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An amazing interview with Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, July 2013 Highlights: What is your area of expertise as a writer or online publisher? I'm not an expert and I aspire never to be one. As Frank Lloyd Wright rightly put it, "An expert is a man who has stopped thinking because 'he knows.'" Brain Pickings began as my record of what I was learning, and it remains a record of what I continue to learn - the writing is just the vehicle for recording, for making sense. That said, one thing I've honed over the years - in part by countless hours of reading and in part because I suspect it's how my brain is wired - is drawing connections between things," "Do you believe in "writer's block"? If so, how do you avoid it? I think the operative word here is "believe." If you fixate on it, it'll be there. It's kind of like insomnia - the more you think about not being able to fall asleep, the less able to fall asleep you become. It's different for everyone, of course, but I find that you break through that alleged "block" simply by writing. As Tchaikovsky elegantly put it, "A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood." The writer's creativity … Define creativity. The ability to connect the seemingly unconnected and meld existing knowledge into new insight about some element of how the world works. That's practical creativity. Then there's moral creativity: To apply that skill towards some kind of wisdom on how the world ought to work."

great article on research showing how mastering a difficult new skill and regular exercise not only delay brain declines but can increase brain volume and its functioning

Amazing three minute video with Deepak Chopra talking and visualizing how the "global brain," the social networks we now create through our participation in Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc., change our brains and our opportunities. We need to use this video in our E-vents.

Amazing TED talk by an Italian artist who created a global community to help him cure his brain cancer. He created a web site, La Cura (the cure) and posted his brain scans online, inviting anyone to help him heal as a whole person. His site went viral and he received over 500,000 contacts. Through his site, he formed his team of neurosurgeons, oncologists, and several thousand people who were there for his cure as a person, not just for his cancer. He offers his open source model as one for anyone to do, for as he says, it is not just healing for himself, but healing for all of us that matters.

by Maud Purcell. States that scientific evidence supports journaling accesses your left brain, which is analytical an rational, but also allows your right brain to be free to create, intuit, and feel. This removes mental blocks and allows one to use all of your brain.

Ronni Bennett's blog on As Time Goes By explores how all the automatic devices on sites from NYT and AARP and Daily Kos that involve popups, slide down covers, and sound are disrupting our concentration and brain health, and how the disruptions on these sites are creating longer-lasting interruptions in our ability to concentrate and think. September 10, 2014

Opinion piece by Daniel J. Levitin, August 9, 2013 on resetting your brain with a vacation.

Blog post by Lisa Lane in her (Online) Teaching Blog, June 25, 2011 She reviews Pink's book on A Whole New Mind. Excerpt: "Accumulation -> Meaning Pink says the predominance of the baby boomer mentality means that the goal of accumulating meterial goods is changing to the desire to find meaning in life, a kind of "post-materialism"." For each chapter on these aptitudes, Pink provides resources and tips to develop your own brain along the new lines. Thus we go from theory in Chapter 1 to a series of storied examples, then each chapter ends with self-help advice. (It's already pretty light - I find it very funny that there's a "Summarized for Busy People" version available.) But the mental yoga commercial was a distraction from the main idea. What's significant here is that right-brained, big picture, contextual, design-based thinking will likely be increasingly respected in our culture.

Blog by Annie Murphy Paul, June 20, 2013, PBS Next Avenue on 8 things that can make you smarter. "4. Attention You've probably heard about the "marshmallow test," a famous experiment conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the late 1960s. He found that children who could resist eating a marshmallow in return for the promise of two marshmallows later on did better in school and in their careers. Well, there's a new marshmallow test that we face every day: the ability to resist the urge to check email, respond to a text or see what's happening on Facebook or Twitter. We've all heard that because "digital natives" grew up multitasking they excel at it, but in fact, we now know there are information-processing bottlenecks in everybody's brain that prevent us from paying attention to two things at the same time. Focused attention is an important internal situation that we must cultivate in order to fully express our intelligence." Another excerpt: "A common example: The ready availability of technology has convinced many people that they don't need to learn facts anymore, because they can always "just Google it." In fact, research from cognitive science shows that the so-called "21st-century skills" that we're always hearing about - critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, creativity - can't emerge in a vacuum. They must develop in the context of a rich base of knowledge that is stored on the original hard drive, one's own brain. For tech to make us smarter, we need to know when to put it away.

