TV makes you "Brain-Dead" Part 02

How to Tell if You’re Smart In a Very Short Time

There are many times when, while you might be tempted to lounge on the couch and vege-out brainlessly in front of your television set.

But maybe “working out” your mind with NLP based techniques can be something much more useful and actually just what you need.

But of course I am biased.

Tired? Yeah! Don’t feel like doing anything? It happens more often than not at the end of a long day at work. But there is something you can do to actually decrease your tiredness, find solutions so you don’t end up “on fumes”.

There is almost a clichÃ© amongst people that your brain cells age and do not replenish. So you are now one year older and forget something – what can you do? And quickly you find the reason: You’re older,right?

Nothing you can do.

Wrong!

New evidence shows clearly that the opposite is true. Dr. Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus at the University of California stated in an interview with Dr. Mercola that:

“Your brain continues to make new neurons throughout life in response to mental activity”.

I hope you caught the words “in response to mental activity“. I suggested in previous articles on this website that one may be looking at the potential development of mind abilities in new ways as a result of studying NLP and releasing negative emotions with Time Line Therapy®. New understandings and abilities to reason differently are not appearing by magic. They are formed as a result of new neurological connections created when your mind is put to work. But at the same time it does not have to be difficult.

What Happens Is,

As pleasant as it may seem to be, watching television has been increasingly demonstrated to have destructive effects on your brain and your mind’s ability to reason correctly. By the way, video games fall in the same category, this when they are inappropriate games; however, there are still video games that are beneficial, most of the time these type of video games can also be upgraded with sites like http://www.p4rgaming.com/5-reasons-avoid-cheap-elo-boosting-services/.

We have spoken about this on a previous Conversation posted under Video section in ourMembership area, and also in a previous articlebut it seems that not many people are really aware of what’s happening to them while they’re “hooked” to the TV. There are real dangers TV posesespecially to the young minds growing up in society today, but it affects adults equally. Think of the artificially created reality-shows. They are not real!! They are scripted and directed for the most effect on the viewers.

These shows were never supposed to be real, they are entertainment and yet so many people get personally involved in the drama as if it is real. Moreover, they get confused between life and TV, to the point to which they emulate what they see, so much that the TV has more reality than life itself. As it stands now, it seems most people are in dire need of redirecting their attention to healthierhobbies and recreation activities.

From the same article we quoted in our video Conversation

“Research has shown that watching TV has a major impact on your brain chemistry. The longer you watch the TV screen, the easier your brain slips into a receptive, passive mode, meaning that messages are streamed into your brain without any participation from you.”

Here is a quote from an article on Dr. Mercola’s website:

“As reported in The Daily Mail, Time Healthland and MSNBC, a new study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine shows that every hour of TV watched by people age 25 or over equates to a 22-minute reduction in life expectancy.”

Did you catch that? Every hour equals 22 min reduction in life expectancy! Does it bother you?

Here is another article worth reading:

“New Reality TV Show Shows People Will Kill Others When Told To”

WHAT?

Does this disturb you? Because it greatly disturbs me!

Are you paying attention?

So instead of letting your brain go to sleep while you’re actually not sleeping is not necessarily a good thing as comfortable is it may seem.

There’s Good News, And Bad News Here

Use It or Lose It

“The basic concept is simple. The brain changes physically, functionally, and chemically, as you acquire any ability or skill. You know this instinctively. Something must be changing as your abilities improve, or as new abilities emerge. You are actually remodeling your brain machinery by ‘practicing’ the skill; those physical changes account for your learning.

Actually what the brain is doing is changing its local wiring, changing the details of how the machinery controlling your behavior is connected. It’s also changing itself in other physical, chemical, and functional ways. Collectively, those changes account for the improvement or acquisition of any human ability.

Dr. Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus at the

University of California. See the full article here.

But Aren’t Watching TVor Playing Computer Games Engaging Your Mind?

Hardly!

It seems thatnot every new activity contributed to new development of cells and neurological connections in the brain.

And you’re not going to like what I am about to say, but it seems that quality and the level of challenge that thenewtask presents to you as well as the seriousness of the task make all the difference. I know, I know! I said the word “serious-ness”. And nobody wants to do serious stuff when relaxing right.

Think again.

Serious does not mean hard or difficult.

But not for nothing do these studies come to tell us what is going on even if youmay think: well, I have watched a lot of TV and I turned out all right. Yeah! That’s exactly what I said about my own experience with watching TV (and I used to love it folks!). But then one little question arose in my mind: how do I know that I turned out all right? I am me. I cannot say how different and maybe smarter I could have been if I avoided my mind being programmed with all that junk,

At least I woke up one day out of my addiction to television and turned off the tube. Nowadays maybe we watch 2 hours of TV every month, and only selected programs that teach us something new.

Then the only problem was that I had to go through an interesting period of time when I did not know what to do with my free time.

What would you do if there were no TV?

Good question!

You can stimulate your mind for the purpose of making it smarter, younger, more intelligent and faster in resolving life’s challenges.

Now, admittedly none of the above may interest or motivate you.

But what my suggestion spells is that you may want to learn something new which is challenging, important, meaningful and surely interesting for you, something that you can be passionate about ” something that must hold your attention and focus.

Now if you consider that children are forced to memorize an astonishing amount of meaningless data in school, and that this useless exercise will not do them any real good and to top that off we slow down or even stifle their brain and mind development with the television programming and meaningless computer games, we are facing a serious situation where we literally dumb down generations of possibly capable young people.

If you’re trying to memorize trivial facts (or the telephone book) or even if you perform difficult work but it is not a challenging task, you will not have the same effects and your brain will not develop new neurons and new neurological connections. It works in the same way for young people.

The funny part is that we got this feedback many times after a two week Master Practitioner training for example. But we did not know what to do with the feedback. We though people were simply polite when they said “I feel smarter”. According to these articles and research maybe they did not just feel smarter, maybe the two weeks of interesting and challenging new learnings really made them smarter, since it prompted the brain to work in new ways, to think differently, and to develop new neurological connections.

Then what to do?

I told you from the very beginning that I am biased. Learn NLP. There is no better way of learning what your mind is doing and control it.

Or learn something useful and new. Something that challenges you. Something you can be passionate about.

We’re really fortunate in our company because we have not stopped learning. You may think that NLP is a field which is complete and we already know everything there is to know. But I would like to propose that NLP is an open field, with many new discoveries and applications every week.

Very simply we feel it is challenging us every day in new ways in at least several ways: immediate memory improvement, long term memory improvement, attention span is lengthened and focus is sharpened. From my personal perspective, even if English is not my native language, my abilities in language and not only language but also linguistics have gone through the roof compared to where they were before.

So we’re really fortunate to work in this field and I will invite all of you to consider it as a possibility for the improvement of your mind-power capabilities.

Sources:

Daily Mail Online August 16, 2011
Time Healthland August 17, 2011
MSNBC.com March 5, 2010
Mercola.com