I think there's something in every Maker that drives us to find new ways to improve ourselves.  I'm not talking about reading self-improvement manuals and organizing our desks.  I'm talking about manipulation of this walking bag of meat that we each call home.  We secretly think that athletes using steroids may be the next stage in evolution.  We want to embed RFID tags under our skin, add heads up displays to our optical nerves, and anything else that might make us more efficient.

A couple of new topics have crossed my browser recently that I'm toying with now.  The first and probably most interesting one is called binaural beats.  It's the theory that you can alter the state of your brainwaves by playing two frequencies (one in each ear) that differ by the number of  Hz of the brainwave you wish to induce.  Your brain processes the two frequencies together and actually creates an "audible" beat in your brain which doesn't exist in the tones themselves.  So for instance if you want to encourage your mind to fall into a Theta wave state (meditation and REM sleep) you play two frequencies that differ by about 6 Hz.  There's some mention of these techniques actually being used to simulate drugs.  I've been looking at them as a sleep aid.  I've never been good at just going to sleep and it seems like age isn't helping matters.  Maybe when I was younger I was just able to survive on less sleep.  So far what I'm finding is that by using binaural beats, I relax more, go to sleep faster, and sleep better.  I can't say whether the beats actually change my brainwaves or simply disrupt my ability to keep thinking so I drift off.

Still on the topic of sleep, the other hack I stumbled upon was called polyphasic sleep.  This is the theory that rather than sleeping all in one whole chunk at night (monophasic sleep) by taking ultra-short naps throughout the day you can be awake more during a 24 hour period.  Since what we really need are the 5 or 6 sections of REM sleep we experience during our sleep cycles the theory is that you can get those in one hour or 30 minute segments during the day.  According to these theories if you can get your naps at the right time you may actually be able to survive and thrive on 3 hours of sleep a day without any bad effects.  There are of course some dissenting theories as well but just the thought of gaining an extra 5 hours of time during my day has my head spinning...

And now I will need to use my binaural beats to get the 8 hours of sleep I really need.

P.S. This also means I'm on the hunt for an inexpensive way to tell if this works (OpenEEG, biofeedback...)