What Makes People Tick?

 Traditionally, we think of ourselves as having five senses. Sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste. However, what about other senses? What about that elusive 'sixth sense' or other senses that we don't usually count? Apart from being a well-known movie, the sixth sense is sometimes named as proprioception, sometimes as sharper intuition and sometimes simply as a way of getting more in touch with your other regular senses. If you're not entirely keen on seeing dead people but would like to figure out more about the ways in which you experience the world, then this article is for you. How many senses do we have, really? And exactly what is our sixth sense? Have you ever considered balance as a sense? How about the before-mentioned proprioception, or the ability to know where your body is. Think about walking in between two parked cars and knowing you won't hit either. What about sensing things like pain, wetness, heat, air temperature? While perhaps pain or feeling i...

 Want a good reason to stress less and take more me-days every now and then? How about this one? A 22 June 2021 article on Neurosciencenews.com with the rather self-explanatory title " It’s True: Stress Does Turn Hair Gray (and It’s Reversible) " claims exactly what it says it does. The article explains that while previous studies using mice indicated the opposite, it's now been proven that it is possible to actually reverse the signs of ageing in hair. Now, what's important to remember is that hair that's already outside of your head won't magically change colour. However hair that will come out in the future can most certainly go back to your natural colour.   The Neurosciencenews article writes about a research study by Ayelet Rosenberg and co entitled " Quantitative mapping of human hair greying and reversal in relation to life stress " published on eLife, also on June 22nd. If you're interested in the full text of the study with proper expla...

In the fifties, when experiments of the kind no longer permissible today were still allowed, Curt Richter, a professor at Johns Hopkins university, did a famous psychology experiment using rats. As the World of Work Projec t website explains: " Curt’s experiments focused on how long it takes rats to die from drowning. He conducted his experiments by placing rats into buckets filled with water and seeing how long they survived. He introduced a range of variables into the experiment, that yielded some interested results. " Some of those different variables were to examine why domesticated rats swam and swam and swam, while wild rats gave up swimming and died, often within only a few minutes.  What makes the experiment noteworthy to me and why I'm writing about it is that, as Heartbeat Services' article Hope Floats explains: "I n a follow-up experiment, as the rats started to give up and sink, he pulled the drowning rodents to safety, dried them off, gave them a br...

 A long, long time ago when I was young and rather innocent, I thought I had my whole life ahead of me. Now, aged somewhere in my late-ish thirties I'm a lot less young and innocent, however starting up this blog again helped me realise something: I do still have my whole life ahead of me. Sure, about a third of that life is in the past by now. But all the rest of it, everything that's still to come, everything I can still do and see, think and share, write and learn, teach and accomplish... All of that is right here, just waiting for me to get there. Waiting for me to accomplish it and do it. I've heard people in their twenties refer to turning thirty as 'THE BIG THREE-OH,' as if turning thirty was something akin to 'this is the beginning of the end'. I can't speak for men, however as a woman I do identify somewhat with this feeling. While Western society has changed from when I was young, I still grew up believing that the best and most ideal & ama...

Recently, I wrote about how I realised that I needed some more happy moments, time in nature and quite simply, time to relax and just be. While I referenced and quoted several articles, there's a lot more information worth sharing and quoting.  For those actually following my posts as I write them (hmmm... maybe one day...), I can confirm that YES, I did it. I spent time in nature. And YES! - It was amazing. It was exactly what I needed. It's almost midsummer here in the northern hemisphere and the days are long. In winter, I sometimes feel lucky to catch even a ray of sunshine as like most people, I'm indoors working during the daytime and barely get (or make) time to go outside. Even then, the skies are grey and the days without snow, rain or hail are often dreary still. Yet now, this close to midsummer, it's light until about 10 pm and heading out into nature after work is actually possible. I'm no therapist or psychologist but honestly, I do very much recommend ...

Today, I'd like to write a bit about something that I've been dealing with for some time now. To say that I'm stressed is a little too simple. To say that I'm depressed isn't quite right either. Rather, I'm tired. Tired of restrictions. Tired of face masks. Tired of spraying disinfectant on my hands whenever I arrive anywhere. Tired of keeping my distance from other people. Tired of not being able to hug my friends when I see them. Tired of being cooped up inside. Tired of working from home. Tired of living my social life through a computer screen. And really, really ready to go back to normal life. Now, before you tune out, this isn't about covid/corona/whatever you want to call it. This is about me. And about how having a few days off from work last week finally made me realise that things need to change before I end up worse off than just tired... It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle somethin...

One of the reasons for not blogging for quite some time is, simply put, that real life intervened. I changed jobs, my long-term relationship ended, I started studying again... All of this, as well as me questioning whether blogging was still what I wanted to do with my time, led to not posting. Not posting for a month leads to not posting for a year, leads to not posting for almost three years. Which brings us to the here and now.  While I still have no interest in making this a personal blog, I do hope to get back to blogging about things that interest me. Things like psychology and anthropology, religion and spirituality, coaching and counseling, education and conservation, global warming and world peace. I'd also like to write about things that are perhaps a little less mainstream yet that very much interest me. Things like the possibility of alien life, parapsychology, meditation, telepathy, mindfulness, reincarnation, yoga and such. Simply put, I've been a little afraid to...

 It's been a while. A long while. Almost three years since my last post, in fact. While I've played around with the idea of reviving this blog (so to speak) over the past few years, as is clear by my long absence - I haven't done that. So, here's a new post. One that promises a return. I've been doing a lot of reading, however what I've found is that I miss writing. I miss researching. I miss sharing my findings and my thoughts on this blog. No, I won't promise you a post a day. However I do promise that I'll be posting more often than just once every three years. Stay tuned!