Skeptics Bet

Tim Minchin sets the skeptic's bet to music in this short and entertaining YouTube video:

Maintaining the Temple

Keeping body, mind and spirit tips from http://mindapples.org/:

First, the short list:

Thanks to Simeon Brody of communitycare.co.uk for sharing his five-a-day:

For what it’s worth, here are my five a day

- Have a project or try to learn something new
- Regular exercise
- Don’t take things too seriously
- Try to let worries go
- Try to be sociable

Not that I do them every day of course, but I try.

We’re all trying Simeon - good luck with them! And nice to see sociability on the list, I couldn’t agree more.

Posted by Andy Gibson

Dr Liz Miller writes wonderfully about self-management of mental wellbeing, and also practises what she preaches to manage her own mental health. You can read more about her in this great interview with her in the Guardian. A quote: “In medicine we live on this myth that illness is for other people.”

Liz's top ten tips for managing your health. Enjoy!

1. Eat healthy food
Start the day with a fresh fruit smoothie. Even easier, a glass of tap water, rehydrates ready for the new day. Eating a healthy diet is about eating natural food. If it was not around 10,000 years ago, then it is probably not good for you and you should not eat it. The best food is organic from your own garden or local farmer. You can have a box of organic goodies delivered to your door. A natural diet and daily exercise keeps the blood sugar steady and that helps keep your energy up, and helps concentration.

2. Avoid junk food
Treat your stomach with respect. Always read the label. Factories turn food into junk. The purpose of a biscuit is to sell another biscuit. Did you ever see a Kit Kat tree? A packet of crisps can be stored for 2 or even three years, and the crisps are still crunchy, there is nothing alive in that bag. “You are what you eat” and do you want to end as a MacDonald and fries or a Pizza express? A modern milking cow produces up 20 litres of milk a day, ten times as much as a natural cow. Modern milking cows produce high concentrations of hormones, most of which go into the milk. Dairy products do more for supermarkets selling yoghurt and semi-skimmed milk than for anyone else in the food chain. The stomach is one of the most complex and interesting organs in the body. It even has its own nervous system or mini brain. It sorts out, digests and absorbs the complete range of diets the different people eat from across the world eat. On the other hand, putting something like Coca-Cola into this delicate and refined organ is like pouring battery acid into your PC. It is hardly surprising people get indigestion.

3. Omega-3 Supplements
The easiest and quickest way to improve your health is through Omega –3 supplements. Omega 3 essential fatty acids help a wide range of medical conditions from heart disease, mental health to better joints. Shop on-line at www.mindfirst.co.uk. or at any health food store, on-line or in the High Street. It takes a couple months for their full benefit to be clear. Choose one without vitamin A or vitamin D. If you are a vegetarian and do not want to take fish oils, then Udo’s Oil, Hemp Seed Oil, or VegEPA are fish free alternatives. The next step is a multimineral, multivitamin supplement and if you can choose natural vitamins in preference to synthetic ones. Once upon a time, a balanced diet gave you the minerals and vitamins you needed but fifty years ago, fruit and vegetables contain five times the vitamins and minerals as they do today. Over-intensive farming, long periods of storage in warehouses, refrigeration, picking unripe fruit and vegetables mean food quality is getting worse.

4. Exercise daily:
Exercise needs to be daily, varied and fun; like dancing, football, running, walking the dog, taking the stairs rather than the lift and running up the down escalator. The gym is fine, but variety is the spice of life and the key to being fit. There are three types of exercise:

1. Those that concentrate on posture such as Yoga, Pilates, Alexander technique, postural alignment and martial arts training. These exercises concentrate on balance, so a person gets their ears above their shoulders, above their hips, above their knees, above their ankles.
2. Those that concentrate on building strength for short bursts of exercise, such as weightlifting, shot putt and gym machines. These exercises build muscle. Core strength is more important than bulging pecs. Regardless of how you look on the beach, if you have strong arms, strong legs and a weak back, you will develop back trouble. Rather than developing specific muscles, all round strength is important.
3. Exercises for stamina, such as running, swimming, football, dancing, skipping, cycling and fast walking.

Try a different exercise, each day of the week

5. Get outside and feel the rays
Sunshine is an instant pickmeup. Just half an hour in the midday sun, especially in winter makes a big difference to theday. Sunshine makes us feel better; so just getting out of the office for a quick wander, even in the rain there is more light outside than there is inside. If you find the winter depressing, think about buying a light box, or a light visor from www.outsidein.co.uk Put it on full blast while you clean your teeth and make your breakfast to stop the winter blues.

6. Avoid alcohol and other poisons
Alcohol reaches those parts that other poisons don’t. It damages the brain, the liver, and the pancreas. Few organs escape its effects. Nothing reduces a person’s energy, damages their lungs, narrows their blood-vessels, gives people wrinkles and increases their risk of cancer quicker than cigarettes. In the right environment, the body can recover from almost anything. Drinking and smoking stop the body healing.

7. Breath from your belly
Most people pant! They take far too many short breaths using only the top part of their lungs. Longer deeper breaths increase the oxygen in the blood without over breathing. Real breathing comes from the belly and it has become counterintuitive. When you breathe in, the belly comes out as the diaphragm pushes down to allow the bottom of the lungs to fill. As you breathe out, the belly comes back in and pushes the air out, like a piston moving up and down. Belly breathing needs the shoulders to be relaxed down and back. Babies and small children naturally breathe from their belly. The first time you start to control your breathing it may feel as though you are going to suffocate, no one has yet. Practise breathing from your belly for a few minutes everyday and gradually it will become more of a habit as you develop a more natural way of living. Being able to control your breathing, is the fastest way to control your state of mind. It is impossible to panic if you breathe gently and quietly!

8. Rest and relax
There are many ways to relax and calm the mind, from meditation through breathing, repeating a mantra, or just becoming more aware of what is happening from moment to moment. Other people relax by reading, sewing or through a hobby. Nonetheless everyone needs time just to chill out, rest and recover and let go the worries of the day.

9. Exercise your mind
In some ways this is the opposite of the last tip. Just as the mind needs to relax, so it also needs to work. The most effective way to work is to focus or concentrate on one task at a time. It can take twenty minutes to recover from an interruption. Modern life is full of diversions, e-mail, texts, mobile phones and it is easy to be continually distracted and do nothing all day. Multitasking sounds great but it is not efficient. People work better if they concentrate on one task at a time. The natural rhythm of concentration lasts between forty and fifty minutes. After that time, take a few minutes to recover, with some belly breathing, stilling the mind, and having a drink of water, before starting the next cycle. Focus takes time to develop. Just as it takes time to get the body fit, it takes time to train the mind to focus on one task only. Start by setting a timer, to help you stay concentrated for a few minutes. As you get mentally fitter, your concentration span gets longer, until you can manage to concentrate intensely for up to forty or fifty minutes at a time. A healthy mind is a fit mind. It is a mind that does what you want it to, rather one that is at the mercy of every passing whim and impulse.

10. Learn all you can about health
Although there is more and more health information available, much of it seems contradictory. One person says do this and another person says do that. Nonetheless, every health article usually has one or two good points worth remembering. But there always has to be a balance, for example, exercise is important but not if you have the flu. Activity has to be balanced with rest, concentration with relaxation and living a healthy life with the demands of earning a living. Some people recommend a low-fat diet, others a low sugar diet. You alone are the best person to find out what suits you and helps you feel healthy and energised.

By being interested in health, you learn more about yourself and this will encourage you to live a happier and healthier life.

Read more about Dr Liz Miller, and drop her a line (like I did), at www.drlizmiller.co.uk

Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death

"Why so many of us think our minds continue on after we die"

This October 2008 Scientific American article begins with lyrics from Iris Dement:

Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.
Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.

Willing to settle for less than immortal words, author Jesse Bering reviews pertinent psychological studies exploring boundries of human evolution. He concludes:

"The types of cognitive obstacles discussed earlier may be responsible for our innate sense of immortality. But although the simulation-constraint hypothesis helps to explain why so many people believe in something as fantastically illogical as an afterlife, it doesn’t tell us why people see the soul unbuckling itself from the body and floating off like an invisible helium balloon into the realm of eternity. After all, there’s nothing to stop us from having afterlife beliefs that involve the still active mind being entombed in the skull and deliriously happy. Yet almost nobody has such a belief.

"Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people didn’t cease to exist simply because you couldn’t see them. Developmental psychologists even have a fancy term for this basic concept: “person permanence.” Such an off-line social awareness leads us to tacitly assume that the people we know are somewhere doing something. As I’m writing this article in Belfast, for example, my mind’s eye conjures up my friend Ginger in New Orleans walking her poodle or playfully bickering with her husband, things that I know she does routinely.

"As I’ve argued in my 2006 Behavioral and Brain Sciences article, “The Folk Psychology of Souls,” human cognition is not equipped to update the list of players in our complex social rosters by accommodating a particular person’s sudden inexistence. We can’t simply switch off our person-permanence thinking just because someone has died. This inability is especially the case, of course, for those whom we were closest to and whom we frequently imagined to be actively engaging in various activities when out of sight.

"And so person permanence may be the final cognitive hurdle that gets in the way of our effectively realizing the dead as they truly are—infinitely in situ, inanimate carbon residue. Instead it’s much more “natural” to imagine them as existing in some vague, unobservable locale, very much living their dead lives."

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=never-say-die