Posts tagged A Talented Mind
Mind Item: A wandering mind may be helpful to your health
My mind has always been a wanderer. It can take me back to my childhood, my first kiss, and into the future to envision my three boys as grown men. I was always told that my wandering mind was an idle mind that had to get back to work. Now, the scientific world may have discovered that everyone with a wandering mind may actually be onto something important for their well-being.
“Recent research suggests that mind-wandering may be important and that knowledge of how it works might help treat such conditions as Alzheimer’s disease, autism, depression and schizophrenia.” Read more at the Los Angeles Times Health and start letting your mind wander today. I know that I will.
Mind Item: Touching own injury ‘cuts pain’
There may be a good reason why people clutch a painful area of their body after receiving an injury, according to a study.
Touching the affected area allows a picture of the body to form in the brain, says a study in Current Biology.
Researchers at University College London (UCL) found that the way the body is represented in the brain is key to reducing perceptions of acute pain.
But it does not work if someone else touches the injury, they say.
Excerpt from BBC News
Brain Tip: Avoid choking under pressure
A star golfer misses a critical putt; a brilliant student fails to ace a test; a savvy salesperson blows a key presentation. Each of these people has suffered the same bump in mental processing: They have just choked under pressure.
It’s tempting to dismiss such failures as “just nerves.” But to University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock, they are preventable results of information logjams in the brain. By studying how the brain works when we are doing our best — and when we choke — Beilock has formulated practical ideas about how to overcome performance lapses at critical moments.
Excerpt from: ScienceDaily
Answer For An Active Mind
Last week I asked my blog followers to send me their answers to the following question and I will reply with any information that could be helpful:
“What is something you are trying to achieve in your life in which you want to know ‘why does my mind do or cannot do that?’”
I received an interesting answer (and question) from one follower (thanks for sharing):
“I’m constantly in the process of doing a lot of things at the same time. With that, I mean that I’m writing a paper, a dissertation, short stories, composing different styles of music and working out ideas for theatre. Though I think it’s great that my production is so wide, I do not particularly like the fact that it is so scattered. When I concentrate on one of these tasks, I get diverted by ideas and inspiration for all the other stuff. In the end I’m doing a bit of everything and am never really able to make big strides in one particular direction. Is that concentration deficiency or do I need to allow all of these ideas to pop up at random times without channelling them?”
Answer: While it is hard to tell from your question whether your mind has “concentration deficiency” (attention deficit), I get the impression that you may have a lot of natural mental abilities that enable you to do many things well and motivate you to seek new experiences and information. This can cause fluctuations in attention and can look like attention deficit disorder but is more the result of an active intellectual mind.
[Attention deficit disorder is a biological deficiency primarily in the brain’s fontal lobe that keeps someone from paying attention long enough on a task before moving onto the next stimulating thought or activity.]
So, what may be happening in your mind that causes unrelated thoughts to pop into your head when you are doing something? Because the neurons in our mind are assemblies that vibrate when activated (communicating with other neurons, storing/retrieving memories, etc.), the vibration in one area (while working on music) can activate another unrelated area that causes you to remember something else (your dissertation). (Parante 2010)
Memory Tool: The key is not to become distracted from what you are doing by thoughts popping into you head. If something pops into your head, write it down in a notebook and refocus on the task at hand. This gives your mind a physical tool to store an idea or thought until later without feeling like you have to deal with it at that time.
Time Box: You can also use time boxing that requires you to choose a task and predict how long you will work on it at that moment. You need to acknowledge that, if you have the urge to do something else, you will remain focused on that task for that specified time no matter what. If something else pops into your head during that task, write it down in your notebook, and return to the task until the time is up.
Use a calendar each day to schedule these time boxes in advance so you work on a variety of things important to you but commit to focusing only on them one at a time for specified time periods.
Practice these methods for your next task. Then practice them for tasks you need to accomplish throughout an entire day. Experiment and see how it goes and let me know. Remember, it is all a work in progress.
Thank you again for sharing your experience and keep us updated on your progress and your own ideas. (My answer should not be consider medical diagnosis and treatment but simply a sharing of helpful information to explore further.)
What The Mind Created
The minds of Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson have the unique ability to craft beautiful lyrics and match them with a rhythm you can feel physically. This combination requires very talented minds with advanced language, spatial, and rhythmic skills. Listen to Winter Song.
Reblogged from themusiclibrary: Winter Song - Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson
What the Mind Created: Poverty and homelessness
“The human mind creates moments of sadness and joy, resilience, caring, and despair.”
Reblogged from liquidnight:Jacob A. Riis Street Arabs in Sleeping Quarters, New York, 1889. “Riis devoted a chapter of How the Other Half Lives to ‘street arabs,’ nomadic children who left the tenements to live by their wits on the streets. He admired the boys’ self-reliance and ‘rude sense of justice,’ and supported efforts to guide rather than tame them.” From Jacob Riis (55 Series)
What Our Minds Create
“The human mind creates objects that reflect our interaction with nature and each other.”
What Our Minds Create: A change in mood when viewing geometric shapes
Geometric shapes have always had an effect on people throughout history. Different shapes elicit different emotional responses in our mind. Here is a cute video called The Ugly Square by Blake Whitman. It is about how a square and circle found each other and changed the world. When viewing this video, keep in mind the following descriptions of how the mind has historically interpreted circles and squares:
The Square: “This form represents solidity; a perfection that is static, earthly and material. It connotes dependability, honesty, shelter, safety. It stands for order and the balance of opposites.”
The Circle: “Early in history the circle became a symbol of male divinity, appearing later as the haloes around the heads of angles. Lacking beginning or end, it represents infinity, perfection and the eternal. It is often used as a symbol of God.”
Source: The Secret Language of Symbols
Among the most significant intellectual developments of the twentieth century is the increasing recognition that all aspects of human behavior and experience are actually functions of a material structure, the nervous system.
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