Exercise as a drug

Dragon Mood? -- what are the implications for me?

While surfing around the web, I ran across a site authored by a Dr. Mercola, MD. Usually I regard these types of sites as quasi-spam, but reading his content, it actually made some sense to me.

I particularly liked this quote below:

I actually view exercise as a drug with regard to being properly prescribed and having proper dosage, And it's one that you can readily substitute for some of the most common drugs used today for things like diabetes, heart disease and depression. All of these conditions will improve with exercise and with the help of an experienced natural health care clinician.

... And as I've explained on countless occasions, normalizing your insulin levels is the most important factor for optimizing your overall health and preventing disease of all kinds, from diabetes, to heart disease, to cancer, and everything in between.

It runs neck and neck with vitamin D as the two most important physical elements that you can do to improve your health.

Brother Squares, Sister Triangles

Dragon Mood? -- fondly remembering

Iwoke up this morning, thinking about my son, Joshua, remembering him as a little boy.

One of the things I remember is making Josh peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches. The current (at that time) parenting gurus all advised giving children choices whenever possible, in order to stimulate their thinking, be more self-aware and to get comfortable learning to make decisions(!).

One of the choices I gave Josh was how did he want his sandwich cut? Brother Squares or Sister Triangles? Brother Squares was cutting the sandwich into four quarters, from midpoint to midpoint of each side of the bread, creating four small squares. Sister Triangles, as you may guess, was cutting the sandwich through the corner points of the bread, thus making four small triangles.

My recollection, though hazy, is that Caroline usually selected triangles, hence the name. Josh initially liked the orthogonal cuts, so they became Brother Squares. Later, he would change it up, selecting one, then the other, torn between his admiration for his god-like, older sister and his need to differentiate himself from the tyrant who was that same sister. I chuckle as I write, remembering this.

Josh, now with a degree in mathematics and a successful actuary, works with numbers, probability and risk.   Laying in bed, it suddenly occurred to me and I laughed at myself as I pondered it, why didn't I introduce him to Brother Squares, Sister Triangles and Buckminster Fuller Hexagons?   What kind of awesome choices would those have been?

June Twenty-Third

Dragon Mood? -- marking the passage of time in wonder!

Today is a day filled with remarkable events.



Here are the first four that come to mind for me:

• President Obama accepted the resignation of U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, the chief military officer of the war in Afghanistan, after he made unprofessional remarks in an interview with the magazine, Rolling Stone
• A 5.0 earthquake hit in Ontario with shocks felt in Boston, Cleveland and Detroit (lucky or not, I felt nothing)
• Federal investigators handed down a 19-count indictment against former Detroit mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick.  Insiders say this is only the tip of the iceberg in prosecuting his misdeeds.
• On a more personal note, today, June 23rd is the day that my ex-husband and I married. If we were still married, this would be our 37th anniversary. I must admit I'm amazed to think about the passage of that much time!  As a young, brash 20-something, I could never have anticipated the twists and turns of my life as they've occurred.

Where am I?

Dragon Mood? -- travel-weary

This post reminds me of a long-ago movie called If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium.

Because of the generosity of several family members, I was able to attend the funeral for my Uncle Hemie. This involved some travel logistics, logistics I will summarize in this way:

• Night One - mid-Michigan
• Night Two - Chicago
• Night Three - Beaumont, TX
• Night Four - Houston, TX
• Night Five - Madison, WI
• Night Six - Milwaukee, WI

Suffice to say, that by Night Seven, I was rather tired and ready to sleep in my own bed.  Which I happily did!

Remembering Uncle Hemie

Dragon Mood? -- sadly remembering

A death in the family, no matter how much it may be expected, still comes as a shock ...

Two weeks ago, my cell phone rang shortly after eight o'clock. Looking at the screen, I saw the call was from my sister. Hmmm, I wondered. This is an unusual time for her to call.

She was calling to tell me of our Uncle Hemie's death. He had died that morning, Wednesday, June 9, 2010, around 5 a.m. The remarkable thing was that he and my Aunt Doris had actually talked with one another shortly before his death.

Uncle Hemie was 88. He had lived a full and vigorous life. These last two years, he struggled, breathing with the help of an oxygen tank 24/7, his world drastically shrunk by his poor health.

I will miss Uncle Hemie.  He was such a gentle man, soft-spoken but a master at telling stories, many of them filled with humor and his droll wit.  His eyes were the twinkling sort.  His hands were thick and well-worn, burnished with hard work and do-it-yourself projects, and I often saw him with his fingers interlaced as if in silent, private prayer.  He was a spiritual man and a faithful believer.  He looked forward to being with Jesus in heaven.

Alice B. Toklas

Dragon Mood? -- vindicated

Check. Another book completed: The Biography of Alice B. Toklas by Linda Simon.

I've always been curious about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Having read this biography, Toklas comes off as an incredibly loyal (most especially to Gertrude), but oddly discomforting person, given to jealousy and cutting off friendships. Gertrude sounds like she was a much more approachable and genial person. While Gertrude worked to secure her reputation as a 'genius' writer, her writing sounds rather repetitive, stream-of-consciousness-like and to my ears, a bit odd (the biographer offers samples in an appendix). What made Toklas and Stein truly interesting (to me) was the company they kept:  Matisse, Picasso, Thornton Wilder and many others.

Because these two women were more of the Victorian era than a 20th-century mindset, they led very circumspect lives. I wish the biographer had had more to work with relative to their relationship as 'modern day' lesbians. I kept finding myself wanting to know more.

I did learn that the phrase, "a rose is a rose is a rose" originated with Gertrude Stein. I feel curiously happy at that and vindicated that I spent the time reading the book.

Pondering my creativity

Dragon Mood? -- enthused

Now that I'm exploring some educational opportunities, my interest in creativity, specifically MINE, is on the rise. Here's an article from PsyBlog that caught my eye. (I've copied it in its entirety so I can reference it in the future and not find a frustrating broken link.)

Boost Creativity: 7 Unusual Psychological Techniques

Looking for the last piece of the puzzle? Try these 7 research-based techniques for increasing creativity.

Everyone is creative: we can all innovate given time, freedom, autonomy, experience to draw on, perhaps a role model to emulate and the motivation to get on with it.

But there are times when even the most creative person gets bored, starts going round in circles, or hits a cul-de-sac. So here are 7 unusual creativity boosters that research has shown will increase creativity:

1. Psychological distance
People often recommend physical separation from creative impasses by taking a break, but psychological distance can be just as useful.

Participants in one study who were primed to think about the source of a task as distant, solved twice as many insight problems as those primed with proximity to the task (Jia et al., 2009).

◊ For insight: Try imagining your creative task as distant and disconnected from your current location. This should encourage higher level thinking.

2. Fast forward in time
Like psychological distance, chronological distance can also boost creativity.

Forster et al. (2004) asked participants to think about what their lives would be like one year from now. They were more insightful and generated more creative solutions to problems than those who were thinking about what their lives would be like tomorrow.

Thinking about distance in both time and space seems to cue the mind to think abstractly and consequently more creatively.

◊ For insight: Project yourself forward in time; view your creative task from one, ten or a hundred years distant.

3. Absurdist stimulation
The mind is desperate to make meaning from experience. The more absurdity it experiences, the harder it has to work to find meaning.

Participants in one study read an absurd short story by Franz Kafka before completing a pattern recognition task (Proulx, 2009). Compared with control participants, those who had read the short story showed an enhanced subconscious ability to recognise hidden patterns.

◊ For insight: read Alice in Wonderland, Kafka's Metamorphosis, or any other absurdist masterpiece. Absurdity is a 'meaning threat' which enhances creativity.

4. Use bad moods
Positive emotional states increase both problem solving and flexible thinking, and are generally thought to be more conducive to creativity. But negative emotions also have the power to boost creativity.

One study of 161 employees found that creativity increased when both positive and negative emotions were running high (George & Zhou, 2007). They appeared to be using the drama in the workplace positively.

◊ For insight: negative moods can be creativity killers but try to find ways to use them—you might be surprised by what happens.

5. Combining opposites
Interviews with 22 Nobel Laureates in physiology, chemistry, medicine and physics as well as Pulitzer Prize winning writers and other artists has found a surprising similarity in their creative processes (Rothenberg, 1996).

Called 'Janusian thinking' after the many-faced Roman god Janus, it involves conceiving of multiple simultaneous opposites. Integrative ideas emerge from juxtapositions, which are usually not obvious in the final product, theory or artwork.

Physicist Niels Bohr may have used Janusian thinking to conceive the principle of complementarity in quantum theory (that light can be analysed as either a wave or a particle, but never simultaneously as both).

◊ For insight: set up impossible oppositions, try ridiculous combinations. If all else fails, pray to Janus.

6. Path of most resistance
When people try to be creative they usually take the path of least resistance by building on existing ideas (Ward, 1994). This isn't a problem, as long as you don't mind variations on a theme.

If you want something more novel, however, it can be limiting to scaffold your own attempts on what already exists. The path of most resistance can lead to more creative solutions.

◊ For insight: because it's the path of least resistance, every man and his dog is going up and down it. Try off-road

7. Re-conceptualisation
People often jump to answers too quickly before they've really thought about the question. Research suggests that spending time re-conceptualising the problem is beneficial.

Mumford et al. (1994) found that experimental participants produced higher quality ideas when forced to re-conceive the problem in different ways before trying to solve it. Similarly a classic study of artists found that those focused on discovery at the problem-formulation stage produced better art (Csikszentmihalyi & Getzels, 1971).

◊ For insight: forget the solution for now, concentrate on the problem. Are you asking the right question?

Everyday creativity
Despite all the high falutin talk of Nobel Prize winners and artists, all of these methods can be applied to everyday life.

Combining opposites, choosing the path of most resistance, absurdism and the rest can just as easily be used to help you choose a gift for someone, think about your career in a new way or decide what to do at the weekend. 'Off-duty' creativity is just as important, if not more so, than all that 'serious' creativity.