like a boy

How does your brain work? Brain imaging, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and similar advanced techniques have given neuroscientists huge insights into this question. Yet studying the brain doesn’t have to be such a high-tech enterprise. Simple experiments can still probe the inner workings of the brain, and many of these are easy to set up at home or are available on the internet.

Try them on yourself and you will experience first-hand some of its strangest, most amazing workings - facets of brain function that scientists are only just starting to understand. You’ll see aspects of perception, memory, attention, body image, the unconscious mind - and the curious consequences of your brain being split in two.

1 Seeing isn’t believing

TAKE a moment to observe the world around you. Scan the horizon with your eyes. Tilt your head back and listen. You’re probably getting the impression that your senses are doing a fine job of capturing everything that is going on. Yet that is all it is: an impression.

Despite the fact that your visual system seems to provide you with a continuous widescreen movie, most of the time it is only gathering information from a tiny patch of the visual field. The rest of the time it isn’t even doing that. Somehow from this sporadic input it conjures up a seamless visual experience.

What is going on? Bang in the middle of your retina is a small patch of densely crowded photoreceptors called the fovea. This is the retina’s sweet spot, the only part of the eye capable of seeing with the rich detail and full colour we take for granted. This tiny spot - which covers an area of our visual field no bigger than the moon in the sky - feeds your visual system almost all of its raw information.

To build up a big picture, your eyes constantly dart about, fixating for a fraction of a second and then moving on. These jerky movements between fixations are called saccades, and we make about three per second, each lasting between 20 and 200 microseconds.

The curious thing about saccades is that while they are happening we are effectively blind. The brain doesn’t bother to process information picked up during a saccade because the eyes move too rapidly to capture anything useful. All in all, your visual system works like a man blundering around in the dark waving around a flickering torch with a very narrow beam.

Despite the fact that you don’t normally notice saccades, you can catch them in action. Look at your eyes close-up in the mirror and flick your focus back and forth from one pupil to another. However hard you try you cannot see your eyes move - even though somebody watching you can. That’s because the motion is a saccade, and your brain isn’t paying attention. Now pick two spots in the corners of your visual field and flick your gaze from one to the other and back again. If you’re lucky you’ll notice, just barely, a brief flash of darkness. This is your visual cortex clocking off.

So how does your brain weave such fragmentary information into a seamless movie? This remains something of a mystery. The best explanation, according to Andrew Hollingworth of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, is that your short-term and long-term visual memories retain information from previous fixations and integrate them into a here-and-now visual experience (Visual Cognition, vol 14, p 781).

There is also some guesswork going on. You can get a feel for this from the frozen-time illusion - the sensation that you sometimes get when you look at a clock and the second hand appears to freeze momentarily before tick-tocking back into action.

This happens because of saccades. To compensate for the temporary shut-down of vision, your brain makes a guess at what it would have seen, but it does so retrospectively. So the 100 or so milliseconds of blindness gets back-filled with the image that appears after the saccade is over. If your eyes happen to alight on the clock just after the second hand has moved, your brain assumes that the hand was in that location for the duration of the saccade too. The “second” then lasts about 10 per cent longer than normal, which is enough for you to notice.

The weirdness isn’t confined to vision. Your auditory system is also full of gaps and glitches that the brain cleans up so we can make sense of the world. This is especially true of speech.

In everyday life we encounter lots of situations that obscure or distort people’s voices, yet most of the time we understand effortlessly. This is because our brain pastes in the missing sounds, a phenomenon called phonemic restoration. It is so effective that it is sometimes hard to tell that the missing sounds are not there.

A good demonstration of this effect was published last year by Makio Kashino of NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Atsugi, Japan. He recorded a voice saying “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?” then removed short chunks and replaced them with silence. This made the sentence virtually unintelligible. But when he filled the gaps with loud white noise, the sentence miraculously becomes understandable (Acoustic Science and Technology, vol 27, p 318).

“The sounds we hear are not copies of physical sounds,” Kashino says. “The brain fills in the gaps, based on the information in the remaining speech signal.” The effect is so powerful that you can even record a sentence, chop it into 50-millisecond slices, reverse every single slice and play it back - and it is perfectly intelligible. You can listen to Kashino’s sound files at http://asj.gr.jp/2006/data/kashi/index.html.

Another demonstration of the brain’s ability to extract meaning from distorted signals is a form of synthesised speech called sine-wave speech. When you first hear a sentence in sine-wave speech it sounds alien and unintelligible, somewhat reminiscent of whistling or birdsong. But if you listen to the same sentence in normal speech and then return to the sine-wave version, it suddenly snaps into auditory focus. Try as you might, you cannot “unhear” the words that you didn’t even realise were words the first time you heard them (listen to demos at www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/sine-wave-speech and www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/home/Chris_Darwin/SWS).

According to Matt Davis of the UK Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, this happens because the brain has circuits that respond to speech, but doesn’t switch them on unless it detects spoken language (Hearing Research, vol 229, p 132). Sine-wave speech isn’t speech-like enough to trigger the circuits, but once you know it is speech they spring into action. “It’s an example of top-down influence,” says Davis. “What you know about what you’re hearing changes the way you hear it.”

Given the tricks that your visual and auditory systems play, it probably comes as no surprise that when they get together, fights can break out. A good demonstration of this is the McGurk effect, in which listening to a series of identical syllables such as “ba ba ba ba” while watching somebody mouth “ba da la va” makes you hear “ba da la va”. Try it for yourself at www.faculty.ucr.edu/~rosenblu/lab-index.html.

Until recently, psychologists believed that the visual system always trumps the other senses, but in 2000 a team of psychologists at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena proved that this isn’t the case. They showed volunteers a single flash on a computer screen. If they accompanied the flash with two very short beeps, the volunteers saw two flashes - in other words, this time the auditory system wins (Nature, vol 408, p 788). See the illusion at www.cns.atr.jp/~kmtn/soundInducedIllusoryFlash2/index.html.

2 This is not my nose

YOU may know the crossed-hands illusion. Hold your arms out in front of you and cross them over, rotate your hands so your palms face each other, then mesh your fingers together. Now slowly rotate your hands up between your arms so you’re staring at your knuckles. Ask someone to point to one of your index fingers, then attempt to move it. Did you move the wrong one?

