Lawsagna

The practice of joy and happiness

Do you notice the stories you are telling yourself?  How do they make you feel and act?  Do they  leave you inspired, joyful, clear, and confident?  Or do they generate negativity, doubt, or resistance?  Many of us take whatever our mind conjures up as the truth and don't challenge our thinking even when it is not working for us.  What would you need to tell yourself to feel joy and happiness? 

In the Yoga Journal article "Joy Story," Sally Kempton is describing a practice of happiness that can help us cultivate the inner states of joy and content that are often missing in our busy, hectic lives.   

Close your eyes and remember a time when you felt really happy. Then take yourself into that moment. See if you can get a feeling-sense of yourself in the situation. Perhaps you'll do this visually—by remembering where you were, what you wore, who was present. Perhaps you'll do it by invoking the feeling, asking yourself, "What did that happiness feel like?" and then waiting until the feeling-sense begins to make itself present in your body. Stick with it until you actually feel the happiness—even if only a little.

Then remove the memory of the scene or situation and just feel the feeling. Find the place in your body where the feeling is centered, then let it expand until it fills you. If you're very visual, it might help if you give the feeling a color—a warm one, like gold or pink. Or you might work with the breath, breathing into the feeling and letting it expand on the exhalation.

Sit with this feeling of happiness. See if you can hold it. See if, for this moment, you can let the happiness become your primary feeling. This is a glimpse, however small, of your true reality.

If you want to learn about the four meanings of happiness, read the rest of  "Joy Story."

Krishnamurti on education

I came across this quotation today from Krishnamurti's "The Function of Education" in Think on These Things and felt compelled to share: 

"Surely, education has no meaning unless it helps you to understand the vast expanse of life with all its subtleties, with its extraordinary beauty, its sorrows and joys. You may earn degrees, you may have a series of letters after your name and land a very good job, but then what? What is the point of it all if in the process your mind becomes dull, weary, stupid? So, while you are young, must you not seek to find out what life is all about. And is it not the true function of education to cultivate in you the intelligence which will try to find the answer to all these problems. Do you know what intelligence is? It is the capacity, surely, to think freely, without fear, without a formula, so that you begin to discover for yourself what is real, what is true."

Learn a language in 2009 and improve your brain

As a linguist by training, I have always liked learning new languages.  In fact, English is not my native language, Russian is.  I started truly learning English when I was in high school and added a few more languages later while studying linguistics.  After reading "The Bilingual Brain" in the Society for Neuroscience Brain Briefings,  I am considering adding a new language to my 2009 resolutions: 

"Parlez vous francais? Sprechen Sie Deutsches? Hablas español? If so, and you also speak English (or any other language), your brain may have developed some distinct advantages over your monolingual peers. New research into the neurobiology of bilingualism has found that being fluent in two languages, particularly from early childhood, not only enhances a person’s ability to concentrate, but might also protect against the onset of dementia and other age-related cognitive decline."

Those who start learning languages at an early age benefit the most.

"In fact, being bilingual may give children an advantage at school. Bilingual preschoolers have been found to be better able than their monolingual peers at focusing on a task while tuning out distractions. A similar enhanced ability to concentrate—a sign of a well-functioning working memory—has been found in bilingual adults, particularly those who became fluent in two languages at an early age. It may be that managing two languages helps the brain sharpen—and retain—its ability to focus while ignoring irrelevant information."

I am glad I am raising my daughter bilingual (English and Russian), and we'll be adding Spanish soon.

Adults benefit from learning languages as well.  There are many misconceptions surrounding adult language learning, especially about the "critical period" hypothesis that argues that the brain is too rigid to learn after puberty, making second language acquisition more difficult for adults.  Current neuroscience research into the competitive nature of brain plasticity offers a different explanation.  The skills we practice compete for our brain map space.  In his book "The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science," Norman Doidge writes:

"As we age, the more we use our native language, the more it comes to dominate our linguistic map space. Thus it is also because our brain is plastic—and because plasticity is competitive—that it is so hard to learn a new language and end the tyranny of the mother tongue.

But why, if this is true, is it easier to learn a second language when we are young? Is there not competition then too? Not really. If two languages are learned at the same time, during the critical period, both get a foothold. Brain scans, says Merzenich, show that in a bilingual child all the sounds of its two languages share a single large map, a library of sounds from both languages."

This can also explain why learning a language as an adult is quite possible and much easier if you immerse yourself in the environment where that language is spoken, or if you otherwise have a strong need or desire to learn it, for example, when your close friends, your spouse, or your co-workers speak a different language.  If you put enough attention into it, it will happen.   It is, to a large extent,  an issue of priorities, time, and motivation. 

What language are you learning this year?

"How the city hurts your brain" by Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Lehrer, the author of "How We Decide," discusses the perils and benefits of city life as they relate to the brain in his article "How the city hurts your brain ...And what you can do about it" in The Boston Globe:

"Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so."

But the urban environment has its positive sides too, including creativity and innovation:

"Recent research by scientists at the Santa Fe Institute used a set of complex mathematical algorithms to demonstrate that the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory -- the crowded streets, the crushing density of people -- also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the 'concentration of social interactions' that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists."

One of the ways to mitigate the negative effects of city living is to spend more time in natural settings that can restore and replenish our mental energy.  Click here to read the full article.

And check out the Urban Mindfulnes blog for tips on how to stay mindful in the city.