blog post by Jennifer Gilhool, 6.4.2013 "You are connected to work 24/7. You don't need your lap top to be connected. You are connected via BlackBerry, iPhone and iPad to name just a few. These devices no longer provide flexibility. Instead, they tether you to the office. They enable you to work all the time and anywhere. And, now, many companies believe that is the definition of flexibility: "'What flexibility means today is not part time,' the head of work-life at one large organization told me recently. 'What people want is the ability to work anytime, anywhere.' That's true if your target labor pool is twenty-somethings and men married to homemakers. The head of HR at another large organization asked, when I described the hours problem, 'What do you mean, how can we get women to work more hours?'" - Why Men Work So Many Hours, Joan C. Williams, May 29, 2013 Harvard Business Review Why Your Manager Doesn't Want You To Innovate Ron Ashkenas Ron Ashkenas Contributor LinkedIn: Busting 8 Damaging Myths About What It Can Do For Your Career 85 Broads 85 Broads Contributor Someone has taken the "human" out of "Human Resources" departments across America. And, this behavior is not limited to operations in America. I work for a multi-national corporation that cannot seem to wean itself from the 24 hour work day. Colleagues in China often begin their day with a 6:00 a.m. meeting and end it with a meeting that begins at 10:00 p.m. or, worse, 11:00 p.m. To combat this problem, the company leadership agreed to a global meeting policy. The policy provides that global meetings should occur only between the hours of 6:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. and that no meetings should occur on Friday nights in Asia Pacific. Further, the policy provides a 10 hour fatigue rule. In other words, there should be 10 hours between your last meeting of the day and your first meeting on the next day. First, if you need a global meeting policy, you are in

Brain Pickings, blog by Maria Popova, master curator, March 9, 2012 Extremely interesting blog on discovering information on the internet and sharing it with others.

Great article by Susan Weinschenk, Brain Wise: Work better, work smarter, September 11, 2012, and why dopamine keeps us "seeking" when we already have enough information. excerpt: Do you ever feel like you are addicted to email or twitter or texting? Do you find it impossible to ignore your email if you see that there are messages in your inbox? Do you think that if you could ignore your incoming email or messages you might actually be able to get something done at work? You are right!" ... "Instead of dopamine causing you to experience pleasure, the latest research shows that dopamine causes seeking behavior. Dopamine causes you to want, desire, seek out, and search. It increases your general level of arousal and your goal-directed behavior. From an evolutionary stand-point this is critical. The dopamine seeking system keeps you motivated to move through your world, learn, and survive. It's not just about physical needs such as food, or sex, but also about abstract concepts. Dopamine makes you curious about ideas and fuels your searching for information. Research shows that it is the opioid system (separate from dopamine) that makes us feel pleasure." Turn off the cues - One of the most important things you can do to prevent or stop a dopamine loop, and be more productive is to turn off the cues. Adjust the settings on your cell phone and on your laptop, desktop or tablet so that you don't receive the automatic notifications. Automatic notifications are touted as wonderful features of hardware, software, and apps. But they are actually causing you to be like a rat in a cage. If you want to get work done you need to turn off as many auditory and visual cues as possible. It's the best way to prevent and break the dopamine loops. What do you think? How do you deal with dopamine loops? Are you willing to turn off your cues?

great short video on how we can be much happier, partly because we can use daily expressions of gratitude and joy to become happy. Happy brains can become happier when they express gratitude and compassion.

Learning is a good way to not only create fresh neurons, but keep them active and healthy. From Infinite Unknown blog

good article on brain function and learning

Reference cited by Bevan Rogel. Donna Sapolin, the editorial director and general manager of Next Avenue wrote this blog about the nine principles cited by Josh Waitzkin to keep your brain sharp, learn new skills, and sustain employment

The reference from Bevan

Blog post by Beth Kanter on best kinds of learning at conferences/seminars, 5.23.13 Excerpt: It cites Sharon Bowman's book on Using Brain Science to Make Science Stick. "The book offers several simple principles to incorporate: Movement is better than sitting Having participants talk is better than listening Images are better than words for instructional aids Writing is better than reading Shorter is better than longer Different delivery options are better than the same"

Short video (under 4 minutes) that stresses importance of focused attention, unplugging, focusing on one thing at a time.

Excellent video on why 20s are critical adult forming period--brain is fully formed for adulthood; "Plan and not quite enough time to do great things"--Leonard Bernstein Musical chair relationships and fear of not being able to sit down at age 30 with partner for life can cause bad decision making Post millennial crisis is not having the career that you want, or family that you want Story of Emma--at age 25--"having an identity crisis". Thought she might want to work in art or entertainment. Lived with boyfriend who displayed temper more than ambition. Head in lap, and sobbed for hour. In case of emergency, please call. who will be there for me? Told her three things that all 20 somethings need to hear: 1. Get identity capital--investment in who you might want to be next. Identity capital begets identity capital. Discounting exploration is not supposed to count when it is procrastination. 2. New piece of capital or person to date comes from weak ties--half of 20 somethings are underemployed, and half of them are not--reaching out to weak ties is how you connect; 3. You can't pick your family but you can pick your friends. You can pick your family and the time is now. The best time to work on your marriage is before you are married. Consciously choosing what you want. Found an old roommate's cousin who helped her get a job; married and has plenty of emergency contacts. One good conversation, one good Ted Talk can have an enormous impact. "Thirty is not the new 20, claim your adulthood, get your identity capital, reach out to weak ties to make your family.