I first encountered him in 2016, when he tweeted that he was “gonna go to the doctor” and “might die” because he wasn’t eating properly. He went on to tweet that he was losing weight and getting better. I was curious, so I sent him an email asking how he was doing, and he replied with this link to an article. The article was from a medical journal, and it was the first time I’d ever seen it.
The article was titled “Rick Wilson: Eating Improves the Body.” This is the first time we’ve actually heard of the guy, and he’s just been posting on Twitter for years. I’m sure he is a nice person, but it seems like he’s always been doing this for the wrong reasons.
It is really good that he has been posting for so long. The article is the most recent in a chain of three medical journal articles showing that eating is beneficial for the body. We’ve seen the same articles published in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Dr. Mark Hyman, the principal author of the medical journal article, is a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco.
It is rare that someone who is a doctor or a researcher has to resort to Twitter. But as of this moment, Dr. Hyman is a regular tweeter, as are many of his peers. He has over 1,400 Twitter followers, the majority of them doctors or academics.
Dr. Hyman’s tweet is a good example of what I can refer to as “meta-cognition” (the ability to think about yourself). He says, “I remember I was 20 years old and a resident at UCSF, and I was in the ER with my wife. I was being chased by a man who was on death-defying fire, and I could hear my wife screaming. I was trying to figure out how to save her.
We can understand why Dr. Hyman would tweet about his wife and that man in the ER, but on this particular day he is a scientist talking about science, a man whose wife was in a car accident, and a guy who is trying to kill himself. One of the ways that we can recognize the power of meta-cognition is not seeing it from someone else’s point-of-view, but seeing it from our own.
At this point I feel like the internet is the ultimate meta-cognition network. You can go anywhere and find a person saying “I’m on death-defying fire, I’m trying to save my wife, I was on that plane yesterday, and I’ve been shot.
Because if I see something in my own blog that I’ve seen before, it means that I’ve seen it before somewhere before. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack; if you know something’s been posted about once before, but you can’t really find it. But the internet is like a haystack; you can find the haystack on any given day.
The internet is like a haystack that you can find the needles on any given day. Its like looking for the needle in the haystack, but if you know the haystack, you can find the needle. Like the little thread of awareness that crosses into the subconsciousness in the brain, there is a tiny thread of awareness in the brain that is the thread that carries you through your day.
