Mind Hacks: Tips and Tricks for Using Your Brain is a book using cognitive neuroscience to present experiments, tricks, and tips related to aspects of the brain by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb. The book was published by O’Reilly in November 2004 as part of the O’Reilly Hacks series. It has since been published in more than 6 different languages.

Mind Hacks is also an ongoing psychology and neuroscience blog that publishes daily news and commentary on mind and brain issues. It won a Scientific American Science and Technology Web Award in 2005.

The power of the subconscious mind is limitless. Many of today’s motivational gurus and thoughtful minds who have written compelling and influential self-help books tell us about the inherent power that is at the core of belief.

However, most people are unaware how to tap the power of the subconscious mind. In this article, we will explore how heterosuggestions is an effective form of the subconscious mind training and how it can unleash the hidden powers of the mind.

Heterosuggestion works on the basis of repeated suggestion. Repeated suggestion is one of the basic tools used for setting goals in general. It is a method through which direct communication takes place between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind.

Through repetition of statements known as affirmations, the subconscious mind receives the suggestions given by the conscious mind, without questioning them, and acts upon those suggestions. These suggestions can be received from any of the five senses we have, and the more senses that are used, the more powerful is the effect.

Heterosuggestion simply refers to the statements that are implanted into your subconscious mind through other people.

Heterosuggestion examples include:

- listening to subliminal or affirmation CDs

- reading articles and books

- listening to the opinions of friends, siblings or parents

- watching programs on TV

Whether we are aware of it or not, we are already being subjected to affirmations daily.

Hence, the first step to leveraging heterosuggestion to tap the power of the subconscious mind begins with your awareness of your surrounding messages. Your subconscious mind pays heed to what you say whenever you talk. Whenever you complain about life, your subconscious mind listens and unquestioningly follows the instructions you are feeding it by manifesting the type of life you keep complaining about.

Therefore, if you are having a difficult time in life, it is because in your subconscious mind you believe that life is difficult. The events that happen in your life and the people you meet will make your life difficult. If you believe in your subconscious mind that money is hard to come by, then you will have a tough time getting money.

So start by paying attention to your surroundings and begin filtering the negative messages out of your life. A popular, effective and positive heterosuggestion technique would be subliminal music. This music is embedded with positive messages in the background which subtly influences your subconscious mind to start creating the desire effects during your conscious activities. It requires little work from the individual and a great way to listen to subliminal music is to listen to it just before bed.

“This article is brought to you by Gus Woltmann”.

In the philosophy of mind, the China brain thought experiment (also known as the Chinese Nation or Chinese Gym) considers what would happen if each member of the Chinese nation was asked to simulate the action of one neuron in the brain, using telephones or walkie-talkies to simulate the axons and dendrites that connect neurons. Would this arrangement have a mind or consciousness in the same way that brains do?

Early versions of this argument were put forward in 1974 by Lawrence Davis and again in 1978 by Ned Block. Block argues that the China brain would not have a mind, whereas Daniel Dennett argues that it would.

It is not to be confused with the Chinese room, which is also a thought experiment in philosophy of mind with similar goals.

Many theories of mental states are physicalist. That is, they describe the mind as the behavior of a physical object like the brain. The most prominent example is the identity theory, which says that the mind is the brain. One criticism is the problem of multiple realizability. The physicalist theory that responds to this is functionalism, which states that a mental state can be whatever functions as a mental state. That is, the mind can be composed of neurons, or it could be composed of wood, as long as it provides mental functionality.

Can one body share two brains worth of information, more than one identity? We know that there are folks with schizophrenia right? It is not that uncommon either in fact it is more than one in one hundred people. So if a human brain can contain more than one identity then can we insert one person’s brain information and download it into another; Memory, skills and knowledge? Sounds crazy right? Well, perhaps, yet lets think for a second, how powerful the human mind is and we know we only use a part of it. Some say less than 20-30% meaning there is plenty of space right?

Many might decry this concept as dastardly evil, yet think for a second, what if your husband or wife could not remain living and you would lose them forever. Why not download your spouse’s brain into your brain, so you could always be together. You would not be lonely and you could feel good, as you would be able to share your life with your significant other. Or in the case of a brilliant scientist they could download their brain into an up and coming fresh PhD student, so they could continue their work together.

Too bizarre to contemplate; too Science Fiction like, indeed but why not if it were possible, why not extend life from within another? It might take some getting use to, as you would be sharing your thoughts with another, but it could work. Currently scientists are working to record dreams and thoughts and transfer them to computer, but it may not be totally possible to do this. It may never be possible, but it maybe possible to transplant a human brain into a machine, which would continuously run by flowing blood and energy into it. It will be interesting to see the future unfold and the solutions, which are chosen to continue the human endeavor in our memories. Think on this in 2006.

“This article is brought to you by Gus Woltmann”.

The UCD Center for Mind and Brain is a research and training unit at the University of California, Davis dedicated to understanding the nature of the human mind from interdisciplinary perspectives.

Scientists currently in the CMB (16 core members) include those interested in a wide range of fundamental questions about how minds are organized. We address these questions using interdisciplinary approaches from social science (anthropology, economics, linguistics, philosophy and psychology), biological science (behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, physiology), engineering science (biomedical and electrical engineering, computer science), and medical science (neurology, psychiatry and medical imaging).

The research mission of the CMB includes investigation of a variety of fundamental issues aimed at answering the fundamental question: How does the mind arise from the biology of the brain? Scientists in the CMB study attention, awareness, cognitive control, language, memory, multisensory integration, music cognition, social cognition, and visual cognition from cognitive neuroscience and developmental perspectives in healthy infants and adults, and in special patient populations.

The Center for Mind and Brain is located adjacent to the University of California, Davis campus at 267 Cousteau Place (main building) and 202 Cousteau Place (CMB and Developmental Psychology Annex). The CMB and Developmental Psychology Annex includes over 30,000 sq ft (2,800 m2). of custom designed laboratories, offices and shared facilities that currently houses 16 faculty laboratories.

Here you have The 10 Most Popular Brain Fitness & Cognitive Health Books of 2008. I hope you find them as stimulating as I did!

1. Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Pear Press, March 2008)

- Dr. John Medina, Director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University, writes an engaging and comprehensive introduction to the many daily implications of recent brain research.

2. The Beck Diet Solution: Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person (Oxmoor House, March 2007)

- Dr. Judith Beck, Director of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research, connects the world of research-based cognitive therapy with a mainstream application: maintaining weight-loss.

3. The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (Viking, March 2007)

- Dr. Norman Doidge, psychiatrist and author of this New York Times bestseller, brings us “a compelling collection of tales about the amazing abilities of the brain to rewire, readjust and relearn”.

4. Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain(Little, Brown and Company, January 2008)

- Dr. John Ratey, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, summarizes the growing research on the brain benefits of physical exercise.

5. The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning (Stylus Publishing, October 2002)

- Dr. James Zull, Director Emeritus of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education at Case Western Reserve University, writes a must-read for educators and lifelong learners.

6. Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves (Ballantine Books, January 2007)

- Sharon Begley, Newsweek’ excellent science writer, provides an in-depth introduction to the research on neuroplasticity based on a Mind & Life Institute event.

7. Thanks: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier (Houghton Mifflin, August 2007)

- Prof. Robert Emmons, Professor of Psychology at UC Davis and Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Positive Psychology, writes a solid book that combines a research-based synthesis of the topic as well as practical suggestions.

8. The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind (Oxford University Press, January 2001)

- Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg, clinical professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine, provides a fascinating perspective on the role of the frontal roles and executive functions through the lifespan.

