Some random thoughts to pass the day

Don't all those goody-goodies who tell you that life is "how you take it" make you want to scream? Me too, but let us have patience with them.

Life's not about how you take it, it's about the glory of living deliberately and crafting circumstances, magnetizing players and forging alliances, leveraging life and engaging the magic so that you can have the sun, the moon, and the stars.

What happens when someone worries?

Basically, they think of 100 reasons why something might go wrong. And all those thoughts then struggle to become things, sometimes overriding their more constructive thoughts. That is the power of worry.

Now, let us say you want something fantastic to manifest in your life.

Hypothetically, let us say you want a blog. 

Have you closed your eyes yet and imagined 100 reasons why it might come to you easily, fast, and harmoniously? I think you should.

Do you visualize?

You eat to nourish your body. You sleep to rejuvenate your spirit. You study, work, and apply yourself for emotional gains. You exercise to tighten your muscles. You listen to music to entertain yourself.

You are not at all averse to investing time and energy for the rewards you seek.

So how about you spare just a few minutes every day to visualize the life of your dreams? Because nothing else you could ever do will make such a profound difference in your fortunes and misfortunes as working with new pictures in your mind.

Can you start today to think good thoughts?

When you think a new thought, entertain a new dream, or mentally choose a new goal, your thoughts "leave" you and go out — in every direction — to the farthest corners of the planet. They carry a life force all their own, like ripples created when a pebble is tossed into a pond.

You cannot change this, but you can totally use the heck out of it.

Think good thoughts.

Wii Video Games Help Stroke Patients Recover More Quickly

My thanks to Bill Daggat for this post:

Stroke patients who engaged in Wii games regained lost strength and motor skills more easily and more quickly than their counterparts who played conventional recreational games, according to Canadian researchers at the Stroke Outcomes Research Unit at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. The study involved 22 people between the ages of 41 and 83 whose strokes left one arm weak, although they were able to touch their chin or opposite knee. Two months after their stroke, half of the patients began a two-week course of video-game therapy with Wii tennis and Wii Cooking Mama, which uses movements that simulate cutting a potato, peeling an onion, slicing meat, and shredding cheese. The other 11 patients played recreational games, such as cards or Jenga (a block-stacking and balancing game). Both groups engaged in eight doctor-supervised sessions, about an hour long, over a two-week period.

Researchers found significant motor improvement in the speed and extent of recovery in the patients who used the Wii technology, which allows users to gauge their actions on a television screen with nearly real-time sensory feedback. When evaluated after the therapy and again a month later, the patients in the Wii group could reach out and grab an object, such as a can of soda, about seven seconds quicker than those who played the recreational games. A larger clinical study of 120 patients is underway. 

Feb. 25, 2010 (San Antonio) -- Active Wii video games may bring some fun into stroke recovery, helping patients regain lost strength and motor skills in the process.

In a first-of-its-kind study, 11 stroke victims with weakness in their arms could reach out and grab objects more easily and more quickly after two weeks of playing the active video games.

In contrast, 11 stroke patients who played card or block games for two weeks showed no change in arm strength afterward, says Gustavo Saposnik, MD, director of the Stroke Outcomes Research Unit at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.

"For the first time, we've shown that the virtual reality gaming system is safe, feasible, and potentially effective at improving motor function after stroke," he tells WebMD.

Until the video games prove safe in larger numbers of stroke survivors --shoulder painbeing the main concern -- it’s too soon to recommend people start playing Wii games after stroke, Saposnik says.
But should the video games pan out in a study of 120 stroke patients now in the planning stage, the Canadian researchers believe they will become an adjunct to traditional stroke rehab programs.
"The great thing about gaming is that it engages the patient and motivates them to participate -- for hours. It gets them to use the [weak] arm repeatedly, which is what is needed to regain strength. And it's fun," says American Stroke Association spokeswoman Pamela Duncan, PhD, a physical therapist at Duke University in Durham, N.C. Duncan is familiar, but not involved, with the research.

Stroke Rehab With Wii Games

Saposnik says he got the idea for the study after his 5-year-old daughter told him their Wii tennis match was stacked against her.

To even out the odds, the left-handed researcher tried playing with his right hand. "It was difficult. But over time, I got better, leading me to believe [the games] could be beneficial for stroke rehabilitation," he says.

