Sunday, July 31, 2011

Insane Science: 5 New Books That Explain The Brain

By Michael Schaub / Source: NPR

When the sun finally comes out and the sweaters get tossed in the basement, we're all at least a little tempted to turn off our brains. Don't do it!

Summer reading — in this case, summer reading about the science of the mind — can be a lot more fun than dodging volleyballs on a beach. Neuroscience isn't just about parts of the brain and hard-to-pronounce chemicals; the books listed here cover everything from religion to pornography, from die-hard optimists to remorseless sociopaths.

Sure, there's a lot of knowledge to be mined in these volumes, but most importantly, they're all fast, fun reads. As subject matter, the brain, it turns out, makes for the ultimate page-turner and science (don't tell my high school bio teacher I said this) the epitome of cool.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE...

How to Hypnotize

Thursday, July 28, 2011

What Happens After "Death"?

A few weeks ago Adrian Cooper offered a free sampler of his book "Our Ultimate Reality: Life, the Universe, and the Destiny of Mankind," to the members of the Mind Power News community. (If you weren't around for that free gift, you can download it here.)

The response to that gift was so overwhelmingly positive that I asked Adrian if he could create a second sampler e-book touching on some of the more esoteric subjects of his book.

Here then, is the second excerpt from Adrian's massive 686 page exploration of 114 of the most intriguing mysteries of life, the universe, and everything.
This free gift includes 5 fascinating chapters:
  • What Happens After "Death"?
  • The Astral Worlds
  • Astral Projection
  • Powers of the Imagination
  • Creating Your Own Reality
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THIS FREE GIFT

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Can a Pill Make You Lose Weight, Fall in Love, Stop Smoking?

By Susannah Cahalan / Source: NY Post

Need to lose weight, win friends and influence people? There’s a pill for that.

Or at least there will be one in the not-so-distant future, says a new pop-neuroscience book, “The Compass of Pleasure,” which discusses the future of psychopharmaceuticals — drugs that can, by adjusting brain chemistry, safely help adjust behaviors believed to be hardwired or a function of poor willpower.

Although there are plenty of chemicals that can help control behavior, the mystery that scientists struggle with is how to create a conduct-controlling drug that is both effective and harmless. This discovery is the pharmaceutical world’s holy grail, says author and Johns Hopkins University neuroscience professor David Linden.

What scientists hope to do is to manipulate the brain’s natural pleasure centers and make destructive but pleasurable activities — such as excessive eating, alcohol consumption and drug use — and blunt or suppress the neural kick you get from engaging in the activity.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE...

Monday, July 25, 2011

How to Slow Down Time with your Mind

By Enoch Tan
Author of Reality Creation Secrets


Your spirit operates outside time and space. When there is an emergency where danger is about to approach you faster than you can normally sense, your spirit will compell you to act quickly without pondering. It directs you through your instinct and reflexes. Think of a time when you moved out of harms way in an instant and the move was so spontaneously it seems that everything just flowed in the moment. Your awareness of what was happening and your response happened without hesistation, but so quickly that it was almost together at the same time.


That is because your spirit can observe things and sense reality beyond your ordinary rate and range of awareness. Imagine that a dagger is flying towards you from the side. In oridnary rate of awareness, there is simply not enough time to notice the dagger coming and to move out of the way. But in the realm of your spirit’s awareness, time is slowed down to a crawl and it can fully perceive everything that is happening no matter how quickly. It sends the message to you and in that moment you experience the spontaneous and seemingly simultaneous knowing and action. The awareness comes just before the action but it seems that time slows almost to a standstill during that moment of thought. Perception and action become as one.

If you want to consciously perceive faster so that things don’t seem to happen so quickly, you have to slow time down in your consciousness. It is not time that slows down but you that slows down. See in your mind’s eye and memory things slowing down. Like a picture frame frozen from a movie in motion. It is the way you experience time slowing down or stopping when you see a beautiful person of your dreams.

It would be an advantage for anyone to stop the world or at least make everything appear to move in slow motion. It would give you time to analyze the situation and the actions of everyone and everything around you. It gives you extra time to determine your actions in a pressure situation. This would would be incredibly useful in business, driving your car in traffic, playing games, military combat, sports and life threatening situations.

Perceptive awareness is being fully alert and living fully in the moment. It is seeing the trees bend in the wind and the way the birds circle overhead. It is sensing how the trees feel and what problems and joy the birds are experiencing. It is experiencing the full moment around us and not just our little thoughts. It is clearing the mind of future events and past replayed scenes, so you can experience the entirely of the current moment in time. It is putting yourself in the full frame picture now in front of you in relationship to everything happening around you. It is being fully alive. With that kind of perceptive awareness, a moment can seem to you to last forever.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY

Sex Magick Revisited

Magic will work. The problem is when we try to explain ‘the how’ the conversation inevitably devolves into new-age idealism… and we’re too cool for that, right?

Fortunately for us, Bill Hicks and TOOL puts it all on the line with a no-nonsense, detached and decidedly non-romanticized account for all paranormal phenomenon. As if we are listening to a newscast we are informed…


“All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. We are all one Consciousness experiencing itself. Life is but a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.”


If we accept this as reality, then magic is not only possible, but inevitable.


READ THE FULL STORY HERE...

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Money Can't Buy Happiness, So Millionaire Gives It All Away

By Henry Samuel / The Telegraph

Mr Rabeder, 47, a businessman from Telfs is in the process of selling his luxury 3,455 sq ft villa with lake, sauna and spectacular mountain views over the Alps, valued at £1.4 million.


Also for sale is his beautiful old stone farmhouse in Provence with its 17 hectares overlooking the arrière-pays, on the market for £613,000. Already gone is his collection of six gliders valued at £350,000, and a luxury Audi A8, worth around £44,000.


Mr Rabeder has also sold the interior furnishings and accessories business – from vases to artificial flowers – that made his fortune.

"My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing," he told The Daily Telegraph. "Money is counterproductive – it prevents happiness to come."

READ THE FULL STORY HERE...

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

FREE REPORT: How to Become a Money Magnet

By Valerie Dawson
Creator of
Money Magnet Meditations


Like most people, you have probably been taught to see money as a tangible resource that resides in your wallet and bank account until you need to spend it. You use it to pay bills, buy products and services, and support worthwhile causes.


When you need more money, you probably do what most people would do: take physical action that will bring in more money, such as working extra hours, asking your boss for a raise, or even selling a few of your material possessions.

What you may not realize is that you can attract money into your life in much easier ways; simply by changing the way you think about money and abundance. It’s called the Law of Attraction, and getting it to work effectively for you can make the difference between a lifetime of lack and struggle, or abundance and ease.

This report is going to share 7 of the biggest mistakes that people make when attempting to use the Law of Attraction to attract more money into their lives; and offer helpful suggestions on how to turn them around if you find that you may be doing the same.

CLICK HERE TO GRAB THE FREE REPORT...

America: A Nation of Psychotics?

By James Ridgeway / Source: Aljazeera

Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.

Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses - primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder - to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder.

Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE...

Monday, July 18, 2011

Money is not the Answer

By T. Harv Eker, author of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind
Money is not the answer. That’s got to sound ironic coming from someone who believes whole-heartedly in the benefits of being rich. Forget about getting out of debt, paying bills, buying nice things, etc. That stuff’s great, but at the end of it all you’re not going to give a damn about your credit rating. Money’s the last thing on your mind in that moment, I would imagine.

Money can reduce the stress of living, but it can bring just as much if not more anxiety. I’ve gone through my cycles of accumulating and losing money, getting more and losing it again. The money wasn’t burning a hole in my pocket. I just had a big hole in my pocket and didn’t bother to sew it up. That hole represented something in my mental blueprint that kept me from being stable with money. There was nothing wrong with the money.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE...

Free Millionaire Mind Seminar!

Friday, July 15, 2011

How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With?

By Maggie Jones / Source: New York Times

We all know that we don’t get enough sleep. But how much sleep do we really need?

Until about 15 years ago, one common theory was that if you slept at least four or five hours a night, your cognitive performance remained intact; your body simply adapted to less sleep. But that idea was based on studies in which researchers sent sleepy subjects home during the day — where they may have sneaked in naps and downed coffee.

Enter David Dinges, the head of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hospital at University of Pennsylvania, who has the distinction of depriving more people of sleep than perhaps anyone in the world.

In what was the longest sleep-restriction study of its kind, Dinges and his lead author, Hans Van Dongen, assigned dozens of subjects to three different groups for their 2003 study: some slept four hours, others six hours and others, for the lucky control group, eight hours — for two weeks in the lab.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE...

Sleep Programming

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Drugs and the Meaning of Life

By Sam Harris / SamHarris.org

Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Every waking moment—and even in our dreams—we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition toward states of consciousness that we value.

Drugs are another means toward this end. Some are illegal; some are stigmatized; some are dangerous—though, perversely, these sets only partially intersect.

There are drugs of extraordinary power and utility, like psilocybin (the active compound in “magic mushrooms”) and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), which pose no apparent risk of addiction and are physically well-tolerated, and yet one can still be sent to prison for their use—while drugs like tobacco and alcohol, which have ruined countless lives, are enjoyed ad libitum in almost every society on earth.

There are other points on this continuum—3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA or “Ecstasy”) has remarkable therapeutic potential, but it is also susceptible to abuse, and it appears to be neurotoxic.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE...

Friday, July 08, 2011

14 Wild Ideas... 5 of Which Are True!

By Robin Hanson

A wild idea is one that many people think is obviously quite unlikely. I'd say at least a third of these wild ideas are likely true.

1. Many times each day, your mind permanently splits into different versions that live in different worlds. The startling prediction of the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics is that when systems like your mind interact with small quantum systems, every possible quantum outcome actually happens in a different "world." Quantum mechanics is our most basic theory of physics, and surveys of prominent physicists reportedly find majorities favoring this interpretation.

2.    If medicine were taxed so much that people only bought half as much, they would be just as healthy. In the 1970s, the RAND Health Insurance Experiment randomly assigned 5000 adults to free or full-price health care over 3-5 years. Free care folks got more eyeglasses and teeth filled, and spent ~30% more, but were otherwise no healthier. This result is consistent with typical time-series and cross-sectional analyses. I'm willing to extrapolate from this 30% change to a 50% cut.   

READ THE FULL STORY HERE...

Tuesday, July 05, 2011

Nothing Is What It Seems

By James F. Coyle, Author of Beyond Belief

Several hundred years ago scientists considered that the weight of an object was fixed and absolute. Then Isaac Newton demonstrated that an object weighed less at the top of a mountain than it did at sea level, where gravity was stronger. (Weight is a measure of the force that gravity exerts on an object). So a new term was coined ..... mass. The mass of an object was considered constant, but its weight varied with height. The higher the object above the earth's surface, the less was the effect of gravity, hence the less its weight.  But height did not affect the "mass" of an object.

So for a long time mass was considered absolute. Then along came Einstein with his relativity theory. He proved that mass actually varies depending on the speed it was traveling. The closer a mass gets to the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) the greater its mass becomes. When it reaches the speed of light its mass becomes infinite and as it would take an infinite force to accelerate an infinite mass then nothing solid can exceed the speed of light.

So speed became more important than mass which had become more important than weight.
At the same time Einstein found that when an object travels very fast, close to the speed of light, time slows down so the astronauts who traveled to the moon and back have aged a fraction of a second less than us earthbound mortals. If an astronaut traveled outward for 5 years at near the speed of light and then turned around and made the same journey back to earth he might be 10 years older while back here on earth something like 50 - 100 years would have passed.

So everything is relative to speed. Both time and mass are determined by speed.

Nothing in our universe is quite what it seems.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE...

Saturday, July 02, 2011

Wake Up and Create Something

By Bob Doyle, creator of Wealth Beyond Reason

It's time for the "mainstream" to WAKE UP. The alarm clock is ringing, they keep hitting snooze, and in the meantime, the life they could be living is passing them by.

Day after day, millions of people go through their lives wishing and hoping and dreaming that things could be better, with absolutely no knowledge that it is they themselves that perpetuate their own dissatisfaction.

It is not the "gifted few" who create their realities. It's not just for those in the metaphysical community. It is all of us. Every single one. However, there are a few who have awakened to this knowledge, and make creating their reality a daily event...manifesting whatever it is they want in their life with seemingly no effort!

Meanwhile the rest of the world looks on in wonder and disbelief. They assume that these "fortunate few" are among the cosmically lucky.

To be honest, the whole thing generates some anger in me. The problem is that we are "dumbed down" by society throughout our whole lives under the pretense that we are actually being intellectualized. The "scholarly" tell us that metaphysical topics like reality creation are pure fantasy. Science insists on measurable evidence of everything before it will acknowledge such claims as fact.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE...

Friday, July 01, 2011

Meditation Cuts Risk of Heart Attack

By Rebecca Smith / Source: The Telegraph

Patients with heart disease who practised Transcendental Meditation cut their chances of a heart attack, stroke and death by half, compared with non-meditating patients, the first study of its kind has found.

Stress is a major factor in heart disease and meditation experts say the technique can help control it.

Transcendental Meditation, practised by the Beatles and based on an ancient tradition of enlightenment in India, involves sitting quietly and concentrating to focus the mind inwards by silently repeating a mantra. The practice is said to induce inner peace by allowing thoughts to flow in and out of the mind.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE...

Instant Meditation