What a hoot! Here’s a photo sent to me of my book displayed at the London Book Fair, in the ‘Award Winners’ section! There it is in the second row…

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Do you find yourself exhausted and mentally overstimulated? Have you considered cutting the cord? Well, here’s a wonderful article from Lifehacker that looks at exactly what happened for Tony Schwartz after he decided to go off the digital map for 10 days.

I Completely Disconnected for 10 Days. Here’s What Happened

I woke up one morning about four weeks ago and realized in a flash that I’d hit a wall. Most days I can’t wait to get to work. On this day, I struggled to get myself out of the house.

This is a guest post by Tony Schwartz via HBR.org.

The first three months of the year had been intensely demanding, between hiring a series of new employees for a rapidly growing business, working with colleagues to develop several new products, traveling frequently, and taking on multiple writing assignments. One of the primary principles of the work we teach at [my company] the Energy Project is that the greater the performance demand, the greater the need for recovery. I needed a vacation, but what I needed most of all was a period of total digital disconnection. My brain felt overloaded and I needed time to clear it out.

My wife and I made reservations to go to our favorite hotel for nine days. But I knew that getting away from my office wouldn’t be enough if I remained tethered to my online life and my work. I decided not to bring my laptop, my iPad, or my cellphone. I left an away message that made it clear I wouldn’t be checking email. I was determined to eliminate temptation to the maximum extent possible. I had learned from past experiences how easy it is for me to succumb, given the opportunity.

As Daniel Goleman writes in Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, a fascinating new book he’ll publish this fall: “Overloading attention shrinks mental control. Life immersed in digital distractions creates a near constant cognitive overload. And that overload wears out self-control.”

From the moment I boarded the plane for our trip, I noticed a shift. Ordinarily, I would have skittered between reading the newspaper, magazines, answering email, and surfing the web (if it was available). I’d brought along a pile of books, mostly novels, and none of them related to work. I began reading the first one, and I very quickly became absorbed. For once, nothing else was competing for my attention.

The first time I felt a distracting impulse, it was to Google something I’d read. The initial pull was compelling, but I let it pass. Over the next several days, it happened perhaps a half-dozen more times, and on each occasion I simply observed the feeling without responding to it. By mid-week, that impulse evaporated, and I realized how much richer and more satisfying any experience is when it’s not interrupted—even if the interrupter is me.

It turned out there were no newspapers at our hotel. My first response was a bit of panic— I’ve read The New York Times daily since I was a teenager—but soon, I realized I was giving up the fix of more information that I didn’t really need. Instead, I became increasingly aware that the relentless diet of information I ordinarily consume leaves me feeling the same way I do after eating a couple of slices of pizza or a hot dog and French fries—poorly nourished and still hungry.

Continue reading here for the entire article.

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In an exciting announcement out of Stanford, researches have been able to treat mouse brains with a special technique that allows for a “transparent” view of the inside of the brain. This is pretty big news! I refer you to Integral Options Cafe for more on the subject.

Enjoy!

~Marsha

Breakthrough – Transparent Brain Imaging

This is a huge breakthrough in brain imaging, as reported in Nature earlier this week. The whole article is available as a PDF online. Eventually, we figure out to do this in a living body, so that we can’t “real” images of the living, thinking brain.

Transparent Brain Imaging Will Accelerate Research 10 to 100 Times

by BIG THINK EDITORS
APRIL 11, 2013

The world of neuroscience is abuzz with the news that a new technique has been developed to study brain anatomy in mice. By removing the brain and treating it with chemicals, researchers are able to obtain a transparent view.

This advance was made by the bioengineering lab of Dr. Karl Deisseroth at Stanford and reported in the journal Nature yesterday. “Obtaining high-resolution information from a complex system, while maintaining the global perspective needed to understand system function, represents a key challenge in biology,” the scientists wrote.

Their answer to this challenge is called CLARITY, which uses chemicals to transform intact brain tissue into a form that is optically “transparent and macromolecule-permeable.”

For more continue HERE

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Belleruth Naparstek is a gifted clinician and teacher (and an absolutely lovely human being), who is THE expert on guided imagery, IMHO. Here, she very succinctly answers the VFAQ (“v” for “very”), “What’s the difference between mindfulness meditation and guided imagery?”

What’s the Difference between Mindfulness Meditation and Guided Imagery?

Question:

Over the past couple of weeks I have read articles bragging on the benefits of mindfulness meditation.  Can you help me understand how and what mindfulness can and can’t do, as compared to guided imagery?

