Whether you want to smash a forehand like Federer, or just be an Xbox hero, there is a shocking short cut to getting the brain of an expert
I’m close to tears behind my thin cover of sandbags as 20 screaming, masked men run towards me at full speed, strapped into suicide bomb vests and clutching rifles. For every one I manage to shoot dead, three new assailants pop up from nowhere. I’m clearly not shooting fast enough, and panic and incompetence are making me continually jam my rifle.
My salvation lies in the fact that my attackers are only a video, projected on screens to the front and sides. It’s the very simulation that trains US troops to take their first steps with a rifle, and everything about it has been engineered to feel like an overpowering assault. But I am failing miserably. In fact, I’m so demoralised that I’m tempted to put down the rifle and leave.
Then they put the electrodes on me.
I am in a lab in Carlsbad, California, in pursuit of an elusive mental state known as “flow” - that feeling of effortless concentration that characterises outstanding performance in all kinds of skills.
Flow has been maddeningly difficult to pin down, let alone harness, but a wealth of new technologies could soon allow us all to conjure up this state. The plan is to provide a short cut to virtuosity, slashing the amount of time it takes to master a new skill - be it tennis, playing the piano or marksmanship.
That will be welcome news to anyone embarking on the tortuous road to expertise. According to pioneering research by Anders Ericsson at Florida State University in Tallahassee, it normally takes 10,000 hours of practice to become expert in any discipline. Over that time, your brain knits together a wealth of new circuits that eventually allow you to execute the skill automatically, without consciously considering each action. Think of the way tennis champion Roger Federer, after years of training, can gracefully combine a complicated series of actions - keeping one eye on the ball and the other on his opponent, while he lines up his shot and then despatches a crippling backhand - all in one stunningly choreographed second.
Flow typically accompanies these actions. It involves a Zen-like feeling of intense concentration, with time seeming to stop as you focus completely on the activity in hand. The experience crops up repeatedly when experts describe what it feels like to be at the top of their game, and with years of practice it becomes second nature to enter that state. Yet you don’t have to be a pro to experience it - some people report the same ability to focus at a far earlier stage in their training, suggesting they are more naturally predisposed to the flow state than others. This effortless concentration should speed up progress, while the joyful feelings that come with the flow state should help take the sting out of further practice, setting such people up for future success, says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at Claremont Graduate University in California. Conversely, his research into the flow state in children showed that, as he puts it, “young people who didn’t enjoy the pursuit of the subject they were gifted in, whether it was mathematics or music, stopped developing their skills and reverted to mediocrity.”
Despite its potentially crucial role in the development of talent, many researchers had deemed the flow state too slippery a concept to tackle - tainted as it was with mystical, meditative connotations. In the late 1970s, Csikszentmihalyi, then a psychologist at the University of Chicago, helped change that view by showing that the state could be defined and studied empirically. In one groundbreaking study, he interviewed a few hundred talented people, including athletes, artists, chess players, rock climbers and surgeons, enabling him to pin down four key features that characterise flow.
The first is an intense and focused absorption that makes you lose all sense of time. The second is what is known as autotelicity, the sense that the activity you are engaged in is rewarding for its own sake. The third is finding the “sweet spot”, a feeling that your skills are perfectly matched to the task at hand, leaving you neither frustrated nor bored. And finally, flow is characterised by automaticity, the sense that “the piano is playing itself”, for example.
