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Here's Looking At Ya!
The human body and brain are weird and wonderful (and we can optimize that!)
The 10almonds Team
February 25, 2023
❝Age is deformed, youth unkind;
We scorn their bodies, they our mind.❞
Yes, that really was his name:
But that’s just his opinion. This middle-aged writer (talking about me now, hi!) thinks that with a little effort, we can be healthy, knowledgeable, and kind at any age.
It’s Life-Hack Saturday at 10almonds, in which we look for ways to make your health and productivity crazy simple, one little thing at a time. Today we have:
Exercising for mobility—it ain’t glamorous, but wow does it make a difference to life
The weirdest thing your eyes do—it’s almost scary but we got used to it
Making reading faster and better—you can have it both ways!
What would you tell your younger self?—a call for submissions
It takes a village—building a community that matters to you
👀 WATCH AND LEARN
Exercises For Incredible Mobility!
When was the last time you had to bench-press anything larger than a small child? Or squat more than your partner’s bodyweight? Or do a “farmer’s walk” with anything heavier than your groceries?
For most of us, unless our lifestyles are quite extreme, we don’t need ridiculous strength (fun as that may be).
You know what makes a huge difference to our quality of life though?
Mobility.
Have you ever felt that moment of panic when you reach for something on a high shelf and your shoulder or back twinges (been there!)? Or worse, you actually hurt yourself and the next thing you know, you need help putting your socks on (been there, too!)?
And we say to ourselves (or at least I did!),
“I’m not going to let that happen to me again”
But how? How do we keep our mobility strong? Olivia has the answer:
Today’s main feature is about leveraging the anatomy and physiology of eyesight for better reading. If you are visually impaired and using a screenreader, we apologize that this next section won’t be of practical use to you personally.
📖 MAIN FEATURE
This Main Feature Should Take You Two Minutes (and 18 Seconds) To Read*
*Or at least, that’s what we’re told by our powerful software that checks things for readability!
Curious what that looks like? Try Out Hemingway App Online Here!
🤫 There’s a problem nobody wants to talk about when it comes to speed-reading
If you’re not very conscientious in your method, information does get lost. Especially, anything over 500 words per minute is almost certainly skimming and not true speed-reading.
One of the reasons information gets lost is because of a weird and wonderful feature of our eyes and brain: saccades.
Basically, our eyes can either collect visual information or they can move; they can’t do both at once. And as you may know, our eyes are almost always moving. So why aren’t we blind most of the time?
We actually are.
Did you know: your eyes take two upside-down 2D images and your brain presents you one 3D image the right way around instead? You probably did know that. So: it’s a bit like that.
Your brain takes a series of snapshots from whenever your eyes weren't moving, and mentally fills in the blanks for you, just like a studio animation. We have a “frame rate” of about 60 frames per second, by the way—that's why many computer monitors use that frequency. Lower frequencies can result in a noticeable flicker, and higher frequencies are wasted on us mere mortals!
Our eyes do some super-speedy movements called saccades (up to 500º per second! Happily no, our eyes don’t rotate 500º, but that’s the “per second” rate) and our brain fills in the gaps with its best guesses. The more you push it, the more it'll guess wrong.
We’re not making this up, by the way! See for yourself:
Fortunately, it is possible to use your eyes in a way that reduces the brain's need to guess. That also means it has more processing power left over to guess correctly when it does need to.
📱 Yes, There’s An App For That
Actually there are a few! But we’re going to recommend Spreeder as a top-tier option, with very rapid improvement right from day one.
It works by presenting the text with a single unmoving focal point. This is the opposite of traditional speed-reading methods that involve a rapidly moving pacer (such as your finger on the page, or a dot on the screen).
This unmoving focal point (while the words move instead) greatly reduces the number of saccades needed, and so a lot less information is lost to optical illusions and guesswork.
If you find that easy to use and would like something with a few more features, you might like another app that works on the same principle: Spritz.
It can take a bit more getting-used-to, but allows for greater integrations with all your favourite content in the long-run:
Check Out Spritz: Android App / iOS App / Free Chrome Extension
Lastly, if you don’t want any of those fancy apps and would just like to read more quickly and easily with less eye-strain, Beeline has you covered.
For free, unless you want to unlock some premium features!
How Beeline works is by adding a color gradient to text on websites and in documents. This makes it a lot easier for the eye to track without going off-piste, skipping a line, or re-reading the same bit again, etc.
Special call for your input:
If you could give your younger self one piece of general life advice, what would it be?
By “general” we mean less like “buy stocks in Google” or “don’t marry J.J.”, and more like advice that would still hold true in any time or place.
We’d really love to do a piece on this, so if you only reply to us once, let this be it! Just hit reply to this email or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW
Purpose: Design A Community And Change Your Life - by Gina Bianchini
To address the elephant in the room, this is not a rehash of Rick Warren’s best-selling “The Purpose-Driven Life”. Instead, this book is (in this reviewer’s opinion) a lot better. It’s a lot more comprehensive, and it doesn’t assume that what’s most important to the author will be what’s most important to you.
What’s it about, then? It’s about giving your passion (whatever it may be) the tools to have an enduring impact on the world. It recommends doing this by leveraging a technology that would once have been considered magic: social media.
Far from “grow your brand” business books, this one looks at what really matters the most to you. Nobody will look back on your life and say “what a profitable second quarter that was in such-a-year”. But if you do your thing well, people will look back and say:
“he was a pillar of the community”
“she raised that community around her”
“they did so much for us”
“finding my place in that community changed my life”
...and so forth. Isn't that something worth doing?
Bianchini takes the position of both “idealistic dreamer” and “realistic worker”.
Further, she blends the two beautifully, to give practical step-by-step instructions on how to give life to the community that you build.
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Wishing you wisdom and good health,
The 10almonds Team