success – Page 2

5 WAYS ON HOW YOU CAN FIND YOUR PASSION IN LIFE

How can you find your place in life, and lead a happy and fulfilling existence? If you have the answer to these two fundamental questions, then you are halfway to achieving them. Here are a few exercises that can help all of us down the path to a deep and enduring happiness.

courtesy by Millionaire’s digest

edited by OpenMindPortal

Exercise 1 – Revisit your childhood. What did you love to do?

Make a list of all the things you remember enjoying as a child. Would you enjoy that activity now?… You can also ask yourself these questions to help get you started: what can be translated and added into my life now? How can those past experiences shape my career choices now?

Exercise 2 – Make a “creativity board.”

Start by taking a large poster board, put the words “New Business” in the centre and create a collage of images, sayings, articles, poems and other inspirations.

The idea behind this is that when you surround yourself with images of your intention — who you want to become or what you want to create — your awareness and passion will grow.

As your board evolves and becomes more focused, you will begin to recognise what is missing and imagine ways to fill the blanks and realise your vision.

Exercise 3 – Make a list of people who are where you want to be.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Study people who have been successful in the area you want to pursue.

For example, during the recession, many people shied away from the real estate market because they thought it was a dead end. Some experts believe that’s the perfect time to jump in — when most others are bailing out — because no matter the business, there are people who are successful in it. Study them, figure out how and why they are able to remain successful when everyone else is folding and then set up structures to emulate them.

If you want to be creative, create a rigorous and formal plan. It’s not the plan that is creative; it’s the process that you go through that opens up so many possibilities.

Exercise 4 – Start doing what you love, even without a business plan

A lot of people wait until they have an extensive business plan written down, along with angel investors wanting to throw cash at them — and their ideas never see the light of day.

Just do what you enjoy — even if you haven’t yet figured out how to monetise it. Test what it might be like to work in an area you’re passionate about, build your business network and ask for feedback that will help you develop and refine a business plan.

It’s a way to not only show the value you would bring, but you can also get testimonials that will help launch your business when you’re ready to make it official.

Exercise 5 – Take a break from business thinking.

While it might feel uncomfortable to step outside of business mode, the mind sometimes needs a rest from such bottom-line thinking. Maybe for you, it will be creative writing, painting, running or even gardening. Read also How to make your brain work better

After you take a mental vacation indulging in something you’re passionate about, come back to a journal and writing down any business ideas that come to mind. You’ll be amazed at how refreshed your ideas are. Looking at beautiful things – art and nature – creates connections that we often neglect to notice.

https://millionairesdigest.wordpress.com/2016/05/23/how-to-find-your-passion-for-travel-beauty-book-bloggers-more/

Lead a Mindful Life Today. Quick tips.

Some things in life should not be taken for granted… You have to be mindful in order to appreciate life. A common thing I will talk about is how life is very precious; being mindful has to be one of the priorities for each of you. It comes from many different aspects such as, simply being open minded, practice meditation, exercise, reading etc.

The simple things that you can do to lead to this life, will drastically improve your mindfulness. No matter which thing you do, one of them or all of them, you will find that implementing those will give you a huge difference in lifestyle.

Open Minded.

Being open minded is probably the key to living a mindful life… Living with the idea that you are better than someone else, is no way to live. There are many trends here that if you speak to someone across the world, are not even thought of. But those trends lead many of you to be closed minded and materialistic.

Life is much more than looking cool or having all the latest gear or being flashy, it is truly about realizing how amazing life is, and using it to benefit not only you, but the world.

Things are different around the world, and even within the country, open heart open mind is a great way to start the journey of mindfulness.

Culture is a major way to open your mind. Just being able to understand that culture is out there, and it is very rich in most cases, will show you how open minded you can be.

There are many of us who do not desire to learn more about the world, however, to live that mindful life, and to be open minded it is a must.

The more you experience culture outside of your own, the easier it will be to lead that mindful life that you want. The world has many things to offer, and without seeing those things you will live in the same society which changes you from being an individual. No matter what you do, you have to make sure you are the best you, and experience the cultures that the world has to offer.

