Friday, May 30, 2008

The Power of Persuasion: Eight Ways to Get Exactly What You Want

By Dan Jones and Alison Motluk
Source: New Scientist


Cajole your boss into giving you a raise, win someone round to your point of view, or persuade your partner it's their turn to put out the trash - getting people to do what you want can be very handy.

Persuasion is a key element of all human interaction, from politics to marketing to everyday dealings with friends, family and colleagues. "Persuasion is a basic form of social interaction," says Eric Knowles, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. "It is the way we build consensus and a common purpose."


Unfortunately persuasion is both notoriously difficult to pull off and almost impossible to resist when done well. Psychologists have long been fascinated by persuasion - why some people are more persuasive than others and why some strategies work where others fail. Over the next six pages we bring together some recent insights into the science of persuasion.


For those who don't want to be persuaded, there are lessons here too. Knowing the strategies charmers and advertisers adopt can help you resist their guile.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Ancient Secrets of Levitation

Source: About.com

Did ancient civilizations possess knowledge that has since been lost to science? Were amazing technologies available to the ancient Egyptians that enabled them to construct the pyramids - technologies that have somehow been forgotten?


The ruins of several ancient civilizations - from Stonehenge to the pyramids - show that they used massive stones to construct their monuments. A basic question is why? Why use stone pieces of such enormous size and weight when the same structures could have been constructed with more easily managed smaller blocks - much like we use bricks and cinderblocks today?


Could part of the answer be that these ancients had a method of lifting and moving these massive stones - some weighing several tons - that made the task as easy and manageable as lifting a two-pound brick? The ancients, some researchers suggest, may have mastered the art of levitation, through sonics or some other obscure method, that allowed them to defy gravity and manipulate massive objects with ease.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

The 7 Master Secrets of the Rich Mind Life Strategy

By Dr. Robert Anthony
Creator of Rich Mind Life Strategy

The Rich Mind Life Strategy is a scientifically provable strategy that does not require you to take a blind leap of faith for it to work. When you apply the combined principles contained in the Seven Master Secrets - along with some ongoing training and mentoring, you cannot fail to attract whatever you desire...

So settle back, and let me take you on a journey through the Seven Master Secrets - and how they can transform your life and the results you create in everything you do...

Master Secret #1: "Master the flow"

This is the one secret most responsible for all the wealth, riches, and happiness ever created throughout all of history...

Being in the flow is the ultimate master secret of the Rich Mind Life Strategy - and it delivers the ultimate rewards...

When you have "mastered the flow", you will know how to align yourself with all the riches you desire by living in a state of ease instead of a state of resistance - which is characterized by fear, doubt, and worry.

You will experience life with a natural ease and grace - and you will find the precise people, circumstances and events lining up and attracting to you that which you most desire...

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Free Report: How to Sleep Better and Unleash Your Energy

Kacper Postawski has launched a brand new program to help anyone who suffers from chronic insomnia or an occasional sleepless night. If you would like to discover how to cure insomnia and enjoy energized sleep naturally, I urge you to check out the Sleep Wiz Revitalizing Program.

Kacper has also written two absolutely free reports packed with powerful research and simple secrets to help you live a more energetic lifestyle. The two reports are called "The 30 Second Secret To Blasting Your Energy Levels Through The Roof In The Morning" and "How to Free Yourself of Any Disease, Stop Fatigue, and Create Unstoppable Energy in Your Life."

Click here for your free copies of these reports

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Lose Weight in 60 Seconds

By Bonnie Schiedel
Source: Yahoo Lifestyle


Got a minute? Try a tip! We consulted health and fitness experts, the latest scientific studies and real-life women who are taking off pounds to find 20 quick weight-loss strategies that work. Add one to your routine today and watch the scale go down!

Change your clothes
If you exercise after dinner, put your workout gear on before you get to the gym. You're less likely to veer off to the couch, says Karen Bridson, a Toronto fitness trainer.

Start with salad
Jennie Wilson of Toronto loads up her plate with a luscious salad before she has her main course, a strategy that's helped the 29-year-old lose 40 pounds in two years. It packs a double-punch: you meet your veggie quota and take the edge off your hunger with filling fibre before diving into the higher-cal entree.

Work out with a cheerleader
A Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania study found that participants who received frequent positive feedback during exercise worked harder than those who received infrequent encouragement or none at all. Click here to find a fitness buddy in the Chatelaine Fitness & sport forum.

Sip green tea
In a study on mice, Japanese researchers found that green tea extract helps endurance during exercise. You may see a similar effect from drinking four cups(1L)of green tea daily.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Music Changes How Your Brain Tastes Wine

Source: BBC

Playing a certain type of music can enhance the way wine tastes, research by psychologists suggests.


The Heriot Watt University study found people rated the change in taste by up to 60% depending on the melody heard.


The researchers said cabernet sauvignon was most affected by "powerful and heavy" music, and chardonnay by "zingy and refreshing" sounds.


Professor Adrian North said the study could lead retailers to put music recommendations on their wine bottles.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

'Called Into the Presence of God'

By Brett Buckner
Source: Anniston Star


Death offers a second chance to the living.


It stirs emotions once thinly veiled, forcing those caught in its wake to confront their own mortality. Through such unwanted introspection, a profound appreciation of life is gained — regrets are mended, failures forgotten and hope for an ever-fragile future is renewed.


Matt Nelson understands the sway death holds over the living. He, too, has been changed by its presence.


Only this death was his own.


As a sales inspector for Terminix, Nelson faces the darkness as a matter of routine. Almost daily, he belly crawls beneath the homes of potential clients, stabbing at the shadows with a flashlight searching for signs of infestation.


But what Nelson experienced beneath a house on Main Street in Glencoe on Monday, April 7 was anything but ordinary. For 30 seconds, while his body was being electrocuted, Nelson stepped out and across the threshold of eternity before being snatched back by an unlikely hero.


Once, Nelson would have rolled his eyes at the mention of a "near-death experience" — with the requisite stories of bright lights and choirs of angels usually told by the same people who believe in alien abduction and Bigfoot.


"I was an absolute skeptic, a cynic," says the 40-year-old Nelson.


That was until it happened to him.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Who's Afraid of Life After Death?

By Neal Grossman
IONS Review


When researchers ask the question, "How can the near-death experience be explained?" they tend to make the usual assumption that an acceptable explanation will be in terms of concepts—biological, neurological, psychological—with which they are already familiar.

The near-death experience (NDE) would then be explained, for example, if it could be shown what brain state, which drugs, or what beliefs on the part of the experiencer correlate with the NDE. Those who have concluded that the NDE cannot be explained mean that it cannot be, or has not yet been, correlated with any physical or psychological condition of the experiencer.


I wish to suggest that this approach to explaining the NDE is fundamentally misguided. To my knowledge, no one who has had an NDE feels any need for an explanation in the reductionist sense that researchers are seeking. For the experiencer, the NDE does not need to be explained because it is exactly what it purports to be, which is, at a minimum, the direct experience of consciousness—or minds, or selves, or personal identity—existing independently of the physical body. It is only with respect to our deeply entrenched materialist paradigm that the NDE needs to be explained, or more accurately, explained away.

In this article, I will take the position that materialism has been shown to be empirically false; and hence, what does need to be explained is the academic establishment's collective refusal to examine the evidence and to see it for what it is. The academic establishment is in the same position today as the bishop who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. Why is this the case?


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Scientists Discover Plants Can Control Weather

Gone are the days of believing plants are just passive organisms. Earlier this year, researchers found that plants can communicate through little understood chemical mechanisms. Now scientists are even saying that plants can do something perhaps even more incredible: Control the weather.

According to researchers at the Scottish Association for Marine Science and the University of Manchester, brown seaweed, kelp, has the ability to create cloudy days at the seaside. But why would plants want to alter weather patterns? Apparently, because cloudy days make the plants more comfortable.


When the sky is overcast kelp are comfortable when the tide goes out, since they are able to stay moist until it comes back. On a bright day however, they dry out. When they start getting dry the plants become stressed and begin releasing iodide. The iodide rises, causing clouds to form overhead, which in turns protects the kelp from unwelcome sunshine.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Can Placebos Cure Our Sick Society?

By Alan Tutt
Author of Choose To Believe

Everywhere you look, the news reports an increasing amount of
violence in the world. Countries continue to go to war, children bring knives and guns to school, and the courts are full of citizens suing each other over minor grievances.

Most of us agree that the world would be a better place if there
wasn't so much violence, yet what can we do?

