What shocked you today?

His name is
KN Krishna Bhat. 86 years old.

He gets paid just twice a year.

He cleans & does puja to the massive 9+ feet tall “Badavi Linga” in Hampi, Karnataka, daily.

After Vijayanagara was destroyed by Bahamani Sultans, no puja for 450 years. He restarted in 1980s!

What shocked me today is this great man at such a old age has to do this. Where has the so called Indian Youth gone? To my surprise he has been doing it daily for last 35 years.

I was in awe of this Great Brahmana Pujary, looking at his chiselled abs, shoulders, biceps, well defined chest muscles ….! This was his pic some years ago. He was well into 80’s then.

If we can’t help the priests, I don’t know who else would.

I think it’s a right time people should start thinking about these people who work selflessly for the temples and Lord.

No help is big enough when we see such people who have dedicated their lives for Dharma!

Step up and help!

How can you uncover your best self?

Start by judging other people — really

Uncovering your micro-motives — that collection of super-specialized things that make your particular heart sing — are key to finding fulfillment and success at work, say social scientists Todd Rose and Ogi Ogas. And there’s a fun way to identify them: observing how you judge others.

Social scientists Todd Rose and Ogi Ogas (of the Harvard Graduate School of Education) study dark horses: the people who triumph against the odds, the winners nobody saw coming.

A dark horse can be an opera singer or a dog trainer, a hairstylist or a diplomat … or a sommelier, carpenter, puppeteer, architect, embalmer, chess grandmaster, midwife, art conservator, astronomer, landscape architect. (These are just some of the people that Rose and Ogas have interviewed as part of their Dark Horse project.) “The personalities of dark horses are just as diverse and unpredictable as you would find in any random sampling of human beings,” write Rose and Ogas. However, “there is a common thread that binds them all together: dark horses are fulfilled.”

So, how do you start finding fulfillment for yourself? In their work, Rose and Ogas have identified four critical elements of fulfillment — including a fascinating factor that they call micro-motives. And this small but mighty trait could be the clue to your best self. Here’s how you can find yours.

Your motives comprise the emotional core of your individuality. What you desire — and what you do not desire — defines who you are in a unique and deeply personal manner. When you do activities that match up with your true motives, your journey will be compelling and satisfying. But if you misjudge or ignore your motives, your progress will be plodding and dreary, or you may abandon the road altogether.

It’s essential to know exactly what puts the wind in your sails — not what someone else thinks should get you going. That’s why knowing your micro-motives is a crucial element of the dark horse mindset. Just ask Saul Shapiro.

When Saul encounters a wobbly wheel on a shopping cart or a tilted picture frame, his mind is drawn to manipulate the components until they are square and right.

Saul has a seemingly unusual micro-motive: he likes aligning physical objects with his hands. When he encounters something awry, like a wobbly wheel on a shopping cart or a tilted picture frame, his mind is drawn by an invisible pulley to manipulate the components until they are square and right. You will not find the urge to align things on any list of universal motives, yet for Saul, this desire is genuine, potent and deeply personal.

One of Saul’s most fulfilling memories from college was when a design professor instructed the class to carve a sphere out of a block of wood by hand. Saul became obsessed. After chiseling a rough sphere, he placed it in a bag that he carried wherever he went. All day long, he put his hand inside the bag to feel for uneven spots, then used sandpaper to smooth them. The act of eliminating imperfections filled him with gratification. When Saul turned in the sphere, it was so perfect that his teacher refused to believe he hadn’t used machine tools.

You might be thinking, that’s nice … but what profession could harness this micro-motive? One possibility is orthodontics, where the central task is aligning people’s teeth. Another possibility is electrical engineering, which is what Saul chose. He was hired as an engineer to tackle a tough technical problem: creating a physical interface that would convert an electrical signal on an old-style copper wire onto a laser signal on a newly invented fiber-optic cable. It required precisely aligning a semiconductor chip the size of a grain of sand with a fiber the width of a human hair, and the alignment had to be precise within a fraction of a micron.

