Is There Really A Mozart Effect?

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Some scientists claim there isn’t; tests show no effect. Well, that doesn’t prove something doesn’t exist. It might only prove you designed a crappy experiment.

Plenty of robust studies show there is indeed an effect and it’s a very good one.

The “Mozart Effect”, if you don’t know, is the supposition that playing nice music, with the right frequencies buried in it, is very stimulating to a child’s brain and can enhance growth and learning. Seems almost common sense, doesn’t it. Not to some people!

I’m looking at a copy of the book by Don Campbell. Per the usual American hubris (conceit), he states that all this was given impetus and cred by researches of Frances H Rauscher PhD, at Center for Neurobiology of Learning in Irvine, California.

These Americans are often decades behind the rest of us and believe they invented everything. Or if they didn’t, then it’s not worth knowing anyway.

The truth is all this was discovered starting in the 1950s in France, with the work of Alfred Tomatis MD. He’s been called the Einstein of Sound and the Sherlock Holmes of sonic detection. Tomatis was the developer of the “electronic ear” concept.

His biggest discovery was not the Mozart Effect but a physiological curiosity, which is that the voice does not contain frequencies which the ear cannot hear. If the ear does not pick up the sound, that sound will be missing from the quality of the voice. Continue reading →

A Successful Success Formula

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The key to healing in any context is the ability to make changes. If you can’t change the way things are, you’re stuck with something you don’t want. To heal disease, heal finances, heal work, relationships, whatever you are struggling with in life, you need to change.

Yet change is one of the most feared and resisted aspects of living—ask any coach or psychologist. Even when a person says they consciously want change, often the resistance it at a deeper level.

I’ve put together a few thoughts on change which I hope will be enlightening and helpful.

Working to a success formula

It is possible to structure the need for change in one’s life into a sequence of events that might be called a “Successful Change Formula”.

Aristotle had one; he said that there are three basic steps that you must take to get what you want out of life:

1. Understand that you can achieve success

2. Define what success represents, for you

3. Organise your life around its achievement by making the necessary changes

Don’t under-estimate the value of these simple steps because here you have the ultimate success formula. It is the secret that everyone who has ever been successful, in any field of endeavour, has used.

Properly adhered to, this will ensure far more efficacious actions than most people usually engage in.

However, I’d like to suggest something a little broader and more modern. Success is seen in terms of decisive change. Obviously, if you haven’t got what you really want, you need to change something. But what? It is vital to recognize accurately what it is that holds you back. Then remedy it. Dealing with the wrong problem will lead to failure. So this is pretty important stuff.

The formula given here will help you. All success and improvement can be mapped in these terms, whether the individual has consciously applied them or not. Obviously, knowing and willing application of its steps will bring a far higher success rate than mere unknowing and random encounters with one or two of the steps. Continue reading →

Was Cyril Burt Correct After All?

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Sir Cyril Lodowic Burt (3 March 1883 – 10 October 1971) was an English educational psychologist who made contributions to educational psychology and statistics.

Burt is known for his studies on the heritability of IQ and his theories that the “best people” gave rise to the “best” children (cleverest). He created a storm

Remember this was in the days of sniveling socialism, when everybody HAD to equal everybody else and it was not PC to even suggest people from poorer families might not actually be that smart.

In 1942, Burt was elected President of the British Psychological Society and in 1946 became the first British psychologist to be knighted for his contributions to psychological testing and, ironically, for making educational opportunities more widely available, despite his critics.

Shortly after he died, his studies of inheritance and intelligence came into disrepute after evidence supposedly emerged indicating he had falsified research data. Some scholars have asserted that Burt did not commit intentional fraud.

More importantly, modern science is starting to back what he said. There was no fraud by Burt; only his critics lied and deliberately tarnished his reputation.

New research indicates that Burt was in fact correct. Up to half of human intelligence can be explained by genetics. There isn’t some big “smart gene” but it relies on the expression of quite a number of genes.

We needn’t go into the biology here. The point is that the smart set really are likely to have smart kids and this truth matters more than socialist agendas.

The researchers found that approximately half of individual differences in intelligence can be explained by genetics and across a great variety of genes. In fact, as the lead researcher explained, this is likely to be an UNDER-estimate, since they could only detect variation that is correlated with common DNA markers.

[SOURCE: Aug. 12, 2011, Molecular Psychiatry]

What Good Is Prayer, Really?

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What good is prayer? Does it have place in our lives today? What do we really mean by prayer? These are interesting questions.

Of course prayer is not the province solely of Christians, though I suspect that that’s they way many of them see it. But Muslims pray, just as devoutly. Many other religions have either prayers or the equivalent of prayer.

In fact prayer or its recognizable equivalent has a cherished place in all societies on the globe and at almost all times in history. Prayer was around long before the Church.

