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Our lives have ebbs and flows. Ends and beginnings are illusions. Starting over is nothing more than recognizing The Pause before picking up your thread and continuing to weave your own story.
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Molly M. Cantrell-Kraig (Circuit Train Your Brain: Daily Habits That Develop Resilience)
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By being a celebrity, you lose your anonymity. It short-circuits your creative powers when people come up and interrupt your train of thought. They consider you completely approachable. And you can't be rude to people, so basically you shut yourself down. I know I do. I shut myself down when people come up and want to shake my hand or want to talk. That's just dead time.
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Bob Dylan
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Bowman was aware of some changes in his behavior patterns; it would have been absurd to expect anything else in the circumstances. He could no longer tolerate silence; except when he was sleeping, or talking over the circuit to Earth, he kept the ship's sound system running at almost painful loudness. / At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened to classical plays--especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare--or poetry readings from Discovery's enormous library of recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed so remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a while he lost patience with them. / So he switched to opera--usually in Italian or German, so that he was not distracted even by the minimal intellectual content that most operas contained. This phase lasted for two weeks before he realized that the sound of all these superbly trained voices was only exacerbating his loneliness. But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi's Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The "Dies Irae," roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered; and when the trumpets of Doomsday echoed from the heavens, he could endure no more. / Thereafter, he played only instrumental music. He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart. / And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.
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Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey (Space Odyssey, #1))
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When things fall apart, they are actually realigning.
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Molly M. Cantrell-Kraig (Circuit Train Your Brain: Daily Habits That Develop Resilience)
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Every set of phenomena, whether cultural totality or sequence of events, has to be fragmented, disjointed, so that it can be sent down the circuits; every kind of language has to be resolved into a binary formulation so that it can circulate not, any longer, in our memories, but in the luminous, electronic memory of the computers. No human language can withstand the speed of light. No event can withstand being beamed across the whole planet. No meaning can withstand acceleration. No history can withstand the centrifugation of facts or their being short-circuited in real time (to pursue the same train of thought: no sexuality can withstand being liberated, no culture can withstand being hyped, no truth can withstand being verified, etc.).
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Jean Baudrillard (The Illusion of the End)
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As with clicker-trained animals, deliberate use of intimidation almost certainly moves your learner off the SEEKING circuit and onto the conditioned fear path in the amygdala. You may get compliance, but learning slows way down.
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Karen Pryor (Reaching the Animal Mind)
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The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits. In the worst cases, the mind essentially trains itself to be sick. Many addictions, too, are reinforced by the strengthening of plastic pathways to the brain. Even very small doses of addictive drugs can dramatically alter the flow of neurotransmitters in a person’s synapses, resulting in long-lasting alterations in brain circuitry and function. In some cases, the buildup of certain kinds of neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, a pleasure-producing cousin to adrenaline, seems to actually trigger the turning on or off particular genes, bringing even stronger cravings for the drug. The vital path turns deadly.
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Nicholas Carr (What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains)
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Focus on what is going well. Focus on what is present. By focusing on what is going well, you will create a channel for more to flow toward you. When you focus on what’s missing or what you are doing “wrong,” you will reinforce lack, or scarcity.
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Molly M. Cantrell-Kraig (Circuit Train Your Brain: Daily Habits That Develop Resilience)
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I promise you, there will be no push-ups. I’m not going to have you run laps. And I definitely won’t have you do any dreaded chin-ups. Your life is the gym and the training ground. Think of it as circuit training for your mind. Allow me to be your coach.
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Darcy Luoma (Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success)
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Mrs. Hayes has instructed me to file a police misconduct and civil rights wrongful death lawsuit in Wayne County Circuit Court against the officer who murdered her husband and against the city and police department that hired and trained this officer and turned him loose on an unsuspecting public.”
“May I quote you on that?” Jillian is eager for a scoop.
“Absolutely. Police brutality is a heinous act. Police officers work in service to the public. The public should be able to rely on that service and the preservation of their safety. The public should expect that police officer functions and services are even-handed, fair, and appropriate, applied the same way for all citizens, regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin.
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Mark M. Bello (Betrayal In Black (Zachary Blake Legal Thriller, #4))
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Without the ability to accept, trust and love oneself, no true foundation can be built for your life.
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Molly M. Cantrell-Kraig (Circuit Train Your Brain: Daily Habits That Develop Resilience)
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The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding...
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William Gibson
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Bad habits can be ingrained in our neurons as easily as good ones. Pascual-Leone observes that “plastic changes may not necessarily represent a behavioral gain for a given subject.” In addition to being “the mechanism for development and learning,” plasticity can be “a cause of pathology.”35 It comes as no surprise that neuroplasticity has been linked to mental afflictions ranging from depression to obsessive-compulsive disorder to tinnitus. The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits. In the worst cases, the mind essentially trains itself to be sick.
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Nicholas Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains)
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I realized with fresh horror that new doors of perception were opening up inside.
New? Not so. OLD doors of perception.
The perception of a child who has not yet learned to protect itself by developing the tunnel vision that keeps out ninety percent of the universe. Children see everything their eyes happen upon, hear everything in their ears' range. But if life is the rise of consciousness…, then it is also the reduction of input. Terror is the widening of perspective and perception. The horror was in knowing I was swimming down to a place most of us leave when we get out of diapers and into training pants. I could see it on Ollie's face, too. When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real: the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing.
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Stephen King (The Mist)
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Remember this study when you are in a negotiation—make your initial request far too high. You have to start somewhere, and your initial decision or calculation greatly influences all the choices that follow, cascading out, each tethered to the anchors set before. Many of the choices you make every day are reruns of past decisions; as if traveling channels dug into a dirt road by a wagon train of selections, you follow the path created by your former self. External anchors, like prices before a sale or ridiculous requests, are obvious and can be avoided. Internal, self-generated anchors, are not so easy to bypass. You visit the same circuit of Web sites every day, eat basically the same few breakfasts. When it comes time to buy new cat food or take your car in for repairs, you have old favorites. Come election time, you pretty much already know who will and will not get your vote. These choices, so predictable—ask yourself what drives them. Are old anchors controlling your current decisions?
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David McRaney (You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself)
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When they find out what I do for a living, many people tell me they love music listening, but their music lessons 'didn't take.' I think they're being too hard on themselves. The chasm between musical experts and everyday musicians that has grown so wide in our culture makes people feel discouraged, and for some reason this is uniquely so with music. Even though most of us can't play basketball like Shaquille O'Neal, or cook like Julia Child, we can still enjoy playing a friendly backyard game of hoops, or cooking a holiday meal for our friends and family. This performance chasm does seem to be cultural, specific to contemporary Western society. And although many people say that music lessons didn't take, cognitive neuroscientists have found otherwise in their laboratories. Even just a small exposure to music lessons as a child creates neural circuits for music processing that are enhanced and more efficient than for those who lack training. Music lessons teach us to listen better, and they accelerate our ability to discern structure and form in music, making it easier for us to tell what music we like and what we don't like.
