Science of the SpiritS


Sherlock

Simple games can develop situational awareness

Brett and Kate McKay
ArtOfManliness
Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:00 UTC
car accident

STOP: BEFORE YOU READ ON, STUDY THE PICTURE ABOVE FOR 60 SECONDS.

THEN, SCROLL DOWN AND SEE IF YOU CAN ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:
  • How many people total were involved in this accident?
  • How many males and how many females?
  • What color were the two cars?
  • What objects were lying on the ground?
  • What injury did the man on the ground seem to be suffering from?
  • What was the license plate number of one of the cars?
How did you do on this little test? Not as well as you would have liked? Perhaps it's time you strengthened your powers of observation and heightened your situational awareness.

Enhancing one's observational abilities has numerous benefits: it helps you live more fully in the present, notice interesting and delightful phenomena you would have otherwise missed, seize opportunities that disappear as quickly as they arrive, and keep you and your loved ones safe.

Today we're going to offer some games, tests, and exercises that will primarily center on that latter advantage: having the kind of situational awareness that can help you prevent and handle potentially dangerous and critical situations. But the benefits of practicing them will certainly carry over into all other aspects of your life as well.

Ready to start heightening your senses and building your powers of observation? Read on.

Comment: For more about Situational Awareness:

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Sherlock

The science part of how Reiki actually works

Arjun Walia
Collective Evolution
Fri, 11 Mar 2016 15:42 UTC
Reiki
The healing art of Reiki has been practiced and taught around the world for many years, with many believing its origins to be as ancient as those of humans themselves. With scientific research now emerging attesting to the ability of human thoughts, emotions, and intentions to affect the physical material world, an increasing number of scientists, quantum physicists in particular, are stressing the importance of studying factors associated with consciousness and its relation to our physical world. One of these factors is human intention.

Reiki essentially uses human intention to heal another person's ailments. Practitioners usually place their hands on the patient in order to channel energy into them by means of touch. It can be roughly defined as using compassionate mental action and physical touch, energy healing, shamanic healing, nonlocal healing, or quantum touch.

Comment: The healing power of Reiki

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Smiley

An exploration of laughter, giggles and mirth

David Robson
BBC Future
Sun, 22 Mar 2015 21:10 UTC
laughing people
© Thinkstock
My conversation with Sophie Scott is nearly over when she spins round in her chair to show me a video of a near-naked man cannonballing into a frozen swimming pool. After a minute of flexing his muscles rather dramatically, he makes the jump - only to smash and tumble across the unbroken ice. The water may have remained solid, but it doesn't take long for his friends to crack up.

"They start laughing as soon as they see there isn't blood and bones everywhere," says Scott. "And they are SCREAMING with mirth; it's absolutely helpless." (If you want to see the video in question, you can find it here - though it does contain some swearing.)

Why do we get such an attack of the giggles - even when someone is in pain? And why is it so contagious? As a neuroscientist at University College London, Scott has spent the last few years trying to answer these questions - and atTED2015 in Vancouver last week, she explained why laughter is one of our most important, and misunderstood, behaviours.
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Clipboard

New study shows that to-do lists suck the fun out of life


Science Beta
Tue, 15 Mar 2016 20:56 UTC
to do list
© Nikki Buitendijk/Flickr
Life moves fast, and finding enough hours in the day to get everything done is, at times, a seemingly impossible task. Scheduling, whether keeping a calendar, a to-do list, or setting a smartphone reminder, is a saving grace for many people trying to accomplish as much as they can, as efficiently as they can.

But a new study suggests it's best to ditch that to-do list when it comes to having fun.

Researchers conducted 13 studies examining how scheduling leisure activities affects the way these events are experienced, and discovered that assigning a specific date and time for leisure can have the opposite intended effect, making it feel much more like a chore.
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People 2

How to tell the difference between worry & anxiety

Guy Winch, PhD
Psychology Today
Tue, 15 Mar 2016 12:39 UTC
anxiety
© Flickr
People often use the terms worry and anxiety interchangeably but they are very different psychological states. Although both worry and anxiety are associated with a general sense of concern and disquiet, how we experience them and the implications they each have for our emotional and psychological health are quite distinct.

