Make Wealth Blog

April 25, 2007

Effective multitasking and cognitive

Filed under: Effectiveness — Kava @ 1:04 am

Multitasking is a term first applied to computer processes. Technically, it refers to the ability of a computer to perform more than one function at the same time. When length of time to complete a task is computed in nanoseconds, it’s obvious that more of the computer’s time is spent waiting to do something than actually doing it. Ultimately creative approaches to capturing and utilizing those unused nanoseconds of time on the computer led to the ability to do several things at the same time, called multitasking. Yet, at another level, a computer cannot do two things at the exact same time, only two things in such close time sequence that they seem to be done together.

The term multitasking used in the sense of human activities has been jokingly used to refer to doing more than one thing at the same time, yet the human brain is not more capable of sending the same impulse to two different places at the same time than a computer is. The nerve endings just fire in such close sequence that it seems as if it happened in the identical time span.

The process of learning in a human is much the same as it is in a computer. The electrical charges of the nerve endings are impressed as memories in certain areas of the brain. We remember an event and are able to call it to the forefront in the same way that a Windows screen can be brought to the foreground to work on it. Just as certain areas of the brain are ‘dedicated’ to certain functions such as digestion, breathing and hearing, so the computer memory will have certain areas used for system operation.

In this sense the human brain is capable of multitasking because we can breathe, digest a overly large lunch and read and understand a book at the same time. In this instance though, different areas of the brain are dedicated to certain functions. For example, the frontal lobe is the part of the brain that has control of planning, spontaneity, emotions, judgment, language and memory. The cerebellum deals with sensory perception and motor output. The medulla controls involuntary impulses such as breathing, swallowing and coughing.

So, the ability to breathe and chew gum at the same time in humans is because breathing is controlled by one area of the brain and chewing gum by another.
The effectiveness of multitasking in the sense of doing two different tasks at the same time though, is limited, particularly if they are tasks which require control by the same area of the brain. A person trying to compose a musical symphony in his brain while mentally adding a subplot to their latest novel probably will not be successful in either one.

However, a person who is doing a repetitive task such as working on an automotive assembly line may be able to do very creative imagining at the same time. This would be considered multitasking by many people. If it is important to complete two tasks at the same time or by the same deadline, it may be a more effective use of your time to finish one and then begin the second one if both involve using the same area of the brain. More time would be lost attempting to jump back and forth between equally creative tasks than it would require to finish both projects consecutively.

April 15, 2007

Cure yourself by meditation

Filed under: Mental energy — Jean @ 3:44 pm

Many people today suffer from chronic diseases such as heart disease, high blood pressure diabetes, and depression. Many have problems such as back pain due to genetics or an accident. Despite state of the art medical care, these problems persist. It may be time for many individuals to become proactive in their medical care and try to heal themselves with meditation. This does not mean giving up your traditional health care routine. Most physicians recognize the many benefits to alternative, or complementary, health care and advise their patient to take part. There are many forms of meditation to practice and you should get information regarding several, and even try an introductory class, to decide which is the right one for you. Many breathing and meditation techniques have been shown to alter bodily functions such as blood pressure, adrenaline levels, heart rate, and reduce pain. Many forms of meditation such as yoga, tai chi, and qigong are rooted in Oriental philosophy and most employ deep breathing and controlled movement. Deep breathing therapy involves concentrating on the mechanism of breathing in order to relax the body and calm the mind, and is often performed in tandem with meditation, a process of clearing the mind of everyday thoughts, which reduces stress and elevates the mood.

Deep breathing meditation originated in Buddhism. It is a technique wherein the mediator learns to place attention on the flow of the breath in and out of the body. The attention is focused upon what is being experienced, without responding to the experience.
Transcendental Meditation (TM) arose from the Vedic tradition in India. This form meditation uses repetition of a word or sound (mantra) to prevent distractions from entering the mind.

Yoga is a mind and body approach to meditation that integrates deep breathing with stretching exercises. The exercise and breathing combination is a form of meditation when performed correctly. Yoga positions involve stretching and relaxing the muscles, while regulating the breathing. Yoga is a form of body work that often reduces pain by restructuring and relaxing the muscles, oxygenating the system and calming the mind.
Meditation has been shown to induce some changes in the body, especially the adrenal response. This is the system that automatically regulates many involuntary bodily functions such as the heartbeat, blood pressure, sweating, breathing, and digestion. It is thought that by concentrating upon and controlling breathing, one of the elements of this system, the mediator gains access to the other elements. In this way, when he or she lowers their rate of breathing, the other functions such as heart rate and blood pressure follow suit.

