Category: Philosophy

Here is the best talk I have ever heard about out how the real world works outside of rational thought, the 5 senses, and this idea of fixing what we have done wrong, in order to attain perfection/success. Speaker is Daniel Duval.

What is a True Leader?  Is it the impulsive young person who is always talking and running out ahead of everybody and the team unknowingly just follows to failure?  Just the meat head jock who is the coolest? The girl who all the guys like, is good looking, smart and athletic?  No, no and no.

A leader is one who has the courage to stand on their own convictions, to walk the road not walked by everyone else, to risk, as well as,  to assist others who do not see the picture, to encourage, be willing to die for the cause that they seek. And in the end, when you find one of these leaders, follow them, they will take you home.

-Stephen McCarthy

On the courage to walk out your convictions:

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

On following everyone else and the same path:

Now we are told the individual’s highest aspiration or vision must be service to the group. The whole matter of “the greatest life” is presumed to be settled. It’s no longer worth re-thinking. This, of course, is propaganda. In many ways, from many angles, it’s taught and implied in our schools. Children learn to parrot the appropriate phrases. They utter them proudly.

– Jon Rappaport

For additional information, click here.

Wednesday, February 06, 2013 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer

(NaturalNews) Professional and elite amateur athletes score higher on certain tests of cognitive function than university students, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Montreal and supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

“Professional athletes as a group have extraordinary skills for rapidly learning unpredictable, complex dynamic visual scenes,” study author Jocelyn Faubert said. “The pros are much superior than scholars in our highly complex mental task.

“In other words, they are smarter [at] learning how to interpret the real world in action.”

The performance of 33 non-athlete university students on a cognitive test was compared with that of 102 professional soccer, hockey and rugby players from the English Premier League, the NHL and France’s Top 14, plus 173 elite amateur athletes from the NCAA American university sports program and a European Olympic training center. Participants performed a test known as 3D-MOT, in which they viewed a simulation of several objects moving through a three-dimensional space, then were asked to describe what they had seen. The movements of the simulated objects were randomly generated by a computer in order to prevent there from being any similarity with a real-world sport that could give the athletes unfair advantage.

The test was designed to evaluate participants’ visual perception and cognitive abilities in relation to complex scenes. Skills involved in such a task include the ability to distribute the tension between numerous moving targets and distracting items, to view a large field of vision, to perceive depth, and to follow rapidly moving objects. Each participant completed the test 15 times.

Although all participants improve at the task over the course of the 15 tests, the professional athletes were significantly better at tracking fast-moving objects than members of the other two groups. Likewise, the performance of amateur athletes exceeded that of non-athlete students.

“They appear to be able to hyper-focus for short periods of time resulting in extraordinary learning functions,” Faubert said.

Link to Study

The following is a study around the process communications model. Over the last year, we have used this model with our teams with great success.

Different Strokes for Different Folks: Connecting with Students for Academic Success, By Michael Gilbert

Schools are challenged to provide meaningful learning experiences to prepare students for immediate and long-term success. The controversial Common Core is an attempt to institute a national curriculum in the United States to align with other countries.

Regardless of the approach, academic content is an important starting point for schools. Varying delivery methods are the companions to connecting with students for successful learning experiences. This article addresses how teachers might consider personality aspects in delivering curricula effectively. The methodology of doing so is explained by examining the Process Education Model, its components and implications. Also included are outcomes of several research and application projects.

The issues of how to prepare students to compete in a global economy are primary in education today. The “Common Core” is one possible approach for education in the United States. It was the adopted curriculum in 45 states. It is the closest the U. S. has come to a national curriculum, unlike most countries the world, where there is a national educational policy. However, issues regarding how to measure the results have spawned some crucial questions (Altman, 2014). While the “jury is still out” on the Common Core, the focus on delivering a meaningful curriculum remains. A formula to consider for academic success might be:

Content + Process = Academic Success

Traditional approaches to instructional delivery may no longer be effective.

“OK! Today, you are going to be working by yourselves. If you have any questions, raise your hands, and I will come to you.”

This scenario has been seen in classrooms all over the U. S. It demands that students conform to the way that the teacher wants them to behave. However, not every student is comfortable with static or limited delivery methods or constraining rules. We have learned that students have differing learning styles and ways of processing information (Gregorc, 1982; Kolb; 1984; McCarthy, 1980). Preference of intake modes (auditory, visual, and kinesthetic) (Barbe & Swassing, 1979) and access to different abilities (analytical, creative, and practical) (Sternberg, et al., 1999) are other considerations for looking at student learning. Also, students may be more adept with some learning styles or focal areas, or “intelligences” (Gardner, 1983).

Classroom structure and limited instructional delivery may be problems in dealing with students who bring home-life baggage to school. They see their “success” as their ability to “shut up and listen to the teacher” (Knaus, 2013, p. 16).

Personality characteristics (Myers & Briggs, 1943, 1976, 1985; Noland, 1978) may also factor into classroom interactions. Most of these models attempt to depict an individual with regard to one or several aspects of personality and suggest that the individual functions in life and in learning situations with the manifestations of those characterizations. Complete Study

By Christine Rosen, The New Atlantis

In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one’s time; it was a mark of intelligence. “This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.”

