I don’t understand the question “what if this predates language?” Could you make more explicit what the question is?

Another question I have about your post is you theorize this effect is because people used to chat with their neighbors shortly after waking. What if this predates language? I can’t imagine 30-60 minutes of non-verbal communication to start your stone age day, but in any case stone age chatting was probably different than our chatting, and perhaps there’s something to that.

Great blog!

In one experiment I did I compared sound + video of faces with sound alone — the sound alone did nothing. I think hearing voices can reduce feelings of loneliness but that is quite different than the faces effect.

As to collective religious wisdom, I seem to remember also that there were studies that Catholic monks who engaged frequently in Gregorian chant were healthier, less depressed, and needed less sleep, than monks where there was less chant. I don’t suppose you have undertaken any experiments with sonorous humming…

I too have tried Booknotes, which worked, but I eventually ran out of interesting lectures in which the speaker was facing directly at the camera. I also spent some time with You-Tube blogs (I also watched LucyinLA!) but found them unwieldy and impractical. The videos are typically very short and even the bloggers that most often provide a lot of face time vary in the amount of direct face time each particular one of their videos provides. Because of this, I ended up spending a lot of time looking for good videos, bouncing around among different videos and watching videos without a lot of good face time. It was difficult to get a quality 30 or 40 minutes of face time every day. However, if anybody wants, I can post a list of the bloggers that I found most helpful.

I am currently using The Teaching Company lecture series. I’ve found that in some of the series the lecturers provide a more direct camera gaze for more of the time than in others and it is difficult to gauge before ordering how good a particular series will be. It’s also worth mentioning, in case any of you decide to order from them, that their website provides information on how prevalent visual aides (charts, graphs, photos) are in each series. The fewer visual aides the better, as they take away from direct face time.

I asked The Teaching Company to post excerpts of their videos on their website (that way I can see which videos are better before ordering). Maybe if enough people request it they will listen!

Janet: I was considering posting on Craigslist a while back but I decided that the post would sound pretty weird to most people who have never heard of the faces method and I would just attract a lot of strange characters (I live in NYC) as opposed to people with whom I would actually be able to have productive morning sessions.

Finally, I wish there were a group study of people who tried the faces technique, so that we could know the percentages of people that achieved positive results. Seth, any thoughts on the likelihood of a study?