Showing posts with label Your. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Your. Show all posts
Thursday, November 10, 2016
A Neuroscientist Explains How Meditation Changes Your Brain
Do you struggle, like me, with monkey-mind? Is your brain also a little unsettled, restless, capricious, whimsical, fanciful, inconstant, confused, indecisive, or uncontrollable? That’s the definition of “monkey mind” I’ve been given!
If you need more motivation to take up this transformative practice, neuroscience research has shown that meditation and mindfulness training can cause neuroplastic changes to the gray matter of your brain. A group of Harvard neuroscientists interested in mindfulness meditation have reported that brain structures change after only eight weeks of meditation practice.
Sara Lazar, Ph.D., the study’s senior author, said in a press release,
“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day.”
To test their idea the neuroscientists enrolled 16 people in an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course. The course promised to improve participants’ mindfulness and well-being, and reduce their levels of stress. Everyone received audio recordings containing 45-minute guided mindfulness exercises (body scan, yoga, and sitting meditation) that they were instructed to practice daily at home. And to facilitate the integration of mindfulness into daily life, they were also taught to practice mindfulness informally in everyday activities such as eating, walking, washing the dishes, taking a shower, and so on. On average, the meditation group participants spent an average of 27 minutes a day practicing some form of mindfulness.
Magnetic resonance images (MRI scans) of everyone’s brains were taken before and after they completed the meditation training, and a control group of people who didn’t do any mindfulness training also had their brains scanned.After completing the mindfulness course, all participants reported significant improvement in measures of mindfulness, such as“acting with awareness” and “non-judging.”
What was startling was that the MRI scans showed that mindfulness groups increased gray matter concentration within the left hippocampus, the posterior cingulate cortex, the temporo-parietal junction, and the cerebellum. Brain regions involved in learning and memory, emotion regulation, sense of self, and perspective taking!
Britta Hölzel, the lead author on the paper says,
“It is fascinating to see the brain’s plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life.”
Sarah Lazar also noted,
“This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”
Credits: **This was originally featured on MindBodyGreen
Tuesday, November 8, 2016
Your Name is What Collin
First, an announcement. You can now comfortably browse Bad Hebrew Tattoos on your iPhone, using our brand new iPhone App, available for free!
Back to buisness, today we have a name tattoo, something we haven't seen in a while. This victim wanted the name Collin, tattooed in Hebrew on his arm. He ended up with this:
To tell you the truth, had this tattoo not been labeled on the site I plucked it from, I would have never been able to interpret it correctly! It reads like a misspelled Ka'alelinen, not at all what the poet intended.
There are several glaring mistakes in this bad Hebrew tattoo. First, the doubling of the letter Lamed - in Hebrew you don't do that, even if Collin does have double L. If it sounds like one L, you write just one Lamed, otherwise a vowel between the two Ls is assumed. Same goes for all double-letter names, such as Anna, Todd or Bobby.
Then, there is the last letter, Nun. The victim unwittingly wrote both final and not-final forms of the letter, instead of using just one. This is a very common (and ugly) mistake, for which alphabet guides and their unaware users are to be blamed.
And finally, the O in Collin is much better represented by a Vav and not the Ayin our victim chose.
Correcting all that, we get a correctly spelled Collin in Hebrew. Note that this spelling can be used for all similarly pronounced names, like Colin or Coline.
Monday, October 31, 2016
Wake Up! Your Butterfly is Burning!
Observe the colorful mess of a tattoo below. Oh yeah, it's another spiritual-wannabe Hebrew tattoo - the best kind out there!
According to the victim, this Hebrew tattoo is supposed to refer to a biblical story about Jesus. In this story (Mark 5:41), Jesus resurrects a dead little girl, by saying to her "Little Girl, Wake Up". Jesus, of course, spoke Aramaic, and in it the expression is "Talitha Cumi".
Our victim here, decided for some reason to get "Talitha Cumi" in Hebrew. However, instead of getting her words from a Hebrew bible, which can be easily found online, she transliterated them to Hebrew herself. Need I say that she got it wrong? The resulting Hebrew tattoo is written backwards and misspelled, not to mention that it has no real meaning in Hebrew, being an Aramaic expression.
If you're very set on "Talitha Cumi" for your Hebrew tattoo, this is how you should write it:
And to wrap things up, I have to mention that burning butterfly. I mean, what's up with that? I can get a burning bush reference, but don't you find burning butterflies a bit sadistic?
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