Concentrate! How to tame a wandering mind. I am about to be zapped in the head with an electromagnet, once a second, for eight minutes.
I fidget, trying to get comfortable in a huge black chair with jointed metal arms that stand between me and the door. I feel faintly ridiculous wearing a tight headband with what looks like a coat hook on the top. “All you need to do is relax,” says Mike Esterman, the researcher about to zap me. That’s easy for him to say – he’s holding the magnet. I’ve come to the Boston Attention and Learning Lab in the US to try and train my brain to focus better.
So far, their methods seem to be particularly promising for enhancing focus in US army veterans with attention problems linked to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and brain injuries, as well as people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). A month earlier, when I had first contacted DeGutis to ask this question, he wasn’t convinced that they could help. I shouldn’t have been that surprised. Hope for change Brain target Focus, focus. Future - Health - The psychology of Tetris. How the secret to the popular game’s success is that it takes advantage of the mind's basic pleasure in tidying up and uses it against us.
Shapes fall from the sky, all you have to do is to control how they fall and fit within each other. A simple premise, but add an annoyingly addictive electronica soundtrack (based on a Russian folk tune called Korobeiniki, apparently) and you have a revolution in entertainment. Since Tetris was launched on the world in 1986, millions of hours have been lost through playing this simple game. Since then, we’ve seen games consoles grow in power, and with it the appearance of everything from Call of Duty to World of Warcraft. Yet block and puzzle games like Tetris still have a special place in our hearts. The writer Jeffrey Goldsmith was so obsessed with Tetris that he wrote a famous article asking if the game’s creator Alexey Pajitnov had invented “a pharmatronic?”
Many human games are basically ritualised tidying up. Game theory. Science & Environment - Why paying attention is anything but elementary. It’s surprising how much of the world we see and yet do not take in. Who better to teach us why we miss so much and what to do about it than Sherlock Holmes? “The true art of memory is the art of attention,” wrote Samuel Johnson. Wise words, indeed, but what exactly is this art? Do we really know what it means when we say we are paying attention to something? One possible answer comes from another literary source that, while admittedly fictional, provides a great deal of insight into what it is that distinguishes actual attention from simple looking: Sherlock Holmes.
In A Scandal in Bohemia, Holmes asks his companion Dr Watson how many stairs lead up to their residence, 221B Baker Street. Our vision is highly selective: the retina normally captures about ten billion bits per second of visual information, but only ten thousand bits actually make it to the first layer of the visual cortex. This basic principle governs our attention all the time. Our attention is a finite resource. Nugget - DaveEllis.TV Introduction. Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway - Susan Jeffers - Audiobook. Home - The Annotated Fall. CRAP: 4 Basic Principles of Graphic Design. The Knowing-Doing Gap: How to Stop Procrastinating. BBC Radio 5 Live - Peddlers: Cycling's Dirty Truth, October 15 2012.
POD. 40 Dev Ass. Proud - Heather Small, M People. THE ALPS IMAX (Complete HD) Just another WordPress.com site. Meaningful Moments - Sandra Magsamen - Gratitude Quotes. Simple Yet Astounding Ways to Relax When You're Overwhelmed - OWN TV. Gratitude Quotes - How to Say Thank You - OWN TV. Susan Jeffers. Also, be sure to sign up for Susan's free newsletter.
Not only will you get a new article every month and other valuable information, you will also be able to download: Why Affirmations are So Powerful! This is a free 25-page booklet in which I have selected some of my favorite affirmations and explained their deeper meaning so you can use them more effectively to push through fear and other negative emotions. You can also download my inspirational and calming screensaver. So enjoy, participate, and become a part of Susan's global family. Billy Casper plays football (Kes) Chris Jordan - Running the Numbers. Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics.
Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.