Exactly what happens in the brain during flow has been of particular interest, but it has been tricky to measure. Csikszentmihalyi took an early stab at it, using electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the brain waves of expert chess players during a game. He found that the most skilled players showed less activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is typically associated with higher cognitive processes such as working memory and verbalisation. That may seem counter-intuitive, but silencing self-critical thoughts might allow more automatic processes to take hold, which would in turn produce that effortless feeling of flow
haha, this is dealy funny, i burst into laughter of my stomach the time I read it, hahahah
Kuroko make a debut on his restart of his new self , the first time he can dribble the ball. And it is not a normal, it is…the Dissapearing Drive
(Source: warchiefdoneleft)
Go slaughter dem haha, the cute angry smile of Riko..and the heart too haha, send a shiver down your spine
(Source: daisy-daisy-daisy)
damn, the guy who drew this make me crazy, they are boys in the manga, shit
Những câu hỏi về cái thiện và cái ác, về cái đúng và cái sai thông thường đều được cho là không thuộc về mảng khoa học. Nhưng Sam Harris cho rằng khoa học có thể là — và nên là — một nhân tố giải quyết các vấn đề đạo đức, hình thành lấy các giá trị của con người và phơi bày những gì tạo nên một cuộc sống tốt đẹp.
(Source: ted.com)
Macbeth Essay
This is the paragraph that mark that start of Macbeth’s killing tragedy. It describe his vision and feeling as he takes each step towards the bed of King Duncan and kill him to take over the throne. “When nature step aside, and wicked dream abuse”. It feel ironic that he know that the dream he is holding is wicked, but he choose to accept it because of the temptation and the fear of losing his wife’s affection. Macbeth is kind-natured and doesn’t have extreme greed for power, yet cannot escape from the century’s perception that the one who wear the crown on his head is most powerful. One of humanity’s great tragedy is that people hurt the stranger because of the stress of fear of losing something you consider more important. I think that’s why when you choose your life partner you would want a person who value the same thing you value or either you have to be strong emotionally enough, or smart, to stand against and deal with the stress, pressure and temptation. Greed and ambition is an emotion that isn’t mean to be hatred, but shouldn’t be misused, mislead to cause conflict and destruction. “Witchcraft celebrates”, “wolf” are good metaphor for the implication of an evil act in the midnight. “hear not my step for fear” feel very wimpy of our Macbeth. In our Vietnamese culture, “the fear of one’s wife” is very much a popular theme for comedic and sarcastic. Generally, this scene is a description of Macbeth’s feeling of fear and announcement of his action before killing Duncan.
Romance at the Eve Time
A Story for the Tet festival of my school magazine.
—————
You may think the story below’s gonna end up somewhere romantic. But apparently, it’s not. But it was a special memory to keep in my life.
Sure, it happen right at the night before the New Year, so it’s special, but I don’t know if it got anything relate to this festival.
It was a year ago, like I said, at midnight before New Year, almost everybody enjoy that day with peers and family. About me, I was alone walking around the city center, watching the crowds and street light sparkling before my eyes. As I was crossing the bridge…
I saw a girl.
She’s not standing any where, she’s sitting, on the bridge side, and everybody stare at her, but she doesn’t seem to care. She stare tirelessly at the sky, at the direction the fireworks’ gonna blow the next hour. I am not good at describing, I just remember her curly hair, and she emited a solitary but gorgeous, glamorous aura. And her eyes shine like those star she was looking.
- Talking with the star before the fireworks, girl - I approached her
- Who are you? - She turned around and asked
- Just a wind - I smiled
- So do you come to blow me away. - She smile
- If you don’t resist, that is.
- You’re quite funny, aren’t you. - She laughed
- Why’re you here alone?
- How about you?
- Like I said, I am the wind. I fly to anywhere I want. And your saddening face’s calling me.
- It’s just…tomorrow I am gonna go to Japan.
- You won’t come back to this country anymore.
- Yes, and I just say goodbye to my boyfriend.
- So that’s it…
I drank the coffee cup I was holding. We both silence while looking at the sky.
- Going to somewhere faraway, getting adapt to a new language, a new culture. Losing my culture identity, maybe. Am I gonna remain a Vietnamese girl anymore.
- You are you. That’s it. Do what you love, live the way you want, keep the memories you like. You will have to write a book if you want to define yourself.
- Do you want to be written in my book.
- Hum, that would be troublesome.
- You’re strange…Do you love this country.
