This is a grab bag of random knowledge and things I found around the internet. The cool thing is, when I’m off social media for Lent, I find way more interesting content from a broader set of sources. Probably because I’m not locked into reading what an algorithm curates for me. Imagine that?
The first and last videos are worth watching. You’ve spent 10 minutes wasting time in less productive ways. You can find time to watch both.
Also, this is the first week where one of the six posts of the week will be some sort of comedy bit. We all need a laugh. Given that it’s an election year, we’ll really need a laugh.
What is the Sixth Day Six? What’s the point? Read more.
The Power of Words | Mohammed Qahtani
This quite literally one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard. It’s only seven minutes long. Great delivery but an even better message we can all be better to remember.
Why Do We Forget So Many of Our Dreams? | Scientific American
Most all of us have woken up and not remembered a darn thing we dreamed about. I never remember dreams anymore. Turns out, a big key to that, is waking up during the REM stage of sleep. If you don’t wake up during that stage and move onto another stage, you’ll likely forget it. So how can you remember more of your dreams? Read on.
Even just thinking about dreams more often can bring them more fully into your waking life. Taking a class on dreaming, reading a book about dreaming or even just thinking more about dreaming has a short-term impact on people’s dream recall, Barrett says.
Click here to read the full article.
How Did the Duck Hunt Gun Work? | Mental Floss
It’s not the most advanced piece of gaming technology. It’s decades old. But seriously, I always wondered “how did that thing work?” If you’ve been asking yourself that question, it’s time to keep reading.
The Zapper’s ancestry goes back to the mid 1930s, when the first so-called “light guns” appeared after the development of light-sensing vacuum tubes. In the first light gun game, Ray-O-Lite (developed in 1936 by Seeburg, a company that made parts and systems for jukeboxes), players shot at small moving targets mounted with light sensors using a gun that emitted a beam of light. When the beam struck a sensor, the targets – ducks, coincidentally – registered the “hit” and a point was scored.
Click here to read the full article.
Why Do I Get Out of Breath Walking Up Stairs If I’m in Good Shape? | SELF
If you exercise a lot, you would think that normal day-to-day activities should be easy, right? Even when I was in the peak of my college cross country days, walking a couple of flights of stairs to class would wear me out, and I never could figure out why. Part of the reason, it turns out, is because I wasn’t training specifically for stair climbing. But the article offers even more to consider.
Even if you’re doing movements that train those type two muscle fibers—like squats, deadlifts, and leg presses—those exercises are still not the exact movement and probably won’t carry over as well as actually climbing stairs would, Hart says. So unless your workout or daily life includes ascending a whole bunch of steps, it’s no wonder tackling a staircase will feel hard and fatiguing when you have to do it.
Click here to read the full article.
This Is What Your Brain Does When You’re Not Doing Anything | Wired
Is there a point to zoning out? Apparently so. And science can (kind of) explain what’s happening and how it could relate to things like depression, Alzheimer’s and dementia. There’s still a lot to learn but there’s at least a new technical term for that zoning out state of your brain: the default network. Here’s more on that.
According to research, the effects of the default mode network include mind wandering, remembering past experiences, thinking about others’ mental states, envisioning the future and processing language. While this may seem like a grab bag of unrelated aspects of cognition, Vinod Menon, the director of the Stanford Cognitive & Systems Neuroscience Laboratory, recently theorized that all of these functions may be helpful in constructing an internal narrative. In his view, the default mode network helps you think about who you are in relation to others, recall your past experiences and then wrap up all of that into a coherent self-narrative.
Click here to read the full article.
Why'd You Say It? | Saturday Night Live
This week’s comedy clip comes from SNL who points out a question we should all ask ourselves before getting hot-headed online. It’s funny but I think it makes a great point.
Click here to watch on YouTube
What am I reading?
I planned to finish this already but life caught up with me. I’ve been going to bed early instead of reading. I’m just halfway through Traffic by Ben Smith, the former managing editor editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed and current co-founder of Semafor. It’s a fascinating book that walks through the history and background stories of some of the most viral websites from the early aughts that have impacted (probably for the worse) how we consume information today.
As always, if you are reading something interesting, feel free to share it! You can reach out by responding to this email or clicking here. Would love to hear from you!