I owe a lot to Dave Rastovich. I have never met Dave and he’s never met me. In fact most of what I know about Dave comes from the one surfing DVD I own, Blue Horizon (Amazon, YouTube). And to be precise it was Dave’s Dad who inspired an idea – an idea that in part led to this blog.
A little about Dave… Dave “Ratsa” Rastovich has every surfer’s dream job. Read More »The Dave Rastovich connection
You may have guess that I am more than a little obsessed with the perception of fatigue. Having completed the Cape Argus Cycle Tour this weekend and having had a taste of being in the saddle for 5 hours, and then looking ahead to the Wines2Whales 3 day mountain bike stage race in November, you can imagine that the topic is very relevant for me, and hopefully for some of you other crazy folk out there.
Picture this, you’ve been riding for three hours and you’re tired, you can feel the burn creeping into your legs, a sure sign that your body is producing more lactate than it can metabolise. You know that if you carry on at this pace you’re not going to make it. And you begin to wonder, how on earth to the professionals do it? Is their perception of fatigue the same as yours or are they immune to feeling the burn. Read More »Perceived exertion and lactate threshold
I have talked about the perception of fatigue. In my previous post I mentioned that Professor Tim Noakes states that “the brain, when it senses that the athlete is overstretching him- or herself, sets off a series of sensations that the body translates as symptoms of fatigue. The brain does so to protect itself, the heart and the rest of the body. “Its main function is to make sure you don’t get into trouble in whatever exercise you’re doing”.
I just completed my very first Cape Argus Cycle Tour, with a wind resisted time of 5 hours and 17 minutes. For the most part I felt stronger than I had expected, but there were times when all I could think of was “when will this end”. I have to wonder at what point my brain was correct when it told my legs, “hey slow down”. It is incredibly difficult to know how far to push yourself. Athletes who have down years of endurance training seem to develop an accurate sense of how far they can go. For those unschooled in endurance sports it is a process of trial and error.Read More »Real or perceived fatigue during the Cape Argus Cycle Tour
In the last couple of posts (sadly more than a month ago – sorry) I talked about awareness and attention, remembering, forgetting and how, under certain conditions, our memories are altered.
Our memories are fragile. We do not commit to memory everything we see, and we do not remember everything we have committed to memory. We can never be one hundred percent sure that we remembered something. Moreover, our memories guide what we expect to see, what we expect to see guides what we pay attention to, and what we pay attention to determines what goes into our working memory, and we retain most those things that have meaning or we understand best (that which is already in our memory banks). In this post I’d like to explore the relationship between memory, perception and positive thinking.
Positive thinking, affirmations, neuro-linguistic programming, vibrational energy and so on all promise to change your world. Read More »Memory, perceptions and positive thinking
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”)Read More »The reliable eye witness
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… Read More »As a Man Thinketh
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.Read More »Who defines us?
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?Read More »Where were you on September 11?
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?
[vsw id=”Ahg6qcgoay4″ source=”youtube” width=”425″ height=”344″ autoplay=”no”]
[gap]
Attention is a “spotlight on experience”. The mechanism of attention decides what we bring into conscious awareness and what we do not.
Read More »Could you be James Bond?