Day 5 of the 'no news' experiment

I am now starting to feel slightly disconnected from the mainstream news events.

It's a little like when you go on holiday and only see the news through the medium of the occasional three day old newspaper flown into the resort.

Now the positive changes are becoming more apparent; I am getting stuck into some tasks that were continually being pushed to the back of the queue and have reclaimed at least an hour of time each day.

The results are positive enough that I plan to continue the experiment and report on what I find.

Why do we dream?

"Why do we dream?" was the question posed by the BBC Horizon TV program last night. It was a fascinating program that investigated this most hidden of mysteries.

Many people are now aware that Rapid Eye Movement or REM periods during sleep indicate that a person is dreaming but now studies have shown that we also dream between these REM episodes. What was most interesting though was that the nature of the dreams in REM sleep appears to be different to the dreams in non-REM sleep.

When test subjects in REM sleep were woken up, their dreams seemed to be of a negative or doubting nature whilst when woken in the non-REM dream periods, the sleepers reported a greater number of positive emotions.

One researcher postulated that this may help explain some forms of depression. The idea being that a person with depression would be entering the REM stage of sleep more often and therefore staying in the negative mood for longer periods during sleep. Whether this is a cause of depression or a side effect of it was at least to this viewer unclear.

It was a fascinating program though, you can watch it again using the BBC iPlayer service (this may not work outside the UK). Follow this link for the program's iPlayer page.

Is knowledge all powerful?

Sometimes I''ll listen to BBC Radio 4 in the morning; I catch up on the news and comment for the day. This morning on their "Thought for the day" slot a churchman (I didn't catch his name) was reflecting on the march of broadband technology and how we all seem to be excited by what it offers and unsettled by never quite knowing where it will lead us.

The topic broadened out to reflect on the way that we try and 'scoop' up knowledge from the internet, it truly is the university of the modern age. But knowledge alone does not always lead to wisdom or even a good outcome, what is sometimes missing is understanding.

The application of knowledge without understanding leads to that feeling of being unsettled. That seems to chime a chord with me. Knowledge and understanding together, now that is a rare combination.

So as you click from link to link on the web, you may find it more fulfilling to reflect on both the knowledge and the understanding of what you find.