Photo: Steve Jurvetson

A while back, there was a TV commercial (for a product/service I can't recall)¹ that showed a group of businessmen having a meeting in a shower. They were there because the executive that called the meeting wanted to leverage the fact that his best ideas came to him in the shower.

That commercial hits us as relevant because nearly everyone has had the experience of being in the shower and having that thought, solution or idea completely come out of "nowhere" that is exactly what we want.

Of course, the commercial takes that experience and attempts to apply it in a way that obviously won't work. It's obvious to pretty much everyone. But, why?

It's because it's not about the shower. It's actually about the "slack" time and is key to innovative thinking. The beauty is that, while gathering your team into the shower won't foster this innovative thinking, it *is* possible to deliberately make these moments happen and is a topic I've been looking at quite a bit lately.

Lots of people develop their own ways to manufacture these moment. I like to think that I did a reasonable job at it myself. However, my recent interest in the junction of economics, neurology, psychology, self-improvement and my longstanding interest in cross disciplinary learning have been coming together to better understand and debug my own brain. Deeper understanding of how my own neurons are working can lead to better decisions and more effective practices.

On this particular topic, recent interest was sparked by an EconTalk episode with William Duggan. He was talking about his book: Strategic Intuition.

The conversation was very enlightening and I bought and subsequently read the book. While I've got lots I could say about the book (it really resonated with me), what's really worth taking away from it is the core idea of what exactly "strategic intuition" is.
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Nearly everyone I've ever met has some irrational fears. Most have several. They range from common fears like being afraid of heights (a fear that has a distinct survival advantage) to being afraid that you left the coffee pot on while you're at work.

I've got one about being afraid that I left the garage door open.

Every time I leave the house from the garage, despite watching the door go down right in front of me, by the time I return, I'm nearly always gripped by the fear that I'll see the garage door wide open as I come around the corner.

Because we've got dog doors in the garage, leaving the garage door open means that the dogs aren't confined to the property. Normal experience has shown that leaving the door open for as little as a minute can result in the dogs wandering the street.

It's an irrational fear because hitting that button on the visor and watching the door go down is pretty much as automatic as turning the lights on in a dark room.

Most of the time when you are self-aware about these fears, you can work on a rational override. You can see Bozo the Clown and tell yourself that the clown will not eat you.

That is, until you have your irrational fear validated.

Tonight, after leaving the house for 2 hours to have dinner and hit Target, we pulled into the neighborhood to see the great glowing void of the garage peering out onto the street.

We both turned to each other, dead sure we'd seen the door close when we left. We raced inside, calling out to both dogs. Within seconds we heard the howls of each in turn.

Somehow, they both slept through our entire trip, never the wiser that the great wide open was waiting for them, just through the back door.

It turns out that something had fallen into the beam of the safety laser by the garage door. So, while we watched the door close, when it got to the bottom, it turned itself around and opened back up once we were out of sight.

Unfortunately, now my irrational fear has just been validated. I'm even more likely to believe that I left it open on each trip out. I can only imagine what kind of psychological damage would come from having a bigger irrational fear validated.

For the past few years, I've been making a concerted effort to question my own assumptions and the assumptions that our culture makes and presents to me. In so many places in life, when you directly examine the "conventional wisdom" about a given subject, it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Over the last couple of weeks, this particular theme has been popping up (which is to say that I've just been noticing it where I've been looking) a lot. In many places, we seem to rely on what we *think* is true rather than actually investigating and determining what actually *is* true.

In many cases, this is because the conventional wisdom is something we're attached to. Take for instance, the idea of creativity. This old article on the myths of creativity (linked from Lifehack.org a couple of weeks ago) lists as #3 in their list the idea that creativity thrives under pressure.

I've heard that hundreds of times from all sorts of people, that they just do "better" work when their scrambling at the last minute. Heck, for a long time, I believed this one myself. The thing is that when you actually study creative output, it just isn't true.

Similarly, Marc Andreessen pointed out an analysis of the concept of "brainstorming" as a group. Again, if you analyze it rationally, having everyone in separate rooms coming up with ideas results in not only more ideas, but better ones as well than having everyone in a room.

On this one, I suspect that the "feeling" of brainstorming as a group gives the impression of higher productivity. It's probably also linked to the fact that in most offices, if you ask people to go to their desks and come up with ideas, they usually get bogged down in unrelated work. That doesn't change the facts, though. It just points to needing to handle brainstorming sessions in a more intelligent way.

Have everyone spend half of the meeting spread out coming up with their own ideas and then bringing them all together later. Don't send them back to their desks to get distracted. Just keep them on task, but brainstorming as individuals.