Saul ended up being successful, and his interface was widely adopted throughout the telecommunications industry. It also made his employer a fortune, while Saul received only a small bonus. This disparity led him to question his role. “I would see guys with MBAs making presentations, and they were making much more money than me and getting to run the company, too,” he says. “I started to think to myself, Maybe I should be one of those guys.”

So he abandoned a fulfilling engineering career and moved into middle management. But his collection of micro-motives was not compatible with his new role; he did not enjoy supervising others and he was not interested in networking, presenting his ideas to others, or persuading them of his point of view. His most potent micro-motives — working with his hands, tinkering with gadgets and mechanisms, doing math calculations, working alone, and aligning objects — were largely neglected as a manager.

At the age of 53, Saul was working part-time at H&R Block doing people’s taxes for $10 an hour.

Saul spent the next 16 years going through ups and downs — but mostly downs — as a middle manager at media and tech organizations. By his late forties, he could no longer get hired yet he couldn’t return to his previous career because his engineering knowledge had become outdated. At the age of 53, he was working part-time at H&R Block doing people’s taxes for $10 an hour. Not only was he unfulfilled, he was not making much money, the reason he had switched careers in the first place.

One thing that still meant a lot to him was being his own boss. Since he didn’t want to start a business from scratch, he met with a franchise broker who told him about affordable franchises — such as employment agencies and elder-care agencies — that were available to purchase in New York City.

One surprising franchise caught Saul’s eye: upholstery repair. Even though he had no experience with it, he recognized that success depends on one’s ability to align fabrics and patches, a process he knew he’d enjoy. He’d be able to use his hands and immediately see the fruits of his labor. He could do jobs from home so he wouldn’t have to own a shop, and he could work by himself so he wouldn’t need to oversee employees.

In 2013, Saul opened an upholstery-repair franchise in Manhattan. He mastered the trade, and now he does repairs for Broadway shows, TV personalities and Times Square hotels. “People who know me best would agree that I’m happier now than with anything else I have done with my career,” he says. “I enjoy what I do almost every day and I’m financially secure. In the end, I figured out how to align my livelihood to my nature.”

Saul discovered his micro-motives by enduring years of jobs that didn’t suit him. For better or worse, most of us won’t have such trials to inform us. Fortunately, you can take advantage of an instinctive activity that you perform every day to grab hold of the micro-motives buried inside you and hold them up to the light. We call it “the game of judgment.”

Your goal in playing the game of judgment is to use your instinctive reactions to others to zero in on these live wires and attempt to trace them to their source.

How many times over the past week have you judged someone — a colleague, a talking head on cable TV, a stranger in the checkout line? Well, you’re going to use these unfiltered reactions to learn something about you. Your micro-motives are composed of deeply rooted feelings, which include subtle preferences, frank desires and private longings. Your goal in playing the game of judgment is to use your instinctive reactions to others to zero in on these live wires and attempt to trace them to their source.

There are three steps to the game of judgment. First, become aware of the moments when you’re judging someone. We all do this all the time. It’s human nature to react to others, whether it’s a mail carrier, police officer, massage therapist, neighbor, store clerk or someone on a magazine cover. Develop an awareness of when you’re doing it, so you can consciously attend to your reaction.

Second, identify the feelings that emerge as you judge someone. How do you know when you’re on the scent of a micro-motive? When you have a vivid reaction. It doesn’t matter whether it’s positive or negative, celebratory or condemnatory, the feeling just needs to be strong. Remember, you’re trying to get in touch with your authentic emotional core.

Third, ask yourself why you are experiencing those feelings. Remember: be honest. The physicist Richard Feynman said it best when he warned, “You must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” Focus on what you would like if you had their life … but also what you would hate. For instance, if you watch a celebrity interview and find yourself thinking, “How can anyone be truly happy when they are chasing riches or fame?” then you know that money and acclaim are probably not powerful motivators for you.

On the other hand, if you reacted to the story of Saul Shapiro by thinking, “Come on . . . the guy’s an upholstery repairman. Let’s not pretend he’s successful!”– you’ve learned something valuable about your micr0-motives. Status and acclaim matter greatly to you. That’s fine; own it. To attain fulfillment, you must be true to what lights your fire — whatever that may be.

