Grabbing our Attention

I've been wanting to write you about the marvelous science channel of The Guardian called the Newton Channel.

I'm trying to sit down and look and make notes on one of the videos every month. It is one of the many projects I am doing this year (and thus explains why I am sadly not blogging so much) to focus more on quality than quantity of information. Over the last five or six years, I have been addicted to information gathering.  That is why this video is appropriate in explaining this need. Here is the video description:

"You can have too much of a good thing … or not enough. The hormone dopamine is responsible for the cravings of addiction, but when levels are abnormally low it causes the muscular twitches of Parkinson's disease. Studying dopamine has also revealed a fascinating distinction between the brain mechanisms that underpin 'wanting' and 'liking' – a finding that has implications not only for our understanding of human nature, but also for the treatment of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia."

Please do watch the video. It is excellent food for thought.

If you wish to partake in a good study program, perhaps you should consider making up your own curriculum. The LifeHacker website collected information on all sorts of online self-study courses.

For example, Professor Benjamin Caballero offers a course on the Principles of Human Nutrition at the Johns Hopkins University.

One of the other projects I have been working on for about two years is learning visualization techniques.  The idea behind developing one's own visual language is to ease information assimilation, differentiation, and recall.  This sounds so very formal and serious a pursuit, but actually it is returning back to childhood, to a time when self-expression was not only limited to spoken and written words.