Monday, July 28, 2008

10 Myths That Stand in the Way of Your Dreams

By David Cameron Gikandi
Creator of the Amazing Lifestyle Creation Formula


Busting the 10 Myths… The Myths That Say, Quite Convincingly, Why Your Dreams Cannot Be Achieved. Let’s Bust Them!


Myth #1: You cannot create wealth if you don’t have education or money to begin with.

This is nonsense. First, education is important. You simply need to know what to do. It is far easier to follow a proven path than to figure it out yourself by trial and error. But education can be acquired, no matter who or where you are. Sure, some people may not afford to go to college or even school. But, if you place one foot forward, and then the next, learn one step at a time, you will ALWAYS find the next step.

If you don’t know how to start and run a business and cannot go to business school or whatever, you can always take one step forward, learn something small about business, start somewhere, and you will find someone at the end of that step who will teach you the next step. And this applies to anything you wish to accomplish!

One step at a time always leads you to the goal. Initially it may be a slow start but sooner or later you will gain momentum. Now, as for money, you also don’t need money to get started. The more you develop your RIGHT information and knowledge and RIGHT network of people, the less you need money!


CLICK HERE TO READ MYTHS 2-9

Thursday, July 24, 2008

The Science of Magic: Understanding Human Cognition and Perception

Source: Medical Research News

A new study concludes that elements of human cognition and perception that are not yet fully understood by scientists may receive greater insight by analysing tricks and techniques used by magicians. These techniques, which have been developed over thousands of years, offer powerful tools to manipulate our perception, according to the scientists.

The research team, from Durham University and the University of British Columbia, say the findings of their work have potential long-term applications in activities that aim to grab - and hold - people's attention, such as human computer interfaces which are thought to become increasingly more complicated.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Can Hypnosis Make You a Poker Champion?

By Iain Legg
Creator of Think Like a Poker Pro


Could hypnosis really help you become a better poker player? When you become aware of all the great things that have been achieved with the power of hypnosis, you have to answer 'Yes' to this question. Definitely yes.


It's now a proven fact that hypnosis and simply changing your frame of mind can help you lose weight, quit smoking and overcome many other challenges.


To quote Matt Damon, poker playing star of the movie Rounders, "I should have done it years ago. It's amazing I didn't even want cigarettes anymore," describing his hypnosis experience to Jay Leno on The Tonight Show in 2004.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Microscopic Robots Could Explore Brain

By Zoe Elizabeth Buck
McClatchy Newspapers

Gas prices have auto manufacturers rushing to make cars smaller, but Bruce Donald drives vehicles so tiny you need a microscope just to see one.

Donald and his team of Duke University computer scientists have constructed a fleet of fully steerable microrobots small enough to move around on the head of a pin. Robots this small could someday explore brain tissue or manipulate delicate electronics.


The robots are about 250 microns long and 60 microns across. They are thinner than the width of a human hair, and you could line two of them end to end inside the period at the end of this sentence.


They look like spatulas that move around on a charged surface using small, springlike steps similar to an inchworm's crawl. The microrobots have a long, thin arm that can be lowered and used as a pivot for turning, allowing the machines to steer freely in any direction.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Monday, July 21, 2008

Humans and Machines Will Merge in the Future

By Lara Farrar / Source: CNN

A group of experts from around the world will hold a first of its kind conference Thursday on global catastrophic risks.

They will discuss what should be done to prevent these risks from becoming realities that could lead to the end of human life on Earth as we know it.


Speakers at the four-day event at Oxford University in Britain will talk about topics including nuclear terrorism and what to do if a large asteroid were to be on a collision course with our planet.


On the final day of the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference, experts will focus on what could be the unintended consequences of new technologies, such as superintelligent machines that, if ill-conceived, might cause the demise of Homo sapiens.


"Any entity which is radically smarter than human beings would also be very powerful," said Dr. Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, host of the symposium. "If we get something wrong, you could imagine the consequences would involve the extinction of the human species."


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Infra-Red Helmet Might Cure Dementia

By David Derbyshire
Source: Daily Mail


Two months ago Clem Fennell was fading fast.


The victim of an aggressive type of dementia, the 57-year-old businessmen was unable to answer the phone, order a meal or string more than a couple of words together.


In desperation, his family agreed to try a revolutionary new treatment - a bizarre-looking, experimental helmet devised by a British GP that bathes the brain in infra-red light twice a day.


