From The ADHD Brain

"To develop this ability, you have to train your mind. Most people believe that concentration is a strenuous and tiring activity, and that it involves exertion and tension, which are difficult and unpleasant. This belief, which usually starts at an early age, is not true". Parents and teachers expect children to study, do their homework and get good grades. Sometimes, they use disciplinary measures against the children. This makes the children feel forced to do something they don't like doing. Telling a child often, that he or she is not concentrating well enough, creates a subconscious aversion to concentration and study. These become associated with coercion, lack of freedom, and doing something they do not like to do. When children grow up, it is no wonder that their power of concentration is too weak. Though most people would admit that good concentration is a great asset, yet, most of them, do nothing to strengthen it, because they don't know ho...

Thoughts claim our attention constantly, wasting our time and energy on unimportant and useless matters. They actually, rule our life. We have become so used to this condition that we regard it as natural. While breathing, we do not need to pay attention to each inhalation and exhalation. We become conscious of the process of breathing, only when we have some difficulty with breathing, such as when our nose is clogged, due to a cold, or when we are in an unventilated room. It is the same with thinking. We become conscious of the constant onslaught of our thoughts, and of our inability to calm them down, only when we need to concentrate, solve a problem or study. We are also acutely aware of them, when we have worries or fears. Examine this familiar situation. You need to study something for your job or for an exam. You sit comfortably on the sofa with the book in your hands and start reading. After a while, you feel hungry and go to the kitchen to eat something. Yo...

"The powers of the mind are like the rays of the sun. When they are concentrated, they illumine." - Swami Vivekananda When I was a child, I saw how a magnifying glass could burn a piece of paper, when the rays of the sun were focused through it on one point. The fire could only be ignited, when the sun's rays were concentrated on a small point. When the magnifying glass was moved too far away, or too close to the paper, the rays were not focused enough, and nothing happened. This experience, describes vividly, how the power of concentration works. It is a skill, which enables you to fix your attention on one single thought or subject, while at the same time excluding from your awareness everything else. "The power of concentration manifests as focused attention and as a one pointed mind." When you focus your mind, you conserve your energies and do not dissipate them on irrelevant thoughts or activities. This is why, developing concentration i...

" The highly anticipated sequel to Close Liaisons . . . In Lenkarda – the main Krinar colony on Earth – Mia is completely at Korum's mercy. With no way to leave and no idea how to operate even the most basic Krinar technology, she has no choice but to trust the K who brought her there – the lover whom she had betrayed. Will he keep his promise to bring her home, or is she destined to be his prisoner forever? Can a human become a part of Krinar society? Does Korum love her, or does he only wish to possess her? Read on to find out . . . WARNING: This book contains strong sexual content and explicit language and is not suitable for readers under 18.  download here   READ ONLINE  

***New Adult Dark Erotic Novel***Kidnapped. Taken to a private island.­I never thought this could happen to me. I never imagined one chance meeting on the eve of my eighteenth birthday could change my life so completely.­Now I belong to him. To Julian. To a man who is as ruthless as he is beautiful—a man whose touch makes me burn. A man whose tenderness I find more devastating than his cruelty. My captor is an enigma. I don’t know who he is or why he took me. There is a darkness inside him—a darkness that scares me even as it draws me in. My name is Nora Leston, and this is my story. Download here READ ONLINE

“I’ve never had a good memory”. If you believ e this you will be glad to know that a ‘good memory’ is not something you are born with. Memory skills can be developed by using a combination of attention techniques and rehearsals study strategies. As we go on we use A STUDENT AS OUR CASE STUDY   ATTENTION TECHNIQUES. Attention is your memory gate keeper , selecting the information which is most important for you to focus on and filtering out distractions not important to your learning process. A similar situation happens when you finish attending a lecture or reading your text book, and a short time later you can’t recall what you heard or read. You were physically present, but not paying attention or concentrating on what information was most important for you to remember. BEFORE LECTURE Be familiar with the material for each lecture so you will know what to expect and can focus your attention during class. • Look at your syllabus before each class to ident...

High school all-­American Neely Crenshaw was probably the best quarterback ever to play for the legendary Messina Spartans. Fifteen years have gone by since those glory days, and Neely has come home to Messina to bury Coach Eddie Rake, the man who molded the Spartans into an unbeatable football dynasty. Now, as Coach Rake’s “boys” sit in the bleachers waiting for the dimming field lights to signal his passing, they replay the old games, relive the old glories, and try to decide once and for all whether they love Eddie Rake — or hate him. For Neely Crenshaw, a man who must finally forgive his coach — and himself — before he can get on with his life, the stakes are especially high. Download here READ ONLINE

The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with three weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist-­high to my father, over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a good crop. Thus begins the new novel from John Grisham, a story inspired by his own childhood in rural Arkansas. The narrator is a farm boy named Luke Chandler, age seven, who lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that s never been painted. The Chandlers farm eighty acres that they rent, not own, and when the cotton is ready they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it.­For six weeks they pick cotton, battling the heat, the rain, the fatigue, and, sometimes, each other. As the weeks pass Luke sees and hears things no ...

"A cheeky tale for recession-­era romantics,­" (More) from a bestselling author The year is 2006 and Holly Talbott is married to the founder of Comer Capital at the apex of excess on Wall street. Sure, Holly loves being a stay-­at-­home mom and keeping house accounts at all the best places, but there are some downsides to being Mrs. Hedgefund. Even botox can't beautify her mother­in-­law's withering stares, and her husband, Tim, is away so often it feels like she's single again. So when it turns out that not all of Tim's trips have been for business, the newly minted divorcée ventures beyond the Upper East Side and finds that sometimes exes have all the fun.­Impeccably rendered with wit and style, The Ex-­Mrs. Hedgefund is an old-­fashioned love story and a celebration of New York-­in any economy. Download here Read online

The first victim is Dylan Vogler, a charming ex-­convict who manages the Bay Beans West coffee shop in San Francisco`s Haight-­Ashbury district. When his body is found, inspectors discover that his knapsack is filled with high-­grade marijuana. It soon becomes clear that San Francisco`s A-­list flocked to Bay Beans West not only for their caffeine fix.­But how much did Maya Townshend the beautiful socialite niece of the city`s mayor, and the absentee owner of the shop know about what was going on inside her business? And how intimate had she really been with Dylan, her old college friend?­As another of Maya`s acquaintances falls victim to murder, and as the names of the dead men`s celebrity, political, and even law-­enforcement customers come to light, tabloid-­fueled controversy takes the investigation into the realms of conspiracy and cover-­up. Prosecutors close in on Maya, who has a deep secret of her own a secret she needs to protect at all costs during ...

Lawyer Dismas Hardy is thrown into a panic when his wife fails to turn up to collect their children from school. He discovers that she is being held in jail for contempt of court because she`s refusing to divulge in a grand jury trial a confidence given to her by a friend, Ron Beaumont. download here READ ONLINE

Every night before I go to sleep, I like to write a simple “to-do” list that I group into two categories. I put some in category ‘A’ (must be done tomorrow) and some in category ‘B’ (must be worked on or done in 2-3 days). I do this because when I sit down at the computer to do work without a plan, I tend to fall flat on my face. My so called “work time” turns into the not-so-productive “check email time” or “browse Reddit” time; nothing of any importance gets done. It seems that I’m not alone! In research by Gollwitzer and colleagues , the subject of “if-then” plans was discussed in relation to how we set and stay consistent with out goals, and the results are not surprising but reveal a lot of insight into how our brain reacts to planning (and even some great tips). The thing is, researchers found that not only do well laid plans seem to get accomplished more often, but planning for failures along the way (“In case of emergency…”) helps people stay on task under...

One of the ways in which your brain continues it’s trickery is through busywork: work that gets “something” done, but not something that produces any measurable results. In fact, research by John Bargh and colleagues reveals that our brain just loves to become robotic and to even mimic people out of habit. I shouldn’t have to tell you that this is disastrous to achieving long term goals! This busy work is often a mechanism our brain uses in cohesion with avoiding big projects (mentioned above): instead of diving into the difficult tasks we KNOW we should get done, we’ll instead float around doing semi-related (read: barely related) menial tasks to make ourselves feel productive without actually getting anything done. Here’s the thing: you might not achieve something pleasant  with that kind of busywork. It takes doing the hard work and it takes deliberate practice, there’s no way around it. The thing is, your brain knows this, that’s why you have to remind i...

Anyone who’s fought the good fight with dieting will likely recognize this phenomenon. Envision this: You’re on a diet, and have been doing well for about 2 1/2 weeks, but you know your defenses are at risk. To make matters worse, you’re having dinner with friends tonight. Instead of the healthy meal you could have made at home, you’re forced to use a restaurant menu. The problem is this: At the bar before dinner, you had a little “cheat” moment by ordering snacks and drinks, after all, you’re with your pals tonight, right? You know that those drinks and snacks, combined with the bread you had before dinner, leave you with one option to stay a bit over your caloric intake goals: you must eat a salad. The thing is, your brain is yelling out “BURGER!”. Instead of finishing the day a tad over your 2000 calorie goal, you order the burger with fries and don’t look back. The crazy thing about this scenario? It’s much more than a momentary act of weakness: psycholog...

