Kindle Notes & Highlights
According to legend, it was while lazing in bed and staring at a fly on the ceiling that Descartes, habitually a late riser, conceived of the “X” and “Y” axes that comprise the coordinate grid, now the bane of so many grade-schoolers who lose sleep studying its properties.
Few people fear being overweight as much as they fear terrorism, even though statistically being obese is much more of a threat to your life than terrorism.
Then if you get a good night’s sleep, relax for a while, or even take a nap, the hippocampus more or less writes these new memories to your neocortex, which houses your long-term memories. This is called memory consolidation. It is especially important when you are learning new ideas or skills. So the best thing to do after learning new information is to take nap, or at least be idle.
Enjoying idleness is anathema to our cultural belief that without unrelenting activity we are somehow not living up to our potential, a belief which we are taught implicitly from infancy.
Psychologists have long used a questionnaire to assess the degree to which people feel control over their lives called the Rotter Internal-External Locus of Control Scale.
