Willpower Not Enough?

What do you want to accomplish in the coming year? Like me, you no doubt named goals you want to make a reality. In past years I relied on strong willpower and determination to see me through. But, somewhere along the way, I joined the 78% of people who fail to keep all their New Year's goals. Why is that?

Interestingly, willpower's not enough! Unless we're committed, we're easily distracted. Ever procrastinate about exercise after a long day at the desk, or eat some strawberry delight loaded with whipped cream after a huge meal? Temptations can quickly take us off track. We easily remain in the computer chair to avoid moving when we could go for a hike or begin aerobics. Only a few go after goals with something more than just willpower. Why isn't willpower enough to meet goals?

A new study, published in Psychology and Health, reveals that if you use your willpower to do one task, it depletes you of the willpower to do an entirely different task.

"Cognitive tasks, as well as emotional tasks such as regulating your emotions, can deplete your self-regulatory capacity to exercise," says Kathleen Martin Ginis, associate professor of kinesiology at McMaster University.

You'd also be interested in ways our brain affects willpower:

Liberating Effects of Losing Control Relinquishing some willpower or self-control is paradoxically tonic for many individuals.

Interestingly, there are differences in brains of self-controlled individuals versus those who struggle staying on track... "While everyone uses the same single area of the brain to make these sorts of value-laden decisions, a second brain region modulates the activity of the first region in people with good self-control," according to Antonio Rangel of Caltech, "allowing them to weigh more abstract factors--healthiness, for example--in addition to basic desires such as taste to make a better overall choice."

Good news is that the human brain has great plasticity and can change. So the more we practice control, we're also more likely to consider many factors before making a choice.

5 Strategies to meet goals by using more of your multiple intelligences. Here're just a few suggestions

Do it through Daily actions - A daily checklist can be motivating and helps insure you complete tasks involved in meeting a goal, whether that is to read material for a project or to keep calorie count below a certain level. Spatial and Logical-mathematical intelligences

Reward yourself when reaching milestones - People like milestones. By setting milestones along the journey to meet a goal, whether it is getting a college degree or swimming more yards in the length of a minute, choosing rewards appropriate to your accomplishment is important. They work as motivators. Intrapersonal intelligence

Learn from failures If you're impulsive and dropped out of college once and you were not able to obtain a position you enjoy, by keeping this in the back of your mind as you complete the next lengthy report due, the work involved will seem well worth the effort it takes. "Impulsive individuals show a switching pattern, resisting current temptations if they recall having succumbed," according to researchers. "Both impulsive and non-impulsive people did a better job of resisting temptation when they recalled past instances of resisting temptation along with their reasons for resisting." Intrapersonal intelligence

Focus on the future "If we are feeling fresh, it's easy to focus on our goals and exert self-control. But when we've already tested the limits of our self-control, it's harder to keep going," the Agrawal and Wan explain. "This is when focusing on the big picture helps us to keep our eyes on the goal and push ourselves harder. In contrast, focusing on the immediate situation only emphasizes how we've already maximized the extent of our willpower and hinders self-control." By picturing myself on the stage to receive my diploma, I was able to stay up at night to complete all the research, analysis and writing necessary for my doctorate. Spatial intelligence

Play motivating music Music moves your brain waves and can change a mood. Play music you consider up-beat prior to times allotted to work on goal daily, and you'll be ready to make great strides on your goal. What's your first choice? Musical intelligence

What works for you? Name a strategy that helps you past "willpower" that sometimes fails. That will provide us a jump start for 2010!

Coming Out of Hibernation

12 quarts a cooking


11 pairs a mailing


10 chapters areading


9 days ashaming


8 thousand alighting


7 Pam gifts awrapping


6 books ahearing


5 times to sing



4 strings a strumming


3 baked cakes


2 cute babies
and Pamela at the pretty, fake tree

The Importance of Sleep

The perception of audio cues, or auditory is recognised as an automation process. This was recognised by a group of psychologist who studied about sound and sleep in the Northwestern University in Evanston. According to them, sound may enhance your memory while sleeping. Then, they conducted some experiments with 2 groups of people. The first group of participants were asked to memorise a computerised-image associated with sound. For example, a picture of a dog, along with some barking sound, infront of a computer. They were asked to nap later. The barking sound was played for them to listen when sleeping. The results of analyses have proven that the first group could remember better than the second group.


Caption: sleeping

Sound is something important, that will enhance a person's memory. The same theory applies to scent. A group of scientist at the University of Lübeck (Germany) found that people were usually better at remembering objects belonged on a computer screen with the scent of a particular object which they had smelled during the learning task and when sleeping. The two scenarios above were proven to be useful to boost a person's sleep learning capacity.

In fact, sleeping is something very important for human. Sleeping is usually a process for us to continue our healthy life. It is a natural restorative cycle that allows our body to rest properly by regenerating itself, so that it can continue to function appropriately. Therefore, taking a nap in the afternoon is healthy for you. A researcher at the Loughborough University (UK) who studied about sleep as a part of his research, suggests that a 10 minutes sleep will enhance performance. This applies to overtired drivers, and could save plenty of lives. On the other hand, computer game players who dreamed about that particular game during their sleep would play the game better in the next day, compared to other players. A brief explanation is that their mental effort increases as soon as they dream of something, and so, sleeping do improve our learning capacity. Although a short nap is useful, but do remember to NOT ignore long sleep. There are various research suggest that long sleep may improve memory performance.


Caption: stages of sleep

My traditional understanding of NOT sleeping enough often refers to the delay of growth rate. Since young, everyone have been telling me that sleeping late / insufficient sleep may cause our body to not grow well. In fact, there are many research proven that sleeping late may become obese. The research by a group of researcher in the Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, in Ohio) found that 15 per cent of short-sleeping women have grown fat compared to other people (click HERE to read the PDF). In other words, there are possibilities that the sleep deprivation effect may increase your weight rapidly! Anyway, the lack of sleep is usually hazardous. Some people recognised the lack of sleep may cause grumpiness. A research from the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) found that the person who had lack of sleep may usually feel groggy. They could not perform simple mathematical calculations!


Caption: the hippocampus

By the way, how will sleep improve our memory? In psychology, our working memory is usually associated to the hippocampus (click HERE to read more about the hippocampus). The memory improvement is referred to the transferring of information from the hippocampus to other brain regions (cortex) while sleeping. Here is a depiction of our brain: when we were sleeping, our short-term memory will transfer information to the hippocampus (long-term memory). The information will be processed in the long-term memory, and sent to the cortex after processing. This explains why sleeping will improve our memory. Other evidence include a reveal from the psychologist of the University of Kansas Medical Centre (Kansas). The psychologist believes that sleeping may enhance the motor region in our brain (a component that deals with muscles control; i.e. eye-movement, limbs etc.).

How many hours do we need to sleep everyday? Well, this is an important question. According to most health journals, childrens (age 10 and below) do need 11-12 hours everyday. At age 10, we need approximately 9 hours of sleep a day. For most adults, 7.5 a night appears to be the best amount of sleep. Elder adults (age 55 or more) usually need 5 hours of sleep a day.

Brain: Jokes and Laughters

Sometimes, I was wondering how human brain works when a person get excited when they heard some jokes, whilst start laughing? In fact, humour is an important understanding to human psychology, especially when jokes require a tremendous amount of brain power and mental activities where a human can never fully understand how joke usually works. Many neuroscientists have used numerous methods to pin down how the brain react when a joke tickled us. However, why some jokes are extremely humorous to some people, but the same joke leave others cold.


Caption: laughter


Caption: brain regions

So, what is joke? The Cambridge dictionary dictated joke as : "something, such as a funny story or trick, that is said or done in order to make people laugh ". Since jokes are meant to be funny, if so, how can we explain cold jokes? A researcher from Durham University (North Carolina) also suggests that jokes will aim at human ability to make rapid judgements about a situation. The question here is which section of human brain deals with these processes.


