 7 ways to Improve Your Brain PlasticityA Brain Fitness Plan 1. Exercise. Change can only occur when the brain is alert and engaged, so you need to be rested. A tired brain is not a highly functional brain. Stay in good shape, go outside, walk each day, eat good food, enjoy the sun. An active and healthy body means an active and healthy brain. 2. Be Positive because Being Positive WorksPositive Change strengthens connections between neurons engaged at the same time towards a model of perfection. The brain wants to make connections that make your life and itself better, that improve its chance of survival. Knowing you can literally change the physical aspects of your brain means you can change. 3. Learn new things. Cross train, study things in groups.Neurons that fire together wire together. Studies show your brain lights up when learning something new, and once habit, your brain lights up and the beginning and the end. Challenge yourself, learn a new language, take up a martial art, start painting or write a book, start a business., (www.lifestylebusinessbookclub.com). Training needs to be taxing and systematically improving. 4. Initial changes are just temporary. Incremental engaged steps, bit by bit produce lasting knowledge.Study a little every time, I study in blocks of twenty minutes switching tasks or subjects, but you need to do a little bit every day, consistency matters. Then test yourself. Training should be incremental. 5. Brain plasticity can be positive or negative (bad habits)Habits can work either way, good or bad, so be conscious of what you do habitually. What you do daily, you become. Control your habits, know what causes you to do something, the cue to your habit, learn what the routine is, and then know the reward. What do you get out of the habit. Think about it. Then hack it. Tweak the cue. Find a better way to achieve the reward. Also, being part of a group helps reinforce the change. 6. Memory is crucial for learning and can be improved.Memory is a skill, not a born gift. It takes work and practice. A quote from Walking With Einstein: It was a technique he promised I could use to remember people’s names at parties and meetings. “The trick is actually deceptively simple,” he said. “It is always to associate the sound of a person’s name with something you can clearly imagine. It’s all about creating a vivid image in your mind that anchors your visual memory of the person’s face to a visual memory connected to the person’s name. When you need to reach back and remember the person’s name at some later date, the image you created will simply pop back into your mind ... So, hmm, you said your name was Josh Foer, eh?” He raised an eyebrow and gave his chin a melodramatic stroke. “Well, I’d imagine you joshing me where we first met, outside the competition hall, and I’d imagine myself breaking into four pieces in response. Four/Foer, get it? That little image is more entertaining—to me, at least—than your mere name, and should stick nicely in the mind.” More notes on walking With Einstein are here: http://www.darylburnett.com/1/post/2012/03/memory-tips-from-the-book-moonwalking-with-einstein.html 7. Motivation is key. Be Engaged.What you do needs to be interesting to motivate, if you want it, you will learn it, so much it interesting. Reward yourself when you progress. Have goal, a reason to improve.D D
Listen;
It is simple.
What makes you different is what makes you interesting.
Revel in that thought
What you think makes you a freak, is what other people will find interesting about you.
Too often we try and hide our differences, we hide what is truly us. We often try to hide our eccentric thoughts and actions that are not the common "norm."
We should highlighting our uniqueness.
Look st the fasmous, they are seriously a wonky bunch, and it is exactly that sbout them that is interesting.
Like fish in water, it is hard for us to understand the culture around us, as it is deeply psrt of our psyche, but when we all buy the same clothes, watch the same television shows, we all read the same books, there is an innate pressure to conform. Everyone feels it, but not many admit it.
We work hard to blend, we work hard to not be different, but listen, different is what works.
Different is what makes this world better.
Those that do not conform, that ignore the common culture are the ones who shape our society for the future.
Those who simply fit in are not doing anything but existing. They simply consume.
Those who do not fit in, us freaks, we are creating and building and making.
Like a lighthouse on the rocks, those that are different shine a light on the "rocks" that could sink our culture within our society.
People want to be different, and they are afraid to show it. People may not always show their admiration, but they truly admire those that walk their own path.
Society may not appreciate it openly, and society may try to attack you and make you conform, but deep down, you have their respect.
Your goal then is to be yourself.
Be yourself so naturslly, be yourself in such a true way, that people cannot view you any other way.
Be real and true.
Naturalness of movement snd thought, with you being you, is what also fascinates others about you.
Be as radically freaking different as you can be, please, our society need it.
D
“We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side.
— Charles T. Munger”
Rituals matter.
They are everything, because they make you, you.
Those daily rituals that we do truly define our lives. They make up our life.
What we are at this moment is a reflection of all the decisions we have made or not made, and of all the daily habits that we have always done. If you have the habit of working out every day, your life snd your body will reflect that choice. If you meditate fifteen minutes every morning and every evening it changes how you think and how you act, and it changes your life. What you do will literally rewire your brain, and how you think is a reflection of what you do. What you do daily matters.
You control what you do, and you control what you think. your habits need to be conscious, it takes effort, it takes time, it tskes thought, but it will transform your life.
If you choose what you want to do, and you decide what nd how you want to be, and you want it enough to build your life around it, you will become it.
You model on the successful, you think the thoughts they think, how that type of person thinks, model your thoughts and control your thoughts, you lesrn those successful habits, and you will become that person. Pick your rituals carefully.
