Illusions Of The Brain (Video)

This is the “Way Cool Scientist” section of Bill Nye The Science Guy: The Brain episode. Pretty neat.

The Lost Art Of Dream Incubation

Dreams can provide us with a direct link to the unconscious, allowing a much larger perspective than our physical senses. They provide an ideal means for honing intuition, for bringing about profound feelings and states of being, for self-exploration, and ultimately, for discovering our own true nature. We can even follow in the footsteps of Tibetan monks who master dream skills as a stepping stone on the path to enlightenment, as the following experience suggests:

“Falling asleep, I remember wondering what truly ‘knowing myself’ would be like. Dreaming, I become aware of this incredible, indescribably powerful ‘Love Light.’ The thought comes that there is no power in the universe like it — it’s absolutely non-judgmental, and dwarfs every worry or desire I’ve ever had. It is peace and simplicity and well-being. It includes sexuality but encompasses far more. Basking in what feels like ‘an ocean of grace’, I begin to realize that I’m not looking at it, but rather that I AM it, recognizing myself.” (C.W., Palo Alto, CA)

1. Choose Your Goal

You can incubate a dream on any topic you choose, but you will have the greatest success with those goals in which you have some emotional investment. Pick a problem or question that concerns you, one which you would be willing to explore. Or, choose an interesting or intriguing goal, one that excites you and with which you can have some fun.

2. Immerse Yourself in the Goal

Engage in activities relevant to the goal. Read books or notes on your chosen subject. Utilize photos, movies, or objects to form associations. Rehearse the situation in the waking state, using role-playing or discussion. Pray or meditate to the goal; fantasize about it. Visualize writing the dream in your journal.

3. Feather Your Nest

Create an atmosphere that will most encourage the dream. Provide a peaceful place to sleep. Choose a time when you are not fatigued, in which you have not indulged in stimulants or heavy food. Have your notebook, pen and light available for recording the dream, or use a tape recorder. Do not give yourself a short length of tape or piece of scrap paper to record–this defeats your confidence in the dreaming process. Retire at a reasonable time if night sleeping, or awake yourself in the early morning hours to return to lighter sleep. You might also try day sleeping.

4. Narrow Your Focus

Write down your request. Outline all aspects of the topic on paper. Get in touch with how you feel about the situation, especially all those reasons for not wanting to resolve or experience the goal. Give yourself permission to discover and explore. The point is to be specific about your goal, but open-ended about the results. Finally, write down the phrase that most clearly speaks to your deepest desires. Use the first person–after all, this is your dream! Date the dream and write “Dream I” if you wish, to indicate to your dreaming mind that you are ready to record.

5. Open Your Expectations

Relax and put yourself in the mood or emotion of your goal. Concentrate on the energy and feeling of the topic. Repeat your goal phrase to yourself. You may, depending upon the topic, choose to adopt one of the following approaches: mantra, affirmation, prayer, or command. If your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the topic. Avoid thinking of alternatives. Think about the topic firmly, but don’t force it. Then let yourself drift into sleep.

6. Sleep and Dream

Trust your dream maker to respond to your request.

7. Recall Your Dream

Try to awake before your usual time to rise: use a music alarm, a partner, or give yourself the suggestion prior to sleep. You might try drinking several glasses of water before sleeping. Don’t move; remain prone and try to recall the images of the dream. Hold on to the feeling tones: these can sometimes conjure up the related dream visuals. When you have the first fragment, turn over in bed to another position–this may stimulate additional dream portions. Try still other positions until you have the fullest recall. Reexperience the dream several times, noting a key word from each segment to help reconstruct the whole dream.

8. Record Your Dream

Record all dreams as soon as possible upon waking. Include the feelings associated with the dream. Title and date the dream, and use the present tense. If, while recording, you have any immediate associations with waking life, note them. If you have no dream recall, simply record the feelings upon waking, or the first thoughts that pop into mind.

9. Reinforce Your Dream

Record each dream! The seemingly trivial can often contain a profound message. Treat all “failures” kindly; encourage yourself to try again. Sometimes the incubated dream will appear on a succeeding night. Share your dream with a partner or group. By yourself, you can try various methods of interpretation. But do something with the dream; actualize it!

First published as Magallón, Linda Lane. “Dream Trek: Incubation Techniques: How To Dream To The Target,” Dream Network Bulletin, 5/3 (1986), 15.

Going With The Flow (Video)

Let go of your resistance and understand how good it can feel by letting go. The following video by Esther Hicks is a wonderful discussion on how going with the flow can improve many areas of your life. Fear, depression or loss of control is just another way of hanging on and not letting go. When your stream is moving fast and your not flowing with it, your life becomes increasingly miserable. Not going with the flow is at the heart of every negative emotion you’ve ever had. Stop paddling upstream against the current.

The Fringe Benefits Of Failure

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivered her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association. Below are notable excerpts and a link to the original video.

“I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.”

“… One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”

“So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.

Thank you very much.”

-JK Rowling
http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html

Does Your Brain Have A Mind Of Its Own?

How many times has this happened to you? You leave work, decide that you need to get groceries on the way home, take a cellphone call and forget all about your plan. Next thing you know, you’ve driven home and forgotten all about the groceries.

Or this. You decide, perhaps circa Jan. 1, that it’s time to lose weight; you need to eat less, eat better and exercise more. But by the first of May, your New Year’s resolutions are a distant memory.

Human beings are, to put it gently, in a unique position in the animal world. We’re the only species smart enough to plan systematically for the future — yet we remain dumb enough to ditch even our most carefully made plans in favor of short-term gratification. (”Did I say I was on a diet? Mmm, but three-layer chocolate mousse is my favorite. Maybe I’ll start my diet tomorrow.”)

