How to Use the Brain - Shake Up Your Habits

The month, The Atlantic has some very interesting articles that relate to the brain and the way we think and make decisions. I really enjoyed the cover story on "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

The author, Nicholas Carr, says, "I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. "

Visit the web site for more reading! The photo.

The Mind, Science and Buddhism

I like this op-ed piece by David Brooks from the NYT so pulled a few ideas and you can visit the web site to read it all! This general concept is central to the Tibetan Buddhist thinking of the Dalai Lama as he begins his science teachings with monks in the monastery located in India. The image is from designedonyou.com.

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.
Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other.

We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

Dalai Lama on Time by Way of Ice Cube

Living in the U.S. is a non-stop sensory stimuli experience. How you manage it can give you some neural highs. You can meditate and reach this with no stimuli, but you can go all out in the opposite direction and soak it in. While looking on the Internet for some ideas about Time and Buddhism, I listened to Pandora.

I tuned into my Rap station and heard 50 Cent, Kanye West and Ice Cube. I love the feel of Rap, and I am interested in what it says from the real to the not-so-real. Ice Cube is back with "Smoke Some Weed"and Eminem is still putting out some very good music worth listening to.

Okay, back to Time and Buddhism. To be sure I am giving proper credit: The material on this page has been collected from the recent book, "Beyond Dogma: The Challenge of the Modern World", (c) 1996 North Atlantic Books, translated by Alison Anderson and Marianne Dresser from talks given during His Holiness's visit to France end 1993. Here.

"Q: What is the concept of time in Buddhism?
A: Regarding the Buddhist concept of time, our philosophy has adopted several positions. The Sautrantika school, also known as the "Holders of Discourse," affirms that all phenomena and events exist only in the present moment. For this school, past and future are nothing other than simple concepts, simple mental constructs. As for the Madhyamika-Prasangika school, the Consequence School of the Middle Way, it generally explains time in terms of relativity, as an abstract entity developed by the mind on the basis of an imputation, the continuity of an event or phenomenon. This philosophical view scribes, therefore, an abstract concept whose function is dependent on the continuum of phenomena. From this point on, to try to explain time as an autonomous entity, independent from an existing object, proves impossible. That time is a relative phenomenon and can claim no independent status is quite clear; I often give the example of external objects which can be easily conceived of in terms of the past or future, but of which the very present seems inconceivable. We can divide time into centuries, decades, years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. But as the second is also divisible into multiple parts, milliseconds for example, we can easily lose our grasp of the notion of present time!
As for consciousness, it has neither past nor future and knows only present moments; it is the continuum of a present moment being trans . formed into another present moment, whereas with external objects the present disappears in favour of notions of past and future. But further pursuit of this logic will lead to absurdity, because to situate past and future we need a frame of reference which, in this case, is the present, and we have just lost its trace in fractions of milliseconds."

"We strongly believe whatever we think of...."

I was writing for my discovery blog WendSight, but thought I would post one thought on Sky Badge since it has to do with innovation and that is one theme of this blog.

On the hunt for innovation, I bumped into this article from the Edmonton Journal. I like the quote below by the Xerox president of its Innovation Group.

"We strongly believe whatever we think of will work," said Sophie Vandebroek, Xerox chief technology officer and president of Xerox Innovation Group.

This is a very simple, but very cool statement!

Small Things from Parents Mean a Lot

Today I was looking at a magazine article about what leaders say about advice they had gotten. It made me think about my father, so I am sharing a story.

My best advice came from my father, Rodger Goodwin. He and my mother, Sue, owned a small business in Lexington, Ky., and during high school and college I spent some summer weeks in the business office.

I can recall how skillful my father was at presenting his ideas that could provide his clients with high-quality and artful ornamental metals for home and business needs. On occasion a client would visit the company on site and I would listen to my father talk with the visitor. I can remember thinking how bold he sounded as he convinced someone to go with the highest quality and if that was not what they wanted they would have to go elsewhere. He said he could only give them the best.

This was not just a sales pitch, he meant it. He was not just trying to get top dollar for his work, he wanted people to want the best and get the best. After a visitor would leave, totally convinced by the way, he would tell me what his thoughts were on how the person approached him, the conversation, and then the results. Essentially, he told me never to provide any work that was not the very best and be willing to give up business in order to be known for the highest quality work.