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Interesting & quick post on research into the neurological basis of reading.

The English city of Manchester has come up with a simple formula it hopes will help keep its citizens trim: eat right, get stuff. Exercise, get more stuff.

Originally a French word meaning "the twittering of birds," jargon, in English, was applied to the codes used by criminals who did not want law-abiding citizens to know what they were saying. Today jargon words are coined not to confuse outsiders but because the objects, jobs, or situations they describe may have no equivalents outside a particular profession.

Ian McEwan is a world-renowned Booker Prize-winning English novelist and screenwriter. Steven Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational...

Therapist Joe Lerner continues to work at resolving his own issues. In this latest installment he shares a couple of successes. Some worthwhile meditation books from Amazon are advertised - three of them are by Eknath Easwaran, a Hindu English professor who came to the US in the 60s. He gained a following as a meditation teacher, and like Joe, I appreciate his passage meditation approach. Seeing the Easwaran books tonight was like unexpectedly meeting an old friend.

Welcome to Manuscriptedit.com, your online partner for English language editing, proofreading, medical writing, formatting, design & development and publication support services. We offer a comprehensive manuscript editing service before its submission for publication as well as after acceptance by the peer review process.

Brain, bodily awareness, and the emergence of a conscious self: these entities and their relations are explored by Germanphilosopher and cognitive scientist Metzinger. Extensively working with neuroscientists he has come to the conclusion that, in fact, there is no such thing as a "self" -- that a "self" is simply the content of a model created by our brain - part of a virtual reality we create for ourselves. But if the self is not "real," he asks, why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct the self? In a series of fascinating virtual reality experiments, Metzinger and his colleagues have attempted to create so-called "out-of-body experiences" in the lab, in order to explore these questions. As a philosopher, he offers a discussion of many of the latest results in robotics, neuroscience, dream and meditation research, and argues that the brain is much more powerful than we have ever imagined. He shows us, for example, that we now have the first machines that have developed an inner image of their own body -- and actually use this model to create intelligent behavior. In addition, studies exploring the connections between phantom limbs and the brain have shown us that even people born without arms or legs sometimes experience a sensation that they do in fact have limbs that are not there. Experiments like the "rubber-hand illusion" demonstrate how we can experience a fake hand as part of our self and even feel a sensation of touch on the phantom hand form the basis and testing ground for the idea that what we have called the "self" in the past is just the content of a transparent self-model in our brains. Now, as new ways of manipulating the conscious mind-brain appear on the scene, it will soon become possible to alter our subjective reality in an unprecedented manner. The cultural consequences of this, Metzinger claims, may be immense: we will need a new approach to ethics, and we will be forced to think about ourselves in a fundamentally new way. At

With Globalization making an impact, gone are the days when one could master just a single language. In the past, native speakers of commonly spoken languages, such as English, could go about conducting their international business without any problem.

That same evening, Bertha Day, the abbey's catering manager, also heard the singing. "I knew that Mrs. Mears, a local lady, had died," she said. Later both Sedgwick and Mrs. Day realized that they had heard the monks of Beaulieu Abbey singing a mass - their custom when one of the inhabitants of the nearby village had died. But no monks had lived in Beaulieu Abbey since 1538.