ctoscano

most people are in ketosis before eating breakfast in the morning, because the liver's glycogen is partially depleted overnight, enough for the liver to produce significant ketones. And nothing will make you enter ketosis faster like skipping a meal or two

There are two claims here that are pretty important and contrary to my understanding and experience: 1) Liver is depleted after usual sleep 2) Fasting is the fastest way to enter ketosis

Even when practicing a very low carb diet your liver is "topped up" through gluconeogenesis while you are sleeping.

If by ketosis you mean the body is producing enough ketones to power itself than the fastest way I know of kickstarting that process is not having carbs for 6 hours then going for a run or lifting heavy weights.

You don't need to starve yourself, you just need to put your body in a scenario where the energy demands overtake the available energy in the form of blood glucose (and strain the stores in the muscle and liver).

This helped me enjoy writing in a notebook, increase my writing speed, and take pride in my writing.

# What I did

I spent an afternoon reading through the first couple chapters and doing the exercise and was surprised not only at the advertised benefits (ease in writing, faster writing, prettier and more uniform writing), but also at how much I learned about the mechanics of writing by doing the exercises.

As I was doing the exercises, as I positioned my elbows and paper and paid attention to the position and easy grip of the pen, the mechanics of writing, I thought about the mechanics of Star Craft. How the use of keyboard shortcuts, control groups, and double tapping numbers to jump to pre-set buildings or units drastically increases your actions per minute. I tried to take that same idea to writing and it worked.

There are two basic movements, up-down and circles. Each letter is a variant of the two. Even a circle is basically an up down motion with a more pronounced finger movement. Drill those like you'd drill 5-s-z to make zerglings, or whatever you use for larva inject.

# What I learned

I eventually figured out that the up-down motion is coming from your arm, not your finger. The fingers are used for fine motion differentiating each letter. The more regular the up-down motion, the more consistent your letters.

The big realization was that I could drastically increase my writing speed by drilling the up-down motion. You should be able to do at least 3 up-down or circles a second. Just do the drill to practice how it feels first, then the writing will take less effort to do quickly and regularly. That is what the drills are for.

# Why I think it was worth doing

I generally like the idea of doing things well. I used to be embarrassed about my writing. Now it is rare that someone sees my writing without complementing it. Writing has become a meditation for me. It helps me focus and slow down my thoughts. When I'm writing on a keyboard I can write a lot faster, which helps when I code, but I find the artificial constrain of writing on pen and paper help me write better, shorter first drafts.

Here is a link to the article.

http://fourhourworkweek.com/2009/07/30/speed-reading-and-acc...

Thomas Frank breaks down the math in a video. Basically our eyes take so long to move and refocus, then read. The lines added by the chrome extension give you a target for your eyes to help practice using your periferal vision, requiring fewer eye movements to read a line.

https://youtu.be/jv2BdHXRD3Q

I see this as an attractive way to establish an apprenticeship. At least for software engineers, it is rather common to move around every 2 to 4 years, which makes it hard to maintain and nurture a mentor relationship.

If I were to invest in a student, my advice and attention would help secure my investment and would probably be worth more than the principle to the student.

This type of Money and Mentorship scheme would be especially valuable for poor, minority, or first-generation college students that come from a community or family unable to offer them informed direction or advice.

There was at least one study I know of that visualization can mitigate the atrophy caused by immobilization by 50%. From the abstract[1]:

A group of healthy individuals underwent 4 wk of wrist-hand immobilization to induce weakness. Another group also underwent 4 wk of immobilization, but they also performed mental imagery of strong muscle contractions 5 days/wk.

Here were their results:

Immobilization decreased strength 45.1 ± 5.0%, impaired VA 23.2 ± 5.8%, and prolonged the SP 13.5 ± 2.6%. Mental imagery training, however, attenuated the loss of strength and VA by ∼50% (23.8 ± 5.6% and 12.9 ± 3.2% reductions, respectively) and eliminated prolongation of the SP (4.8 ± 2.8% reduction).

The Atlantic ran a story on that research paper[2].

I am curious if the participants in the experimental group strictly adhered to the protocol, or if they flexed their arms within the constraints. More research needs to be done, but visualization is a common practice among top athletes (Michael Phelps and "watching the video tape"[3]).

A quick Google search for visualization during exercise yielded another article[4] summarizing a study[5] on the effects of visualization on strength gain. From the abstract:

The first group (N = 8) was trained to perform "mental contractions" of little finger abduction (ABD); the second group (N = 8) performed mental contractions of elbow (ELB) flexion; and the third group (N = 8) was not trained but participated in all measurements and served as a control group. [...] Training lasted for 12 weeks (15 min per day, 5 days per week).

The results:

At the end of training, we found that the ABD group had increased their finger abduction strength by 35% (P < 0.005) and the ELB group augmented their elbow flexion strength by 13.5% (P < 0.001). The physical training group increased the finger abduction strength by 53% (P < 0.01). The control group showed no significant changes in strength for either finger abduction or elbow flexion tasks.

The nice thing about this study is that it also attempted to explain the strength increases by taking EEG measurements of brain activity. It showed a significant increase in activity related to increased control of voluntary muscle contractions.