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Daniel J. Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music)
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The message is clear: attention radically changes brain activity. Paying attention to the overall shape of the words prevents the discovery of the alphabetic code and directs brain activity toward an inadequate circuit in the opposite hemisphere. To learn to read, phonics training is essential.
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Stanislas Dehaene (How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now)
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At Takamatsu Station I take a bus to the fitness club. I change into my gym clothes in the locker room, then do some circuit training, plugged into my Walkman, Prince blasting away. It’s been a while and my muscles complain, but I manage. It’s the body’s normal reaction—muscles screaming out, resisting the extra burden put on them. Listening to “Little Red Corvette,” I try to soothe that reaction, suppress it. I take a deep breath, hold it, exhale. Inhale, hold, exhale. Even breathing, over and over. One by one I push my muscles to the limit. I’m sweating like crazy, my shirt’s soaked and heavy. I have to go over to the cooler a few times to gulp down water.
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Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
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and shoot-don’t-shoot training. This is the Oklahoma v. Tuttle decision (1984, 10th Federal Circuit Court), and today many law enforcement trainers teach that a law enforcement agency is probably not in compliance with federal circuit court guidance if they are still shooting at anything other than a clear, realistic depiction of a deadly force threat.
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Dave Grossman (On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace)
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The witch mania is shameful. How could we do it? How could we be so ignorant about ourselves and our weaknesses? How could it have happened in the most “advanced,” the most “civilized” nations then on Earth? Why was it resolutely supported by conservatives, monarchists, and religious fundamentalists? Why opposed by liberals, Quakers and followers of the Enlightenment? If we’re absolutely sure that our beliefs are right, and those of others wrong; that we are motivated by good, and others by evil; that the King of the Universe speaks to us, and not to adherents of very different faiths; that it is wicked to challenge conventional doctrines or to ask searching questions; that our main job is to believe and obey - then the witch mania will recur in its infinite variations down to the time of the last man. Note Friedrich von Spee’s very first point, and the implication that improved public understanding of superstition and skepticism might have helped to short-circuit the whole train of causality. If we fail to understand how it worked in the last round, we will not recognize it as it emerges in the next.
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Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
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With this warning, Mussolini demanded and was given authority to do just about whatever he wanted; but his initial priority, surprisingly, was good government. He knew that citizens were fed up with a bureaucracy that seemed to grow bigger and less efficient each year, so he insisted on daily roll calls in ministry offices and berated employees for arriving late to work or taking long lunches. He initiated a campaign to drenare la palude (“drain the swamp”) by firing more than 35,000 civil servants. He repurposed Fascist gangs to safeguard rail cargo from thieves. He allocated money to build bridges, roads, telephone exchanges, and giant aqueducts that brought water to arid regions. He gave Italy an eight-hour workday, codified insurance benefits for the elderly and disabled, funded prenatal health care clinics, established seventeen hundred summer camps for children, and dealt the Mafia a blow by suspending the jury system and short-circuiting due process. With no jury members to threaten and judges answerable directly to the state, the courts were as incorruptible as they were docile. Contrary to legend, the dictator didn’t quite succeed in making the trains run on time, but he earned bravos for trying.
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Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
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Exercising an unfit muscle causes soreness, which is followed by improved muscle function and increased resistance of that muscle to become sore. In that sense, soreness after exercise is good (as long as it lasts less than a week and doesn’t come back). Sore joints, on the other hand, are collateral damage (see above). Most people think that if they do an intense workout (say 90 minutes of circuit training in a gym) that they should lose weight. And indeed, if you weigh before and right after such a workout, the scale goes down because of sweating and water weight loss. However, if it makes you sore for the next few days don’t be surprised to see the scale go up. That’s because muscle soreness indicates that your muscles are temporarily inflamed, and inflammation causes fluid retention and swelling in that muscle. Once again, don’t let the scale make you crazy. Once the soreness is gone, the swelling is gone, and the scale comes back down where it’s supposed to be.
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Jeff S. Volek (The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living: An Expert Guide to Making the Life-Saving Benefits of Carbohydrate Restriction Sustainable and Enjoyable)
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The most important lesson I took away from my year on the competitive memory circuit was not the secret to learning poetry by heart, but rather something far more global and, in a way, far more likely to be of service in my life. My experience had validated the old saw that practice makes perfect. But only if it's the right kind of concentrated, self-conscious, deliberate practice. I'd learned firsthand that with focus, motivation, and, above all, time, the mind can be trained to do extraordinary things.
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Joshau Foer
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That's the thing about living life on the circuit, training from such an early age —you make a dozen different hotels and apartments and countries your home, which is another way of saying you kind of live nowhere. Everything drifts by. You never let yourself get too deep or have too much fun because you know that they day after tomorrow you'll be gone. Only the tennis rackets remain, always by your side. People think it's a glamorous life. And, in a way, it is —maybe it is. I am not convinced. it can also be confusing and lonely.
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Maria Sharapova (Unstoppable: My Life So Far)
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No brain region is an island, and the formation of circuits connecting far-flung brain regions is crucial—how else can the frontal cortex use its few myelinated neurons to talk to neurons in the brain’s subbasement to make you toilet trained?2 As we saw, mammalian fetuses overproduce neurons and synapses; ineffective or unessential synapses and neurons are pruned, producing leaner, meaner, more efficient circuitry. To reiterate a theme from the last chapter, the later a particular brain region matures, the less it is shaped by genes and the more by environment.3
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
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It was a remarkable undertaking. The United States and its agents used explosives, arson, short-circuiting, and other methods to damage power stations, shipyards, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, public transportation, bridges, and so on; they derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned twelve cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others; used acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slowdowns in factories; killed by poisoning 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy;
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William Blum (America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else)
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Maybe we can use this Shakespearean triad of lunacy, lover and poet as a tool to propose a classification of events based on the Lacanian train of imaginary, Symbolic and Real: a lunatic dwells in the imaginary dimension, confusing reality and imagination; a lover identifies the beloved person with the absolute Thing in a symbolic short-circuit between signifier and signified which nonetheless maintains the gap that for ever separates them (the lover knows very well that, in reality, his or her beloved is an ordinary person with all his or her failures and weaknesses); a poet makes a phenomenon emerge against the background of the void of the Real.
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Slavoj Žižek (Event)
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Although there were serious attempts to unify the various strands of the French Resistance, the political situation remained somewhat complex throughout the war. It was into this complicated state of affairs that the first F Section agent of the SOE was parachuted into central France on the night of May 5-6, 1941. In the end, more than 400 SOE agents were sent into France during the course of the occupation, and 39 of them were women.
