Perceptions of Time

Quarter 2 : Five Temporal Takeaways

This is the second of four sneak previews of what’s inside my forthcoming book, Managing Time Mindfully, being published on the 11th December

Perceptions of Time Infographic
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Temporal Takeaway #1:
The idea that the left brain is logical and the right brain is creative has become an urban myth. A better approximation is that the left brain sits inside space and time and the right brain site everywhere and ‘everywhen’ else. This is still a gross simplification and approximation.

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Temporal Takeaway #2:
The Ancient Greeks had a god named Kronos who looked after matters on the Earth plane. Their god called Kairos concerned himself with managing the heavens. This is perhaps a more accurate model for how the left and right brain operate, whilst being more metaphorical.

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Temporal Takeaway #3:
Our gut, or enteric, mind has more neurons that a cat’s brain. It operates around 5 to 10 seconds ahead of our conscious mind and is always, always right.

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Temporal Takeaway #4:
Most people are intrinsically around 33% efficient. As the normal human mind can only hold one thought at a time, if we mull over the past or worry about the future, we lose focus on what we are doing right now..

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Temporal Takeaway #5:
Every minute spent in meditation comes back to us many times over. We get the time back in spades. Our creativity, luck, productivity and longevity all benefit. Regular meditation can even allow us to live weller longer.

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p.s. this blog was posted live exactly on the 25th November, timed with the Full Moon

Managing Time MindfullyThese themes and more are explored in the second quarter of my new book, Managing Time Mindfully, which is published on the 11th December — the exact date of the next New Moon.

Order your copy today and get free access to the Your Perfect Day pack of meditations, to help you get more done in less time.

Get your copy of Manage Your Time Mindfully here

Your Perfect Day Meditations


Related Posts :

Publishing in Tune with the Moon
Quarter 1 : First Tickings
Quarter 3 : Managing Time
Quarter 4 : Temporal Alchemy
November Moon Phases

Creativity Blocks #005: Lack of Time

One of the most common complaints you hear nowadays is that there is not enough time.

The world is speeding up – we are being bombarded by TV, news, social media – how is it possible to keep up?

Well it’s a common misconception that the march of time and it’s ticking clock is both fixed and immutable.

You hear people saying things like, “You can’t change the past” and “There are simply not enough hours in the day.”

Both these statements are not necessarily true.

It’s also said that, if you want something done, give it to a busy person. I even heard someone say once that they didn’t have enough time to read a time management book !!

Well there’s two books I recommend highly both that take a different approach, mentioned at the bottom of this blog … but even they don’t really show how time can be bent, managed and stretched.

It’s all in mind

Now this might seem far fetched, or in the realms of Doctor Who or Back to the Future, but scientists are coming to the conclusion that our reality – our space and time – are linked to our consciousness. In fact, it’s more accurate to say that it’s our very consciousness that actually creates our reality and space and time. So all you need to do to change time is to make a change in your consciousness.

A fly and an elephant both perceive time differently to us … and I for one have noticed a difference in peoples’ cognitive reaction time. Have you ever tried to swat a fly only for it to seem to know where you are about to strike? It’s nerve signals don’t have to travel as far as ours so its physiology and neurology means it reacts quicker.

I am sure you have heard about athletes who have been “in the zone” – a sort of timeless place – or perhaps you have had a light bulb moment where in less than a second, you get a flash of inspiration – a whole picture for a new idea. If you were able to MRI scan your brain at this moment, you would see both the right and left hemispheres light up in synchronism. For that split second you were Whole Brain (or even Whole Mind) Thinking. A brain scan would show that your brain was generating alpha and probably even theta waves.

It is now thought our left brain sits in space and time and our right brain everywhere and “every-when” else. By making our left brain go silent and work in harmony with our right, our perception of the speed of time changes.

Now you can access this state while meditating. When I mention this to people, their first reaction is that they don’t have time to meditate. I know it sounds counter-intuitive but I can testify that 20-30 minutes meditation before any creative session will deliver not only the time back by a factor of 3 or 4 but also produce the most sublime output that appears to have come from nowhere.

“But I can’t make my mind go quiet,” is normally the next protest swiftly followed by, “I’d like to meditate but I don’t have time to learn how.”

Well, if you hear yourself saying this, help is now at hand. You don’t need necessarily to enter an ashram for two months. Although, if you did, it might well be time well spent …

Have a listen to this audio track to learn a routine you can use anytime and anywhere – great also for getting back to sleep in the early hours – but not as one client of mind did for listening to while driving !!!

