The Scipionic Circle 78: Gaining Farsighted Perspective, The Power of Contrast, and Caffeine's Effects on Sleep
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The Scipionic Circle 78: Gaining Farsighted Perspective, The Power of Contrast, and Caffeine's Effects on Sleep
“I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, And you are not in this world to live up to mine."
Hello, friend.
Welcome to another issue of The Scipionic Circle — I hope you find something of value.
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Food for Thought
I. Gaining Farsighted Perspective: The Power of Detachment and Deeper Understanding in the Present Moment
"In the present moment we lack perspective. With the passage of time, we gain more information and see more of the truth; what was invisible to us in the present now becomes visible in retrospect. Time is the greatest teacher of them all, the revealer of reality.
"We can compare this to the following visual phenomenon: At the base of a mountain, in a thick forest, we have no ability to get our bearings or to map out our surroundings. We see only what is before our eyes. If we begin to move up the side of the mountain, we can see more of our surroundings and how they relate to other parts of the landscape. The higher we go, the more we realize that what we thought further below was not quite accurate, was based on a slightly distorted perspective. At the top of the mountain we have a clear panoramic view of the scene and perfect clarity as to the lay of the land.
"For us humans, locked in the present moment, it as if we are living at the base of the mountain. What is most apparent to our eyes—the other people around us, the surrounding forest—gives us a limited, skewed vision of reality. The passage of time is like a slow ascent up the mountain. The emotions we felt in the present are no longer so strong; we can detach ourselves and see things more clearly. The further we ascend with the passage of time, the more information we add to the picture. What we saw three months after the fact is not quite as accurate as what we come to know a year later.
"It would seem, then, that wisdom tends to come to us when it is too late, mostly in hindsight. But there is in fact a way for us humans to manufacture the effect of time, to give ourselves an expanded view in the present moment. We can call this the farsighted perspective, and it requires the following process.
"First, facing a problem, conflict, or some exciting opportunity, we train ourselves to detach from the heat of the moment. We work to calm down our excitement or our fear. We get some distance.
"Next, we start to deepen and widen our perspective. In considering the nature of the problem we are confronting, we don’t just grab for an immediate explanation, but instead we dig deeper and consider other possibilities, other possible motivations for the people involved. We force ourselves to look at the overall context of the event, not just what immediately grabs our attention. We imagine as best we can the negative consequences of the various strategies we are contemplating. We consider how the problem or the apparent opportunity might play itself out over time, how other problems or issues not apparent in the moment might suddenly loom larger than what we are immediately dealing with. We focus on our long-term goals and realign our priorities in the present according to them.
"In other words, this process involves distance from the present, a deeper look at the source of problems, a wider perspective on the overall context of the situation, and a look further into the future—including the consequences of our actions and our own long-term priorities." — From The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene.
II. The Power of Contrast: Perception, Incremental Changes, and Their Overlooked Influence
"Fill one bucket with cold water, another with hot water, and a third with water at room temperature. Put one hand in the bucket of cold water and the other hand in the bucket of hot water. Then put both your hands in the bucket of room temperature water. What happens? You will feel that your cold hand feels warmer and that your warm hand feels colder. We judge stimuli by differences and changes and not absolute magnitudes. For example, we evaluate stimuli like temperature, loudness, brightness, health, status, or prices based on their contrast or difference from a reference point (the prior or concurrent stimuli or what we have become used to). This reference point changes with new experiences and context. This means that how we value things depend on what we compare them with. The grossly overpriced $100 tie seemed reasonable after John bought the fairly priced $1,500 suit. The order in which something is presented matters. Sales people often try to sell the more costly item first. We are out buying a computer and some diskettes. In comparison to $1,500 computer, diskettes at $10 seem like a bargain. After we buy the big ticket items, the add-ons seem cheap in comparison. Experiments have shown that we go across town to save $10 on a clock radio but not to save $10 on a large-screen TV. The difference between $100 and $110 seems like a larger saving than the difference between $2850 and $2860. But it’s the same $10 saving.
"In one experiment, a group of people was asked to choose between $6 and an elegant pen. Most choose the cash. Another group of people was asked to choose between $6, the elegant pen, or an inferior pen. Most choose the elegant pen. By adding an inferior option, another option seemed more attractive.
"Contrasts may blind us to change until it’s too late. For example, we often don’t notice the bad behaviour of others if it goes sour gradually over time. Often we see reality as constant, although it gradually changes. A stimulus must reach an absolute threshold before we can detect it. Before we notice a change in a stimulus, a certain relative change most occur. If the change is slow enough, we don’t notice the change. Our ability to detect and react to changes in a stimulus decreases as its magnitude increases. To a small stimulus, only a small amount must be added. To a larger stimulus, a large amount must be added. Sometimes it is the small, gradual, invisible changes that harm us the most. Warren Buffett says: ‘One of the problems in society is that the most important issues are often these incremental type things.’ He continues: The world is not going to come to an end because tomorrow there are 200 or 250 thousand more people on the planet than there were today. That’s about the number it grows every day... it is like eating about 300 calories more each day than you burn up; it has no effect on you today. You don’t get up from the table and all of a sudden everybody says, ‘My God, you look fat compared to when you sat down!’ But, if you keep doing it over time, the incremental problems are hard to attack because that one extra piece of pie doesn’t really seem to make a difference. The 250,000 people tomorrow don’t seem to make any difference, but the cumulative effects of them will make a huge difference over time, just like overeating will make a huge difference over time. The time to attack those problems is early." — From Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin.
III. Caffeine, Adenosine, and the Complex Dance of Wakefulness and Sleep
"Your twenty-four-hour circadian rhythm is the first of the two factors determining wake and sleep. The second is sleep pressure. At this very moment, a chemical called adenosine is building up in your brain. It will continue to increase in concentration with every waking minute that elapses. The longer you are awake, the more adenosine will accumulate. Think of adenosine as a chemical barometer that continuously registers the amount of elapsed time since you woke up this morning.
"One consequence of increasing adenosine in the brain is an increasing desire to sleep. This is known as sleep pressure, and it is the second force that will determine when you feel sleepy, and thus should go to bed. Using a clever dual-action effect, high concentrations of adenosine simultaneously turn down the “volume” of wake-promoting regions in the brain and turn up the dial on sleep-inducing regions. As a result of that chemical sleep pressure, when adenosine concentrations peak, an irresistible urge for slumber will take hold. It happens to most people after twelve to sixteen hours of being awake.
"You can, however, artificially mute the sleep signal of adenosine by using a chemical that makes you feel more alert and awake: caffeine. Caffeine is not a food supplement. Rather, caffeine is the most widely used (and abused) psychoactive stimulant in the world. It is the second most traded commodity on the planet, after oil. The consumption of caffeine represents one of the longest and largest unsupervised drug studies ever conducted on the human race, perhaps rivaled only by alcohol, and it continues to this day.
"Caffeine works by successfully battling with adenosine for the privilege of latching on to adenosine welcome sites—or receptors—in the brain. Once caffeine occupies these receptors, however, it does not stimulate them like adenosine, making you sleepy. Rather, caffeine blocks and effectively inactivates the receptors, acting as a masking agent. It’s the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears to shut out a sound. By hijacking and occupying these receptors, caffeine blocks the sleepiness signal normally communicated to the brain by adenosine. The upshot: caffeine tricks you into feeling alert and awake, despite the high levels of adenosine that would otherwise seduce you into sleep.
"Levels of circulating caffeine peak approximately thirty minutes after oral administration. What is problematic, though, is the persistence of caffeine in your system. In pharmacology, we use the term ‘half-life’ when discussing a drug’s efficacy. This simply refers to the length of time it takes for the body to remove 50 percent of a drug’s concentration. Caffeine has an average half-life of five to seven hours. Let’s say that you have a cup of coffee after your evening dinner, around 7:30 p.m. This means that by 1:30 a.m., 50 percent of that caffeine may still be active and circulating throughout your brain tissue. In other words, by 1:30 a.m., you’re only halfway to completing the job of cleansing your brain of the caffeine you drank after dinner.
"There’s nothing benign about that 50 percent mark, either. Half a shot of caffeine is still plenty powerful, and much more decomposition work lies ahead throughout the night before caffeine disappears. Sleep will not come easily or be smooth throughout the night as your brain continues its battle against the opposing force of caffeine. Most people do not realize how long it takes to overcome a single dose of caffeine, and therefore fail to make the link between the bad night of sleep we wake from in the morning and the cup of coffee we had ten hours earlier with dinner." — From: Why We Sleep: Unlocking The Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker, PhD.
Quotes to Ponder
I. Plato on empathy:
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
II. Fritz Perls on individuality:
“I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, And you are not in this world to live up to mine."
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Thank you for reading,
Matthew Vere