| Mental Effort |
| It won't kill you, honest |
| Brain grows when older workers learn new
tricks, study shows Jul 9, 2008 Health News Hamburg- When older workers learn new skills, their brain cells develop, German scientists said Wednesday after a study that used computer tomography to peer deep inside the brain. The study, in which people aged 50 to 67 were taught to juggle, disproved a previous assumption that brain growth ends during young adulthood. It was conducted by Eppendorf University Hospital in Hamburg and the University Hospital in Jena, Germany. After three months of learning, parts of the brain grew. When the subjects stopped juggling for another three months, their brains shrank again. The study, with lead author Arne May, was reported in the Journal of Neuroscience. 'This shows how important it is for older people to keep taking on new challenges and learning new things,' May said. |
| Creative work better for you
Employees who have more control over their daily activities and do challenging work they enjoy are likely to be in better health, according to a new study from The University of Texas at Austin published in this month's Journal of Health and Social Behavior. 12/18/2007 Science Blog "The most important finding is that creative activity helps people stay healthy," said lead author John Mirowsky, a sociology professor with the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin. "Creative activity is non-routine, enjoyable and provides opportunity for learning and for solving problems. People who do that kind of work, whether paid or not, feel healthier and have fewer physical problems." Although people who work do give up some control over their daily activities, the study found that being employed leads to better health generally, regardless of the amount of creativity required in their work. "One thing that surprised us was that the daily activities of employed persons are more creative than those of non-employed persons of the same sex, age and level of education," Mirowsky said. The study was composed of 2,592 adults who responded to a 1995 national telephone survey that was followed up in 1998. The survey addressed general health and physical functioning, as well as how people spent their daily time on and whether their work, even if unpaid, gave them a chance to learn new things or do things they enjoy. "The health advantage of being somewhat above average in creative work (in the 60th percentile) versus being somewhat below average (in the 40th percentile) is equal to being 6.7 years younger," Mirowsky said. It is also equal to having two more years of education or 15 times greater household income, he added. Although the authors didn't examine specific job positions that may confer this health advantage, professions considered not to involve a creative environment included those in which people work in assembly lines. Jobs that are high-status, with managerial authority, or that require complex work with data, generally provide more access to creative work, Mirowsky said. "People with a wide variety of jobs manage to find ways to make them creative," Mirowsky said. "And, people with higher levels of education tend to have more creative activities in their lives, paid or not." From http://www.utexas.edu [1] |
| Mental declines can be reversed
As we get beyond retirement age, most of us will not be as mentally sharp as we once were. But a researcher at the University of Alberta says most people have the ability to reverse the mental declines that come with aging. BJS 09/15/2005 "Can we reverse mental declines? Well, for most of us, the answer is yes, and I think that is definitely exciting and encouraging news," said Dr. Dennis Foth, a professor in the University of Alberta Faculty of Extension and the academic director of the U of A's Certificate in Adult and Continuing Education. Foth and his research colleague, Dr. Gordon Thompson of the University of Saskatchewan, also found in their literature review that mental declines related to aging are not universal (they affect some more than others), and they are not pervasive (the declines normally affect different parts of our cognitive capacities to varying degrees). Foth said mental declines are pathological for about 10 per cent of the general population over the age of 65, and not much can be done at this time to overcome the debilitating cognitive effects of diseases that affect the brain, such as Alzheimer's disease. But for the other 90 per cent of the population, cognitive decline need not be inevitable. "A lifetime of good mental habits pays off," Foth said. "People who are curious at a young age are more likely to be mentally active and stay active as they age. And we found it is never too late to start. With a little effort, even people in their 70s and 80s can see dramatic improvements in their cognitive skills." There are many different types of classes and mental exercises that people can do to keep their minds vibrant, Foth said, but the trick to getting more people to maintain or even improve their cognitive abilities is "ecological validity". Ecologically valid activities are those that people do on regular basis as part of their daily lives, said Foth, whose paper with Thompson is published this month in Educational Gerontology. Examples of "ecologically valid" activities that can improve mental capacity include reading, traveling, memorizing poetry, playing card games, doing crossword puzzles, learning how to play a musical instrument, taking continuing education courses and surfing the Web. Foth and his colleagues are beginning to study these activities to determine which ones improve which cognitive skills. He believes this research can lead to the development of learning programs and activities that can isolate mental declines and reverse them. He added that attitude can play an important role in maintaining cognitive skills throughout life. "People often describe their memory skills as being far worse than they actually are, and this type of attitude can start a vicious cycle," Foth said. "These people won't enroll in a class that might be beneficial to them because they believe they wouldn't be good at it. We have to protect against that." |
Revenge of the Right Brain
Logical and precise, left-brain thinking gave us the Information
Age. Now comes the Conceptual Age - ruled by artistry, empathy, and
emotion
By Daniel H. Pink 30 January 2005  When I was a kid - growing up in a middle-class family,
in the middle of America, in the middle of the 1970s - parents dished out a
familiar plate of advice to their children: Get good grades, go to college,
and pursue a profession that offers a decent standard of living and perhaps
a dollop of prestige. If you were good at math and science, become a doctor.
