Graham English

Posts Tagged ‘MindHacks’

Musicophilia: The Neurology Of Music

MindHacks pointed me to the just launched Musicophilia, the site and book by Oliver Sacks, a neurologist who has become quite popular publishing books about his patients and who also contributes to the advancement of music as a powerful tool for healing and awakening.

Scott Adams ‘Hacks’ His Brain

This is an amazing story.
First the Dilbert creator loses his voice due to a rare condition known as spasmodic dysphonia. Now he reveals in an amazingly affecting personal blog post how he learned to speak again. In Bodyhack.
Full link: Scott Adams ‘Hacks’ His Brain
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Hearing and Consciousness

From Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain
Hearing is the first sense we develop in the womb. The regions of the brain that deal with hearing are the first to finish the developmental process called myelination, in which the connecting “wires” of neurons are finished off with fatty sheaths that insulate the neurons, [...]

Hack Your Musical Mind

From Mind Hacks:
All abilities are skills; practice something and your brain will devote more resources to it.
Brain scanning of musicians has shown that they have larger cortical representations of the body parts they use to play their instruments in their sensory areas — more neurons devoted to finger movements among guitarists, more neurons devoted to [...]

Songwriting For Busy People

Mind Hacks posted how choice is demotivating when there are too many options.
“Offer students a choice of 6 essays, rather than 30 essays, for extra-credit and more will take up the opportunity if there is less choice of essay titles – and, what is more, they write better essays.”
And if you have 45 song ideas [...]

For Those Of You Who Think You Might Be Tone Deaf

From one of my favorite books of 2005, “Mind Hacks : Tips & Tricks for Using Your Brain (Hacks)” (Tom Stafford, Matt Webb), comes a blog post citing The Distorted Tune Test. If you pass (or fail, depending how you look at it), you may be eligible to take part in a US National Institute [...]