Caption: fMRI machine


Caption: fMRI detector

Some neuroscientists from New Hampshire utilises the functional Magnetic Resonance Imagine (fMRI: is a system to monitor the blood flow the human brain), monitoring human brain when watching movies. They revealed that our left posterior temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus in human brain handle jokes. That is also the brain region that linked to language and attention. On the other hand, this section of the brain has some relation with the motor output (movement of limbs), associating with the reward processing. This explains the pleasure you attain, moving your limbs etc. when you get a joke. The correspondence level of limb movement also depends on the humour level of that particular joke.


Caption: ventral striatum


Caption: prefrontal cortex


Caption: cingulate cortex of the brain

The ventral striatum is a section of our brain that deals with rewarding. By the way, there were 4 major senses in a human: (1) eye - vision (2) ear - auditory (3) touch - tactile and (4) nose - olfaction. This ventral striatum controls the olfaction (also known as olfactory), the sense of smell. Recent research indicated that the olfactory strongly involved in tongue activities. It means that our tongue may stimulate the olfactory senses. Different rewards such as drug, sex and other entertainments (i.e. music, movies) are involved in this region of the brain. Though humour (or joke) is way more complex compared to other primeval rewards such as sex and food. Why? Mainly because activities such as sex only involve circulation of information within small sections of brain regions (such as the ventral striatum) but jokes usually involve other brain regions also, such as the frontal and cingulate cortex. Things are usually more complex and complicated when it involve circulation of information within many brain regions! The brain sciences unit at Cambridge (UK) indicated that jokes are basic reward for a person, but are strictly important to a person's survival.


Caption: the left prefrontal cortex

Senior research Watson suggests that the process of a particular joke may circulate differently to a men and women. This means that both men and women may perceive a joke differently. There are research that focuses at this topic, stating that women will show greater activity in their left prefrontal cortex than men. This means that you require more effort to make a women laugh than a men. In fact, women show greater response in their limb movement than men. This suggests that women do feel a greater sense of reward. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (vol. 102) suggests that a person's personality is also important in the contribution of jokes. It was stated that there were more reward responses in an average person (average by mean of extrovert and emotionally stable). By the way, the left prefrontal cortex handle different cognitive abilities such as language, memory processing and other more significant activities dealing with stress and other more complex mental processes (also known as the executive function).

Many future research are aiming at the rewarding system as they do believe that the reward system is disrupted in depression, and could be interesting to see if this deficit extends to more complex processing such as humour. They are also looking forward on similar research dealing with austism since people with autism have difficulty understanding comedy.

Tip of the Day

Do you know:

Why human yawn? Most research suggest that the lack of oxygen in our brain or the lack of fresh air causes a person to yawn. Well, that was true at some points. However, recent research has proven that yawning is coordinated to the social behaviour of a group. This means that when a person yawn in a bus, other people will start yawning very soon. This may be due to the human ability of detecting and responding to other people's yawns.

Proteins

There are few types of proteins; animal proteins are those that comes from animal products and vegetables protein that comes from vegetables, particularly green vegetables. In chemistry, the amino acid is a molecule that builds up proteins. There are 8 amino acids with which a person's body need for different functions. If any amino acid components are missing, then the protein sunthesis in our body will significantly be reduced. However, if we consume any foods that has all components of the amino acid, then that particular food is called a complete protein. Most vegetables does not have all amino acids. So what a person usually do is to consume different vegetables in order to attain all amino acids for their body. For instance, grain is low in methionine (an essential protein for body nutrition) but pulse contain sufficient amount of acid amino. Therefore, consuming both grain and pulse together are important.


Caption: protein and water

Recently, there are some evidences from some medical journals, stating that proteins may heal a damaged brain. A group of scientist uses laboratory mices for their experiments and analyses. They compared brain injuries of 2 groups of mices: (1) laboratory mice and (2) controlled mice. They spend 7 days and discovered that mices with brain injuries have much lower amino acids compared to controlled mice. These amino acids are usually found in protein-rice foods because proteins has the ability to build muscles. Their experiments also proven that sufficient level of amino acid have caused mices to perform better on learning tasks. This means that protein may have the ability to increase a person's intelligence in learning. The differences of human and mices will probably aimed at their hippocampus (read more about brain and hippocampus by clicking HERE), particularly a person whose brain was damaged. It will usually affect their excitement level! This means that lack of protein may also affect our excitement when doing something.