When you’re judging a debt collector, try to determine which gets your heart thumping faster: the process of tracking down deadbeats, or the act of making them pay?

The most difficult part is resisting the sense that there are some motives we should be driven by — such as money, or helping other people. This can cause us to suppress or downplay our own micro-motives. The game of judgment can help you break the spell, as long as you are attentive and specific. If you are favorably judging a park ranger, you may initially think, “Being outside and around nature all day would be great.” Or, judging a debt collector, your reaction might be, “Oh boy, I’d love tracking down deadbeats and forcing them to pay up.”

Don’t stop there. Keep sifting through your feelings until you’ve gone as far as you can. For example, with the park ranger, you might also realize, “Even though being outside would be great, it does seem like a lonely job. I don’t think I could handle the daily isolation.” Now you’ve identified two potential micro-motives: the desire to be around nature and the desire for steady social engagement.

Or, when judging the debt collector, try to determine which gets your heart thumping faster: is it the process of tracking down deadbeats, or the act of making them pay? Is there something about catching people who are trying to avoid being caught that energizes you? Or is it something about being an agent of fair play and administering justice when nobody else can? When it comes to knowing your micro-motives, the details always matter.

Keep in mind, the purpose of the game of judgment isn’t to coolly assess the merits and deficiencies of other people. It’s not about them at all. The goal is to use your intense emotional responses to ferret out the hidden contours of your own desires. You’re both the player and referee in the game of judgment, and only you can know for sure when you’ve traced one of your micro-motives to its fullest depth.

The game of judgment can take some time to get the hang of, but it’s far more reliable and effective than standardized tests of motivation. There are hundreds of career tests that employers and guidance counselors use to evaluate the motives of employees and students each year. Despite what their creators may insist, these tests are not designed to help you identify your unique pattern of motivations, but rather to determine how closely your responses resemble those of the “average professional” in a given field.

Standardized assessments of motivation are doomed to misinterpret or ignore one of the most important facets of your micro-motives: the presence of contradictory motives, such as the desire to interact with other people and the desire to be alone, or the desire to conform and the desire to rebel. When you are committed to embracing the diversity of your micro-motives, the most antithetical of them can be reconciled, harnessed and consolidated into a unified sense of purpose.

Thankyou.

3 ways that your memory stays sharp even when you get older.

While overall memory declines as we age, that’s far from the end of the story. In fact, there are certain things older people continue to remember quite well, says researcher Alan D. Castel.

Our memories are our identities, and at my lab at UCLA, I’ve worked to understand how we remember what matters to us, especially as we age. Memory decline is one of the first things that concern people about growing older — it can start after the age of 20, so being more forgetful when you are 60 or 70 is often normal. And while a vast amount of research has shown the deficits that accompany aging, it’s far too simplistic to say that the elderly have impaired memories. In fact, there are many things older adults remember quite well. Here’s a look at a few of them:

1. Older people tend to remember the essentials.

A great deal of memory research focuses on what might be considered by some of us to be mundane — word lists, face-name pairs, studying and being tested on pictures — and it’s unclear why this might be important to remember. But how about things that are of real concern or interest?

Imagine you’re packing for a trip. You want to make sure you’ve put in the most important items, the ones that would be extremely costly and/or inconvenient if you forgot them (e.g., your passport, your credit cards). While I wish we could have followed people on their vacations to see what they left behind, we created an experiment to examine this in the lab. We presented subjects with 20 possible items that you might pack on a trip (e.g., medications, passport, sunscreen, toothbrush, phone charger, deodorant, swimsuit, sandals). When we later asked them to recall the items, the older adults (average age was 68) recalled more of the items that they felt were important than the younger adults (average age of 20.4), even though they remembered fewer items overall. We’ve since done other studies showing older adults will have a greater memory for important medication side effects from a long list and for a grandchild’s dangerous allergens than younger adults.

We did another experiment when we came up with a list of words to remember. Some were more important and paired with higher point-values or rewards, while others were less important and associated with lower point-values or rewards. The goal was to maximize one’s overall memory reward — to do that, you needed to remember the words paired with the highest values. We found that older adults remembered fewer words overall but recalled just as many of the highest-value words as younger adults.

