Somatic Mechanic

Observatory - Converting Body Movements Into Electricity - NYTimes.com

It may not seem like it, but even the laziest of couch potatoes is a human dynamo. The act of breathing — of moving the ribs to draw air into the lungs and expel it — can generate about a watt of power. And if the potato actually gets up off the couch and walks briskly across the room, each heel strike can produce even more power, about 70 watts’ worth.

via www.nytimes.com

This article shows us the solution for the article last week about sitting and its detrimental effects on health! In order to power up your computer or television, you have to provide the current by wearing an item of clothing (pants? a vest? a sweater?) embedded with the piezoelectric crystals described in this article. Then you have to MOVE your body to power up your devices.
Even better, wouldn't it be great if you could store the electricity for later use? For instance, you know Mad Men is on tonight, you know you want to watch it, so you have to be active enough during the day to (*gasp*) earn the 60-minutes of downtime later on... Cool ideas...

Mindfulness and mood

 Nice article from Livescience describing the mechanism of awareness and mood states.  As Eric Franklin, author of "Inner Focus Outer Strength" says, "without awareness you have no choice".  Instead you'll only get what you always got before.  This mindfulness is the basis of ideokinesis and of improvement of motor skills.  So if you want to be a better dancer, Pilates or Gyrotonic student, or tennis player, mindfulness and awareness is the key.  

Meditation exercises could boost mental toughness in soldiers readying for war, keeping them from becoming overly emotional, according to new research.  --from LiveScience.com

Sitting leads to health problems....

The NYTimes has a great article today that summarizes the health impact of sitting.  It's not pretty folks. 

It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.

 

The author repeats the oft-suggested recommendation to turn your desk into a treadmill+desk area.  The idea being:  run or walk on the treadmill while you do your desk work.  I am reminded of how it felt to go for a run while pushing my infant son in a stroller.  All I can say is:  DON'T DO IT.  It completely disrupts the normal biomechanics of running or jogging or frankly, even walking.  You can check this out by going out for a run and holding your arms out in front of you.  Very quickly you realize how much momentum is created by your arms swinging at your sides.  If you are running or walking on a treadmill and you can't swing your arms (because they are on the keyboard in front of you) you are losing the wind-up phase of every step.  Ick. 

However, it may be that the health benefits of walking on a treadmill while working is worth the biomechanical ick factor.  I just know that I couldn't do it.  Instead I fidget.  I bounce my leg up and down... I type a few words then spin in my chair,  I look out the window, etc.  I never knew that being a fidgeter would turn out to be in my favor!

Vital Signs - Study Ties TV Viewing Habits to Life Expectancy - NYTimes.com

The study followed 8,800 adults ages 25 and older for six and a half years and found that each daily hour of television viewing was associated with an 18 percent increase in deaths from heart disease and an 11 percent increase in overall mortality.

via www.nytimes.com

 

Our physiology is best adapted to activity, not sitting! We are more like monkeys in trees than like sea sponges. Richard Dawkins' book The Ancestor's Tale does a wonderful job of taking us backward through evolution, all the way back to ctenophores like this

Fascinating stuff.  

Recall the earlier article about arterial flexibility being related to trunk flexibility?  Well this is where the rubber meets the road folks.  You gotta move it, shake it, stretch it, and challenge your body.  If you are only challenging your mind through PBS programs and science tomes your life expectancy will reflect that.

The NYTimes article about sitting and life expectancy is here.

Spirituality is blocked, or not blocked, by regions in the brain

 

LiveScience reports:

Scientists have identified areas of the brain that, when damaged, lead to greater spirituality. The findings hint at the roots of spiritual and religious attitudes, the researchers say.

The study, published in the Feb. 11 issue of the journal Neuron, involves a personality trait called self-transcendence, which is a somewhat vague measure of spiritual feeling, thinking, and behaviors. Self-transcendence "reflects a decreased sense of self and an ability to identify one's self as an integral part of the universe as a whole," the researchers explain.  

Before and after surgery, the scientists surveyed patients who had brain tumors removed. The surveys generate self-transcendence scores.

Selective damage to the left and right posterior parietal regions of the brain induced a specific increase in self-transcendence, or ST, the surveys showed.

Are meditation experts just really good at activating and deactivating certain areas of their brains?  In a concrete sense, is that what meditation is?  I'm thinking of those PET scans of the brains of experienced meditating Tibetan monks and how they showed specific patterns of neural activation (more information here, and here.)