Caption: protein synthesis

Protein is an extremely essential component in a person's body. It usually deals with building tissues, nerves and bones. Protein will also help in building muscles (evidences from the above), organs, blood, skin, hair and nails. Therefore, a bad skin quality may inform you the lack of protein in your body. Body proteins are usually broken down when converting into energy if your body has insufficient carbohydrate or fats. Therefore, it is a very useful component, acting as a substitution of carbohydrate. People will usually go for protein drinks when dieting, rather than eating massive amount of carbohydrates (i.e. rice and noodles). Excessive amount of proteins that is not needed will usually convert to fats by our liver, and stored for future usage.


Caption: protein pyramid

Enzymes are made off proteins. Enzymes has a function that breaks down fats and carbohydrates in our body. Those are usually known as the digestive enzymes. A part of that, proteins are also useful for our immune system. We know that antibodies are needed to fight against bacterias and viruses. However, do we know that these antibodies are actually made up of proteins? Maybe consuming some protein drinks or foods enriched with proteins are useful when a person is ill?


Caption: some examples of protein

Here are a list of protein sources:

1. Lean meats: organic chicken
2. Fish: organic oily fish such as salmon, sardines, haddock and cod.
3. Pulses: chickpeas, lentils, beans, soya beans, tofu and miso.
4. Eggs: chicken eggs
5. Dairy products: milk (goat's milk is easier to digest than cow's milk), cheese, yogurt and fresh cream
6. Saturated fats: butter and palm oil (but try not overconsuming them, else it will lead to high cholestrol level), omega-3 and omega-6 fats (the omega fats are needed for brain functioning, hormone activity, proper metabolism, healthier skin, hair and nails). omega-6 fats are usually attainable rfom seeds (i.e. sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds) and nuts (almonds, hazelnuts, cashews, apriccot, macadamia nuts). Only saturated fats like coconut are acceptable and are appropriate to be consumed regularly.
7. Unsaturated fats: olive oil and avacados.


Caption: protein structure

In conclusion, protein may heal brain injuries / damaged. However, the researcher has no specify what kind of damage it will heal. Brain diseases such as tumor and stroke are famous brain diseases that causes brain damage. If so, will consuming protein heal it in long-run?

Medical Robots

The world smallest surgeon was developed with the intention of crawling into our body whilst performing surgery. This 1.4 cm beast is sometimes known as the nanobots that has the potential of swimming through the blood. These robots usually take tissue samples and deliver drug for our body through vital human organs such as the ear, eye and lungs. It also has the capability to install other medical devices inside our body.


Caption: medical robots


Caption: the robot in our retina (eyes)


Caption: the actual size of the medical robots

This is how surgery works with the medical bots in the future. Instead of operating our body with large incisions before performing surgery, the surgeons only need to insert a 1 cm device into our body, particularly for surgery related to stomach and gall bladder. The surgery with the medical robots are proven to help in reducing blood loss, surgery pain and increases the recovery speed. This special device could form a snake by connecting 15 of its similar piece simultaneously. The purpose is for hard-to-reach area in our body. One other speciality of the medical robot is that it could perform stitching from the inner part of our body.


Caption: heart lander

A similar but different device to the medical robot for heart surgery, namely the heart lander has been developed. This device has one purpose, that is to deliver minimal invasive therapy to the surface of our beating heart. It is a special device used particularly for cardiac therapy. In other words, this device will help in reducing necessary damage accessing to our heart. The heart lander is twice the size (3 cm) of the medical robot specified above. The main benefits of using the heart lander is: (1) the price is affordable (2) the motion of our heart beat will not affect the operation of the device (3) it does not breach the lung space, and (4) the device could monitor the specific section of our heart, in the exact location.


Caption: future surgery robots

The heart lander is monitord by a surgeon through an external monitor (called the X-Ray video machine), controlling the movement with a joystick. Alternatively, the device has enormous sensors that could detect and navigate its own path to that particular spot in our body. Recent research as reported by the Innovation Journal, stated that the first testing was successful with pigs. A roboticist suggests that these medical robots should be available for use by surgeons in the next 5 years.

Can't install nvidia drivers in windows 7?

Hi all.

I upgraded my Sony Vaio laptop VGN FZ21S recently to windows 7. Everything went smooth but when I checked the device manager I noted that for the graphic card driver, I had only something called "Standard generic display driver" (Or something similar to that). This was ok for your basic stuff. But wouldn't be no where near nvidia for hardware acceleration or active x

So I tried to download nvidia drivers from nvidia site and sony vaio site. Downloaded. But windows 7 didn,t allow me to install it !

It simply couldn't recognize the hardware. As always I tried several forums and other internet places for help. There were several suggestions. None did help, no matter how many times I did it. So frustating.

Some how I did it on my own. Here is how ......

When you upgrade to win 7 as a clean sweep, windows will make a folder knwon as "Windows.old" under Local C. This contains all your programes. files and drivers you used in vista. This is a snap shot view of my folder

When you open drivers folder under C:windows.old/windows/drivers, you will see all of your old drivers

Now go to device manager and use "Upgrade driver" Under display divices

It will now install the vista driver which will solve the problem. You will be able to upgrade all of the drivers for other divices like audio, mouse, ethernet etc.. replacng the windows 7 inbuilt equavalants.

I am not a it geek. But I know there are lots of guys frustated with the same problem. This is me sharing my success hoping atleast someone out there would see this and benifit from this.

Thanks

If you have seen this just make a comment. It's nice to know if I have helped somebody

Good luck with your windows 7

Out of this World Wednesday: Second Series in Spanish (Based on a Pattern)

Tip of the Day

Do you know:

A medium-glass of orange juice will ruin a person's diet since it usually contain 200 calories (considering the amount of vitamin C and some other vital nutritions containing in it). Therefore, please make sure the orange juice is freshly squeezed from oranges as cheaper brand orange juice mostly contain unnaturally high levels of sugar.

Building Social Worlds

People build social worlds as they meet and talk to others. Interestingly, when two people interact, their brains also become a single complex system, Andreas Roepstorff finds.

As we meet more people online, we network with those who inspire and take our thoughts to new places. We count these fold as friends. Two online friends, who share compelling ideas and noteworthy posts are, Liz Strauss and Mark McGuinness. Recently, each asked me to write a guest blog - for me an opportunity to collaborate with them and extend my work with MITA International Brain Center in new arenas. I leaped to the challenge...

The Blogging Brain - Ever wonder what goes on in the brain of a blogger? Liz Strauss was curious about that and asked me to write a post for Successful Blog.

The 8 Types of Creative Intelligence - Mark McGuinness, author of Lateral Action, wanted to know more about creativity and the brain. Interestingly, creativity often comes through novelty. The multiple intelligences open pathways to creativity, especially as you tap into the ones you don't tend to use.

Mark emailed me midweek to say that the article "really took off on Twitter!"

The internet dramatically increases possibilities for social interactions along with the type and number of friends we might have. In this case, an invitation to write a guest blog for two top-notch bloggers, opened an opportunity for me to interact with their regular readers and consider what they had to say. You could think of this experience as an adventure into Liz and Mark's social worlds.

Dr. Ellen Weber and I recently met Liz Strauss and Steve Roesler at the Bloggers Hub at the World Business Forum 2009. What fun!

Left to Right, me, Dr. Ellen Weber, Steve Roesler, Liz Strauss

Original Research on the Teaching of Spanish

In her first book, Charlotte Mason discusses the teaching of a child's first foreign language through the ear first!