This effect has been the basis for stroke recovery program developed at the University of Alabama Birmingham by Dr. Eduard Taub. Here is explaining the program and it's results to the Dalaim Lama October 2014[6]. This is relevant because the therapy is about reorganizing the brain to use an unaffected area to regain partial muscle control. In other words, the therapy finds and strengthens new neural pathways to control the otherwise healthy muscles[7].

There are a lot of techniques that people have used for learning and training that we only recently started to take seriously and verify using EEG and fMRI by peering into the brain. I have been researching this stuff to inform an ed tech product for efficient lifelong learning, specifically to teach people about how the brain works and the implications and applications for learning.

I am trying to empower people to be efficient, confident learners. Doubt and not knowing how to learn leads people to believe that they are just "not smart" and discourages from from learning. It is true for children and adults.

[1]http://jn.physiology.org/content/112/12/3219

[2]http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/muscle-str...

[3]http://lifehacker.com/5896846/the-right-habits

[4]http://sportsmedicine.about.com/od/sportspsychology/a/thinks...

[5]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?uid=14998709&cmd=showdeta...

[6]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJlmRISL-QA&feature=youtu.be...

[7]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint-induced_movement_th...

This is a commitment that inspires cooperation. The quantified self community needs gadgets like these, but also open platforms that encourages tinkering.

I just purchased a Luna Developer Pack[1].

[1]http://lunasleep.com/extras/

If I were to pick one part of that course to share it would be the explanation of how long term memories are formed through practice (1-6 Introduction to Memory).

Knowing how something actually works, and knowing precisely how my actions achieve the desired result is important to me. I'm very skeptical of study techniques, and more interested in the underlying physiology that I am trying to manipulate.

Long-term potentiation (LTP) "is widely considered one of the major cellular mechanisms that underlies learning and memory."[1]

Spaced Repetition[2] and Spaced Learning[3] at techniques directly designed around LTP.

The course content is locked, but there is a fantastic paper that gives a thorough overview of what we know about the behavior of memory[4], as well as a video series by the principle author[5] linked below.

This is kind of my thing. Please let me know if you are interested in learning more, or if you know of additional sources you'd recommend I check out.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_learning

[4]http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/pubs/RBjork_EBjork_1992.pdf

[5]http://www.gocognitive.net/interviews/spacing-improves-long-...

You are not alone.

Some words I took from your post were that “[T]there is only one truth. You […] ALLOW yourself to be distracted.” and “It will never be up to anyone other than yourself[.]”

There is a theory that our default state of mind is that “racing state” that coned88 described, that most people are like that most of the time. Only few people, like both you are coned88 notice that it is happening. Fewer still learn, internalize, and practice noticing when their mind wanders and bringing their focus back to the task at hand, or as you put it, being a man.

So in short, yes coned88, you just purge thoughts, actions, and literature that are not moving you towards accomplishing the task at hand.

This can be taught. Or, as you put it, “[P]hysiologically as a human you are designed to adapt” and, more or less, we all have the same basic physiology.

In response to coned88’s first question “Any advice on what I should do?”

coned88’s, I’m tempted to tell you about my personal story, but I will focus on the advice and try to rely on my credibility as a stranger on the internet and citations for credibility.

There are secular meditation techniques based on Tibetan Buddhism has been shown to increase the practitioners ability be aware of shifts in focus. I’m primarily citing personal experience.

I’d like to recommend a book, a course, with instructions to help you increase your focus, but I don’t know of one. The books I have read focus on managing stress and healing emotional wounds instead of improving mental performance. The vast majority of stuff out there uses a lot of poetry, jargon, and generalizations I cannot recommend, but this lifehacker article was the best I found[6]. I hope it helps you.

My secular interpretation of Buddhism is that they used fables to codify knowledge before they had writing. Information is easier to memorize that way[4]. Monks were trained to decode the knowledge from the fables. Or at least that is my understanding.

Considering the short history of psychology in the West[5], as well as the cults, self help gurus, and experiments with drugs in the 60’s, it is still hard to find credible sources that validate meditation. Advances in neural imaging, as well as a growing psychological literature, as well as my personal experimentation has lead me to believe that specific meditative practices lead to increased awareness and control of mental focus.

“Our data indicate that meditation training makes you better at focusing, in part by allowing you to better regulate how things that arise will impact you.” –Christopher Moore, Associate Professor of Neuroscience, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT as quoted by the MIT Press[1]

A lot of the current research[2] focuses on using fMRI machines to see what is happening in the brain during meditation.

"What we're trying to do is basically track the changes in the networks in the brain as the person shifts between these modes of attention," Dr Josipovic says, according the BBC article. How you use your brain has been shown to physically change over time based on how it is used. "One thing that meditation does for those who practise it a lot is that it cultivates attentional skills," Dr Josipovic says.

[1] http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2011/meditation-0505

[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12661646

[3] http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallaci...

[4] http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_foer_feats_of_memory_anyone_...

[5] William James, Link to Harvard.edu http://bit.ly/1yrbVVD

[6] http://lifehacker.com/5895509/train-your-brain-for-monk-like...