In the study which found impaired neurogenesis the rats were consuming caffeine chronically. Were the impairments in neurogenesis due to sleep deprivation which would not occur in morning-only human coffee drinkers?
From personal experience, the times when I've been happiest are:
a) The weeks after the time during adolescence when I entered an altered state of consciousness induced by meditation and music during a christian summer camp and believed that I'd had a spiritual experience - this cured the issues with eating disorder / depression that I'd had before (whereas professional counselling was totally ineffective) but I regret that at the time I was too young to be able to interpret my experience rationally. Maybe this is why religion correlates positively with happiness among pentecostals/evangelicals but not among religious groups with less focus on inducing altered states of consciousness.
b) Peak experiences during runners' high,... (read more)
Whether to cheat on gift aid and whether I should steal money from my parents to fund charitable donations. In my case the fear of being caught and desire to appear moral in front of other people won out over the desire to do the right thing.
When I have to go home during the holidays I have the dilemma of deciding whether it is worse to eat animal products or to argue with my parents. Normally I'd compromise and agree to eat small quantities of milk and eggs and only eat meat in cases where it would be wasted if I don't eat it. Now Mum often cooks too much meat and tries to persuade me that the leftovers will be wasted if I don't eat them. If I eat them, she'll keep using the same trick. If I don't, she'll say that I'm being irrational and betraying my principles against wasting food.
At around three years old one of the staff at preschool suggested that I had Aspergers or ADHD after I had gotten into trouble for playing with the fire extinguisher. I was formally diagnosed on the autistic spectrum at age four/five. I took two separate verbal ability tests at age 4y7m as part of the assessment process to receive a diagnosis and scored respectively in the 4th and 96th percentiles. Wildly discrepant, but not in the gifted range.
In my case social isolation was due more to a lack of interest in socialising than to a lack of innate ability. I was comparatively sociable during my primary school years, though I had... (read more)
Does CBT make the patient happier, or is it a way of persuading patients to self-rate their happiness as higher on surveys and pretend to be happy? I was forced into talking therapy during the early teenage years (for issues related to Aspergers syndrome) and am convinced that the answer is the latter.
In the specific case of height increases it is possible that heterosis played a role; genes correlated with greater height are more often dominant than recessive, and as modern transport led to people mating further afield rather than mainly marrying others within their village average homozygosity decreased.
There exists a polynomial time reduction from SAT to the problem of asking Eliezer Yudkowsky whether a formula is satisfiable. It only remains to be proved that he is not using any hyper-computable processes.
Curiosity also has it's downsides; it's hard to get boring work done when there's always some question that you urgently need to google.
Here's an insight into what life is like from a stationery reference frame.
Paperclips were her raison d’être. She knew that ultimately it was all pointless, that paperclips were just ill-defined configurations of matter. That a paperclip is made of stuff shouldn’t detract from its intrinsic worth, but the thought of it troubled her nonetheless and for years she had denied such dire reductionism.
There had to be something to it. Some sense in which paperclips were ontologically special, in which maximising paperclips was objectively the right thing to do.
It hurt to watch some many people making little attempt to create more paperclips. Everyone around her seemed to care only about superficial things like... (read 505 more words →)
There is a specific emotion which can be induced by some types of trailer, classical and religious music, meditation, long distance running, psychedelics, natural beauty, some types of art and thinking about certain abstract topics (especially consciousness, theoretical physics, pure maths, meta-ethics, economics) - an emotion that might be described as 'cosmic sadness', 'intense euphoria' or 'being profoundly moved'.
It is rational for a hedonist to seek to experience this emotion even though experiencing it often causes irrational beliefs, because it is the most pleasurable of all emotions. The emotion is more easily triggered following a period of low mood and is subsequently often followed by a period of improved mood - the... (read more)