2. Older people tend to remember what they need to do in the future.

Sometimes the most important things for us to remember involve future actions. This is called “prospective memory” — and it might take the form of remembering to take medications at a certain time tomorrow, or paying a credit card bill on a particular date or else we’ll get penalized. While prospective memory might be worse in older age, there are important exceptions. Researchers have found a “prospective memory paradox”: despite older adults doing poorly on laboratory tasks of prospective memory, they fare well in the real world.

For example, in research studies older adults may be asked to perform a future task such as “When you see the word ‘president’ on the next page, please raise your hand.” Sometimes they get so focused on reading that they forget to react when “president” appears — but does that mirror the forgetfulness of not taking one’s medication at noon in 2 days? As many of us know, older adults have often developed strategies to prompt their prospective memories, like putting their wallet by the front door or their medications by their eyeglasses. To bridge this gap between lab-based prospective memory tests and real life, one study asked people who came to the lab to mail back postcards every week; researchers wanted to determine how younger and older adults would compare in remembering to do this future-focused task. To their surprise, it was the older adults who diligently mailed in the postcards each week.

Of course, some older adults remember to do things the old-fashioned way: they write it down in a calendar they consult every day. When I called then-97-year-old John Wooden, retired from a legendary career as a basketball coach, to schedule an interview, he wrote it in a calendar. Then, he called me the day before to confirm I was still coming to see him — he was reminding me!

3. Older people tend to remember what intrigues them.

Humans are curious from an early age. My young son loves the adventures of the mischievous Curious George and of learning about the world. Our curiosity blossoms with age, but we typically become interested in different things as we get older. After all, Curious George is not the favorite bedtime reading of most adults.

To test your own level of curiosity and memory, read the following trivia questions, decide how interested you are in learning the answers (on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being not interested at all, and 10 being extremely interested), and then try to come up with answers (the answers are at the very bottom of this article):

What mammal sleeps the shortest amount each day?

What was the first product to have a bar code?

What was the first nation to give women the right to vote?

These are fairly difficult trivia questions, and some are probably more interesting to you than others. In one study done in my lab, younger and older adults were given questions like those that you just read. Much like those, all of the queries were chosen such that we guessed almost none of the participants knew the correct answers. Afterwards, the subjects gave each a curiosity rating — showing how interested they were in learning the answer. They were then told the answers. A week later, the same subjects were presented with the same questions and asked to recall the answers. It was the older adults who remembered the ones they were more curious about — and they forgot the less interesting ones. The younger adults didn’t show this pattern.

There’s a certain pleasure in recalling trivia and absorbing new information about the world. I’ve noticed the most popular games at senior centers and retirement communities often involve this kind of random knowledge. People sometimes worry about having too many stray facts in their minds. But even though trivia may appear to have little useful value, the fact that it continues to arouse curiosity — and sticks in older people’s minds — shouldn’t be discounted.

4. OK, older people may forget what they’re doing in a particular room, but they can jog their memory.

Our surroundings can influence how we remember things. Have you ever found yourself in the kitchen and not had the faintest idea what compelled you to go there? This is a common occurrence for everyone, but especially for older adults. Some research suggests that walking through doorways or crossing physical boundaries may actually trigger forgetting. When you move from one place to the next, the doorway leads to a new environment that does not provide the necessary cues to remember what you were doing in the other room. As you enter the new room, your brain must either keep in mind or re-create what you were thinking when you were in the earlier room — but our minds often wander as we go to another room or we start thinking about something else.

The best way to remember what you need is to walk back into the first room where you originally had the thought of why you needed to go to the other room. The context of that original room can trigger your original intention. In addition, walking is one of the best ways to keep your memory sharp. With enough time and walking, you’ll find the memory eventually comes back.

P.S. But don’t get too hung up on what you can and can’t remember.

