Über.

I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain’s ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels…ever so good.

The fundamental problem is that an evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself. This was a key insight of evolutionary psychology in the early 1990s; although evolution favors brains that tend to maximize fitness (as measured by numbers of great-grandkids), no brain has capacity enough to do so under every possible circumstance. Evolution simply could never have anticipated the novel environments, such as modern society, that our social primate would come to inhabit. That would be a computationally intractable problem, even for the new IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer that runs 280 trillion operations per second. Even long-term weather prediction is easy when compared to fitness prediction. As a result, brains must evolve short-cuts: fitness-promoting tricks, cons, recipes and heuristics that work, on average, under ancestrally normal conditions.

The result is that we don’t seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness, but it’s even better at delivering fake fitness—subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity. The business of humanity has become entertainment, and entertainment is the business of feeding fake fitness cues to our brains.

Sobering.

Nevertheless, frenzied corporate cultures still confuse sleeplessness with vitality and high performance. An ambitious manager logs 80-hour work weeks, surviving on five or six hours of sleep a night and eight cups of coffee (the world’s second-most widely sold commodity, after oil) a day. A Wall Street trader goes to bed at 11 or midnight and wakes to his BlackBerry buzz at 2:30 am to track opening activity on the DAX. A road warrior lives out of a suitcase while traveling to Tokyo, St. Louis, Miami, and Zurich, conducting business in a cloud of caffeinated jet lag. A negotiator takes a red-eye flight, hops into a rental car, and zooms through an unfamiliar city to make a delicate M&A meeting at 8 in the morning.

People like this put themselves, their teams, their companies, and the general public in serious jeopardy, says Dr. Charles A. Czeisler, the Baldino Professor of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School.¹ To him, encouraging a culture of sleepless machismo is worse than nonsensical; it is downright dangerous, and the antithesis of intelligent management. He notes that while corporations have all kinds of policies designed to prevent employee endangerment—rules against workplace smoking, drinking, drugs, sexual harassment, and so on—they sometimes push employees to the brink of self-destruction. Being “on” pretty much around the clock induces a level of impairment every bit as risky as intoxication.

As one of the world’s leading authorities on human sleep cycles and the biology of sleep and wakefulness, Dr. Czeisler understands the physiological bases of the sleep imperative better than almost anyone. His message to corporate leaders is simple: If you want to raise performance—both your own and your organization’s—you need to pay attention to this fundamental biological issue. In this edited interview with senior editor Bronwyn Fryer, Czeisler observes that top executives now have a critical responsibility to take sleeplessness seriously.

I wonder what America would look like if everyone got eight hours of sleep and got half an hour of exercise every day.

When professional cyclists were told they were racing against their own best times, they tended to match those times, even when the times were faster than they had ever raced. I wonder how useful that sort of influence would be if we applied it to other areas.

In a few years it will be feasible to create a CGI version of yourself – an avatar – that lives a better lifestyle in the digital world than you do in the real world. The avatar would have a healthier diet, exercises more, be less shy in social settings, more assertive at work, and perhaps have a more perfect golf game. If you spent a few minutes every day observing your avatar doing what you wished you could do, would the peer pressure motivate you to higher achievement? I think it might. In a way, this would be the high tech version of writing down your goals every day and visualizing success. The avatar would simply make the visualization easier.

I think living healthier is the single biggest accelerator we could apply to improving society today. But here I am, falling prey to the same excuses – too much work, not enough time, too tired, too hard, tomorrow.

So I made a decision. I decided to re-prioritise.

For the last month, my number one priority every single day has been to exercise. I have done this to the exclusion of meetings, work tasks and leisure time.

In doing this, I realised how absurd it was to live any other way. Exercise:

• increases productivity and focus
• improves physical health
• balances your mental state
• makes you a better worker, boss, employee, brother, son, husband, lover, parent, mentor and friend.

An 8 hour work day with exercise is more valuable than an 10 hour work day without.

Justifying daily exercise as your number one priority is such an easy thing to do.

If exercise isn’t your number one priority, your priorities are wrong.

I completely agree with this.

From Sept. 2010 to August 2011, 115 children under 18 died from flu-related complications, according to the latest CDC report. Nearly half of the deaths were in children who were previously healthy, with no underlying medical conditions that would put them at greater risk for severe disease. And nearly half of the kids were younger than 5 (most were younger than 2). “[Y]oung age in itself is a risk factor” for severe flu, the CDC said in a press release.

The official number of deaths may be small, but it’s likely an underestimate, the CDC said, because the agency’s surveillance method includes only those patients who are tested for influenza and then reported to the CDC. Left out are the majority of children and teens who die from flu, but are never tested.

There’s an easy way to reduce pediatric deaths from flu: vaccination. The CDC’s report shows that based on available vaccination data 77% of the 74 kids who died from flu and were eligible for the flu shot were never fully vaccinated.

Science, bitches.

The theory goes like this: Metabolism in all mammals is not 100% efficient. Oxygen is actually a very toxic chemical that produces free radicals, which can be very destructive. Same goes for sugar. When we break down sugar and use oxygen to generate energy (ATP), our cells inevitably generate free radicals, which is a waste/unwanted substance. The main defense mechanism against free radicals are antioxidants. If the cell lacks antioxidants (usually it does), these free radicals attack lipids, proteins, and more importantly, DNA. The cell tries to repair DNA, but the process is not perfect. Over the years, due to our own metabolism, we acquire cumulative DNA damage, and the longer we live, the more chances that some key proteins are mutated, and we get cancer. Apart from antioxidants, cell cycle regulation, DNA repair, another mechanism exists to protect us from inevitable cancer: aging.

As we get older, and accumulate DNA damage, our stem cells sense this happening, and put limits on their own reproductive potential. They slow their own cell replication to move themselves as far back from cancer as possible (fast replication). As a result, our tissue does not turnover as fast, hence our skin gets wrinkled, our immune system weakens, etc… Whether we remain young and have a high risk of cancer, or age very fast and be protected from cancer is a balance intrinsic to each and every one of us. Dogs get cancers at a very early age because their metabolic rate is incredibly fast, and they develop DNA damage much faster. However, your lifestyle can edit that balance. If you have a healthy diet low in sugar, high in antioxidants, in theory you can reduce DNA damage, keeping your DNA looking younger, and reducing risk of cancer when you are older, and prevent aging at a young age. Other things you can do is a long topic of discussion, but generally eat less sugars, eat “healthy”, have a low basal metabolic rate, avoid radiation exposure, have good DNA repair genes, and don’t stress (cell stress response).