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While sifting through the vast quality of articles, newsletters and reports in my Braintenance Inbox, I came across  an interesting "News Release" written and distributed by PsychTests that truly resonated with me. It's about why some of us survive and actually thrive under the trials of adversity, while others crumble and become embittered to the point of immobility. Please read on... Diagnosis: Attitude Problem – PsychTests’ Study Reveals How The Trait Of Resilience Affects Well-being   Research by PsychTests.com indicates that resilient people approach stress, challenge, and life in a way that boosts their well-being.   Montreal, Canada – November 3, 2015 – Attitude is everything. The Buddha wisely said that “The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry ...

Brainwave Entrainment For Mind Mastery By Douglas E. Castle for The Braintenance Blog And GEI Consulting External Audio And Visual Stimuli Can Change Brainwaves, Brain Chemistry And Your Thinking Brainwave entrainment is any practice that aims to cause brainwave frequencies to either mimic or to fall into step with a periodic stimulus having a frequency corresponding to the intended brain-state (for example, to induce sleep or to induce focus), usually attempted with the use of specialized light and sound effects. It depends upon a "frequency following" response based upon the assumption that the human brain has a tendency to change its dominant EEG frequency toward the frequency of a dominant external stimulus. Entrainment is not to be confused with subliminal programming where thought patterns are subconsciously or superconsciously receiving actual audio or visual messages to induce behavioral or mood changes. For Entrainment, stimulus may be audio, as in the case of bin...

Your Personal DiSC Assessment: Braintenance – Douglas E. Castle How will you work in a team setting? What probable role would you gravitate toward? Will you play well with others? DiSC is a personal assessment tool used to improve work productivity, teamwork and communication. DiSC is non-judgmental and helps people discuss their behavioral differences. If you participate in a DiSC program, you'll be asked to complete a series of questions that produce a detailed report about your personality and behavior. What does DiSC stand for? Dominance Person places emphasis on accomplishing results, the bottom line, confidence Influence Person places emphasis on influencing or persuading others, openness, relationships Steadiness Person places emphasis on cooperation, sincerity, dependability Conscientiousness Person places emphasis on quality and accuracy, expertise, competency Each of us can be placed (after having been tested) into one of the above categories. You'll get to test yours...

One of the keys to eliminating anxiety, depression and distraction is the meditative exercise of living in the moment. Doing this requires that you focus intently on all of the myriad sensations which you are experiencing in a single moment of conscious living. This is a challenge for most individuals, who are more accustomed to ruminating over the past or anticipating the future. Even the most intelligent persons (and certainly all followers and dedicated practitioners of Braintenance ) are preoccupied with thoughts which are "out of sync" with the living, full-sensory experience of the present moment. While the meditative exercise of present-moment living will not, per se , increase your mental magnitude and specific sets of thinking and problem-solving brain skills, it will indirectly benefit your thought processing mechanisms by allowing your overly-conscious mind to take a brief vacation from excessive cerebration. The mind, as any other muscle, needs its rest. Try to t...

 ? In Braintenance, confusion is the magic which creates new neurological pathways, greater plasticity, and enhanced creative skills. The brain and mind are strengthened in the same fashion as the bodybuilder builds and defines new muscle -- by changing the workout regimen to "shock" the body into over-compensation. The mental exercises which follow are gearing toward forcing you to think (and problem-solve) in a different manner than you usually do by changing the entire problem-solving scenario. Want to strengthen your mind? of course you do. Simply find the missing numbers or letters in each of the following sequences. You'll notice that you are not trying to find the next number or letter in each sequence (as you are accustomed to doing) -- you are being asked to think interpolatively instead of extrapolatively: 1)   A C _ D C E D _ E G 2)   _ 4 9 _ 25 _ 49 3)   2 4 _ _ 10 _ 14 4)   P_S_ENG_RS  O_  A  T_AIN 5)   _...

Six Degrees Of Separation: Getting Connected By Douglas E. Castle For The Braintenance Blog There is a theoretical maximum of only six persons (connections, similar to links in a chain) between you and anyone whom you'd like to meet in the entire world. Some quick background information follows: Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called "Chains." In the 1950's, Ithiel de Sola Pool (MIT) and Manfred Kochen (IBM) set out to prove the theory mathematically. Although they were able to phrase the question (given a set N of people, what is the probability that each member of N is connected to another member via k_1, k_2, k_3...k_n links?), after twenty years they were still unable to solve the problem to their o...

Thinking about abstractions and examining cause-and-effect relationships are an integral part of intelligence strengthening. The more you utilize your introspective imagination, the greater your ability to conceptualize and to be creative. The mere notion of thinking about the nature of your mind, and of consciousness itself is a wonderful Braintenance exercise.  Give these questions some thought. Some of them require that you think about thinking -- a kind of recursive, "fractal logic": Have you ever wondered about the nature of your mind? Is the mind separate from the brain or is the thinking, working mind merely a manifestation of the biological brain's self realization? Do we imagine the existence of our minds? Does the mind animate the brain? Or does the brain animate (or generate) the mind? Are the brain and the mind somehow symbionts? Can one exist without the other? If the brain dies, does the mind die automatically? Can consciousness, as we understand it, exist i...

Analogies Are Mind Expanders If you'd like to truly sharpen your ability to think associatively and to open up some exciting neural pathways in the bargain, doing exercises involving analogies may be just the think to add to your Braintenance regimen. These exercises even improve you pattern recognition, total cognition and creative thinking. If you'd like to think outside of the box (and keep your mind fresh in the process), analogies are wonderful tools. An analogy ( dog is to puppy as cat is to kitten , or, as it commonly appears on standardized tests, especially in higher grades: dog : puppy :: cat : kitten ) is a comparison between two things that are usually thought to be different from each other, but have some similarities. They help us understand things by making connections and seeing relationships between them based on knowledge we already possess. Analogies are a ubiquitous staple of standardized tests. This type of comparison plays a significant role not only in im...