In ‘Elastic,’ a Physicist Argues That the Mind Needs Time to Play

Regarding the title, I'd say choose your profession in a way that you don't have to choose between work and play. You are reading HN so you're likely in a position to have many options. Life's too short to be doing things that don't feel like playing.

Especially given that everything is playing whether you realize it or not because the universe, entropy and purpose but that's a whole another story.

But even from purely financial point of view, it's likely that you will be better off by becoming master at what you consider to be a fun game.

I absolutely need at least a few hours a week of creative outlet (Right now it's writing. In the past it has been painting, or woodworking or... to my wife's dismay, a long list of forgotten hobbies).

It sometimes feels like I have a small child in my head, one that wants to play, be free, and just burn off excess energy through creativity. And if I don't do that, he throws a temper tantrum, anxieties and restlessness start kicking up.

After both personally experiencing and learning clinically more about how sleep - or lack thereof - impacts cognitive, physical, creative and immune capability I think it's a hugely important piece of the intelligence puzzle.

My hypothesis is that sleep amounts to a nightly scrimmage for the rest of our lives. So it's where we go to practice the things that we're planning on doing or could possibly encounter. We take the inputs from the previous days etc... into simulating future events/outcomes.

In reinforcement learning terms sleep is where we do "exploration" in our own personal simulation of the experienced world and real life is where we do "exploitation."

Funfact: the first wheels were potter's wheels. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-salute-to-th...

My favourite early invention is cloth. Fire's not really an "invention" in the same sense, more like taming wolves and horses.

On the other hand, if your mind is not preoccupied, finding the solution may take very little time. His practice in his book Getting Things Done helped me practice this, not just abstractly know it.

Growing up, I came to believe that the word "concerted" means something like "effortful" or "work hard to do something". I later learned that it actually refers to a group of people working together (in concert) to accomplish something [1]. So technically, a person cannot make a concerted effort to do something alone.

Seeing the word used here in this technically incorrect way leads me to wonder how uncommon my experience is. Are we on our way to redefining this word with a more relaxed definition?

1: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/concerted

https://library.ias.edu/files/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf

I find it baffling that a physicist who is respectable enough to write a book with Stephen Hawking would be able to stomach writing a book with a man who claims that quantum mechanics proves that meditation can affect one's "quantum-mechanical body" and prevent aging.

EDIT: It seems I've misunderstood the book he wrote with Chopra. It's structured as a debate. I still that giving Chopra anything less than open hostility is a mistake, but it seems Mlodinow is not some new-age woo peddler.