If you were better at English and history, become a lawyer. If blood grossed
you out and your verbal skills needed work, become an accountant. Later, as
computers appeared on desktops and CEOs on magazine covers, the youngsters
who were really good at math and science chose high tech, while
others flocked to business school, thinking that success was spelled MBA. But a funny thing happened while we were pressing our noses to the grindstone: The world changed. The future no longer belongs to people who can reason with computer-like logic, speed, and precision. It belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind. Today - amid the uncertainties of an economy that has gone from boom to bust to blah - there's a metaphor that explains what's going on. And it's right inside our heads. Scientists have long known that a neurological Mason-Dixon line cleaves our brains into two regions - the left and right hemispheres. But in the last 10 years, thanks in part to advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers have begun to identify more precisely how the two sides divide responsibilities. The left hemisphere handles sequence, literalness, and analysis. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, takes care of context, emotional expression, and synthesis. Of course, the human brain, with its 100 billion cells forging 1 quadrillion connections, is breathtakingly complex. The two hemispheres work in concert, and we enlist both sides for nearly everything we do. But the structure of our brains can help explain the contours of our times. Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work, and business were characteristic of the left hemisphere. They were the sorts of linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs. Today, those capabilities are still necessary. But they're no longer sufficient. In a world upended by outsourcing, deluged with data, and choked with choices, the abilities that matter most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of the right hemisphere - artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent. Beneath the nervous clatter of our half-completed decade stirs a slow but seismic shift. The Information Age we all prepared for is ending. Rising in its place is what I call the Conceptual Age, an era in which mastery of abilities that we've often overlooked and undervalued marks the fault line between who gets ahead and who falls behind. To some of you, this shift - from an economy built on the logical, sequential abilities of the Information Age to an economy built on the inventive, empathic abilities of the Conceptual Age - sounds delightful. "You had me at hello!" I can hear the painters and nurses exulting. But to others, this sounds like a crock. "Prove it!" I hear the programmers and lawyers demanding. OK. To convince you, I'll explain the reasons for this shift, using the mechanistic language of cause and effect. The effect: the scales tilting in favor of right brain-style thinking. The causes: Asia, automation, and abundance. Asia Few issues today spark more controversy than outsourcing. Those squadrons of white-collar workers in India, the Philippines, and China are scaring the bejesus out of software jockeys across North America and Europe. According to Forrester Research, 1 in 9 jobs in the US information technology industry will move overseas by 2010. And it's not just tech work. Visit India's office parks and you'll see chartered accountants preparing American tax returns, lawyers researching American lawsuits, and radiologists reading CAT scans for US hospitals. The reality behind the alarm is this: Outsourcing to Asia is overhyped in the short term, but underhyped in the long term. We're not all going to lose our jobs tomorrow. (The total number of jobs lost to offshoring so far represents less than 1 percent of the US labor force.) But as the cost of communicating with the other side of the globe falls essentially to zero, as India becomes (by 2010) the country with the most English speakers in the world, and as developing nations continue to mint millions of extremely capable knowledge workers, the professional lives of people in the West will change dramatically. If number crunching, chart reading, and code writing can be done for a lot less overseas and delivered to clients instantly via fiber-optic cable, that's where the work will go. But these gusts of comparative advantage are blowing away only certain kinds of white-collar jobs - those that can be reduced to a set of rules, routines, and instructions. That's why narrow left-brain work such as basic computer coding, accounting, legal research, and financial analysis is migrating across the oceans. But that's also why plenty of opportunities remain for people and companies doing less routine work - programmers who can design entire systems, accountants who serve as life planners, and bankers expert less in the intricacies of Excel than in the art of the deal. Now that foreigners can do left-brain work cheaper, we in the US must do right-brain work better. Automation Last century, machines proved they could replace human muscle. This century, technologies are proving they can outperform human left brains - they can execute sequential, reductive, computational work better, faster, and more accurately than even those with the highest IQs. (Just ask chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.) Consider jobs in financial services. Stockbrokers who merely execute transactions are history. Online trading services and market makers do such work far more efficiently. The brokers who survived have morphed from routine order-takers to less easily replicated advisers, who can understand a client's broader financial objectives and even the client's emotions and dreams. Or take lawyers. Dozens of inexpensive information