- Wel, I love this place and time. The country is peaceful. If I was born in the Middle East, the terrorist’s gonna got me. If I was born in America, the stock market’s gonna got me. Food and Drinks here are cheap but delicious. I am not rich, but my family and relatives are very warm heart people. How about you, girl?
- I feel my life was just normal. I wonder about future.
- It’s not like you let where you live decide what you feel right. I mean, everything I am grateful of my past, either it seem good or bad, but I may decide a completely different path in the future and still feel happy.
- Want me in your path, Mr.Wind ?
- I am just a Wind past by you tonight, If there’s fate, we’ll meet again.
- You’re a mysterious breeze
The the fireworks spark colorfully before our very eyes.
Understanding Manga
Way faster than your printed textbook but still slower than a cinema movie, manga, or graphic novel by English terminology, a independent style of comics drawn by Japanese Artist, or mangaka, have become a popular form of entertainment and inspiration not just for kids, but reader at all ages like novels in the world. By using drawings of actions moments with thoughts and conversations placed in bubbles, manga have made drawing art from just a visual medicine to be capable of expressing more of our living experiences like sound and touch, motions, time, space, emotions, thinking and imagination. Flip your eyes and mind through 500 mangas series drawn by 300 authors, you will literaly live in and feel 300 different worlds with the different drawing styles, story telling and rhythm, transition, irony and sense of humor, the logic between panel and background special effects. While America comics focus on story about hero to create role model for children with the mindset of good and evil, Japan manga stories connect ourselves to almost every aspect of human life experiences, imaginations, interests and social issue. The topics that may seem familiar with everyone, if they usually watch movies, are actions, romance, fantasy, adventure, supernatural and martial arts. There are manga about many sports, from the most popular like soccer, basketball, baseball, tennis to ice hockey, ski-jumping, fencing and gymnastic, manga about cooking, doctors, teachers. The variety of personality of manga character are enormous based on artist imaginations. A person skill, mindset and perception develop in the whole story along with people he meet, either friend or foe, and his relationships and experiences with them. In manga, one character’s inspiring act can make his enemy today become his friends tomorrow. And either through his friends and experiences, he learned the necessary life lessons to become stronger physically, mentally and emotionally. While many manga are based on total fiction and imagination, many manga artist have successfully combine scientific theory, philosophy and creativity to explain and create the system of supernatural abilities and martial arts in their worked. Hot social issue in human history like war, love, freedom, destiny, ethics, happiness, social relationships and leadership are presented in every good manga. Yeah I am talking about the good one. Based on own past and personality, we readers will have different thoughts and feelings about the characters and the stories we read. Most people tend to think the manga world are all about dreamers who escape the reality. Well, won’t try to deny it but it is not the fault of manga and the people who create it. It is the same with game. It is our fault, readers, who doesn’t know what good can we learn from manga and game to make our real life better. Believe me, if you jump into those page and become the characters in it, you may see more magic and inspiration there, but the pain you suffer in your journey are much more terrify than in your realife. The real deal here is we must analyze, research and compare to know how reality is the same and different from manga to make the best use of it. What make manga interesting and educational is it let us see the way a person do his work and his career like treating customers and patients, playing a sport, a game, cooking a meal or acting on stage reflect that person’s mind, spirit, perception and attitude toward his works, thus create different results and level of success. By reading manga, we understand our perception, our mental and emotional stage and our spirit, not just our knowlege, have a huge influence on our reality. Movies do the same thing but at fast pace while in manga, a person or a scene “moments” are captured (don’t have to use rewind and pause on the DVD to scratch it) ideally while still let us feel actions and time by using motions special effect. The solution shouldn’t be espcaping reality and run into the virtual world, but not reject it either, we have to find ways to use and apply their positive influence into our real life. If we ourselves are already weak mentally, even if we don’t read manga or play games, our life wouldn’t be any good, I think, or even worse, if you run into suicide, drugs and cocain. Our life is our responsibility anyway. Have a good night with your homework and if you have some spare time, read some…manga, thnks ^.^