Meditation and Yoga.

Of the many ways that you can become more of a mindful person, meditation is a great first step. It involves centering yourself and trying to see who you are. You can find many different ways of meditation as well. That range from yoga, exercise, literal meditation, reading, the list goes on and on. What you have to figure out is how can you incorporate it into your life today, and make a difference in how you are feeling tomorrow. But how do you start?

It is possibly a shortcut to leading a mindful life. It takes a ton of discipline in order to meditate. It goes hand in hand with being open minded, because you are taking a step back and relaxing your mind; which leads to your mind being open and free. The simple “Om” isn’t the only way of meditating, it can be many things. Yoga is a combination of meditation and exercise. You focus on your breath, and in some practices you focus on centering yourself.

On those same lines, even regular exercise can be used as a practice of meditation. There are many good chemicals that release during exercise that can help reduce stress, and create a relaxed mind.

Reading.

One key way of being more mindful in life, is to read.

Reading is by far the best way to learn about things that are happening around the world, it is also an amazing way to provoke thought. When you read an article or a story in which it stimulates your brain to think, you will find yourself being much more open to change and open to life.

Creating a routine where you read at least one article or story a day (Or a certain amount of chapters in a novel) can significantly improve your mindfulness as well as keeping your brain sharp.

Of the many different benefits that reading has on your mind, the maintenance of your brain health is the most important. Read also How to make your brain work better, Training the Brain’s Motivation Center. Without your brain and mind, you are a shell. Those are what make you an amazing individual and different from the rest of the world. Just reading regularly will help keep you fresh and ready to take on the next step in your journey through life. You have one life to live and one brain/mind to have, you have to maintain them otherwise they will degrade. Read also What is the connection between Music and the Brain?, and How to improve your memory.

Finally Living a Mindful Life.

Being mindful is something that comes in time. Our minds always learn and develop as we age, and they will never stop doing that. Just by implementing things that will keep you mindful and conscious, you will find a huge improvement in your way of life. read also Level of consciousness vs happiness. Leading this lifestyle is not just a simple change; it is a way of life shift.

To understand what it truly takes in order to get to where you want, you have to jump into it all out. If you take risks, they will certainly pay off, that goes especially with being more mindful.

Time is limited, so you have to make use with the time we are given and with time will come mindfulness.

Open your mind, meditate, read, or whatever you find helps you the most. Stick to those and you will get where you want.

Life has many amazing things to offer, you just have to be the best you, implement lifestyle changes, and go out and accomplish your dreams.

Article Credits: Dustin Meyer

-Millionaire’s Digest Staff Member, Contributor, CEO & Founder of Evolutionary Mind

Edited by OpenMindPortal

https://millionairesdigest.wordpress.com/2016/05/23/quick-tips-lead-a-mindful-life-today-for-beauty-book-writing-bloggers-more/

Mindfulness for kids. Simple explanation of complex philosophy.

The highest function of education is to bring about an integrated individual who is capable of dealing with life as a whole

Krishnamurti

If you were to google mindfulness it states that

it is a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique.

For me, mindfulness is learning to live in the present moment and take things one thing at a time. It is a tool that helps myself and my students to deal with the anxieties that we deal with on a daily basis. It is a reminder to be grateful for the things that I have and the things that are going right in my life. For my reading students, it is a tool to help them calm themselves at the beginning of every class period and through our “Mindful Monday” practices, it helps them to train their brains to focus on tasks (something that has helped some of my most struggling readers).

Many believe that mindfulness is meditation. What I have found through my reading and research is that mindfulness is like the marathon that you train for and meditation is the training that you do for that marathon. Through meditations, you are able to train your brain to be aware of when you are “off task” and tune back into the moment that you are in. Being in tune with the present helps us to be more productive, helps us to enjoy the things that we do more, and helps us to deal with our stresses by not worrying about the past or the future.