In a wonderful study conducted at Stanford University in the late 1960s, psychologist Walter Mischel offered preschoolers a choice: a marshmallow now, or two marshmallows if they could wait until he returned. And then, cruelly, he left them alone with nothing more than themselves, the single marshmallow, a hidden camera and no indication of when he would return.

A few of the kids ate the oh-so-tempting marshmallow the minute he left the room. But most kids wanted the bigger bonus and endeavored to wait. So they tried. Hard. But with nothing else to do in the room, the torture was visible. The kids did just about anything they could to distract themselves from the tempting marshmallow that stood before them. They talked to themselves, bounced up and down, covered their eyes, sat on their hands — strategies that more than a few adults might on occasion profitably adopt. Even so, for about half the kids, the 15 to 20 minutes until Mischel returned was just too long to wait.

Toddlers, of course, aren’t the only humans who melt in the face of temptation. Teenagers often drive at speeds that would be unsafe even on an autobahn, and people of all ages have been known to engage in unprotected sex with strangers, even when they are perfectly aware of the risks. (To say nothing of the daily uncontrollable choices of alcoholics, drug addicts and compulsive gamblers.)

What gives? Why are we as a species so often so desperately poor at achieving our goals? If we are, as the selfish-gene theory would have it, organisms that exist only to serve the interests of our genes, why do we waste so much of our time doing things that are not, in any obvious way, remotely in the interest of our genes? How can one explain, for example, why a busy undergraduate would spend four weeks playing “Halo 3″ rather than studying for his exams?

The selfish-gene theory doesn’t, in itself, answer these questions, but there is another facet of evolution that can: The fact that evolution is entirely blind, unable to look forward, backward or to the side. As Charles Darwin observed, evolution invariably proceeds through a process called “descent with modification.” In lay language, this means that Mother Nature never starts from scratch, no matter how useful an overhaul might be. Everything that evolves necessarily builds on that which came before. Our arms, to take one simple example, are adaptations of the front legs of our primate ancestors.

In practical terms, that means that evolution’s products aren’t always particularly sound. Truly dismal solutions are quickly weeded out; if someone has a genetic condition that brings them into the world without a functioning heart, they don’t live long enough to reproduce. But merely adequate solutions (what engineers call “kluges”) — like the awkward, injury-prone human spine, good enough but far from perfect — can stick around indefinitely if better solutions are too far away on the evolutionary landscape.

In the mental machinery that governs our everyday decisions, kluges abound. Take, for example, the scenario described in the beginning of the essay — the fellow who forgets his errand on the way home. His problem is clearly not in finding his way to the grocery store — it’s in remembering to go in the first place.

The problem is that evolution failed to realize that remembering goals is not like recognizing objects. When your brain sees a lion, the thing to do is to decide, lickety-split, to get out of the way. Run first; ask questions later. We’re programmed for just that kind of split-second decision; just about every creature on the planet is built such that it can identify things like predators and prey very rapidly. We’re not programmed to remember precise episodes from the past. Why not? Because remembering the exact date on which you last saw a lion is not particularly helpful when you’re trying to get out of the way.

Alas, evolution didn’t have the foresight to realize that different kinds of tasks require different kinds of memory, and it used the same basic sort of memory for everything, not just for remembering what lions and tigers look like (in which general tendencies suffice) but also for cases — like tracking our goals — where a bit more precision would have been helpful. As a result, trying to remember what to do next can be a little like trying to remember what you had for breakfast yesterday: There are too many breakfasts and too many yesterdays for our biological memories to keep track of.

The same thing can happen with our goals. When you sit in your car late in the day and ask yourself, “What am I supposed to do next?” and all of a sudden the cellphone rings, your brain can easily lose track of which “next step” is the right one. Instead of zeroing in on the specific memory it needs, it may well settle for remembering whatever you’ve done in the car most often — and that’s drive home. Voila, autopilot.

Our attempts to pursue our goals are often thwarted by the fact that evolution has built our most sophisticated technologies on top of older technologies — without working out how to integrate the two. We can plan in advance, using our modern deliberative reasoning systems, but our ancestral reflexive mechanisms, which evolved first, still basically control the steering wheel. When the chips are down, it’s those mechanisms that our brains turn to, and that means that our brains frequently wind up relying on machinery that is all about acting first and asking questions later, squandering some of the efforts of our deliberative system.

No sensible engineer would have designed things this way. Why design fancy machinery for making long-term goals if you’re not going to use it? Yet the brain is structured such that the more tired, stressed or distracted we are, the less likely we are to use our forebrains and the more likely to lean back on the time-tested but shortsighted machinery we’ve inherited from our ancestors.

Still, all is not lost. Even though our short-term desires are pretty good at grabbing the steering wheel of our consciousness, our more recently evolved deliberate minds are powerful enough to regain at least some measure of control.

Consider, for example, the difficulty that most people having in sticking to abstract goals like “I intend to lose weight” or “I plan to finish this article before the deadline.” Nice thoughts, but not formulated in terms that your ancestral, reflexive brain might understand. The work-around? Translate those abstract goals into a form your ancestral systems — which traffic largely in dumb reflexes — can understand: if-then. If you find yourself in a particular situation, then take a specific action: “If I see French fries, then I will avoid them.” As Peter Gollwitzer, my colleague in New York University’s department of psychology, has shown, even simple changes like these can markedly increase the chances of success.

Our conscious, deliberate systems will never have total control, and our memories will never be perfect, but as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, recognition is the first step. If we come to recognize our limitations, and how they evolved, we just might be able to outwit our inner kluge.

Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University, is the author, most recently, of “Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind.”

The Foxhole Manifesto

Interesting video. I think it’s a genuine attempt to see religion in the many ways people in our society view God. This is one man’s attempt to reconcile these different points of view.