If so, you’ve just experienced a minor failure of your body schema - your mental representation of the location, position and boundaries of your body. Your brain builds this up by drawing on data from vision, touch and a body-wide network of proprioceptive sensors that monitor position. Your body schema is a critical part of self-awareness, which is why it feels so odd when it goes wrong.

In the crossed-hands illusion, the schema fails because of a confusing visual input. You don’t normally see your hands in this convoluted position; the finger you move is the one that is pointing in the direction that the correct one would be pointing if you had simply clasped your hands as if in prayer.

An even odder way of disturbing your body schema is an illusion that taps straight into your sense of body ownership. Known as the rubber-hand illusion, it fools you into thinking a rubber hand - or even a piece of wood, or a table - is part of your body.

To experience the illusion, get hold of a model hand (it doesn’t have to be very realistic) and put it on the table in front of you. If it is a left hand, put your actual left hand somewhere you can’t see it, in the same pose as the rubber hand. Now get someone to touch and stroke your unseen hand and the rubber hand with identical movements. If you concentrate on the rubber hand, you will probably get the uncanny feeling that it is your own. (See a video of the rubber hand illusion here)

What this illusion shows is that your sense of body ownership is less anchored in reality than you think. Your brain will happily override information from proprioception to conjure up an incorrect yet coherent body schema based on vision and touch.

In fact, your mental body map is an absolute sucker for visual information. This year Frank Durgin of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania set up the illusion as described above but instead of touching the rubber hand he merely “stroked” it with light from a laser pointer, leaving the unseen hand alone. Two-thirds of 220 subjects reported a sense of ownership of the rubber hand and said they had the sensation of heat and even touch from the laser pointer (Psychological Science, vol 18, p 152). “It’s obvious the hand is rubber - no one is fooled at all,” says Durgin. “But if your brain decides it’s your hand, all the conscious awareness in the world won’t change it.”

If you can’t get hold of a fake hand, there are other (though less reliable) ways to experience the illusion. Some people can be fooled into believing a piece of wood has replaced their hand. Around half of people can even be made to feel a table top is part of their body. Sit at a table and put your hand out of sight underneath. Get someone to tap and stroke this hand while doing exactly the same to the table top directly above. If you watch the table top, you may experience the illusion that the table has become part of your body.

Proprioception may be the junior partner to vision and touch in creating your body schema, but it still plays a key role. You can demonstrate this with an illusion that taps into proprioception alone. This Pinocchio illusion is hard to do without a specialist piece of equipment called a physiotherapy vibrator, but if you can get hold of one, try this. Close your eyes, touch the tip of your nose and then get somebody to apply the vibrator at about 100 hertz to skin at the very top of your bicep. This creates the strong sensation that you are straightening your elbow, and that your nose is simultaneously growing longer and longer, like Pinocchio’s.

Vibrating the skin above a tendon excites stretch receptors in the muscle, creating a powerful sensation that the muscle is stretching and the joint is extending. This confuses your proprioceptors, which revise your body schema accordingly. The result is rather like having a phantom limb: the sensed position of your arm in space doesn’t correspond to its actual position.

If you’re touching your nose at the same time, this leads to a weird sensation that it is growing. Your brain integrates the touch sensation from your fingers with the “movement” of your arm and comes to the erroneous conclusion that your nose must be growing to fill the gap.

The Pinocchio illusion is an important tool for understanding how the brain calculates the size and shape of our bodies. This isn’t just an academic question. When it goes wrong, such as in body dysmorphic disorder, anorexia and phantom limb, the results can be devastating (PLoS Biology, vol 3, p e412).

3 A brain of two halves

WOULD you consider yourself to be logical and analytical or creative and empathic? According to popular psychology you’re one or the other, and it’s all down to which half of your brain you use the most: the rational and calculating left or the intuitive, artistic right.

It’s a myth, of course, but like all good ones it contains a grain of truth. Your cerebral cortex - the outer layer of your brain that deals with higher functions - is indeed split into two halves. They are connected by a flat bundle of nerve fibres called the corpus callosum, but work in subtly different ways - and these differences occasionally flicker into your conscious awareness.

The left-brain/right-brain myth arose from experiments done in the early 1970s on people who had had their corpus callosum cut as a last-ditch treatment for epilepsy. These “split-brain” patients showed some strikingly odd responses to information that was preferentially sent to one side of the brain or the other by presenting it to the extreme left or right of their visual field. This works because the right visual field is monitored by the right eye, which routes straight into the left brain, and vice versa.

For example, when a word or picture is presented to their right brain, split-brain patients are often unable to read or recognise it. This and similar experiments led to the idea that the left side of the brain deals with logic and facts while the right side is more intuitive and interpretive. We now know that this dichotomy is too simplistic, but its essence holds true. The latest view is that the two hemispheres have subtly different styles of information processing: the left has a bias towards detail, the right a more holistic outlook. You can watch a video of a split-brain experiment at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo&mode=related&search=.

Most people, of course, have a functional corpus callosum that shunts information between the hemispheres. Even so, subtle left-right differences exist. One task where the hemispheres operate differently is face recognition. When most of us see a face, our right cerebral hemisphere does the lion’s share of the work recognising its gender and decoding its expression. And because the right hemisphere is fed by the left visual field, that means we have a notable left-sided bias in our judgement of faces.

Look at this pair of faces (left). Which appears happier? Chances are you chose the bottom one. The two faces are, however, identical apart from being mirror images of one another. The picture is called a chimeric face and is made by taking two pictures of the same face, one with a neutral expression and the other smiling, chopping the pictures in half and joining the two mismatched pieces. Our general bias towards the left side of the face (as we look at it) makes us see the faces as different even though they are essentially equivalent.

It isn’t just visual processing that is lateralised. There is some evidence that emotion is too, with the right side of the brain more specialised for negative emotions and the left for positive ones. Amazingly, simply activating one or other hemisphere by moving parts of your body can noticeably change your emotional state.

You can experience this by repeating an experiment first done in 1989 by Bernard Schiff and Mary Lamon of the University of Toronto in Canada (Neuropsychologia, vol 27, p 923). They asked 12 volunteers to perform a “half smile”, lifting one corner of their mouths and holding it for a minute. Left-smilers reported feeling sadder afterwards, while right-smilers felt more positive.

Other researchers have reproduced the effect simply by getting people to contract the muscles of their left or right hand a few times. More recent research has suggested that motivation is similarly affected: people who performed right-sided muscle contractions became more assertive and spent longer trying to crack an impossible maths puzzle.

Unsurprisingly, these claims are controversial, with some teams failing to replicate the results. Last year, however, Eddie Harmon-Jones of Texas A&M University in College Station used EEG to confirm that flexing the hand muscles produces changes in emotion, but only when it is preceded by activation of the opposite cortex (Psychophysiology, vol 43, p 598). The left-brain/right-brain legend, it appears, is alive and well.

4 Probe your subconscious

IT WAS a ground-breaking investigation into the nature of consciousness and free will. In 1983, psychologist Benjamin Libet of the University of California, San Francisco, hooked five volunteers up to an EEG machine and asked them to make voluntary movements, such as lifting a finger, whenever they felt like it. Watching the electrical activity in their brains, he discovered that his subjects only became consciously aware of their intention to act a few hundred milliseconds after their brain had initiated the movement. Libet was forced to conclude that what feels like a conscious decision may in fact be nothing of the sort (Brain, vol 106, p 623).

This experiment was the first demonstration of what is now an established theory in neuroscience: a major proportion of your thoughts and actions - even things you believe you are in conscious control of - actually take place in your unconscious. Most of the time you are essentially flying on autopilot.

Libet’s experiment involved equipment that you’re unlikely to have at home, but you can tap into a similar phenomenon using what is known as the “ideomotor effect”. Make a pendulum out of a paper clip and a piece of thread and dangle it over a cross drawn on a piece of paper. Ask yourself a simple yes/no question, such as “am I at home?” or “do I have a cat?”, and tell yourself that if the pendulum swings clockwise, the answer is yes, while anticlockwise means no. Spookily, the pendulum will generally start rotating in the direction of the correct answer.

It looks supernatural, but it’s not. The reason it works is that, as soon as you ask the question, your unconscious brain fires up motor preparation circuits in anticipation of the answer it expects to see. These circuits initiate subtle muscle movements that you are not normally aware of - except when they are amplified by a pendulum (or dowsing stick or Ouija board). This is your unconscious brain in action.

A different aspect of your mental underworld is reflected in your “implicit assumptions”. Your subconscious mind isn’t just planning and executing actions, it also spends a great deal of time analysing the world, looking for patterns and relationships that can help you navigate through life. The conclusions it comes to are called implicit assumptions - subtle prejudices about people and events. For example, if you hear on the radio that a teenage boy has been shot dead in a car park near his home, it’s almost impossible not to make assumptions about his family background and the area where he lived.

“Everybody has implicit assumptions,” says Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville who played a big part in their discovery. “They’re a necessary part of how the brain operates and they generally serve us very well.”

But not always. Nosek and colleagues argue that because we are not in control of our implicit assumptions, and are seldom aware of them, it is possible to develop unconscious prejudices that your conscious mind would find unappealing or even abhorrent - such as associating men with science and women with the arts, preferring thin people to fat people or assuming that blonde women are stupid. “You may think you’re egalitarian, yet your associations are often quite different,” says Nosek.

Nosek and colleagues have devised a way to access these implicit assumptions (take the test at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit). The tests are based on the idea that people find it easier to recognise pairs of stimuli that fit their unconscious assumptions - white people and positive words or black people and negative words, for example. People often find the results of their tests “provocative”, says Nosek. “The most common implicit associations are race and age - they’re quite profound.”

Maybe sometimes it is better to ignore your unconscious mind.

5 Pay attention!

IMAGINE you are walking down the street and a passer-by asks you for directions. As you talk to him, two workmen rudely barge between you carrying a door. Then something weird happens: in the brief moment that the passer-by is behind the door, he switches places with one of the workmen. You are left giving directions to a different person who is taller, wearing different clothes and has a different voice. Do you think you would notice?

Of course you would, right? Wrong. When researchers at Harvard University played this trick on 15 unsuspecting people, eight of them failed to spot the change.

What this demonstrates is a phenomenon called “change blindness”. It happens because of a chronic shortage of a crucial mental resource: attention. You are blithely unaware of most of what is going on around you, to the point where you can fail to notice “obvious” changes in your surroundings.

Attention is not well understood, but whatever it is, we have a limited amount. Of all the information entering or being generated by your brain at any one time - sights, sounds, memories, ideas and so on - only a tiny fraction enters your consciousness. Object-tracking studies suggest that the maximum number of items we can attend to at any one time is around five or six (see demos at http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/finstlab/demos.htm).

Scientists studying attention spend a lot of time playing with change blindness because it provides direct access to the attentional system. In the door experiment, the subjects fail to see the change because their attention is elsewhere and the door conceals what would otherwise be attention-grabbing motion.

You can experience the same thing by watching “flicker images”. These consist of two consecutive images that differ only in one key feature - two cowboys who swap heads, say. If the images are flashed up in quick succession with a brief blank screen between them (which acts like the door), most people take an astonishingly long time to spot the difference (see demos at www.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/download, or try flicking your attention between the two images in the diagram below).

Similarly, we often fail to notice blatant continuity errors when films cut from one scene to another. We also usually fail to detect gradual changes to a static scene, such as the addition of a large building (see demos at http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.html and http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/Slow%20changes%20bis/intro.html).

“Basically, the explanation is that attention is needed to see change,” says psychologist Ronald Rensink of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. “Attention is drawn automatically to the motion signals that accompany a change. But if these are swamped, then the observer can’t rely on automatic control, but needs to hunt around with their attention.”

A similar phenomenon is motion-induced blindness, in which concentrating on a moving pattern causes what should be very prominent static objects - such as bright yellow dots - to disappear (see demos at http://pantheon.yale.edu/%7Ebs265/demos/MIB-percScotoma.html). Motion-induced blindness was only discovered in 2001 and it is still unclear why it happens, but most researchers think it has something to do with attentional resources.