My impression is that the end result of the two techniques is pretty much the same.  It’s just the process of getting there that is different  – is that true?

Thanks.
Alex

Dear Alex,

Yes, your impression is pretty much correct, although there has been more research done on mindfulness than guided imagery.  Still the outcomes on stress, performance, depression, pain, anxiety and quality of life appear to be comparable.

Mindfulness meditation is a way of constantly bringing attention to our internal experience, and focusing on things like the sensation of breathing; the way the inside of the body feels; and/or noticing thoughts, impressions, sensations, emotions, perceptions and feelings, as fleeting as they may be, as they register on your mind.

The idea is that of course the mind can’t stay focused on any of these things for more than a second or two – it jumps around of its own accord (- and as a result is frequently referred to as “monkey mind” by meditators). But the practice has you continually noticing what the mind is doing and gently bringing its focus back to one or more of those designated internal experiences.

What happens is that over time, this has a calming effect. It centers you. The more aware of your internal experience you are, the better able you are to be strong and steady within yourself, and less at the whim of other people and external events. Your ability to focus and concentrate improves.  And as your body awareness gets more acute, your early warning system for problems or symptoms gets strengthened.  You’re better able to notice when something isn’t quite right and get it looked at, taken care of.  In other words, steady, disciplined practice makes most people braver, smarter, stronger and more effective.

For the entire article click here.

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Check out this article in the upcoming issue of Mindful magazine: “What’s Sex Got to Do With It?” — in which I talk about orgasm, genital friction, mindfulness, and other fun stuff.

~Marsha

What’s Sex Got To Do With It?

All that friction is nice, but what we and our partners are really craving is connection, attention, a little wild abandon­—and better use of our tongues.

If mindfulness can make us happier, healthier, and more compassionate (that is, if the raft of current scientific research is to be believed), what can that same moment-to-moment awareness do for our sex lives? Imagine the possibilities.

On the face of it, having enjoyable, loving sex seems like the last thing we might be inclined to tune out. But we all know the kind of mind-wandering that can strike even in the midst of great pleasures. From a mental replay of the staff meeting earlier in the day to obsessing about the final luscious peak of the sex you’re having in that very moment, in lovemaking, as in life, tuning out is a part of being human that’s very difficult to turn off.

That’s where mindfulness comes in.

But before we go there, let’s admit: sex is tricky to talk about. It’s either too much information or not enough. And it’s probably the most subjective thing you’re likely to have an opinion on. (Substitute one little word in “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like,” and you’ve got it just about right.)

It’s challenging because our sexuality is such an essential part of who we are. It’s energy that flows through us whether we’re in a softly lit bedroom or not. And it’s energy we continually need to respond to and guide. (If we didn’t, chances are making chitchat with, say, your dry cleaner could develop into something pretty awkward and inappropriate.)

But get two people sharing some intimate space and toss in a little attraction, and “guide” doesn’t exactly cover it. The energy is palpable, positive, pleasurable. The very best sex happens when we tap into and are at play with that nearly untamable energy: yours, mine, ours. 
We don’t own it or possess it (or the other person, for that matter), but we get to dance with something more powerful than us for a little while. It’s the difference between chess and tango.

And being mindfully aware in situations like that can work wonders. Or so researchers at Brown University found. Their study was designed to measure the effect of mindfulness on sexual arousal. They found that compared to the control group, who did not practice mindfulness, the 44 women who took a three-month mindfulness meditation course (and who spent some time looking at racy pictures) reported feeling much more aroused, much more quickly.

Increased awareness was the key, according to Gina Silverstein, the study’s lead author. Mindful sex involves being able to observe and describe what’s happening inside your body and mind without sorting experiences into “bad” and “good” or trying to change your feelings. When we are able to do that, Silverstein says, we can “turn off 
the autopilot.”

Studies have also shown that long-term meditators experience increased cortical gyrification (folding) of the brain’s insula. Doesn’t sound terribly erotic, does it? Until you read another study from Dartmouth that found women with more gyrified insula experience more intense orgasms.

For the entire article please click here.

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Mindfulness is entering the lives of many new young people as it’s added to school curriculums around the world. This victory is even more relevant as studies show that mindfulness helps reduce teen depression. Now that’s a wonderful thing!

Mindfulness Programs In Schools Reduce Symptoms Of Depression Among Adolescents: Study

Mindfulness, the practice of cultivating focused awareness on the present moment, has been shown to have a number of benefits, including emotional stability and improved sleep. Now, some schools have started incorporating mindfulness programs into their curriculums, teaching kids as young as five years old how to use body scans, mindful breathing and attention to their thoughts and emotions to become more focused. According to a recent study, such programs could be successful in leading to reduced depression-related symptoms among adolescents.

