The Science Of Being

I'm a bit of a night owl.

When I say a "bit," I'm lying. My brain doesn't really start to work until about 10 pm and then it has trouble shutting down. At just that time, my husband starts to softly snore on the couch---he will wake when the sun rises, happy,and wanting to start the day together. He is always urging me to go to bed earlier and saying axioms like "The early bird gets the worm" to prove his point. And sometimes living in LA, I get this sense that the whole world is closing up shop at night and arising early, early to soak in the never-ending single season of sun. To say the least, I sometimes feel out of sync with the city I live in. 

But maybe it's not LA's fault, that it's just not working for me. Maybe it comes down to our unique circadian rhythms?  

According to Till Roenneberg, a professor of chronobiology at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and one of the world’s experts on sleep, each of us has a personal “chronotype,” which can be characterized as early, intermediate, and late. 

If you are forced to wake up off your schedule--say three hours earlier than your body actually desires--you actually suffer from a "social jet lag." This happens even if you wake just one hour later than your circadian rhythm. 

But what is social jet lag? Well, beyond being a bit foggy and cranky, this social jet lag has been linked to increased stress, obesity, and depression. In fact, when we are running off our circadian rhythms we are 33% more likely to become obese. And it's not just that we have an affinity for one time or another, our chronotype  is actually present in every cell in our bodies meaning that the "urge to stay up late or to rise early is not a lifestyle choice but resides in our DNA."

What does this means for us?

Well, we can try to understand our own unique circadian rhythm and develop habits around them? For me, that could mean not running first thing in the morning, but after work or giving in to the fact that my best thoughts all happen post-midnight and to stop chasing that dang early bird worm.  

Or if we don't have that luxury of sleeping a little later, we can just try to absorb as much sunlight as possible, as exposure to sunshine can edge our circadian rhythms to be slightly earlier. 

According to Daniel Kahneman, "Psychologists think of ideas as nodes in a vast network, called associative memory, in which each idea is linked to many others." We can link simple things like "sitting" and "chair" or complicated things like "fall" and "nostalgia" But the way we understand the world is a brain full of connections that we don't fully have control over. For example, I can't be blamed that the smell of basements is linked to my parents' divorce in my mind and I'll never be fully comfortably sitting in those mole-like rooms. And you can't be blamed if you never want to go back to that bar where you got into a fight with your boyfriend. Linked. And while some of us, may not like that we have "limited access to the workings of our minds," there is an upside as far as I'm concerned. And that upside is that: Words actually do influence us quite a bit. 

In a study done by John Bargh at NYU, it was found that participants who were exposed to "elderly themed" words like Florida, bald, or wrinkle were actually more likely to walk slower after being primed by the words. This was called the "Florida Effect" in the study, though the phenomenon of "influencing an action by an idea is known as the ideomotor effect." 

This is wonderful news for writers who often are curious if our words have any effect on the world, but it's also great news for the rest of us because we can literally prime ourselves to act or feel a certain way. Woke up on the wrong side of the bed? Read something happy and you may be able to re-prime your day. 

If you want to know how hard you are working, film your own eyes.

I find that some days I can work all day without truly having that satisfied feeling of “working.” When we work we use our automatic system and our effortful systems to cognitively approach tasks.

 According to Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, our automatic system is basically our gut responses, things that come effortlessly to us like driving a car on an empty road, whereas our effortful system is “the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about what to do.” The effortful system requires attention and the harder the task that our effortful system has to cognitively solve, the more attention it requires which is why our eyes dilate when our brain is hard at work. So as I started this post if you want to know how hard you are working, film your eyes.

 But pupils aren’t all work, they are also accurate indicators of attraction. When we see something we are attracted to, we can’t help divert more attention to it. (This is not learned bad behavior. In one study babies were shown to stare longer as faces that were considered classically attractive.) Psychologist Eckhard Hess found that when we are attracted to someone or something, our eyes dilute as well. Our effortless system seems to instinctually know this, as men are more likely to be attracted to women with dilated pupils.

 So often I rely on coffee to be smarter, but what I  should really be doing is challenging myself more and trying to do new things. A recent study by Andrea Kuszewski found that one way to increase your intelligence is to focus on growing your fluid intelligence ie "your capacity to learn new information, retain it, then use that new knowledge as a foundation to solve the next problem, or learn the next new skill, and so on." Her tips for those of us looking to be smarter: 

1. Seek Novelty: Novelty not only helps increase our brains plasticity, but also shoots dopamine into the brain making us happier. 

2. Challenge Yourself: "You want to be in a constant state of slight discomfort, struggling to barely achieve whatever it is you are trying to do, as Einstein alluded to in his quote. This keeps your brain on its toes, so to speak."

3. Think Creatively: "Creative cognition involves divergent thinking (a wide range of topics/subjects), making remote associations between ideas, switching back and forth between conventional and unconventional thinking (cognitive flexibility), and generating original, novel ideas that are also appropriate to the activity you are doing."

4. Do Things The Hard Way: "Your brain needs exercise as well. If you stop using your problem-solving skills, your spatial skills, your logical skills, your cognitive skills—how do you expect your brain to stay in top shape—never mind improve? Think about modern conveniences that are helpful, but when relied on too much, can hurt your skill in that domain."