Mindhacks

Do you ever find yourself asking “what is my purpose in life?”

Many do.

Photo courtesy of gradin

The level of ease required for us to wake up every morning to head to school or work is largely influenced by the amount of passion burning within us. If you’re passionless you’re bound to get out of bed with great difficulty and the reason is simple – having nothing to look forward to.

Passion is the basis of healthy and satisfactory living. More importantly it breeds motivation. Without passion, learning is dry, even boring, and daily tasks require a huge amount of effort to complete.

Imagine doing what you do but with an added twist – enjoyment. If you can’t imagine the possibility, then you don’t know what you’re missing, and it’s a tragedy.

You deserve to know.

“What is my purpose in life?” will become a question you no longer need to ask yourself

Thousands upon thousands today know. They know, and they’re finally living a life of purpose and passion, and it’s all thanks to the New York Times Best-Seller…

… The Passion Test.

Here’s a positively fascinating article from the archives of CNN on how one man’s incredible memory might unlock the secrets of our infinite minds.

Amazing memory man never forgets

LA CROSSE, Wisconsin (AP) — For as long as he can remember, Brad Williams has been able to recall the most trifling dates and details about his life.

For example, he can tell you it was August 18, 1965, when his family stopped at Red Barn Hamburger during a road trip through Michigan. He was 8 years old at the time. And he had a burger, of course.

“It was a Wednesday,” recalled Williams, now 51. “We stayed at a motel that night in Clare, Michigan. It seemed more like a cabin.”

To Williams and his family, his ability to recall events — and especially dates — is a regular source of amusement. But according to one expert, Williams’ skill might rank his memory among the best in the world. Doctors are now studying him, and a woman with similar talents, hoping to achieve a deeper understanding of memory.

Williams, a radio anchor in La Crosse, Wisconsin, seems to enjoy having his memory tested. Name a date from the last 40 years and, after a few moments, he can typically tell you what he did that day and what was in the news.

How about November 7, 1991?

“Let’s see,” he mused, gazing into the distance for about five seconds. “That would be around when Magic Johnson announced he had HIV. Yes, a Thursday. There was a big snowstorm here the week before.”

He went on to identify correctly some 20 other events, including the birth of the first test-tube baby in 1978, the toxic-gas leak in Bhopal, India, in 1984, and Billie Jean King’s victory over Bobby Riggs in tennis’s “Battle of the Sexes” in 1973.

“I’ve always been this way,” Williams said. “Growing up, I never really had reason to think I wasn’t like everyone else.”

So how does he do it?

“You want the Nobel Prize right now? Tell me that answer and I’ll publish it,” said Dr. James McGaugh, who has studied Williams since last summer. “We don’t know. We do know that he carries this information with him, that it’s detailed, that it’s just there. That’s what we want to know — why is it there?”

Williams’ brother first contacted McGaugh, a research professor at the University of California, Irvine, after the neurobiologist published a case study of a similar person in the journal Neurocase in 2006.

That woman is in her mid-40s and was identified only by the initials A.J. She told McGaugh that whenever she hears a date, memories from that date in previous years flood her mind like a running movie. The phenomenon, she laments, is “nonstop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting.”

“Most have called it a gift, but I call it a burden,” she wrote. “I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy!!!”

McGaugh and his colleagues subjected A.J. to a battery of psychological tests. Given a date at random, she was nearly flawless in recalling the day of the week and what she did that day. The details she provided invariably matched what she had written in diaries decades earlier.

Scientific literature documents people who could memorize a series of 50 to 100 random letters or digits. Another person read a 330-word story twice, then reproduced it nearly verbatim a year later.

But those research subjects remembered meaningless information. What distinguishes Williams and A.J. is their “superior autobiographical memory” — an above-average ability to remember dates and details from their distant past, McGaugh said.

“In subjects we regard as having this ability, they do better than 90 percent on the tests we provide,” McGaugh said.

The tests typically involve reproducing personal information that can be corroborated with old scrapbooks, yearbooks and diaries, sources that McGaugh often tries to obtain from family members without the subjects’ knowledge.

Other tests involve naming a notable public event and asking for its date, or vice versa.

Williams and A.J. both performed better on topics that interested them. Williams excels at pop-culture trivia such as Academy Award winners, but he stumbles on sports.

A lifelong bachelor and self-described Scrabble addict, he finished second when he appeared on “Jeopardy!” in 1990. He says he went 5-for-5 on “1984 movies” but tripped up on categories including “snakes” and “words that begin with ‘kh’.”

