In this post, looking back at last week:

1. At last, I understood and experienced non-self!
2. Discontinuities extended
3. Emotions and music
4. Al modeling of emotions
5. Speaking of being awestruck
6. Regulating emotions with and without music
8. Hookmark
8. Media: Interviewed for CJAD; SFU
9. mySleepButton
9.1. Google Play Saga continues
9.2. mySleepButton 2.0
10. I wrote for Brett Terpstra’s blog
11. IT: VPN and link titles
12. Announcement: I have left Somnolence+
13. 12 Angry Men
14. Political actions.
15. $$$ It was time for me to invest in stocks
16. Party
17. Easter: brunch with a friend
18. Social media posts
19. How I quickly write my round-ups.

(Table of contents courtesy of Marked app.)

At last, I understood and experienced non-self!

On the Making Sense Substack regarding Episode #408 – Finding Equanimity in Chaos I posted:

After all these years (and I’m in my 50s), thanks to this episode, I finally understand non-self to a certain extent (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms!)

Discontinuities extended

Today, I added two new chapters to Discontinuities: Love, Art, Mind, which is available now on Leanpub:

1. A chapter on Leonard Cohen’s blues (and my past ones), and
2. a chapter in Memory of Dr. Claude Lamontagne, who contributed a chapter to this book.

The beauty of Leanpub is that one can write in markdown and publish incrementally.

Emotions and music

Last week, I did a lot of reading and research for a chapter on emotions and music for the Discontinuities: Love, Art, Mind book. The following two papers, which I instilled last week, are two of the most central papers of the chapter:

• Juslin, P. N. (2025). Major theories of emotion causation and their applicability to music: The case for multi-level approaches. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 1-46,
• Juslin, P. N. (2013). From everyday emotions to aesthetic emotions: Towards a unified theory of musical emotions, and
• Sakka & Juslin (2018) Emotion regulation with music in depressed and non-depressed individuals.

It is already a common assumption that the function of art is to attract attention. But I want to take that a step further, by bringing in the concept of mental perturbance.. More specifically, I argue that the most successful art triggers mental perturbance. This means it not only sustains attention while it is being experienced, but it tends to repeatedly come to mind afterward. I think this is an original hypothesis.

So, amongst other papers, last week I read Why is sad music pleasurable? A possible role for prolactin—by David Huron, 2011. It says that “a third source of sadness is cognitive rumination.” I was hoping this would shed light on my hypothesis, but there wasn’t much in the paper on rumination. I will broaden my literature review to find papers relevant to the perturbance hypothesis.

Also last week, using productive practice, a practice I explain in Cognitive Productivity books, I instilled several ideas from Menninghaus’s and others’ papers on aesthetic emotions.

AI modeling of emotions

Last week, I skimmed a 460-page chapter (!) of Eva Hudlicka’s upcoming Handbook of AI Modeling of Emotions. The chapter is on emotion generation. I used the technique described here: Editing Tables of Contents with PDF Pen Pro: Delving Tips and Screencast – CogZest. I.e., I created a table of contents in the margins while skimming each section. This is a pre-read. This would have been quite fast if I had just created the navigation pane (contents). But given that I was pre-reading, it took me hours. I now feel well oriented with respect to the content and look forward to selectively delving it.

I am confident that anyone interested in computational modeling of emotions, whether for practical or factual aims, will find Eva’s book invaluable. I am awestruck by the book!

Speaking of being awestruck

Oh, another fantastic thing! I have hired a business coach, Aura McKay, and had my first 2-hour session with her. One of my goals with Aura (which she suggested) is to find balance in my various projects and to set actionable goals working back from 10-year goals, to 2-year goals, 1-year, 90-day, 30-day, and 7-day goals. We’ve already taken a stab at all this goal setting in our first, high-powered, session!

Such business coaching is a great complement to psychotherapy, which I still undergo regularly. Psychotherapists can’t give you business coaching. And business coaches don’t do therapy. I need them both.

Regulating emotions with and without music

I updated the meeting notes on the upcoming Beacon Humanist Meeting on regulating emotions with and without music (2025-04-27). Beacon, incidentally, is accepting new members.

Hookmark

Every week I work extensively on Hookmark](https://hookproductivity.com), an app that helps knowledge workers stay in psychological flow by enabling them to instantly retrieve information that is pertinent to their current focus.

Amongst other things, last week I did QA related to this question: Best Practice for Multi-User Environment: Sync links through iCloud or Dropbox?. I confirmed that multiple users can share their Hookmark links via a shared folder (e.g., in Dropbox or in iCloud). we had not anticipated that use case, but Hookmark can handle it well.

I also announced on social media that we are tracking to release Hookmark for iPhone and iPad before the end of the month! I also said that Hookmark 6.9 is coming this month. I published this via @hookmarkapp handle on X. I also pre-announced some of the features in Hookmark’s product road map there. I mentioned that we intend to render obsolete the message No linkable item found in app. This means you’ll always be able to hook content to an app; the idea of an app being incompatible with Hookmark will, thankfully, be dead.

Media: Interviewed for CJAD; SFU

• Last week, SFU published an article based on an interview with me: Reprogramming Rest: Dr. Luc P. Beaudoin’s Science of Falling Asleep – Faculty of Education – Simon Fraser University
• Last week, I was interviewed for Now Trending. The circa 10-min interview was published on Sunday. (I haven’t listened to it and I don’t know if a recording is available.) The interview focused on the cognitive shuffle.

mySleepButton

A couple of noteworthy bits of information regarding Hookmark.