Pearl Witherington was one of those women. Although the SOE trained her to be a courier for a Resistance circuit called the Stationer network, nothing but her own strength, intelligence, and determination could have prepared her for the drastic change in roles that occurred while she was working in occupied France, a change that has made her one of the most celebrated female agents in SOE history
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Kathryn J. Atwood (Code Name Pauline: Memoirs of a World War II Special Agent (5) (Women of Action))
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I used to doubt the Fool when he told me that all of time was a great circuit, and that we are ever doomed to repeat what has been done before. But the older I get, the more I see it is so. I thought then that he meant one great circle entrapped all of us. Instead, I think we are born into our circuits. Like a colt on the end of a training line, we trot in the circular path ordained for us. We go faster, we slow down, we halt on command and we begin again. And each time we think the circle is something new.
Each circle spins off a circle of its own. Each one seems a new thing but in truth it is not. It is just our most recent attempts to correct old errors, to undo old wrongs done to us and to make up for things we have neglected. In each cycle, we may correct old errors, but I think we make as many new ones. Yet what is our alternative? To commit the same old errors again? Perhaps having the courage to find a better path is having the courage to risk making new mistakes.
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Robin Hobb (Golden Fool (Tawny Man, #2))
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The most obvious way that defensive motivational states make themselves known to us is, in fact, through our own behavior. The ability to observe one’s behavior and thus create representations of behavior in working memory is called monitoring.77 By directing our attention to our behavioral output, we can acquire information about what we are doing and intentionally adjust our behavior in light of thoughts, memories, and feelings. As an executive function of working memory, monitoring, not surprisingly, involves circuits in the prefrontal cortex.78 We use observations of our own behavior to regulate how we act in social situations.79 If you become aware that your behavior is negatively affecting others, you can make adjustments as a social situation evolves. Or if you notice you are acting in a biased way toward some group, you can make corrections. In addition, through monitoring one can observe undesirable habits and seek to change these through therapy or other means. Not everyone is equally adept at using monitoring to improve self-awareness. The field of emotional intelligence is all about how people differ in such abilities and how one can be trained to do better.80
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Joseph E. LeDoux (Anxious)
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We put the dogs in a play and invited the parents, since there was no one else to be an audience. But the pets were poorly trained and failed to take direction. There were two soldiers and a fancy lady we’d dressed in a frilly padded bra. The soldiers were cowards. Deserters, basically. They ran away when we issued the battle cry. (A blaring klaxon. It went hoh-onk.) The lady urinated. “Oh, poor old thing, she has a nervous bladder!” exclaimed someone’s chubby mother. “Is that a Persian rug?” Whose mother was it? Unclear. No one would cop to it, of course. We canceled the performance. “Admit it, that was your mother,” said a kid named Rafe to a kid named Sukey, when the parents had filed out. Some of their goblets, highball glasses, and beer bottles were completely empty. Drained. Those parents were in a hurry, then. “No way,” said Sukey firmly, and shook her head. “Then who is your mother? The one with the big ass? Or the one with the clubfoot?” “Neither,” said Sukey. “So fuck you.” THE GREAT HOUSE had been built by robber barons in the nineteenth century, a palatial retreat for the green months. Our parents, those so-called figures of authority, roamed its rooms in vague circuits beneath the broad beams, their objectives murky. And of no general interest.
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Lydia Millet (A Children's Bible)
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All I wanted to say,” bellowed the computer, “is that my circuits are now irrevocably committed to calculating the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” He paused and satisfied himself that he now had everyone’s attention, before continuing more quietly. “But the program will take me a little while to run.”
Fook glanced impatiently at his watch.
“How long?” he said.
“Seven and a half million years,” said Deep Thought.
Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other.
“Seven and a half million years!” they cried in chorus.
“Yes,” declaimed Deep Thought, “I said I’d have to think about it, didn’t I? And it occurs to me that running a program like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole are of philosophy in general. Everyone’s going to have their own theories about what answer I’m eventually going to come up with, and who better, to capitalize on that media market than you yourselves? So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and maligning each other in the popular press, and so long as you have clever agents, you can keep yourselves on the gravy train for life. How does that sound?”
The two philosophers gaped at him.
“Bloody hell,” said Majikthise, “now that is what I call thinking. Here, Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like that?”
“Dunno,” said Vroomfondel in an awed whisper; “think our brains must be too highly trained, Majikthise.”
So saying, they turned on their heels and walked out of the door and into a life-style beyond their wildest dreams.
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Douglas Adams (The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Boxset: Guide to the Galaxy / The Restaurant at the End of the Universe / Life, the Universe and ... and Thanks for all the Fish / Mostly Harmless)
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The story we are told of women is not this one.
The story of women is the story of love, of foundering into another. A slight deviation: longing to founder and being unable to. Being left alone in the foundering, and taking things into one's own hands: rat poison, the wheels of a Russian train. Even the smoother and gentler story is still just a modified version of the above. In the demotic, in the key of bougie, it's the promise of love in old age for all the good girls of the world. Hilarious ancient bodies at bath time, husband's palsied hands soaping wife's withered dugs, erection popping out of the bubbles like a pink periscope. I see you! There would be long, hobbledy walks under the plane trees, stories told by a single sideways glance, one word sufficing. Anthill, he'd say; Martini! she'd say; and the thick swim of the old joke would return to them. The laughter, the beautiful reverberations. Then the bleary toddling on to an early-bird dinner, snoozing through a movie hand in hand. Their bodies like knobby sticks wrapped in vellum. One laying the other on the deathbed, feeding the overdose, dying the day after, all heart gone out of the world with the beloved breath. Oh, companionship. Oh, romance. Oh, completion. Forgive her if she believed this would be the way it would go. She had been led to this conclusion by forces greater than she.
Conquers all! All you need is! Is a many-splendored thing! Surrender to!
Like corn rammed down goose necks, this shit they'd swallowed since they were barely old enough to dress themselves in tulle.
The way the old story goes, woman needs an other to complete her circuits, to flick her to fullest blazing.
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Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies)
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In 1979, Christopher Connolly cofounded a psychology consultancy in the United Kingdom to help high achievers (initially athletes, but then others) perform at their best. Over the years, Connolly became curious about why some professionals floundered outside a narrow expertise, while others were remarkably adept at expanding their careers—moving from playing in a world-class orchestra, for example, to running one. Thirty years after he started, Connolly returned to school to do a PhD investigating that very question, under Fernand Gobet, the psychologist and chess international master. Connolly’s primary finding was that early in their careers, those who later made successful transitions had broader training and kept multiple “career streams” open even as they pursued a primary specialty. They “traveled on an eight-lane highway,” he wrote, rather than down a single-lane one-way street. They had range. The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment. They employed what Hogarth called a “circuit breaker.” They drew on outside experiences and analogies to interrupt their inclination toward a previous solution that may no longer work. Their skill was in avoiding the same old patterns. In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack. Pretending the world is like golf and chess is comforting. It makes for a tidy kind-world message, and some very compelling books. The rest of this one will begin where those end—in a place where the popular sport is Martian tennis, with a view into how the modern world became so wicked in the first place.