Because a person’s interest in the information is a key factor in recall ability, some researchers doubt that Williams and A.J. are unique.

“If it’s a truly amazing memory that just sucks things up, it shouldn’t be based on how interesting something was to you,” said Stephen Christman, a neuropsychologist at the University of Toledo in Ohio.

Christman, who wasn’t involved in the research, pointed to baseball fanatics who remember obscure statistics because of their passion for the game. Perhaps, he speculated, A.J. obsesses so much over past events and relives them so frequently in her mind that it’s now effortless for her to recall countless dates and events.

The number of people with comparable memory skills has been hard to pin down. After publishing his research with A.J., McGaugh heard from about 50 people claiming they had the same skill or, like Williams’ brother, knew someone who might.

Of them, McGaugh and his colleagues have identified a third person — a 50-year-old Ohio man — who shows similar promise.

Ever since pointing his elder brother in McGaugh’s direction, Eric Williams, 45, has been recording Brad’s adventures for an upcoming documentary. The movie, to be titled “Unforgettable,” is scheduled to be completed later this year.

“The human brain is the most complicated and important machinery in the known universe,” McGaugh said. “My aim with this research isn’t to cure Alzheimer’s. It’s to decrease the mystery of this marvelous machinery.

(source)

Here’s some research from the University of Chicago discussing how brainwaves pattern themselves after rhythms of nature. Jose Silva, founder of the Silva Method, was one of the first few proponents in using Alpha waves in order to achieve a relaxed and meditative state for learning and comprehension.

Brain waves pattern themselves after rhythms of nature

The same rules of physics that govern molecules as they condense from gas to liquid, or freeze from liquid to solid, also apply to the activity patterns of neurons in the human brain. University of Chicago mathematician Jack Cowan will offer this and related insights on the physics of brain activity this week in Boston during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“Structures built from a very large number of units can exhibit sharp transitions from one state to another state, which physicists call phase transitions,” said Cowan, a Professor in Mathematics and Neurology at Chicago. “Strange and interesting things happen in the neighborhood of a phase transition.”

When liquids undergo phase transitions, they evaporate into gas or freeze into ice. When the brain undergoes a phase transition, it moves from random to patterned activity. “The brain at rest produces random activity,” Cowan said, or what physicists call “Brownian motion.”

Although the bulk of his work involves deriving equations, Cowan’s findings mesh well with laboratory data generated on the cerebral cortex and electroencephalograms. His latest findings show that the same mathematical tools physicists use to describe the behavior of subatomic particles and the dynamics of liquids and solids can now be applied to understanding how the brain generates its various rhythms.

These include the delta waves generated during sleep, the alpha waves of the visual brain, and the gamma waves, discovered during the last decade, which seem related to information processing. “The resting state of brain activity seems to have a statistical structure that’s characteristic of a certain kind of phase transition,” Cowan said. “The brain likes to sit there because that’s the place where information processing is optimized.”

Cowan organized a session for AAAS on Mathematics and the Brain, which will take place from 8:30 to 10 a.m. EST Saturday, Feb. 16. He also will participate in a news briefing on the topic at 3 p.m. EST Friday, Feb. 15. Joining him at both events will be mathematician Nancy Kopell of Boston University and computational neuroscientist Tomaso Poggio of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At this stage of his research, Cowan said it would be premature and speculative for him to try to relate how phase transitions in the brain might relate to neurological conditions or states of human consciousness. “That’s for the future,” he said.

Another component of his latest research is the close relationship between spontaneous pattern formation in brain circuits and in chemical reaction networks. In this research, he shows how mathematics can help explain visual hallucinations and how the visual cortex obtained its stripes, which are visible to the naked eye when removed from cadavers.

“This line of research on pattern formation can be traced back to Alan Turing, who also founded the modern science of computation,” said Terrence Sejnowski of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., who is a leading specialist in computational neurobiology.

Cowan’s quest to understand the brain’s workings using numerical methods spans more than four decades. Along the way he has collaborated with a series of Ph.D. students and colleagues in physics, mathematics, biology and neuroscience.

In 1972, he and postdoctoral fellow Hugh Wilson, now of Canada’s York University, formulated a set of equations that could describe the dynamics of neural networks. Now called “Wilson-Cowan equations,” they became a mainstay of neural network research. “But I always knew that those equations were inadequate, so I kept thinking about them,” Cowan said.

