The lawyer approaches the stand and asks,
“Mrs Doogood, did you see a tall slender man running into the alley with the TV”
“Yes I did”
“Is that person in the room today?”
“Yes, he is sitting right over there”
Implanting memories is not as difficult as you might think. We never have a perfect representation of the world, and our brains are very good at making sense of what we see. We see the whole, even though some of the parts are missing (we see the “gestalt”) Continue Reading »
I am always hunting for my keys, usually because I wasn’t paying attention when I put them down, or I was interrupted by something else when I walked in the door, or I put them down on Friday evening and never needed them again until Monday morning,
We really don’t know why we forget things, but there are a number of possible reasons. Firstly, memories are physical, and physical things decay. Neural connections, if not reinforced through rehearsal simply fade away.
“You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.”
Quote by James Allen, the author of the classic (and possibly the first) positive thinking self help book, “As a Man Thinketh” (published in 1902). More than a century later, neuroscience is beginning to unravel “As a man thinketh in his heart so is he“, and that’s part of what this blog is about. You can read, or listen to, “As a Man Thinketh” at the James Allen Online Library for free.
How would define yourself? As a doctor, lawyer, CEO, surfer, father, daughter? How would other people define you? As rich, poor, attractive, skinny, friend, foe? How would marketers define you? As middle class, 30 to 39, black diamond? The world is full of labels, branding, in-groups and out-groups. Continue Reading »
If I had to ask you whether you wish you could improve your memory”, I would imagine many of you would sound a resounding “yes”. There have been many books written on improving memory (names, phone numbers, lists) and they usually rely on memory tricks where you attach vivid imagery to poetry to create in the hope of creating meaningful associations. That might work when remembering names, but what else influences what we remember? Continue Reading »
Do you what it takes to be a secret agent? James Bond needs to have a high level awareness and attention. Let’s see if you make the grade. Here’s an exercise for you to do to test your awareness. Watch the video below and see how many passes the team in white makes?
[gap]
Attention is a “spotlight on experience”. The mechanism of attention decides what we bring into conscious awareness and what we do not.
Continue Reading »
Continuing on the topic of mind over matter, and specifically in relation to exercise, I am reminded of some work done by Professor Tim Noakes several years ago. Professor Noakes challenged a long established belief that fatigue originates in the muscles (when the muscles run out of oxygen, glycogen or ATP), or when there is too much lactic acid. This model was called the “Limitations Model”. Rather, Noakes and his colleagues proposed that fatigue originates in the brain (I can now hear all coaches saying “you’re not tired, it’s in your head). According to Noakes, “fatigue is a complex emotion affected by factors such as motivation and drive, other emotions such as anger and fear, and memory of prior activity” (read more here). Continue Reading »
Over the Christmas holidays I’ve been doing a fair amount of training in preparation for the race I’ve entered. Despite getting up before dawn during my holidays, I found I was highly motivated, full of energy and putting in some personal bests on various rides and runs. That stopped on Monday, my first day back in the office. Continue Reading »
Traditional Eastern medicine can be traced back thousands of years; well before the advent of science as we know it – many of the ideas found across Asia can be traced back to the Upanishads of around 1200 to 900 BCE. Rather than cast these ideas aside because they do not conform to the Western idea of science, I think of them as mechanisms for explaining patterns that were observed over hundreds if not thousands of years, but have yet to be explained in Western terms. Continue Reading »
Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes his book, “The Black Swan“, as a book about confirmation bias. The black swan is very rare, and if you had never seen nor heard of a black swan you might be inclined to say that they do not exist. In an effort to make sense of the world, we create schema, or mental images of how things are (and should be). Furthermore, we tend to search for information that confirms our schema. Let’s say that my schemata for dogs is that dogs are vicious creatures liable to attack at any time, then I am probably going to attend information that confirms my prior belief. For instance, when reading the newspaper, I would attend to an article about a dog attack a small child, but ignore one about a dog saving a child from drowning. You see, attending to any information that runs counter to my dog schemata, then I would create what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”, and dissonance creates a feeling of unease. Continue Reading »