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David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
“
Good to know,” Reacher said. “Tell your uncle no laws have been broken. Tell him he’s been paid for the room. Tell him I’ll see him later.” The guy on the right uncrossed his arms. The guy on the left said, “Are you going to be a problem?” “I’m already a problem,” Reacher said. “The question is, what are you going to do about it?” There was a pause, hot and lonely in the middle of nowhere, and then the two guys answered by brushing aside their coats, in tandem, casually, right-handed, both thereby showing black semi-automatic pistols, in pancake holsters, mounted on their belts. Which was a mistake, and Reacher could have told them why. He could have launched into a long and impatient classroom lecture, about sealing their fates by forcing a decisive battle too early, about short-circuiting a grander strategy by moving the endgame to the beginning. Threats had to be answered, which meant he was going to have to take their guns away, because probing pawns had to be sent back beaten, and because folks in Mother’s Rest needed to know for sure the next time he came to town he would be armed. He wanted to tell them it was their own fault. He wanted to tell them they had brought it on themselves. But he didn’t tell them anything. Instead he ducked his own hand under his own coat, grabbing at nothing but air, but the two guys didn’t know that, and like the good range-trained shooters they were they went for their guns and dropped into solid shooting stances all at once, which braced their feet a yard apart for stability, so Reacher stepped in and kicked the left-hand guy full in the groin, before the guy’s gun was even halfway out of its holster, which meant the right-hand guy had time to get his all the way out, but to no avail, because the next event in his life was the arrival of Reacher’s elbow, scything backhand against his cheekbone, shattering it and causing a general lights-out everywhere.
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Lee Child (Make Me (Jack Reacher, #20))
“
Heightened capacity for visual imagery and fantasy “Was able to move imaginary parts in relation to each other.” “It was the non-specific fantasy that triggered the idea.” “The next insight came as an image of an oyster shell, with the mother-of-pearl shining in different colors. I translated that in the idea of an interferometer—two layers separated by a gap equal to the wavelength it is desired to reflect.” “As soon as I began to visualize the problem, one possibility immediately occurred. A few problems with that concept occurred, which seemed to solve themselves rather quickly…. Visualizing the required cross section was instantaneous.” “Somewhere along in here, I began to see an image of the circuit. The gates themselves were little silver cones linked together by lines. I watched the circuit flipping through its paces….” “I began visualizing all the properties known to me that a photon possesses and attempted to make a model for a photon…. The photon was comprised of an electron and a positron cloud moving together in an intermeshed synchronized helical orbit…. This model was reduced for visualizing purposes to a black-and-white ball propagating in a screwlike fashion through space. I kept putting the model through all sorts of known tests.” 5. Increased ability to concentrate “Was able to shut out virtually all distracting influences.” “I was easily able to follow a train of thought to a conclusion where normally I would have been distracted many times.” “I was impressed with the intensity of concentration, the forcefulness and exuberance with which I could proceed toward the solution.” “I considered the process of photoconductivity…. I kept asking myself, ‘What is light? and subsequently, ‘What is a photon?’ The latter question I repeated to myself several hundred times till it was being said automatically in synchronism with each breath. I probably never in my life pressured myself as intently with a question as I did this one.” “It is hard to estimate how long this problem might have taken without the psychedelic agent, but it was the type of problem that might never have been solved. It would have taken a great deal of effort and racking of the brains to arrive at what seemed to come more easily during the session.” 6. Heightened empathy with external processes and objects “…the sense of the problem as a living thing that is growing toward its inherent solution.” “First I somehow considered being the needle and being bounced around in the groove.” “I spent a productive period …climbing down on my retina, walking around and thinking about certain problems relating to the mechanism of vision.” “Ability to grasp the problem in its entirety, to ‘dive’ into it without reservations, almost like becoming the problem.” “Awareness of the problem itself rather than the ‘I’ that is trying to solve it.” 7. Heightened empathy with people “It was also felt that group performance was affected in …subtle ways. This may be evidence that some sort of group action was going on all the time.” “Only at intervals did I become aware of the music. Sometimes, when I felt the other guys listening to it, it was a physical feeling of them listening to it.” “Sometimes we even had the feeling of having the same thoughts or ideas.” 8. Subconscious data more accessible “…brought about almost total recall of a course that I had had in thermodynamics; something that I had never given any thought about in years.” “I was in my early teens and wandering through the gardens where I actually grew up. I felt all my prior emotions in relation to my surroundings.
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James Fadiman (The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys)
“
This study, which we published in 2007, provided strong evidence that the brain’s attention systems can be trained. Like any form of workout, from weight lifting to cycling to learning a second language, it causes an enduring change in the system that is engaged. In this case, that change is the ability to maintain laser-sharp concentration with less and less activity in the brain’s attention circuit.
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Richard J. Davidson (The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live - and How You Can Change Them)
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Voltage is measured in volts. Current is measured in amperes. Resistance is measured in ohms. One volt is the electrical pressure required to cause 1 ampere of current to flow through a resistance of 1 ohm. Scientists have made experiments which show that 6280 trillion electrons pass a given point each second when there is 1 ampere of current in a circuit.
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TSD Training (Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Volume 1 of 4 - Fundamentals: Includes Principles of Electricity, Fundamentals of Gasoline Engines, Physics of Refrigeration, and Refrigerants)
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So often we accommodate casual Christianity and then wonder why there’s not more power in our lives. God desires that we have more power, but we short-circuit it. We hold high ideals but see few results because we have an aversion to risk, and we develop our lifestyle around this aversion. We prefer to think of Christianity as a religious philosophy rather than as a top-down revolution meant to turn the powers of darkness on their heads. We’re in a culture that trains us to live by feelings, emotions and our desires instead of living with real clarity.
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Robby Dawkins (Do What Jesus Did: A Real-Life Field Guide to Healing the Sick, Routing Demons and Changing Lives Forever)
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was now over two million dollars, a nice little nest egg nobody knew about, not even his ex-wife. The $200,000 from Smith would simply be walking-around cash. The St. Paul police and the bureau suspected Smith had a partner when they took him down, but Smith never put Burton’s name in play. He took all the weight. When Smith was being sodomized in jail, when the bureau visited him, talking about how they could make his life easier if he just told them who he worked with, he didn’t give in, didn’t fold, and didn’t turn in his partner. Burton knew all this, tracking his partner’s incarceration, always worried he might break. He never did. Meanwhile, Burton moved to kidnapping and found his true calling within the bureau. When he brought home the daughter of one of New York’s wealthiest businessmen, taking down the kidnappers in a spectacular chase through the subway tunnels, his name and reputation were cemented. He published a book. Traveled the country speaking about his cases, and now performed training for the bureau. Retiring at the end of the year, he could expect to greatly enhance his wealth on the speaking circuit. Several prestigious colleges had inquired of his interest in teaching. His life was set. Then, four months ago Smith showed up on his doorstep. Burton owed him and there was no argument. His life was what it was because Smith never turned him in. Smith took all the heat, and Burton ended up with all the glory. Burton spent days and nights thinking of ways out of helping Smith. He offered up part of his nest egg. Smith wasn’t interested. Burton offered to put him in touch with people who would put him to work, let him earn a respectable living, start a new life, a comfortable life, a decent life. Smith wasn’t interested in any of that. He wanted one thing: he wanted Charlie Flanagan, and he didn’t just want to hurt him, he wanted to gut him. And Burton owed him. And if Burton refused, Smith would kill him. If he could just get through the next day, help Smith get what he wanted and get his crew theirs; he’d be free and clear. Smith would be gone. Burton could retire a happy and wealthy man. If Charlie Flanagan, Lyman Hisle, and their daughters had to pay the ultimate price for that—well, it was him or them. If that was the way it had to be, he’d
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Roger Stelljes (Deadly Stillwater (McRyan Mystery, #2))
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It comes as no surprise that neuroplasticity has been linked to mental afflictions ranging from depression to obsessive-compulsive disorder to tinnitus. The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits. In the worst cases, the mind essentially trains itself to be sick.
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Nicholas Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains)
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DAY 1 CHEST & CALVES Incline Barbell Bench Press – Warm-up sets and then 3 working sets Incline Dumbbell Bench Press – 3 working sets Flat Barbell Bench Press – 3 working sets Optional: Dip (Chest Variation) – 3 working sets Calf Workout A If you can’t do dips, find out whether your gym has an assisted dip machine. If it doesn’t and you still want to do 3 more sets in your workout, you can do 3 sets of flat dumbbell presses. DAY 2 BACK & BUTT & ABS Barbell Deadlift – Warm-up sets and then 3 working sets Barbell Squat – 3 working sets Barbell Row – 3 working sets One-Arm Dumbbell Row – 3 working sets 3 to 6 ab circuits If you have lower-back issues, remember that you can swap the deadlift for a more lower-back-friendly variation like the sumo or hex deadlift, or you can drop it altogether and choose another “approved” exercise like the T-bar row. If you can’t do pull-ups or chin-ups, you can use a machine that assists you. If your gym doesn’t have one, you can do dumbbell rows instead. DAY 3 SHOULDERS & CALVES Seated or Standing Barbell Military Press – Warm-up sets and then 3 working sets Side Lateral Raise – 3 working sets Bent-Over Rear Delt Raise – 3 working sets Calf Workout B DAY 4 ARMS & ABS Barbell Curl – Warm-up sets and then 3 working sets Close-Grip Bench Press – Warm-up sets and then 3 working sets Alternating Dumbbell Curl – 3 working sets Seated Triceps Press – 3 working sets 3 to 6 ab circuits DAY 5 LEGS & BUTT Barbell Squat – Warm-up sets and then 3 working sets Leg Press – 3 working sets Romanian Deadlift – 3 working sets Hip Thrust – 3 working sets Calf Workout C If you’re going to lift 5 days per week, I recommend that you start with this routine for your first eight to ten weeks. It’s the first phase of the workouts you’ll find in the bonus report. In terms of which days to train on, most people like to lift Monday through Friday and take the weekends off, maybe doing some cardio on one or both of these days. This works well. Feel free to work your rest days however you want, though. Some people prefer to lift on the weekends and take off two days during the week. Work your cardio in as needed. You can lift and do cardio on the same days without an issue.
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Michael Matthews (Thinner Leaner Stronger: The Simple Science of Building the Ultimate Female Body)
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The brain devotes more cortical real estate to functions that its owner uses more frequently and shrinks the space devoted to activities rarely performed. That's why the brains of violinists devote more space to the region that controls the digits of the fingering hand. In response to the actions and experiences of its owner, a brain forges stronger connections in circuits that underlie one behavior or thought and weakens the connections in others.
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Sharon Begley (Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves)
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Think about it. Why would a company like Emerald want a robust intercity transit system? They don’t want workers to commute elsewhere—and they definitely don’t want it to be easy for tourists to leave and spend cash in La Ronge or Moundville.” As Misha spoke, Sulfur had a vivid image of their not-so-distant future. They could almost hear the words that Verdance would use to make its announcement. We made a good faith effort, they would say. We got transit started and now it’s up to each city to carry on, they would add. And then, because most of the wealthy owners had private transit, there would be endless debates over where to plant those ugly tracks that Cylindra had already rejected. Nobody would want them next to their nice neighborhoods. There would be excuses about how trains messed up the Pleistocene purity of Sasky, but really it would be about not wanting to deal with the class of person who took public transit. Sulfur imagined the tracks slowly softening into mulch while millions of people tried to get around by cobbling together circuitous routes from dozens of local transit systems that each charged a separate fare. And then rich commuters would deal with the problem by building Mounts who couldn’t say whether they consented to be used that way or not.
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Annalee Newitz (The Terraformers)
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This here is Miz Nellie Ward," Dane started. "Until about an hour ago, she was the owner of one of the finest brothels in Dodge City.” He smiled at the woman and continued. “The place burned to the ground and all her girls left to work for another house.”
“What the hell is this about, Marshal?” Mindy said. “If you think I’m going to work for Nellie you’re crazy.” She nodded at the woman. “No offense, Nellie. It’s just that I ain’t got a hankering for spending my time flat on my back. That about killed my mama.”
“None taken,” Nellie said, her lips twitching.
“Although that’s not why Nellie is here, missy, you might not be so quick to dismiss a job,” the marshal said. “Stuart stopped me on the way over here so I could tell you to turn in your dress, cause you’ve been fired.”
“Well, hell. Ain’t that like a man? Takes the mayor’s side in this, without even hearing what really happened.”
“Forget it, girl. What I have to say to you—” his eyes swept over the other three women behind bars. “All of you—is I have a proposal.”
He paused, making sure he had all their attention. “Nellie’s place burned down, and she has nowhere to go. All of you are a burr under my saddle. I can’t have women in my jail, but none of you have a job or a place to stay.” He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair.
“So, this is the deal. There’s a wagon train right now at Fort Dodge from Independence that’s headed to Santa Fe, New Mexico territory. Now I happen to know there are plenty of men down that way looking for wives.”
One of the women gasped. “Marshal, surely you’re not suggesting . . .”
