Raise Your IQ: View Art.

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On a serious note, dear fans of The Braintenance Blog, observing art -- truly taking the time to examine paintings and other still visual forms of artistic creation -- can and does increase your IQ, as that is conventionally measured.

In the seemingly passive act of observing, we actually call into play numerous elements of spacial reasoning, cause and effect logic (and a search for meaning), identification of multiple symbols, spontaneous re-interpretations of the subject matter on the canvas (or other medium) at which we're looking, eye-mind area stimulation and neuronal connectivity... and numerous others.

It is quite ironic that in the simple act of viewing a painting, so many active excitations of both hemispheres of the brain (working in communication and a kind of cooperative harmony) are taking place.

For more on this topic, please have a look at my other blog, The Daily Dose Of Brilliance, and read the article which follows...then, click on the back arrow and come back to visit with us a bit more. I assure you that you will be captivated by the work of art on display there on my blog's cyberspace wall. You'll react.
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Did you know that you can increase your IQ and creative ability just by looking at a work of art? http://bit.ly/IQview

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Numerous studies in Europe, while not thoroughly conclusive, have scientists believing that viewing art can also have the following salubrious advantages:

• increasing neuronal plasticity;
• increasing communication and coordination between the two hemispheres for improved creativity, abstract reasoning, spacial visualization and other wonderful things;
• delaying the onset of senile dementia and possibly Alzheimer's Disease;
• improving our own inherent ability to create art;
• improving motor skills! 

Q: If we generalize and extrapolate this principle of passive psychoactivation visually, might it be possible that certain of our abilities may be enhanced merely by the seemingly passive act of listening to different types of music? I wonder...

Thank you, as always, for reading me... and for stretching your mind a bit further every time that we're together.

Douglas E. Castle

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ANAGRAM GENERATOR - Braintenance Entertainment

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Here at The Braintenance Blog we work you hard. We don't just supply mind agility games (as Lumosity does), but we make your mind work in a myriad of ways through a myriad of channels. A great way to have some lowbrow [nothing to do with beer] entertainment (as opposed to brain entrainment) is to create anagrams out of colleagues' and friends' names, or, if you are either a conspiracy theorist or merely an angry person who'd like to find "hidden meanings" or hilarious re combinations of brand or product names, this is your chance.

If you are not familiar with anagrams, here's the Wikipedia definition, description and an example or two:

An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once; for example orchestra can be rearranged into carthorse. Someone who creates anagrams is called an anagrammatist. The original word or phrase is known as the subject of the anagram.
Any word or phrase that exactly reproduces the letters in another order is an anagram.

However, the goal of serious or skilled anagrammatists is to produce anagrams that in some way reflect or comment on the subject. Such an anagram may be a synonym or antonym of its subject, a parody, a criticism, or praise; e.g. George Bush = He bugs Gore; Madonna Louise Ciccone = Occasional nude income or One cool dance musician; William Shakespeare = I am a weakish speller, Roger Meddows Taylor = Great words or melody. Anagrams are also often used in fiction for character aliases, such as Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort, Leonardo da vinci = O Draconian Devil, The Mona Lisa= Oh, Lame Saint, So dark the con of man= Madonna of the Rocks in The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.
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So your anagram can either be just a rearrangement of letters to form silly-sounding alternative words using the same letters as your target word, or (if you're really skilled), the anagram can actually generate a thought-provoking  [do you think without provocation? I do.] bit of opinionated commentary on your subject.

But let's get on with it!

Here is your ANAGRAM GENERATOR. Just click on the button and you'll be transferred to the actual page. If you have fun, please do us the honor of forwarding this article to your friends, colleagues and social media groups. Let's go viral. Turn these other people into card-carrying members (We're actually having some Braintenance cards among other Braintenance gear at Zazzle!) of the Braintenance Brigade .



Have fun. Next time, it's back to work.

Douglas E. Castle for The Braintenance Blog, The Daily Burst Of Brilliance Blog and The CrowdFunding Incubator Blog (new to view!)

p.s. An anagram for Douglas Castle's Braintenance...

Scandalise elegant obscurant.

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Guilt-Prone Individuals Versus Sociopaths

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C'mon. Click On The Image...It Might Be Your Lucky Day.

It should be no surprise to you, my fellow (and lady) followers of The Braintenance Blog, that guilt-prone individuals tend to be the most honest in terms of their conduct in social and employment situations.

Their level of advancement in the corporate or entrepreneurial enterprise world is generally at the median average or perhaps a bit higher.