In modern times, hurry, bustle, and agitation have become a regular way of life for many people — so much so that we have embraced a word to describe our efforts to respond to the many pressing demands on our time: multitasking. Used for decades to describe the parallel processing abilities of computers, multitasking is now shorthand for the human attempt to do simultaneously as many things as possible, as quickly as possible, preferably marshalling the power of as many technologies as possible.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, one sensed a kind of exuberance about the possibilities of multitasking. Advertisements for new electronic gadgets — particularly the first generation of handheld digital devices — celebrated the notion of using technology to accomplish several things at once. The word multitasking began appearing in the “skills” sections of résumés, as office workers restyled themselves as high-tech, high-performing team players. “We have always multitasked — inability to walk and chew gum is a time-honored cause for derision — but never so intensely or self-consciously as now,” James Gleick wrote in his 1999 book Faster. “We are multitasking connoisseurs — experts in crowding, pressing, packing, and overlapping distinct activities in our all-too-finite moments.” An article in the New York Times Magazine in 2001 asked, “Who can remember life before multitasking? These days we all do it.” The article offered advice on “How to Multitask” with suggestions about giving your brain’s “multitasking hot spot” an appropriate workout.

But more recently, challenges to the ethos of multitasking have begun to emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” The psychologist who led the study called this new “infomania” a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review’s “Breakthrough Ideas” for 2007 was Linda Stone’s notion of “continuous partial attention,” which might be understood as a subspecies of multitasking: using mobile computing power and the Internet, we are “constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing.” Full article

See also a Stanford Study on the same subject

One of the great myths of success in life and sport is “That if you work harder and longer, the work will produce the results” or “if you work harder than the other person and give up on a balanced, healthy life, that you will make it.”

Add the following quote:

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”  – Ellen Goodman

I challenge all athletes and parents..  What is the “real reality” that we are teaching in sport based on this myth and the quote from Ellen?

The thought of working harder could be changed to the following:

“If everyone is going this direction, I can take a different direction to the same end point by working smarter than everyone else..”

The trick is.. Does anyone have a different path?

Check out these pages and our philosophy… You will find a million different paths to every goal of obtaining elite performance in life and sport.

By Stephen McCarthy

The following short youtube clip is from Dr. Edward Group on the importance of detoxing your environment.

Areas covered include:

1.  Add plants to your living space.

2.  Use a air purification system.

3.  Clean out or throw away toxic cleaning supplies.

4.  Use Himalayan salt and aroma therapy to detox air.

By Julie Wilson, Natural News

2014 exists in an era when technology allows us to instantaneously access vast amounts of information; however, this advancement has apparently caused our intellect to dwindle, resulting in a population of people unable to think analytically.

A recent study conducted by Dr. lyad Rahwan, an honorary at the University of Edinburgh, revealed frequenters of social network sites like Twitter and Facebook, have difficulty thinking critically and independently.

Dr. Rahwan’s study consisted of a group of 20 individuals whom he asked three trick questions repeatedly.

“For example they were told that a bat and ball cost 1.10 [British pounds (GBP)] in total and that the bat cost 1 [GBP] more than the ball, and then they were asked to work out how much the ball costs,” reported the Daily Mail.  More information

Additional Research:

1.  Limit technology, Improve Performance

2.  30 min of cell phone usage changes performance

3.  Limiting technology with North Carolina Basketball Coach

Letter to John Brazer 24 Aug 1819

You ask my opinion on the extent to which classical learning should be carried in our country. A sickly condition permits me to think and a rheumatic hand to write too briefly on this litigated question. The utilities we derive from the remains of the Greek and Latin languages are, first, as models of pure taste in writing. To these we are certainly indebted for the national and chaste style of modern composition which so much distinguishes the nations to whom these languages are familiar. Without these models we should probably have continued the inflated style of our northern ancestors, or the hyperbolical and vague one of the east. Second, among the values of classical learning, I estimate the luxury of reading the Greek and Roman authors in all the beauties of their originals. And why should not this innocent and elegant luxury take its preeminent stand ahead of all those addressed merely to the senses? I think myself more indebted to my father for this than for all the other luxuries his cares and affections have placed within my reach; and more now than when younger, and more susceptible of delights from other sources. When the decays of age have enfeebled the useful energies of the mind, the classic pages fill up the vacuum of ennui, and become sweet composers to that rest of the grave into which we are all sooner or later to descend. A third value is in the stores of real science deposited and transmitted us in these languages, to-wit: in history, ethics, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and natural history.