“Yes, ma’am I am suggesting. You gals will either get on that wagon train with Nellie here as your chaperone or wait until the circuit judge comes around when he sobers up. He’ll be so blasted hung over, he’s liable to send y’all off to the state prison.”
“That’s outrageous. You can’t force us to marry strangers.” Another young, pretty girl clutched the cell bars, her knuckles white.
“No, ma’am, you’re probably right. I can’t do that. But what I can do is leave you sitting here until old Judge Bailey makes his appearance. Sometimes we don’t see him for six months.”
“I’m willing.” The girl curled up on her cot said, her voice barely above a whisper.
From Prisoners of Love: Nellie, A Christmas to Remember
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Callie Hutton
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What most people don’t know is that when they think about a highly charged emotional experience the brain will fire in the exact sequences and patterns as before; they are firing and wiring their brains to the past by reinforcing those circuits into evermore hard wired networks. They also duplicate the same chemicals in the brain and body (in varying degrees) as if they were experiencing the event again in that moment. Those chemicals begin to train the body to further memorize that emotion (Dispenza, 2012).
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Annie Hopper (Wired for Healing: Remapping the Brain to Recover from Chronic and Mysterious Illnesses)
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For full effect, this is, of course, proceeded by normal brainwashing. The victim is first isolated from his or her previous environment and trained to hook the bio-survival circuit onto the “guru” and/or the Ashram or commune. The emotional circuit is bent and broken by continuous attacks upon status (ego), until the only emotional security left is found in Total Submission to the group reality-island. The re-infantilized victim is then ready to imprint any semantic circuitry desired, from psychological cults, political cults, religious cults, etc. The socio-sexual circuit can then easily be programmed for celibacy, for free love, or for whatever sexual game the guru has selected. Then, and only then, the neurosomatic buttons are pushed and ecstasy is “given” to the subject “by” the guru.
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Robert Anton Wilson (Prometheus Rising)
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In pre-ethological terms, the emotional-territorial circuit is what we usually call “ego.” Ego is simply the mammalian recognition of one’s status in the pack; it is a “role” as sociologists say, a single brain circuit which mistakes itself for the whole Self, the entire brain-mind apparatus. The “egotist” behaves like “a two year old,” in the common saying, because Ego is the imprint of the toddling and toilet-training stage.
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Robert Anton Wilson (Prometheus Rising)
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Training children to obey adult authority is so influential that it appears to override the brain’s natural “mirror neurons”; it dismantles the brain’s shared neural circuits that are instantly activated by the pain, emotion, and experience of another person.
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Jennifer Fraser (The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health)
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Indian Railways is the fourth largest rail network in the world These are the top 5 most luxurious trains which have the best beautiful views from the window of your seat and serve the best hospitality. These trains pass through beautiful places. Surely your experience will be at the next level.
Maharajas' Express : It runs between October and April, covering around 12 destinations most of which lie in Rajasthan.
Palace on Wheels: The train starts its journey from New Delhi and covers Jaipur, Sawai Madhopur, Chittorgarh, Udaipur, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, Bharatpur, and Agra, before returning to Delhi. If you plan on experiencing this royal journey, make sure you have Rs. 3,63,300 to spend!
The Golden Chariot : you can take a ride along the Southern State of Karnataka and explore while living like a VIP on wheels. You start from Bengaluru and then go on to visit famous tourist attractions like Hampi, Goa and Mysore to name a few. The Golden Chariot also boasts of a spa, a gym and restaurants too.
The Deccan Odyssey: The Deccan Odyssey can give you tours across destinations in Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Gujarat. It starts from Mumbai, covers 10 popular tourist locations including Ratnagiri, Sindhudurg, Goa, Aurangabad, Ajanta-Ellora Nasik, Pune, returning to Mumbai.
Maha Parinirvan Express / Buddha Circuit Train: The Buddha Express travels through parts of Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, where Buddism originated over 2,500 years ago. This isn’t as opulent as the other luxury Indian trains and instead drops passengers off at hotels at famous tourist destinations such as Bodhgaya, Rajgir and Nalanda.
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Indian Railways (Trains at a Glance: Indian Railways 2005-2006)
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Terror is the widening of perspective and perception. The horror was in knowing I was swimming down to a place most of us leave when we get out of diapers and into training pants. I could see it on Ollie’s face, too. When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real: the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing.
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Stephen King
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Build some muscle. Muscle is more metabolically expensive than body fat. The more muscle you have, the more calories you’ll burn each day—even at rest. Having more muscle also improves your body’s ability to regulate blood glucose levels after meals, which has been linked to reduced body fat levels.3 Increase workout intensity. Adding more daily activity like walking is a good idea, but adding more intensity to your exercise routine will make a bigger impact on your metabolism. This is due to excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. After an intense weight training session or circuit training routine, your body burns calories at a higher rate for several hours after the exercise session has ended. Move more. Look for opportunities to increase nonexercise movement throughout the day: taking the stairs instead of the elevator, walking while talking on the phone instead of sitting down, or standing instead of sitting when possible.
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Scott H Hogan (Built from Broken: A Science-Based Guide to Healing Painful Joints, Preventing Injuries, and Rebuilding Your Body)
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I make my mistakes out loud, giving people a chance to learn from the echoes they create.
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Molly M. Cantrell-Kraig (Circuit Train Your Brain: Daily Habits That Develop Resilience)
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Your now isn't your always.
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Molly M. Cantrell-Kraig (Circuit Train Your Brain: Daily Habits That Develop Resilience)
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By making space for the unplanned and unorthodox, we allow for unforeseen resolutions of challenges we may be facing.
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Molly M. Cantrell-Kraig (Circuit Train Your Brain: Daily Habits That Develop Resilience)
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We're never perfect. We're always measured against a yardstick we'll never see.
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Molly M. Cantrell-Kraig (Circuit Train Your Brain: Daily Habits That Develop Resilience)
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You are worthy of good things.
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Molly M. Cantrell-Kraig (Circuit Train Your Brain: Daily Habits That Develop Resilience)
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Let me amend that. Of course I’m sure it was done. Every generation likes to think that they discovered sex, but I’m sure that far more sophisticated people than me were experiencing cunnilingus in 1940, all over New York City—especially in the Village. But I’d never heard of it. God knows, I’d had everything else done to the flower of my femininity that summer, but not this. I’d been palmed and rubbed and penetrated, and certainly fingered and probed (my heavens, how the boys liked to poke about, and so vigorously, too)—but never this. His mouth had ended up between my legs so fast, and the sudden realization of his destination and his intent had shocked me to the point that I said “Oh!” and started to sit up, but he reached up one of his long arms, placed his palm on my chest, and firmly pressed me back down again, without once stopping what he was doing. “Oh!” I said again. Then I felt it. There was a sensation occurring here that I didn’t even know could occur. I took the sharpest inhale of my life, and I’m not sure I let my breath out for another ten minutes. I do feel that I lost the ability to see and hear for a while, and that something might have short-circuited in my brain—something that has probably never been fully fixed since. My whole being was astonished. I could hear myself making noises like an animal, and my legs were shaking uncontrollably (not that I was trying to control them), and my hands were gripping down so hard over my face that I left fingernail divots in my own skull. Then it became more. And after that, it became even more still. Then I screamed as though I were being run over by a train, and that long arm of his was reaching up again to palm my mouth, and I bit into his hand the way a wounded soldier bites on a bullet. And then it was the most, and I more or less died.