The study involved 22 people whose strokes left one arm weak, although they were able to touch their chin or opposite knee.

Two months after their stroke, half began a two-week course of video game therapy with Wii tennis and Wii Cooking Mama, which uses movements that simulate cutting a potato, peeling an onion, slicing meat, and shredding cheese.

The patients could use a Velcro strap to attach the controller to their hand if necessary.

The others played recreational card games or Jenga, a block stacking and balancing game.

Both groups engaged in eight doctor-supervised sessions, about an hour long, over a two-week period. "During each session, they'd engage in one game for 30 minutes, then the other for the next 30 minutes," Saposnik says.

The findings were presented here at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2010.

Source:www.webmd.com/stroke/news/20100225/wii-games-speed-stroke-rehab

How do we know how to tell time

As I get older, the mysteries of the mind grow more interesting. One of the mysteries that puzzles me is how do we understand the passage of time. Some days time goes by so slowly (The Rightgous Brothers)  yet on other days time keeps slipping into the future (Steve Miller Band). I have as I imagine you have sat and watched time slowly slide by and at other times time rushes past.
So what do the Scientist say: My thanks to Bill Daggatt for this story and links:

The ability to tell and keep time plays an integral role in what we do every day - from recognizing speech patterns to creating music. Yet, no one knows how the brain keeps time. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have begun to unravel the mystery by showing that a network of neurons kept alive in a petri dish could be "trained" to keep time. The research will enhance understanding of how the brain works and how certain conditions that have resulted in time-keeping deficits, such as dyslexia, could be treated.
 The neurons, derived from the brain of a rat, were trained to fire for specific amounts of time, depending on how long they were stimulated by electric current. The team stimulated two sets of neurons with simple patterns, which consisted of electric stimuli separated by different intervals lasting from a 20th of a second up to half a second. After two hours of electric stimulation, the scientists tested to see how each cell responded to just a single electrical pulse. In the networks trained with a short interval, the activity lasted for a short period of time. Conversely, in the networks trained with a long interval, network activity lasted for a longer amount of time. Based on the three-year study, scientists have hypothesized that the ability to distinguish time is more generalized in the brain, meaning that pockets of neurons throughout the brain are capable of keeping time on their own without tapping into a centralized area.
 The researchers used an electrical current to stimulate networks of cultured brain cells, similar to giving the cells an electric shock. While these networks contained tens of thousands of neurons, they make up only a small fraction of the 100 million or so neurons present in a rat brain. (The human brain contains about 100 billion neurons.)

The cells were stimulated at specific time intervals, ranging from one-twentieth of a second (50 milliseconds) to half a second (500 milliseconds).

After two hours of cell shocking, the scientists tested to see how each cell responded to just a single electrical pulse. They saw the network activity — the way the neurons fire, and whether or not this firing spreads or propagates throughout the network — differed depending on the training interval.

In the networks that had been trained on the short intervals, say 50 ms, the activity lasted for about 50 ms before dying out. But in the networks trained at 500 ms, the activity lasted for longer, around 500 ms.

"In a manner of speaking, those circuits could tell time in the range that they were stimulated with or trained with," said Dean Buonomano, professor of neurobiology and psychology at UCLA. "In other words if you needed to tell time, [to] tell 500 milliseconds, it would not really be possible to do that with the [brain] slices trained on 100 milliseconds, but it would be with brain slices trained with 500 milliseconds."

Scientists don't know whether this ability to tell time depends on a single part of the brain, a sort of centralized clock, or whether the function is more generalized, so networks of neurons throughout the brain are inherently capable of keeping time on their own without an orchestrator.

The results give weight to the latter hypothesis, since the segregated neurons could learn to keep time without tapping into a centralized brain area.

Ultimately, learning how the brain tells time will help us better understand how he brain works, which is important for figuring out what goes wrong when the brain has problems, Buonomano said.

"If we don’t understand how the brain works, we don't understand how to fix it," he said.

Interestingly, there are no known diseases in which a person's ability to keep time is completely lost, Buonomano said, although certain conditions, such as dyslexia, appear to have time-keeping deficits. This is in contrast to something like forming memories, where lesions in certain parts of the brain can prevent people from making long-term memories, he said.

This further supports the idea that timing keeping is generalized rather than centralized, he said.

The study was published June 13 in the journal Nature Neuroscience

Sources:http://esciencenews.com/articles/2010/06/15/ucla.scientists.teach.cultured.brain.cells.keep.time

www.livescience.com/health/brain-cells-keep-time-100618.html

To those of us born 1946-1960

No matter what our kids and the new generation think about us,

 WE ARE AWESOME !!!

OUR Lives are LIVING PROOF !!!

To Those of   Us  Born

1946 - 1960 :

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED THE

'40s, '50s, '60s !!

 

First, we survived being born to mothers who may have smoked and/or drank
While they were pregnant.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.
Then, after that trauma, we were

 

Put to sleep on our tummies
In baby cribs covered
With bright colored lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets,

And, when we rode our bikes,
We had baseball caps,
Not helmets, or no caps at all on our heads.

As infants and children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, no booster seats, no seat belts, no air bags, bald tires and sometimes no brakes.

Riding in the back of a pick- up truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.

 

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this.

 

We ate cupcakes, white bread, real butter, and bacon. We drank Kool-Aid made with real white sugar. And we weren't overweight.

WHY?

 Because we were always outside playing...that's why!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day.
--And, we were OKAY.

We would spend hours building
Our go-carts out of scraps
And then ride them down the hill,

Only to find out we forgot the brakes.. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem..

We did not have Play Stations, Nintendos and X-boxes. There were

• No video games, no 150 channels on cable,
• No video movies or DVDs,
• No surround-sound or CDs,
• No cell phones,
• No personal computers,
• No Internet and no chat rooms.

WE HAD FRIENDS

And we went outside and found  them!

 

We fell out of trees, got cut,
Broke bones and teeth,
And there were no lawsuits
From those accidents.

 

 We would get spankings with wooden spoons, switches, ping-pong paddles, or just a bare hand, and no one would call child services to report abuse.

We ate worms, and mud pies
Made from dirt, and
The worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls, and
although we were told it would happen- we did not put out very many eyes.

 

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them.

Team Sports had tryouts
And not everyone made the team.

Those who didn't had to learn
To deal with disappointment.

Imagine that!!

 

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

Our generations has produced some of the best   risk-takers, Problem solvers, and inventors ever.

The past 50 to years have seen an explosion of innovation and new ideas..We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.  if YOU are one of those born

  

Between 1946-1960, CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives  for our own good.

While you are at it, forward it to your kids, so they will know how brave and lucky their parents were.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it ?

Creative Loafing

Have you tried creative loafing? It is a good excuse to relax, and also a great way to come up with new ideas and solutions to problems. How does one creatively loaf? Just relax, open your mind, and use one of the many idea-generating techniques.

A Creative Loafing Technique

My favorite technique is one that is best for generating new ideas rather than solving specific problems. It can be used in any area of life. It is simply the imagining of new applications for existing ideas.

Once, while laying on the couch, I saw an advertisement for a company that uses a dog to find mold in your house. You may know that dogs can be trained to sniff out almost anything. There was even a news story a year or two ago about a dog that could detect if you had cancer.

What was my first thought? "I wonder what else dogs could find by smell?" The first idea that came to mind was to use dogs to find other pets. They find lost people so well, so why not have a service to find lost pets? just one sniff of the cats favorite rug, and the dog is on the trail.

A Creative Loafing Example

You can certainly use your relaxing times to just randomly ponder things, but why not put creative loafing together with a good idea-generating technique. Then you can lay under a tree and have an endless stream of creative new ideas. For this "new-application technique," just start with the essence of the idea, and look for new ways to use it.

For example, you might lay there and think about the pneumatic tubes that deliver your money and papers at a bank's drive-through. The essence is a cartridge that delivers things through a tube using air pressure. I imagine the same thing would work for human transport. Could you ride "the tube" to the next city, or maybe make this into an amusement park ride?

Look other aspects of an idea too. For example, these tubes allow several customers to be waited on at once. Where else do they need this? A fast food drive through comes to mind. Perhaps pneumatic tubes would spill drinks, but the idea of multiple car lanes can be used. Several drive-through windows, radiating out like spokes, at different angles, would allow three different lines of cars.

If you want to practice using this technique, just lay back and...

- Imagine three new uses for pedal-power.

- Imagine two new uses for magnets.

- Think of a new application for Darwin's theory of natural selection, outside of biology.

