If you need to cram some really important information into your brain and remember it
for at least 24 hours, that strong cup of coffee sitting next to you should do the trick.
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine had people study a bunch of different
pictures.
Then they gave some of the people 200 milligrams of caffeine about five minutes after they
were done and some were just given placebos.
Then they brought all back the next day and showed them more pictures to see how well
they were able to remember what they had learned the day before.
And what they found was that those people who were given caffeine were significantly
better at identifying when they were being shown pictures that were very similar, but
just slightly different than some of the images they had seen the day before.
These clever researchers also interestingly found that caffeine doses of less or more
than 200 mg had no memory boosting effect at all.
Welcome to this installment of the daily conversation.
A lot of us rely on caffeine when we don’t sleep well enough, but a new study shows that
thinking we got a good night’s sleep can actually increase our performance too.
The researchers essentially ran fake brain scans on everyone in the study, which made
the participants think the investigators could tell how much REM sleep they had gotten the
night before, even though the scientists really had no way of knowing.
So they tricked the two groups into thinking they had either slept 16.7 percent of the
night in the last, REM phase of sleep or 28.7 percent, almost twice as much.
And surprise surprise, the group that thought they got much more sleep did better on a test
of skills most affected by sleep deprivation than the group that thought they got less.
One man who I can’t imagine gets much deep sleep these days is Aleksander Doba - a 67
year old Polish man who is currently making the 4,700 mile journey across the Atlantic
ocean--for alone in a kayak--for the second time.
He seemed to be in trouble the other day when the US Coast guard received a HELP distress
message from his kayak and sent a tanker that was in the area over to help.
It turns out he accidentally pressed the emergency button, so Aleksander waved them off because
he wanted to keep the integrity of his solo, unaided expedition intact.
“I rarely need assistance, but when it seems I do, it is a complete accident.”
Aleksander is just a few hundred miles off the U.S. coast, which means he’ll soon be
in view of these giant, unmanned, tethered, Army surveillance blimp-things that will rise
above suburban Baltimore later this year.
The operation will begin with two blimps that will work together to detect aircraft within
a 340-mile radius and vehicles within a 140-mile radius.
As a result of a lawsuit, the emails of two of America’s highest flying corporate executives
have been released.
They show that Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt worked together to make sure that apple and
google didn’t get into a recruitment war over talent that would have driven the salaries
of their employees higher.
Other emails show Jobs also pressured Google’s Sergey Brin and the former CEO of Adobe.
The release shows George Lucas also was part of the practice.
Some of the talented employees at Google have come up with this amazing timeline of the
evolution and popularity of different genres of music over the last 6+ decades.
There’s also this creative video showing how clothing styles in East London have evolved
over the last 100 years.
And we’ll end with this artistic project that juxtaposes people as different as a Baptist
Churchgoer and a White Supremacist or an indigent vs. a wealthy couple.
It’s the brainchild of photographer Mark Laita and is showcased in his book, “created
equal”.
That’ll do it for our rundown of the stories that had us talking today.
Click here to watch the previous episode of TDC or visit our channel to see our latest
video.
Thanks for watching, until tomorrow, for the daily conversation, I’m Bryce Plank.