and advice services are reshaping law practice. At CompleteCase.com, you can get an uncontested divorce for $249, less than a 10th of the cost of a divorce lawyer. Meanwhile, the Web is cracking the information monopoly that has long been the source of many lawyers' high incomes and professional mystique. Go to USlegalforms.com and you can download - for the price of two movie tickets - fill-in-the-blank wills, contracts, and articles of incorporation that used to reside exclusively on lawyers' hard drives. Instead of hiring a lawyer for 10 hours to craft a contract, consumers can fill out the form themselves and hire a lawyer for one hour to look it over. Consequently, legal abilities that can't be digitized - convincing a jury or understanding the subtleties of a negotiation - become more valuable. Even computer programmers may feel the pinch. "In the old days," legendary computer scientist Vernor Vinge has said, "anybody with even routine skills could get a job as a programmer. That isn't true anymore. The routine functions are increasingly being turned over to machines." The result: As the scut work gets offloaded, engineers will have to master different aptitudes, relying more on creativity than competence. Any job that can be reduced to a set of rules is at risk. If a $500-a-month accountant in India doesn't swipe your accounting job, TurboTax will. Now that computers can emulate left-hemisphere skills, we'll have to rely ever more on our right hemispheres. Abundance Our left brains have made us rich. Powered by armies of Drucker's knowledge workers, the information economy has produced a standard of living that would have been unfathomable in our grandparents' youth. Their lives were defined by scarcity. Ours are shaped by abundance. Want evidence? Spend five minutes at Best Buy. Or look in your garage. Owning a car used to be a grand American aspiration. Today, there are more automobiles in the US than there are licensed drivers - which means that, on average, everybody who can drive has a car of their own. And if your garage is also piled with excess consumer goods, you're not alone. Self-storage - a business devoted to housing our extra crap - is now a $17 billion annual industry in the US, nearly double Hollywood's yearly box office take. But abundance has produced an ironic result. The Information Age has unleashed a prosperity that in turn places a premium on less rational sensibilities - beauty, spirituality, emotion. For companies and entrepreneurs, it's no longer enough to create a product, a service, or an experience that's reasonably priced and adequately functional. In an age of abundance, consumers demand something more. Check out your bathroom. If you're like a few million Americans, you've got a Michael Graves toilet brush or a Karim Rashid trash can that you bought at Target. Try explaining a designer garbage pail to the left side of your brain! Or consider illumination. Electric lighting was rare a century ago, but now it's commonplace. Yet in the US, candles are a $2 billion a year business - for reasons that stretch beyond the logical need for luminosity to a prosperous country's more inchoate desire for pleasure and transcendence. Liberated by this prosperity but not fulfilled by it, more people are searching for meaning. From the mainstream embrace of such once-exotic practices as yoga and meditation to the rise of spirituality in the workplace to the influence of evangelism in pop culture and politics, the quest for meaning and purpose has become an integral part of everyday life. And that will only intensify as the first children of abundance, the baby boomers, realize that they have more of their lives behind them than ahead. In both business and personal life, now that our left-brain needs have largely been sated, our right-brain yearnings will demand to be fed. As the forces of Asia, automation, and abundance strengthen and accelerate, the curtain is rising on a new era, the Conceptual Age. If the Industrial Age was built on people's backs, and the Information Age on people's left hemispheres, the Conceptual Age is being built on people's right hemispheres. We've progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we're progressing yet again - to a society of creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. But let me be clear: The future is not some Manichaean landscape in which individuals are either left-brained and extinct or right-brained and ecstatic - a land in which millionaire yoga instructors drive BMWs and programmers scrub counters at Chick-fil-A. Logical, linear, analytic thinking remains indispensable. But it's no longer enough. To flourish in this age, we'll need to supplement our well-developed high tech abilities with aptitudes that are "high concept" and "high touch." High concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to come up with inventions the world didn't know it was missing. High touch involves the capacity to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning. Developing these high concept, high touch abilities won't be easy for everyone. For some, the prospect seems unattainable. Fear not (or at least fear less). The sorts of abilities that now matter most are fundamentally human attributes. After all, back on the savannah, our caveperson ancestors weren't plugging numbers into spreadsheets or debugging code. But they were telling stories, demonstrating empathy, and designing innovations. These abilities have always been part of what it means to be human. It's just that after a few generations in the Information Age, many of our high concept, high touch muscles have atrophied. The challenge is to work them back into shape. Want to get ahead today? Forget what your parents told you. Instead, do
something foreigners can't do cheaper. Something computers can't do faster.
