The Human Body Is Too Complex For Easy Fixes

This article is about an all-too-present theme in our societies nowadays: that of upgrading your body in order to enhance your productivity. Some people do it by taking drugs, which is a thing in Silicon Valley. Others fast for weeks to "cleanse" their bodies and achieve a spiritual state of mind. The author of this article tried to hack his sleeping routine when he got a newborn baby who slept poorly. He wanted to try the polyphasic sleep, "a trend among the kind of people who quantify every aspect of their nutrient intake", which means that you only sleep for 20 minutes every few hours and you'll be in tip top shape. "Sleep would be conquered! In its place, productive bliss."

Things, however, aren't so black and white, the author soon found out. Our bodies are complex biological systems that have evolved over millions of years, and everything in them is interconnected — if you take one thing out of the puzzle, it's reflected in all the other components. Quick fixes don't work.  

Often going hand in hand with efforts to quantify the body and behaviors through all manners of technology, this hacking ethos relies on the idea that if people can just collect more data to better understand themselves, perhaps they can engineer themselves to perfection. We can hack our technologies, and even our societies, so why not ourselves?

Also, you may want to read this article too, about the learning differences between humans and computers.