The whole concept of mindfulness really resonated with me after hearing about it at the workshop earlier this year. I am a self-confessed worry wart. I have always been. Anxiety and the need to please have burdened me all of my life. Add on the role of being a mother and the anxiety and mommy guilt has been enough to put me over the edge! However, when I started to read the journals that I ask my students to keep daily, I began to realize that

my anxiety at age 40 was nothing in comparison to what some of these 11 and 12-year-old boys and girls are dealing.

I could not believe how anxious they were and how so many of them were desperate to find some tool to help them. It made me really start to think about what may happen to some of them if they did not learn to handle the stresses that they are feeling at this point in their life.

As a teacher and a mom, I worry about what kids are doing to relieve stress. We hear all of the time about drug abuse, bullying, and suicide. It all scares me to death. While it seems that every generation has their new and different things that stress them out, it seems to me like a tool like mindfulness is exactly what all generations could use to help them to relieve anxiety and live a happier life.

With the age of less and less recess in schools and technology distracting us from everything, I truly believe that mindfulness is a tool that everyone needs to learn, especially our children. It used to be a badge of honor to be able to say you could multi-task like no one else (Read also How to cope with information overload). However, there is more and more research to say that our brains are not meant to multi-task. The part of our brain that was meant to activate for fight or flight for a short amount of time is now activating for longer and longer periods of time with no rest. None of this is good! Read also How to declutter your mind.

…When I decided to start the journey of mindfulness with my students, I knew that I needed to do more than tell them about it. I knew that it was going to be important to incorporate it into our every day. Since I teach middle school, I see my students for a 40 minute class and then they move on to other classes…

I started by explaining to the students how their brains work. I gave them some of the facts from brain research. I also polled them through their journals to find out if they categorized themselves as “stressed” or “anxious”. It amazed me to read the results.

So many the students who seem to have things together day in and day out confessed to being ridden with stress and anxiety for various reasons.

After explaining how the brain works and why we tend to feel anxious in different situations, I had them think about situations they have been in where stress and anxiety has taken over. We identified how our body reacts (how we feel, how we look, etc). Many students had no problem coming up with the typical symptoms of their heart racing, sweating, shaking, etc. I then told them that I was going to give them a tool to help them in situations of high stress, but also a tool that will just help to give their brains a break throughout the day. It is called our “Mindful Minute”. My goal for the class is to work up to a full minute (deeply focusing on the present moment), but at first a full minute is hard for the students to complete…

..Recently, I asked my students to write about the times that they have used the mindful minute outside of class. Many wrote about doing it on their own before a big hockey game or dance recital. Others have said that they actually focus on their breathing to help them fall asleep at night. Still others told me about how they try to do it as soon as they feel anxious about something. I cannot tell you how happy that made me to hear that they were actually applying this skill outside of the classroom. After all, that is what it is all about!

Aggregated by OpenMindPortal

Cover by OpenMindPortal

Source:

https://mymindfulmission.wordpress.com/2016/05/17/what-is-mindfulness/

The Stress of Uncertainty is the worst

New research suggests that stress from fear of the unknown can be greater than the stress associated with knowledge of an outcome, even when the outcome is painful.

In the study conducted by University College London, the fear of getting a painful electric shock led to significantly more stress than knowing that you will definitely be shocked.

The research, published in Nature Communications, found that situations in which subjects had a 50 percent chance of receiving a shock were the most stressful while zero percent and 100 percent chances were the least stressful.

Our experiment allows us to draw conclusions about the effect of uncertainty on stress. It turns out that it’s much worse not knowing you are going to get a shock than knowing you definitely will or won’t. We saw exactly the same effects in our physiological measures — people sweat more and their pupils get bigger when they are more uncertain

conclude researches.

This is the first time that the effect of uncertainty on stress has been quantified, but the concept is likely to be familiar to many people.

When applying for a job, you’ll probably feel more relaxed if you think it’s a long shot or if you’re confident that it’s in the bag,

said co-author Dr. Robb Rutledge.

The most stressful scenario is when you really don’t know. It’s the uncertainty that makes us anxious. The same is likely to apply in many familiar situations, whether it’s waiting for medical results or information on train delays.

