60 Small Ways to Improve Your Life in the Next 100 Days Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to make drastic changes in order to notice an improvement in the quality of your life. At the same time, you don’t need to wait a long time in order to see the measurable results that come from taking positive action. All you have to do is take small steps, and take them consistently, for a period of 100 days. Below you’ll find 60 small ways to improve all areas of your life in the next 100 days. Home 1. Day 1: Declutter MagazinesDay 2: Declutter DVD’sDay 3: Declutter booksDay 4: Declutter kitchen appliances 2. If you take it out, put it back.If you open it, close it.If you throw it down, pick it up.If you take it off, hang it up. 3. A burnt light bulb that needs to be changed.A button that’s missing on your favorite shirt.The fact that every time you open your top kitchen cabinet all of the plastic food containers fall out. Happiness 4. 5. 6. How many times do you beat yourself up during the day? 7. Learning/Personal Development 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.
Why do You Turn Down the Radio When You’re Lost? You’re driving through suburbia one evening looking for the street where you’re supposed to have dinner at a friend’s new house. You slow down to a crawl, turn down the radio, stop talking, and stare at every sign. Why is that? Neither the radio nor talking affects your vision. Or do they? In talking about using a cell phone while driving, Steven Yantis, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, had this to say: “Directing attention to listening effectively ‘turns down the volume’ on input to the visual parts of the brain. He's talking about divided attention, or the ability to multitask and pay attention to two things at once. Your attentional capacity can be taken up by inhibiting (tuning out) distractions, dividing your attention across multiple things, or even sustaining your attention on one thing (vigilance). How to Divide Your Attention More Effectively Do very different tasks.
Physical Exercise and Brain Health What is the connection between physical and mental exercises? Do they have additive effects on brain health? Are they redundant? Let’s start by reviewing what we know about the effects of physical exercise on the brain. The effect of physical exercise on cognitive performance Early studies compared groups of people who exercised to groups of people who did not exercise much. Laurin and colleagues (2001) even suggested that moderate and high levels of physical activity were associated with lower risk for Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. The problem with these studies is that the exercisers and the non-exercisers may differ on other factors than just exercise. The solution to this problem is to randomly assigned people to either an aerobic training group or a control group. In 2003, Colcombe and Kramer, analyzed the results of 18 scientific studies published between 2000 and 2001 that were conducted in the way described above.
On the Fallibility of Memory and the Importance of Evidence As we await the vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation and the results of the ongoing FBI investigation, America is left to ruminate a little longer on the testimonies he and Christine Blasey Ford gave before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Both were highly emotional and heartfelt. The Constructive Nature of Episodic Memory Sometime in the early 1980s, Sigmund Freud’s theories of the subconscious and the psychosexual stages of childhood experienced a resurgence in popular culture. This paved the way for a decade of “uncovering” of memories, whose technique, particularly in children, was fraught with suggestion, and which culminated in bizarre and tragic phenomena such as the McMartin Preschool case of the late ’80s, in which innocent adults were falsely imprisoned on the basis of children’s suggested “memories” of often lurid and theatrical sexual abuse. For this reason, memories are subject to what is known as the Misinformation Effect. The Misinformation Effect Flashbulb Memories
Home - Visual Thinking Strategies Brain Fitness Program and Neuroplasticity Update (11/10/10): Have you seen PBS great specials on Brain Fitness and Neuroplasticity ? The Brain Fitness Program DVD ($24.95) “The Brain Fitness Program is based on the brain’s ability to change and adapt, even rewire itself. brain. PBS aired in December 2007 a special program on neuroplasticity, brain fitness, aging and the brain titled “Brain Fitness Program”. In 2008, PBS released a second DVD: Brain Fitness 2: Sight and Sound DVD ($24.95) “This program, specifically designed to help people get the most from their vision and hearing as they age, considers how these senses change throughout life and what people can do to keep them healthy and fully functional.” If you do not have time to watch these great documentaries, here are a few points one needs to understand about neuroplasticity: 1. 2. 3. To read about evidence of neuroplasticity in the human brain take a look at Brain plasticity: How learning changes you brain
Exercise Improves Old Brains The moment of truth has arrived, again. The holidays have passed, the leftovers are dwindling and you have renewed your annual New Year's resolution to get back into shape... for real. Don't worry, you are not alone. As we get older, those extra pounds start to affect other areas of our health, contributing to the onset of diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol and even sexual function. Several new studies in the last month have now built stronger links between our levels of physical activity and the health of our most important body part, the brain. Shrinking brain According to John Ratey, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of "Spark: the revolutionary new science of exercise and the brain" (2008, Little, Brown), "Age happens. Starting at age 40, we lose about 5 percent of our brain volume per decade, but then at age 70 other conditions may start to accelerate the deterioration. What the aging brain needs is a pumped-up blood flow.
Strategies Quick Learners Use To Pick Up Anything The Visual Leap - About Visual Thinking >> Home • About Visual Thinking About Visual Thinking Visual thinking, also called visual learning, is a proven method of organizing ideas graphically - with concept maps, mind maps and webs. Scientifically based research demonstrates that visual learning techniques improve memory, organization, critical thinking and planning. Visual thinking is an intuitive and easy-to-learn strategy that works for many academic and professional projects. Visual Leap programs use visual thinking software as a learning tool, and this software accelerates the learning process. According to studies conducted by the Institute for the Advancement of Research in Education, visual learning techniques improve: Test scores Writing Proficiency Long-term Retention Reading Comprehension Thinking and Learning Skills Visual thinking is intuitive. Visual thinking is easy to learn. Joseph D. 37% of people are visual-spatial learners. The Visual Leap will help you harness this asset.
Sleep, Tetris, Memory and the Brain As part of our ongoing Author Speaks Series, we are honored to present today this excellent article by Dr. Shannon Moffett, based on her illuminating and engaging book. Enjoy! (and please go to sleep soon if you are reading this late Monday night). Two years ago I finished a book on the mind/brain, called The Three Pound Enigma: The Human Brain and the Quest to Unlock its Mysteries . Fast-forward to the present, when I am a resident in emergency medicine at a busy inner-city trauma center; I have two-year-old twins and a husband with a 60-hour-a-week job of his own. Sleep is so obvious a physiologic need (from insects to mammals, all animals sleep) that it doesn’t even occur to most of us to wonder why we have to do it—why in the world would we need to lie down, paralyzed, for a third of our lives, with our brains in some sort of auto-pilot chaos?
Recession and real estate in India Manoj Pant, ET Bureau Feb 13, 2009, 03.02am IST In an earlier article (ET, Nov 19) I had argued that the current global recession has clearly dominant Keynesian features. The crucial issue is not just the fact that there is a demand contraction but that this has been brought about by a market failure which fuels adverse expectations on the part of both producers and consumers. These adverse expectations lead to reduced production by producers anticipating lack of demand and increased savings by consumers anticipating lack of jobs. In the absence of government intervention (which fills in the missing demand) it is not clear when and how such expectations get reversed. However, it is still foolhardy to guess when exactly the current recession would come to an end. The crucial role of expectations is also clear from the fact that monetary policy has successfully driven interest rates to near zero levels in most OECD countries and yet there is still no sign of demand recovery.
Hippocampal clock regulates memory retrieval via Dopamine and PKA-induced GluA1 phosphorylation Mice Mice (male and female, at least 8 weeks of age) were housed in cages of 5 or 6, maintained on a 12 h light/dark schedule, and allowed ad libitum access to food and water in their home cages. GluA1 S845A knockin mice were obtained from Jackson Laboratory (stock number 012613)41,42. All of the experiments were conducted according to the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, Japan Neuroscience Society and Tokyo University of Agriculture. Generation of transgenic mice Transgenic mice were generated as described previously43,44. Administration of Dox TRE promoter-dependent transgene expression was regulated using the animal’s (dnBMAL1 and WT mice) drinking water containing 100 μg/mL Dox (Sigma-Aldrich, St Louis, MO, USA) dissolved in 5% sucrose to mask the bitter taste of Dox. RNA analyses RNA-sequencing Total RNA from hippocampus was isolated using the RNeasy Mini Kit (Qiagen) according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) AAV experiments
Time on the Brain: How You Are Always Living In the Past, and Other Quirks of Perception I always knew we humans have a rather tenuous grip on the concept of time, but I never realized quite how tenuous it was until a couple of weeks ago, when I attended a conference on the nature of time organized by the Foundational Questions Institute. This meeting, even more than FQXi’s previous efforts, was a mashup of different disciplines: fundamental physics, philosophy, neuroscience, complexity theory. Crossing academic disciplines may be overrated, as physicist-blogger Sabine Hossenfelder has pointed out, but it sure is fun. Neuroscientist Kathleen McDermott of Washington University began by quoting famous memory researcher Endel Tulving, who called our ability to remember the past and to anticipate the future “mental time travel.” McDermott outlined the case of Patient K.C., who has even worse amnesia than the better-known H.M. on whom the film Memento was based. Tellingly, not only can he not recall the past, he can’t envision the future. Alas, they couldn’t.
Declarative Memory (Explicit Memory) and Procedural Memory (Implicit Memory) - Types of Memory Long-term memory is often divided into two further main types: explicit (or declarative) memory and implicit (or procedural) memory. Declarative memory (“knowing what”) is memory of facts and events, and refers to those memories that can be consciously recalled (or "declared"). It is sometimes called explicit memory, since it consists of information that is explicitly stored and retrieved, although it is more properly a subset of explicit memory. Declarative memory can be further sub-divided into episodic memory and semantic memory. Procedural memory (“knowing how”) is the unconscious memory of skills and how to do things, particularly the use of objects or movements of the body, such as tying a shoelace, playing a guitar or riding a bike. These different types of long-term memory are stored in different regions of the brain and undergo quite different processes.