10 Differences between Worry and Anxiety

1. We tend to experience worry in our heads and anxiety in our bodies.

Worry tends to be more focused on thoughts in our heads while anxiety is more visceral in that we feel it throughout our bodies.

2. Worry tends to be specific while anxiety is more diffuse.

We worry about getting to the airport on time (specific threat) but we feel anxious about 'traveling' (a vaguer and more general concern).

Comment: In this day and age there is a lot to be worried and anxious about. As Gabriela Segura, M.D. wrote as far back as 2013,"Our normalcy bias prevents us from taking notice that tens of millions of people in Western countries are dropping like flies from illness, depression and self-destruction." But, by maintaining nutritious diets and restoring balance to our lives, we can take huge steps that protect ourselves, and future generations, from this flood of toxicity.

Also see:
Face life with Éiriú Eolas, a stress relief program

On a planet gone crazy, there is a stress-relief program that helps you face life. Used by thousands of practitioners world-wide, Éiriú Eolas helps to effectively manage the physiological, emotional, and psychological effects of stress, helps to clear blocked emotions, and helps improve thinking ability.

Try it for yourself. Do it for the people you love. Do it for the future.


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Roses

Not just a death, a system failure

Barbra Moran
The New York Times
Sat, 06 Feb 2016 14:30 UTC
hospital bed
© Abbas/Magnum Photos
On the day before my mother died, she gave my father a list of demands. He wrote them on the back of an envelope and showed them to me as he left the intensive care unit. There, in his clear block handwriting, it read:

CREAM

WHISKEY

HEROIN

My mother was not herself. And yet, she was completely herself. When Mom's liver stopped working, her brain, which we had always considered loopy, grew addled. But she was still funny. She hallucinated monkeys on unicycles circling her bed. She learned that Michael Jackson had died, "probably from all that plastic surgery," she said. She remembered Sarah Palin, and thought she was a twit.

Mom died, at 67, in 2009, but lately I've been reflecting on her last days. I'm applying to medical school, and her story keeps coming up in my essays and interviews. Her death spurred me to apply, partly because it gave me courage — nothing in med school could be worse than watching the way my mother died. Her death was so grisly that I vowed to help change the way people die in America.

Mom had a chronic liver condition, an autoimmune disease that had been under control for years but suddenly worsened. After her liver failed, her kidneys followed, then her lungs. After four months in the I.C.U. she was on 24-hour dialysis, with a breathing tube down her throat and a feeding tube up her nose. She hated all the tubes; her hands were tied to the bed so she couldn't pull them out.

She needed a liver transplant, but was too sick to survive one. Then a fungal infection invaded her lungs, dodged the antibiotics and spread through her body. On a Friday afternoon in August, our family met with the doctors. If we left Mom on life support, the fungus would eat her alive, putrefying her innards, turning her fingers black. It would be a cruel death, they said.

It's already been a cruel death, I thought.
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People 2

'Understanding' in close relationships doesn't necessarily produce empathetic responses


Science Daily
Mon, 07 Mar 2016 19:27 UTC
empathy, comforting others
Researchers studying empathy in relationships find that in the absence of caring, understanding alone doesn't cut it when stressful situations arise

So you had a terrible day at work. Or the bills are piling up and cash is in short supply. Impending visit from the in-laws, perhaps?

When stress sets in, many of us turn to a partner to help us manage by being a sounding board or shoulder to cry on. Your odds of actually feeling better are much improved if they're both those things.

New research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara reveals that simply understanding your partner's suffering isn't sufficient to be helpful in a stressful situation; you've got to actually care that they're suffering in the first place.