Can you see how easy it is to come up with new ideas? Why not learn a few more techniques? Then apply them to personal problems. Finally, to make the best use of your creative loafing time, keep a notebook or your personal recorder ready.

Whimsy

The Town Turtles  of Sandy Springs

This community art/fund raising project involves seventy-five 56" tall "shelled ambassadors" that graced their community throughout the summer of 2005. Wonderful art and wonderful turtles


A few years ago Orlando had large cow statues all over town that people had painted and decorated. I wonder if other cities would be bold enough to use art to unite and apply some magic to their cities.

There is magic in the moment

There is always beauty or magic in the moment

If you allow yourself to experience the magic, outdoors or inside, no matter where you are, you can stop and watch the magic unfold around you or you can hear the  music for your soul, in your mind and drown out the voices that don't allow you to see or hear the magic in life, that is around you. Ever watch a toddler experience life their eyes light up at the new wonders they see, hear and experience. we used to allow oursleves this magid, and we can again we can do it anywhere.

There is no bad weather, just inappropriate clothes or expectations. The temperature today would have been bliss in March, right? (Please adjust the examples to fit your region.)


There is no – It’s cold -- like a fact. Cold is a judgment. It may be below 50 F (10 C) but cold or hot is up to you. Pleasant or nasty is your expectations, not the temp.

You can say legitimately, “I’m cold and I’m tired of endless gray days.” or you can say, "I'm cold, but the endless days of gray will soon be gone and blue sky's will soon be here" The weather and the day just IS. Get it?

This is an  example of the adage – Pain is guaranteed, suffering is optional. Weather happens. I inflict my own unhappiness with an internal story that the weather is supposed to be some way that it isn’t. If you want to capture the magic in the moment, change your internal story and fall in love with what’s right here, right now.

Feng Shui

Some interesting advice I received in May:


1. Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully

2. Marry a person you love to talk to. As you get older,the conversational skills will be as important as any other

3.Don't believe all you hear, spend all you have or sleep all you want

4. When you say, "I love you, " mean it.

5. When you say, "I'm sorry", look the person in the eye

6. Be engaged at least six months before you marry or move in with each other

7. Believe in love at first sight

8. Never laugh at any one's dreams. People who don't have dreams, don't have much

9. Love deeply and passionately. You might get hurt, but it is the only way to live live completely.

10. In disagreements, fight fairly. No name calling

11. Don't judge people by their relatives

12. Talk slowly, but think quickly.

13. When someone asks you a question you don't want to answer, smile and ask, "Why do you want to know?"

14. Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk

15. Say "Bless you" when someone sneezes

16. When you lose, don't lose the lesson.

17. Remember the three R's: Respect for self, Respect for others, Responsibility for all your actions

18. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship

19. When you realize that you have made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct the mistake

20. Smile when you picking up the phone. The caller will hear the smile in your voice

21. Spend some time alone

Think about butting out

Life should have more meaning, but there are always something holding you back, and you find it difficult to break through the obstacles as they are stacked against you. Compile a list of some of the important changes you'd like make in your life and  and then list the reason you are not making these changes.

For example: I'd like to spend more time with my family, but I am too (fill in your own but or check off one of these:)
__ tired
__travel to much for work
__have too much work after hours.
__list your but here:

I'd like to eat better, but I'm ......
I'd like to read more, but I .....

Now go back to each item and replace the word but with the word and. Then add the following phrase and fill it out So I need to......

I'd like to spend more time with my family, and I travel a lot for my job. So I need to ....
I'd like to eat better, and I'm surrounded at work by sugary snacks. So I need to ....
I'd like to read more, and I rarely have time when I can sit down with a book. So I need to ....
Exchanging and for but moves you to a different mind set, my wife (an English teacher would say)" it's grammar's way of saying, "deal with this."

Take a Sabbath to help you find a way from but to and

Select one day a week and stop working; don't answer your email, ignore your voice mail, turn off your phone, use the day for rest, peace, reflection and a time to find or re find the balance missing from your life.
We sometimes need to take  important punctuation marks in busy lives, religious folks call this the Sabbath, and do this every 7 days. However you can take the day arbitrarily and if used wisely your day can give you the same sense of peace. When you do this you have to work hard to ignore those who will say to you, you are just using a day to be lazy and not do anything. Tell them they are incorrect, you are actually helping your mind refresh, renew and you are searching to find a way from but to and