Researchers at the University of Leuven study looked at the experiences of 408 students from five different schools in Flanders, Belgium, all between the ages of 13 and 20. At the beginning of the study, the students answered a questionnaire designed to reveal symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress, and were then divided into a test group and a control group. The test group followed an in-class mindfulness training program which consisted of instruction in mindful breathing and body scan exercises, sharing experiences of these exercises, group reflection, inspiring stories, and education on stress, depression and self-care. The control group, meanwhile, received no training. All students filled out the questionnaire after the training, and again six months later.

The researchers found that students who adhered to the mindfulness program exhibited decreased symptoms of stress, anxiety and depression both immediately after and six months after the program. Whereas before the training, 21 percent of the test group and 24 percent of the control group reported symptoms of depression, after the mindfulness training, 15 percent of the test group versus 27 percent of the control group had depression symptoms. Six months later, 16 percent of the test group and 31 percent of the control group showed signs of depression.

For more, continue reading HERE.

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If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area I highly recommend that you visit Stanford University for this awesome “Compassion and Business Conference” on April 30, 2013. For more info please check below:

EVENT: Compassion and Business Conference

This one-day conference, presented by the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE), will explore the role of compassion and helping in business. It will feature presentations by expert researchers as well as business leaders who have successfully implemented compassion-based programs in their organization.

Attendees can expect presentations on both basic and applied research related to compassion, helping, and social entrepreneurship. The audience will include both academic and business professionals, so the talks will be tailored to a lay audience.

To register click HERE.

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I’m asked this question all the time: “Do the “brain training” gizmos, or online stuff like Luminosity, really help build intelligence/brain power?” My answer: No.

As a neuropsychologist, I was glad to see this research finally starting to hit the mainstream — here’s an article from the New Yorker magazine.

Brain Games are Bogus

A decade ago, a young Swedish researcher named Torkel Klingberg made a spectacular discovery. He gave a group of children computer games designed to boost their memory, and, after weeks of play, the kids showed improvements not only in memory but in overall intellectual ability. Spending hours memorizing strings of digits and patterns of circles on a four-by-four grid had made the children smarter. The finding countered decades of psychological research that suggested training in one area (e.g., recalling numbers) could not bring benefits in other, unrelated areas (e.g., reasoning). The Klingberg experiment also hinted that intelligence, which psychologists considered essentially fixed, might be more mutable: that it was less like eye color and more like a muscle.

It seemed like a breakthrough, offering new approaches to education and help for people with A.D.H.D., traumatic brain injuries, and other ailments. In the years since, other, similar experiments yielded positive results, and Klingberg helped found a company, Cogmed, to commercialize the software globally. (Pearson, the British publishing juggernaut, purchased it in 2010.) Brain training has become a multi-million-dollar business, with companies like Lumosity, Jungle Memory, and CogniFit offering their own versions of neuroscience-you-can-use, and providing ambitious parents with new assignments for overworked but otherwise healthy children. The brain-training concept has made Klingberg a star, and he now enjoys a seat on an assembly that helps select the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The field has become a staple of popular writing. Last year, the New York Times Magazine published a glowing profile of the young guns of brain training called “CAN YOU MAKE YOURSELF SMARTER?”

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Why early reading – let alone from a DVD – is a lousy deal for babies

(Originally published May 27, 2010)

Most often, the bottom-line reason people find their way to my psychotherapy practice is because of relationship issues — struggling marriages, unsuccessful dating, lousy relationships with family and/or coworkers — and of course, their relationships with themselves are also frequently out of whack. Much of this shows up as depression and anxiety.

Rest assured that all of them can read very, very well. I work in Washington, DC, not far from the White House, and none of the patients I see are wanting for intellectual development; almost all of them are highly educated and exceptionally successful in their careers.

It’s the “other stuff” of life that eludes them — loving and being loved, balancing their lives, managing their emotions, living a life of meaning and depth. Almost without exception, their early experiences of connection with their parents — their attachment — looms large in how they got here.

What does this have to do with babies and reading, and those horrendous advertisements for teaching your baby to read?

First and foremost: The fundamental task of early childhood isn’t learning to read, or to “get ahead” for school, or to impress the neighbors, or to give the folks something to brag about. Encouraging children to surge ahead beyond their real developmental needs leaves them with some really sludgy clean-up to grapple with later on. The most important task of early childhood is experiencing a healthy, secure attachment in which the child’s caregivers are attuned to the child’s inner state and respond in a contingent manner. Let me say that again. What kids need from the get-go is a parent who “gets” them, who pays attention to what’s going on inside them, and who responds to them in a way that’s actually related to what the kid is feeling.

Healthy, secure, attuned attachment gives kids some much deeper “advantages” in life than whether they learn to read early (and learning to read early doesn’t actually give them any advantages, anyway – which I’ll get to in section II below).

The research on attachment shows that there are a number of benefits which last a lifetime, including but not limited to at least the following dozen:

• The ability to sustain attention
• Better management of physical reactions to emotions – leading to improved immunity and fewer stress-related illnesses
• Less anxiety
• Better relationships with childhood peers, and healthier relationships as adults
• Fewer behavioral problems
• Increased capacity for empathy
• Greater ability to regulate mood (for example, calming down from excitement, or not getting caught up in frustration)
• Enhanced skills in communicating emotions in healthy ways
• Greater confidence and self-esteem (and it isn’t just based on performance and grades, but rather a sense of abiding and healthy self-worth)
• Better able to generate alternative solutions to interpersonal conflict
• Enhanced insight into themselves, and others
• Better modulation of fear, allowing for a willingness to explore and take on growthful challenges

“Well,” a parent (or a video marketer) might say, “letting a baby or a toddler watch an educational video to help them read earlier won’t interfere with healthy attachment.” Actually, it can. As a psychologist/neuropsychologist who has been practicing psychotherapy and conducting cognitive evaluations for nearly twenty years, as well as having researched the relationship between brain and behavior in both infants and adults — I believe that using television to “teach” young children is a big mistake, with significant costs down the road.

(I’ll say here that reading with your child is a solid, helpful, wonderful thing to do. Explicitly teaching babies to read, especially by video, is what I’m grousing about here.)

I’d love it if parents who feel they’re giving their child a “gift” with an early reading DVD would consider the following questions:

What’s the message when (by offering your child a mesmerizing “educational” DVD, and also showing them your pleasure at their achievements) you emphasize the value of learning to read extra early, over time spent with siblings, parents, or friends?

What might your child be learning from developing the habit of spending time in front of a “worthwhile” or “engaging” video, rather than with someone who loves him or her?

What are you telling your child when you’re putting them in front of the TV instead of showing them that you value interacting with them and want to be with them?

How does it help a child to see a screen as their teacher, rather than a real person — what do they do when they have a problem they need to solve, and they don’t have the early, repeated experiences of asking an adult to help them?

What are you saying to your child about the value of learning if you can’t spend the time yourself to do it with them? (In the commercial for Your Baby Can Read, the announcer asks one thrilled parent of three early readers, “And did you have to do anything?” The mother replies with joy, “I didn’t have to do a thing!”)

I understand that parents are overworked, and stressed, and sometimes feel the need to use the television as a babysitter. Maybe they themselves don’t have enough of a repertoire for unwinding or taking care of themselves beyond watching TV (or other types of screen time). Maybe they also have some leftovers from their own childhoods, about how they were or weren’t connected to their parents in ways that allowed them the dozen benefits listed above. (Regular readers of this blog will know that it’s not too late for those parents to rewire their brains and get those kinds of benefits for themselves — and for those of you who are new here, I hope you’ll take a look at some of my other posts to learn more.) And another thing: Early reading doesn’t do much for your child’s success in school, and there’s evidence that it may even be detrimental. Let’s take a look at a few points in that regard – and note that this list is only a few of many reasons why early reading is a lousy deal for your child.

Louise Bates Ames, PhD, a superstar in child development and the director of research at the world-renowned Gesell Institute of Child Development, stated that “a delay in reading instruction would be a preventative measure in avoiding nearly all reading failure.” Leapfrogging necessary cognitive developmental skills — and asking a young brain to do tasks for which it isn’t truly ready — is asking for trouble with learning.

The brains of young children aren’t yet developed enough to read without it costing them in the organization and “wiring” of their brain. The areas involved in language and reading aren’t fully online — and aren’t connected — until age seven or eight. If we’re teaching children to do tasks which their brains are not yet developed to do via the “normal” (and most efficient) pathways, the brain will stumble upon other, less efficient ways to accomplish the tasks — which lays down wiring in some funky ways — and can lead to later learning disabilities, including visual-processing deficits.