9. The Brain Trust Program: A Scientifically Based Three-Part Plan to Improve Memory (Perigee Trade, September 2007)

- Dr. Larry McCleary, former acting Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Denver Children’s Hospital, covers many lifestyle recommendations for brain health in this practical book.

10. A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain (Pantheon, January 2001)

- In this book (previous to Spark), Dr. John Ratey provides a stimulating description of how the brain works. An excellent Brain 101 book to anyone new to the field.

Let me ask you know…have you already chosen a book to read next?

“This article is brought to you by Gus Woltmann”.

How People Learn is the title of an Educational Psychology book edited by John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking and published by the United States National Academy of Sciences’ National Academies Press. The committee on How People Learn also wrote “How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom” as a follow-up.

The book draws the following conclusions, among others:

Learners and Learning:

* “Effective comprehension and thinking require a coherent understanding of the organizing principles in any subject matter,” and
* “In-depth understanding requires detailed knowledge of the facts within a domain. The key attribute of expertise is a detailed and organized understanding of the important facts within a specific domain.”

Thus, the debate within education between advocates of deep conceptual understanding and advocates of broad factual understanding misses the point. In-depth understanding is necessary to truly understand the content, but broad factual understanding is also necessary as it allows a person to remember and organize what they have learned.

Teachers and Teaching: “Teachers need expertise in both subject matter content and in teaching,” and “Teachers need to develop models of their own professional development that are based on lifelong learning, rather than on an ‘updating’ model of learning, in order to have frameworks to guide their career planning.” These conclusions have implications for teacher hiring and professional development policies.

Learning Environments:

* “Assessment and feedback are crucial for helping people learn.”
* “Classroom environments can be positively influenced by opportunities to interact with… families and community members around school-based learning goals.”
* “New tools of technology have the potential of enhancing learning in many ways. The tools of technology are creating new learning environments, which need to be assessed carefully.”

Why do so many people suffer from information overload and so few people achieve information mastery? If you are interested to improve your mind, improve your memory, improve concentration and to remember tons of information, there are memory training methods and memory techniques that really work. But information mastery is more than memorizing tons of information. It’s also about how to make information make sense not only to yourself, but to those you wish to communicate its importance to.

So how do you have information mastery? The answer has to do with the way you picture information to yourself. Consider the following. College and high school graduates usually know many ways of representing information. Unfortunately, though, the representations that they know are usually the wrong ones. Believe it or not, these representations can actually make it harder to learn a body of information and gain a subjective sense of ownership.

What are the most popular formats for representing facts? These may include formats such as tables, flowcharts, pie charts, equations, and graphs, they can be wonderful. They can even be useful to you for organizing a body of information you have already mastered. Sometimes you might use them to summaries a set of facts. Other times they reveal properties of the information that you would otherwise not notice. But do they help you at the point when you are first becoming comfortable with a new domain of knowledge? The answer almost always is “no”.

You use graphs and tables to communicate information because they summarize a lot of data succinctly with a few lines on a page. When you are first learning new information, however, you usually want everything to be loose and expanded instead of tight and compact. If you are like most people, tables and graphs will help you only if they are ones that you already know well. You normally want all the details and qualifications and special circumstances to be written in full. That way you can devote your mind power to identifying and understanding the main facts.

Here is an example of how I make sense of tables. Recently, a financial planner from an investment company met with me to discuss a return on an investment for one of her company’s products. Her model was in the form of a spreadsheet. She began going through the model, explaining what it meant line-by-line. I started to feel restless and uncomfortable. To understand this model, I knew that our conversation would have to move in a different direction.

So I focused instead on her goal. Which was, to convince my friend to purchase her company’s product. Then I asked myself what her unique selling point was. It turned out that there was one key cell in the spreadsheet. If the figure in that cell was correct, then her product genuinely was more attractive than the competition. If that figure was wrong, my client ought to choose a different product.

So I marked the key cell and asked her to confirm that this value was the crucial one. She confirmed this. Then I wrote that figure on a new piece of paper, with a note saying what it meant. After that the problem became to verify whether or not this crucial figure was correct or not. By now I was doing most of the talking. I started asking her to explain how the key figure had been calculated. It turned out that I needed only a few select pieces of information to evaluate her entire argument.

Different people like to represent new information in different formats. A colleague of mine likes to make pictures. I prefer a long list of point form notes. Some people are most at home with tables and graphs. Do not feel captive to the format in which you receive the information. The best form is whatever makes it easiest for you to understand and evaluate the facts.

“This article is brought to you by Gus Woltmann”.

Brain reserve may be defined as the brain’s resilience, its ability to cope with increasing damage while still functioning adequately. This passive, threshold model presumes the existence of a fixed cut-off which, once reached, would inevitably herald the emergence of the clinical manifestations of dementia.

Brain size

A 1997 study found that Alzheimer’s disease pathology in large brains did not necessarily result in clinical dementia.Another study reported head circumference to be independently associated with a reduced risk of clinical Alzheimer’s disease.

While some studies, like those mentioned, find an association, others do not. This is thought to be because head circumference and other approximations are indirect measures.

The number of synapses is lower in early onset dementia that in late onset dementia. This might indicate a vulnerability to the manifestation of clinical cognitive impairment, although there may be other explanations.

Evidence from a twin study indicates a genetic contribution to cognitive functions. Heritability estimates have been found to be high for general cognitive functions but low for memory itself.Adjusting for the effects of education 79% of executive function can be explained by genetic contribution . A study combining twin and adoption studies found all cognitive functions to be heritable. Speed of processing had the highest heritability in this particular study.

Cognitive reserve also indicates a resilience to neuropathological damage, but the emphasis here is in the way the brain uses its damaged resources. It could be defined as the ability to optimise or maximise performance through differential recruitment of brain networks and/or alternative cognitive strategies. This is an efficiency model, rather than a threshold model, and it implies that the task is processed using less resources and in a way that makes errors unlikely to occur.

Childhood cognition, educational attainment, and adult occupation all contribute to cognitive reserve independently.The strongest association in this study was found with childhood cognition.

In a study of normal aging, education was found to be related to levels of cognitive functioning but unrelated to rates of cognitive change, suggesting that cognitive reserve reflects the persistence of earlier differences in cognitive functioning rather than differential rates of age-associated cognitive declines.

You’re at work, introducing a new employee to a co-worker, and you momentarily forget their name. Or you go to the grocery store to pick up something “urgent”, and you aimlessly wander the isles trying to remember why you’re there. Sound familiar? As we age, we generally find our brains feeling less and less reliable in our daily lives, and at some point, perhaps we cross a threshold and momentarily worry that this might be a trend. But the real question is: What can we do to keep our brains sharp?

There are many things we can do to challenge our brains. We could enroll ourselves in an advanced math course, or read the Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary from front to back, but neither of those choices seems to be particularly appealing. Another option is to play any of the growing number of brain fitness games that are popping up in a variety of areas, including online, CDs and DVDs, and even game consoles. If you’re going to do something healthy, you might as well enjoy yourself in the process.

Brain fitness games have a strong foundation in science, and offer a varied and complex workout across multiple areas of the brain. Although these games rely on science in order to be effective, for them to gain mainstream acceptance, they must also be delivered in an entertaining and engaging manner. Casual gaming principles are a perfect fit, as they are designed to be fun and accessible to diverse audiences, including those that are new to gaming. The engagement and polish of a well-designed brain game not only has the potential to interest a large demographic, but can also help players find motivation to exercise their brains on a regular basis.

Brain Fitness and Casual Gaming

The explosive growth of gaming continues to bring a great deal of diversity into the industry, including new genres, distribution models, platforms and input devices. As a result, the demographic continues to expand, creating more opportunities in areas that were previously considered too small or niche to reach the mainstream. With genre-creating titles like The Brain Age, Wii Fit and Guitar Hero enjoying blockbuster sales, more and more people that haven’t traditionally considered themselves to be “gamers” are getting actively involved in games on a regular basis, which isn’t just great for the existing industry, but also for new companies and business models that push the boundaries of what we currently refer to as “games”.

There is a large segment of the casual audience, generally in the baby boomer demographic, who enjoy casual game content but didn’t grow up with games, and as a result don’t necessarily feel that games offer enough value to be a regular part of their daily lives. However, the recent surge of health-oriented games has generated new interest, bringing more people into games and shifting the perception that games offer only entertainment.

Brain fitness games in particular are a great fit for these truly casual audiences, as the 30+ crowd that makes up the core casual demographic, is also more likely to consider the importance of keeping the mind sharp, for their everyday lives, as well as their future. The online space, with its ease of access to so many people, is the perfect place for people to play fun, healthy games that stimulate the brain, and even feel that it’s a valuable use of their time.

Strengthening the Mind by Increasing “Brain Reserve”

One of the essential concepts at the core of brain fitness is the concept of “brain reserve”, also related to the concept of brain plasticity, which can be strengthened at nearly any point of person’s life by doing tasks that are novel and complex, and stimulate a balanced variety of areas within the brain.

Brain reserve relates to the brain’s ability to physically reorganize itself in response to the demands placed upon it. A brain with a strong reserve is one that has formed many cellular connections and is rich in brain cell density. A strong reserve is generally believed to have the ability to delay the onset of mental deterioration, such as Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Simply put, mental diseases must work longer and harder to manifest in a brain that has built up strong reserve.

A healthy brain should look like a lush and vibrant jungle, rather than an island with a single palm tree. A jungle-like brain is representative of a healthy brain, because it is full of cellular connections that are very dense, and therefore indicate a very strong brain reserve. If you think of mental disease like AD as a weed-whacker, it invades the brain and begins to do its damage by destroying brain cells. However, it takes AD a long time to show any impact, if it has to destroy a jungle’s worth of brain cell connections. In contrast, AD can manifest fairly quickly after infiltrating the brain if it simply needs to destroy only a relatively few cellular connections, like an island with a single palm tree.

Casual brain fitness games offer people a variety of well-rounded, scientifically based activities wrapped within a fun and engaging experience that is accessible to even first-time gamers. By offering stimulation across the spectrum of the brain, and ramping the difficulty in a way that increases the complexity of the tasks, brain games can offer people an effective way of increasing their brain reserve, and yet still have the appeal of casual gaming entertainment.

Balancing and Maintaining the Brain

Although organizations in the brain fitness industry sometimes use differing terminology, and may conceptually organize brain fitness into different categories, there is a general consensus regarding the major areas of the brain. At Fit Brains (www.fitbrains.com), we divide our games into five major categories: Memory, Concentration, Language, Visuospatial and Executive Functions. In addition to these primary areas of the brain, each area is further subdivided into sub-measures that are reflected within game activities and progression metrics. These areas are not distinctly separate; they work together in conjunction, like different instruments in an orchestra, and can be blended with one another to achieve a fuller measure of brain stimulation.

The Fit Brains platform represents brain balance and brain reserve as the Fit Brains Index (FBi) and as Brain Points. If your FBi is in the “Healthy” range or higher, that is a positive indicator that you are regularly engaging in brain fitness exercise on the site. Brain Points, on the other hand, are an indication of your cumulative brain fitness efforts across all games since you first joined the site. It is valuable for players to be aware that both the FBi and Brain Points benefit the most from regular, balanced activity across the five major cognitive areas.

At Fit Brains, we designed our casual brain game platform on a foundation of existing cognitive training research, such as the ACTIVE study, that continues to emerge from the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. The scientific aspects of the platform are designed by a prominent neuroscientist, Dr. Paul Nussbaum, one of the leading brain health doctors in the US, and recent winner of the 2007 American Society on Aging “Gloria Cavanaugh Award” for his excellence in training and education in the field of aging.

The ACTIVE study, funded by NIH, demonstrated that adults are able to improve brain functions with proper training. The brain is healthiest when it is active and regularly challenged. With frequent brain training, the brain performs optimally and is able to maintain its abilities through the years. In addition to brain fitness games, the other important aspects of a healthy brain lifestyle include physical fitness, nutrition, socialization and meditation/spirituality.

The Right Motivation: Brain Fitness or Entertainment

In order to offer the benefits of brain fitness games to the widest possible audiences, it is important to consider the motivations and interests of the potential demographics. Some people are looking for something to help them exercise their brain, while others are merely looking for entertainment, but will also likely appreciate the added value of brain fitness. An effective, mainstream brain fitness experience allows users to choose their own motivations, while providing them with opportunities to expand their horizons, and either learn more about their brains, or be encouraged to challenge themselves with more entertainment-based accomplishments.

On the brain fitness side of the equation, Fit Brains offers a suite of tools that track a wide spectrum of player-progression metrics across the various activities. This includes balance between each of the major brain areas, as well as targeted recommendations based on more fine-tuned metrics related to each of the cognitive sub-measures. To round out the offering, there are also a series of brain circuit trainers that guide players through a balanced brain workout over a specified period of time, ranging from 3 to 30 days.

For those who are more motivated by the entertainment aspects of the site, there are also a collection of meta-game incentives designed to encourage players to visit on a regular basis and play a wide variety of brain games. These features include Brain Points, Trophies, Achievements, Leaderboards and Social/Community Gaming. They are each intended to encourage a more “sticky” brain fitness experience, by inviting players to return to the games frequently and extend their experiences, or earn special rewards that go beyond the games themselves.

Ultimately Casual Experience

One of the most important goals of brain fitness games, as well as casual gaming in general, is to be accessible to the largest variety of audiences. As the market expands and brings in more people that are new to games, this becomes even more difficult. One of the biggest challenges is to find the right level of game difficulty that can accommodate a wide range of both experienced gamers, as well as those playing games for their first time. Some games offer user-chosen difficulty settings that can be intimidating or confusing to new users, and often don’t accommodate the complete spectrum of player abilities; other games have only a single level of difficulty progression designed to fit everyone.

At Fit Brains, our casual brain-fitness games are designed to accommodate the fact that many of our site members are often new to video games. In order to minimize issues with “user-chosen” or “one-size-fits-all” difficulty settings, we have developed an adaptive database system that allows us to offer personalized gameplay experiences through a variety of progression-charting and peer-clustering mechanisms. This technology allows us to gather valuable user metrics from various components within each game in order to set baselines that are relevant to each user and that are contrasted with statistical patterns derived from the broader site user population.

This data is displayed to the end user in the form of brain fitness metrics, which also includes brain exercise recommendations and brain training circuits. The data is also used to personalize each user session, by adapting each of the games to a variety of trackable parameters, including: scoring, play time, content accessibility, cognitive difficulty, and more. Over time, the database continues to adapt to each player and provide personally-tuned, casual brain fitness gaming experiences for everyone. By utilizing a self-tuning backend system, users of any level can join the experience and find both challenge and reward on a personal level. This focus on personalization allows the brain fitness experience to be effective and also accessible to the widest audiences possible.

Conclusion

In order for brain fitness games to resonate successfully with mainstream audiences, it is important that they provide the right balance between science and entertainment. The science extends the game beyond a mere “brain theme” into an effective tool for personal growth. The entertainment helps people to maintain the motivation to participate in healthy activity on a regular basis. Brain fitness games may share many of the same opportunities and challenges found within the casual games industry, but the health-oriented focus has the potential to resonate more deeply with players, which in turn helps the industry expand and draw in wider audiences that may be even more casual than the existing ones.

Mark Baxter is the Co-Founder and VP Product at Fit Brains (http://www.fitbrains.com). H has been in the Games and New Media industry for more than eight years, in a variety of roles including: Officer, Producer and Creative Director. He was the President and Founder of Gnosis Games, an independent games studio that developed multiple #1 Casual Games, including “Paparazzi” and “Private Eye”. In 2005, Gnosis was nominated as the Canada New Media Award’s “Most Promising New Company of the Year”.

In 2006, Gnosis was sold to Threewave Software, a AAA game development studio focused on producing top-tier online content for PCs and consoles. As a Senior Manager of Threewave, Mark lead the Gnosis Casual Games division and worked closely with top brands and clients including: Disney, Electronic Arts, Real Arcade, Shockwave and Big Fish Games.

“This article is brought to you by Gus Woltmann”.

TRACE’s relevance to the modularity debate has recently been brought to the fore by Norris, Cutler and McQueen’s (2001) report on the Merge model of speech perception. While it shares a number of features with TRACE, a key difference is the following. While TRACE permits word units to feed back activation to the phoneme level, Merge restricts its processing to feed-forward connections. In the terms of this debate, TRACE is considered to violate the principle of information encapsulation, central to modularity, when it permits a later stage of processing (words) to send information to an earlier stage (phonemes). Merge advocates for modularity by arguing that the same class of perceptual phenomena that is accounted for in TRACE can be explained in a connectionist architecture that does not include feedback connections. Norris et al. point out that when two theories can explain the same phenomenon, parsimony dictates that the simpler theory is preferable.

Modularity of mind is the notion that a mind may, at least in part, be composed of separate innate structures which have established, evolutionarily developed functional purposes. Proponents believe this view is implied by Noam Chomsky’s concept of a universal, generative grammar. Such universal features of language imply the existence of an underlying “language acquisition device” structure in the brain. This device is postulated to be autonomous and specialized for learning language rapidly – a module.

Parsimony is a ‘less is better’ economy or caution in arriving at a hypothesis or course of action. The word derives from Middle English parcimony, from Latin parsimonia, from parsus, past participle of parcere: to spare. It is a general principle that has applications from science to philosophy and all related fields.

In science, parsimony is preference for the least complex explanation for an observation. This is generally regarded as good when judging hypotheses. Occam’s razor also states the “principle of parsimony”; however, some argue that parsimony should not be elevated to the status of a general principle.

In systematics, maximum parsimony is a cladistic “optimality criterion” based on the principle of parsimony. Under maximum parsimony, the preferred phylogenetic tree is the tree that requires the smallest number of evolutionary changes.

In biogeography, parsimony is used to infer ancient migrations of species or populations by observing the geographic distribution and relationships of existing organisms. Given the phylogenetic tree, ancestral migrations are inferred to be those that require the minimum amount of total movement.

Parsimony is also a factor in statistics: in general, mathematical models with the smallest number of parameters are preferred as each parameter introduced into the model adds some uncertainty to it. Additionally, adding too many parameters leads to “connect-the-dots” curve-fitting which has little predictive power. In general terms, it may be said that applied statisticians (such as process control engineers) value parsimony quite highly.

Lee and others provide cases where a parsimonious approach does not guarantee a correct conclusion and, if based on incorrect working hypotheses or interpretations of incomplete data, may even strongly support a false conclusion:

When parsimony ceases to be a guideline and is instead elevated to an ex cathedra pronouncement, parsimony analysis ceases to be science.

Fodor’s Modularity of Mind

Historically, questions regarding the functional architecture of the mind have been divided into two different theories of the nature of the faculties. The first can be characterized as a horizontal view because it refers to mental processes as if they are interactions between faculties such as memory, imagination, judgement, and perception, which are not domain specific (e.g., a judgement remains a judgement whether it refers to a perceptual experience or to the comprehension of language). The second can be characterized as a vertical view because it claims that the mental faculties are differentiated on the basis of domain specificity, are genetically determined, are associated with distinct neurological structures, and are computationally autonomous.

The vertical vision goes back to the 19th century movement called phrenology and its founder Franz Joseph Gall, who claimed that the individual mental faculties could be associated precisely, in a sort of one to one correspondence, with specific physical areas of the brain. Hence, someone’s level of intelligence, for example, could be literally “read off” from the size of a particular bump on his posterior parietal lobe. This simplistic view of modularity has, of course, been disproven over the course of the last century.

In the 1980s, however, Jerry Fodor revived the idea of the modularity of mind, although without the notion of precise physical localizability. Drawing from Chomsky and other work in linguistics as well as from the philosophy of mind and the implications of optical illusions, he became one of its most articulate proponents with the 1983 publication of Modularity of Mind.

According to Fodor, a module falls somewhere between the behaviorist and cognitivist views of lower-level processes.

Behaviorists tried to replace the mind with reflexes which Fodor describes as encapsulated (cognitively impenetrable or unaffected by other cognitive domains) and non-inferential (straight pathways with no information added). Low level processes are unlike reflexes in that they are inferential. This can be demonstrated by poverty of the stimulus arguments in which the proximate stimulus, that which is initially received by the brain (such as the 2D image received by the retina), cannot account for the resulting output (for example, our 3D perception of the world), thus necessitating some form of computation.

In contrast, cognitivists saw lower level processes as continuous with higher level processes, being inferential and cognitively penetrable (influenced by other cognitive domains, such as beliefs). The latter has been shown to be untrue in some cases, such as with many visual illusions (ex. Müller-Lyer illusion), which can persist despite a person’s awareness of their existence. This is taken to indicate that other domains, including one’s beliefs, cannot influence such processes.

Fodor arrives at the conclusion that such processes are inferential like higher order processes and encapsulated in the same sense as reflexes.

Although he argued for the modularity of ‘lower level’ cognitive processes in Modularity of Mind he also argued that higher level cognitive processes are not modular since they have dissimilar properties. The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way, a reaction to Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, is devoted to this subject.

Fodor (1983) states that modular systems must – at least to “some interesting extent” – fulfill certain properties:

1. Domain specificity, modules only operate on certain kinds of inputs – they are specialised
2. Informational encapsulation, modules need not refer to other psychological systems in order to operate
3. Obligatory firing, modules process in a mandatory manner
4. Fast speed, probably due to the fact that they are encapsulated (thereby needing only to consult a restricted database) and mandatory (time need not be wasted in determining whether or not to process incoming input)
5. Shallow outputs, the output of modules is very simple
6. Limited accessibility
7. Characteristic ontogeny, there is a regularity of development
8. Fixed neural architecture.

Pylyshyn (1999) has argued that while these properties tend to occur with modules, one stands out as being the real signature of a module; that is the encapsulation of the processes inside the module from both cognitive influence and from cognitive access.[2] This is referred to as the “cognitive impenetrability” of the module.

“This article is brought to you by Gus Woltmann”.

The soul, in many religions, spiritual traditions, and philosophies, is the spiritual and eternal part of a living being, commonly held to be separable in existence from the body; as distinct from the physical part. It is typically thought to consist of a human’s consciousness and personality, and can be synonymous with the spirit, mind or self. The soul is believed to live on after the person’s physical death, and some religions posit that God creates souls. In some cultures, non-human living things, and sometimes other objects (such as rivers) are said to have souls, a belief known as animism.

The terms soul and spirit are often used interchangeably, although the former may be viewed as a more worldly and less transcendent aspect of a person than the latter. The words soul and psyche can also be treated synonymously, although psyche has relatively more physical connotations, whereas soul is connected more closely to metaphysics and religion.

Every part of our bodies is all connected to each other and therefore relies on each other to do their respective jobs. If one of those parts is not healthy then it only makes common sense that it’s going to affect the other parts.

There are three very distinct parts to our being. That is the mind, body and soul. If one is not healthy then the other two suffer. Let’s take a look at each of these three parts separately.

The Mind:
Our mental and emotional well being as a very strong influence on the rest of the body. If the mind is not focused and strong then it cannot direct the body functions to do their job. Most often when the mind becomes despondent so does the body. In reality, the general health becomes affected. This can be backed up by the many Doctors that once they have exhausted all avenues of coming up with a diagnosis with a person they may put it off to being a mental issue. Another good example as to how the mind and the emotions can affect our overall well-being is with anxiety attacks. These are triggered by the mind yet they can be so severe they mimic a heart attack sometimes. Obviously when these are occurring, one is not feeling very healthy.

The Body:
The body like the mind affects other areas as well when it is sick. Look at how mentally exhausted an individual becomes when they are dealing with chronic pain. It’s not the cause of the pain that is the culprit to the mind it’s the pain level. If whatever ails the body is restrictive in some way, this too can have a major impact on the mind. It’s that cliché that the mind is willing but the body isn’t. A body that is not healthy is a creator of many negative factors.

The Soul:
No matter what each persons individual belief it there is a connection to the rest of the body. When an individual is in poor spirits, it has a direct effect on the health of the mind and the body as well.

So to get the very best from life one must strive to stay healthy in mind, body and soul. This can only be done by knowing the needs of each of these facets and then taking positive steps to meet those needs.

“This article is brought to you by Gus Woltmann”.

Cognitive science can be defined as the study of intelligence. It embraces multiple research disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, artificial intelligence, sociology and biology. The term cognitive science was coined by Christopher Longuet-Higgins in his 1973 commentary on the Lighthill report, which concerned the then-current state of Artificial Intelligence research. In the same decade, the journal Cognitive Science and the Cognitive Science Society were founded.[2][dead link] Cognitive science differs from cognitive psychology in that algorithms that are intended to simulate human behavior are implemented or implementable on a computer.

Like most approaches to the mind, cognitive science can be traced back to philosophical questions, especially about the nature of knowledge. For instance, Plato’s dialog Meno, where he investigates the source of knowledge, can be seen as a foundational text.

The modern culture of cognitive science can be traced back to the early cyberneticists in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, who sought to understand the organizing principles of the mind . McCulloch and Pitts essentially invented the neural network, but did not have the computational tools to develop it into modern form.

Another precursor was the early development of the theory of computation and the digital computer in the 1940s and 1950s. Alan Turing and John von Neumann were instrumental in these developments. The modern computer, or Von Neumann machine, would play a central role in cognitive science, both as a metaphor for the mind, and as a tool for investigation.

In 1959, Noam Chomsky published a scathing review of B. F. Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior. At the time, Skinner’s behaviorist paradigm dominated psychology: Most psychologists focused on functional relations between stimulus and response, without positing internal representations. Chomsky’s work showed that in order to explain language, we needed a theory like his generative grammar, which not only attributed internal representations but characterized their underlying order. This hugely successful theory would inspire much later cognitive science.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, much cognitive science research focused on the possibility of artificial intelligence. Researchers such as Marvin Minsky would write computer programs in languages such as LISP to attempt to formally characterize the steps that human beings went through, for instance, in making decisions and solving problems, in the hope of better understanding human thought, and also in the hope of creating artificial minds. This approach is known as “symbolic AI”.

Eventually the limits of the symbolic AI research program became apparent. For instance, it seemed to be unrealistic to comprehensively list human knowledge in a form usable by a symbolic computer program. The late 80s and 90s saw the rise of neural networks and connectionism as a research paradigm. Under this point of view, often attributed to James McClelland and David Rumelhart, the mind could be characterized as a set of complex associations, represented as a layered network. Critics argue that there are some phenomena which are better captured by symbolic models, and that connectionist models are often so complex as to have little explanatory power. But the flexibility and biological plausibility of these models made them very successful.

Today a plurality of approaches exist, from connectionism, to a focus on dynamical systems models, to attempts to reintroduce symbolic models using tools from modern computer science such as machine learning.

Are you working in a company or law firm where executive coaches help leaders become more capable decision makers? Does your company or law firm provide executive coaching and leadership development for high performing leadership talent?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself is “Do I have safeguards that red-flag conditions that may lead to bad decisions?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent organizations provide executive coaching and leadership development for leaders who make decisions at all levels of the organization.

Safeguards

The brain’s way of working makes it particularly difficult to correct our own mental processes. Like a goldfish in a bowl, how can we know we’re wet?

When no red flags exist, the decision-making process can be fast and simple. When we spot red flags, we can design appropriate, effective safeguards that are less likely to demotivate everyone involved in the decision process. We enjoy targeted processing, instead of suffering increased bureaucracy and time-consuming conflicts.

Safeguards reduce the risk that red-flag conditions will lead to a bad decision. While it may not be possible to eliminate all risks, we can greatly improve the odds of making sound decisions with fewer mistakes. Four types of safeguards counterbalance and defend against errors:

1. Experience, Data and Analysis: In business, there are many ways data can be collected and experience broadened. Discussion with key customers can provide valuable feedback. Consultants can be hired to offer objectivity and outside perspectives.

2. Group Debate and Challenge: The process of debate can help expose assumptions and beliefs. It’s vital to choose the right participants, as the group must identify appropriate challenges that meet organizational goals.

3. Governance: It may be necessary to set up a separate governance team if one doesn’t exist apart from the decision-making team. The new team should be designed as a vital backstop to stand in the way of any flawed judgments that make it past the decision team.

4. Monitoring: The monitoring process tracks the progress of the decision. Awareness of monitoring encourages decisions makers to think carefully before making their recommendations. If decision makers know the outcome will be recorded and publicized, they will be motivated to think-and rethink-their positions.

Monitoring offers a quick solution to a bad decision. Early progress reports let you know if course corrections are needed. Monitoring can catch any problems the first three safeguards miss.

Identify Biases and Implement Safeguards

Most large organizations already have structured decision processes with built-in safeguards, which were likely implemented to correct past mistakes. Decision processes, however, must be tailored to flag conditions that may distort perceptions. By identifying biases, we can select specific safeguards that target our cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities.

There aren’t any foolproof guarantees against bad decisions. Life’s complexities ensure we’re never going to get everything right. Keep these summary points in mind:

• It’s possible to improve your decision-making abilities and continually grow.

• There are specific, identifiable steps you can take to prevent bad outcomes and reduce your risk of making bad decisions.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders develop safeguards to red-flag poor decision making. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

“This article is brought to you by Gus Woltmann”.

Consciousness is subjective experience or awareness or wakefulness or the executive control system of the mind. It is an umbrella term that may refer to a variety of mental phenomena . Although humans realize what everyday experiences are, consciousness refuses to be defined, philosophers note.

“Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives”
—Schneider and Velmans, 2007

Consciousness in medicine (e.g., anaesthesiology) is simply regarded as wakefulness and is assessed by observing a patient’s alertness and responsiveness. Consciousness in psychology and philosophy has four characteristics: subjectivity, change, continuity and selectivity.Intentionality or aboutness (that consciousness is about something) has also been suggested by philosopher Brentano. However, within the philosophy of mind there is no consensus on whether intentionality is a requirement for consciousness.

Consciousness is the subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Issues of practical concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill or comatose people; whether non-human consciousness exists and if so how it can be measured; at what point in fetal development consciousness begins; and whether computers can achieve a conscious state.

Etymology
Search Wiktionary Look up consciousness in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

The word “conscious” is derived from Latin conscius meaning “1. having joint or common knowledge with another, privy to, cognizant of; 2. conscious to oneself; esp., conscious of guilt”. A related word was conscientia which primarily means moral conscience. In the literal sense, “conscientia” means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge. The word first appears in Latin juridic texts by writers such as Cicero[citation needed]. Here, conscientia is the knowledge that a witness has of the deed of someone else.

René Descartes (1596-1650) is generally taken to be the first philosopher to use “conscientia” in a way that does not seem to fit this traditional meaning, although this has recently been countered by Boris Hennig. In any event, John Locke had much influence on the 18th Century view of consciousness: in Samuel Johnson’s celebrated Dictionary (1755), Johnson gives a definition of “conscious” as “endowed with the power of knowing one’s own thoughts and actions,” and takes Locke’s own definition of “consciousness” as “the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind.”

Locke offered a definition of consciousness in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) that remained closely intertwined with moral conscience (I may be held morally responsible only for the act of which I am conscious of having achieved; and my personal identity—my self—goes as far as my consciousness extends itself).

Twelve years earlier, Ralph Cudworth used the modern meaning of consciousness in his “True Intellectual System of the Universe” (1678) and associated the concept with personal identity, which is assured by the repeated consciousness of oneself. Cudworth’s use of the term also remained intertwined with moral agency.

There is a whole set of thought vibrations available for you to choose from.

In any life area that has mixed signals going on, you will find a plethora of vibrations all mixed in together. Some vibrations say – “I have it going really good. This is working out so well!”

While others say – “Oh boy, what’s happening? The whole thing is not working at all. Why am I even wasting my time on this?”

To choose the strain of thoughts that ultimately support what you want to create, is your job as the creator of your life journey.

Your mind is like a child, or rather your subconscious mind is like a child and it beams all of these messages into the Universe attracting situations. You can use your conscious mind to overrule or overwrite this subconscious mind because it is important to train this subconscious mind to get the results that you want.

Coaching is about working on this program, and as you (we) cajole your subconscious into letting go of old thoughts and feed in new useful, loving and supportive thoughts, your vibrations change for the better and so does your reality. The whole energy changes around you.

It’s all a new understanding, perspective and programming that goes into your subconscious so that change happens.

Your conscious mind can help in changing focus and awareness and help guide your subconscious to contain better beliefs and thoughts. The only problem is if your conscious mind gets too rigid and does not want to let your subconscious think differently. This happens to overly intellectual people and people who have experienced so many contrary situations (contrary to what they would have liked to experience) that allowing the subconscious mind to think differently seems to be a Herculean task.

In such cases, information needs to be fed in very logically and carefully because the mind needs to be totally convinced to release all doubts and fears. It is a case of trust, and as a person learns to trust, he/she lets go of old and rigid thought patterns that were just not sitting right. The old subconscious just created the same situation again and again, and the consequences get very clear to see and experience.

For example if there is a man or woman in your life who seems as if he/she is not treating you correctly, it’s because this person is the projection of your subconscious mind and its beliefs. You may want one thing, but this subconscious mind projects another. As this subconscious mind is trained differently, change happens around you. You can also keep this in mind while dealing with other people because they too have the same issues. Their subconscious mind is also trained to think incorrectly thereby creating their experiences with you.

If you want change, and would like to experience the results of having different beliefs in your subconscious mind, then allow this subconscious mind to hold different beliefs and your life will certainly reflect that change. Work on your vibrations and from the mix of thought vibrations, choose and transmit correct and useful ones to the Universe and have it bring back good and happy situations to you.

Magnify the vibes that will support you and let go of those that don’t. Let your subconscious project a different reality for you and take correct and happy actions.

The power lies with you to get this change to happen. Lots of love!

“This article is brought to you by Gus Woltmann”.

Quantum mind theories are based on the premise that quantum mechanics is necessary to fully understand the mind and brain, particularly concerning an explanation of consciousness. This approach is considered a minority opinion in science, although it does have the support of the well-known Roger Penrose, who has proposed a quantum mind theory in conjunction with Stuart Hameroff. Karl H. Pribram and Henry Stapp have also proposed variations.

The quantum mind hypothesis proposes that classical mechanics cannot fully explain consciousness and suggests that quantum mechanical phenomena such as quantum entanglement and superposition may play an important part in the brain’s function and could form the basis of an explanation of consciousness.

Supporters of the quantum mind hypothesis have not submitted any evidence to support its claims for peer review, but the hypothesis has also not been falsified. As such, the hypothesis is still in its early phases.

Quantum Mind Power

If there is one thing more complex than the concept of love, it is the human mind. It is therefore, more complicated than any other parts of a human being. People in all kinds of profession tend to get interested in studying and understanding the brain. People somehow believe that scientifically, they can explain fully the workings of one’s mind. Though people memorize parts of the brain and its function, there is always something to think about like how exactly does a psychotic mind works and there is always something new in the brain. Does the mind of a killer normal? Does it think that way because of its past experiences and perceptions?

People could not fully and truly understand everything there is to know in a brain. But there is a program made called quantum mind power. It is made for people to understand and control over mind setting. Since people studied mind matter thoroughly, people are now searching for its right keys, right control for its extensive power.

Quantum mind power has something to do with unlocking the mind power of a person. It seems that the mind is not that powerful and large enough. It also seems that mind matter is not complicated enough, people find ways to empower it still. The exploration of the brain could mean a new discovery giving way to achieving mind power. The process is surprisingly as old as a time exercise, meditation. Also, the quantum mind power has something to do with the wavelengths of our brain; it somehow changes its programming, hence, its ways and navigations. These changes that could be processed in the brain are focused in people’s internal being. The internal being is all about the personality, aura, confidence, attitude and lifestyle.

If this could be proven to be effective to all kinds of brains, since brain is very complex, then, people can capture exactly what kind of mood they want in this moment. This has something to do with uplifting one being to avoid breaking down to a stress or depression. Mind matter could be a lot of things so sometimes it should be diverted to something light. The light would be normality and stability. This means balancing the gravity of one’s physical and emotional needs.

Since people are aware that the condition of the mind affects the drive, motivations and goals of a being, it is only fitting to find ways in improving one’s brain activity whether it be praying, imagining or meditating. It is also right to find ways to make it keener as people grow old. So if people are satisfied in having a healthy brain, then goes harmony with body and positive outlook in life. Surely, with clear mind, people will have their goal straight.

Also, there are people who find it hard to have peace of mind. And all people are afraid of losing sanity. If the quantum mind power will make life a better place for one’s life and if it really does improve one’s lifestyle, then it must be the cleaner of people’s brains.

“This article is brought to you by Gus Woltmann”.

The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain is the third installment of the educational Dr. Brain series, created and published by Sierra Entertainment.

