Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
As is the case when you are awake, the sensory gate of the thalamus once again swings open during REM sleep. But the nature of the gate is different. It is not sensations from the outside that are allowed to journey to the cortex during REM sleep. Rather, signals of emotions, motivations, and memories (past and present) are all played out on the big screens of our visual, auditory, and kinesthetic sensory cortices in the brain. Each and every night, REM sleep ushers you into a preposterous theater wherein you are treated to a bizarre, highly associative carnival of autobiographical themes. When it comes to information processing, think of the wake state principally as reception (experiencing and constantly learning the world around you), NREM sleep as reflection (storing and strengthening those raw ingredients of new facts and skills), and REM sleep as integration (interconnecting these raw ingredients with each other, with all past experiences, and, in doing so, building an ever more accurate model of how the world works, including innovative insights and problem-solving abilities).
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
When we reached the pier, Steve was waiting there along with a group of fishermen and a handful of locals and tourists. Steve said that one of the fishermen on an offshore boat thought he had sighted the mother whale near one of the oil rigs. The oil rig was about a mile and a half offshore and it was almost in a direct line with the pier. I had swum out there only once before, during an open-water race, but at that time, I had had a paddler with me on a long paddleboard. He had helped me stay on course, and he had watched for danger. But the baby whale had already turned and started to head offshore. He looked over at me as if to say, Please come swim with me. I knew it made no sense to follow him. I could think of many reasons why I couldn’t or shouldn’t, but I didn’t want him to go off alone. Sometimes things just don’t make sense, sometimes there’s no reason to explain how or why I wanted to do them; I only knew that I had to, I had to try. Without trying I would never know what could happen. It was like reading a great mystery and never knowing how it finished, always wondering who did it. Sometimes the things that make the least sense to other people are the ones that make the most sense to me. Maybe I knew this, too, because I didn’t always fit in. I was shy and large, and I believed that I had to work hard and study hard to do well. I had different friends—from computer wizards to the guys on the water polo team and the girls on the swim team to friends in drama and music—but I didn’t fit into any one group. I had things I knew I wanted to do and didn’t play the teenage boy and girl games. I was more interested in studying people who had been leaders, made discoveries, or explored, men and women who were always going against established thought. It was always difficult to swim against the tide, doing something new or different, because the ideas that could result might cause something to change. Many people are happy with things as they are. They are comfortable with what they already know. But if I didn’t move outside my comfort level, how would I ever experience anything new, how would I ever learn, or see or explore? I believe that each of us has a purpose for being here, that we have certain gifts and certain challenges we need to learn from and fulfill for our lives to have meaning and richness. “I’m going to swim with him,” I shouted to Steve.
But if you watch the hidden camera footage of the stunt, and note the time of day (morning rush hour) and the demographics (busy government employees on their way to work), it starts to make more sense. Those mindless barbarians who had no idea what they were witnessing were commuters on their way to work who couldn’t afford to stop at that exact moment to appreciate art. Certain art hungers for context.
The Art of Asking
Amanda Palmer and Brené Brown
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise