A coworker apologized for dragging the other day because she woke up at 2AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. Happens to me, too, I said, and here is what works for me.  All unscientific, wholly personally effective. These are my antidotes to lying awake because of the rush of thoughts that are keeping me awake.

1. Quiet those thoughts.  Here I fall back to the techniques of meditation by focusing on one word or phrase and repeating it over and over, and getting back to it when my mind wanders off to other thoughts.  I either use a simple mantra (e.g. “so hum” or somesuch), or a series of words that offer self-suggestion (“Breathe. Sleep. Dream. Heal.”)  Sometimes the cadence matches my breathing, sometimes the ticking of the clock, if I’m too aware of that.

2. Make noisy thoughts.  Just the opposite of #1, I flood my awareness with nonsense, mostly real words but strung together in streams of consciousness, but purposely veering away from (explicit!) meaning, and with a rhythm to match breathing or external sounds. “Reciprocal findings aloft wasting nothing but really encountered aligned from the get-go to state something certain astoundingly grateful tomorrow and twice to recall something blue and electric and so on…”.  What happens is that this crowds out real thoughts, tricks the mind into thinking it is thinking, but after a while lulls it to sleep because it can’t really deal with the "thoughts" you're giving it.

3. Dispense with the thoughts immediately. Deal with each thought coming down with the conveyor belt, immediately, and in a way that will satisfy whatever your brain thought needed to be dealt with at 2AM.  I’ve found that most every thought that is coming at me can be dispensed immediately with one of three words:

• “Yep”  If it’s a thought that is basically positive or neutral, and I want to acknowledge it and send it on its way before it leads to more thoughts.
• “Drop” If it’s a thought that’s destructive or negative, and I want to toss it, and send it on its way.
• “Later” If it’s a thought about something that I know I should be working on or dealing with, I don’t really want to dismiss its importance, I just want to set the bit that I’ll agree to work on it later, and send it on its way.

If I dispense with the thoughts, pretty soon the conveyor belt stops sending things my way, and I’m off to sleep. If I’m using this method, I’ll sometimes end up switching over to method 1, with “Yep. Drop. Later.” as the quieting mantra, just waiting for the next thought to come along.

4. Switch to 3D. When I’m lying awake with my eyes closed, there are still visual stimulation, usually patterns of light and dark and colors that morph around behind my eyelids. In this method, I force those patterns to appear 3D, adding as much depth as I can imagine. For some reason, things move from random patterns in 3D to other images in 3D, and from there into dreaming and sleep. The other thing it does is forces me to focus my thoughts on the visualization task, which distracts it from the specific or verbal thoughts that are keeping me awake.

As I said, these may be idiosyncratic and may not work for everyone, but go ahead and give them a try, and good luck falling back asleep.

I am glad this talk went up so soon, while the movie "Temple Grandin" is still currently showing on HBO, and I'd encourage everyone to watch them both. Temple Grandin was one of those TED speakers with presence and approachability as an attendee at the conference itself, and whose story is one of those you'll find yourself connecting at many levels.

One of my favorite lines (paraphrasing): "If it weren't for the autism gene, there would be no Silicon Valley."

Well, yesterday was Day 0, with TED University and activities. But on Day 1, here are some snippets:

Daniel Kahneman: The experiencing self is far different from the remembering self. That difference has a significance in many systems based around memories. We think of the future as anticipated memories. If you could go on a vacation knowing that you'd have no photos and your memories would be erased, would that change your choice of vacation? What defines a story: changes, significant moments, and endings. Mostly endings. You live so many seconds, but most don't leave a trace. Shouldn't they count? What then determines happiness - experience or memories?

David Cameron, soon to be PM of UK?: The global public debt is $32 trillion and rising. Which means, no matter what you want to do, there isn't any money for it. Sorry. So what are you going to do? That's what redefines government in the 2010s. Combine political thinking with the information revolution and develop systems that reinforce transparency, accountability, and choice. And this is from the British Conservative Party. Would that we had conservatives in America that could stand on real conservative values and not just exploit and celebrate ignorance.

Jake Shimabukuro. "The Ukulule is an instrument of peace." before storming into variations on flamenco, Ave Maria, and Bohemian Rhapsody to a standing ovation.

Esther Duflo: 9 million children under age 5 die each year, which is like a Haiti earthquake every 5 days. Love that she's drawing that comparison, as I've tried to equate smoking deaths each year to having a 9/11 every three days. She's mastered the use of controlled experiments in social programs to see what really works or not, independent of political axes.

Michael Shermer: "Belief is the natural state of things" - Evolutionary psychology gave us a belief engine because false positives - we heard a rustling in the bushes, thought it was a tiger and ran even though it was just the wind - didn't harm us. False negatives - we heard a rustling in the bushes, thought it was the wind, but it was a tiger, did us in. That's why we believe in all sorts of things like aliens, wolfmen, and gods.

William Li. Angiogenesis. It's why blood vessels grow not to much but not too little. Grow too much, they get cut short. If they get hurt they grow back. Oops - 70 diseases (including the big ones) are affected by angiogenesis not working, so not just drugs, but the right foods, will get things back in whack.

Dan Barber of Blue Hill Restaurant lost his love for the "sustainable fish" that was fed on chicken pellets, but found a perfect farm in Spain where you don't have to feed the fish (imagine a farm where you don't have to feed the animals), where the health of the preditors is good for the overall crop (imagine that on a farm!) and the water leaving the farm comes out cleaner than the water entering it. How to make that a global pattern? Wait and see. Funny and engaging.

Philip Kaplan of Blippy, a startup, has a credit card + social network that puts every detail of every purchase you make on the public site. Crazy? Effective? Keep watching.