The findings, published in the journal Psychological Science, provide the first evidence that cognitive and affective forms of empathy work together to facilitate responsive behavior.
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Oscar

Narcissism epidemic: The societal shift from commitment to the collective to a focus on the individual

Olivia Remes
The Conversation
Fri, 11 Mar 2016 08:20 UTC
narcissism
© Shutterstock
The subject of narcissism has intrigued people for centuries, but social scientists now claim that it has become a modern "epidemic". So what is it, what has led to its increase, and is there anything we can do about it?

In the beginning

The term narcissism originated more than 2,000 years ago, when Ovid wrote the legend of Narcissus. He tells the story of a beautiful Greek hunter who, one day, happens to see his reflection in a pool of water and falls in love with it. He becomes obsessed with its beauty, and is unable to leave his reflected image until he dies. After his death, the flower narcissus grew where he lay.

The concept of narcissism was popularised by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud through his work on the ego and its relationship to the outside world; this work became the starting point for many others developing theories on narcissism.

So when does it become a problem?

Narcissism lies on a continuum from healthy to pathological. Healthy narcissism is part of normal human functioning. It can represent healthy self-love and confidence that is based on real achievement, the ability to overcome setbacks and derive the support needed from social ties.

But narcissism becomes a problem when the individual becomes preoccupied with the self, needing excessive admiration and approval from others, while showing disregard for other people's sensitivities. If the narcissist does not receive the attention desired, substance abuse and major depressive disorder can develop.

Comment: Are we more narcissistic than ever before? The answer is yes!

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Better Earth

6 evidence-based ways drumming heals body, mind and soul; a fundamental form of human expression

Sayer Ji
Wake Up World
Tue, 13 Oct 2015 11:32 UTC
drum healing
From slowing the decline in fatal brain disease, to generating a sense of oneness with one another and the universe, drumming's physical and spiritual health benefits may be as old as time itself.

Drumming is as fundamental a form of human expression as speaking, and likely emerged long before humans even developed the capability of using the lips, tongue and vocal organs as instruments of communication.

To understand the transformative power of drumming you really must experience it, which is something I have had the great pleasure of doing now for twenty years. The below video is one of the circles I helped organize in Naples Florida back in 2008, which may give you a taste of how spontaneous and immensely creative a thing it is (I'm the long haired 'hippie' with the gray tank top drumming like a primate in the background).
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Book 2

The disease of living too fast: 'Americanitis'

Julie Beck
The Atlantic
Fri, 11 Mar 2016 16:55 UTC
Busy
How a 19th-century nervous condition shaped the way modern Americans think about health and happiness

In the decades after the Civil War, a lot of things were changing in the (re-)United States. The late 19th century and early 20th saw a huge increase in the country's population (nearly 200 percent between 1860 and 1910) mostly due to immigration, and that population was becoming ever more urban as people moved to cities to seek their fortunes—including women, more of whom were getting college educations and jobs outside the home. Cars and planes were introduced to the public; telephones and telegraphs proliferated. Modern society was full of new wonders—or, seen differently, new things to be anxious about.

In his 1871 book Wear and Tear, or Hints for the Overworked, the physician S. Weir Mitchell fretted: "Have we lived too fast?"

Comment: The dis-ease of being busy
What happened to a world in which we can sit with the people we love so much and have slow conversations about the state of our heart and soul, conversations that slowly unfold, conversations with pregnant pauses and silences that we are in no rush to fill?

How did we create a world in which we have more and more and more to do with less time for leisure, less time for reflection, less time for community, less time to just... be?

Somewhere we read, "The unexamined life is not worth living... for a human." How are we supposed to live, to examine, to be, to become, to be fully human when we are so busy?

This disease of being "busy" (and let's call it what it is, the dis-ease of being busy, when we are never at ease) is spiritually destructive to our health and wellbeing. It saps our ability to be fully present with those we love the most in our families, and keeps us from forming the kind of community that we all so desperately crave.

Since the 1950s, we have had so many new technological innovations that we thought (or were promised) would make our lives easier, faster, simpler. Yet, we have no more "free" or leisurely time today than we did decades ago.


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