What makes people Tick? and other such musings...

Today I was thinking, as I am wont to do, about how people function. It is a topic that I spend a lot of time with, although goodness knows why. Questions like "What happens if you never went poop?" are just interesting to me. Would the orifice close up and disappear? Would we still have a butt crack? How would you get rid of bodily wastes? Fascinating. But butts were not the point of this post, merely the introduction.

The point of the post is that lately I've been wondering about three things- sleep, health, and thinking. You see, in addition to the sniffles, I have been on a truly strange sleep schedule lately. Each night since returning from the wedding, I have gone to bed later and later. Not because i particularly wanted to, but because I wasn't tired and lost track of time. This morning, I finally got tired around 8-am. It makes me wonder about sleep. What is "natural sleep?" Have we always slept this way? What if a person's natural rhythm was not exactly in line with a day? Have people tinkered with sleep? What did they learn?

And because I was fooling around with that tiddlywiki thing so much last night, it got me wondering how people link ideas together in their brains. How would you maps someones mind? Would it be a flowchart, a dictionary, a cloud of words, some of which are bigger than others? would it be a web of related things, and all consciousness does is dance between the degrees of separation?

Yes, this kind of stuff is fun to think about. If I were a mad scientist, you well know what I would be doing to people. But luckily, I am not, and so my experiments are mostly harmless.