Belief expert Alan Tutt tells us that our actions are firmly
based on what we believe. "Someone who believes in a bright future isn't as likely to be violent, whereas someone who believes that 'you have to fight to survive' will be quickly moved to violence," Alan says.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

How Technology is Changing Your Brain

By Susan Greenfield
Author of The Private Life of the Brain


Human identity, the idea that defines each and every one of us, could be facing an unprecedented crisis.


It is a crisis that would threaten long-held notions of who we are, what we do and how we behave. It goes right to the heart - or the head - of us all.


This crisis could reshape how we interact with each other, alter what makes us happy, and modify our capacity for reaching our full potential as individuals.


And it's caused by one simple fact: the human brain, that most sensitive of organs, is under threat from the modern world.


Unless we wake up to the damage that the gadget-filled, pharmaceutically-enhanced 21st century is doing to our brains, we could be sleepwalking towards a future in which neuro-chip technology blurs the line between living and non-living machines, and between our bodies and the outside world.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Mind Control by Cell Phone

By R. Douglas Fields
Source: Scientific American


Hospitals and airplanes ban the use of cell phones, because their electromagnetic transmissions can interfere with sensitive electrical devices. Could the brain also fall into that category?

Of course, all our thoughts, sensations and actions arise from bioelectricity generated by neurons and transmitted through complex neural circuits inside our skull. Electrical signals between neurons generate electric fields that radiate out of brain tissue as electrical waves that can be picked up by electrodes touching a person's scalp.

Measurements of such brainwaves in EEGs provide powerful insight into brain function and a valuable diagnostic tool for doctors. Indeed, so fundamental are brainwaves to the internal workings of the mind, they have become the ultimate, legal definition drawing the line between life and death.


Brainwaves change with a healthy person's conscious and unconscious mental activity and state of arousal. But scientists can do more with brainwaves than just listen in on the brain at work-they can selectively control brain function by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). This technique uses powerful pulses of electromagnetic radiation beamed into a person's brain to jam or excite particular brain circuits.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Monday, May 12, 2008

The Woman Who Can't Forget Anything

By Gary Robbins
Source: Orange County Register


The "human calendar."


That's what some people call the woman who contacted UC Irvine neurobiologist Jim McGaugh six years ago and said, "I have a problem. I remember too much."


She wasn't exaggerating. McGaugh and fellow UCI researchers Larry Cahill and Elizabeth Parker have been studying the extraordinary case of a person who has "nonstop, uncontrollable and automatic" memory of her personal history and countless public events.


If you randomly pick a date from the past 25 years and ask her about it, she'll usually provide elaborate, verifiable details about what happened to her that day and if there were any significant news events on topics that interested her. She usually also recalls what day of the week it was and what the weather was like.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Misery is the Secret to Happiness

Source: Times of India

The key to a happy relationship could be accepting that some miserable times are unavoidable, experts say. Therapists from California State University, Northridge and Virginia Tech say accepting these problems is better than striving for perfection.


And they blame cultural fairytales and modern love stories for perpetuating the myth that enjoying a perfect relationship is possible. The report was published in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy.


The authors, Diane Gehart and Eric McCollum say it is a "myth that, with enough effort we can achieve a state without suffering." And they say healthcare professionals may not be helping the situation. "The field of mental health perpetuates this myth with the very concept of 'mental health', which implies a state without suffering," they say.


But this belief can eventually cause people to believe that with enough effort they can eliminate suffering. And experts say this is an unrealistic aim in relationships, and striving to achieve it can lead people to feel they have failed.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Simple Ways to Improve Your Memory

By Joel Falconer
Source: Lifehack.org


Memory is one of the integral parts of day-to-day human life.


We're using it every moment, consciously or not, as we perceive the world and interpret it based on our memories and experiences, or as we look for the car keys, trying to recall where, exactly, was the last place they were seen.


It's no small wonder that this part of our brain would fall prey to such inefficiency and failure, given the busy pace of Western life and the constant barrage of information that the hippocampus must somehow keep up with. But at the same time, how can we fall complacent when such an essential thing as memory doesn't work properly?


Many personal development fans spend hours, weeks, months and years dedicated to other areas of their lives while they completely ignore the memory.


You should up your standards. Your memory should be a finely-tuned, working piece of equipment that you can depend on. So where can you start?


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Monday, May 05, 2008

Memory Training Boosts Your Brainpower

By Nicholas Bakalar
Source: New York Times

A new study has found that it may be possible to train people to be more intelligent, increasing the brainpower they had at birth.

Until now, it had been widely assumed that the kind of mental ability that allows us to solve new problems without having any relevant previous experience — what psychologists call fluid intelligence — is innate and cannot be taught (though people can raise their grades on tests of it by practicing).


But in the new study, researchers describe a method for improving this skill, along with experiments to prove it works.


The key, researchers found, was carefully structured training in working memory — the kind that allows memorization of a telephone number just long enough to dial it. This type of memory is closely related to fluid intelligence, according to background information in the article, and appears to rely on the same brain circuitry. So the researchers reasoned that improving it might lead to improvements in fluid intelligence.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Sunday, May 04, 2008

10 Things Your Body Can Do After You Die

By Maggie Koerth-Baker
Source: CNN


From getting hitched to saving the environment, here's proof you can still be a busybody long after you kick the bucket.


1. Get married

Death is no obstacle when it comes to love in China. That's because ghost marriage -- the practice of setting up deceased relatives with suitable spouses, dead or alive -- is still an option.


Ghost marriage first appeared in Chinese legends 2,000 years ago, and it's been a staple of the culture ever since. At times, it was a way for spinsters to gain social acceptance after death. At other times, the ceremony honored dead sons by giving them living brides. In both cases, the marriages served a religious function by making the deceased happier in the afterlife.


While the practice of matchmaking for the dead waned during China's Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, officials report that ghost marriages are back on the rise. Today, the goal is often to give a deceased bachelor a wife -- preferably one who has recently been laid to rest. But in a nation where men outnumber women in death as well as in life, the shortage of corpse brides has led to murder.


In 2007, there were two widely reported cases of rural men killing prostitutes, housekeepers, and mentally ill women in order to sell their bodies as ghost wives. Worse, these crimes pay. According to The Washington Post and The London Times, one undertaker buys women's bodies for more than $2,000 and sells them to prospective "in-laws" for nearly $5,000.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Friday, May 02, 2008

Six Steps to Living an Abundant Life

By Dr. Robert Anthony
Creator of Rich Mind Life Strategy


You can reprogram your present reality, and begin creating your life by design, manifesting everything you truly desire, just by taking six easy steps. You can begin right NOW.

1. Focus on What You Want to Manifest


You need to quit focusing on what is missing from your life. This includes
focusing on what you don’t want to happen. As soon as you realize you are focusing on what you don’t have, choose a different thought, or “flip the switch.”

Shift your focus to what you intend to attract and manifest in your life.
Put yourself in a state of receiving and accepting and move away from the state of lacking.

2. Stop Struggling


If you find yourself viewing your present circumstances as the reason for why you
can’t have what you want, STOP. Whatever difficulties you are currently facing, know they are only temporary and will last only as long as you continue to give the difficulties your attention. Your present circumstances are alive in just THIS moment. What you give your attention to grows. You attract what you focus on. So move your focus away from your current difficulty and you’ll stop feeling the struggle.

CLICK HERE TO READ ALL SIX STEPS

Thursday, May 01, 2008

The Limits of Memory: We Can Only Remember Four Things at a Time

By Josh Hill
Source: The Daily Galaxy


New research into our mind's capabilities to retain knowledge has shed light on a question that has been discussed for many years: how much can our mind remember at a time?


The study focused on ‘working memory’, that part of our mind which refers to the temporary storage of information that still allows us to pay attention and manipulate it. Some believe that working memory is separate to any of our other memory storages, many believe that working memory is simply that part of our long-term memory that we can currently access.


Research originally suggested that our working memory cut off point was around the seven items mark. However scientists are revising that idea, when adding the limitation of no memory tricks, such as repeating items over and over or grouping them together.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Is Your Dog Psychic?

Does your dog seem to know when you’re coming home? Do other people in your house tell you they knew you were on the way home based on how your dog was acting?



We're sponsoring a university experiment to determine if some dogs know when their owners are coming home.

Does your dog have the unexplained ability to know when you’re coming home… even when you come home at odd hours… even when she couldn’t possibly hear your car? If so, then we urge you to join our study.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS EXPERIMENT