as much to someone else and receiving questionable nutrition in return — really don’t want to admit that by doing so, they’ve opened themselves up to deliberate manipulation of the nastiest kind.  That the people you “trusted” to be as lazy as you–to at least not be trying to do you harm in the interest of making a buck–are, in fact, going full speed ahead with that and are, in fact, being incredibly successful at it.  And you’re letting them.

It’s an uncomfortable realization that’s going to become more uncomfortable soon, as the children we’re now raising a full third of to develop juvenile diabetes begin to ask us why the hell we stopped cooking at home, when the stuff we were buying was such obvious junk.

Exerpt from NYTimes article on the book:

When it comes to stimulating our brains, Dr. Kessler noted, individual ingredients aren’t particularly potent. But by combining fats, sugar and salt in innumerable ways, food makers have essentially tapped into the brain’s reward system, creating a feedback loop that stimulates our desire to eat and leaves us wanting more and more even when we’re full.

Dr. Kessler isn’t convinced that food makers fully understand the neuroscience of the forces they have unleashed, but food companies certainly understand human behavior, taste preferences and desire. In fact, he offers descriptions of how restaurants and food makers manipulate ingredients to reach the aptly named “bliss point.” Foods that contain too little or too much sugar, fat or salt are either bland or overwhelming. But food scientists work hard to reach the precise point at which we derive the greatest pleasure from fat, sugar and salt.

via Well - How the Food Makers Captured Our Brains - NYTimes.com.

There’s a lot of argument over whether people being attacked — especially women confronted with sexual assault — should fight their attackers.

Courtesy of The Straight Dope, here’s some data (emphasis mine):

• A recent ten-year study of attacks on women (733 rapes, 1,278 sexual assaults, and 12,235 general assaults) found that on the one hand, resisting an attempted rape lowered the odds of the perp completing the act by nearly two-thirds. But on the other, it slightly increased the odds of injury and doubled the chance of serious injury.
• A study of 3,206 assaults against women between 1992 and 1995 showed that women who fought back early in the attack were half as likely to be injured, and 75 percent of women queried reported that fighting back helped. An earlier study using data from the 70s found that women who resisted had less likelihood of being raped and 86 percent sustained no serious injury as a result — which, I suppose, means 14 percent did sustain serious injury.
• Another ten-year study of victim response in 27,595 crimes (assault, sexual assault, robbery, larceny, and burglary) showed across the board that resisting resulted in less injury than not resisting. Similarly, studies have found that resisting reduces the likelihood of an attempted crime succeeding. For example, the chance of a would-be robber pulling it off drops somewhere between 20 and 48 percent.

…As to the “but you’re more likely to be injured!” argument that one can draw from these…yeah, you’ve gone from being a victim in an attack or rape, to being a party to a brawl.  Parties to brawls often get injured as a result.  But which would you rather be?

There’s another question this raises, for me anyway:  Is it more ethical not to fight back?  I have several friends and family members who are Quakers and the die-hard-pacifist types of Buddhist, so it’s a valid question.  My thoughts:

• It makes sense to seek harmony with the Universe, and “yield to overcome” is awesome advice, because in harmony and nonaggression you are seeking to have the fewest possible opp0nents, which is the best way to have the fewest possible losses!  But that doesn’t mean that if someone makes you their opponent, you don’t treat them as such.
• The point of kungfu as I study it is to cause as little harm as possible to be done, to everyone.  Your training is there to (for example) make it possible to break someone’s arm and run away, rather than having them rape or kill you.  My Sifu, a Shaolin Monk and one of the gentlest, kindest and most peaceful people I’ve ever met, says that he has never had to use his training to attack anyone, that defending has always been enough.  But he doesn’t go so far as to say that he wouldn’t attack someone, to prevent greater injury to himself or someone else (and I feel truly, truly badly for anybody that he *did* have to attack…OUCH).  Also, I believe him when he says that defense is often enough — if you’re attacking someone and they block you with a well-delivered, probably painful, move and return to a ready stance, that’s probably gonna talk you out of what you were thinking of doing, a good chunk of the time.
• I would gladly have taken a beating rather than suffer the NotRape that I’ve experienced.  And so, I think, would everyone, if they knew the options.  Rape and its cousins are some of the worst things people can do to each other.
• Lastly, the perpetrator pays for a crime in psychological suffering and karma, and often their punishment–even if it’s only “in their mind”–is worse than the victim’s, in the long run.  It’s no mercy to a person to let them go through with hurting someone else; and it is a mercy to prevent them, to at least give them another chance not to screw their life up that way.  (Apologies for the excessive use of the grammatically-incorrect “their” as a substitute for “him/her”…I’m just feeling lazy and neuter-gender.  ;)

More below, on protecting oneself, preventing assaults and kungfu.

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