Honoring our limitations and ignorance
In praise of idleness, sleep, and the somewhat unoptimized life
I don't know how the brain works. Nobody does. We know some things. For example, our brain needs sleep to function, to reorganize itself. Sleep is not just "doing nothing" -- hamsters take themselves out of hibernation to take a nap. But we don't really know why sleep is so crucial for the brain and the immune system. There's a "default network" that comes alive when we are idle, daydreaming, not adding numbers or otherwise engaged on a focused task. We don't really know what it does, just glimpses.
When I see recommendations on optimizing life, it reminds me of the last years of my PhD with Yann LeCun and Jean Ponce, when deep learning (Yann) hadn't yet won over hand-crafted features (Jean). The features made intuitive sense: edge detectors, part detectors, what humans would think up as a sensible model, not like the complicated un-explainable messy thing that were our trained neural networks. Yet in time, fully learned systems would perform much better and leave the hand-crafted features in the dust. Optimizing every corner of my life feels like I am designing the features instead of letting my complicated big messy organism do its thing, whatever that is.
For me, that's what balance is most about: optimizing some, but leaving room for some chaos and messes, and allowing for the possibility that the messes might be more useful than we know -- that this possibility is substantial enough that I don't need to beat myself up because it’s not all tidy and optimized. Being structured some days, and drifting like a jellyfish on others. Honoring the mystery that we are. I love improvising, exploring, wandering, and feeling the deep sense of wonder when I get somewhere with no idea how or why that happened.
Some of the most cherished insights or breakthroughs in my life have come at random moments, walking around, or seemingly out of nowhere after days (or months!) of practice that seemed stuck, until some faint glimmer of sensation caught my mind’s eye, I followed it, and suddenly a vast expanse opened. It feels as if there are two crews that are tasked with growing the envelope of my life. One is methodical and inhabits my current known landscape, pushes the limits with a steady hand. It works in a predictable and reliable way. Then there’s the wilder one, that stops to admire shiny things and play with them – mostly nothing happens, but now and then, a wall comes crashing down and a whole new world opens.
I like how musicians and dancers talk of “having a practice”. That often includes playful exploration and improvisation. As scientists, we have a practice too: dreaming up and conducting experiments, reading papers, thinking, discussing with colleagues. To me, honoring the unknown of how our mind and body do what they do, means viewing sleep and wandering as part of my practice. When I decide whether to pack my agenda more, or let it breathe, I need to consider whether this extra deliberate item is truly worth more than the space it takes. Here’s a very scientific equation:
Practice outcome value = [deliberate practice quality volume] * [dark matter magic dust]
How is this next hour best spent, building up more deliberate practice or collecting magic dust? If I haven’t prepared, there’s nothing for magic dust to operate on. But if I don’t sleep enough or don’t leave space for wandering, I don’t have enough magic dust to realize the full potential of my practice.
If I just can’t feel sleepy or switch off my brain, then I don't stress over it – it is what it is and I can take a nap the next day. But other days, it is more of a choice of winding down or staying engaged with what I am doing, and facing the temptation of squeezing in one more thing for the day. I ask myself, is staying up and doing this going to move me to a better place than what the strange alchemy of sleep would do? Sometimes I feel YES, YES IT IS, I AM ON A ROLL! and I keep doing what I’m doing, and stay in my flow. Other times I instead decide to honor the work of my past selves of earlier in the day (or previous days! Reorganization takes time), and not stomp all over their practice by trying to cram more. Adding on deliberate activity would amputate the potential of my practice rather than add to it. Or I try and feel the awe of trusting that my brain probably knows better on sleep, and that it will give me a keener eye tomorrow for the glimmering threads that might open up new rooms in my universe. And I remind myself that sleep also helps with emotional regulation, immune function, better response to vaccines, fewer junk food cravings, all kinds of benefits which truly make it like magic dust.
I find that it works a lot better for me to come from a place of respecting my own practice and the mysterious ways of our natural hardware, than just telling myself I “should” get more sleep.
And if I fret too much about what the optimal tradeoff would be, I imagine I’m a jellyfish leisurely gliding along the ocean. Optimizing everything might be optimizing noise, overfitting on the tiny part we understand, human hubris instead of wisdom. I let go. There’s so much we don’t know, and peace in the vastness of our ignorance.