Nevertheless, stress is not always negative and counterproductive. The study also found a potential benefit. People whose stress responses spiked the most at periods of greatest uncertainty were better at judging whether or not individual rocks would have snakes under them.

From an evolutionary perspective, our finding that stress responses are tuned to environmental uncertainty suggests that it may have offered some survival benefits

said senior author Dr. Sven Bestmann.”

Sources:

http://psychcentral.com/news/2016/03/30/stress-from-uncertainty-may-override-actual-event/101113.html

https://rennickeassociates.wordpress.com/2016/04/27/the-stress-of-uncertainty/

What kind of habit keeps you exercising?

It’s not always easy to convince yourself to exercise after a long day of work. (Ok, it’s never easy.) But people who consistently manage to do it may be using a simple trick—whether they realize it or not—according to a new study published in the journal Health Psychology.

The most consistent exercisers, researchers found, were those who made exercise into a specific type of habit—one triggered by a cue, like hearing your morning alarm and going to the gym without even thinking about it, or getting stressed and immediately deciding to exercise.

It’s not something you have to deliberate about; you don’t have to consider the pros and cons of going to the gym after work,

explains L. Alison Phillips, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University and one of the study’s authors. Instead, it’s an automatic decision instigated by your own internal or environmental cue.
The researchers wanted to see whether this type of habit, known as an instigation habit, was better than another type of habit at predicting who stuck with a month of exercise. At the beginning and end of the monthlong study, they asked 123 university students and faculty questions that assessed how often they exercised and how strong their exercise habits were—whether they did it without thinking, for example. From these questions, they gleaned whether a person has a strong instigation habit—one where a cue triggers the instantaneous decision to exercise—and whether a person has a strong execution habit—that is, knowing exactly what kind of exercise they’ll do once you get to the gym, or being able to go through the motions of an exercise routine while being mentally checked out.

The only factor that predicted how often a person exercised over the long-term, they found, was the strength of their instigation habit. It got stronger with time, too.

When people started exercising more frequently over the month and became more active, I saw that their instigation habit strength increased with that frequency, but execution habit didn’t really change in relation to frequency at all…

Mandy Oaklander | July 9, 2015 | Time

https://pragmasynesi.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/what-kind-of-habit-keeps-you-exercising/

How to make your brain work better

7 activities your brain has to enjoy every day

Neuroscientists believe that the net effect of spending eight hours a day in the office performing repetitive tasks, a further two hours commuting, and the rest of the day scrolling through social media or watching TV, is an impairment of our normal brain functions. In short, we are being transformed into easily manipulated, apathetic zombies.

A daily routine, similar to the one above, has been scientifically proven to kill creativity. This occurs as a result of a rapid drop in our level of consciousness in such conditions. Read: Levels of consciousness vs happiness. Lacking the opportunity to really focus on a new task and the possibility of stretching itself to solve problems, the brain slips into so-called ‘down time’ or ‘sleep walker’ mode. The brain’s capacity to be proactive disappears quickly in such conditions, and it simply becomes lazy.

This is comparable to the process which occurs when we stop doing physical exercise, and the body consequently swiftly enters a more sedentary mode. Similarly, the brain loses focus and slumps into a semi-awake state.

An alternative scenario sees the brain engaging in 12 hours of extreme activity, permanently focusing on a variety of new tasks, learning on the go, and engaging in intensive decision making. It is constantly working at its peak. While this situation appears preferable, our brain is not designed for such extremes either. After a while it will simply stop functioning properly, due to information overload – another common feature of modern life. Read How to cope with information overload.

What happens next? The overly-active brain loses its ability to process new information, and again automatically switches to down-time mode. The recharging period could be long. Chronic information overload also causes fatigue, lack of creativity and depression.

According to David Rock, director of the Neuroleadership Institute and the author of bestseller Your Brain at Work, the human brain needs to experience 7 types of activities in order to function properly and we must have all of these every day.

If you want a plant to grow, it needs the right amount of water and nutrients,” says Rock. “It’s obvious when you leave one of those out. With the brain, it’s a less obvious. The right dietary elements are only one part of this.… The basic balanced diet that you probably already know is a foundation, but there are other types of inputs that your brain needs that people tend to ignore. And these are essentially exercising different types of circuits in the brain, allowing other circuits to rest and recover.