The description of brain development on which the “Your Baby Can Read” program rests its questionable claims is remarkably flawed, confusing language acquisition with reading. They state: “A baby’s brain thrives on stimulation and develops at a phenomenal pace…nearly 90% during the first five years of life! The best and easiest time to learn a language is during the infant and toddler years, when the brain is creating thousands of synapses every second — allowing a child to learn both the written word and spoken word simultaneously, and with much more ease….” There is a huge and unsupported leap here from language acquisition – which is definitely an important developmental task, necessary for connecting to one’s outer world – and reading, which is a very different neurological and cognitive task, and one which is not developmentally appropriate for a baby or toddler’s brain.

Does early training really get you anywhere? There is a classic study of twins which was done by another pioneer in child development, Arnold Gesell, PhD, MD. He studied a pair of toddler twins, who were not yet able to climb stairs. For the study, one of the twins was given daily practice and encouragement to climb stairs, and the other twin had no stairs to practice on. After six weeks of practice, the “trained” twin could climb the stairs, and the “untrained” twin could not. However, within one week of being given the opportunity to climb stairs, the untrained twin completely caught up with the trained twin’s stair-climbing ability.

The whole idea that learning to read early gives children — or our educational system, or our economy — an “advantage” is not based on empirical evidence. If you look at the US and Britain, you see the trends toward earlier reading and increasingly less successful educational systems. On the other hand, the majority of children in Finland begin instruction in reading at age seven — two years later than here in the US (and even later than the folks at “Your Baby Can Read” would have you start). The outcome? Finnish students not only catch up to their earlier-starting counterparts, but they surpass the United States, other European countries, and Asian countries as well, with top overall scores in the world in reading, science, and math. Oh, and the Finnish do attend preschool, but it isn’t “academic” in nature — it emphasizes social development and exploration.

If you want your child to be wired for success in life — whether you measure that by academic and career achievement, leading a meaningful life, contributing to the world, or being an adult who creates loving, healthy relationships with others — give them the gift of healthy, attuned attachment. Let your child know that who they are matters to you more than how well they perform in school. Give them your time and attention.

And, equally important, get clear on how your own habits and wiring might be getting in the way of growing deeper, more meaningful connections with others (including your child). Or how they leave you with measurements of your own success which might not be terribly fulfilling or enlivening — which you then unwittingly pass on to your child. As Daniel Siegel, MD says, “How you make sense of your childhood experiences has a profound effect on how you parent your own children.”

Bottom line: If you want to give your children an advantage in life, tune in to them.

© 2010 Marsha Lucas. All Rights Reserved

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“Part Wayne Dyer, part Henry Rollins” — this guy has written a Totally F*cking Awesome post. Much wisdom with much authenticity and much foul language. Quite honestly, I love it.

The Official Guide To

Feeling Awesome

This post is about how to feel real fucking good, no Vicodin or receiving of oral sex required. You can always add in those amenities later if you like, probably best to avoid the Vicodin though

We live in a society of bored, stressed-out, anxious, agitated, always-in-a-hurry furrow-browed beings. What you’re about to read is your ticket to the direct line out of the status quo of the masses and onto exactly what you can do to feel not only good, but totally awesome

We’ve traded our peace of mind, sense of wonder, serotonin, endorphins, optimism and good vibrations for resentment, regret, stress, worries, cortisol, too much concern for what others think and too much focus on shit that just simply does not matter.

It’s time to take back what is rightfully yours.

I once heard a well-known business guru when asked if he was happy in front a crowd of people, respond “I’m not happy, I’m miserable most of the time, aren’t you? It’s not about feeling good, it’s about business”

The message stuck.

I saw a room full of people who sacrificed how they felt most of the time, for how they thought more money, more success, more stuff, and a better presentation of who they are would make them feel. Funny thing is, most of them had already achieved what the world would call “success”

It became apparent to me, that even though they were successful, were leaders in their fields, appeared to have their shit together and could talk a good game with the best of em’… most of them simply weren’t happy, and neither was I

I was making good money, had cool things, and what I thought was a “dream life” … but most of the time, I felt like, well… Shit.

In fact, I’ve spent a great deal of my life feeling uneasy, tense and just plain lousy

It’s like there was always a low-level hum of constant anxiety somewhere in the background of my being. Like a constant motor running… the off button was jammed.

Stress, worry, agitation and a feeling of something being “off”

Diagnosed with OCD and ADHD… and not the pedestrian kind that your typical American has today… I’m talking about being 8 years old and the teacher’s trying to pry me from the ceiling fan, reports sent home with me that said “It’s as if Chris isn’t even in the classroom, he’s off in some other world”, and constant visits to the principle’s office as well as the child psychologist.

Via. chrismccombs.net

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