"Listen to Stephen Pierce's In Seach of Heroes Interview–What are you willing to trade off to get to where it is you want to go? " by Ralph Zuranski
What are you willing to trade off to get to where it is you want to go? You just can’t have it both ways. If you want to sit back and relax and kick back with your umbrella martinis, or whatever, on the beach but you don’t have any money, what sense does that make? If you want to be able to kick back, go fishing all day, okay, fine.
But push yourself to the point where you will not only appreciate that, but you deserve that because of the value that you provided to a lot of people. To do that, it’s going to take some time and it’s going to be uncomfortable, but that’s okay.
I kind of see it like if you’re doing something that seems to be way too easy maybe you’re doing something wrong. If you’re doing something and you start to come up against some difficulties, it’s not the rule but I’d be willing to say maybe you’re doing something right.
I don’t always want to be right when I’m doing something. I don’t want things to always be easy. I don’t feel as if I’ve learned. Now I’m not saying like bring on the heat. Nobody likes it because it makes you feel uncomfortable.
“Listen to Stephen Pierce’s In Seach of Heroes Interview” by Ralph Zuranski
Stephen Pierce’s Brain University
Zapping sleepers’ brains boosts memory
Applying a gentle electric current to the brain during sleep can significantly boost memory, researchers report.
A small new study showed that half an hour of this brain stimulation improved students’
performance at a verbal memory task by about 8%.
The approach enhances memory by creating a form of electrical current in the brain seen in deep sleep, the researchers suggest.
Jan Born at the University of Luebeck in Germany, and colleagues, recruited 13 healthy medical students for the study and gave them a list of word associations, such as “bird” and “air”, to learn late in the evening. Afterwards, researchers placed two electrodes on the forehead and one behind each ear of the volunteers and let them sleep.
The students’ various sleep stages were monitored using an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine. When the students entered a period of light sleep, Born’s team started to apply a gentle current in one-second-long pulses, every second, for about 30 minutes.
The EEG readings revealed that this current had put students into a deeper state of sleep.
The next morning, the students performed about 8% better on the word memory test than when they underwent the same type of memory experiment without brain stimulation.
Nerve firing
Born believes this memory boost was due to the pattern of the applied current mimicking that seen in naturally occurring deep sleep, where memory consolidation is thought to take place.
Strong brain currents in this stage of sleep probably cause more intense nerve firing, he says, which might enhance activity in the brain’s memory centre, the hippocampus.
Some researchers are skeptical of Born’s “mimicking deep sleep” theory, however. Felipe Fregni at the Harvard Center for Non-invasive Brain Stimulation in Boston, US, says that he and other scientists have shown that brain stimulation with non-sleep-type currents can produce similar memory enhancements.
Potential side effects
There is growing evidence that brain stimulation might one day help improve memory in patients with dementia or other forms of cognitive impairment, experts say.
“It could be very useful to restore function in people with brain injury,” says Daniel Herrera at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York, US, who has studied the effects of brain stimulation in rats.
Healthy people might eventually try using this approach to maximize their brainpower, Herrera says:
“I think every single medical student in the country might want to plug into this type of device at home or in the dorm.”
But he stresses that applying electrical currents to the brain might have unwanted side effects.
Born also says he would be “a little hesitant” to regularly use brain stimulation during sleep to boost
memory: “In the end we don’t know if there are adverse side effects that we just don’t recognize at the moment.”