As Canadians live longer and pay more attention to diet and healthy lifestyles, those in middle to upper ages want to “add life to years”, not just years to life.

One way for aging well is to consume colour-rich plants (i.e., mixed vegetables, varied fruits and particularly different brightly coloured berries).

Why is coloring a good guide for food selection?

Science teaches us that vivid colours in plants like berries come from pigments provided by Nature to ward off pests and attract pollinators, helping to guarantee regeneration of the species.

Pigments have another important function for the plant. Located mostly in the outer layers, skin or rind, they fashion an antioxidant defensive shell against sun and radiation exposure which, if not prevented from forming free radicals, would oxidize cells, membranes, proteins and DNA.

Simply, pigments assure survival of the species by guarding against oxidative stressors in the plant’s environment.

Fortunately for humans, eating colour-rich plants transfers that antioxidant benefit to us.

The French Paradox and Anti-Aging Benefits

Clinical studies have shown that French citizens who regularly consume red wine have unexpectedly low rates of neurological, inflammatory and cardiovascular disorders. This occurs despite their preference for high-fat foods that should promote these diseases.

How do they gain this protection?

Regular consumption of red wine is thought to provide sufficient quantities of grape antioxidant pigments that fight disease-promoting fats and other oxidizing factors.

Oxidative stress is the cell’s failure to balance and defend itself against production of oxygen free radicals which damage nucleic acids, carbohydrates, proteins and lipids. Oxidative damage is particularly detrimental in the brain because its cells cannot be renewed.

Understanding the French paradox and its dependence on fruit antioxidants was a clue for other scientists to examine the value of berry consumption against typical aging and oxidative stress diseases.

Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Lou Gehrig’s (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), visual decline, memory, motor and cognitive deficits, arthritis, diabetes and even cancer are likely to have some degree of oxidative stress at their origin.

Dietary choices of colourful foods and antioxidant benefits supplied by berries and other colour-rich plants may be an answer for lowering the risk of contracting such diseases.

Although studies showing this benefit of colourful plants are only preliminary, the results are encouraging.

Berry Phenolics and the Brain

Berries (blueberries, blackberries, black raspberries, strawberries, among others), exemplify a familiar and popular plant group with varied colors.

Small, water-soluble chemicals called “phenolics” – the colour pigments from berry skin, pulp and seeds with tongue-twisting names like resveratrol, anthocyanin, quercetin, peonidin and malvidin – have antioxidant properties known to be valuable for human health.

Some of the most convincing laboratory research on the benefits of berry phenolics shows improvements in the following brain functions, revealing a possible link to inhibition of the aging process:

Dr. Paul Gross
http://www.articlesbase.com/health-articles/toward-berry-good-aging-81200.html

Imagine a typical courtroom with a judge, jury, court reporter, bailiff, assorted spectators and oh yes, a gorilla. Would anyone notice the primate? More significantly, would your jurors notice? Recent research suggests that under the right conditions they just might not.

Lawyers often lament about jurors’ failure to attend to, remember, and use key evidence and testimony in their deliberations. Jury interviews have revealed that some jurors claim no memory of certain witnesses. Attorneys and their clients frequently attribute this failure to a lack of motivation or intelligence. How else could an otherwise competent person miss something so central to the case? Over the years, efforts have been made to experiment with procedural interventions designed to increase juror comprehension. Research on perception suggests an explanation other than motivational or intellectual; instead the culprit may be a kind of “cognitive blindness”.

My own experience may be illustrative: I once was invited to lecture at a bar association meeting in the mid-west. The program coordinator had planned to have someone meet me at my gate (this was when one could still do that) and take me to my hotel, but at the last minute called to say that no one was available; I would have to get myself to the hotel. I arrived on time and navigated through the crowd at the gate, found a taxi and went to the hotel. Three hours later I received a call by an exasperated person who, with very little introduction asked, “where were you?”

It turns out that while I was en route, someone was dispatched to collect me at the airport after all. He even went to the trouble of making a large sign with my name on it which he showed to each person who disembarked. He became frantic thinking he had missed me and would get in trouble. The poor guy; I never saw him or his sign even though it displayed something as personally salient as my name. I was blind to his best efforts to capture my attention simply because I did not expect anyone to be there.