It is a universal human yearning to reach out and be listened to by forces which are bigger, wiser, more knowing and guiding our lives. This is especially true at times of great duress. But is by no means confined to these events.

Only modern sophisticated man has talked himself out this time-honoured method of summoning up the deep moving forces of life when they are needed most.

The Essence of Prayer

Taken on the world stage, prayer-equivalent has always enjoyed huge respect and popularity. The minor drop off of prayer in the West caused by the Church’s troubles holding its flock together has little relevance to the vast majority of persons who make up the human race. Prayer is with us, alive and well. Always was and (probably) always will be.

Part of the purpose of this website is to seek new meanings for prayer; to find out what the real essence of prayer is; and isolate it from the distractions and trimmings of religious cant and hypocrisy. I believe if we can succeed in doing this, then prayer will have a renewed vigour and appeal.

This does not mean that religion is unimportant. It does mean that prayer is, and should be, independent of any particular credo or formalized structure, such as churches and temples.

Prayer fulfils a certain requirement and it is hard to see how it could be replaced, speaking as a doctor and psychologist. Continue reading →

Rumi Eyegazing Part 1

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Guru, him say: Any two lovers know the power of gazing into each others’ eyes. It carries one deeply inside and creates a harmonious whole which is bigger than either of the pair; a oneness identification; a union. It can be erotically thrilling at times but more typically it goes beyond body thrill into the realms of delight and surrender.

 

In Transformational PsychologyTM, we use “eye gazing” to enhance perceptions and connectivity with others. It is absolutely vital (and little practiced in most psychotherapies, I observe) that you process the person in front of you, not some imagined trial case. You can’t do that without actually looking at the person in front of you.

So often the practitioner is trying to force the client to fit their preconceived notions, he or she fails to observe the individual in front of them. Often the practitioner has only a narrow range of skills and wants the client to align with these—or has some crank pet theory—so he or she pretends the case fits into these prejudices and misses the real signals from the client. How else could mischief like false memory syndrome get started?

But there is much more to eye gazing than just learning the skill of quiet contemplative listening; it can lead us to see the soul of another and, as if by magic, our own soul too. In fact eye gazing can take us to extraordinary mind spaces and I highly commend it as an exercise, leading to better communication skills and deeper insights.

History Of Eye Gazing?

It’s a practice which has a long and honorable tradition. Will Rogers in his book The Spiritual Practices of Rumi (originally titled Rumi: Gazing At The Beloved) gives us a few examples:

Darshan is a Hindu concept. It comes from a Sanskrit word meaning “Seeing and being seen by God”. Well, most traditions declare we are made in the image of God, so why not? If you look deep into another’s soul or Being, you should be able to see God there. And  by the way, what you see is just a reflection of yourself too…

It may have a formal setting, where the Master or Teacher sits in front of the class and encourages them to share darshan with him. He pours out his gaze; students return it and learn the mysteries of God. Ramana Maharshi, a great twentieth century teacher and one of the great givers of darshan, said “When the eyes of the student meet the gaze of the teacher, words of instruction are no longer necessary.”

It can be further said that something takes place between the two, which almost defies words. Love, in my experience, is a word that doesn’t really cover it. Or if it does, than normal measures of love are seriously lacking.

According to Johnson, the Cowichan Indian tribe of Vancouver Island have a concept of “disease of the eye”. This refers to the tendency to pass another human and averting one’s gaze as one does so. To them, it’s a kind of affront of God, to deny or try to sidestep another’s presence or Being.

Well, there’s a lot of eye disease on the streets of modern cities. Maybe that’s part of the problem of urban craziness?

Oscar Ichazo, the Chilean shaman, has developed a practice called traspasso, in which students sit across from each other and hold each other’s gaze. It means, roughly, giving up oneself.

The late Charlotte Joko Beck (1917-2011), modern US Zen teacher, author and founder of the Ordinary Mind Zen School, included eye gazing in the meditation routines she taught. For her it was a pathway to the intense here and now, no clutter, just being “here”.

The willingness to accept and hold another’s gaze, without being uncomfortable or confrontational, is something of a skill. It is, in a sense, a measure of our spiritual maturity.

Rumi’s True Love

Jalaluddin Rumi is one of the most read poets of our age and one of the most admired love poets of all time, along with Ovid, Sappho, John Dunne and, perhaps, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

It comes as a surprise to many of his devotees, that Rumi’s love poems were entirely directed towards a man called Shams of Tabriz. Continue reading →

Motivation, Purpose and Rewards

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What we think about motivation and rewards may be totally wrong!

I don’t know about you but I was brought up on the rewards and penalties thing: reward what’s good and punish what’s bad, you’ll propel it towards good stuff. O yeah! Well that turns out to be total hocus pocus. Another of what I call “Hoaxes” (“Everybody knows that…” sort of thing).

To find out the truth, revealed by repeated scientific studies, not opinion, get a gander at this video.