Google Play Saga continues

Last week, we published on mySleepButton.com why mySleepButton is still not back on Google Play Store. Blame Google.

mySleepButton 2.0

Here I am pre-announcing that we will release mySleepButton 2.0 before the end of the year. So if you have feature requests, now is a good time to contact support@cogsciapps.com about them.

I wrote for Brett Terpstra’s blog

Last week, I wrote a guest blog post for Brett Terpstra’s blog. The title is: “Supercharged Bookmarking: Hookmark + Linkding Integration.” Brett will publish it tomorrow (Tuesday April 22; i.e., after the long week-end).

IT: VPN and link titles

I’ve been struggling to access SFU’s VPN. There has been too much back-and-forth with SFU’s IT services. What a time sink! In the process, I’ve hooked some emails in Outlook for web. Luckily, that is possible, but the Outlook email web resources title is useless.

I raised a similar issue with respect to LinkedIn on LinkedIn. I wrote there:

why doesn’t LinkedIn properly name posts? Instead they are all generically called “Post | LinkedIn”. That makes getting back to them with bookmark managers impossible unless one manually renames them (which I sometimes do using the CogSci Apps Corp. app, Hookmark). ChatGPT names its conversations sanely in contrast.

To learn about the importance of software being LINK-FRIENDLY, cf. Linking Manifesto FAQ and Press Kit – CogZest and the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking

Announcement: I have left Somnolence+

With a heavy heart, last week I sent the board of Somnolence+ (of which I am not a member) an email announcing that I am withdrawing from any active participation in the company. Going forward, I will only be a passive shareholder of the company (wanting to sell my shares to one or more of the other shareholders). My reasons are manifold, including time. In the sleep space, which is just one of my areas of R&D, I need to concentrate

• at Simon Fraser University on empirical and theoretical research, including comparing the cognitive shuffle to other bedtime cognitive techniques (such as monotonous imagery training, cognitive refocusing, and Articulatory suppression, i.e., techniques that my colleagues and I reviewed in a 2020 systematic literature review in Sleep Medicine Reviews: Pre-sleep cognitive activity in adults: A systematic review,
• at CogSci Apps on mySleepButton, and
• at CogZest on my next book which will be about sleep onset and insomnolence, and

Speaking of time, I haven’t had time to read I Don’t Have Time!: How to Avoid the THREE Biggest Time Mastery Mistakes CEOs Make: MacKay, Nancy, Human, Nico: 9781069050007: Books – Amazon.ca, which was recommended to me last year by Wayne Carrigan. It’s on my reading list.

12 Angry Men

All films I “consume” are relevant to my Discontinuities: Love, Art, Mind project (such as my Learning from Stories project). Last week my wife and I saw Twelve Angry Men. What a fantastic film!

Political actions.

I am a big fan of Mark Carney, who, like me, was a Commonwealth Scholar in England 😊. My wife and I saw him interviewed on

• Mark Carney : l’économie d’abord | Tout le monde en parle (means: first, the economy on the show “everyone is talking about this”)

I am no fan of the Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, whom I consider to be a “mini-Trump.” Poilievre is surly, negative, and spouts falsehoods. He rallies an ignorant base that likes Donald Trump and derogatorily refers to any of his accomplished opponents as “elites.” Need I say more? So I have donated to his Liberal opponent, Bruce Fanjoy 😊 .

$$$ It was time for me to invest in stocks

I think the market is beaten down, so I invested in stocks on the TSX a considerable portion of the cash I had on the sidelines. I subscribe to several newsletters of The Successful Investor (TSI) and almost only buy stocks that they recommend, a strategy that has served me well since 2002.

I used my cognitive productivity hacks to plow through TSI recommendations in relation to my current portfolio.

Party

My personal life and business life overlap considerably. As such, I announced the Discontinuities Party on June 14, 2025 – CogZest. This is a party to celebrate the fact that I have published Discontinuities: Love, Art, Mind in its incomplete form. It is now about 85% done! I am expecting several surviving contributors to the book to attend the party, where I will offer a toast to their work.

Easter: brunch with a friend

On Easter morning, at a White Spot restaurant, I had brunch with my dear friend Wayne Carrigan, a business advisor. Amongst other insights, he gave me some tips for marketing my next book, which will be on sleep onset and insomnolence.

Social media posts

I posted several times on LinkedIn, BlueSky, the fediverse, Facebook and X. And I posted on Sam Harris’s Substack

My LinkedIn posts included deep conversations with David Colman who I met on LinkedIn, and with whom I might collaborate on a paper on terminological obfuscation in psychology. I’ve been collecting examples of this malpractice for over 10 years.

I do try to rise beyond the shallows with social media, i.e., actually do deep thinking there. Not always easy.

How I quickly write my round-ups.

I find doing these round-ups useful for me as a form of weekly review. I can quickly generate my reports because I use

1. mySelfQuantifier to review what I did. The spreadsheet even includes links (there are 4 columns for links in my updated version of mySelfQuantifier),
2. Hookmark’s Bookmarks window to access other links,
3. Grammarly to clean up my writing, and
4. ChatGPT as needed.

Next week, more work for CogSci Apps Corp., CogZest, and SFU. My main deep work will be on the ‘music and emotions’ chapter of Discontinuities: Love, Art, Mind.