Sociopaths (those without any feelings of guilt, compunction or contrition and unencumbered by 'conscience) tend to advance more rapidly and to greater heights than do their more honorable counterparts. In fact, sociopaths generally are better at leadership roles than are others. There are a number of reasons for this centering around focus, non-distraction, leveraging of assets (Human and otherwise) and persistence despite resistance.

An article about the behavior and performance of guilt-prone individuals was published recently in a BigThink IdeaFeed Newsletter. That article is excerpted and appears here:

How Guilt-Prone Are You?

Orion Jones on October 12, 2012, 9:00 AM

Article written by guest writer Kecia Lynn

What's the Latest Development?

Social scientists at Carnegie-Mellon University have published their findings of a study that measured over 270 participants to determine their levels of "guilt proneness." Guilt proneness is the ability to anticipate bad feelings prior to doing something bad. The researchers used a 16-point Guilt and Shame Proneness (GASP) scale to find out subjects' responses to various dilemmas such as this one: "After realizing you have received too much change at a store, you decide to keep it because the salesclerk doesn't notice. What is the likelihood that you would feel uncomfortable about keeping the money?"

What's the Big Idea?

People with higher levels of guilt proneness were, unsurprisingly, more likely to walk the moral and ethical straight and narrow, even if they weren't being observed or going to get caught. Between 30% and 40% of adults in the study qualified as highly guilt-prone, and more women than men, and more older people than younger people, were in the high guilt-proneness category. Put simply, these are the "nice folks" that the researchers suggest you want in your life and workplace.

Read it at The Wall Street Journal

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An observation is that we tend to want guilt-prone and empathetic persons as our friends and confidantes, but when it comes to leadership in a crisis, we tend to follow leaders with an inclination toward sociopathy.

Douglas E. Castle for The Braintenance Blog and The Daily Burst Of Brilliance Blog

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Controlling Your Thoughts - The "Overmind" - Your Two Conscious Minds.

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You are of two conscious minds, metaphorically. One mind is the conscious performer, busily engaged in thinking and acting; the other (far less cultivated and not as well understood) is the detached mind. This is the mind that can stand outside of you and observe both your conscious thoughts and behavior. It is your MIND OVER MIND, or simply, the Overmind [a convenient Lingovation].

If you can develop this overmind, you can control any aspect of your conscious mind's thought programs and actions. You can control your thoughts and decide what you'd prefer to be thinking about and doing. This requires an exercising of the Overmind.

The best way to do this is by simply being mindful in the moment of what you are doing. Do not just think and act -- use your underexercised and underdeveloped Overmind to observe, as if an outside examiner, every sensation and action and thought of each moment. This deliberate mindfulness can be cultivated to the extent that the Overmind can eventually intervene and converse with the conscious performer (the "regular" conscious mind) in order to change its thought patterns (i.e., its conditioned programming, usually in the form of a less-than-satisfactory stimulus-response loop which needs to be broken but which has become neurologically etched and ingrained due to countless repetitions of the same pattern).

When your Overmind has become so detached from the rest of your conscious thoughts and actions that it is really the external representative of your intelligent will (instead of a creature of impulse, going around in circles), you will have achieved a state of incredibly powerful control... Control over your thought cycles, your actions, your impulsive reactions and all manner of non-productive behavior.

Try being mindful and getting the "feel" of your Overmind as it separates itself from your ordinary thoughts and actions and teaches itself to reprogram your thoughts and actions as if it were an objective, wise outsider.

The Braintenance Blog Prescription? Let your Overmind play each and every day.

Douglas E. Castle

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Here are the answers to the "complete the sequence" exercises from last time. The answers are in red. The explanations are incomplete. You see, somewhere in the recesses of your mind, those patterns are quite visible -- as we work together, you will learn to access these patterns (i.e., pattern recognition) in order to complete these exercises with incredible ease.


2) Find the next number in each of the following sequences of numbers (key: learn the rule, and then extrapolate):

• 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, __ 31 (prime number sequence)
• 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, __81 (each number squared)
• 1100, 1010, 1001, 0110, 1101 __ (there is no pattern -- the last number in the sequence simply did not belong; perhaps it should have been 0101....but you tried to justify it. Right?)
• 0, 2, 2, 4, 6, 10, 16, 26, 42,__(68 - this is a variant on the Fibonacci Sequence)
• 2, 20, 200, 2,000, 20,000 __ 200,000
• 6, 24, 120, 720, 1,540, _____12,320 (think factorially! - 6 = 1x2x3; and 24 = 1x2x3x4; the pattern is simply factorial)

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