The Smarter Brain: Multi-Tasking Addiction, The Best Diet for Your Brain, Colours Your Eyes Can't See

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Quote Worth Thinking About On...

Taking Action

“‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually,’ just do it and correct course along the way.”

— Tim Ferris, Author and Entrepreneur

Ideas Worth Exploring

1

Why We’re Addicted to Multi-Tasking

Multi-tasking is the attempt to hack time, to do as much with it as we can. And we do it because we know we have limited time on this earth.

“The desire to multi-task is rooted in the fear of death...Ultimately, the awareness of our mortality...drives us to maximize the precious time we’ve been gifted.”

“We live in a world where maximizing your time is linked to productivity, where your sense of worth is linked to what you produce. So the adage of ‘use your time wisely’ is often coded language for ‘make yourself useful.’”

Big idea: We try to hack time because of the nagging awareness in the back of our minds that our lives have an expiration date.

Source: Lawrence Yeo, More to That (​7 min read​) ​​ ​2

The Best Diet for Brain and Body Health (Study)

Your diet affects how you think, feel, and your overall state of health. A study by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition affirms the benefits of “Mediterranean dietary traditions,” which “historically have been associated with good health.”

“This Mediterranean diet pyramid is based on food patterns typical of Crete, much of the rest of Greece, and southern Italy in the early 1960s, where adult life expectancy was among the highest in the world and rates of coronary heart disease, certain cancers, and other diet-related chronic diseases were among the lowest.”

The Mediterranean diet is a colorful symphony of “abundant plant foods (fruit, vegetables, breads, other forms of cereals, potatoes, beans, nuts, and seeds), fresh fruit as the typical daily dessert, olive oil as the principal source of fat, dairy products (principally cheese and yogurt), and fish and poultry consumed in low to moderate amounts, zero to four eggs consumed weekly, red meat consumed in low amounts, and wine consumed in low to moderate amounts, normally with meals.”

Big idea: The Mediterranean diet and lifestyle is a model for healthy eating and living.

Source: Willett, et al (1995) ​Mediterranean Diet Pyramid: A Cultural Model For Healthy Eating​ The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition ​ ​3

The Colours Our Eyes Can’t See

“[O]ur experience of the world is shaped in part by our visual system—which is both extremely complex and limited.” There are colors that we can't see: “impossible colors,” sometimes called “non-physical colors.”

“Take birds who have great vision—the pigeon has once been described as ‘two eyes with wings’—with ‘double cones’ which enable them to see ultraviolet wavelengths and give them sharp color vision. In contrast, the human eye only has three types of cone cells which allow the perception of three main colors: blue, green, and red.”

Big idea: “Impossible colors...are a great reminder to not consider our perception of the visual world the only possible experience.”

Source: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Ness Labs (​3 min read​)

What I'm Thinking About: Life is a single-player game going on in your head.

Today I Learned: Peanut oil can be used as part of a key ingredient in explosives. (​Source​)

Hope you have a productive week ahead,

Mayo, Founding Editor​