Train Your Brain to Focus - Paul Hammerness, MD, and Margaret Moore by Paul Hammerness, MD, and Margaret Moore | 1:32 PM January 18, 2012 Next time you are sitting in a meeting, take a look around. The odds are high that you will see your colleagues checking screens, texting, and emailing while someone is talking or making a presentation. Many of us are proud of our prowess in multitasking, and wear it like a badge of honor. Multitasking may help us check off more things on our to-do lists. Over the past decade, advances in neuroimaging have been revealing more and more about how the brain works. Here are three ways you can start to improve your focus. Tame your frenzy. Frenzy is an emotional state, a feeling of being a little (or a lot) out of control. What can you do? What can your team do? Apply the brakes. Your brain continuously scans your internal and external environment, even when you are focused on a particular task. What can you do? What can your team do? Shift Sets. What can you do? What can your team do?
Music-Memory Connection Found in Brain | LiveScience People have long known that music can trigger powerful recollections, but now a brain-scan study has revealed where this happens in our noggins. The part of the brain known as the medial pre-frontal cortex sits just behind the forehead, acting like recent Oscar host Hugh Jackman singing and dancing down Hollywood's memory lane. "What seems to happen is that a piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our head." said Petr Janata, a cognitive neuroscientist at University of California, Davis. Janata began suspecting the medial pre-frontal cortex as a music-processing and music-memories region when he saw that part of the brain actively tracking chord and key changes in music. Test subjects went under an fMRI brain scanner and listened to 30 different songs randomly chosen from the Billboard "Top 100" music charts from years when the subjects would have been 8 to 18 years old. "It's not going to reverse the disease," Janata said.
A Brief History of Drugs: From the Stone Age to the Stoned Age' by Antonio Escohotado Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments: An Entheogen Chrestomathy Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D. and Paula Jo Hruby, Ed.D.Author Index | Title Index A Brief History of Drugs: From the Stone Age to the Stoned Age Escohotado, Antonio. (1999). Rochester, VT: Park Street Press. Description: paperback, viii + 168 pages. Contents: Preface, introduction, 18 chapters, index. Note: Translated by Kenneth A. Excerpt(s): In 1989 as I was finishing a long investigation on this sub-ject-which in the end filled three volumes in small print with narrow margins-it seemed that the probable future of that book was to rest in the bookcases of different university libraries, a summary of suggestions to students as to how to consider the effect of this or that drug in the evolution of medicine, morals, religion, economics, and the mechanisms of political control. Initiation was prohibited only to murderers. This turn of events required erasing any point of compari-son, any communion not based on autosuggestion. ...
Chromatic typewriter types works of art A typewriter that paints? Artist Tyree Callahan modified this 1937 Underwood Standard typewriter to do just that, replacing each key with a different hue that can paint on paper. A chromatic typewriter isn't by any means practical (the keys have to be manually reloaded with paint) - but the concept is still pretty interesting. View all So, how did he come up with the idea to create the typewriter, and once he had that idea how did he turn it into a reality? How did you come up with the idea for the typewriter? The idea for the Chromatic Typewriter came about one day in the studio as I was struggling along with a watercolor. How did you put the idea together? It took a few months to find this one [the typewriter]. The piece was intended to be purely conceptual, but I do have a confession: as I was applying paint to the keys I could not resist trying it out. The additional challenge, however, was the layout of colors. The colors were chosen from an HTML color palette chart available online.
AllClearID Offers Free Identity Protection Monitoring I've taken advantage of the free serviced offered by Sony. It was easy, painless, free and since I've signed up for it- I've gotten one email (aside form standard registration emails) saying my account up to that point was fine with no suspicious activities reported. Otherwise I barely remember it's there. so that says something.
This is your Brain on Music | Neurotic Physiology Sci will admit I spent most the time "preparing" for this post by listening to LOTS of music. This is your brain: (Source) Is this your brain on Music? (Source) Well, to be entirely honest...probably not. So, let's start out with a little bit of a musical "high": (ahhhhhh, that's the stuff) Salimpoor, et al. Whenever I do outreach to kids in schools about drug research and drugs in the brain, we end up talking about "natural" highs. The idea is this: humans find a lot of things pleasurable. (Dopamine system is in Blue, image is from NIDA) The nucleus accumbens is mostly studied for the way dopamine signals within it change in response to drugs like cocaine or amphetamine. ...and music. To see how much of an effect (and in what time the effect worked) music has on the brain, the authors of this study recruited people who responded strongly to music. They took people who got "chills" when listening to music, and unlike other studies, they had them bring their music IN. Time for pretty pictures.
Speed of Light in MPH Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter Lightspeed! The speed of light in mph (miles per hour) is 670,616,629 mph. Just to give you some perspective, the average distance from the Earth to the Moon is 238,854 miles. The average distance from the Sun to the Earth is 92,955,817 miles. In fact, in just a single hour, light can get from the Sun all the way out to beyond the orbit of Jupiter and most of the way to Saturn. Of course, most measurements of the speed of light are done in the metric system. We have written many articles about the speed of light for Universe Today. Here’s a cool calculator that lets you convert many different units for the speed of light, and here’s a relativity calculator, in case you wanted to travel nearly the speed of light. We have recorded an episode of Astronomy Cast which answers many questions about the speed of light and relativity. Tagged as: speed of light
Lamborghini Madura by Slavche Tanevski One Sharp Black Lambo From the darkest depths of the design mind of the one called Slavche Tanevski comes THIS! The Lamborghini *Ankonian. It’s black. It’s sharp. And I don’t mean flashy in any kind of bad way. It’s not quite “green,” but it’s does have that sort of environmental friendliness in mind with it’s downsisedness. + Does this car look familiar to anyone? *NOTE from Chris Burns: originally I’d had this car marked “Madura”, when in fact it is called the Ankonian. Designer: Slavche Tanevski