Then in 1985, he ran across an article in a Japanese journal that described a statistical physics approach to chemical reaction networks. “It took me years to understand how to use these tools for biological networks,” he said. “It so happens that there is an analogy between the behavior of chemical reaction networks and neural networks.”

His research career began in 1962, when as a graduate student in electrical engineering, he worked with the founders of neural network theory. These included Norbert Wiener, who died in 1964, before they could work jointly on the problem that Cowan continues to address.

“I didn’t really understand what he was saying to me until I worked it out myself. He was one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century,” Cowan said.

Source : University of Chicago
Image Source: HERE

The Scene of Memories

I was taken aback recently by a memory I had of as a teenager learning how to bake. Recently, I was treated to a lunch at a local cafe that specialized in pastries and other wonderful carbohydrates. Suddenly, an overwhelming wave of nostalgia hit me as I recognized the delicious scent of lightly crusted apple pies freshly baked from my common dorm kitchen.

Now STOP. Look at the following picture:

What do you remember? (Leave me a comment and let me know!)

As I reflected on these events, I came across this article published recently in time on how emotions and your scent of smell mysteriously work together…

Emotion Makes Nose a Sharper Smeller

By AP/LAURAN NEERGAARD

Know how a whiff of certain odors can take you back in time, either to a great memory or bad one? It turns out emotion plays an even bigger role with the nose, and that your sense of smell actually can sharpen when something bad happens.

Northwestern University researchers proved the surprising connection by giving volunteers electric shocks while they sniffed novel odors.

The discovery, reported in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, helps explain how our senses can steer us clear of danger. More intriguing, it could shed light on disorders such as post-traumatic stress syndrome.

“This is an incredibly unique study,” said Dr. David Zald, a Vanderbilt University neuroscientist who studies how the brain handles sensory and emotional learning. “We’re talking about a change in our perceptual abilities based on emotional learning.”

Scientists long have known of a strong link between the sense of smell and emotion. A certain perfume or scent of baking pie, for instance, can raise memories of a long-dead loved one. Conversely, a whiff of diesel fuel might trigger a flashback for a soldier suffering PTSD.

Could an emotionally charged situation make that initial cue be perceived more strongly in the first place?

The research team recruited 12 healthy young adults to find out.

Volunteers repeatedly smelled sets of laboratory chemicals with odors distinctly different from ones in everyday life. An “oily grassy” smell is the best description that lead researcher Wen Li, a Northwestern postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience, could give.

Two of the bottles in a set contained the same substance and the third had a mirror image of it, meaning its odor normally would be indistinguishable. By chance, the volunteers correctly guessed the odd odor about one-third of the time.

Then Li gave the volunteers mild electric shocks while they smelled just the odd chemical. In later smell tests, they could correctly pick out the odd odor 70 percent of the time.

MRI scans showed the improvement was more than coincidence. There were changes in how the brain’s main olfactory region stored the odor information, essentially better imprinting the shock-linked scent so it could be distinguished more quickly from a similar odor.

In other words, the brain seems to have a mechanism to sniff out threats.

That almost is certainly a survival trait evolved to help humans rapidly and subconsciously pick a dangerous odor from the sea of scents constantly surrounding us, Li said. Today, that might mean someone who has been through a kitchen fire can tell immediately if a whiff of smoke has that greasy undertone or simply comes from the fireplace.

But the MRI scans found the brain’s emotional regions did not better discriminate among the different odors, Li noted. That discrepancy between brain regions is where anxiety disorders may come in. If someone’s olfactory region does not distinguish a dangerous odor signal from a similar one, the brain’s emotional fight-or-flight region can overreact.

Researchers say that is a theory not yet tested.

For now, Northwestern neuroscientist Jay Gottfried, the study’s senior author, says the work illuminates a sense that society too often gives short shrift.

“People really dismiss the sense of smell,” said Gottfried, who researches “how the brain can put together perceptions of hundreds of thousands of different smells. … Work like this really says that the human sense of smell has much more capacity than people usually give it credit.”

Find this article here.

(Image Source)

Positive Psychology?

The recent Authors@Google talks have produced some of the most enlightening talks available on the Internet.

One such talk I came across comes from Sonja Lyubomirsky, Professor of Psychology at the University of California . She’s a ‘positive’ psychologist that proposes a few life-changing strategies that you can employ to achieving a regular supply of joy and happiness into your life.

How do you pursue happiness?

How do you identify happiness?

I highly recommend this video: