For a limited time, at least, I would be able to have my time freed up to do my work without having to waste the greatest part of each day doing things I don’t want to do just to put a roof over my head and food on the table. I would also have the means to outsource tasks that swallow up yet further proportions of my time unnecessarily, enabling the work to be done in a distraction-free environment.

Where I needed to take time out for additional training in specific areas, or to travel abroad in order to network, close deals or even undertake training in another part of the world for several months, I would be able to do so without a second thought.

Instead of worrying about how I’m going to save up for even one piece of equipment that I need to start the research, I would be able to have a fully equipped laboratory suite to work in. And be able to staff it, and pay volunteers’ expenses.

The drafting in of technicians and other experts to handle specific issues that may come up (such as IT or other equipment installation) would be no problem.

Publishing, promotion and any other administrative matters could easily be covered out of the small change.

Any training courses, materials, equipment, delivery organizations etc. that were developed as a result of the research, and from which the public would be able to benefit, could be established from part of the sum, and continue to raise revenue in terms of books, courses and equipment sold, which could potentially fund continuing R&D.

But yet again, I can foresee a large windfall being spent on houses, cruises, holidays, parties, cars and champagne. If you award such a sum to those of average ability and average disposition, that is what will inevitably happen.

I have heard it said that extraordinary ability needs extraordinary opportunity. Clearly, the Euromillions number-picking machine didn’t get that memo.

I’d choose a difficult, irascible Hooke over a zillion charming idiots any day of the week.

http://graduatefog.co.uk/2012/1849/poundland-intern-cait-reilly-backlash-jan-moir/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2086000/Cait-Reilly-Human-right-stack-shelves-Poundland-Shes-trolley.html

While I can see the arguments on both sides of the story, what sticks out for me is the hypocrisy being shown by many commenters.

Kids at school are told that they had better work hard enough to go to University and get a degree, otherwise they’ll end up working in Poundland. So the kid works hard and gets their degree, and then they’re berated for not wanting to take a job in Poundland.

I’ll wager that most students (unless they come from an exceptionally privileged family background) have done plenty of grunt jobs to pay their way while studying already. What possible value can an extra few weeks’ work in Poundland add to their CV?

This scheme was supposed to be to catch out people who are working illegally while claiming benefits. While a lawsuit might be a bit extreme, at least it’s got people talking about how unintelligently the scheme is being administered.

Hello my friend!

 

In the times of uncertainty, when everything shakes and collapses, investment in to your own personal potential and abilities is the safest and wisest.

 

Some people so get used to struggle with their learning and memorization that they actually believe it is normal to read a book and forget its content in just a few weeks or days. What is the point?

 

If you can imagine how different your life would be if you could memorize entire books and if you recognize the importance of your mental shape and abilities such as speed of thinking, sharp focus and stable, effortless attention – then you are going to LOVE my 2012 present!

 

I decided to give away 100 courses for just 99$ to those who truly see the potential of having real Phenomenal Memory.

 

The discount coupon can be used only 100 times. The Coupon name is – just99

 

Happy New 2012 Year! You have unlimited potential and I hope you let it shine in 2012!

 

Ruslan.

School of Phenomenal Memory
PO BOX 48171, Spokane, WA 99208-1171, USA

My reply:

Ruslan,

You have got a nerve sending me this when my account on the site has been locked out since the summer!

If you have no intention of restoring my access to the forum or the student area, then would you at least do me the courtesy of removing me from your email list.

Regards,
SevenSigma

Professor Alan Smithers of Buckingham University said children in the top ability range are ‘perhaps too often left to their own devices’.

…

‘We don’t do enough for the really able in our education system.’

Understatement of the millennium.

Here is an explanation of each exercise, as contained in the course, together with my comments on them.

1. Thumb twiddling: the instructions are to lock one’s fingers, leaving the thumbs free to move, and to rotate the thumbs around each other without them touching. The student is supposed to be totally focused on the action of rotating the thumbs, without allowing their thoughts to wander, for a minute or two. The whole exercise is done with one’s eyes closed. This is supposed to teach students to concentrate and divert from their thoughts. A more complicated version of this exercise is to do it in your imagination, without actually moving your hands.

I had long suspected that this had been drawn from some meditational practice or Yoga, but have been unable to find any webpage describing or video demonstrating that exact exercise in the context of those subjects.

Nevertheless, the following may be interesting. This page shows a homunculus – a “little man” showing the importance of various parts of the body, as seen by the brain. Notice how large the hand, particularly the thumbs, are on this diagram in relation to other parts of the body. An experiment was conducted where a spider monkey had to rotate a ball with his hand to obtain peanuts. The monkey would spend all day turning the ball to collect the treats. Scans of the regions of his brain relating to his fingers and thumbs were taken. Then the researchers tried something – they taped up his thumb and smallest finger, leaving only his three middle fingers free to rotate the ball. After three months, the monkey’s brain was scanned again. This time, the areas connecting to his thumb and pinky finger had decreased in size, whereas the brain regions connecting to his three middle fingers had increased.

Now, I hope that nobody thinks that they’re going to become Mensa material just by twiddling their thumbs for hours. Perhaps this exercise does have some effect on fine motor dexterity, if nothing else. There is possibly a study here waiting to be done by someone.

2. Focusing on the breath: simply taking a minute or two to concentrate on the sensation of the breath going in and out, without thinking about anything else, and without trying to slow down or speed up the breathing.

This one is a classic meditation exercise, one which is often taught as an easy exercise for newbie meditators. I am uncertain, however, of the supposed benefits of only doing the exercise for 1-2 minutes, as the instructions direct. I can only speak for myself here, but it can take me at least that long just to settle down and clear my thoughts.

3. Warmth: placing the hands close together, with the palms facing each other but not touching, and feeling the sensation of warmth in between. It is not made clear whether this warmth is supposed to be real or imaginary. Again, this is only a short exercise to be done for 1-2 minutes, and if any other thoughts occur, the student is to try and get rid of them and carry on doing the exercise.

Again, I suspected that this was supposed to be a form of meditation, and then I found this.

As with the breath exercise, I question whether any benefits to be gained from doing the exercise are curtailed or prevented by performing it from such a short period of time.

4a. Moving the attention up and down the body, and feeling a “warm wave” as the attention passes over the various muscle groups.

This is very similar to something we used to practise at a Yoga class I used to attend many years ago, although what we were doing was tensing and then relaxing each muscle group. Right at the end of the description of this psychotechnical exercise, the next topic is introduced with, “After a few relaxation exercises…”, although the preceding exercise was not explained as such. It merely gave the instruction to place one’s attention on various parts of the body. I think perhaps this was supposed to be a relaxation exercise, it just wasn’t very clearly explained.

4b. Focusing the attention on a room object, and then moving the attention to another room object nearby. The point is to focus exclusively on that object, and not allow any other distracting thoughts.

This is a concentrative meditation technique, designed to build up one’s ability to concentrate. To make the exercise even harder, it is suggested that the student tries this technique with a radio or TV on in the background to build up the ability to ignore external distractions.

So far, with all these concentration/meditation/relaxation techniques, I had two rather large questions or uncertainties while doing them on the course. The first, as I have mentioned, is the length of time which they are to be done seems very short, too short to get the maximum or indeed perhaps any benefit. Perhaps it would be better to pick one of these early exercises and go for broke, rather than try to fit them all in the same practice session.

Secondly, we are told that whenever other thoughts crop up, we are to get rid of them and carry on doing the exercise. OK, so how do you get rid of a thought? Don’t think of pink elephants! I bet you just did, didn’t you? Thinking about trying to get rid of unwanted thoughts is still thinking.

I was given a different perspective on this whole business of stopping one’s thoughts and just focusing on one thing earlier this year. I was explaining how I’d never had any success in learning to meditate. I’d get to 10 breaths, perhaps 20 if I was lucky, and then I would find myself sitting there thinking about some other thing entirely, with no idea how long I’d been drifting off onto other things instead of doing the exercise! The opinion I was given was that exceptionally high functioning people simply can’t meditate like that – the urge and need to think and be doing something with the mind is too strong. They need to use creative visualization meditations instead. So perhaps that is why some of the exercises described further down were always much easier for me to do than these beginning exercises.

5. Letters: this exercise requires the student to take a newspaper or magazine, and count all instances of a certain letter within a few chosen paragraphs. Different letters can be chosen each time, and then moving onto whole words. A timer can be used to see how long it takes the student to find all the letters.

Perhaps it’s just me, but this exercise was just too easy to do for it to be a simple attention stability exercise. The mention of the timer was the clue, and perhaps this exercise again could be more clearly explained. The way I found to turn this exercise from a pointlessly easy drill to something fun and challenging was to treat it as a speed exercise. As it was far too easy counting all the letters A, B etc., as explained in the exercise instructions, I tried finding two or three letters at a time. For example, looking for every instance of A and M in the paragraphs chosen, and try to cross them all out within a certain time limit without making any mistakes. The constant switching certainly beefed up the drill, and the more letters looked for simultaneously, the greater the working memory load too. If that still becomes too easy, I guess you could try doing it now with the page upside down.

6. Mental drawing: exactly as it says, whereby the student is supposed to visualize a chalkboard, whiteboard, paper surface or any surface on which characters and shapes could be inscribed. Letters, numbers, short words, foreign language symbols and geometric shapes are recommended as characters to be drawn in the mind’s eye about 2-3 feet in diameter, on an imaginary surface 3-6 feet away.

I felt that this was the first exercise presented which directly related to the content of the course. In GMS, mental drawing is used to learn new foreign words and complicated signs, and also to fix associations between the figurative codes and the numbers etc. which they are supposed to relate to (an apple for the letter A, for example). However, in actual practice, I did not find mental drawing to be the most effective way of learning all the figurative codes, especially as there are over 100 to learn in the early lessons. (I cheated. I made a Superlearning session to learn all those instead.) It could be that I just never fully mastered this as a skill, but I just didn’t find it that efficient as a learning technique.

7. Image manipulation: taking a couple of objects, such as a glass and a box of matches, and performing every possible mental manipulation with them – matches in the glass, glass in the matches, and so on. When this is done, more objects can be added.

8. Image stabilization: visualizing any item, a spoon, for example, and viewing it from one angle but keeping the image in one position without allowing it to move or rotate.

9. Image transformation: taking any kind of object and transforming its form or shape. So if you used as your image a pencil, it could become long and thin, short and stubby, etc.

10. Image modification: taking an object but this time changing its type, while keeping the types of objects within the same general category. So for example, if you chose a house, you might visually transform it into a hotel, an office block, a beach hut, a church, and all other kinds of buildings.

11. Memory activation: basically, running through from moment to moment all the events of the day before. If that is too easy to do, the student is instructed to run through his/her life video of yesterday backwards.

12. Visualizing colours: an orange fruit, the red, amber and green of traffic lights, a blue sky, white snow etc.

I wanted to discuss points 7-12 together, as they all seemed like slightly different variations on a similar theme – that of enhancing the ability to really see and manipulate images in the imagination. I’m possibly calling this by the wrong name, as my attempts to Google “creative visualization” all returned pages and pages of hits relating to sports performance and people’s hopes that they can attract desirable outcomes into their lives by visualizing them.

Obviously, the way these exercises are used in GMS are for neither (although if you develop the skill and then go away and use them for other purposes, I hope you will let me know what successes you have!).

Very little came up when I tried searching for “creative visualization effect on the brain”. However, we do know that visualization enhances the amount of theta waves, which are linked with memory ability, among other things.

While taking the GMS course, I frequently felt that there were certain exercises, techniques and pieces of data that could have benefited from some extra background or explanation, and these psychotechnical exercises were a prime example. I would have preferred a little more (well, quite a lot more actually) about what exact cognitive processes are being trained, and a more precise explanation of what is supposed to be gained from doing the exercises. These are my speculations so far, and if I come up with anything else, I will write a follow-up post.

In one recent issue, there were articles about all sorts of exciting new developments in research in the field of memory, mental functioning etc. and I started to notice a pattern, after about the third or fourth such article, to the way the information was being reported.

Typically, the report would start out by explaining how some research team in some part of the world had made an exciting breakthrough discovery about the way the brain works, and there would be a brief discussion about how the team had made the discovery and what work was ongoing. It became clear, at the end of each article, that the clinician, and not the self-developer, was the target audience for these articles. I’ll quote an example:

Emerging research suggests that compounds in blueberries known as flavonoids may improve memory, learning and general cognitive function, including reasoning skills, decision making, verbal comprehension and numerical ability. In addition, studies comparing dietary habits with cognitive function in adults hint that consuming flavonoids may help slow the decline in mental facility that is often seen with aging and might even provide protection against disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Or what about this one, concluding an article about “dumb” genes:

Despite their suspicions that the consequences of disabling this gene will materialize eventually, both Silva and Dudek see theraputic potential: the RGS14 gene and protein are now promising future targets of treatments for learning and memory disabilities.

And so on.