By practicing getting into this state while your eyes are open, you will find time changes its speed … and you will get more done in less time !!!

Create as much time as you need and get more done

Living Timefully

Recommended Reading

If what I’ve written above it just too whacky and you just want to better manage your day and “claw back” time, then read Time Management for Dummies by Clare Evans (no relation).

I also recommend getting hold of a copy of Steven Taylor’s excellent book called Making Time – it explains in some detail how consciousness and time are interrelated and how you can start to control time to your advantage.

Where Do Ideas Actually Come From?

Incredible advances in understanding how our brains work have been made by neuroscientists, yet the place where our consciousness is generated and our mind resides proves elusive. It’s a good guess is that it’s only proving tricky to find because people are looking in totally the wrong place.

So when it comes to finding the source of something even more ethereal such as an idea, where do you even start looking? Even an expensive MRI scanner won’t help you here as it measures the brain state after a thought has occurred. Apart from anything else, you might not have an MRI scanner handy when that idea comes along as they tend to be random in nature.

Bring in the Thought Detectives
To find the source of ideas, we have become sleuths. The first clues to pick up on can be found in our language.
It is no accident that we say things like, “Off the top of my head” and “At the back of my mind”. When something is on “the tip of my tongue”, it well be exactly where it is at that moment in time.

If you observe people when they talk, the position of their hands gives much away too. Sometimes people reach above their heads as if they are pulling an idea out of the ether. They will pat the centre of their chest if they feel passionate about something.

It turns out that thoughts exhibit properties similar, but different, to electromagnetic waves. The quantum physicists, neuroscientists and the mystics (and crackpots) are all converging on the same type of somewhat preposterous conclusion. It looks like our three space and one time dimensions sit on top of a number of other dimensions that, accordingly, sit outside space and time. Furthermore, it is in these ethereal realms that thoughts propagate from the present, past and future.

So it seems that the latest theories in cosmology are somewhat converging with those on consciousness. These theories could explain things like your dog knowing you are coming home or that you know the phone is about to ring and who is going to be on the other end of it. Da Vinci may well have had the prescience to invent the helicopter and parachute by using a similar mechanism.

Water, Water Everywhere
A similar mystery exists around where ideas and thoughts go once we had them. The search for the location of our memory in our brains has proved fruitless.

Some further illumination into this conundrum can be had from the phrase, “I can feel it in my water”. Many people I spoke to when researching my book on light bulb moments testified that they got their ideas when in the shower or when out walking near a river or waterfall.

It is also reported that people who have had transplants of organs like the heart, lung and kidney exhibit personality changes and can even pick up memories from the donor.
It appears that the water in our cells is not just to stop us drying out. The Japanese author Masaru Emoto has done many experiments with water that show its state changes with the mood and emotions of people around it.

Nothing New Under the Sun
For some readers, some of this might sound bonkers and for others, it may nothing new you may have heard bits or all of it elsewhere. Well it appears that much of what we are re-discovering was known and accepted by the ancient Greeks and civilizations that predated them by thousands of years.

There may be a benefit to those who suspend their belief and accept that some of this might be true, even if it’s not been quite ratified and embraced by the left-brained scientific community. If you accept the notion that thoughts might come from outside our brains from a collective thought pool, we must then ask the question of why we just picked up on a specific thought at a specific time.

After all, if this is all true, there’s a near infinity of thoughts bouncing around in the cracks between our neurons.
If these specific ethereal whispers are filtering through to your conscious awareness, perhaps it’s important that you pay attention to them. What’s more, as they only occur in the space between your thoughts and if you want more of them, it may pay great dividends to attend that meditation or yoga class.

Which side are you on?

One of the most amazing feats we can perform is to consciously control which parts of our brain we are using.

Once mastered, you can then put this under ‘unconscious control’ and increase your creativity several fold.

A good example of this is when you learn to ride a bike or drive a car. Once learned, you can do something else and multitask without having to give what is an amazingly complex task a second thought.

Now I should say the the whole left and right brain model is both simplistic and only serves to help us understand that we can be in different states of mind. Our left and right brain functions are caused by our state of consciousness not the generators of it and what is processed by the physical left and right are nowhere near as separate as perhaps currently thought. It is a good approximation thought to help us get our mind around what is one of the most complex structures we currently know of in the Universe – our own brains.

In simplistic terms, however, what happens is that the right brain learns a process and hands it to the left to handle automatically.

To understand how the right and left interact, do the following exercise:

Step 1: Write down the word MAGIC on a piece of paper

Step 2: Then write it down two more times

Step 3: Now write it down backwards

Step 4: Then write it down backwards two more times

Step 5: Notice how when you wrote the new word backwards for the second and third time how much you speeded up, probably copying the word you first wrote. Notice how the third time was even quicker than the second time.