To their astonishment, Mr Fennel began to make an astonishing recovery in just three weeks.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Your Mind's Role in Weight Loss

By Jon Benson
Excerpt from 7 Minute Muscle


It is estimated that we have approximately 65,000 thoughts each day. Ninety five
percent of those thoughts are the same thoughts we had yesterday, and the day before that and the day before that. And most of the thoughts we have, be they positive or negative, elicit specific physical responses. It makes sense to look into this.

Before we get into the science and specifics necessary to think your way to faster
results I want to utterly convince you that success begins and ends between your ears. If you have any doubts as to the validity of this claim, read on.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Mind Over Pain: The Future of Surgery

By Danny Penman
Source: Daily Mail


A beautiful sunny day in the Cotswolds, two years ago.


Six paragliders are circling like eagles on powerful currents of rising air. A group of children gaze with open mouths as the giant parachutes dive and swoosh silently above their heads.


Then, suddenly, something starts to go wrong.


Breaking away from the group, one of the paragliders is hit by a powerful gust of wind, turning the parachute canopy inside out.


The pilot starts spinning like a sycamore seed towards the earth. Though he fights desperately, he cannot regain control of his parachute.


After what seems an eternity, the young man smashes into the hillside, driving the lower part of his right leg through the knee and into his thigh. He lies face down on the ground, blood trickling from his mouth.


After a moment of stunned silence, he begins screaming in agony.


He knows medical help is at least 30 minutes away and that it will take another hour to reach hospital.


To make matters worse, he knows that he can’t afford to lose consciousness because he might never again awaken if his skull has been fractured in the fall.


Something stronger than a ‘stiff upper lip’ is called for.


So the man slowly begins to suppress the pain of his shattered leg using a form of self-hypnosis he’d read about as a child.


He begins by forcing himself to breathe slowly and deeply before imagining himself in a garden full of flowers.


With a supreme effort of will, he mentally pushes the unwanted pain of his shattered knee to the back of his mind.


Even though shards of bone can be seen through his jeans, he forces himself to believe that his knee is only bruised.


He refuses to believe in pain.


‘It is a myth,’ he keeps telling himself. ‘Pain does not exist.’


And inch-by-inch the agony recedes before, finally, becoming isolated and distant.


The hypnosis had worked. He remains in a state of calm, until finally the paramedics arrive with the blessed relief of chemical anaesthesia.


An apocryphal tale? Perhaps so. But I know this story to be all too true. I know it, because I was that young man who crashed his paraglider.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Friday, July 11, 2008

Did Madonna Use Mind Control to Snare A-Rod?

By George Rush and Bill Hutchinson
Source: New York Daily News


Pop icon Madonna is using kabbalah to brainwash Yankee star Alex Rodriguez into believing they are "soulmates," the ballplayer's estranged wife is telling friends.


Cynthia Rodriguez, who has bolted to rocker Lenny Kravitz's Paris pad to avoid the limelight, is blaming the Material Girl for breaking up her five-year marriage, a close friend told the Daily News. The 34-year-old stunner has revealed to close confidants that she discovered a note her husband wrote professing his true feelings to Madonna.


"I believe he was having an affair with Madonna," she told a friend, who spoke anonymously for fear of angering A-Rod. "She said she found a letter where Alex told Madonna: 'You are my true soulmate.'"


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Sunday, July 06, 2008

The World Is Getting Happier

Despite the anxieties of these times, happiness has been on the rise around the world in recent years, a new survey finds.

The upbeat outlook is attributed to economic growth in previously poor countries, democratization of others, and rising social tolerance for women and minority groups.

"It's a surprising finding," said University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart, who headed up the survey. "It's widely believed that it's almost impossible to raise an entire country's happiness level."


Denmark is the happiest nation and Zimbabwe the the most glum, he found.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Saturday, July 05, 2008

The Placebo Effect: The Triumph of Mind Over Body

By Peter Arguriou
Source: Nexus Magazine


One of the most commonly used terms in medical language is the word placebo. The placebo effect is used as a scale for evaluating the effectiveness of new drugs. But what exactly is the placebo effect and what are its consequences in the deterministic structure of Western medicine?


The placebo effect has been frequently abused by health professionals to denote and stigmatise a fraud or fallacy. Alternative therapies have often been characterised as merely placebos.

But the placebo effect is not a fraudulent, useless or malevolent phenomenon. It occurs independently of the intentions of charlatans or health professionals. It is a spontaneous, authentic and very factual phenomenon that refers to well-observed but uninterpreted and contingent therapies or health improvements that occur in the absence of an active chemical/pharmacological substance.

Make-believe drugs-drugs that carry no active chemical substances-often act as the real drugs and provoke therapeutic effects when administered to patients.


In many drug trials, the manufacturers of the drug sadly discover that their product is in no way superior to the effect of a placebo. But that does not mean that a placebo equates to a null response of the human organism. On the contrary, a placebo denotes non-chemical stimuli that strongly motivate the organism towards a therapeutic course. That is, the placebo effect is dependent not on the drug's effectiveness but solely on therapeutic intention and expectation.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Can Placebos Heal the Economy?

By Alan Tutt
Author of Choose To Believe

With today’s economy being such a hot topic in the presidential campaigns, everyone’s asking, “What are the candidates’ plans for healing the economy?”


“It may not matter what they do,” says Alan Tutt, author of Choose To Believe. “The world around us reflects the sum total of our beliefs. If we believe the economy is bad, that’s what we’ll see. On the other hand, if we believe the economy is only getting better, our experience will prove it to be true. If the public believes the issue is being effectively handled, we’ll see the economy improve. It’s that simple.”


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Friday, July 04, 2008

Three Strange Cases of Mass Hysteria

By M. Christian
Source: DarkRoastedBlend.com

For a topic involving laughter, what you're about to read is not amusing. Creepy and disturbing, yes. Funny, no.

1. The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic


Things supposedly started innocently enough. Kashasha, near Lake Victoria in Tanzania in 1962: One girl in a boarding school there told another girl a joke. Maybe, "Have you heard the one about?" or "A Jew, an Indian, and Herbert Hoover walk into a bar …" or "Take my wife, please … " Whatever the setup, the delivery, or punch line, the result was laughter. Whether it was a giggle, a guffaw, a chortle, a snort is irrelevant. The listener found it funny.


But then things went dark, weird, and creepy: one girl laughed, but then so did another, and then another, and then another, and then another.


After exposure, the incubation period from nothing to hysteria was short, from a few hours to a couple of days. There was no fever, no physical symptoms, just laughter and occasional crying between short moments of exhausted recuperation. When victims were restrained they sometimes became violent.


No one knew what to do. The school administrators were puzzled, local doctors were confused. Trying to put a lid on the phenomena, the administrators shut the school down.

But that was too little, too late: Whatever it was began to spread.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Thursday, July 03, 2008

The Spiritual Effects of Psychedelic Drugs

In a follow-up to research showing that psilocybin, a substance contained in "sacred mushrooms," produces substantial spiritual effects, a Johns Hopkins team reports that those beneficial effects appear to last more than a year.

Writing in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, the Johns Hopkins researchers note that most of the 36 volunteer subjects given psilocybin, under controlled conditions in a Hopkins study published in 2006, continued to say 14 months later that the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction.


"Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives," says lead investigator Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor in the Johns Hopkins departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Neuroscience.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Scientific Evidence of a Living, Conscious Universe

I believe that the most far-reaching trend of our times is an emerging shift in our shared view of the universe – from thinking of it as dead to experiencing it as alive.

In regarding the universe as alive and ourselves as continuously sustained within that aliveness, we see that we are intimately related to everything that exists.


This insight – that we are cousins to everything that exists in a living, continuously regenerated universe – represents a new way of looking at and relating to the world, and overcomes the profound separation that has marked our lives.

From the combined wisdom of science and spirituality is emerging an understanding that could provide the perceptual foundation for the diverse people of the world to come together in the shared enterprise of building a sustainable and meaningful future.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

14 Scientifically-Proven Ways to Boost Brain Power

Until just a few years ago, doctors believed that the brain stopped making new neural connections - meaning that the memory began to get irreversibly worse - when the body stopped developing, usually in the early 20s. And doctors knew that, like any other part of the body, neurons weaken as people age. Loss of brain function due to neural breakdown was assumed to be a normal, unavoidable part of aging. It turns out they were wrong.

In the past few years, it has become clear that you can, in fact, make new neurons starting in your 20s and continuing well into old age. You can literally rewire the brain with new parts as the older parts wear out. How?


There are lots of things you can do right now to preserve, protect and enhance your gray matter.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY