Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

New Zealand has a new government in place, one with, I hope, quite a different philosophy of social change to the previous one. I don’t think my health blog is necessarily the place to talk politics, but I do want to talk about different approaches to changing behaviour, sparked off by a blog post on [...]

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It’s an old joke. A man hurrying along a New York street asks a passing musician, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”
The musician replies, “Practice, man. Practice.”
photo credit: t_a_i_s
But Carnegie Hall isn’t the only destination that can be reached by practice. Regular practice can take us in the direction of our dreams.
I say [...]

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SharpBrains have an interesting interview with neuroscientist Michael Posner, in which he talks about attention and how a new neuroimaging technique called diffusion tensor is helping to reveal the brain’s networks.
Posner’s research suggests that what we call “attention” has three elements:

Alerting – you might think of this as “coming to attention”.
Orienting – direction attention to [...]

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