ExamineHealth

An Introduction to Brain Waves

Your brain waves are important.  Heck, your brain is important.  For something that controls so much of what goes on in our lives, you'd think we'd know more about it.

Literally everything that you experience is filtered through your mind and/or created by your mind.  Your thoughts and belief systems form the world that you live in.  Your subjective experience is determined by your state of mind.  Whether you're happy or sad is a choice that you have the ability to make.  And it all comes down to what's in your head.

There are a lot of aspects of this conversation.  There are a lot of different ways to examine your mind.  To me, they all have value.  Some more than others.  One of the most valuable studies of your brain and your mental state involve your brain waves.

The study of brain waves can grant us insight into many mental phenomena.  We haven't yet scratched the surface of what our minds are capable of, or exactly how they work.  Every piece of information helps, every experiment brings us a little bit closer to understanding.  There are experiences we have that are hard to explain.  There are people that seem to do impossible things with their mind.  Just because we haven't figured out how these things are done, does not mean there isn't a good explanation for them.  To reference Arthur C Clarke's third law of prediction:  "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

In this article, I'm going to cover an introduction to brain wave science.  What it's about and what it's told us so far.  It is quite easy to expound on these ideas and draw additional conclusions, which many have done.  I feel these are all worthwhile ventures, and will continue down this path in future articles.

Americans drank 8.7 billion gallons of bottled water in 2008, totaling sales of $11.2 billion dollars...

(This is still only half the amount of carbonated soft drinks, and barely ahead of beer and milk.  However, that's a lot of water - and a lot of bottles.)

It takes 17 million barrels of oil (that's enough to fuel 1 million cars for a year) to produce a year's worth of water bottles...

Worse, 86% of those water bottles are thrown into landfills, not recycled... 

Is it not clear that we need to break ourselves of the bottled water habit?  In a previous article I discussed the quality of bottled water VS filtered tap water, so I am not getting into that here.  Today I'd like to talk about water bottles themselves.  Are they inherently bad?  Or is it just their disposable nature that makes them so damaging to the environment?  Can we reduce the carbon footprint of these bottles by reusing them?  And is that safe?

Exercise is a critical component of your overall health; it may even be one of the most critical.  Of course, there are an infinite number of ways that one can get the requisite exercise, and many of us are on the search for the program or type that fits us best.

It is my strong belief, that just as important as what exercise you're doing, is that you are changing what you are doing over time.  Variation is a key component to consistently improving your fitness.  Our bodies are incredibly adaptable and will quickly get used to any movement or set of movements that we repeat on a regular basis.  This will initially result in significant gains, as your muscles and neurology adapt to the new movements.  However once they've mastered that particular motion, the progress will begin to taper off.  Every single muscle in your body can be worked in different ways, from different angles, at different speeds, to achieve different results.

This is why the primary concept behind P90X is variety.  They refer to the approach as 'muscle confusion'.  The idea being that you work your muscles in a variety of unique ways to keep your body from getting used to any one particular movement and hitting a plateau.  With enough changes, your neurology has a harder time locking onto a particular exercise and understanding it.  Before you know it, you're hitting it with another variation to keep it on it's toes. 

When you participate in an event or a social group, what are you bringing to the table?  Many people simply show up, hang out in the background, or dabble in small talk with others in the group - pandering around obvious bits and bites or gossiping about the latest happenings.  While time-consuming, these things are rarely productive or add anything to the events in progress.