Try To Fall in Love Once A Month – A Thought Exercise

Falling in love is a great feeling. The bliss of happy thoughts floating through my mind making everything seem a little brighter and better. It’s inspiring and it is an experience that is worth doing over and over again.

I am single, so I can repeat it a lot.

It isn’t the full fledged love that is so revered by romance novel readers, in fact, it isn’t really love at all. It’s more of an infatuation/distraction thing that I use to help me lose myself in thought. I don’t think it’s dangerous to my well-being because I’m not risking anything. In fact, it’s a device that I use to help me figure out what I’m thinking or, when thoughts are not coming, to inspire my thinking.

It does not deal with real people or at least any tangible aspect of real people. It isn’t love for the sake of companion or partnership – my goal with it isn’t to find lasting happiness, it’s to find a muse to riff on. Over the last years I’ve noticed that I write songs with more ease whenever I am feeling something. As with most expressive art, I have an easier time capturing feelings in if they are a little darker – I think that has something to do with negative emotional states being easier to maintain so you have a chance to actually capture their essence in words. But I don’t like writing lyrics or poetry all the time because going to that bad place, or staying in it, is uncomfortable. My last good stint of song writing was during my last few months in Chatham before I made the decision to return to Milton. It’s of no surprise that I was extremely unhappy during that period of my life.

What my quest for love deals with now is the idea of love and the possibilities that meeting someone new presents to me. I truly believe that relationships have the most potential right before the two people met. Before you know anything about another person, you can be anything to each other because limits have not been placed on the relationship. A world of opportunity exists provided we do not met or exchange any information that would place limits on these possibilities. This belief is both theoretically sound and useful in a practical sense as a thought exercise.

A commuter friend clued me into this practice. She takes the train to Toronto almost every weekday and develops “train crushes” on some of the people she sees during her travels. If you don’t commute on the train you may never have thought about it, but people tend to take the same train, riding on the same car, sit at the same spot and walk the same route everyday. Humans are creatures of habit and they naturally tend to automate the commuting experience because first thing in the morning you don’t really want to be thinking about anything. Well, she sees many of the same people day in day out and, over time, allows herself to float away in love fantasies. She has also noticed how finding anything out about these people will kill everything. Her crushes, like mine, only exist in a vacuum and will quickly fade away when new information is uncovered about the objects of our desire.

Why do we do it? Her reason and my reasons are very different. She didn’t have a blackberry or a laptop so she couldn’t work on the train. It was her, her iPod, the view of the Gardner and her crushes. But she has since got a promotion and all the mobile devices that come with the new position and now she works on the train. She doesn’t even consider train crushes anymore.

For me it is about creating a mood that leaves me hopeful for the future because I do my best thinking when I feel this way. Falling in love does this for me. I know it’s a state of mind so it’s always going to be there. I have little doubt that my cycling abilities will fade as I get older, I have the same certainty that my ability to feel love will remain high for as long as I live. Given this, I may as well learn how to tap into that source of positive emotion to fuel my writing, thinking and living. I’d be a fool to ignore this ability.

It’s worth mentioning that the death of these love feelings isn’t painless, but it isn’t too difficult either. Inside I KNOW that there is no mutual connection between me and them, there’s just a mental connection based on deliberate cognitive distortions. There *may* be a sense of perceived loss, but most of all, the muse dies and I go back to writing things that are more grounded in reality and somewhat less creatively inspired. There is a dissonant feeling when things start to go south. Initially I would start to feel a little out of sorts and be unsure of the reason why. But the process is clearer now. Once the out of sorts feeling kicks in, I know it’s time to put thoughts to paper, or screen, and let my fingers do my minds bidding.

Like this article right here, it reflects the end of love for someone.

I wonder if she is aware of the life we will not spend together or if she just realized that she really likes vanilla?

You Are Seeing What You Want To See

Rachel was talking to me about people watching. She was relating a story about an interaction between a man and a women that was fairly innocuous but extremely passionate if you watched their body language. When I asked her who she thought the two people were to each other she laughed and said that isn’t why she does it. It’s interesting for her to watch without trying to create their identities or piece together the lives they may be living. I wondered about this for a minute because while I like people watching and tend to pick up on some of the more subtle aspects of the interaction, I’m always trying to piece together who is who and why they are doing what they are doing. I started thinking about how this tendency may be corrupting or biasing what I actually perceive.