Do not use negative terms, focus on th positive efforts, those things that you do that make your life better.
Eliminate the nonessential, and become what matters the most to you.
D
"I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In sort, for myself, I am a hard act to follow." — Kay Redfield Jamison
Too often get get lost in the smaller details of our world, and we focus too much on our own problems, and we do not look at how large and how amazing things really are around us. We forget the great things we can do, that what we do can be great.
Everything we do matters, everything we do is important.
Anything and anywhere, if looked at close enough is simply magnificent.
It is one of those "a butterfly in South America flutters its wings and it results in a hurricane in Asia" type of things.
I truly believe doing everything you do as well and as consciously as possible matters, it just does, and it is obvious if you look at the results of small actions in your life. Today's world puts tools that used to be only accessible to large companies or countries into the hands of one person. You have more access to more information and to more tools for creation than anyone else if history, more than Leonrdo Da Vinci, more than Socrates, more than Edison, more than Einstein.
It used to be possible to read evey book in the world, there were maybe two hundred. Today, you have tools and knowledge that are simply staggering in power aand scope, and these tools truly are infinte.
What are you going to do with it?
Problems happen, things go wrong, but don't let what happens limit your world. You have the tools to solve any problem in the world.
Make your life a spiderweb of networks of people and options and tools and knowledge. Make sure you use all your tools.
Your potential future is infinite and it is filled with multiples of paths, and you should jump from option to option, choosing your own way among an infinite amount of possiblity, making the world better, one piece at a time.
We need to be people who are raw pure expression, of pure commitment, of pure being.
Action:
This week use one tool you have never thought of using. Any. Twitter or a power hammer. They are the same.
D
“My chief task has been to conquer fear,” he said. “The public sees only the thrill of the accomplished trick; they have no conception of the tortuous preliminary self-training that was necessary to conquer fear.… No one except myself can appreciate how I have to work at this job every single day, never letting up for a moment. I always have on my mind the thought that next year I must do something greater, something more wonderful.” Lucky for me, I didn't suffer from any of those afflictions when I was standing nearly ninety feet above Manhattan on a twenty-two-inch pillar for almost thirty-five hours. In fact, for the first time in my life, I had a clear understanding of the world. I realized that this world is just a series of sunrises and sunsets. And that's it. My Dream Manifesto In order to live a fulfilled life, one must resist the temptations surrounding them: Never overindulge. Have few extravagances. Resist addictions. Respect all life. Remember that a mistake is only a mistake when you fail to learn from it. Accumulate knowledge. Listen. Read. Observe. Visit the ocean. Try to interact with all different types of people from all walks of life. Wonder and be amazed. Love and respect those close to you. Learn to love yourself. Pursue your dreams and goals with passion. Our potential to create is limitless. Mysterious Stranger: A Book of Magic by David Blaine
Hoping is for people who are out of ideas and not listening.
I have read several random things lately that all link together and have me rethinking how to approach each opportunity that comes my way.
Ideas are always there, if you look close enough, and listen to others around you.
We always have resources left to invest, they may not be resources that we see immediately, but they are there, and they are useful. Find those resources.
If you want to make money, the most important principle is to be incredibly helpful. Be useful. Provide something valuable, and people will be eager to support
The two most important things you can have is capital and a network: and if you don't have capital, start build the network. - Dan Andrews
Great book I have started to read by Isaac Watts who shared his philosophy on understanding the The Improvement of the Mind. Which was written in 1815 toward the end of his life, and it had tremendous influence on generations of students and teachers.
It is better to do than to think and by do I mean collect data. It is better to do an experiment than to think about doing an experiment, in the sense that you will learn more from an hour spent doing (e.g., doing an experiment) than from an hour thinking about what to do. - Seth Godin
I like John von Neumann’s characterization of this the best, in the following quote, “The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construction which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.”All my writing is basically model-building. Though in my blog and book I don’t use mathematics, my approach is basically the same one I adopt for my mathematical modeling work. - Venkatesh Rao
I see now that there are always options, and the key is to create many models, tiny experiments, to see what works, and then double down.
D
"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones." — Arthur Conan Doyle ( A Study in Scarlet)
Today someone told me that your brain does not make up the faces in your dreams, and that all the faces of the people in your dreams are the faces of all the people you have ever met in your life.
That someone you may have just randomly passed on the street may now populate your dreams as a character in a play.
That makes me realize that my face may live in other people's dreams.
It makes me wonder how much I walk in other people's minds, how many minds I walk in other people's sleep, as they too walk in mine.
It makes you realize that you have an effect on others, and that we are all connected both in the physical world and the mental landscapes.
In Japanese folk tales, often people who have bad thoughts or are possessed, or who use magic in their sleep, awake to find their hair smells of smoke.
We should all awake, our hair smelling of smoke. We are all using magic.
We live many lives in many minds, and we are all many people. We exist in different ways, as different things, as different people.
As technology expands, our words, our gestures, and our thoughts become more transparent, more meme, more viral, until in both the digital and and physical worlds, our selves become intertwined and connected with others, as we are all us.
Dreams are as real a part of us as our hands or eyes.
We are built of thought, it is a lamp that shines on us all.
D
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