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Elizabeth Gilbert (City of Girls)
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The mere act of showing up for yourself each day will begin to shift the world in your favor.
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Molly M. Cantrell-Kraig (Circuit Train Your Brain: Daily Habits That Develop Resilience)
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You cannot borrow security. You must invest in yourself. It is through this investment that you develop resilience. Each failure creates an opportunity for “bouncing back,’ thus strengthening your soul’s elasticity.
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Molly M. Cantrell-Kraig (Circuit Train Your Brain: Daily Habits That Develop Resilience)
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If your body isn’t firing on all cylinders, nothing you do will fundamentally change the way things are happening for you in your life.
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Molly M. Cantrell-Kraig (Circuit Train Your Brain: Daily Habits That Develop Resilience)
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Lasting change happens on a subconscious level before it can fully manifest on the surface level. The triumvirate of body — mind — spirit must work in balance in order to create your best results and strongest self.
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Molly M. Cantrell-Kraig (Circuit Train Your Brain: Daily Habits That Develop Resilience)
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One of my biggest fears is that school-age children end up getting labeled as having ADHD and are given medication when parents could have put in the early training that may have nipped these problems in the bud or at least made them less severe. I wonder how many children diagnosed with ADHD may not have a neurological condition but rather be suffering from a lack of time being put in on education in the early years to help develop those brain circuits and increase the ability to focus and concentrate.
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Jo Frost (Jo Frost's Toddler Rules: Your 5-Step Guide to Shaping Proper Behavior)
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In compassionate adepts, the brain’s insula begins to enlarge. The insula makes us aware of our internal emotional states and raises our level of attention to their signals. It also has rich connections to the heart and other visceral organs, allowing it to track and integrate signals coming from the body. In empathetic people, the insula responds strongly to the distress of others, just as though we were suffering ourselves. Activation of the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) indicates that we can see things from the perspective of another person. This allows us to put ourselves in their shoes and take their needs into consideration. 6.10. Empathy is a neurological event, not simply an emotional state. There’s a part of the anterior cingulate that lights up only when we’re contemplating actions that help others. It isn’t activated by outcomes that favor only us. This region is also associated with impulse control and decision-making; we can choose win-win options rather than the desire-driven cravings of the nucleus accumbens. When adepts are confronted by the suffering of others, the premotor cortex lights up. This means that the brain hasn’t just noticed the distress of a fellow being; it’s getting ready to take action. In experienced meditators, the nucleus accumbens shrinks. This structure, which we looked at in Chapter 3, is active in desire and addiction. Deactivation of the nucleus accumbens through empathetic connection equates to a weakening of self-centered attachment. Calming our emotions and focusing our attention, we’re no longer driven by our wants and compulsions, and the brain circuitry associated with this part of the reward circuit begins to wither. When training people in EcoMeditation retreats, I focus on the Empathy Network only after the first three networks are active. First I have them focus on self, then on just one other person. Only after that do we expand our compassion to the universal scale. That’s because thinking about other people can easily take us into mind wandering. People I love, people I don’t, and the things that happened to cause those feelings. Trying to be compassionate toward people who harmed us can lead us out of Bliss Brain. So I activate the Empathy Network only after the Attention Network is engaged. BRAIN CHANGE IS LIFE CHANGE The fact that blissful states, practiced consistently, become blissful traits is a profound gift to us human beings. It means that we aren’t condemned to live in the Caveman Brain with which evolution endowed us. That practice can evolve our brains, some parts slowly, some parts quickly, is a remarkable innovation.
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Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
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She sat looking at the ancestral map of Taggart Transcontinental on the wall of his office, at the red arteries winding across a yellowed continent. There had been a time when the railroad was called the blood system of the nation, and the stream of trains had been like a living circuit of blood, bringing growth and wealth to every patch of wilderness it touched. Now, it was still like a stream of blood, but like the one-way stream that runs from a wound, draining the last of a body’s sustenance and life. One-way traffic—she thought indifferently—consumers’ traffic.
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Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
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He did have some small advantage, though. He knew the truth about surveillance. Ever since the dawn of GWOT the nations of the West – apart from the United States, where civil libertarians tended to carry rifles and use them on closed-circuit cameras as an expression of their freedoms – had put their faith in creating a paranoid state, one where every move of every citizen was recorded and logged and filmed and fuck you, if you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to worry about.
Whether this had had any great influence in the course of GWOT was a moot point, but there was one thing not generally appreciated about the paranoid state. It was incredibly labour-intensive.
There were simply not enough people to monitor all the cameras. Every shop had one, every bus and train and theatre and public convenience, every street and road and alleyway. Computers with facial recognition and gait recognition and body language recognition could do some of the job, but they were relatively simple to fool, expensive, and times had been hard for decades. It was cheaper to get people to watch the screens. But no nation on Earth had a security service large enough, a police force big enough, to keep an eye on all those live feeds. So it was contracted out. To private security firms all trying to undercut each other. The big stores had their own security men, but they were only interested in people going in and out of the store, not someone just passing by. So instead of a single all-seeing eye London’s seemingly-impregnable surveillance map was actually a patchwork of little territories and jurisdictions, and while they all had, by law, to make their footage available to the forces of law and order, many of the control rooms were actually manned by bored, underpaid, undertrained and badly-motivated immigrants.
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Dave Hutchinson (Europe in Autumn (The Fractured Europe Sequence, #1))
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Over the past few millennia, we’ve co-opted brain circuits already in use to scan the world for food or danger, in a sense fooling ourselves into paying attention to the inert little symbols on the page. Brain scans have shown that areas once used exclusively for scanning the horizon—for recognizing animal tracks, ripe berries, and snakes in trees—became the region that allowed us to quickly recognize letters and words. We’ve trained our brain to read by modifying the structures we once used to sense danger and movement and odd shapes in the grass. Dehaene and other researchers have found that most of our letter shapes are actually transpositions of key shapes from nature to which we’ve learned pay attention: a “Y” resembles the crook of tree branches, a “T” (on its side) the shape formed whenever one object masks another—imagine a telephone pole breaking the line of the horizon. “T-detector” neurons help us determine which object is in front, Dehaene wrote. “We did not invent most of our letter shapes: they lay dormant in our brain for millions of years, and were merely rediscovered when our species invented writing and the alphabet.