But to whom are these things useful? Certainly not to all men. There are conditions of life to which they must be forever estranged, and there are epochs of life too, after which the endeavor to attain them would be a great misemployment of time. Their acquisition should be the occupation of our early years only, when the memory is susceptible of deep and lasting impressions, and reason and judgment not yet strong enough for abstract speculations. To the moralist they are valuable, because they furnish ethical writings highly and justly esteemed: although in my own opinion, the moderns are far advanced beyond them in this line of science, the divine finds in the Greek language a translation of his primary code, of more importance to him than the original because better understood; and, in the same language, the newer code, with the doctrines of the earliest fathers, who lived and wrote before the simple precepts of the founder of this most benign and pure of all systems of morality became frittered into subtleties and mysteries, and hidden under jargons incomprehensible to the human mind. To these original sources he must now, therefore, return, to recover the virgin purity of his religion. The lawyer finds in the Latin language the system of civil law most conformable with the principles of justice of any which has ever yet been established among men, and from which much has been incorporated into our own. The physician as good a code of his art as has been given us to this day. Theories and systems of medicine, indeed, have been in perpetual change from the days of the good Hippocrates to the days of the good Rush, but which of them is the true one? The present, to be sure, as long as it is the present, but to yield its place in turn to the next novelty, which is then to become the true system, and is to mark the vast advance of medicine since the days of Hippocrates. Our situation is certainly benefited by the discovery of some new and very valuable medicines; and substituting those for some of his with the treasure of facts, and of sound observations recorded by him (mixed to be sure with anilities of his day) and we shall have nearly the present sum of the healing art. The statesman will find in these languages history, politics, mathematics, ethics, eloquence, love of country, to which he must add the sciences of his own day, for which of them should be unknown to him? And all the sciences must recur to the classical languages for the etymon, and sound understanding of their fundamental terms. For the merchant I should not say that the languages are a necessary. Ethics, mathematics, geography, political economy, history, seem to constitute the immediate foundations of his calling. The agriculturist needs ethics, mathematics, chemistry and natural philosophy. The mechanic the same. To them the languages are but ornament and comfort. I know it is often said there have been shining examples of men of great abilities in all the businesses of life, without any other science than what they had gathered from conversations and intercourse with the world. But who can say what these men would not have been had they started in the science on the shoulders of a Demosthenes or Cicero, of a Locke or Bacon, or a Newton? To sum the whole, therefore, it may truly be said that the classical languages are a solid basis for most, and an ornament to all the sciences.

By Henry David Thoreau, “Reading” from Walden

The student may read Homer or Æschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard. Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. The crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the Middle Ages were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of genius written in those languages; for these were not written in that Greek or Latin which they knew, but in the select language of literature. They had not learned the nobler dialects of Greece and Rome, but the very materials on which they were written were waste paper to them, and they prized instead a cheap contemporary literature. But when the several nations of Europe had acquired distinct though rude written languages of their own, sufficient for the purposes of their rising literatures, then first learning revived, and scholars were enabled to discern from that remoteness the treasures of antiquity. What the Roman and Grecian multitude could not hear, after the lapse of ages a few scholars read, and a few scholars only are still reading it.

However much we may admire the orator’s occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may read them. The astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and health of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.

No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;–not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech. Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the pains which be takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that he becomes the founder of a family.

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor Æschylus, nor Virgil even–works as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equaled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who never knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.

I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature, and not be forever repeating our a-b-abs, and words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading. There is a work in several volumes in our Circulating Library entitled “Little Reading,” which I thought referred to a town of that name which I had not been to. There are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of this, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide this provender, they are the machines to read it. They read the nine thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and how they loved as none had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love run smooth–at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get up again and go on! how some poor unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who had better never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having needlessly got him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world to come together and hear, O dear! how he did get down again! For my part, I think that they had better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of universal noveldom into man weather-cocks, as they used to put heroes among the constellations, and let them swing round there till they are rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks. The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down. “The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the Middle Ages, by the celebrated author of ‘Tittle-Tol-Tan,’ to appear in monthly parts; a great rush; don’t all come together.” All this they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and with unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no sharpening, just as some little four-year-old bencher his two-cent gilt-covered edition of Cinderella–without any improvement, that I can see, in the pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in extracting or inserting the moral. The result is dulness of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties. This sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer market.

The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell. Even the college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will know of them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them. I know a woodchopper, of middle age, who takes a French paper, not for news as he says, for he is above that, but to “keep himself in practice,” he being a Canadian by birth; and when I ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this world, he says, beside this, to keep up and add to his English. This is about as much as the college-bred generally do or aspire to do, and they take an English paper for the purpose. One who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties of the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? Most men do not know that any nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture. A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of;–and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and class-books, and when we leave school, the “Little Reading,” and story-books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.

I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him–my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily papers of the mind, the classick pages fill up the vacuum of ennui, and become sweet composers to that rest of the grave into which we are all sooner or later to descend.”

By Elizabeth Renter, Natural Society

If you’re a reader, chances are there are a few books that stand out as having changed the way you thought about something. Far more than just a little escapism, books have the ability to change our lives, and as a new study shows—they can even change our brain chemistry.

Researchers from Emory University in Atlanta published their work in the journal Brain Connectivity, where they revealed reading a novel can have lasting effects on the brain.

For the study, 21 undergraduates were recruited to read the novel Pompeii, by Robery Harris. Written in 2003, the volume follows a protagonist as he watches the impending eruption of Mount Vesuvius from afar. It’s a thriller and has a “strong narrative line”, something the researchers thought important when choosing the book. More details