The Gorilla Study

Why do people fail to notice things that are right in front of them? An interesting study conducted by university researchers at Harvard and the University of Illinois attempted to answer that question. In the research, participants were asked to keep a silent count of the number of times five persons passed a basketball to each other. The persons passed the ball in a fixed order but kept moving around the room randomly. At a predetermined point, a person dressed in a full gorilla costume walked through the scene and in one condition even stopped in front and beat its chest in stereotypical fashion. The study participants were then asked among other things whether they noticed anything unusual or unexpected during the exercise.

The average result across all conditions was that nearly 50% of the participants did not notice the unexpected event. In one condition, as many as 58% failed to notice the gorilla. The investigators attributed this failure to a type of “blindness” which occurs when people are focused on a task and something outside their expectations occurs. This phenomenon explains why for example motorists hit bicyclists they report they never saw even though they were alertly monitoring for other cars, or theater goers fail to notice old friends as they search for a seat.

Unnoticed Gorillas in the Courtroom

While this study dealt strictly with perception, the parallels to information processing in the courtroom are worth considering. Jurors tend to focus on the trial narrative that is personally relevant. Facts and testimony outside that narrow range of expectations can be classified as “unexpected” and is subject to being missed due to jurors’ temporary “blindness”. Indeed, the typical case is replete with metaphorical “gorillas”. For example, many corporations go to great length to let the jury know what a good corporate citizen it is. However, since many jurors believe that corporations are motivated by greed, the selected examples of corporate beneficence go unnoticed as they fall outside jurors’ expectations.

In science cases (e.g., pharmaceutical product liability cases) we often see that jurors fail to attend to the causation evidence and deliberate as if they never heard any testimony on the subject. Indeed, some of these jurors act surprised that causation is even a contended issue. This is different than pointing out that some jurors are biased against corporations and hear but refuse to accept pro-corporate messages. Instead, the point here is that some jurors never hear the message in the first place. Indeed, underestimating the power of juror expectations is one of the fundamental errors committed by experienced trial counsel.

In the gorilla study participants were permitted to see a video of the scene they had just watched but this time with the goal of looking for something unexpected; many could not believe that they missed the gorilla. In hindsight, the presence of a gorilla seems so obvious. Similarly, lawyers, working on a case for months or years can’t remember what it was like not to see the gorillas in their case. They present their cases as if key facts and evidence are obvious to all and as a result become the unwitting victims of juror blindness.

Helping Blind Jurors See

We know of two principle approaches to reducing juror blindness. The first and simplest to implement is repetition of key information. To use the perception researchers’ paradigm, if you leave the gorilla in the room long enough, eventually someone will notice it. Yet, most trial evidence is not as prominent as a living, breathing, chest beating gorilla. In fact, two decades of practical experience tells us that repetition alone is often insufficient to achieve increased attention and often falls woefully short of affecting juror attitudes. The more challenging yet often more successful approach is to integrate important evidence so that it is consistent with juror expectations.

If the goal is to convince jurors that the company is a good corporate citizen in the context of a toxic tort case, listing charitable donations and community involvement often go unnoticed because they are not part of jurors’ expectations and focus. And even if jurors should notice this information, it is often discarded as irrelevant. In such a case, jurors are focused on whether or not the company acted irresponsibly in managing potentially hazardous materials. This issue is personally relevant because jurors want to live in a safe world. Evidence of safe corporate policies and practices in the context of what was known at the time is more likely to be noticed as this is what jurors are focused on and expect to see and hear.

In the causation example, most jurors expect that the cause of death will be listed on an autopsy report. When jurors learn an autopsy was not performed (as is often the case in a product liability case) they then decide that causation matters but not because the defense has been hammering on the scientific evidence. In deciding causation it is unlikely that they will use the scientific evidence at all. An autopsy fits jurors’ expectations about how cause of death is established. The lack of an autopsy is personally relevant in a way that the science evidence can never be.

Motivating jurors to notice key evidence requires the trial attorney to first determine the nature of jurors’ case-specific expectations. This is difficult and challenging but will help jurors see the case, gorillas and all, perhaps for the first time.

References

O’Keefe, D., Persuasion: Theory and Research Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002.

Simons, D. and Chabris, F. Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events. Perception, 1999, 28, 1059-1074.

