Avoiding Over-Complication to Add Mental Capacity

A few years ago I offered, to the customary rousing acclaim, a way to easily add 57% more memory capacity via reframing. Here's a similar use case.


Long story short, a quick bout of food poisoning mushroomed into a biological infection, and I'm in Europe so everyone's super into probiotics ("fauna replenishment" was the previous sanctimony to references to "The Planet"). So I've been given an antibiotic plus two forms of probiotics - which strikes me as idiotic, given that the former will slaughter the latter). But part of avoiding Ugly Americanism is to play it cool and follow instructions.

But one more thing. As I daily pit cooties against anti-cooties - spoiler: the anti-cooties win - countless millions or even billions of microorganism corpses will be generated to slowly decompose in my system, releasing all manner of toxins. If this sounds unbearably awful, consider that you experience something similar when you patronize steam table joints where the food's left at room temperature and it's nuked to heat and kill the cooties. Dead cooties are better than live cooties, but dead cooties are not, ahem, salubrious.

The antibiotic must be taken with food. One probiotic needs to be taken 2 hours before or after the antibiotic. And the second probiotic needs to be taken before a meal. Imagine yourself bleary with fever and dehydrated, trying to keep that straight.

But wait! There's more! I already take one pill an hour before breakfast. And pills with breakfast. Plus night-time pills. Now it feels like we're approaching a logistics saturation point.

Maybe time to brute force the whole thing into a calendar structure with timers, and carry around a (wink-wink/nudge-nudge) medications bag.

But the preexisting regime is KNOWN to me. I don't have to think of it. It's baked in. It just happens. It's not pill-taking complication, it's an entirely different sector of daily life. There's no reason to group it all together into one big blur. The two processes don't touch, needn't touch. It's only the presence of the word "pill" that makes me imagine any such thing.

No, this needs to be framed as two independent processes: life-as-it's-always been, plus (now that I've taken a moment to calmly map it out) 1. idiotic probiotic #2 first thing, 2. antibiotic with breakfast, and 3. idiotic probiotic #1 two hours after breakfast. That's not such a strain! Meanwhile, the usual pill-taking remains sublimely uninvolved in its separate part of the brain.

Which actually feels pleasantly odd even to me, and I'm the guy who thought this up! It reminds me of watching schools of different sorts of fish fail to interact in a large aquarium tank. The human mind might categorize them all as fish, but they never got the memo. They're like distinct civilizations.

Similarly, in the memory trick, if you have numbers to remember, your instinct will be to cram them all into your (very limited) number memory place. But just because they're all numbers doesn't mean you need to glom them together. Different numbers can be stored in different ways that don't interact at all. If you avoid over-stuffing, you can effortlessly add extra capacity.

It would be nuts to combine all the pill-taking into a complicated structure far more daunting than the sum of its parts.