The ideal ratio of each of the 7 types varies from person to person, but it is important to have them all and separate them from one another. For example, don’t try to catch-up with friends or work during your down-time or time-in. In order to be more productive, creative and to feel happy and satisfied, we have to differentiate and clearly understand what kind of activity we are engaging in at a particular moment, allowing our brain to benefit from it. Likewise, don’t check your social media during your focus time.

Focus time

This is our productive time when we get things done. Our brain is highly active and exercised by problem-solving and intellectual challenges.

It’s helpful for creating deep circuits,” says Rock “and it’s a healthful and helpful process.

Without focus-time the brain becomes idle, resulting in mental sluggishness. It is very important to force it to focus, even if there’s no immediate need for it to do so. Let’s say you are on a two week holiday, and plan to spend your time doing nothing. That sounds great, but not for your brain. Give it the chance to focus for at least a few hours a day just to “keep it fit”. Learning a new language, reading a challenging book or doing any problem-solving tasks is very beneficial.

Connecting time

We are all social animals to some extent. We need to be connected and belong to a group, and our brain has the same need.

Being isolated socially is twice as dangerous to yourself as smoking. If you’re just working and not maintaining a social life, you’re probably impacting your health and well-being, not just your mental performance…

says Rock.

I moved to different countries at various times in my life, starting again from scratch. Each time I experienced a terrible lack of connection to people at the beginning. I didn’t have friends in these new locations, and sometimes could not even call the places I lived in ‘home’. What did I do? I visited local gyms or dance classes. Even without deeper interpersonal interactions, our brain can be satisfied through merely talking to other people… So give it a chance to be connected: Go out, help someone, start doing something with other people, and it will bring plenty of positive things into your life.

Down time

Down time is unrelated to problem-solving or to achieving your goals. It could be achieved by reading an interesting novel (don’t confuse this with reading professional literature – this is something to be done in your focus time), cleaning your home, cooking, or just sitting on a park bench, enjoying nature. Down time allows the brain to rest and recover.

You’re allowing space for your unconscious connections to come to the surface, to solve complex problems,

believe Rock.

Down time is vital for healthy brain functioning. However, it should be limited. It is always very tempting to dwell in such a mode all the time. As I mentioned earlier, when adopted for prolonged periods, down-time makes our brain lazy and impairs its functioning. Instead, take a 15-30 minute break every 2-4 hours of your active time. It will be refresh you and help you to unwind, but do not regress into this mode for hours or days.

Time in

Time in allows your brain to, in a sense, reorganize itself through reflection,

says Rock.

It’s different from down time, which is very inactive. With time in, you’re thinking about your thinking, you’re mindful and connecting your brain in deeper ways. It’s the kind of practice that allows you to reflect on your thoughts.

Yoga, meditation, psychoanalysis sessions, various spiritual practices such as tantric breathing, and many other techniques could help you to reach this mode. It is a state of being which enables you to capture your true feelings, analyse your experiences, and stimulate new ideas. Time in is one of the healthiest things you can do. Balancing yourself as a person will also improve you from a professional point of view as well. People lacking time for internal deep reflecting finally reach a state in which they are disconnected from what they want, what they need, and what really makes them happy.

Speaking about real time-in Rock noticed:

The number (of such hours) continues to decrease as I ask people. It’s not 20 or 10 or even 5 hours. For a lot of people, it’s a couple of hours a week, if that.

The culprit, he thinks, is our extremely fast lifestyle, overloaded as it is with tasks and information. The solution:

Find the ideal window in your week when you can carve out focus time — to do what I call level three thinking, deeper problem solving and writing and creative work.

It is a time slot which differs from person to person, but Rock says that the best time is generally early in the day, and early in the week — Monday, Tuesday, maybe Wednesday morning.

Play Time

This is all about novelty, the unexpected and fun, allowing new novel connections to form,

says Rock.