Human beings have a very good reason for trying to make predicts about people’s intentions and behaviour. We are social creatures so historically speaking our chance of surviving are increased if we are well liked by others because they will let us become part of the group. Apart from being social creates, we are also rivals to those in the same peer group – we need others to survive, but we also need to compete against others to thrive. Anything we can do to give us a leg up on the competition is most likely going to help us. To this end, we make predictions about people when we see them. In “Blink” Gladwell referred to making these predictions as thin slicing and uncovered a number of instances when they are very accurate. The fact that we have this innate ability that is often correct indicates a survival advantage to having it so it’s natural that we do it.

I’d assume that because it presents us with a survival advantage, we’re going to be better at predicting things that could hurt us and less effective at determining things that have nothing to do with survival. Rachel watching the two people in the coffee shop is an example of a situation that isn’t going to impact her life from a survival stand point. As a consequence, she has gained the ability to shut off the natural tendency to make predictions. What she lets into her brain is the raw sensory information and from there it is not interpreted. It simply exists as information and it is encoded without biases.

For the predictors, they thin slice a situation and begin to collect data that confirms their prediction. This can have disastrous consequence to the accurate interruption of events. There are countless stories of doctors making bad calls about stuff even in the face of imperial evidence that indicates an alternative cause. Doctors need to stay open and assess all of the information they collect in order to make the best guess about the cause of an illness – there is a reason why they are called educated guesses.

The issue with making predictions about stuff is compounded by the fact that we try to be right and will go to great lengths to BE right whenever we make a guess about something. For example, people who are betting on horses at the track will report a big boost in the confidence about their bet as soon as they put money down. This more complete buy-in after making a prediction likely helps us to conserve mental energy because we no longer need to think about the subject and buy-in is needed for the formation of survival rules – if you fail to believe the rule you created you are not going to modify your behavior and will have learned nothing.

Those prone to make predictions and seek to validate them need to pay particular attention to collecting ALL of the information and remaining open to new information that may become available. New information SHOULD change your opinion, either to reinforce it or to detract from it. Otherwise the accuracy of the predictions will always be suspect.

Writing And Making Use Of A Personal Development Journal

I started journaling after Natalie died. My next girl friend bought me a Sherra Club notebook and I started writing in it on Feb 18th, 1996. When I reread my first entry, which explained what I was going to do with the journal, I laugh because it sounds more like the purpose of this blog – I had wanted to write down things that others would find useful. It was my intention to help them. It’s funny now because the journal quickly changed from being something that would be useful to others to something that would be useful to me.

Before I put pen to journal paper, I had been writing on individual sheets of paper or in a blue note book. I was grieving and had found writing letters to Natalie explaining how I was feeling about her death to be helpful for me as it seemed to make my thoughts more real. The stuff was sad or self indulgent, I had noticed that I felt better after I wrote out just how unhappy I was because I never felt as bad as my words made it seem. The writing was an exercise that was moving me past the grief and mourning. Since I was feeling better 6 months on, I decided that it was time to make a more permanent contribution to the grief process by doing something that would be useful to others.

The problem was that I wasn’t anywhere close to knowing how I was feeling about death and grief and I was a far cry from being self-aware. My life and mind were littered with impulsive thoughts, anger and immaturity. As such, the entries in the journal moved from being concise and evolved lessons that could be useful for others to ideas and thoughts about whatever seemed to be gripping my mind at the time. From a quantity point of view, it was a fairly productive period because there were lots of things swirling around my consciousness and my unconscious mind seemed to be working in overdrive too because stuff seemed to flow out of me once I started writing. Some of it was really good for an incomplete man in his mid-twenties, most of it was what you would expect, not garbage, but not the stuff with universal appeal that I had hoped would be coming out of me. The journal moved from being a book of lessons to a book about my personal development.