Our beliefs about our memory can be very influential. In fact, many of us have negative beliefs and expectations about aging’s impact on the brain. This kind of “stereotype threat” can make people perform stereotypically — in a way that is consistent with what they think is expected of them. Stereotype threat has been examined to determine if it causes older adults to underperform on tests of memory. Labeling something a memory test, or asking people to come to a memory study, does appear to invoke anxiety, and research has shown that renaming it as a “wisdom test” (and then administering the same memory test) leads to better performance by older adults. So, the next time you start to worry about forgetting a world capital or a famous actor’s name and wonder what this means about your brain and your memory, try not to sweat it.

Note: The research covered here involves mostly healthy older adults who report memory changes in older age. However, if you experience more frequent and concerning memory problems, you should consider consulting a neurologist.

Hallucination, reveals our mind.

Neurologists and author

Oliver sacks brings our attention to Charles bonett syndrome

We see with the eyes but we see also see with the brain. And seeing with brain is often called imagination. And we are familiar with the landscapes of our imaginations, our inscapes. We have lived with them all our lives. But there are also hallucinations as well, and hallucinations are completely different. They don’t seem to be of our own creations. They don’t seem to be under our control. They seem to be coming from outside and to mimic perception. Here Oliver sacks is going to talk about hallucinations, varoius types of hallucinations.

What are hallucinations? Why do we get hallucinations?

There are many different types of hallucinations. And a particular sort of visual hallucination. An , old lady, Rosalie, a patient of mine, started experiencing visual hallucinations. When she has been completely blind from macular degeneration for last five years.

I went into see her. It was evident straight away that she was perfectly sane and lucid, and of good intelligence, but she has been very startled, because she’d been seeing things. So I said,”What sort of things?” And she said,”People in eastern dress, in drapes walking up and downstairs. A man who turns towards me and smiles. But he had huge teeth on one side of his mouth. Animals too. Then one night the scene changes i see cats and dogs walking towards me and then stop at a certain point. Then changes again, I see a lot of children walikng up and downstairs, they wear bright colours, rose and blue, like eastern dresses”. So I said, “Is this like a dream?”

She said,”No, it’s not like a dream, it’s like a movie, a silent movie and she said it’s rather one of the boring movies.” These hallucinations are completely unrelated to any thing she was feeling or doing, they seem to come on by themselves and disappear. She had no control over them.

On one occasion one saw, a man in a sriped shirt in a restaurant. He turned around and then, he divided into six figures in striped shirts, who started walking towards her. And then the six figures came together again, like a corcentina. Once, when she was driving or rather her husband was driving the road divided into four, she felt herself going up simultaneously up four roads. These are the examples of very mobile hallucinations. Sometimes she sees a teenage boy sitting on the hood of the car. And when they came to a stop, boy would do a sudden vertical take off about 100 feet in the air and then disappear.

This another woman has another different type of hallucinations, she was fine with her sight but, the visual parts of her brain, , little tumor in the occipital cortex. And above all, she would see cartoons. These cartoons would be transparent and would cover half the visual field like a screen. And especially she saw cartoons of Kermit, the frog. She said,”Why Kermit? Kermit, the Frog means nothing to me.”

But what did disturb her was the persistent, continuous images or hallucinations of faces, and the faces were often deformed, of very large eyes or teeth. And these frightened her.

Well what is going on with these people?

The tough part in this is reassuring people, that they aren’t going insane. And about 10 percent of the visually impaired people get these. But not more than 1 percent of the people acknowledge them, because they are afraid that they will be seen as insane or something. And if they do mention to their doctors, they might be misdiagnosed. In particular there’s a notion that if you see things or hear things, you’re going mad. But these psychotic hallucination are quiet different. Psychotic hallucinations whether they are visual or vocal, they address you, they accuse you. They seduce you, they humiliate you. They jeer at you. You interact with them.

There’s a film, you are seeing a film which has nothing to do with you or that’s how people think about it.

Temporal lobe hallucinations

There is also a rare thing called temporal lobe epilepsy, and sometimes if one has this, one may feel oneself transported back to a time and place in the past.

You’re at a particular road junction. Smell chestnuts roasting, hear the traffic, all senses involved, waiting for your girl. And it’s that day, back in 1982. And the temporal lobe hallucinations are all senses hallucinations, full of feeling, full of familiarity, located in the space and time, coherent, dramatic.