Ross Laguzza
http://www.articlesbase.com/law-articles/gorilla-in-the-courtroom-when-jurors-go-blind-93684.html

Kevin T. Robertson has spent the last 21 years as a successful entrepreneur studying and researching, Communication, Marketing, Cognitive Science, Body & Nero Linguistics, Real Estate Investing, Creative Finance, Sales Strategies, Success Habits, Peak Performance, and The Psychology of Achievement.
The post production provided by Gregory A. Lewis of T.EYEFILMS LLC.
Kevin T. Robertson has presented at least 150 successful customized programs each year to corporate partners internationally for the past 16 years. Kevin has delivered over 2,650 Keynote Speeches, Public & Onsite Seminars, specializing in Customized Topics.

Kevin has gained extensive experience working with the hearing impaired as well as crossing language barriers. With the aid of sign language and multicultural bilingual interpreters, Kevin has become a master communicator of translating business strategies to over 76 different Nationalities in the United States and has presented business presentations to companies in over 30 countries abroad.
www.focusstrategyseminars.com/

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Technorati Tags: Body & Nero Linguistics, cognitive science, communication, Creative Finance, Gregory A. Lewis, Kevin T. Robertson, Marketing, Motivational Supercharger, Peak Performance, Psychology of Achievement, Real Estate Investing, Sales Strategies, Success Habits, T.EYEFILMS LLC

John explains his interest in computers, cognitive science, and the transition to contemporary media. Includes computer animations generated by MSc students.

Duration : 0:4:7

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Technorati Tags: Design, digital, Edinburgh, experience, John, Lee, media, postgraduate, student

The HorizonTAL project scans the horizon in technology and learning. This is part one of a video collage from the second charrette inside London’s Tower Bridge. Prof, Stephen Heppell leads.
see www.heppell.net/horizontal for much more

Duration : 0:3:26

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Technorati Tags: education, health, heppell, horizon, scanning, Technology

UC Berkeley professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics George Lakoff explores how successful political debates are framed by using language targeted to people’s values instead of their support for specific government programs in this public lecture sponsored by the Helen Edison Series at UC San Diego. Series: “Helen Edison Lecture Series” [11/2005] [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 11194]

Duration : 0:58:57

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Technorati Tags: Cognitive, debates, George, Lakoff, language, politics, Science

Links – full interview: Daniel Dennett Being interviewed on CCTV International, January 2nd, 2008 “Religion Vs Atheism in the U.S.”

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLPnNp28Fzg

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXqySGRX8l4&feature=related

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6E3fdRzfRM&feature=related

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/dennettd/dennettd.htm

Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28, 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. Dennett is also a noted atheist and advocate of the Brights movement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett

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Technorati Tags: Atheism, atheist, bang, big, Carl, CCTV, Daniel, Dennett, Gould, interview, Jay, religion, Sagan, Stephen, Universe, Vs

My Resume for a full time position in Signal Processing, Programming and neuro/cognitive Science.

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Technorati Tags: C/C++, Cognitive, EEG, HDL, Matlab, MEG, neuroscience, Processing, Resume, Signal

*Footage from Awakening To Mindfulness – Seattle, Oct 2009 presented by FACES Conferences.

Based on Dr. Shapiro’s recent book, The Art and Science of Mindfulness: Integrating Mindfulness into Psychotherapy and the Helping Professions; this workshop offers scientific research and meditative practices for therapists interested in awakening the mind and opening the heart. Drawing on current research in psychology, medicine, and cognitive neuroscience, we will investigate the effects of mindfulness meditation on decreasing pathology and increasing positive psychological and physiological states. Further, we will explore the mechanisms of action through which mindfulness meditation has its transformative effects.

For more information about Mindfulness Conferences or DVDs visit http://www.facesconferences.com.

Speaker: Shauna Shapiro, Ph.D.

Professor of Counseling Psychology, Santa Clara University
Co-author, The Art & Science of Mindfulness, 2009
Previously Adjunct Professor, Andrew Weil’s Integrated Medicine Program, University of Arizona

Duration : 0:4:50

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Technorati Tags: art and science of midnfulness, art mindfulness, mindfulnes conference, mindfulness, mindfulness meditation, science mindfulness, shauna shapiro

After Jeffrey K. Zeig, Ph.D. presented a workshop at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on February 11, 2008, Jeffrey T. Guterman, Ph.D. spoke briefly with him about his reflections on the legacy of Albert Ellis, Ph.D., the father of cognitive-behavior therapy and founder of rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT). Zeig and Guterman discuss distinctions between Zeig’s and Ellis’s approaches to psychotherapy.

