When should you decide?
 

Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a criminologist and a social worker. The three prisoners had completed at least two-thirds of their sentences, but the parole board granted freedom to only one of them. Guess which one: ...


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue.html?_r=1

I'm guessing the Social Worker, was I correct? :D

Three carpenters died and went to heaven; a Jew, a Baptist, and a Mexican...

no, wait, never mind.

A fascinating article. Most of my significant decisions on a daily basis are made in the morning. Although I may have been mulling the pros and cons of some decision or other for days or weeks, I nearly always decide what I'm going to do with it during the mid morning hours.
My very early morning hours consist of feeding and cleaning pens and are fairly physical and require concentration. At about 8 I go in for breakfast and after breakfast I go out to do the milking. Typically, during my evening feet up on the porch meditations I mentally "throw out" stuff I am in a quandary about. I just let it go, knowing that the answer will come. During my milking session, which is quiet and contemplative, the answers (decisions) often come.
After about 2 p.m., the only decision I can trust myself to make is "Guinness or ***** Creek?" :D

Was one of them a female with an outstanding body?

For years I've served on a committee that meets from 9am until 2pm. I've often noticed that late afternoon decisions are shoddy compared to morning decisions.

Hardly surprising. Who the hell says awake in a committee at the best of times, let alone in the afternoon.

- Peter.

I served on some of those 6 hour committees. I got over it. Nothing's worth the agony.

After reading that article, I would change 6 hr meetings to two 3-hour meetings or maybe two 2-hr meetings to improve decisionmaking.

Woke up thinking about this article. There's a related issue. Years ago I had a friend who went on a long fast. Probably over 2 weeks. At the end of the fast he got worried because he lost the will to eat and couldn't start eating again. He went to a counselor/minister who coerced him into starting to eat again. I'm wondering how that fact bears on the kinds of decisionmaking anlyzed in the experiments. The experimenters looked at everyday decisionmaking and the everyday ups and downs of food consumption related to those decisions. What happens when food is out of the equation? How does human decisionmaking change? Lots of cultures have the idea of long fasts and I wonder if those fasts do something to the parts of the brain that the experimenters examined. Could those long fasts induce permanent changes in the brain? It's likely that early humans went without food for much longer periods than we usually do. Would those lean times have resulted in different brain behavior generally?

This is my third week of fasting...and my dreams are very, very lucid..almost surreal.

Dunno if there is a connection. Also, my body has 'switched day and night'.

At nite (When food is consumed), I am wide awake..during the day (when food is withheld)..I am very lethargic.

I used to tell people, "No one ever erected a monument to a committee". I was wrong. There is one. It is in Runnymeade England. Paid for by the American Bar Association. It was erected to honor a committee of sorts- a broup of barons, who held a knife to the throat of the king- and made him sign Magna Carta. So if what your committe is working on is of this great of importantance, carry on. Otherwise, get your butt outta there and get back to work!

The story on glucose levels is very interesting and explains a lot.