There is a related and even more counter-intuitive demonstration of our limited capacity for attention. If you are deliberately concentrating on something, it can render you oblivious to other events that you would normally have no trouble noticing. This “inattention blindness” is probably the reason why motorists sometimes collide with objects such as pedestrians and buses that they simply “didn’t see”.

The most famous demonstration of inattention blindness was staged in 1999 by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It involves a game of basketball. Chances are you’ve seen it or read about it before. If not, have a look at http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html. The task is to count the number of passes made by the team in white. You won’t believe your brain.

6 Made-up m emories

A FEW years ago, the actor Alan Alda visited a group of memory researchers at the University of California, Irvine, for a TV show he was making. During a picnic lunch, one of the scientists offered Alda a hard-boiled egg. He turned it down, explaining that as a child he had made himself sick eating too many eggs.

In fact, this had never happened, yet Alda believed it was real. How so? The egg incident was a false memory planted by one of UC Irvine’s researchers, Elizabeth Loftus.

Before the visit, Loftus had sent Alda a questionnaire about his food preferences and personality. She later told him that a computer analysis of his answers had revealed some facts about his childhood, including that he once made himself sick eating too many eggs. There was no such analysis but it was enough to convince Alda.

Your memory may feel like a reliable record of the past, but it is not. Loftus has spent the past 30 years studying the ease with which we can form “memories” of nonexistent events. She has convinced countless people that they have seen or done things when they haven’t - even quite extreme events such as being attacked by animals or almost drowning. Her work has revealed much about how our brains form and retain memories.

While we wouldn’t want to plant a memory of a nonexistent childhood trauma in your own brain, there is a less dramatic demonstration of how easy it is to form a false memory called the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Read the first two lists of words and pause for a few minutes. Then read list 3 and put a tick against the words that were in the first two. Now go back and check your answers…

1. List 1
   apple, vegetable, orange, kiwi, citrus, ripe, pear, banana, berry, cherry, basket, juice, salad, bowl, cocktail
2. List 2 
   web, insect, bug, fright, fly, arachnid, crawl, tarantula, poison, bite, creepy, animal, ugly, feelers, small (Now wait a few minutes)
3. List 3 
   happy, woman, winter, circus, spider, feather, citrus, ugly, robber, piano, goat, ground, cherry, bitter, insect, fruit, suburb, kiwi, quick, mouse, pile, fish

July 31, 2009, 4:23pm   Comments

姓氏：魏
祖宗：毕公高
分类：以邑或国名为氏

姓氏起源

1. 出自姬姓，以邑为氏，或以国名为氏。周文王第15子毕公高受封于毕，其孙毕万在毕国被西戎功灭后，投奔到晋国，成为大夫。 因功，被赐魏地为邑，其后子孙以邑为氏，称为魏氏。公元前445年 毕万的后代魏斯建立魏国，公元前225年被秦所灭后，亡国的魏国王 族以国名为氏，形成魏姓最重要的一支。史称魏姓正宗。
2. 外姓改姓魏。战国秦昭襄王时有国相、穰侯、昭襄王母宣太 后异父弟魏冉，本楚人，芈姓，后改姓魏；南宋蒲江人有魏了翁，庆 元进士，本高氏，后改姓魏；明代有昆山人唯校，其先世本李姓，弘 治进士，后改姓魏。

郡望： 巨鹿郡
秦始皇二十五年（公元前222年）置郡，治所在巨鹿 （今河北平乡西南）。相当今河北白洋淀、文安洼以南，南运河以西 、高阳、宁晋任县以东，平乡、威县以北、山东德州、高唐、河北馆 陶之间地。汉代至北魏因袭沿用。

堂号： “九合堂”
春秋时晋有大夫魏绛。山戎向晋请和，绛向晋君 说和有五利。于是晋便和附近的少数民族山戎等缔结了友好条约。8 年之中，晋国九合诸侯，称为霸主，都是魏绛的功劳。 魏姓因巨鹿为望，故也以”巨鹿”为其堂号。

迁徙分布：
魏氏早期主要是在今山西、河南、山东省境内发展繁衍，也有部 分分居于今湖北、湖南省境。

July 21, 2009, 11:46pm   Comments

Most of us spend a lot of time staring at a computer or TV screen, playing video games, or gabbing into our cell phones. The brand names for these products are all familiar, but where did they come from in the first place? Just what is a Nokia? Here’s a look at the origins of some of your favorite tech and gadget companies’ names.

1. Kodak: Founder George Eastman named the camera and film corporation in 1888. Eastman wanted a short name that was easy to pronounce and could only refer to his products. He later said that he favored the letter “k” because it “seems a strong, incisive sort of letter.” Once Eastman decided he wanted the name to start and end with “k,” he played around with combinations of letters until he found one that he liked in “Kodak.”
2. Nintendo: Nintendo’s name translates into English as “leave luck to heaven.” The name made more sense before Nintendo got into the video game business; it opened in 1889 to make hanafuda cards, a type of Japanese playing cards decorated with floral designs.
3. Sony: When Sony got its start in 1946, it had a decidedly less catchy name – Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo. Within a few years, the company’s founders wanted a new name, so they combined sonus, Latin for “sound,” with “Sonny,” the term of endearment for a young boy. The newly coined word captured both the superior sound quality and small size the company was shooting for with its products.
4. Sega: Sega got its start in Hawaii in 1940 as Standard Games, a business that provided military bases with pinball machines to help amuse soldiers. In 1951, the company moved to Tokyo and renamed itself “Service Games” to reflect its business of importing coin-op machines for American military bases. In 1965, Service Games merged with another coin-op company, Rosen Enterprises, and shortened its name to Sega.
5. Nokia: The modern telecom giant hasn’t always been involved in such tech-heavy fields. The company got its start in Tampere, Finland, in 1865 as a pulp mill and paper manufacturer. When owner Fredrik Idestam opened a second plant in Nokia, Finland, in 1868, he decided the town’s name would suit his company, too.
   The town takes its name from the Nokianvirta River that flows through it, which in turn takes its name from an archaic Finnish word referring to the small furry animals, mostly sables, which lived on the river’s banks.
6. Cisco Systems: The recent addition to the Dow Jones Industrial Average takes its name from San Francisco, where it was founded in 1984.
7. Atari: The video-game pioneer takes its name the board game Go. In Go, atari is a term that indicates that a player’s stone (or group of a player’s stones) are in immediate danger of being captured by the player’s opponent.
8. Toshiba: Toshiba formed following the 1939 merger of consumer products company Tokyo Denki with machinery firm Shibaura Seisakusho. By taking the “To” from the former and the “Shiba” from the latter, a new company name was born.
9. Sanyo: Sanyo’s name means “three oceans” in Japanese; the company’s founder wanted to sell his wares across the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans to reach the entire world
10. Seiko: The watchmaker takes its name from a Japanese word meaning “exquisite” or “success.
11. Canon: When Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory started developing Japan’s first-ever 35mm camera equipped with a focal plane shutter, the engineers dubbed the creation “Kwanon” after the Buddhist goddess of mercy. At this point the company’s logo even included the thousand-armed goddess.
    When the camera was ready to roll out worldwide in 1935, the company decided to tweak the name to “Canon” so it would be easier for international markets to accept.
12. Sharp: The electronics manufacturer got its start in 1912 as metalsmith Tokuji Hayakawa’s personal outlet for his inventions, including a specialized snap buckle. In 1915 Hayakawa invented an improved mechanical pencil he dubbed Ever-Sharp, and to honor the fine point of his creation, Hayakawa started calling his company “Sharp.”
13. Magnavox: The stalwart electronics company began in 1915 when Edwin Pridham and Peter Jensen created a moving-coil loudspeaker, which they named “Magnavox,” Latin for “great voice.”
14. Coleco: The video game kingpins of the 1970s and 80s (and the people who brought you Cabbage Patch Dolls!), Coleco was originally a company that sold shoe leather. The name Coleco is a shortening of “Connecticut Leather Company.”
15. Motorola: Founder Paul Galvin named his company in a twist on the old naming convention of putting “-ola” at the end of phonograph and radio names like the Victrola. Since Galvin and his company were making car radios, he merged “motor” with “-ola” to get the name.
16. Samsung: Samsung got its start in 1938 when Lee Byung-Chull started the “Samsung Store” in Korea. The store initially focused on exporting dried fish and fruit, but it jumped into electronics in the 1960s. The name Samsung is Korean for “three stars,” a nod to the lucky properties of the number three.

July 16, 2009, 6:13pm   Comments

Four Essential Members of a Great Design Team

April 23, 2009, 2:42pm  Comments

1. Leave the copy machine set to reduce 200%, extra dark, 17 inch paper, 99 copies.
2. In the memo field of all your checks, write “for sexual favors.”
3. Specify that your drive-through order is “TO-GO.”
4. If you have a glass eye, tap on it occasionally with your pen while talking to others.
5. Stomp on little plastic ketchup packets.
6. Insist on keeping your car windshield wipers running in all weather conditions “to keep them tuned up.”
7. Reply to everything someone says with “that’s what you think.”
8. Practice making fax and modem noises.
9. Highlight irrelevant information in scientific papers and “cc” them to your boss.
10. Make beeping noises when a large person backs up.
11. Finish all your sentences with the words “in accordance with prophesy.”
12. Signal that a conversation is over by clamping your hands over your ears and grimacing.
13. Disassemble your pen and “accidentally” flip the ink cartridge across the room.
14. Holler random numbers while someone is counting.
15. Adjust the tint on your TV so that all the people are green, and insist to others that you “like it that way.”
16. Staple pages in the middle of the page.
17. Publicly investigate just how slowly you can make a croaking noise.
18. Honk and wave to strangers.
19. Decline to be seated at a restaurant, and simply eat their complimentary mints at the cash register.
20. TYPE IN UPPERCASE.
21. type only in lowercase.
22. dont use any punctuation either
23. Buy a large quantity of orange traffic cones and reroute whole streets.
24. Repeat the following conversation a dozen times.
    “DO YOU HEAR THAT?”
    “What?”
    “Never mind, it’s gone now.”
25. As much as possible, skip rather than walk.
26. Try playing the William Tell Overture by tapping on the bottom of your chin. When nearly done, announce “No, wait, I messed it up,” and repeat.
27. Ask people what gender they are.
28. While making presentations, occasionally bob your head like a parakeet.
29. Sit in your front yard pointing a hair dryer at passing cars to see if they slow down.
30. Sing along at the opera.
31. Go to a poetry recital and ask why each poem doesn’t rhyme.
32. Ask your co-workers mysterious questions and then scribble their answers in a notebook. Mutter something about “psychological profiles.

April 07, 2009, 2:01pm   Comments

1. Pay attention. You can’t remember what you never knew, so don’t be multitasking when you’re trying to learn or memorize something: Give it the spotlight of your full attention at least once.

2. Understand. The more completely you get it, the less likely you are to forget it. (If you don’t understand football, you’re not likely to remember the scores.)

3. Repeat and apply. Directly after learning something, repeat it, preferably out loud. Even better, use it in your own way. If you want to remember a joke, for example, tell it to someone and try to make them laugh.

4. Chunk. Although short-term memory can deal with only about seven items at a time, you can finesse this limit by grouping items together and thinking of each group as a unit. Later, you can unpack those units. Remembering the numbers 5, 4, 6, 1, 9, 8, 6, 5 and 8 is harder than remembering the numbers 546, 198 and 658.

5. Make meaning. Nonsense is hard to remember. Compare this:

disease reported control Chicago mumps the for of center an in outbreak

with this:

The Centers for Disease Control reported an outbreak of mumps in Chicago.

To make meaning where none inherently exists, the experts recommend embedding the information in an invented narrative. The license plate 3PLY981 thus becomes: Three carpenters cut a piece of plywood into nine pieces and ate one. Yes, I know, no one eats plywood; but that’s actually a strength of the narrative in this case. (See step 7.)

6. Look for patterns. Stanford researchers have found that forgetting is a key aspect of good remembering, but not because you have to clear out space; rather, it’s because forgetting the less relevant details reveals the more meaningful underlying structure.

7. Visualize. Search the information for some element you can turn into an image. If you’ve just met a Bridget Brooks and want to remember her name, you might picture the Brooklyn Bridge spanning her face from ear to ear. The more striking or ridiculous the image, the more likely it is to stick in your mind.

8. Hook it to something funny. Stalagmites or stalactites — which ones go up? Well, it’s like ants in your pants: The ‘mites go up, the ‘tites come down.

9. Hook it to a melody, chant, rhyme or rhythmic motion. Remember singing A-B-C-D-E-F-G to the tune of “Baa Baa Black Sheep”? How about: “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two/Columbus sailed the ocean blue”? Or try pacing rhythmically while memorizing a table of data.

10. Associate new with old. Greek and Roman orators had a trick for remembering a speech. They would create a striking image for each topic they meant to cover (see step 7), mentally put these images in the rooms of their home, and then, while giving the speech, picture strolling through their home. Each next room would remind them of their next topic, and in the proper order. Note that they didn’t have to remember the order of their rooms, because this knowledge was already imprinted in their brains.

11. Link learning to environment. The memory tends to associate information with the environment in which one learns it. If you’re going to be tested on something and you know where the test will occur, study the material in the same sort of place. If you don’t know anything about the test site, study in a variety of locations so the memories won’t get locked into cues from one environment.

12. Let ‘er drift. If a memory is staying out of reach, stop fishing for it, the experts say. Instead, let your mind drift to the general area: to friends you knew then, to the school you went to, the car you drove … with luck, you’ll happen into the end piece of a chain of links leading to the memory you’re after.

April 28, 2008, 9:40am   Comments

The average guy lasts only 5 to 10 minutes during sex, and 71 percent of men want better sexual endurance. Use these strategies and ye shall, ahem, overcome

1.Master masturbation.
Masturbate with a woman’s orgasm in mind, not your own. In other words, take your time: Work up to 15 minutes. Bring yourself close to the point of no return, but don’t let yourself ejaculate until time is up.

2.Squeeze.
If you’re overheating during sex, stop and squeeze right below the head of your penis, focusing the pressure on the urethra — the tube running along the underside of the penis. This pushes blood out of the penis and momentarily represses the ejaculatory response.

3.Pinpoint ejaculatory inevitability.
The process of sexual response has four phases: excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution. The trick is to recognize the spectrum of feelings throughout the process. Rate your sexual excitement on a scale of 1 to 10. Try keeping yourself at 7.

4.Sexercise.
A Kegel is an exercise that helps tighten muscles responsible for ejaculatory control. Become familiar with them by cutting off the flow of urine and then starting and stopping it repeatedly. Once you have the exercise down, practice your Kegels anywhere: at your desk, behind the wheel. Tighten your muscles and hold for a count of 10, then release.

5.Press, don’t thrust.
Press the end of your penis into her clitoral head. Linger in her vaginal entrance, where the most sensitive nerve endings are. When you do have intercourse, focus on small, shallow movements that penetrate the first 2 to 3 inches of her vagina.

6.Show a little courtesy.
Ladies first, gentlemen — and we’re talking about more than just holding the door open. When you help her have an orgasm first, it relieves you of some of the pressure to please and the psychological anxiety that feeds into PE.

7.Ask your doctor about Prozac.
A recent study showed that 73 percent of men who suffered from premature ejaculation either were cured or improved after taking 20 milligrams of Prozac a day for a week and 40 mg thereafter.

8.Go for a second round.
Shrug off an early emission with some extra attention to her arousal (yes, it means staying awake), then getting back in the saddle. Most men last much longer the second time around. And the more you practice, the longer that first time will last.

9.Let her climb on.
When she’s on top, your penis is less stimulated. And ask her to go slowly — long and fast thrusting is hazardous to a man’s endurance.

10.Stop thinking of your orgasm.
The area of the brain responsible for triggering orgasm is engaged whether you’re trying to have one or halt one. The more attention you give it, the more likely it is to arrive. Focus on what’s happening now — her silky thighs on your hips, say — and you’ll diffuse pleasure throughout your whole body.

April 02, 2008, 12:41pm   Comments

Adapted from The Healing Aromatherapy Bath, by Margo Valentine Lazzara (Storey Books, 1999).

Mental clutter, hyper-mind, head on overdrive—we’ve all been there. Here is some soothing relief.

SIMPLE SOLUTION:  Try these simple suggestions for slowing things down. Your concentration and memory will improve, you will gain greater perspective on your life, and you’ll be able to think more clearly and with less effort.

Learn to relax your mind as you relax your body, to reap the benefits of less stress, and gain a more calm and mindful awareness of the present moment. You will be surprised how easy it can be.

1. Witness your thoughts. No one can stop thinking entirely; it is impossible. If you start trying not to think, you only end up thinking about how to stop thinking! What you can do, however, is to withdraw from your thoughts and become more of an objective spectator.

2. Picture your mind as a blank canvas or a dark sky. Allow your thoughts to come and go, but resist the urge to follow each one. Your brain will eventually slow down and you will feel less pressured.

3. Count. If you find it difficult to let go of your thoughts, try counting slowly as you breathe. Watch your thoughts and try to resist following them. Turn your attention to the count as you breathe out.

4. Pay active attention. As you work and think, try to keep your attention on the task at hand. Be strict with yourself and each time your mind wanders, return it to the task. As you keep refocusing your attention, your “mind stillness” will improve.

5. Still your body. One sign of fragmented attention is fragmented movement. For example, when you are at the theatre, it is easy to tell if others around you are fully attentive to the performance. People who sniff and sigh, move their heads this away and that, and wiggle in their seats are having some difficulty concentrating. Rapt attention is usually accompanied by still body posture.

6. Find a comfortable position and don’t allow yourself to move. Concentrate on what you are doing or watching, drawing your attention away from physical distractions, and focus your thoughts on your task. After a while, you will notice that you fidget less and feel less physical discomfort. You are now channeled into mental exertion.

7. Interest your mind. Try to find interest in projects to help you concentrate. Taking up a new hobby can be a tremendous help. You should also try to find something interesting even in the dullest chore. If you are at a gathering, find someone and start a conversation. Be inquisitive and you might discover you have similar interests.

8. Open the mind. Just as strength, stamina and flexibility must be incorporated in your physical routine, the mind needs new and absorbing challenges to give it a change from its everyday journey. Notice something new on the same way home that you might not have noticed before. Buy a magazine on a subject you normally wouldn’t look at, read it, and open yourself to new possibilities.

March 26, 2008, 1:39pm   Comments

Your mind: it’s just another piece of hardware. Make sure you download the latest patch and upgrade to the newest operating system.

That, in so many words, is the fate of humankind described by David Pescovitz, co-editor of the BoingBoing.net blog and research director with the Institute for the Future.

We’ve long used caffeine and various other drugs to alter our states of mind. But those are “really blunt instruments” compared with the future technology that advances in neuroscience will bring, Pescovitz said Tuesday as he moderated a panel discussion on the “future of mind hacks” at the O’Reilly ETech conference on emerging technology in San Diego.

“In the near future, these technologies will be available to us to help us take control of our own minds, to alter our own minds – to bring a DIY hacker mentality to your own head,” Pescovitz said.

The details on how this will work are fuzzy at best. Pescovitz referred to the members of his panel as being much smarter than himself, and they were a bit more cautious in describing advances that might lead to enhancements of the human brain.

“We always want to better ourselves. And we’re always looking for shortcuts, easier ways to achieve our end goal,” said Timo Hannay, the head of Web publishing of the Nature Publishing Group who used to work as a neurophysiologist studying the molecular mechanisms of memory.

Side effects are inevitable, though, particularly if what we use to alter our brains comes in pill form, he said.

“When you take a shortcut, there’s almost bound to be some kind of adverse side effect or aftereffect,” Hannay said. “It’s very likely when you get significant enhancements, there will always be things balancing those.”

But the most drastic enhancements discussed Tuesday won’t come in pill form but through reconfiguring the brain’s so-called “hardware and software.”

Current research has enabled non-human primates to play the old video game Space Invaders using nothing but their own thoughts, said Daniel Marcus, director of the Neuroinformatics Research Group at Washington University School of Medicine.

Scientists measure the activity of neurons while a monkey plays Space Invaders with a joystick, and then connect the monkey’s brain signals to a device that performs the functions of a joystick without requiring any physical manipulation.

“Eventually, you can take the joystick away and the monkey learns to control the video game using its own neural signals,” Marcus said.

The Space Invaders experiment has been performed in at least one human trial, Marcus said in an interview after the panel discussion. Marcus isn’t involved in this research himself but is excited about its potential.

“I think it has a lot of potential for quadriplegics,” Marcus said. “They just want to have some sort of interaction with their environment, to be able to feed themselves, to type something into a computer and communicate. That really seems realistic to me. The idea of being able to fully control a body is a long ways off, but these are steps in that direction.”

In a separate project, one brain-controlled gaming system is already being demoed, with mixed results.

Marcus doubts we’ll all be cyborgs 50 years from now, but says even healthy people might benefit from some sort of brain interface that connects to – well, something.

Research is limited right now. Scientists are measuring the activity of only 100 neurons or so at a time, which means that while a monkey can use its head to play Space Invaders it still needs to use its hands to play a more complicated game such as the maze-like Pac-Man, according to Marcus.

Marcus’s own research involves the brain scanning technology fMRI, which pinpoints the areas of the brain that light up in response to visual stimuli or other triggers. His work analyzing Alzheimer’s disease illustrates some of the dangers that might accompany any attempt to re-engineer the human brain.

When we’re not doing anything, our brains switch to a default mode, which appears to have major importance and perhaps has something to do with memory. The parts of the brain most involved in this default mode are also the ones most affected in the brains of people suffering from Alzheimer’s, according to Marcus.

This seems to indicate that in some humans, the normal functioning of the brain is damaging itself, and is something that has to be considered when performing any future “mind hacks,” Marcus said.

“When you’re not working on some other task these [brain areas] go up in activity,” Marcus explained in an interview after the panel discussion. “The second you go off-task, these start doing some work. We don’t know exactly what this work is but it must be really important because the brain works really hard to turn on these areas. But these are the exact same areas that show damage in Alzheimer’s disease. It’s as if the activity in these neurons is leading to some sort of damage.”

With the brain being vulnerable to its own actions, mind hackers have to be careful if they “target some part of the brain that’s really open to intervention because it’s known to be highly plastic,” he said.

Beyond the potential for physical damage, all this stuff raises ethical questions as well, panelists said. Some perfectly healthy college kids like to use Adderall, a drug that treats attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, as a stimulant to improve their focus and help them study and take tests, Pescovitz said. Some employers use random drug tests to make sure workers aren’t hooked on illegal narcotics – what if companies start testing employees to make sure they’re on drugs, Pescovitz asked. Will this create a neural divide?

“One of the ethical issues it raises is the divide between the people who can afford it and those who can’t,” Hannay said.

On the plus side, “these tools can be helpful to bridge neural divides,” particularly for people with conditions like dyslexia, said Alvaro Fernandez.

Fernandez runs Sharp Brains, a Web site that provides information on tools used to improve cognitive function. These tools can be as simple as brain teasers. But Fernandez predicts a burgeoning industry in mind improvement that will rival the physical fitness business.

What does it mean for you? Probably not much for now, but Pescovitz looks forward to the day when businesses have brain fitness centers for their employees, complete with vending machines loaded with pharmaceuticals and kiosks that zap your mind with magnetic waves. Goodbye, Starbucks, hello Skynet.

March 06, 2008, 9:56pm   Comments

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them - that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” - Lao-Tzu

No matter how much structure we create in our lives, no matter how many good habits we build, there will always be things that we cannot control — and if we let them, these things can be a huge source of anger, frustration and stress.

The simple solution: learn to go with the flow.

“Smile, breathe and go slowly.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

For example, let’s say you’ve created the perfect peaceful morning routine. You’ve structured your mornings so that you do things that bring you calm and happiness. And then a water pipe bursts in your bathroom and you spend a stressful morning trying to clean up the mess and get the pipe fixed.

You get angry. You are disappointed, because you didn’t get to do your morning routine. You are stressed from all these changes to what you’re used to. It ruins your day because you are frustrated for the rest of the day.

Not the best way to handle things, is it? And yet if we are honest, most of us have problems like this, with things that disrupt how we like things, with people who change what we are used to, with life when it doesn’t go the way we want it to go.

Go with the flow.

What is going with the flow? It’s rolling with the punches. It’s accepting change without getting angry or frustrated. It’s taking what life gives you, rather than trying to mold life to be exactly as you want it to be.

“Flow with whatever is happening and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.” - Chuang Tzu

A reader recently asked me to write more about going with the flow, so this is my attempt to share some of the things that work for me. As always, I don’t have any claims to perfection, and I’m learning as I improve, but the tips below should help anyone.

1. Realize that you can’t control everything. I think we all know this at some level, but the way we think and act and feel many times contradicts this basic truth. We don’t control the universe, and yet we seem to wish we could. All the wishful thinking won’t make it so. You can’t even control everything within your own little sphere of influence — you can influence things, but many things are simply out of your control. In the example above, you can control your morning routine, but there will be things that happen from time to time (someone’s sick, accident happens, phone call comes at 5 a.m. that disrupts things, etc.) that will make you break your routine. First step is realizing that these things will happen. Not might happen, but will. There are things that we cannot control that will affect every aspect of our lives, and we must must must accept that, or we will constantly be frustrated. Meditate on this for awhile.
   
2. Become aware. I’ve mentioned this step in previous articles on other topics, but that’s because it’s extremely important. You can’t change things in your head if you’re not aware of them. You have to become an observer of your thoughts, a self-examiner. Be aware that you’re becoming upset, so that you can do something about it. It helps to keep tally marks in a little notebook for a week — every time you get upset, put a little tally. That’s all — just keep tally. And soon, because of that little act, you will become more aware of your anger and frustration.
   
3. Breathe. When you feel yourself getting angry or frustrated, take a deep breath. Take a few. This is an important step that allows you to calm down and do the rest of the things on this list. Practice this by itself and you’ll have come a long way already.
   
4. Get perspective. This always helps me. I get angry over something happening — my car breaks down, my kids ruin my microwave — and then I take a deep breath, and take a step back. You know how you’re watching a movie and the camera zooms away and you can see much more of the world on the screen than you could before? How it goes from closeup to a larger, panoramic view of things? That’s what happens in my mind’s eye. I start to zoom away, until I’m pretty far away from things. Then whatever happened doesn’t seem so important. A week from now, a year from now, this little incident won’t matter a single whit. No one will care, not even you. So why get upset about it? Just let it go, and soon it won’t be a big deal.
5. Practice. It’s important to realize that, just like when you learn any skill, you probably won’t be good at this at first. Who is good when they are first learning to write, or read, or drive? No one I know. Skills come with practice. So when you first learn to go with the flow, you will mess up. You will stumble and fall. That’s OK — it’s part of the process. Just keep practicing, and you’ll get the hang of it. Someday, you may even become a Zen Master and write a guest post on what you’ve learned for Zen Habits. :)
6. Baby steps. Along the same lines, take things in small steps. Don’t try to become that Zen Master mentioned above overnight. Don’t try to bite off huge chunks — just bite off something small at first. So make your first attempts to go with the flow small ones: focus on the tally marks (mentioned above) first. Then focus on breathing. Then try to get perspective after you breathe. And you might try the easier situations first — if your work problems are easier to accept than your frustrations with your kids, for example, start with work.
7. Laugh. It helps me to see things as funny, rather than frustrating. Car broke down in the middle of traffic and I have no cell phone or spare tire? Laugh at my own incompetence. Laugh at the absurdity of the situation. That requires a certain amount of detachment — you can laugh at the situation if you’re above it, but not within it. And that detachment is a good thing. If you can learn to laugh at things, you’ve come a long way. Try laughing even if you don’t think it’s funny — it will most likely become funny.
8. Keep a journal. This is one of the best uses of a journal actually. Once a day, try to recall what all your tally marks were for — and then write about those situations. Why did you get upset? What did you try to do? Did it work, and if not, why not? What can you do next time? This kind of recollection and examination, after the fact, will help you learn from the process.
9. Meditate. If you aren’t good at keeping a journal, at least do a daily review in your head. Do some meditation, or have a bath, or a cup of hot tea, and as you’re de-stressing, go over your day and examine it. Don’t get frustrated — you’re learning. Do some deep breathing, and then go over each situation, trying to see it as a detached observer. This kind of review will help you improve in the learning process.
10. Realize that you can’t control others. Ah, one of the biggest challenges. We get frustrated with other people, because they don’t act the way we want them to act. Maybe it’s our kids, maybe it’s our spouse or significant other, maybe it’s our coworker or boss, maybe it’s our mom or best friend. But we have to realize that they are acting according to their personality, according to what they feel is right, and they are not going to do what we want all of the time. And we have to accept that. Accept that we can’t control them, accept them for who they are, accept the things they do. It’s not easy, but again, it takes practice.
11. Accept change and imperfection. When we get things the way we like them, we usually don’t want them to change. But they will change. It’s a fact of life. We cannot keep things the way we want them to be … instead, it’s better to learn to accept things as they are. Accept that the world is constantly changing, and we are a part of that change. Also, instead of wanting things to be “perfect” (and what is perfect anyway?), we should accept that they will never be perfect, and we must accept good instead.
12. Enjoy life as a flow of change, chaos and beauty. Remember when I asked what “perfect” is, in the paragraph above? It’s actually a very interesting question. Does perfect mean the ideal life and world that we have in our heads? Do we have an ideal that we try to make the world conform to? Because that will likely never happen. Instead, try seeing the world as perfect the way it is. It’s messy, chaotic, painful, sad, dirty … and completely perfect. The world is beautiful, just as it is. Life is not something static, but a flow of change, never staying the same, always getting messier and more chaotic, always beautiful. There is beauty in everything around us, if we look at it as perfect.

“I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me.” - Bob Dylan

February 29, 2008, 4:38pm   Comments