While not as exotic as an Eastern philosophy, maintaining an optimistic attitude and an open mind can be a form of meditation. Perform a daily routine of reflecting upon the positive elements in your life and dwell on them, instead of what is wrong. Research has demonstrated again and again that one of the most important factors in the success rate of treating patients with chronic disease is their ability to maintain an attitude, which nearly always improves their condition.

April 10, 2007

Personal development and growth

Filed under: Advice — Jean @ 12:10 pm

Personal development and growth is probably, aside from diets, the most written about topic you will find today. There are nearly limitless articles and books, self help tapes and CDs that all target our innate desire to change in ways we perceive as “better”. Most self-help projects today are scams try to convince u of the limitless riches we can attain if we unlock out personal powers. This usually involves buying something and the only thing here growing is the huckster’s bank account. Others offer self-assessment guides to determine just what about ourselves is wrong and needs improvement. These skirts are the true issues surrounding personal development and personal growth.

Personal development and personal growth are concepts that take into account the realistic fact that life changes as we live it and we must both grow and change to be equal to the challenges. As we leave adolescence behind and become adults, we are expected to be able to build our own lives and to weave a fabric of living that will expand with the changes we encounter. We may do this by choosing to develop a productive career or to have a family or by a combination of both, but it is generally not acceptable to not develop a path in life. The steps taken toward achieving these goals often force changes on us, and require that we grow and develop more skills to deal with them. This is the philosophy behind self-help.

Many people have come up with exercises and tips that have been useful to them, and will allow individuals to understand and to meet the various stages of his or her life. Some even prepare us in advance for these milestones, such as childbirth, marriage, and developing a career. Another form of serious self help, often takes the form of counseling or support groups, and targets those who have fallen behind in these stages or who left the loop entirely, such as alcoholics and drug addicts. These support groups often stress the stages of life, and recommend that the participant take a virtual journey through them to recreate where and how they began to falter. The next step is to try to reintegrate the addict into life at an appropriate stage.

One important aspect of growth and personal development is to clearly see what you want and expect from life. It is important to make these goals, even though they often change throughout the course of life, with and without out intentions. These goals are often enough for some lucky people to steer a steady course.

However many of us need more at some point. Growth and development programs and philosophies that enable us to focus on the positive aspects in out lives and formulate a positive and productive attitude are strong empowering elements. An optimistic attitude has been shown to be beneficial to all areas of life, from achieving success to fighting termini illness. It is often noted that optimists often fail more frequently in life that those with a more negative attitude, they just don’t incorporate the failure into their self-image, which continues to shine brightly. Doctors repeatedly cite the better prognosis that patients who remain optimistic about their treatment often enjoy. The power of positive thinking is no myth, and those programs and books that keep us in touch with this concept are valid tools for personal growth and development.

April 6, 2007

Keep your mind sharp

Filed under: Memory — Kava @ 5:10 pm

With all the advances made in health care, people on the average are living longer. With this increase in the quantity of a normal lifespan, many individuals are working to maintain their health to ensure a good quality of life. This means exercise, not only of the body but also of the mind. Keeping the memory sharp is even more important than ever.
One important reminder is that any technique undertaken to perk up one’s memory will probably not do much to the development of Alzheimer’s disease, which is a progressive physical deterioration of the brain. However, doctors have noticed that patients who routinely work on their memory skills often progress to the serious stages more slowly. Research has also statistically demonstrated that patient loneliness speeds diseases progression.

Activities that keep your mind active will retain your memory skills. One of the best ways to do this is to learn a foreign language. This activity requires keeping memory skills intact to learn the vocabulary and nuances of the language. It also comes in useful if you decide to travel to foreign countries, which is another way to improve you memory. Travel in general keeps the mind alert since the traveller is placed in an unfamiliar place and must rely upon memory skills to move about. Travel is a large puzzle, which the traveller uses memory, maps, guides, schedules and other tools to solve. This seems more interesting than memorizing vocabulary, but both are effective ways to retain memory skills. Actually, learning any new skill will exercise the brain and keep it fit. Many people learn crafts or other new hobbies, and in turn teach them to others, which is also a great exercise.
Participating in puzzle solving, like sudoku and crosswords is an activity popular with many. Word puzzles are effective since they draw upon the memory of words for their solution and sudoku puzzles target the logic portion of the brain. Card games require both memory and logic.

Many health care providers believe that super nutrition and supplements may also keep brainpower at a peak and help maintain memory skills. Certainly, nutritional deficiencies and overuse of drugs and alcohol are harmful to the memory. But ingesting enough folic acid (vitamin B 6) can be effective in slowing the declines in memory that can occur with age and overindulgence. In studies, participants who took folic acid for a month long time period did much better on memory tests that the group that did not.

Other vitamins and minerals that have demonstrated to be beneficial to memory are Vitamins C and E, and Omega 3 fatty acid, which is usually found in fish oils and flax seeds. Anthocyanin, the blue pigment in blueberries, is a powerful antioxidant that is beneficial to brainpower. For centuries, practitioners of Ayurvedic medicine have used Bacopa (Bacopa monnieri), an herb native to India that is appearing in western stores, as a memory and concentration enhancer.

Studies repeatedly show that memory is affected by the person’s state of mind at the time information is introduced. Stress and distraction negatively affect the ability to remember things since they interfere with the ability to absorb and process the information. Try to clear your mind when you are introduced to new people and you may find that you can remember names better.

April 3, 2007

Power of Positive Thinking

Filed under: Positive thinking — JoshN @ 2:37 pm

Negative thinking, is part of everyone’s life, however there are ways that everyone can get rid of the negative thinking and turn it into positive thinking. There are many situations that come up in everyone’s life when they are encouraged to participate in negative thinking, but the actual decision to take part in that negative thinking is totally up to that person who is tempted. The power of positive is undeniable; there are so many advantages to being able to truly think in a positive way.

A person’s happiness and effectiveness truly depends upon the kinds of thoughts that go through their mind, based on that fact it is nearly impossible to be truly happy if a person is continuously thinking about unhappy thoughts. Marcus Aureluis was one of the wisest men that ever lived on the face of the earth and he once made a statement that was very true when it comes to a person thoughts, he said “A man’s life is what his thoughts make of it”. Basically, that meant that a persons thoughts make up how a person lives his or her life. Your thoughts can determine your own destiny or fate.

When someone truly looks at positive thinking as a whole picture, they will see that positive thinking is a quality that you have to learn over a period of time, it is something that a person has to practice in order to become better at it. A person cannot just say to their self “I am going to think positive today” because that is not going to work. Positive thinking is not something that you can do only when you feel like doing it and it is not something that a person can just keep bottled up in the back of their head.

If you want to truly master positive thinking, you must be able to participate in positive thinking everyday all day. By actually practicing positive thinking everyday you are able to create a state of mind where you are able to constantly stay positive no matter what the circumstances may be and that is a very important factor or phase of learning positive thinking. In the end of it all, you will create yourself a large amount of positive energy that will in return only create positive situations for you everyday.

There are many ways that you can make positive thinking a part of your everyday life and in return you will be able to stop defeating your self and you will be able to make your life better than it is right now. The first step you can take toward your walk to positive thinking is to observe yourself and pay close attention to your thoughts. During the day keep track of all the positive and negative thoughts you have by jotting them down in a notebook or on a piece of paper. When it comes to the end of the day, take a look at what you have come up with. Check out the number of times that you had positive thoughts and how many times that you had negative thoughts. If you notice that you had more negative thoughts than positive thoughts it is time that you figure out what you can do to make you’re thinking skills better.

The next day when you get up, you will need to observe your thoughts again. However, this time is going to be a little different because you are going to need to pay close attention to the types of negative thoughts that you are having and then note how they affect your life as a whole. It doesn’t matter what the root of the negative thought is, all that matters is that you convert that negative thought into a positive thought.
Every negative belief that you have is manifested in your life, meaning that you are the reason that that particular negative thought is there and these beliefs are based solely on the thoughts that you have. So in order to create a positive thinking skill, you need to be able to think about all the positive things that people and situations have to offer you and overlook the bad things in life.

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