Below are the 5 steps I took to write and make use of my journal:

The First Step in writing a useful personal development journal is populating it with honest information. You need to feel free enough to write whatever is on your mind without fear of being judged harshly by others. You need to write from the heart whenever you can because this is where the truth lies. It’s a journal and it contains your thoughts but these are NOT necessarily facts. We all think a bunch of stuff that ISN’T facts or even what we want. If we think others will be reading them, the depth and clarity of the idea will suffer. In fact, we tend to leave stuff out that may be useful; take blogging for example, I take great care to make sure every word I use is the right word and that I am sure that I think and feel how I am claiming to think or feel. The ideas are not set in stone but I’ve thought about them long enough to say that what I have written is how I think about the particular item. New information can change the idea but it will need to be pretty compelling.

The Second Step in writing a useful personal development journal is writing in it frequently. This one is a little tricky because writing is a skill that you need to practice and what you write as practice may have nothing to do with personal development. Try your best to keep the non-personal stuff out of the journal, but keep the journal close at hand when you are practicing because some of your clearest ideas will pop into your head when you’re writing something completely unrelated.

The Third Step is writing a useful personal development journal is writing about things that are personal to you – this doesn’t necessarily mean personal items, it can, but it also includes stuff that addresses or concerns how you look at the world, realization that you have just had, or things that you have learned that seem significant even if you do not know why they feel important. Information about new jobs, new classes, new friends and new romantic partners should be included. Very often these things will move your awareness very quickly and, at the very least, they open up a world of new experiences that will shape who you are.

The Forth Step in writing a useful personal development journal is filling it with information over a long period of time. While you should only write to the journal whenever you have something personal to say, you should make an effort to write at least once a week. It may not happen, but you need to try. Most often you will go in phases of intense writing, when it seems like you have a lot to say because you have reached a new place in your understanding of the world, followed by no writing, when you’ve captured everything you had on your mind. Keep your journal handy when you enter one of these no writing phases because you have no idea when the dam will break and ideas will stream out. Just make sure to date each entry with at least the month and year, but it’s a good idea to include the day of the month as well.

The Final Step is rereading it from cover to cover a couple of times a years looking for patterns, common themes, changes in your understanding and evolving ideas. This is what will make it useful to you from a development perspective. If you have followed the first 4 steps, this should be fairly easy and sometimes painful to do. Ideas evolve over a period of time and they tend to lag just slightly behind steps of increased maturity, which themselves tend to follow new experiences. Given the lag, it can be useful to read it backwards as well; this will often present you with the enhanced idea, then the moment of increased maturity and then the experience that was the trigger of all of the progress.

Regardless of the direction you read, you NEED to do this because otherwise what you have written will never come alive or resonate within you. Keep in mind that human beings are incredible pattern matching machines so keep giving it information to work with so it can start to uncover the patterns. Your brain has a lot of power that isn’t called upon very often so give it something to work with so you can tap into this ability. Remember, when you read something that you have written and it creates a sense of dissonance (a feeling of wrongness because what is written and how you view the world are not in line) you have hit upon something that is likely personal development.

Some of the patterns themes that I have found and what I did about them:

A need and a desire to be by myself (not in a relationship) for a while to figure out what made me tick. Between the ages of 18 and 31 I had been single (not in a long term relationship) for less than 6 months and the longest period of time followed Natalie’s death (about 3 months). It was everything I knew about adult life and, in hindsight, I was unhappy for most of it. There was one entry in particular that just sickened me to read because I mentioned that I was jealous of an X girlfriend who had taken the time after we broke-up to be single while I just found another relationship without thinking about what I had learned from the last one. When the next relationship ended, I took the time and have been, for the most part single and happy since. I finally got to know who I am and what I like doing, which marked the beginning of the most productive period of my life so far.

Finding completion in another person vs. in myself. Along the same lines as the need to be alone, reviewing the journal revealed that my sense of self depended upon being in a relationship. I had worth if I was in a partnership with someone else. I’m not hacking on partnerships, just those that contain one partner who isn’t already a complete individual. They say you cannot be useful to another if you cannot be useful to yourself and I tend to agree, as would my X girlfriends during this time. If the relationship went bad, I suffered and took it out on them because I felt my identify was being jeopardized. I haven’t been in a relationship for almost 2 years now and, while there are things I miss (like making dinners together, holding hands, hugging, feeling unconditional love from someone who isn’t family and having someone to be alone with) I do not miss the doubt and the toxic approach I took to get what I needed to feel complete.