Note that I haven’t purposely written it down backwards in this blog as this would spoil the effect. What is happening is something like this.

Step 1: your right brain decoded the sentence above and sent it to the left to handle

Step 2: the left brain repeated the task twice with a modicum of right brain holistic supervision

Step 3: either your right brain forms a whole picture in your mind’s eye of MAGIC backwards and then tells the left brain to write it OR your right brain gets your left brain to write each letter down and then forms the picture of it backwards – perhaps correcting itself with the position of the A and I and G and M after the first attempt

Step 4: when you repeat it, your left brain either copies what it sees on the page or uses the right brain whole image and processes the whole synthesised word

Now repeat the same exercise with the word POWER but this time do it with your eyes closed to experience the difference.

Now this might all sound a bit trivial and we perform complex actions like this every day without giving them a second thought. Just being able to do this is magical. If you really think about it, being able to comprehend that we are doing it is even more magical – and the beginning of a new level of mind control.

If you would you like to learn more about these techniques, make sure you get a copy of Tom’s new book to find out where ideas really come from and how you can make sure yours actually happen …

The Art and Science of Light Bulb Moments

Related blogs:

Getting in the Zone

Whole Brain Thinking

The Inspirational Breath

Cross Crawling

Mapping your Mind

Food for Thought

Getting in the Zone

Over the course of a day, you breathe through different nostrils, The left nostril oxygenates the right brain and the right nostril the left.

Neurons don’t store oxygen, they need to be fed it.

This visualisation is a great way to prepare for any creative project.

It both energises and balances both sides of the brain.

Once you learn the sequence, you can do all or part of it at any time to give you an extra boost throughout the day.

DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS WHILE DRIVING, FLYING A JUMBO JET OR OPERATING MACHINERY


Getting in The Zone

Before you listen to this visualisation, stare at the infinity image for 30 seconds so it is impressed on your Mind’s Eye.

If you have an iPhone, iPad or MP3 player, you can download it here …

If you would you like to learn more about these techniques, make sure you get a copy of Tom’s new book to find out where ideas really come from and how you can make sure yours actually happen …

The Art and Science of Light Bulb Moments

Related blogs:

Whole Brain Thinking

The Inspirational Breath

Cross Crawling

Mapping your Mind

Food for Thought

Which side are you on?

The anatomy of a click through

When we click on a link, we don’t give it a second thought – especially these days when we are presented with 100’s if not 1000’s of potential hyperlinks each day.

Links nowadays are not limited to those on web sites or in email newsletters. They abound in Twitter tweets and on Facebook Walls.

Knowing how and why people click on one link as opposed to another is of course of interest to the person who posted the link. Indeed understanding how we interact with any text is important for any writer.

Here’s a typical sequence of events:

1. About a second before we are consciously aware of anything, our right brain is continually filtering information before presenting it to our left brain for further processing and analysis. This is known as whole brain filtering.

2. To get past the gatekeeper of the right brain, which works holistically, we have to write content which matches patterns the right brain will light up to. Example might include:

  • Keywords – e.g. Video, ebook, iPad, your favourite football team/author/pop group
  • Rhymes
  • Fun & puns
  • Freebies
  • Double takes
  • e.g. If I had written Triple Take, the right brain would inform the left that there is something new it doesn’t understand that needs analysis

3. Once the left brain is presented the information, it analyses it further with criteria like – is it a con or a spam and is it something to deal with now or park for later? If the former, the motor commands to our arm and hand muscles to click on the link are issued.

4. When we then look at the destination page the whole process is repeated for the opening paragraph – or the image or first few seconds of the audio or video – and then so on for all subsequent content until we meet another link that we follow.

5. So our right brain analyses the whole and our left, the detail.

As for the Google search engine, both have to match otherwise our spam filter kicks in. For example, if we thought we were on a page containing a freebie but it becomes clear the point of the page is to sell you something, you will soon go elsewhere. Long sales pages try and subvert this process by beating the left brain into submission.

“OK,” it says, “I didn’t want to buy anything but it was $5000 and I can get it for only $20 today only.

“The overruled right brain screaming, “They saw you coming.”

6. For best results, the message needs to be completely congruent say from from initial Tweet, to blog title right through the body text to the final call to action.

7. If you have read this far, you will be approaching the call to action – yes, this blog is a soft selling page. Do you feel conned? I hope not as this blog contains some useful free information.