Now, I don’t think anyone would believe for an instant that I believe people who are experiencing difficulties with some area or another of their cognitive functioning shouldn’t receive appropriate intervention. But I certainly feel that I am very entitled to ask why average and above-average people are not at least regarded as equally deserving of a chance to try any new brain-enhancing discoveries on themselves.

I had the chance to speak to some neurofeedback professionals, a leader in the neurotech field, and a professor of psychology at a recent workshop, and they all seemed to be of the opinion that my interest in this field was a minority one. To put it very crudely there are two main camps. There are the academic research bods, who are basically interested in rats and stats. Then there are the clinicians, who are interested in restoring roadworthiness when the wheels come off. But where are the people who share my particular interest?

“So, where are the hot-rod builders?” I asked. “Where are the people who want to take a Formula One brain and fine-tune the hell out of it?”

There are people out there who don’t have degrees etc. but are handy with electronics and technical stuff, like Dave Siever. There are people who have built up whole on-line businesses selling BWE products. But sooner or later, if they are to achieve any credibility, they have to align themselves with either the academic or clinical camp.

And of course, there are a lot of quacks out there, selling a lot of quack products, a fact which does none of us any favours. One particular piece of quackery around the turn of the last century probably created enough fallout to stall scientific discovery and product development in the field of applied electricity as a brain enhancer about 100 years.

So let’s say someone discovers something that has been proven in trials to significantly improve memory functioning. Why are the sick and the senile given first dibs at using the technology, process or supplement that caused it, instead it being immediately available for already capable people who are into self-development?

Hidden under the thin veneer of an argument about “most need”, there is an agenda: Capable people are a threat. And if some rising star entrepreneur, or a member of one of the selective societies of which I am a member, were to develop some part of his/her cognitive functioning by (let’s say) an extra 10%through the application of science, I can imagine an awful lot of the High Priests on this planet being afraid. Very afraid.

The workshop was entitled Introduction to Audio-Visual Entrainment: Arousal, AVE Technology and Cranio-Electro Stimulation (CES) and Transcranial DC Stimulation (tDCS). Sounds scary? Not really. This technology has been thoroughly tested in research trials and I believe is the most exciting developing field in the area of neuroscience.

You can see the outline of the course here.

I have been using light and sound entrainment, as well as CES equipment, on and off for some time now, and it is wonderfully relaxing. In fact, I haven’t explored a fraction of what these gadgets can actually do yet, and when I do, I will probably write up my findings here or on my main site. As a person who is very excited about the field of cognitive enhancement,  I find the work that Dave and others have been doing particularly fascinating.

tDCS (transcranial direct current stimulation) units are not normally sold to the public, but are supplied to clinical professionals. I, however, have managed to order one. The manufacturer is satisfied I know what I am doing.

I found the information about quantitative EEG from the workshop filled in a few gaps in my knowledge of neurophysiology, and it is very possible I may be attending further workshops in the future on neurofeedback. Watch this space for further reports and articles.

I have been reading (well, actually re-reading) Dave’s book “The Rediscovery of Audio-Visual Entrainment”, which you can order as a hard copy from MindAlive Inc. but I found that you can actually download certain key chapters from their site.

Let me start by saying I am not going to even begin to speculate on whether you are guilty or innocent. I was not present at the scene of the crime, and I was not there in court when the evidence was heard.

The topics I would like to raise are: money, and being in the public eye.

Media speculation has it that you are about to return to your home country where there is more than likely going to be a multi-million dollar fortune thrown at you – publishing deals, interview rights, film rights, the works.

What are you going to do with that money? Will you forward it to something that will help forward the advancement of the human race, like educational research or neuroscience?

Probably not. Like most average members of the human species, you will spend it on the same old Planet Earth humanoid dramatizations – houses, cars, champagne, trips around the world, all manner of consumer gadgets, parties, the list goes on.

You might be about to become too rich to care about what I am about to say, and it would probably (very sadly) go over your head anyway, BUT…there are those of us who are willing to roll up our shirt sleeves and DO worthwhile things in the world. Are you?

I, for instance, would be over the moon if I could open my own college with research facility, to investigate into ways of revolutionizing education, enhancing personal ability, and using science to improve the way our brains work. Even yours.

The only things that are stopping me from getting even a small-scale project going are lack of finance, and lack of a public platform to promote the findings. You have both a fortune coming your way, and you have the eyes of the world upon you.

Now you have to consider what you are going to use them for.

Yours truly,
SevenSigma