Hacking your brain into Awesomeness
 

Another article from cracked that i liked alot:D I'll be sharing 1 way everyday. You might want to bookmark this so that you can use it when school/uni starts againlool So here we go:D

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

@bebseh I'm posting one every day to keep the readers interested. In addition to that some people don't like long posts so this might be better for those readers so that they would feel comfortable reading this
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#4.Hallucinate Like You Just Took LSD, Legally

Holycrap I'm gonna try the hallucination thing soon :D but I need a red light ):
question about the 1st one, what if we skipped a nap of these 4 hours interval, what happens? cuz if you go to work/uni/trip/out.. you won't find the time nor the place to sleep in.

Your questions prompted me to do some searching:p

Basically polyphasic sleep (a.k.a: The Uberman Sleep Schedule ) Is a big no-no. It can be very stressing on your body, as stated in the beginning of the post, you will get a feeling of jet-lag when attempting to get used to it. I did a little googling and i'll give you a quick summary of what i learned:

Humans are basically used to monophasic or biphasic sleep. As in they sleep during the night or once in daytime and once at night. Babies for example are polyphasic, but growing up they adapt and become biphasic.

Getting used to polyphasic sleep is extremely hard and possibly dangerous for some individuals



Source

The source also provides some data of people who have attempted polyphasic sleep. For those of you who are interested this will definitely answer your questions.

that's what I thought, thanks.

so it's best to do what I do, after years of experience :P, take a nap in the afternoon it should be short not a 2-3 hours nap or else you will wake up tired as if a piano had fell on your head. When you wake up you will be refreshed, for best result take the nap after the lunch. I think this way combines both ways the biphasic and the polyphasic and it gives the best out of the two.

That would be a great idea. A 1 hour nap in the afternoon or 2 half hour naps are all you need to stay refreshed. Just don't sacrifice a good night's sleep. You should get a bare minimum of 4 to 6 hours a night depending on if you slept during the afternoon and your own "biological clock". This can vary from person to person.
Which is why you see people who sleep 4 hours at night and feel great and satisfied.

how are you going to do the red light thing? :P

#3. Dream Whatever You Want to Dream



What if we told you there was a way to make all your fantasies come true? You could have that sports car you've always wanted and the daily brunch with Sarah Palin and Cannonball Run-era Burt Reynolds. Hell, we'll even throw in a few superpowers for your enjoyment.
Welcome to the wonderful world of lucid dreaming.


Holy Crap, How Can I Do It?


Most of you reading this have had a lucid dream before. Every once in a while you wind up in a dream but somehow recognize it as a dream, and you may have found yourself able to pretty much program the dream to your specifications. While there are plenty of tips and tricks to make this happen on purpose, we've narrowed it down to what seems like the most useful, so that you can be riding dinosaurs with Gary Coleman in your sleep in no time:




1. Keep a Dream Journal


As soon as you wake up from a dream, write down every little thing you can remember about it. Supposedly by writing it down, your brain recognizes certain patterns that only occur in a dream (since most dreams are immediately forgotten) and if they are on paper, you can recall them easily.

2. Think about exactly what you want to dream right before you fall asleep.


Makes sense. For instance you've probably fallen asleep watching MythBusters before and immediately dreamed you were flying through the air, using a giant version of Jamie's mustache as a hang glider.
3. The best time to have a lucid dream is either right before you regularly wake up, or right after.
Studies have shown that more people have lucid dreams when they take a nap shortly after they first wake up in the morning.


So you can do all that, or if you are the lazy type, get yourself something like the [url=http://www.lucidity.com/novadreamer.html]NovaDreamer[/quote], a device that detects when you've entered REM sleep and then makes a noise that's supposed to be not quite enough to wake you up, but enough to raise your awareness to, "Hey, this is totally a dream I'm having!" levels.


How Does It Work?


Obviously the big difference between a dream and real life is that if the Hamburglar came bursting out of your refrigerator right now and started screaming at you in Vietnamese, your first thought would be "This is a strange and unusual event that is occurring right now, and I should question my perceptions." If the same thing happens in a dream, you just go with it.


In a dream state, your mind mostly loses the ability to criticize anything that's happening because dreaming just doesn't involve the critical part of your brain. You're all worried that you're at work in your underwear, and don't even blink at the fact that your boss is a dragon who speaks in the voice of your old middle school gym coach.


