Where to scrounge for a Nobel Prize

Although I have wasted a perfectly good science high education, I could still redeem myself by doing ground-breaking research in areas no one takes seriously. It is amazing that despite the number of desperate academics, there remain subjects which have not been completely squeezed for grant proposals.

For instance there is the field of Happiness, which is only coming into its own. Some American universities have ongoing studies on happiness: the one at Harvard follows groups of alumni since the 1930s. (Their identities cannot be revealed yet, but a researcher mentioned that one of them became President of the United States, and by a simple process of elimination we know it’s John F. Kennedy.)

One reason Happiness has only recently been deemed worthy of scientific study is that it is regarded as the province of quacks and self-help books. What have we got against self-help books? For starters there is the name: it sounds like something schoolboys were told would make them blind.

Then there is the fact that self-help books urge their readers to change their behavior and personality. Even if you believe people can change, the self-help industry preys on their unhappiness. It is fairly obvious that much unhappiness springs from the refusal to accept what you are, and the unfulfilled desire to be someone else.

(If it is not fairly obvious, I dibs the research grant.)

If the self-help industry really wanted to help the unhappy, they would teach acceptance — which is not to be confused with surrender or martyrdom. It is easier to forgive others than to forgive yourself.

Hey, I should write a self-help book.

Here is my initial contribution to Happiness research: Your unhappiness at any given time is inversely proportional to your happiness when you recall that time. I call this my Theory of Retrospective Happiness. Simply put, the more miserable you were at a certain time, the happier you will be when you recall that miserable time.

It is by no means original; it turns up in movies as “Someday we’ll look back on all this and laugh”, or in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors as “Comedy is tragedy plus time.” However I believe I am the first to have stated it as a scientific principle so I claim credit.

Another discipline where I can make a positive contribution is Loafing. It is not even considered a proper area of study, so I would be a pioneer. Loafing is often associated with laziness. This is not only unfair, it is grossly incorrect.

If one were lazy she would simply do nothing. Whatever loafers may be, they are doing something.

Loafing is the work you do in order to avoid the work you must or are paid to do. It requires creativity and resourcefulness. It takes effort, just not the effort expected of you. For instance, I am loafing this very second.

This being a column on gadgets and technology, I had planned on writing a comparison of a locally produced “original” dvd and a “pirated” copy of the same movie (The bootleg was much better).

However, all the best intentions in the world will not keep our minds from wandering off into interesting, less urgent spheres.

You know exactly what I’m talking about, you there in the office on a Sunday allegedly rushing to beat a deadline, and you in the school library pretending to write a term paper. You are not doing what you’re supposed to be doing. You are loafing. We can quantify what you’re doing thus:

The volume of work you do to get out of the work you have to to is equal to or greater than the volume of work you are avoiding.

I vaguely recall reading a similar statement by Garfield the cartoon cat, but my formula takes precedence because everyone knows cats can’t speak.

But the field in which I have real Nobel potential is Sleep. I am massively gifted in this area because I can sleep anytime, and unlike narcoleptics I do it by choice. Those who know me can attest to my terrible sleeping habits: drinking coffee late at night, turning in at 3 or 4 a.m. And it doesn’t matter because whatever time I go to bed, I will lose consciousness for eight or nine hours straight and still manage to wake up while it’s daylight.

While reading D.T. Max’s splendid medical mystery The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, I learned that Sleep Medicine is a new field. Its recognized founder is William Dement—possibly the best name for a sleep doctor ever.

In his introduction, D.T. Max notes that sleep is one of the body’s most primal functions but, get this, we don’t really know what it’s for. “Did it once exist to keep us out of harm’s way for part of the day—to make us lie low while predators were hunting? Is it time reserved for the central processing unit that is the brain to devote to updating its databases? Or perhaps the unconsciousness of sleep is exactly its purpose: sleep exists to help us forget useless information.”

D.T. Max cites an interesting statistic: 10 percent of the western world suffers from insomnia. That’s 120 million humans staring at the ceiling in the dark, counting sheep. Funny we should mention sheep since Max’s book covers fatal neurological disorders that affect sheep, cows, and humans.

Which brings me to my Insomnia Paradox: Thinking about the need to fall asleep actually keeps you from falling asleep. True, this only works for common insomnia. If you are an insomniac and a hypochondriac, stay away from D.T. Max’s book.

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In future columns we will look into different therapies for sleeplessness. In the meantime I urge insomniacs to help our research by e-mailing their personal experience of insomnia to emotionalweatherreport@gmail.com.