Charles bonnet hallucinations

Charles bonnet hallucinations are quiet different. So, in charles bonnet hallucinations, you have all sorts of level, from geometrical hallucinations to pink, blue squares up to quiet elaborate hallucinations with figures and especially faces, and sometimes deformed faces, are the are the single commonest thing in these hallucinations. And the second commonest is cartoons.

So, what’s being going on?

Fascinatingly, in the last few years, it is possible to do functional brain imagery, to do fMRI on the people as they are hallucinating. And, to find the different parts of the brain are activated as they are hallucinating.

When people have this geometric hallucinations, primary visual cortex is activated. This is the part of the brain that perceives edges and patterns. You don’t form images in this part of your brain. When images are formed a higher part of visual cortex is involved in the temporal lobe. And in particular one area of the temporal lobe is called the fusiform gyrus. And it’s known that people have damage in their fusiform gyrus, they may losse the ability to recognize faces. But if there’s abnormal activity in the fusiform gyrus, they may hallucinate faces, and this is exactly what you find in some of these people. There is an anterior part of this gyrus, where teeth and eyes are represented, and that part of the gyrus is activated when people get deformed hallucinations.

The basic algorithm used to image black hole, revealed

At the heart of the milky way there’s a massive black hole that feeds off a spinning disks of hot gases, sucking up anything that ventures close to it–even light. We can’t see it but it’s event horizon costs a shadow could help answer some important event of universe. Scientists used to think taking such an huge image would take an telescope the size of the earth until Katie butman and team of astronomers came up with a clever alternative.

A hundred years ago Albert einstein first published his theory of general relativity. In the years since then scientists have provided a lot of evidence, in support of it. But one thing predicted from this theory, black holes, still have not been directly observed.

Although we have some ideas what black hole might look like, we’ve never actually taken a picture of it before.

But that did changed. We’re seeing first picture of our black hole, now.

Getting this first picture will come down to an international team of scientists, an earth sized telescope and an algorithm that puts together in final picture.

Here is the brief glimpse into the efforts involved.

So if you out past the bright city lights tonight, you may be just lucky enough to see a stunning view of the milky way galaxy.

And if you zoom past millions of stars, 26,000 light years towards the heart of the spiraling milky way, we do eventually reach at the cluster of stars right at the center. Peering past all galactic dust with infrared telescopes, astronomers have watched these stars for over 16 years.

But it’s what they don’t see is the most spectacular. These stars seems to orbit an invisible object. By tracking the path of these stars, astronomers have concluded that only thing small and heavy enough to cause this motion, is a supermassive black hole– an object so dense that it sucks up anything that ventures too close — even light.

But what happens if we were to zoom in further?

Is it impossible to see anything by definition, that is impossible to see?

If we were to zoom into radio wavelengths, we expect to see a ring of light caused by gravitational lensing of hot plasma zipping around the black hole.

In other words, the black hole cause the shadow on this backdrop of bright material, carving out a sphere of darkness. This bright ring reveals the black hole’s event horizon, where the gravitational pull becomes so great that not even light can escape.

Einstein’s equation predict the size and shape of this ring, so taking the picture of it wouldn’t really be only cool, it would also help us to verify that these equations hold in the extreme conditions around the black hole.

However this black hole is so far away from us, that from earth, this ring appears incredibly small — the same size to us as an orange appears to us on moon. That makes taking the picture of it extremely difficult.

Why is that?

Well, it all comes down to a simple equation.

Due to phenomenon called diffraction, there are fundamental limits to the smallest objects that we can possibly see.

This governing equation says that in order to see smaller and smaller, we need to make our telescope bigger and bigger. But even with the most powerful optical telescopes here on earth, we can’t even go close to the resolution necessary to the image of the surface of moon.

So how big telescope do we need in order to take a high resolution picture of the Black hole?

Well, by crunching the numbers you can easily calculate that we would need a telescope of the size of the entire earth.

If we could make a telescope of the size of the Earth we could just start to make that distinctive ring of light indicative of black hole’s event horizon.

Although this won’t allow us to see a clear image of the black hole but we could get a glimpse of the immediate environment around the black hole and black hole.