This could be absolutely anything that makes you laugh or experience relaxed and positive emotions. Comedy shows, shopping with friends, drinks or dinner out, playing games and any number of other options can be included in this category. Doing something “just for fun” at least once a day, enormously increases productivity and creativity.

Physical Time

Your brain benefits tremendously from physical activity, particularly aerobic activity. A recent study showed people were 23% more effective on days they exercised,

says Rock.

“When we exercise, we’re oxygenating the brain and helping to flush out toxins, but we’re also activating regions of the brain intensely that don’t otherwise get activated, and this allows other functions to rest and helps with the overall coherence of the brain. There’s increasing evidence that thinking is very closely connected to movement, and it seems you can improve the quality of thinking by improving your effectiveness at physical activities, and it’s not just an aerobic benefit.”

So make a habit of having physical time every day. If you have no chance to get to the gym, just walk home.

Sleep time

This is the time when our brain activates its special recovery mode to put all the things it has absorbed over the course of the day together.

The sleep situation in our society has become a terrifying problem,

explained Dr. Jessica Payne, head of the Sleep, Stress, and Memory Lab at Notre Dame, and advisory board member for the Neuroleadership Institute.

If you’re not getting enough sleep before work, research shows you might as well be working drunk,

she adds.

This is not just a metaphor. According to Dr. Charles Czeisler from Harvard Medical School, a week of sleeping four or five hours a night induces impairment equivalent to a blood alcohol level of 0.1%.

The advice? Get enough rest and try to enjoy all 7 types of mental activities every single day!

Tatiana Dmitrieva

8 Questions To Ask Yourself To Feel Better

Ask yourself great questions and have a great life. Ask yourself bad questions and have a bad life.

Questions are really powerfull and determine your descisions, focus, mindset.

Ask yourself a question and your brain will find the right answer.

Here are some questions that will put you in a better state.

What’s really hilarious about this right now?

Why is it so easy for me to get excited about my life?

What am I greatful for?

Why am I so awesome?

What do I find really interesting right now?

What are the 3 best things I love about life?

What is the best thing that happened in the last week?

What is the best thing ever that happened to me?

Why do I love myself so much?

Don’t just read them. Really answer them and your state will change.

The trick here is to ask yourself questions that allready implies awesomeness. Questions like that will make you look at things from different angle and mindset. That’s the key. To look at life differently.

Now get out there and feel great!

https://dopelifey.wordpress.com/2016/04/26/8-questions-to-ask-yourself-to-feel-better/

How to improve your memory

Draw it to remember it. Good trick to know.

Here’s the Memory Trick That Science Says Works — You draw it

Jeffrey Kluger | April 22, 2016

If the brain could brag that’s pretty much all it would do. It’s easily the most complicated organ in your body, and, more than that, the nimblest computer that has ever existed. But the brain has a bug and everyone knows is: memory. No matter how powerful its operating system becomes, its storage system stinks.

Even in childhood, when the brain is as clear and uncluttered as it will ever be, memory is still imperfect, given to random failures, depending on how rested we are, how attentive we’re being and a range of other things. Now, a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests an unusual strategy for improving it: drawing.

As long ago as 1973, investigators were studying the memory-boosting advantage of so-called dual-coding—the way that a combination of both thinking about an object or activity and drawing a picture of it can make us remember it better. Research did show that the strategy worked, but the studies were both sparse and flawed, failing to account for the mere fact that it takes longer to draw a picture than, say, write a word, and whether writing the word in a more time-consuming way—using elaborate calligraphy, for example—would thus boost recall too.

In order to tease out those and other variables, a group led by psychologist Jeffrey D. Wammes recruited sample groups of students and ran seven different trials of essentially the same experiment on them. In all of the trials, the scientists started with a list of 80 simple words—all nouns and all easy to draw, such as balloon, fork, kite, pear, peanut and shoe. A random series of 30 of those words were flashed on a screen along with instructions either to draw the object or write down its name. After the 30 words, they would perform a filler task—listening to a series of tones and identifying whether each was low-, high-, or medium-pitched. That task had nothing to do with the study, except to get the subjects’ minds off of what they had just done, so that the memories could either consolidate or, just as often, vanish. Finally, they would write down a list of as many of the objects from the first test as they could.