The need to take an active role in my life and define my life by my actions, instead of letting stuff happen. I had the classic victim complex and I was very good at seeing reasons why I couldn’t do want I wanted. I would manufacture road blocks, transfer my feelings onto other people and basically sit on my ass while life was done to me. Oh so much wasted time. Ironically, seeing this pattern years ago, I did nothing about it until I made the conscious choice to remain single. Then, when I started doing things, I really surprised myself by what I was able to do.

A lot of self hatred. I didn’t like myself very much and I think I was trying to kill myself slowly. I was a smoker, I had a poor relationship with food, I stressed about things that didn’t matter and I would destroy anything that was good in my life because I didn’t think I had value or worth. I felt a lot of shame and anger and I blamed myself for everything that didn’t go the way I like. My friends didn’t really notice this, but my parents did and, when I started to realize it, my dad spoke very frankly about how my actions actually made me feel and what they did to him and my mom. (Part of me is very grateful that I had drifted away from my brother during this time because we never had to rebuild our relationship after I destroyed it with my self loathing). My parents stuck by me because that’s what parents do for their children.

Peace. Very, very odd. I noticed that after my trip out east last summer I effectively stopped writing in the journal. There were 3 entries after the trip and the last one was on October 1, 2006 and it concerned the success of a race my bike team entered. In fact, the last 5 or 6 entries are more just reports of events and things that I did. There was no confusion, turmoil or pain. One of them mentions the fact that what I was hoping to find out east was actually within me all along and that I was ready to deal with it. The thing was, once I realized the journey was an internal one, it was over because I knew that whatever I needed to get out of life I could manufacture within myself. All I wanted was to be happy and I can be happy whenever I want and without reason. I did not need another person, another location or another experience to bring it to me, all I needed was the will and it would follow.

My advice to you is that you start a personal development journal and follow the 5 rules. If you are already journaling, take a few hours today to reread what you have written. At worst, you get to see how your writing has improved over the last few years, at best, you’ll see yourself for who you are and finally have the strength to do something about it. Knowledge is power so make the effort to find the knowledge, the quality of your life may depend upon it.

Refeeds To Enhance Muscle Growth?

Nutrition Quest 3 by Mike Roussell of T-nation.com covers refeeds, a topic that I find very interesting.

Refeeds are best used when interspersed throughout long periods is calorie and/or carbohydrate restriction. As the name implies, you’re acutely refeeding nutrients (calories and/or carbohydrates) into your system after it’s been deprived of those nutrients for a predetermined period of time (5 days, 7 days, 2 months, etc.).

It’s important to distinguish between a “refeed” and just trying to rationalize going off your nutritional plan (e.g. cheating). Refeeds are strategically placed and when used right are integral parts of your nutritional plan. Cheating on your diet is more often than not an unplanned event brought on by poor planning or exposure to a situation in which your will power is compromised and you succumb to the primal urge to stuff your face!

I find this topic very interesting because I’ve noticed things happening to my body composition and weight that seem to confirm Mike’s claims. I don’t spend a lot of time doing the same thing so my diet / nutritional plan seems more random than a steady state of sustained caloric restriction. My food intake is restricted Monday to Thursday evening, then I will tend to eat a lot. It’s lower again Friday and Saturday until dinner time when I will eat a lot. Sunday is the same as Saturday with a large dinner and usually a couple of helpings of dessert. There are consistent meals thoughout, post workout shake, breakfast every morning, casine protein before bed, eating at least every 2.5 to 3 hours, etc…, but what I eat as whole food is varied both in terms of what it is and when I eat it. It is a conscious decision to vary the food and the timing because it prevents the body from adapting and become more efficient at processing the food. Some people call this calorie cycling.

