Being efficient about the wrong things

[oursin]

Have had a link open in tabs for a few days on the grounds that, that is interesting but weird, maybe there's a DW post in that, and then there was another one I saw this morning, and I realised that there is a sort of synergy between the two of them.

Let’s Cure the Disease of Sleeping, which I suspect is written by someone who deals with the unfortunate need of the corporeal body for nutrition with something like Soylent.

And as he cannot do without Morpheus entirely, he tries to make the process work for him instead of being wasted time (mmmmm, sleeeep):

To make sleeping more worthwhile, I read a few books on how to dream better and how best to record my thoughts after I awoke (with a journal on my nightstand). Indeed, some great ideas and art in the world have come about as a result of dreams.
....
Another pastime I took up was lucid dreaming. I did learn how to fly on demand, dream in vivid colors, and control to some extent what I wanted to do, not unlike Neo in The Matrix. The problem is, lucid dreaming is a major hassle to accomplish—it requires concentration before you go to bed, and concentration while sleeping. Hence, it doesn’t feel like sleep at all, and therefore isn’t very rejuvenative.

So he's all about the potential of SCIENCE to eradicate or at least reduce the need to kip.

Bah, I say. We see that the writer is 'presidential candidate of the Transhumanist Party'.

This idea that eradicating pauses and hesitations must lead to greater efficiency (and is that, we ask, necessarily a goal to be aimed at? Paging WH Davies.) also emerged for me when reading this article on the why it's not necessarily a wholly good thing to expunge the ums and the ahs when you're giving a talk: Your Speech Is Packed With Misunderstood, Unconscious Messages.

Many scientists... think that our cultural fixation with stamping out what they call “disfluencies” is deeply misguided. Saying um is no character flaw, but an organic feature of speech; far from distracting listeners, there’s evidence that it focuses their attention in ways that enhance comprehension.

Sing it! Strategic use of 'errrrr'....

And possibly also connected: Why boredom is anything but boring - though that's more about how it is interesting to SCIENCE and how you study it.