And something that fills one of the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an
abundant age. In other words, go right, young man and woman, go right.
Adapted from A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to
the Conceptual Age, copyright by Daniel H. Pink, to be published in
March by Riverhead Books. Printed with permission of the publisher.
Contributing editor Daniel H. Pink wrote about Gross National Happiness in issue 12.12. |
|
Is the unexamined life worth living? By Robert Gerzon He doesn't mince words. He doesn't say that the unexamined life is "less meaningful than it could be" or "one of many possible responses to human existence." He simply and clearly says it's not even worth living. Why does he make such strong, unequivocal statement? Socrates believed that the purpose of human life was personal and spiritual growth. We are unable to grow toward greater understanding of our true nature unless we take time to examine and reflect upon our life. As another philosopher, Santayana, observed, "He who does not remember the past is condemned to repeat it." Examining our life reveals patterns of behavior. Deeper contemplation yields understanding of the subconscious programming, the powerful mental software that runs our life. Unless we become aware of these patterns, much of our life is unconscious repetition. As a psychotherapist, I see so many tragic examples of the effect of an unexamined life. I remember Melissa, a sensitive, attractive woman in her late forties who realized that a series of repetitive, doomed-from-the-beginning relationships had used up so many years of her life that it was now too late for her to realize her dream of a husband, home and family of her own. I recall Donald, a caring, hard-working man who ignored his wife and family for too many years and found himself depressed and living alone in an apartment by the time he came to see me. If only Melissa and Donald had taken the time to examine and reflect upon their lives as they were living them, they could have made changes and had a different experience during their lifetime. The good news is that it is never too late to start examining our life more thoroughly -- and to reap the rewards. Melissa never had the child she wanted but she stopped recreating her past and eventually married a loving man who helped her heal her childhood wound of a father who deserted her. It was too late for Donald to get a second chance with his wife, but he was able to build strong relationships with his children. We all have blind spots. Sometimes when I examine a chronic problem in my life, I have that unsettling feeling that I must be missing something, but I can't quite see what it is. We try to examine ourselves, but none of us can see our own back side (our "shadow"). That's why Socrates' method of self-examination included an essential element that became known as "Socratic" dialogue. Dialoguing with a close friend, a spouse, a skilled psychotherapist or spiritual adviser helps reveal those blind spots we cannot see by ourselves. Our society discourages self-awareness with a weekly cycle of working and consuming that keeps us too busy to slow down for self-reflection. Consumer capitalism's game plan prefers an unaware and vaguely dissatisfied populace that tries to fill the emptiness inside with shiny new products. It's a radical act to stop and contemplate your life. But according to Socrates, it's the only game that really matters. |
| Why Nerds Are Unpopular Wired.com Dec 2004 If you're too cool for school, you're probably not very smart. Some of us would rather build rockets than friendships. When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. The A tables contained football players and cheerleaders and so on. The E tables contained the kids with Down syndrome. We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to give ourselves a D. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was. I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: There is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular. Why? The answer, I think, is that most smart kids don't really want to be popular. If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular. But, in fact, I didn't - not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things. At the time, I didn't try to separate my wants and weigh them against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn't have taken it. And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school. Leon Battista Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance man, writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem like slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. A teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year. The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly and wonder why they seem so incapable. Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted. Why? It's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to do things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders. If it's any consolation to the nerds, it's nothing personal. The group of kids who band together to pick on you are doing the same thing, and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together and go hunting. They don't actually hate you. They just need something to chase. It's no wonder, then, that smart kids tend to be unhappy in middle school and high school. Their other interests leave them little attention to spare for popularity, and since popularity is a zero-sum game, this in turn makes them targets for the whole school. And the strange thing is, this nightmare scenario happens without any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of the situation. Excerpted from Hackers & Painters, a new book of essays on computers by Paul Graham |
| Learning languages 'boosts brain' Source: BBC NEWS: 2004/10/13 Learning
a second language "boosts" brain-power, scientists believe. |