I am not looking for an easy and obvious answer here. I am looking for a way to leverage a huge social graph (maybe of millions of people) and find out what I would probably mostly miss/skip in my life based on my current profile. Furthermore I definitely want to get in touch with the people that are totally unrelated to my interests. I am sure they will offer me a different view of the world.

However in the next years (maybe that’s many many years, but eventually it will happen) scientists will achieve a perfect understanding of how brain works and how we can alter our memories. What used to be science fiction is now becoming partially a reality. For example some people with permanent loss of vision can start seeing again by using electrodes which stimulate the right areas of the brain which generate what we know as vision. This is just the beginning of science being able to manipulate the brain. I totally believe that in the future, scientists will be able to create memories and experiences on demand.

This is where is gets very interesting. While it would be fun that we will be able to experience a trip to Paris without even being there by simply attaching this experience to our brains through whatever device will be able to do this, things will get serious once these experiences alter the fundamental values of our brain. And let me give you an example: How would you think of life and your daily routine if deep inside in your brain you had memories of yourself before you were born and after you are dead? These are memories that most religions of the world are trying to “persuade” you that they exist. All religions have an answer for what happens after death. But once technology will be able to manipulate the human mind, these answers will be able to become real experiences for everyone. They will be 100% real and totally authentic for the people who try this. This will be either used for good (people working together to achieve a very specific thing in their lives) but either for bad (I guess it will be a lot easier to persuade people to attempt suicide attacks)…

Both of them are very relaxing for the brain and once you observe them you realize that anything can change in the very next second. You can’t predict the movement of the fish nor how the next bubble in the lava lamp will be shaped. And if you want to test the theory, here is a software that takes a photo of your random object and converts it into a number; the Lavarnd.

I have a lava lamp at home and an aquarium in the office. Both offer pretty much the same result though the aquarium includes some interactivity as well, which in fact reduces slightly the randomness factor:)

But Richard Branson and his team seem to be dedicated to conquer the universe. And what if we really relocate let’s say half of the population to another planet. How that will be like in terms of communication? If for example I want to talk to my partner in Mars would that be possible?

Well, obviously we can transmit signals to other planets but considering the fact that light needs about 4.35 minutes to reach Mars from Earth we won’t be able to have real time communication with any of the inhabitants. So the way we will be communicating will be through video conversations exactly like the way seesmic works (of course with some more delays since videos won’t be available immediately from planet to planet).

Loic my friend, the future of extraterrestrial communications is in your hands;)

From my point of view, this is quite boring. It’s good to be with people that have other interests than the ones you have. It’s the only way of getting out of a world that you have built and exploring new activities. You can gain some life-changing experiences when you do this, trust me.

So next time you hear about a “perfect match” think again if that’s what you are looking for. It is safe to say that you want to live your life with people that like and do common things with you but as most of the times, safety kills the excitement.

I don’t know if you have ever been at a casino but if you haven’t you should visit one. Be careful though… go there not for the obvious reason (winning/losing money). Go there to see and analyze how people act knowing the probabilities of winning a game. You will be amazed on how stronger the emotions are from logical thinking.
That being said, I am going to describe my method of playing which most of you will find stupid and boring. I call it “I am very happy once every 18.5 days”. But first let’s do a flashback. Remember when you where a child and you had a small piggy bank? Probably most of you had one and you were collecting money frequently. When there was a special time like your birthday for example you had to broke mr. piggy and you could use the money to buy anything you wanted. Note that you were not disappointed when you put money into mr. piggy because you knew that some day you would take them back but you were very happy once you got them all together.

So this is my method: Play only an amount that you are comfortable of losing (I play 20 euros) and play it only once on the roulette (I split it into two numbers). Believe it or not I am only playing once each time I visit a casino and I don’t go there often. But once every 18.5 times I leave the casino very happy because one of my 10 euro bets gives me 360 euros. The rest of the times I am just leaving the casino happy knowing that the 20 euros were a reasonable amount to spent to have a drink (which by the way is free at the casino). Over time, the experience to be very happy costs you 10 euros for every time you are very happy (this is what the casino makes from paying you 36 times the bet and not 37). Well, that’s the cost of breaking mr. piggy!

But why once every 18.5 times?

Well, obviously if you had split your bet over red or black you would be happy once every two times. But you wouldn’t be much happy. You would just double your money. It would happen more often but you wouldn’t get the excitement of a *36 return on investment:) Depending on how often you visit a casino and how you set your happiness level you might want to change this. On another point of view, if you play at a lottery the most chances are that you won’t win even if you played everyday for 1000 years but if you do win you will be a lot happier than winning 18 times your money at the roulette.

So as a final advice: Setup your happiness levels and don’t play out of them. At a range of 1 to 10, 1 is losing a reasonable amount of money (not more than what you would have paid for a typical night at a bar) and 10 multiplying your money by a great factor. Remember though: Always leave happy. Because if you do the mistake to play that reasonable amount of money several times the same day you won’t leave happy!

What does this mean to business success?

Well, I have been watching several extremely successful entrepreneurs and what I found out so far is that many of them went from good to great because of a tiny change in their life. Moreover, this change might not even had to do with business itself. They met someone special, they were at the right place in the right time but almost all do not credit their success to day-to-day business activities. These are to maintain a successful business.

Personally, in my life, success always came from non business related factors. I can recall meeting someone during holidays at a place where I wouldn’t have been anyway and then doing business together, or even finding the right person in very unusual circumstances. On the other hand, I met my girlfriend after searching for a house for my parents. In all these situations I wasn’t searching for what I actually found, but the result was a success.

My point is that life is very strange and unpredictable. You should not expect great success from a well known path. Of course you should not expect either strange things to happen in your life in order to have great success. What you can do is to always be ready to identify what is going on every moment in your life and how that might help you succeed in any factor. If you are totally busy executing your plan without being able to identify the opportunities around you then you will loose the game. You will be successful but you will not enjoy great success.

So, my question for today is: What if humans had no soul? What if you exist only when you are living and being able to think and feel?

When I first thought of that question I immediately continued to think: No, this can be true. There is no way we exist only when we are alive. No one can believe this. All religions in the world believe that people have a future after death.

With those assumptions let’s do an experiment: Let’s consider that we can “save” the current information that exists on a human brain somehow. If that is only what makes him alive then if you actually had all the information you could save a human as information. And if you can recover this information to one or several other people then you would have humans thinking that they are alive and being the same persons (at the very moment of waking them up).  They would have the same experiences, feelings, etc. Of course from the time they get alive, all things will start to get different for them.

And now consider the following thought: What makes you think that every morning  you are still alive and not died while you were asleep? If you actually died while you were sleeping and then someone could wake you up with the thoughts and feelings that you actually had to think and feel in the morning if you hadn’t die how would you know? What actually matters is that when you wake up you remember what you did last night, last week, your whole life. You are actually the same person only because you remember and you can recall what you did before.

Another experiment then comes into place:  What makes you think that your thoughts and feelings are actually yours. They part of the universe after all aren’t they? If you think something, it is happening as  a set of actions / events (biological ones) which are part of the universe and secondly part of your brain. So when you are thinking, something happens to the whole universe not just your brain. You actually think that you are a separate existence only because you have a limited view of what the universe is. So if your thoughts are part of the universe, along with the thoughts from other people then the whole universe thinks something, which is a collection of all thoughts. It is alive and thinking.

So what happens if you die? Well, from the limited point of view that your existence had, you stop filling anything. You won’t exist again in the same way, only because there in nobody that can have the exact same experiences with you. If you think this from the wider view of the universe, only one small thought stopped to function. It will be just another experience for it, because it will continue to think of other things. It would be exactly like waking up in the morning and not remembering what you had for dinner yesterday. So in fact you are not dying.

The question that immediately raises is simple: If humans won’t exist anymore does it mean that the universe will be dead? Of course not! We assumed that humans are only thoughts and feelings. Thoughts and feelings are actions performed by the brain. They are a physical process just like the movement of the planets, or the movement of the quarks is. One thought can result to a feeling just like one meteor can results to a change of a planets’ surface.

So in fact, if you assume that no soul exists, people are immortal. Someone (the universe) is thinking  (performing a set of actions like the biological actions of the brain which result to thoughts and feelings) whatever you think and will continue to think after you die. Your own thoughts will be a memory, just like your thoughts are after you wake up each morning.

Later on I figured out that I can recall numbers. I can practically recall any number that I have seen at least once. I might need 5 to 10 minutes to recall it sometimes but I always end up with the number. I usually don’t remember any other thing apart from numbers… I am not good at remembering names, places, texts, etc. Moreover, until recently I couldn’t understand how I could remember a number I have seen once and not a name that I have heard of once.

The solution is that I have connected numbers with feelings. The strange thing is that each number has a different appeal to me. For example if someone tells me the numbers 60582, 5886, 4078, 2016 I can immediatelly feel them as “good” numbers. However, if you tell me 7747 for example I would say this is a “bad” number. Absolutely no reason and no logic behind these thoughts. It’s just a feeling and that causes me to remember the numbers. Moreover each number itself has a specific appeal to me no matter how big it is. But usually when I read numbers I break them into 4 or 5 digit parts. This helps remembering them and connecting them to a sequence of feelings. For example if I read a credit card number, I split it into 4 4-digit numbers. I can easily remember it then.

Does anyone else believe that different numbers cause different feelings? Are there “good” and “bad” numbers for you?

I actually love thinking about anything. I even have it as a hobby. Every minute of free time I have I keep thinking of something. Don’t get me wrong. I am not always thinking of business issues or sophisticated stuff. The more crazy the thoughts the better time I have.

So I decided to create the extreme toughts category where I can post mostly crazy thoughts and stuff that you might thought it’s not worth thinking about (maybe that’s true though).

More posts to follow…