March 2016

Imagine yourself in a new town. You have time to spare so you hire a tour guide. You meet at 9 am and he offers you an itinerary – the local museum, the waterfalls, the historic bridges, the castle etc. You turn up at 9 am all ready for the day. All goes according to plan – for the first three minutes. You follow his words and gaze around the charming little museum and then he’s off… First he talks about where the word museum comes from then what museums would be like if they were all under water, then… Read More »Tour Guide

One of the most challenging aspects of life as a human is dealing with our brains. The history of our species is written into this ugly jelly sloshing around in our heads and there’s not much we can do about it. At the root of us is the reptilian brain, that core set of responses we share with reptiles and which still takes up space inside us – and it’s a good thing too. We might live in the twenty-first century but we still need to be aware of any dangers in our environment. The mammalian brain is still there… Read More »Stop Fighting: You’ll lose!

It’s a common experience – that eerie feeling that you cant quite see the way ahead. As the Talking Heads song has it ‘Well – how did I get here?” But what you probably do when this happens is bury the feeling and just keep on keeping on. Here’s an exercise that you might try to open up your sense of the here and now and potentially re-orient yourself. It’s very hi-tech – you’ll need a pencil and paper. Step One – Who drew your map? We’ve all heard the cliché that life’s a journey but its worth taking a… Read More »Lost?

Are you paying attention? Really? Are you? Or is your mind elsewhere already? Have you jumped a couple of lines to see how this ends? Is 300 words too long to wait? If it is and you are then settle down (or at least try to!) what you’re doing is utterly typical and completely in fashion Have you noticed that so much of your life is postponed, distracted, ill-focused? You walk down the street listening to music that reminds you of your past while emailing a friend about something that may or may not happen in the future. In the… Read More »Monkey Brains

(Or as Homer once mis-pronounced it – ‘What’s a gyyymm?’) It’s common enough nowadays to talk about the body as a machine. Ever since the early physicians began to examine cadavers they seized on mechanical explanations for how we operate. Yes indeed – the thigh bone’s connected to the knee bone. Such mechanical explanations are very useful. Anyone visiting a doctor who dismissed such connections is best advised to move rapidly in the opposite direction. Gyms are themselves giant machines in which we run and pull on machines to gain rewards from machines – they’ll even reward you with a… Read More »Men and the Gym