In most of the trials, the subjects got 40 seconds to draw their picture, but in one they got just four seconds. In another variation, they would draw the object or write the word or, as a third option, list its descriptive characteristics. In another, the third option would be to visualize the object. In yet another, they would write the word as elaborately and decoratively as possible.

But no matter how many variations of the test the researchers ran, one result was consistent: Drawing the object beat every other option, every single time.

We observed a significant recall advantage for words that were drawn as compared to those that were written. Participants often recalled more than twice as many drawn words.

said Wammes in a prepared statement.

Just why this is so is not clear. One past theory had been that drawing requires what the researchers call a deeper LoP—or level of processing. But the trial in which the subjects were required to list the characteristics of an object went pretty deep too, and it didn’t make a difference. Another theory had been that drawing simply takes longer, but the four-second trial appeared to debunk that.

For now, Wammes and his group are speaking only generally, concluding that drawing encourages

a seamless integration of semantic, visual and motor aspects of a memory trace,

as they wrote in their paper. It will take more work to put flesh on those theoretical bones. For now, however, they only know that the technique works—providing a long-awaited software patch for the computer inside your head.

https://pragmasynesi.wordpress.com/2016/04/26/draw-it-to-remember-it/

Training the Brain’s Motivation Center

It will change your life! Read it carefully! Now you can achieve anything you want! Limitlessly! How? Just simply training regularly the brain centre responsible for motivation!

Work hard! Play hard! Dream even harder!!!!

Courtesy of https://rennickeassociates.wordpress.com/2016/04/25/training-the-brains-motivation-center/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Matthew A. Scult

Matthew Scult is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. More about his research and writing can be found at http://www.matthewscult.com or follow him on Twitter @NeuroMatt1

My heart pounds as I sprint to the finish line. Thousands of spectators cheer as a sense of elation washes over me. I savor the feeling. But then, the image slowly fades away and my true surroundings come into focus. I am lying in a dark room with my head held firmly in place, inside an MRI scanner. While this might typically be unpleasant, I am a willing research study participant and am eagerly anticipating what comes next. I hold my breath as I stare at the bar on the computer screen representing my brain activity. Then the bar jumps. My fantasy of winning a race had caused the “motivation center” of my brain to surge with activity.

I am participating in a study about neurofeedback, a diverse and fascinating area of research that combines neuroscience and technology to monitor and modulate brain activity in real time. My colleagues, Katie Dickerson and Jeff MacInnes, in the Adcock Lab at Duke University, are studying whether people can train themselves to increase brain activity in a tiny region of the brain called the VTA. Notably, the VTA is thought to be involved in motivation—the desire to get something that you want. For example, if I told you that by buying a lottery ticket you would be guaranteed to win $1,000,000, you would probably be very motivated to buy the ticket and would have a spike in brain activity in this region of your brain. But while studies have shown that motivation for external rewards (like money) activate the VTA, until now, we didn’t know whether people could internally generate a motivational state that would activate this brain region.

(But we definitely will not hurt ourselves trying. I, for instance, always practice 5-10 min of watching (do not read as it is my main activity during a day and it is useful to switch for something else) visual stimuli related to my dream achievements every 2-4 hours while work. It always gives me energy to carry on. Always! It just works. End of story! That’s why I can easily work 12-15 hours a day being inspired and motivated – (OMP editor’s comment)

To see if people can self-activate the VTA, my colleagues are using neurofeedback, which falls under the broader umbrella of biofeedback. Biofeedback uses technology to give people information about the functioning of their bodies so that they can try to change their physiology. Studies on using the technique to control heart rate, breathing rate, muscle tension, and skin temperature have been around since the 1960s, and these types of biofeedback are often used to help people reduce anxiety, chronic pain, or psychological disorders, with varying degrees of efficacy.