I feel my best on Monday and Tuesday so I plan my hardest workout for these days. It’s most likely that I am more completely recovered from the over eating on the weekend. But I tend to carry a little more water and look slightly bloated, both indications of an increase in muscle glycogen. I tend to look my leanest on Thursday afternoon but have the least strength so I try to focus on doing only cardiovascular exercise because it doesn’t suffer the same drop in performance.

Sometimes though, I will eat clean for longer periods of time – my Thursday, Saturday and Sunday evenings will seem more like Monday or Tuesday evenings with normal sized clean meals; usually happening when I’m in a bulking phase and performing a lot less cardio. The goal is muscle gain without too much fat gain so the diet has to be clean. Lasting 6 to 10 weeks, these phases are tough because of the restriction in what I eat, but I have noticed that there is a period of a couple of weeks afterwards when I seem to keep growing bigger. This period sees me eating a lot more food that is higher in calories that I won’t eat the bulk – foods that contain more moderate to high GI carbs. It seems that I experience a two to three week period of dramatic overcompensation from the workouts in which my muscles seem to fully recover and grow to adapt to the increased workload they’ve been subjected to.

The problem I run into in determining what is going on is that I don’t train for the same reasons or sports year round. I consider myself an endurance athlete more than a power athlete. I build mass and work on strength in the winter because I can’t be riding outside. While I like building muscle, I will focus on building it for less than 4 months a year, the rest of the time I’m working to maintain it and build my endurance. As a consequence, I have no idea what the long term muscles building impact would be of following my eating approach year round.

There is something to the approach of refeeding. While I’m not sure what specifically is happening, it does seem to give the body a boost in recovery department. Lifters and endurance athletes will benefit from this extra kick.

Hacking Your Senses

When I was in University I wrote a paper comparing the neuroplastisty of the child and adult human brain. The research indicated that the childs brain was better at recovering and relocating functioning from a damaged area if the amount of damage was large. The adult and child brain were about equal for small amounts of damage. The paper wasn’t very well received because it went against the traditional understanding that neuroplasticity effectively stops around age 12. Regardless, I learned something even if it was only that the adult brain can relocate brain functioning if it receives a small injury.

A lot has happened in the years since I graduated. The Internet exploded and information about everything is available all the time. Undoubtedly, the consumption of information is going to have an impact on me. It’s going to increase the amount interconnection between the brain cells because I will be learning a lot more (the interconnection between brain cells is one of the outcomes of increased learning) assuming I choose to consume the information.

Recall my post about the Maclean.ca article on Keeping Your Brain Functioning All Life Long, the one that reveals that even adults in their senior years can improve their brain function and take years off their mental age? That means I’m right in thinking that the impact of the Internet will continue to impact my brain well into my life, given that constant use helps to prevent mental aging.

But “Mixed Feelings” by Sunny Bains in Wired.com adds another layer of complexity and optimism to the mix. The article reveals recent research findings that our brains are able to hack our senses by interrepting information from on sense modality that codes for something else entirely – they talk about using a belt rigged with a number of vibrators and having the one that is pointing north shake. This will allow the wearer to know which way they are facing; basically giving the user a directional sense by hacking their sense of touch. It’s very interesting. What’s more, the directional information becomes part of the users consciousness and eventually unconsciousness. The constant influx of information will promote neural branching as the brain adapts. The brain is going to grow more dense in area that is devoted to sensing this directional ability. Wow!

To draw this back to my paper, if the adult brain has the ability relocate function in response to small brain injuries, does it have this ability to relocate function even if their is no injury? More so, what will it do with this new information that comes in that indicates something other than the raw sensory experience?

Further, what is the potential for sense hacking with a young brain given that it does have better neuroplasticity for large brain injuries? What impact will this have on developing neural density or even on localizing new sense functions to other unused regions of the brain?

Do You Know Art When You Hear It?

“Pearls Before Breakfast” is a Washington Post article about a qualitative research experiment to see how commuters would respond to professional musician Joshua Bell playing his $3.5 million Stradivari violin beside a garbage can in the L’Enfant Plaza in Washington D.C. It’s a high pedestrian traffic area and more than 1000 people pass him during the 45 minute free concert.