But if you change your mental state ever so slightly, that critical part of your brain can keep functioning even while in dreamland. If you can perfect the technique of dreaming while not all the way asleep, the next thing you know you're ordering up a date with Smurfette.

#2.Learn More While You Sleep


So say you haven't followed that first step up there and choose to continue sleeping like other mere mortals. A very minor change in your schedule can still let you use your sleep patterns to your advantage, by making you smarter.

Holy Crap, How Can I Do It?

No, we're not talking about those scams where they have you put a tape recorder under your pillow and let it teach you Spanish while you're asleep. What scientists have found out is if you need to remember a bunch of information (say, for a big exam), do NOT study right up until time for the exam. Study at least 24 hours before, and sleep on it.

They did a study at Harvard that proved this technique works. Participants were separated into three different groups after being shown images that they were told to memorize. One of the groups was tested on the memorization after 20 minutes, the other after 12 hours and the last after 24 hours. You would expect that the ones who were tested just 20 minutes later would do best, but that would, of course, make a really crappy story.
No, the participants who slept on it and had 24 hours for the information to fester in their brain did the best on the test, while those who only had 20 minutes did the worst.

Scientists say the ability your brain has to retain information works in three different ways: acquisition, consolidation and recall. While the first and last occur while you're awake, it's the middle-man that is important during sleep.

When you sleep, your brain is constantly processing information that you couldn't have processed with everything going on up there during the day. This works to strengthen your neurological bonds in the brain. Think of it like downloading something on a computer. When you go to download something while your youtube is up, it takes longer, right? Close up any applications that are running and you have a smoother, quicker download.
Yeah, kind of like that... maybe.
So does this technique work with the "sleep two hours a day" system we mentioned earlier? We're not sure anyone has tried it, but by our calculations such a person would immediately gain mental superpowers, possibly including telekinesis.

#1.Believe Something Happened (That Totally Didn't)



Stop for a moment and recall your fondest childhood memory. Or your worst. In either case, there's a really good chance that it's total BS.


Memory is a funny thing. Research has consistently found that our memories from when we were kids are either extremely inaccurate, or didn't happen at all. They are just elaborate constructions of a memory storage system that isn't very good at distinguishing real memories from fake ones.


So what if we told you that there was a way to do this on purpose? To hack your brain into believing (and "seeing" vividly) a completely made-up event that never actually happened?


Holy Crap! How Do I Do It?


The trick is you need somebody else to do it for you (or to you). But it takes very little effort, and no Total Recall-style brain-hacking machines.


For instance, in a study in 1995, researchers sat down a group of people and mentioned four incidents from their childhood (gathered from family members) and asked subjects how well they remembered them. What they didn't mention was that one of the stories (a tale of them being lost in a specific shopping mall) was utter BS.


It didn't matter. Twenty percent came back with sudden memories of the event that, in reality, never happened. The sheer act of asking them if it did, caused them to manufacture the memory, filling in details on the fly.


Researchers knew they could up that 20 percent figure. In another test, an unsuspecting group of people who had visited Disneyland in the past were placed in a room with a cardboard cutout of Bugs Bunny and/or were shown fake ads for Disneyland featuring Bugs. Afterwards, 40 percent claimed they vividly remembered seeing a guy in a Bugs Bunny costume when they were at Disneyland. They didn't, of course (Bugs isn't a Disney character).


Another study took it a step further, and actually Photoshopped a picture of each subject riding in a hot air balloon. When asked if they recalled this non-event, 50 percent said they did. Other experiments successfully convinced people they had at one time nearly drowned, been hospitalized or been attacked by a wild animal.


How Does It Work?


Your brain kind of plays it fast and loose when it stores memories, and for good reason: Usually the details don't matter. You remember your best friend's phone number but don't remember exactly where and when he told you. You remember that you hate zucchini, but don't remember what day of the week you tried it. Your brain breaks up memories into a stew of general lessons learned and important stuff you'll need later.


The problem is that same process makes it difficult to distinguish real memories from fake ones, since the source of a memory is so often discarded in the stew. A fact you think you read in a newspaper might in reality have been read in a fictional novel, or heard from a friend, or dreamed, or implanted by somebody who's messing with you.


So not only could somebody do this for you (though it would have to be set up so that you don't know where and when) but it seems like you could run a pretty successful business just implanting happy childhoods for people.


You know, like that time you found out you were adopted, and that your real parents were the Thundercats.