The latest iteration of biofeedback is neurofeedback, which provides a person with information on their brain activity milliseconds to seconds after it happens. Neurofeedback can use either an EEG machine, which records the electrical activity of the brain and is very fast, but not very specific, or it can use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which records changes in blood flow in the brain and can better target specific brain regions, but is slower. The fMRI version of the technology has been around since as early as 1995 and its potential is slowly being realized. Studies on rtfMRI (the rt stands for “real-time”), have found that giving people feedback on their brain activity might be able to help them to control that activity. These studies both help us to better understand the functioning of the brain and can be used for clinical purposes. Perhaps the most common use to date has been for chronic pain, where people learn to decrease activation in regions of the brain that process pain perception. [For more information about neurofeedback see “How Real-Time Brain Scanning Could Alleviate Pain,” by Heather Chapin and Sean Mackey; Scientific American Mind, March 1, 2013.]

The study I’m participating in is about using the technology to better understand the functioning of the VTA and its relationship with internally generated motivation, with potential for clinical applications down the road. In animal models, artificially affecting functioning of the VTA can affect how much an animal eats or drinks, and can even affect its emotional responses. If people could learn to activate their VTAs deliberately, it could have important applications to anything from helping someone stick to a diet to helping with psychological disorders.

Back in the fMRI, I lie on the uncomfortable scanner bed, looking up at the giant machine that reminds me of something I might encounter on a spaceship. Katie Dickerson’s voice comes over the intercom and gives me suggestions of ways to try and activate my VTA. She says I could try to think of phrases, like “you can do it!” or “increase that signal!” and says that it might help to think of the task as a fun game. So I think “I can do this!” but to my dismay the bar remains pretty flat. I think about winning $1,000,000, but don’t get much of a jump for that either. Then I picture myself running with a cheering crowd and music playing, and the bar goes through the roof.

For the study, participants were placed in one of four groups. All four groups started out by getting in the scanner and trying to activate their brains using motivation strategies, but first without receiving any feedback. After doing this for several minutes, people in the first group (like me) would try again, but this time would see a thermometer on the computer screen in front of them. When activity in the VTA went up, the bar on the thermometer would rise. When activity in the VTA went down, the thermometer would drop. The other groups either got feedback from a different brain region, got fake feedback, or were shown a visual distraction. These groups were used as comparisons to ensure that it really was the signal from the VTA that was being registered in the neurofeedback group. Afterward, all four groups tried one more time without the feedback (real or fake). At the end of the study, all participants were debriefed about their group assignment and the purpose of the study.

The results were published recently in the journal Neuron. It turns out that the strategies people tried initially did not activate their VTAs very much—the same experience I had. In other words, what people thought of as motivating did not match up with activity in what we consider to be the “motivation center” of the brain. How could that be? One possible explanation is that it can be difficult to get a sense of just how motivated we are to do something. Consider times when you might have thought you were highly motivated (“I know I am going to stick to my diet/exercise regimen this year”), and didn’t follow through. Another interpretation is that while we might have some sense of how motivated we are in a given moment, our subjective perceptions might not translate to VTA activation. There might not even be a clear feeling associated with the activation at all, explains MacInnes. That’s where the feedback came in.

The study found that, like me, people were better able to activate their VTAs, on average, once they got neurofeedback compared to people who got false feedback or no feedback. And the learning stuck—once people knew the strategies that worked for them, they were effective even once the feedback was taken away. Overall, different strategies worked for different people and some people in the control groups were still able to activate their VTAs even without the neurofeedback. The take-home message is that there is still a lot to learn.

Perhaps the biggest unanswered question is what could result from an ability to better activate one’s VTA. One possibility is that internally generated VTA activation could allow people to have the extra oomph to better meet their goals. So maybe when I need to do errands, but am really not in the mood, I can think about winning a race and it will give me the drive to go to the grocery store. For others, enhanced VTA activation might be able to help with studying. After all, studies have found VTA activation associated with better memory performance. And given other studies showing VTA signaling being related to eating and mood, it’s possible that it could help people with eating disorders or depression. Time will tell whether this method will be useful clinically, but for now I can say for certain that it can be a lot of fun getting to know your brain—and for me at least, it seems that having fun is one of the keys to activating my VTA.