The findings did not support the predictions of how people would respond and only one group of people consistently noticed him and it isn’t the group you’d expect to take notice:

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

The article follows up with a lot of the people who passed him by and they offer up a variety of reasons why they didn’t stop and pay more attention. Time constraints were cited as the most common reason for not stopping, but watching the videos, it seems more likely that the people were not open to the experience of observing fine art during their daily commute.

What I found very interesting from watching the videos is that even when someone did stop, it didn’t seem to motivate others to stop. Very often we use the principle of social proof to determine what is appropriate behavior in unusual circumstances, this didn’t occur here. Even when others gave them permission to stop, people just kept on going, ignoring the free show by one of the worlds best violin players.

I’m not sure why children were the only group to consistently take notice of him, and the article doesn’t go into this finding. It could be that they have yet to learn appropriate commuter behavior, it could be that this was their first real life experience with someone playing a violin or it could be that they heard beauty and Joshua’s playing struck them significant enough to warrant their full attention. I kind of hope it’s the last one and that the innate tendency to identify and appreciate art is something that we unlearn as we become more socialized because then all we have to do is stop unlearning and enjoy. But I’m pretty skeptical of this hypothesis. Most likely the children look because a guy playing a violin is an odd thing to come across on the way to day care.

The Discipline High – Part Two

After I wrote The Discipline High – Part One I ended up talking to my brother about it. The discussion moved very quickly from does it exist to what it is?

Initially I had thought that I had somehow been able to create something out of nothing by fostering a positive feeling by NOT eating. It seemed a reasonable assumption because I do feel a sense of pride / accomplishment whenever I’m able to eat appropriately. The truth is, during bike season, I don’t need to be very mindful of what I eat because I’m very active – eating a box of cookies is excessive, but so is riding for 4 hours. In fact, some have said that I don’t really have a choice BUT to eat a box of cookies because I may utilize more than 2000 calories in a day in just exercise (the average 300 gram box of cookies has a little over 1200 calories). I need recovery sugar and while cookies do not supply you with dextrose or maltodextrin, the two sugars that replenish and boost muscle glycogen the most efficiently, they do contain sucrose with will help refill drained muscles and they taste pretty good. It’s a very bad idea to diet during the season because you may be denying your body the energy it needs to fully recover, which will result in an over trained state which will hurt your performance.

The discipline high only comes into play in the off season, between November and mid April because I scale back my activity dramatically. I do more resistance training to build muscle and strength, and this activity requires a lot less energy than riding; my estimate is about half the energy. Since my activity level decreases dramatically in the off season, I have to watch what I eat a lot more closely. When I mentioned this to Des, our understand about the source of the high became obvious. Why do I try to build muscle? Some of it is to help my cycling, some of it is to make moving around easier, some of it is to make my activities easier, and some of it is to have a body that looks nice. But having a strong core is very different from having a wash board stomach. A strong core allows you to drive more power to the legs by having a solid foundation from which to move so less energy is absorbed by movement of the upper body. Having a 6-pack is not necessary for this. I could have a strong core even with 20 percent body fat (many power lifters are just like this). The fact is, during the off season when weight gain can be an issue, I diet to keep the weight off and stay lean.

So my desire to have 6-pack abs is fueled by something other than athletic performance. It comes down to the motivation for wanting them and what they represent to me. First off, I have associated leanness with beauty, youth, and vitality because most lean people do have a look of vitality that is attractive and young looking. I have this association so it’s reasonable to assume that my desire to have them stems from my desire to be viewed as attractive and youthful with a lot of energy. Given that I’m pretty modest about my body, I’m not actively seeking other peoples approval or recognition for looking a particular way. But I feel that if I remain lean and well muscled, I have done everything that I can to remain attractive and young. In the event that my body ever becomes a deciding factor in anything, and I can’t ever see that happening, I have the peace of mind knowing that I have done my best. Wash board abs represent my knowledge about fitness and the human body and the level of hard work that I’m capable of. I regard them as a window into my brain and my personality and not something to be looked at as nice. I think they look good because they reveal who I am and not because they appeal to some primal urge.