As in the first two games, Lost Mind features science related puzzles. Where the previous installments featured a large, semi-free-roaming environment, however, Lost Mind confines the player to one single area (Dr. Brain’s laboratory), with puzzles accessed from a central ‘map’ screen. Similarly, while the previous games’ puzzles ranged across a variety of disciplines (both Castle and Island contained memory and word puzzles, as well as puzzles related to art and the sciences), Lost Mind focuses solely on the human brain, with puzzles related to spatial orientation, memorization, and symbolic association.

Due to the restricted game environment, much of the humor that was found in the first two games is missing in Lost Mind; since the player no longer has free rein over an entire island or castle, there is very little to explore, and very little with which to interact.
The Main Navigation Area

Between the second and third installments, several new characters have been introduced: Dr. Brain’s niece, Elaina, is on hand to replace Dr. Brain as host, and also serves as a guide to Dr. Brain’s mental pathways. Also, Rathbone, Dr. Brain’s laboratory rat, provides what limited verbal humor can be found in the game.

Puzzles

* Train of Thought – A real-time path finding puzzle in which the player attempts to guide several (sometimes several dozen) colored balls along the tracks to their respective exit point. Rathbone resembles an Irishman in this puzzle.
* Synaptic Cleft – A real-time game of forces where objects enter from the left and must be guided to a small aperture on the right. Various attractive and repellent obstacles litter the center region. Rathbone has a heavy southern accent and resembles a cowboy in this puzzle.
* Neural Maze – A multi-dimensional maze in which the player must find a way from start to finish. The start and end points are usually on different levels, neither of which having paths leading all the way to the end. The player must often move up and down through dozens of levels several times before finally arriving at the destination. Rathbone has a heavy Brooklyn Accent and looks like a utility worker in this puzzle.
* File Sorting – A pure memory puzzle in which the player must store objects and then retrieve them at a later point. The higher levels involve swapping of compartments to further muddy the waters. Rathbone resembles Rod Serling with a similar theme from The Twilight Zone in this puzzle.
* Pentode – A real-time matching puzzle involving Greek letters, Roman numerals or even periodic elements. Rathbone talks like a stereotypical Hollywood butler for a rich mansion, and you must listen to him to solve the Pentode puzzle.
* The Music Region – A puzzle primarily involving musical aptitude, particularly for reading musical score. A piece is played and the user must correct the score to match the desired musical sound. Rathbone resembles a gentleman similar to the musician Amadeus Mozart from the movie Amadeus and plays the harpsichord.
* 3D Construction – A puzzle of pure spacial orientation. The player must reconstruct the plans for a multi-layered, 3-dimensional object based only on visual inspection and manipulation of an original model. Rathbone has a Scandinavian accent in this game and wears a construction hat.
* Motor Programming – A primitive (non- complete) programming language similar to Logo in which the player must programmatically guide a mini-Dr Brain through a maze of obstacles while collecting a number of items. Rathbone is “Rathbot” in this puzzle, and talks and looks like a robot.
* Word Surge – Similar to the classic word-scramble game, but with slightly more complex possibilities. The strategies for solving the puzzles are similar to those required to solve a Rubic’s Cube. Rathbone resembles a British gentleman from the 18th century in this puzzle.
* Dreamland – The final puzzle, requiring that the player beats the previous puzzles before being able to access it. Almost exactly like the Synaptic Cleft puzzle, except the mouse is attractive rather than repellent to the desired object. Rathbone is not present in this puzzle at all.

“This article is brought to you by Gus Woltmann”.

Mind Quiz: Your Brain Coach, known as Nounenrei: Nou Stress Kei Atama Scan in Japan, is a mental training game for the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable. It is similar to Nintendo’s Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! It involves playing 16 different training exercises to measure and improve particular parts of the player’s brain, such as one’s brain age and its brain stress degree.

On June 29, 2007, Ubisoft, the game’s publisher voluntarily pulled the game from store shelves in the UK upon complaints that the word spastic, a term that is offensive in the UK, was triggered when the player didn’t perform well on certain questions. Ubisoft stated “As soon as we were made aware of the issue we stopped distribution of the product and are now working with retailers to pull the game off the market.”

The only country where the European English version of the game is sold is Australia since the term is not considered especially offensive there.

Do You Have a Good Sense of Humor? Take the Quiz

Plato once said that “Life was meant to be lived as play.” When I ask audience members if they have a sense of humor, I usually get 25 per cent of the group raising their hands. Yet, when I tell a joke, most of the audience laughs. I’d like to expand your understanding of yourself and humor. Underneath the word PLAYFULNESS are more specific terms such as humor and fun. Humor is the ability to give laughter or be the instigator of playfulness. This is the more yang, or masculine principle. Fun, on the other hand, is the ability to receive laughter. This is the more yin, or feminine, principle of playfulness. A useful metaphor may be that humor is the plug, and fun is the socket. The ability to be playful with life is to have both. Some people are good at receiving laughter; they can laugh at jokes or irony, but rarely express humor themselves. These people have a good sense of fun. Conversely, some people use humor often to instill laughter in others, yet may not be able to laugh themselves. Several professional comedians fall into this category. They have a good sense of humor, but not a good sense of fun. The ideal is to have both.

What Are Your Attitudes Towards Humor?

Before building on your sense of humor, it is important to do a personal attitude inventory. Read each statement and think about how often this is true for you…

A) Always B) Mostly C) Don’t Know D) Never

1. Life is hard, mostly a struggle. A B C D

2. When I work I have a lot of fun. A B C D

3. I find I worry a lot in life. A B C D

4. My mental health improves when I’m having fun. A B C D

5. Having fun seems to just get me into trouble as a presenter. A B C D

6. I laugh at myself when I make a mistake. A B C D

7. I feel overwhelmed by my responsibilities. A B C D

8. I take my responsibilities seriously, but myself lightly. A B C D

9. When I’m having fun, other people seem positively affected by me. A B C D

10. When I’m doing something that is just for fun, it feels like a waste of time. A B C D

11. I thrive on adventure. A B C D

12. I’m not playful when I work because there is too much to do. A B C D

13. I put off learning more about humor because I don’t have time. A B C D

14. I am grateful for my life, and make each moment count. A B C D

15. When I’m with a group of people socially it takes me a while to feel relaxed enough to be playful. A B C D

16. Using humor feels too risky. A B C D

17. I’m concerned people will think I’m stupid or foolish if I try to make them laugh. A B C D

18. People generally consider me a positive, upbeat person. A B C D

19. My audiences are usually poker-faced grouches who practice mirth control. A B C D

20. If I’m having fun at the front of the room, others feel uncomfortable. A B C D

21. The people I spend most of my time with are fun-loving people. A B C D

22. I look for what is wrong with a situation, before I look at what is right. A B C D

23. I have a good sense of humor; I can easily make people laugh. A B C D

24. When I was growing up, my family was humorously challenged. A B C D

25. I have a sunny disposition. A B C D

26. I laugh easily. A B C D

27. When things go wrong, I eventually find some angle on it that is funny. A B C D

28. Whenever I start to enjoy myself, I start to feel guilty. A B C D

29. I tend to see the glass as “half empty”. A B C D

30. My humor seems to hurt and/or offend people A B C D

31. I’m less self-conscious when I’m having fun. A B C D

32. I like to stay in control. Having fun often seems too chaotic. A B C D

33. I balance work and play in my life. A B C D

34. I make sure I take time to enjoy myself each day. A B C D

35. Most women aren’t very funny. A B C D

36. Women’s humor is just as valid as men’s. A B C D

“This article is brought to you by Gus Woltmann”.