Everybody realizes that they procrastinate from time to time, and it’s something we are forced to battle with every day. How can we fight this persistent opponent? Interesting research from Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik (of whom the Zeigarnik Effect is named after) reveals to us an interesting tidbit about the human mind: we are better at remembering things that are partially done . Ms. Zeigarnik came to this conclusion by testing the memory of folks doing simple “brain” tasks like puzzles or crafts. She then interrupted them and asked them to recall (with specific detail) the tasks that they were doing or had completed. She found that people were twice as likely to recall more detail about the tasks they had been interrupted in than in the tasks they had completed. What does this have to do with procrastination? Before we get to that, know this: in a study by Kenneth McGraw , participants were given a very tricky puzzle to solve with an “unlimited” amount of ti...

Would you believe that fantasizing is the #1 way your brain can unintentionally ruin your goals? It seems unlikely, right? The thing is, the proof is in the pudding (or in this case, the research): psychologists have found that while positive thinking about the future is broadly beneficial, too much fantasy can have disastrous results on achieving goals . The problem with positive fantasies is that they allow us to anticipate success in the here and now. However, they don’t alert us to the problems we are likely to face along the way and can leave us with less motivation—after all, it feels like we’ve already reached our goal. It’s one way in which our minds own brilliance lets us down. Because it’s so amazing at simulating our achievement of future events, it can actually undermine our attempts to achieve those goals in reality . Our poor brain is thus a victim of itself. Again, this is not to say that visualizing goals is necessarily a haphazard strategy for ac...

As admittedly wonderful and fascinating as the human brain is, it definitely can feel like our brain is out to get us sometimes. Summed up perfectly in the many observations of the “Scumbag Brain” meme, our brain does seem to engage in “sabotage” in terms of how it naturally reacts to situations. In this next post you’ll learn how to combat your brain’s own brilliance, overcoming it’s instinctual reactions which often have devastating effects on those all-important long term goals that you set for yourself. Let’s get started!

I used to think ordinary lives were the low-key, under-the-radar, stay-at-home kind of lives and the extraordinary ones were the ones filled with travel and people and crazy adventure. I’m learning to see that the dividing line I thought I saw between those lives isn’t really there. Let me explain. Have you ever noticed, when you’re watching an inspirational video, how much difference the music makes? The photography might be amazing and the visuals might be inspiring, but what would happen if you turned the music off? A key element would be missing. Wouldn’t it? The song without the footage doesn’t quite do it. Neither does the footage without the song. There’s something about the two of them together. They just “pop” in a way nothing else does. I want my life to “pop” like that. But what is the difference between a life that “pops” and one that doesn’t? For a long time I thought that, if life wasn’t quite “popping” the way I wanted it to, I needed to do someth...

It’s astonishing how quickly things change. Weather. Goals. Dreams. Loves. Expectations. Interests. Life can shift so quickly  So what do we do when the seasons of our life begin to transform? How do we anticipate what is coming next? Here are 3 ways to embrace life’s shifting seasons: 1. Don’t wear a winter jacket in summer. Whether you are starting a new job, about to get married, moving to a different place, or just trying something new, there are things that you did before that you cannot carry with you into your next opportunity. Be open to learning and taking advice from others. Be open to letting go of things that don’t serve you anymore. God wants to use the people, places and circumstances around you to bless and teach you. 2. Weather the storm. I once read on the wall of a camping store, “There is no bad weather, only bad clothes.” This is as true in life as it is in camping. We often don’t know what the next season will bring. Prepare for u...

I’m getting into some debatable vocabulary here, but I want to point out a stark difference between imagination and fantasy. I’m hoping a simple dileniation might help those of you with active imaginations. I’m capable of living almost exclusively in my mind. I can walk and daydream for hours. But some of these daydreams haven’t proved helpful. And the ones that aren’t helpful are daydreams about my own glory. C.S. Lewis delineated between the two in his book Surprised by Joy . In the book, he talks about his early days imagining “Animal Land” which was a world he made up with his older brother. The time he spent imagining Animal Land, he noted, was great practice for becoming a writer. But fantasies about his own glory, he noted, (he would often spend time fantasizing about being a good dancer) was only practice for becoming a fool. Gulp. If I’m daydreaming about where a chapter might go, or an idea for a future book, it’s a good thing to let my mind run wild. ...

Human footprints were found preserved on Calvert Island in Canada They were radiocarbon dated to a remarkable 13,200 years old If confirmed they would be the oldest human footprints in North America Discovery also suggests people once migrated down the coast Human footprints were found preserved on Calvert Island in Canada They were radiocarbon dated to a remarkable 13,200 years old If confirmed they would be the oldest human footprints in North America Discovery also suggests people once migrated down the coast Read more: HERE