What does this have to do with the discipline high? Well, I think the discipline high is just another form of delayed gratification; in this case, social recognition for achieving something that requires a lot of effort. I know that answer is a lot less appealing than my “something out of nothing” hypothesis but this explination is a lot more reasonable and I like its compatibility with evolutionary psychology. Only the social survive.

Keeping Your Brain Functioning All Life Long

Imagine reseachers finding out that you can teach an old dog new tricks, uncovering the aging brains ongoing ability to sense, encode and assimilate new information and redevelop previous connection between brain cells to maintain and consolidate knowledge. Well you don’t have imagine because that is what they have found. The Secret To Not Losing Your Marbles by Lianne George of Macleans.ca tells you how.

It used to be held as religion among neurology experts that the brain was plastic, or malleable, in our infancy; after that, its infrastructure was set. “Within the last five to 10 years, I used to teach — we all used to teach — that when you’re older, your brain is finished, kaputsky,” says Stuss. “[This idea] was actually the basis of a Nobel Prize that was awarded to two scientists from Harvard — David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel — and it was largely horses–t,” says Merzenich. “Their notion was that the brain developed into mature functionality by the end of this critical period and beyond that period, it was like a computer — every neuron knew what to do.” A person had a finite number of brain cells and once they were gone, they were gone. But if this were true, says Merzenich, how do you account for learning? “You can learn to play the piano if you’re 70 if you really want to, through driving your brain to master that ability. The brain is plastic through a lifetime.You never lose your ability to acquire ability.”

This lifelong ability to adapt, called brain plasticity, and the ability to generate new brain cells, called neurogenesis, are now heralded as the twin pillars of aging smart. Research conducted by Merzinich and others in the ’80s and ’90s was among the first to prove they work. In early studies, they observed the deterioration of aging rats. “They gradually lost their ability to control their paws,” says Merzenich. “They struggled to feed themselves by manipulating food and ultimately, they lost control of hind limbs, dragging them around.” Using brain imaging technologies, scientists found that part of the problem was the poor quality of sensory information the rats were receiving at this stage of life. When the rats were directed to perform certain activities in a particular manner and order, Merzenich and his colleagues found they could help them recuperate their motor skills and prolong their lives by 15 to 20 per cent. “The rats didn’t lose their mobility for an extra three months,” says Merzenich. “And when you looked inside the brain of the rat, you had actually restored substantially the quality of information that was coming from the paw. The point is, these kind of experiments demonstrated that you could take these very old brains — rats, not humans of course — and you could drive them to learn things and acquire new skills.”

As a 34 year old, I’m grateful that this research has come out now while I’m still young enough to do something about it, but the finds are very encouraging for the older generation too, in fact, even more encouraging. I’m active, healthy and still learning, this is one of the most enlighening periods of my life so I’m feeling pretty confident about the present state of my cognitive functioning. The future is bright with technological discoveries so there’s a good chance they’ll come up with something that will help my ailing brain when the time comes. But for older people who have been burned with the “can’t teach an old dog new tricks” stigma, the findings are great news, provided they are willing to invest in getting their brain functioning back. Like most changes, it is going to require effort but while your brain isn’t the sponge it used to be but it will still absorb whatever you immerse it in.

Interpersonal Synergy In Friendships

Recently I made friends with someone new, Rachel. This happens less and less as I get older, most of the people I met now are activity partners (people to do stuff with), romantic partners or co-workers. There is a purpose to these interactions and each of us play our role. But with Rachel it was different. We’re drawn to each other in a natural way that seems to foster an interpersonal synergy that fuels thought and positive action.

As a result of spending time with her I’ve become more aware of what I look for in friends. First off, while I do activities with my friends, they serve a social function and are not the purpose of our visits. For example, I don’t have any close friends who I ride with. I really like the guys on my cycling team, but we know each other BECAUSE we ride together. A couple of my friends snow board and a few of them work out, but by in large, other than the bike races, I do my activities by myself. It’s hours a week on the road, the trails or the gym by myself because that is what I like to do.