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Greg Toppo (The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter)
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wall against his back, then frowned as he heard a creaking sound coming from somewhere close by. He was about to investigate, when the house was plunged into darkness once again. * * * Ryan swung his car through the gates and was forced to reduce his speed along the narrow driveway, for which Phillips was eternally grateful. They followed the road over the little stone bridge next to the Archimedes screw and heard the water bubbling furiously through its crushing blades as they passed. They rounded a bend and the house materialised through the trees, its windows flaming brightly against the inky blue-black sky. “It doesn’t look real, does it?” Phillips said, his eyes trained on the perfect backdrop. “It’s not going to disappear before your eyes,” Ryan muttered. Then, in a moment of extreme irony, that is exactly what happened. The two men looked on in shock as the house seemed to disappear, its walls blending with the colour of the night sky and the trees surrounding it. CHAPTER 30 “What the hell?” Martin Henderson swore beneath his breath as the lights went out. He stepped away from the wall to begin feeling his way towards the doorway but the house was pitch black and he could barely see his own hand in front of his face. The circuit had blown again, he thought, which was hardly surprising when a couple of old crackpots insisted on living like Victorian throwbacks rather than relying on the National Grid like the rest of the known world. The sooner he could get away from here, the better. His fingers brushed against the architrave on the doorway and he began to retrace his steps using the wall as a guide, no longer concerned about keeping his meeting at nine o’clock. He only hoped the other person was having as much trouble as he was, finding their way through the maze of rooms in the old house. When his fingers touched nothing but air, he realised he’d reached the turning to lead him back into the small hallway outside the bedrooms and the morning room, and the lift shaft was somewhere over his left shoulder. Blind without any light source, Henderson’s other senses were heightened considerably. He shivered as he stepped in front of the doors to the lift shaft, feeling an icy breath of wind brush against his cheeks. His brain was slow to compute the fact and he did not realise the implication until it was too late. The doors were open. The figure stepped out in front of him, barely making a creak against the floorboards but it was enough to alert him to the presence of another. “For The Valiant,” they whispered. Two firm hands came up to thrust against his chest and
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L.J. Ross (Cragside (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #6))
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Traditional training programmes can be a hit or a miss. A miss could arguably be attributed to their generic format of delivery or lack of consideration of the professional needs of an individual or an organisation. Line managers need to scrutinise business needs versus experience, knowledge or skill gaps to invest in relevant capacity enhancement for their human capital for concrete results.
Many excellent professionals work outside their fields of study because of :
- Learning on the job or through cross functional circuit stints
- Mentorship from seasoned professionals
- Relevant continuous professional development
- Participating in simulated learning environment
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Victor Manan Nyambala
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This ability to change the brain’s wiring, to grow new neural connections, has been demonstrated in experiments such as one conducted by Doctors Avi Karni and Leslie Underleider at the National Institutes of Mental Health. In that experiment, the researchers had subjects perform a simple motor task, a finger-tapping exercise, and identified the parts of the brain involved in the task by taking a MRI brain scan. The subjects then practiced the finger exercise daily for four weeks, gradually becoming more efficient and quicker at it. At the end of the four-week period, the brain scan was repeated and showed that the area of the brain involved in the task had expanded; this indicated that the regular practice and repetition of the task had recruited new nerve cells and changed the neural connections that had originally been involved in the task. This remarkable feature of the brain appears to be the physiological basis for the possibility of transforming our minds. By mobilizing our thoughts and practicing new ways of thinking, we can reshape our nerve cells and change the way our brains work. It is also the basis for the idea that inner transformation begins with learning (new input) and involves the discipline of gradually replacing our “negative conditioning” (corresponding with our present characteristic nerve cell activation patterns) with “positive conditioning” (forming new neural circuits). Thus, the idea of training the mind for happiness becomes a very real possibility.
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Dalai Lama XIV (The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living)
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An essential pedagogic step here is to relegate the teaching of mathematical methods in economics to mathematics departments. Any mathematical training in economics, if it occurs at all, should come after students have at the very least completed course work in basic calculus, algebra and differential equations (the last being one about which most economists are woefully ignorant). This simultaneously explains why neoclassical economists obsess too much about proofs and why non-neoclassical economists, like those in the Circuit School, experience such difficulties in translating excellent verbal ideas about credit creation into coherent dynamic models of a monetary production economy.
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Steve Keen (Adbusters #84 Pop Nihilism)
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He could remember in basic training that the imperceptible click of the light switch being turned on was enough to jolt the entire platoon to life before the DIs could start yelling, although they still did. It was as if the recruits could sense the vibrations of excited electrons preparing to move at the closing of the circuit, yearning to burst into glorious light.
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D.W. Bell (The Revelator)
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Circuits can be found everywhere in your sparring sessions: positions, submissions, guards, sweeps - they are everywhere. Watch your opponents and training partners for patterns and then check yourself out. It's a base human condition.
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Oliver Staark (Zen Jiu Jitsu - Kindle Publishing Package: 30 Day Protocol + White to Blue + BJJ Over 40)
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Hollywood Hotel was the first major network show to broadcast from the West Coast. The film capital was rich in nationally known talent untapped by radio. It had remained untapped because of a telephone company policy that cost the networks up to $1,000 to reverse radio circuits: everything then was geared to broadcast from east to west, and it was sometimes said that a producer could bring a film star east for a five-day train trip for less money than it cost him to air a radio show from California. In 1934 the radio centers were Chicago and New York. This all changed with Hollywood Hotel. Hostess Louella Parsons immediately offset the technical tariff by persuading the elite of the film world to appear on the show without pay. Parsons was then the most feared and powerful newspaper columnist in Hollywood: her column, which appeared across the nation in Hearst newspapers, was widely seen as a maker or breaker of films and careers. She lined up stars who otherwise might be paid $1,000 for a single radio appearance, and scheduled as many as half a dozen each
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
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This circuit will be the same every day, except that each day the focus will roll on to a different one of the five exercises. Designated as (RF) in the plan that follows, this focus exercise will be given extra attention and will be the exercise you really want to put your energy into that day. Every workout will give you a chance to practice the first four exercises. Use these practice sets to improve and ingrain your form and technique. You should be mostly concerned with doing these exercises correctly so as to build the muscle memory and pathways required for long term health in the associated movement patterns. Then, you will train a single exercise each day. This is your chance to sufficiently work each exercise and movement pattern weekly, allowing your body to adapt and improve in order to progress. This rolling focus is what transforms a single daily circuit into a true full-body workout program that can provide results day after day, month after month, and year after year.
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Clinton Dobbins (The Simple Six: The Easy Way to Get in Shape and Stay in Shape for the Rest of your Life)