Type physicalism (also known as reductive materialism, type identity theory, mind-brain identity theory and identity theory of mind) is a theory, in philosophy of mind, which asserts that mental events are type-identical to the physical events in the brain with which they are correlated. The thesis of type physicalism is that mental event types (for example, pains) are identical, perhaps contingently, with specific physical event types in the brain (for example, C-fiber firings).

It is called type identity in order to distinguish it from a similar but distinct theory called the token identity theory. The type-token distinction is easily illustrated by way of example. In the phrase “yellow is yellow is yellow is yellow”, there are only two types of words (”yellow” and “is”) but there are seven tokens (four “yellow” and three “is” tokens).

Philosophy of mind is a branch of modern analytic philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e. the relationship of the mind to the body, is commonly seen as the central issue in philosophy of mind, although there are other issues concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to the physical body.

Dualism and monism are the two major schools of thought that attempt to resolve the mind-body problem. Dualism can be traced back to Plato, Aristotle and the Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy, but it was most precisely formulated by René Descartes in the 17th century. Substance Dualists argue that the mind is an independently existing substance, whereas Property Dualists maintain that the mind is a group of independent properties that emerge from and cannot be reduced to the brain, but that it is not a distinct substance.

Monism is the position that mind and body are not ontologically distinct kinds of entities. This view was first advocated in Western philosophy by Parmenides in the 5th century BC and was later espoused by the 17th century rationalist Baruch Spinoza. Physicalists argue that only the entities postulated by physical theory exist, and that the mind will eventually be explained in terms of these entities as physical theory continues to evolve. Idealists maintain that the mind is all that exists and that the external world is either mental itself, or an illusion created by the mind. Neutral monists adhere to the position that there is some other, neutral substance, and that both matter and mind are properties of this unknown substance. The most common monisms in the 20th and 21st centuries have all been variations of physicalism; these positions include behaviorism, the type identity theory, anomalous monism and functionalism.

Most modern philosophers of mind adopt either a reductive or non-reductive physicalist position, maintaining in their different ways that the mind is not something separate from the body. These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, especially in the fields of sociobiology, computer science, evolutionary psychology and the various neurosciences. Other philosophers, however, adopt a non-physicalist position which challenges the notion that the mind is a purely physical construct. Reductive physicalists assert that all mental states and properties will eventually be explained by scientific accounts of physiological processes and states. Non-reductive physicalists argue that although the brain is all there is to the mind, the predicates and vocabulary used in mental descriptions and explanations are indispensable, and cannot be reduced to the language and lower-level explanations of physical science.Continued neuroscientific progress has helped to clarify some of these issues. However, they are far from having been resolved, and modern philosophers of mind continue to ask how the subjective qualities and the intentionality (aboutness) of mental states and properties can be explained in naturalistic terms.

A mental event is a particular occurrence of something going on in the mind or mind substitute. It can be a thought, a dream, a feeling, a realization, or any other mental activity. Mental events are not limited to human thought but can be associated with animal and artificial intelligence as well.

“This article is brought to you by Gus Woltmann”.

Article Writing, Not Brain Cramming
Most of us have come across those article writing campaigns in which the author used the same words over and over. Not only do these articles not make any sense, but they are incredibly hard to read. The point being, that if the article is not well written and readers cannot decipher the message, what good is it? After a few sentences of a keyword crammed article most people click onto a competitor’s site because they are looking for good information, not search engine cramming.

Not only are readers taken back by keyword stuffing, many of the search engines as well as the article submission sites will reject or black list those sites that insist on posting veiled attempts to bring in higher traffic ratings. This might work if traffic count was the only thing that a company or website was attempting to achieve. However, most sites, are looking to increase their revenue, sales or list building campaigns and can do so with well written articles, instead of keyword stuffed junk.

Article writing can be a very lucrative and promising way to build a site, product or service, but it must be done correctly. Most people turn to the internet to learn more about a particular product and when they are faced with a poorly written article, they quickly become discouraged. Staying away from article cramming or excessive use of keywords, the success rate greatly improves. Not only is the marketing campaign delivering good quality information, the reputation is saved as well as the ability to stay on the “A” list instead of the black list.

The Conscious and the Subconscious Mind

One of the words that you will always find in self-help books and audio programs is the word ’subconscious.’ This is the word that every success coach and psychologist use to bring out the message of basic self-development. However, do you really know what’s subconscious is?

The prefix ’sub’ means below or under or even hidden, and when it is read together with the word ‘conscious’, it literally means below or under consciousness. For that, we can summarize that subconscious is the mind that operates below the level of our normal consciousness (unconscious is sometimes used to substitute the word subconscious). It also means that this part of the mind is hidden from us almost all the time.

The Conscious and The Subconscious Mind

First and foremost, human minds are made up of two virtual parts: the conscious and the subconscious. The word ‘virtual’ is used here because it is impossible for us to separate the two minds and locate them in any part of our bodies. Mind and body are two separate entities and for that your mind is not your brain. Like your liver and heart, the brain is an organ that performs numerous activities that sustain your life.

The subconscious is very powerful but please note that it is not in the sense that the subconscious is better or greater than the conscious. Subconscious and conscious are both great tools only when we know how to employ them wisely and correctly.

Both subconscious and conscious play different roles in sustaining our lives and which also mean they both compliment with each other. The subconscious cannot substitute the conscious and which is also true, vice-versa. You cannot prefer one more than the other because they are just two different kind of minds that possess different strengths and perform different functions.

The conscious mind is the part or level of your mind which are reading this article right now; the state where you have your full consciousness. Conscious is the mind that does all the thinking and it guides you in making decision. It thinks in a logical way and thus, it possesses the ability of reasoning and very often, the solutions that come up by the conscious mind are always to serve to our best, at least in its own perception.

On the other hand, the subconscious is the part of your mind that does not possess the ability of reasoning because it could never think. Some people even refer the subconscious as the dumb mind. It makes no decision and it depends entirely on the conscious mind to feed it with information. Whatever the conscious mind impress on it will be taken seriously, be it right or wrong, good or bad. The subconscious’s job is to execute them and it does it without question.

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The causes of amnesia are organic or functional.
Organic causes include damage to the brain, through trauma or disease, or use of certain (generally sedative) drugs.
Functional causes are psychological factors, such as defense mechanisms..

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Believers consider spiritual energy to be of a different type than those known to science, and therapies involved are often classed as alternative medicine.
Various ideas pertaining to spiritual energy have been postulated in various cultures.
Though there are varying approaches, energy therapies are typically based on the premise that – on a fundamental level – everything in the universe is made of energy.
From this perspective, human beings are also fundamentally energy.
Theories of spiritual energy are not validated by the scientific method, thus are dismissed as non-empirical beliefs by the scientific community..
Hallucination
A hallucination is a sensory perception experienced in the absence of an external stimulus, as distinct from an illusion, which is a misperception of an external stimulus.
Hallucinations may occur in any sensory modality – visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, or proprioceptive (sense of balance and position in space).
Psychological research has presented the idea that hallucinations may result from biases in what are known as metacognitive abilities.
These are abilities that allow us to monitor or draw inferences from our own internal psychological states (such as intentions, memories, beliefs and thoughts).
The ability to discriminate between self-generated and external sources of information is considered to be an important metacognitive skill and one which may break down to cause hallucinatory experiences..

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People are often identified as dyslexic when their reading or writing problems cannot be explained by a lack of intellectual ability, inadequate instruction, or sensory problems such as poor eyesight.
Some disagreement exists as to whether dyslexia does indeed exist as a condition, or whether it simply reflects individual differences among different readers..
Procrastination
Procrastination is the deferment or avoidance of an action or task which requires completion by focusing on some other action or task.

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