When I’m with my friends, the activity is just a back drop on which to have an experience. Most of the time we just talk in the kitchen while making dinner or have a couple of drinks. As an outsider watching these interactions, I can’t imagine them seeming like they are very purposeful but I have no doubt that they would see that we’re having a good time and that there is a high level of engagement. The conversations vary from talking nonsense (humor type improve about whatever comes up), to information exchange to idea exchange. The information exchange type conversations do not get my full attention. I’m not sure why, but I tend not to pay much attention to this stuff. I place a much lower value on this type of information, likely because these are the types of conversations that I have with activity partners and co-worker. These are just the details you need to get by and I find most of them pretty uninspiring.

The nonsense talking gets us laughing which is fun and feels good (all of my friends have either a good sense of humor or a great ability to laugh). It also helps to consolidate ideas or turn thought fragments into ideas. Given that I do not feel any judgement from my friends, I am completely free to say whatever I feel like. Sometimes I just need to say things out loud to make them more real in order for me to think about them clearly. My friends are often the first and only people to hear article ideas, workout programs, training tips and jokes. However, the biggest benefit of nonsense talking is its ability to open the mind through a sort of mental lubrication. Whenever you are engaging someone with the pure intent of having a good conversation, you open yourself up to all the possible directions that the conversation may take. A lot of the time we don’t stay on topic and will hop all over the place in a seemingly random fashion. The only pattern is that we are open to whatever the other is saying. It’s like good improv, it may not go the direction that you think should, but it goes somewhere and if you let it, it keeps on going.

As some point, the conversation will usually drift back to a more purposeful interaction that is focused on a single idea or point. It will still have the same sort of freestyle stream of thoughts to it, but they will all be related in some way to a key idea. These are the best conversations because they are free flowing, spontaneous and enlightening. There is a interpersonal synergy generated that allows each of us to consider topics in ways that are different from the norm. Patterns and the interconnected nature of ideas become evident were only randomness existed before. I find these conversations to be invigorating and I leave them feeling uplifted and with my head spinning.

I have some friends where all of our conversations are like this. We rarely discuss details about life or if we do, it is just to get the conversation going as to why things are that particular way. It is pretty amazing because I discuss certain topics with certain friends but regardless of what we talk about, the experience is the same and I leave the conversation feeling great and thinking that I’m a little better off because of it.

It wasn’t until I met Rachel that I realized that I was this way with my friends. I had often wondered if I was too serious all the time because of my passion for training and the intensity at which I seek out information that I am interested in, but I now realize that too serious and not serious enough are basically the same thing to two different people. I am the way I am and some people are going to be drawn to that while others will be repelled. It is not uncommon for someone to tell my that talking to me is draining, that they feel I am analyzing them and that they need to be on their guard. They are sort of right, I am trying to figure out why they do the things they do, but it’s only to get the conversation going. It isn’t judgement, it’s just how I talk to people.

What it comes down to now is that I’ll most likely go right for the guts of the matter and alienate people as I go. I’ve found that if they don’t get what I say, they don’t get me. If they think I’m judging them, it kills the conversation immediately. There is no changing this. The connection is either there or it isn’t. And no matter what the intention or desires of each one of us, there really isn’t any point in existing as a friend around someone who you don’t gel with. It isn’t anything personal to me or them, it’s just the way the world works. If you want to be happy, you need to engage the people who make you feel happy and for me that means the people who I feel an interpersonal synergy with.

Too Many Lifting And Fitness Tips To Count

4 Days in 15 Minutes A Summary of the 2007 Health & Fitness Summit by Chris Shugart of T-Nation has so many tips in it that you really don’t have a choice but to read it; well, maybe you can attend next years summit.

  • Textbooks are often wrong by the time they’re published. Textbooks are not “evidence.”
  • The body is built to walk 3.5 miles per hour, or about a 17 minute mile.
  • Just 17 minutes of physical activity a day can lead to a pound of fat loss a month.
  • The first step in playing fast is to eliminate excess body fat.
  • Too busy to eat breakfast? Then you’re too busy to be good!
  • Grape juice is just as good as wine when it comes to antioxidants.

This is one of those threads were it pays to read the comments as well. There’s a lot of wisdom there for the taking!