I’m feeling rather accomplished and proud of a new document and system I drafted tonight after an impromptu 15 minute house meeting:

House Rules for Laundry

I don’t know why, but I LOVE organizing processes, especially around laundry. And with 7 housemates, we have a strong need to keep the laundry area working stress-free.

We are putting this into effect starting this week. Wish us luck! $10 penalties tend to work well for motivating people in our house :)

Here’s the permanent marker boxes I drew on the dryer, and magnetic name tags to tell whose laundry is where. We are getting organized!

So this is yet another hypothesis. I realized this tonight after a long day of hair picking/pulling and getting fed up with it. I was thinking of a way to hypnotize myself:

The key to stopping any addictive behavior is to interrupt and repattern the reward circuits in the brain.

When you do something that gives you pleasure, you begin to form a chemical attachment to that activity in the brain. The more the pleasure/satisfaction occurs, the stronger the attachment. Research dopamine.

So, in a moment you are not caught up in an obsessive/addictive behavior, you can actively work on shutting off your dopamine pump toward the undesirable activity.

Imagine this activity your mind loves to do. Now imagine something horrible happening because of it. Become repulsed. Repeat this 10 times.

I found that this was actually a relaxing activity! My forehead and jaw softened as I made the negative association and my breathing deepened. It is as if I snapped myself out of a begging dog posture toward the pleasure of the activity.

For every time you slip up and allow yourself pleasure from the offensive activity, create an equal number of unpleasurable experiences with your imagination. For example, every single cigarette drag, or every nibble at a nail.

I’m excited to try this out. Let me know if you try too!

I remember hearing one time that if you listen to a song over and over, you will eventually reach a threshold where you are “sick” of that song. Either you won’t hear it/register it while it is playing, or you will get annoyed and want to skip it. The number I remember being told was 42 or 46 times (don’t recall exactly).

I have about 300 songs on my BlackBerry right now, which I use when I go out jogging with my housemate’s pit bull. I also use it occasionally on the bus or BART when I want to listen to music, but I’m ignoring that for simplicity.

So I was wondering how long it will take until I get sick of all the songs I have on my BlackBerry. I don’t want to leave the house one day to find that I have to skip over every song on my BlackBerry.

So my calculation went like this:

300 songs

probably have listened to them at least 20 times already, assume 20 more good listens

each song probably averages about 3.5 minutes

So that means, I have about (300*20*3.5/60) = 350 hours of listening left before I am sick of every song, or just about a year of jogging with the dog. Seeing as I started this last September, I am approaching the threshold!

Time to reload/buy more songs.

Ahh, SCIENCE!!

If you have not heard of Theory of Mind, it’s quite remarkable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

Basically, as humans, we all have minds, or assume others have minds (!), and we have to interpret what someone was thinking or meaning based off their words and actions. This is a VERY complex data operation, which is probably why you don’t see any computers able to do it yet.

Well, some people are able to interpret or correctly guess what others mean and think much better than others. I happen to be pretty decent at it. I have this validation over 31 years of figuring out what people mean and being pretty close to guessing why things happen most of the time.

I think this is a highly right brain-oriented activity.

I know some people with genius IQ’s who have a LOT of trouble doing this. Their brains are simply not wired to process complex inputs for a correct output. This is not to say they don’t take in inputs – they certainly do, and probably at a rate much faster and higher than normal people do, the problem is they don’t know what to do with all the data once it is swimming around in their minds. They become very LOGIC-oriented as a coping mechanism, reducing the myriad data into discrete, easily-solvable functions, which many times yield simple but incorrect conclusions.

For example, I asked my housemate John, a security guard, whether he sucks at math. His answer is that he is able to take a very large problem and break it down easily, but has trouble with very simple algebra when you start with a short, easily solvable problem. He is also VERY adept at his job, which requires him to figure out what people want and why, even if they are not speaking English.

I know someone VERY intelligent, who relies heavily on people asking him questions, rather than letting him interpret what they are saying and comment back. This is a way of getting around the complexity of the data inputs.

The left brain is more adept at spatial awareness, and processing language and data like mathematics, but lacks complex interpretation skills. That’s what the right brain is for. No, I’m not a brain scientist nor can I point to any specific study that verifies what I am saying, so use your brain to figure out if it makes sense to you or not ;-)

I had a perfectly lovely date with a Turkish/Italian man last night, who informed me of an awesome dog breed in Turkey called the Kangal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangal_Dog). He mentioned that this huge dog needs something like 7 miles per day of roaming to keep fit and happy, so best to keep them in the countryside where they can go out freely.

This got me thinking whether humans have a similar number for how much walking to do per day. I say walking and not just exercise because I imagine our ancient ancestors spent most of their time walking and not deadlifting, etc. I am wondering how close this 10,000 steps per day fad comes to our optimal walking need. At an average stride length for a man of 2.5 feet, 10,000 steps covers 25,000 feet, or just under 5 miles. This seems really reasonable, especially considering that walking (at 150 lbs) burns about 100 cal/mile, this is a caloric burn of about 500/day. Over a week this equates to 3500 calories burned, saving you roughly a pound of bodyweight from being put on each week.

I think walking also stimulates nerve endings in the feet, acupressure-style, which can stimulate healing processes in other parts the body. Walking without a heavy pack on also helps build core strength and posture support, and good posture can alleviate everything from sinus drip to migraine headaches and back pain.

I mention all this because I used to hate walking. I considered it an inefficient waste of time, and boring. I walked 12 miles on Sunday (with a dog, less boring!), much longer than I’ve walked in a long while, and my body feels so good! I’ve walked/hiked more in the past eight months than I probably have my whole life, and I am in the best shape of my life. Coincidence? I think not.

My guess is I probably do 3-5 miles when I go out, some of that jogging/sprinting. So the numbers are lining up pretty well. Imagine if everyone did this, we’d meet more of our neighbors and all be better looking and more healthy!