The child should never see French words in print until he has learned to say them with as much ease and readiness as if they were English. The desire to give printed combinations of letters the sounds they would bear in English words is the real cause of our national difficulty in pronouncing French. Again, the child's vocabulary should increase steadily, say, at the rate of half a dozen words a day. Think of fifteen hundred words in a year! The child who has that number of words, and knows how to apply them, can speak French. (Volume 1, page 302)

Pamela is a visual learner with a history of severe auditory processing issues and aphasia. I was very skeptical about teaching Spanish without the printed word, much less at a rate of a dozen words per day. Last month, I described how I overcame my doubt of ear only methods when Pamela learned new Spanish words without seeing them in print. I alluded to mulling through Phase II of our experiments with Spanish and, today, I will reveal our new plan.

At first, I feared we were reinventing the wheel. Rosetta Stone works like the series mentioned by Gouin. The software shows the printed sentences, which is what I am trying to avoid! Lara, a Texan homeschooler interested in Charlotte Mason's ideas, highly recommends Rosetta Stone, but she too is supplementing with the idea of Gouin's series. I would like to hold off on pricey software until we have gotten Spanish into Pamela's ear (and mine). The Easy Spanish claims to follow Mason and Gouin but relies on the printed word in the first year of learning Spanish.

In Gouin's method, you teach language in a series of sentences about a topic familiar to the child: usually, a process somebody does or a pattern from nature. He called these "the series" which could be everything from the growth of a plant to the grinding of corn in a mill, or making as sandwich as Lara suggests. Charlotte Mason wrote,

You think the thing out in the order of time and natural sequence; you get the right verbs, nouns, and such epithets as are necessary, follow suit, and in amazingly few sentences, very short sentences too, connected by 'and,' you have said all that is essential to the subject. The whole thing is a constant surprise, like the children's game which unearths the most extraordinary and out-of-the-way thing you can think of by means of a dozen or so questions. . . You really learn to think in the new language, because you have no more than vague impressions about these acts or facts in your mother tongue. You order your thoughts in the new language, and, having done so, the words which express these are an inalienable possession. Volume 1 page 303-304

Steve is a native speaker of Spanish, but he is also un hombre de negocios (a businessman). He works long hours and travels often enough to be inconsistent in teaching Pamela Spanish. I brainstormed a way to scaffold him and make the most efficient use of his time. Here is the process:

I wrote a series about Steve in English. I tried to think of words that Pamela would easily recognize: coffee (café), computer (computadora), five miles (cinco millas), pants (pantalones), and gray car (automóvil gris):

Steve is my father. He is a businessman. He gets up early. He drinks coffee. He works on the computer. He runs five miles. He takes a shower. He wears a shirt and pants. He drives to the office in a gray car.

Then, I translated it into butchered Spanish with the help of babelish and cleaned up what I knew to be wrong (too many pronouns which are not needed in the subject of Spanish sentences). I emailed a copy to Steve, which he edited very quickly and emailed back:

Steve es mi papá. Él es un hombre de negocios. Se levanta temprano. Toma el café. Trabaja en la computadora. Corre cinco millas. Se toma una ducha. Usa una camisa y pantalones. Maneja a la oficina en un automóvil gris.

Before Steve left for work one morning, I grabbed the video camera. I filmed us going back and forth through the series. I read a sentence in Spanish to him so he would have the exact script and he repeated it. We went through the entire series in less than five minutes.

I took some pictures and loaded them into Windows Movie Maker (which I use often to edit RDI videos). I pulled the audio from the film of Steve saying the sentences and married Steve's oral sentences (which I edited to repeat twice with a long pause) to the pictures. The following video was our virtual Steve to help us practice 10 minutes a day while he was at work or in Chile or China or upstairs taking a nap!


I put the pictures and written sentences in Excel to help me practice with Pamela and keep track of what we have studied. One side has the pictures only with no written words, while the other side has sentences only. After a few days, I would read a sentence aloud in Spanish and let her pick the picture that went with the sentence. At no time do I have her view or read the printed sentences!




When she was ready, Steve did the same and we have a video of their interaction.


I was pleased at how much Pamela imitated her father in the video. Since my goal is to help get Spanish in our ears, I am not focused on speaking Spanish, which is the next step because we are trying to follow the progression of typical language progression as described in this paper. Any Spanish Pamela speaks right now is gravy and we will postpone any focus on combining words until we have a year of hearing Spanish under our belts.