Some other conventional wisdom comes out and becomes pervasive because it's what we want to believe. A recent book, Myths of Innovation looks at one such area. We all (especially the press and blogs) want to believe in the idea of all innovation coming in that garage-in-the-wild-west, burning-the-midnight-oil, eureka-moment version of innovation. The truth is much less sexy. I'm not done reading this book yet, and have only been able to listen to a few minutes of this podcast interview with the author. However, all of it keeps resonating this same chord with me.

I'm definitely digging this trend, even if it's just that I'm finally noticing it. This stuff is striking me the way that Stumbling on Happiness did. It gets me in a mindset to think through my habits and the things that I take for granted. It makes me question my beliefs about practical matters like happiness, creativity, productivity, morality, work, etc. I like that.

It all feeds into the general approach to life that I've been taking lately which is that many of these issues require that you quit relying on the lower/older portions of your brain to make decisions and plan, instead using the top. That's mostly a debate between snap judgments and rationally examining a situation. It's clear to me how much of life comes down to the battle between the top and bottom of my brain.

Over the past few months, my habit of getting up early has been broken. I've gradually dropped more and more days out of the week until I was pretty much getting up the same time Shelly does: 6:00am on weekdays and 7-9am on weekends. Given that getting up early (5am, 7 days a week) was responsible for me getting ahead on projects, a general sense of well-being, lower levels of stress, etc., you can imagine what this trend has meant for my mental health.

I've gradually also had to shift my starting time at work later. Which means staying later. Which means getting home later. Which means eating dinner later. Which means sitting down in the evening to relax later. All of which means bedtime comes sooner.

Finally sick of the whole vicious cycle, yesterday I decided to start getting up early again. However, rather than pick an arbitrary start time, I wanted to make the change empirically. Given what I've learned about sleep cycles, there's a natural rhythm, the end of which flushes out the sedatives your body naturally produces to keep you from moving too much during the dreaming phase. If you wake up at the end of one of these ~90 minute cycles, you are able to get up fairly easily. However, if you wake in the middle of a cycle, you'll feel pretty dang groggy until your system clears out.

Unfortunately, I think part of what broke the habit for me was that my schedule left 5:00am as being in the middle of a cycle instead of at the end of one. I'd get up at 5:00 and have to fight to wake up. Given my aversion to mornings in the first place, that was a combination punch that knocked me out.

However, over the last few weeks, I'd noticed that, during my normal short wakeups during the night, I was seeing consistent times on the alarm clock. Those times matched up with about 90 minute-divisible times from when I went to bed +/- 20 minutes for when I fell asleep. I rarely sleep through the night and usually wake up 2-3 times, though only for a couple of minutes.

Figuring that I'd eventually want to get back to early mornings, I made a note on a pad on the nightstand for when we went to bed and the wakeup time nearest 5:00am. I never once saw anything within a half-hour of 5:00am, which made it abundantly clear why that time wasn't working for me. However, I did see a pretty consistent pattern: 4:24, 4:28, 4:22, 4:34, etc.

So, yesterday morning, I set the alarm for 4:30am and muttered under my breath about the insanity of that time (which I used to say should only come once a day). I woke up at 4:29 and rolled over to see the clock flip and the radio turn on. This morning, I rolled over at 4:27 and just shut it off and got up.

Yesterday, I felt 10x better than I've felt in months. I was alert all day, had better focus and the day was SO much longer. This morning I'm wide awake and have none of the morning "grog" that I'd gotten used to again. I remember why I was getting up early before and really need to stick with this.

It's become clear to me, based on my own methodical look at this problem in my own life that the *duration* of the sleep isn't as critical for me, at least as the rhythm. There seems to be some science to back that up as well. I feel WAY better on 4 even cycles equaling 6 hours than I do on 8 hours in 5 1/3 cycles.

I suspect that the conventional wisdom of "you need to get 8 hours of sleep" is targeted at a 7.5 hour sleep time (5 cycles) and padded for the time to fall asleep. However, I also know that if I go 6 or 7 cycles, I'm more tired than if I go 4, so there's something less than straightforward about this whole science.

Photo: frank wouters

It seems that elephants are pretty much everywhere in the news this week. And, they're exhibiting behavior that's much closer to ours than lots of people are expecting.

Stories about elephants that intelligently attack villages and essentially wage war are simultaneously creepy and not at all surprising. I remember first "getting" that animals exhibit this kind of "human" behaviors when watching chimpanzees doing organized hunting of monkees on a Trials of Life video in Mr. Bakke's biology class in high school. So, finding out that another species does it too doesn't surprise me.

That finding fits in nicely with the more widely reported story of elephants joining the small list of animals that recognize themselves in a mirror.

It seems like we've only just scratched the surface of really understanding the animal world and what goes on in non-human skulls.