–

Jeffrey K. Zeig, Ph.D. is the Founder and Director of the Milton H. Erickson Foundation, http://www.erickson-foundation.org, architect of The Evolution of Psychotherapy Conferences, http://www.evolutionofpsychotherapy.com, and President of Zeig, Tucker & Theisen behavioral sciences publishers, http://www.zeigtucker.com

–

VERBATIM TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW:

Guterman: You know that Ellis died last year.

Zeig: I spoke at his tribute.

Guterman: You spoke at his tribute? So, and I know that was in New York. So, what I’m wondering is if you can just share your reflections on his legacy.

Zeig: Oh, an incredible legacy. Albert Ellis saw more patients than anybody in the history of psychotherapy. And he was a wonderfully experiential psychotherapist. He recognized that psychotherapy didn’t happen just because of the words that you said. It was because of the experiences that you had. So, Ellis’s contribution is of one of the great psychotherapists of history. That’s secure, being the father of cognitive-behavioral approaches to psychotherapy. But more than that, he was a tremendous humanist. He spoke endlessly. He spoke whenever people requested him to speak. He was always active. He was a great contributor to the Erickson Foundation. And I think that I first met Al at the 1985 Evolution Conference. But I considered him to be a wonderful friend of the Erickson Foundation.

Guterman: And since you mentioned that, I loved so much, I had the audio tape of, I believe it’s your 1985 workshop at the Ericksonian Conference on metaphor.

Zeig: Yeah.

Guterman: If you recall. Do you remember you and Ellis debated?

Zeig: We debated, but that was not in ‘85. So, I think what,

Guterman: I’m not sure what yours was.

Zeig: But on the Erickson Foundation Web site: http://www.erickson-foundation.org

Guterman: Okay. Which I’ll link to with this video.

Zeig: Link to. Yeah. Well, I think there’s the actual debate that Ellis and I had.

Guterman: On metaphor…

Zeig: Not on metaphor.

Guterman: …in psychotherapy.

Zeig: It was, like, poetry versus science.

Guterman: That’s it. And I just want to, as we close this, cause I know there’s other people want to speak to you. You had drawn a distinction between your approach to psychotherapy and Ellis’s approach, saying that yours is an inside-out approach and his is an outside-in.

Zeig: Yes.

Guterman: You know, because his being educative.

Zeig: Yeah.

Guterman: So, today, you draw distinctions, saying, talked about the importance of the experiential approach in psychotherapy, accessing emotion in the client, versus just providing information. So, despite the legacy of Ellis that you value so much, that you just spoke of, you, I was just wondering if you could speak for a moment about that distinction between your work and Ellis’s model. Because being a sort of outside-in approach, because nevertheless he was very provocative.

Zeig: He was very provocative and, also, experiential, but more didactic in his approach than I. And much more research-based in his approach. So, I tend to be more on the model of using art. He was more on the model of using science.

Guterman: Right. So, I, I mean, we could really, if we really wanted to go and look at it, we could draw distinctions.

Zeig: To try to expound on that in a few moments is just impossible.

Guterman: And we could spend all day….

Zeig: Absolutely.

Guterman: on that.

Zeig: And fruitfully so.

Guterman: And it would be like a Kuhnian issue of proponents of their paradigms practicing their trades in different worlds.

Zeig: Yeah, but I hope you keep developing that love of Ellis. He was somebody I loved and respected immensely. So, his work shouldn’t be lost. It’s just too important to contemporary culture, not just to psychotherapy.

Guterman: That’s very much appreciated, Jeff…

Zeig: Good luck with it.

Guterman: And thanks very much for the workshop today.

Zeig: Good luck.

Guterman: I learned a lot.

–

More Information:

http://www.erickson-foundation.org

http://www.jeffzeig.com

Duration : 0:3:53

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Technorati Tags: albert, Cognitive, ellis, erickson, jeffrey, jeffreyzeig, jguterman, milton, psychotherapy, rebt, zeig