But as we all know building a single dish telescope of the size of the Earth would be impossible.

And by connecting telescopes around the world we were able to create an international collaboration called the Event horizon telescope, is creating a computational telescope of the size Earth, capable of resolving structure on the scale of black hole’s event horizon. Each telescope in the world wide network works together. Linked to the precise timings of atomic clock, teams of researchers at each of the site freeze light by collecting thousands of terabytes of data. This data is then processed here in a lab in Massachusetts.

So how does this even works?

So let’s just pretend we could built an earth sized telescope. So it would be a little bit like turning the Earth into a giant spinning disco ball. Each individual mirror would collect light that we could then combine together to make a picture.

However, now let’s say we remove most of those mirrors so only a few remained. We could still try to combine this information together, but now there are a lots of holes. These remaining represent the mirrors where we have telescope. This is an incredibly small number to take a measurements to make a picture from. But although we only collect light at a few telescopic locations, as the earth rotates, we get to see other measurements. In other words, as disco ball moves, mirrors changes locations and we get to observe different parts of the image.

Algorithms developed to take the picture of the black hole.

The imaging algorithm we develop to fill the missing gaps of the disco ball in order to reconstruct the underlying black hole image. Katie Bouman designed those algorithm to find the most reasonable image that also fits the telescope measurements. Using these algorithms we’re able to piece together the pictures from this sparse, noisy data.

Since there are number of infinite images that perfectly explain our telescope measurements, we have to chose between them in some way. We do this by ranking the images based upon how likely they are to be the black hole image,and then choosing the one that’s most likely.

But when it comes to the images from black hole, we’re posed with a real conundrum; we’ve not seen any black hole images before.

In that case what is likely a black hole image, and what should we assume about the structure of black hole?

If all images produce a very similar – looking image, then we can start to become more confident. One way we can try to impose different image features is by using pieces of existing images. So, we take a large collection of images, and we beark them down into their little patches. We then can treat each image like a puzzle pieces. And we used the commonly seen puzzle pieces to piece together in an image that also fits our telescopic measurements. Different types of pieces has distinctive set of puzzle pieces.

So what happens we take the same data but we use different set of puzzles to reconstruct an image?

So if we get the same image by different set of puzzles we start to become more confident that the image assumptions we are making aren’t biasing the final image we get too much. So picture of a black hole that we have never seen before be eventually be created by piecing together the pictures we see all the time.

Measurements like these help us find the very first image of black hole and hopefully, verify those basic theories om which scientists rely on a daily basis.

Thankyou

The coming neurological epidemic

Biochemist Gregory Petsko, makes a convincing argument that, in next 50 years we will see an epidemic of neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease as the as the world population ages.

Unless we use something to prevent it over the next 40 years we are facing an epidemic of neurological diseases on a global scale. This planet, earth has more than 20 percent of it’s population over the age of 65. This is the world we live in. And this is the world your chlidren will live in.

For 12,000 years, the distribution of ages in human population has looked like a pyramid, with oldest on the top. It’s already flattening out. By 2050, it starts to be a column and starts to invert. This is why it’s happening.

The average lifespans more than doubled since 1840, and it’s increasing currently at the rate of about 5 hours every day. And this why, that’s not entirely a good thing; because over the age of 65, the risk of getting Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease will increase eventually.

Right now those other neurological diseases for which we have no cure or prevention —

Costs about a third of the trillion dollars a year. And it will be well over a trillion dollars by 2050.

Cause:

Alzheimer’s disease starts when a protien that should be folded up properly, misfolds, into a kind of demented origami.

So approach being taken is to try to design a drugs that function like molecular scotch tape, to hold the protien into it’s proper shape. That would keep ut from forming the tangles that seem to kill large sections of brain when they do. Interestingly enough, other neurological disesaes which affects very different parts of the brain also show tangles of misfolded proteins, which suggest that the approach might be just a general one and might be used to cure other diseases, not just Alzheimer’s disease.

There’s also a connection to cancer here, people with neurological disesae have very low incidence of most cancers. And this is the reason that most people aren’t pursuing right now, but which we’re fascinated by.

Most of the important and all the creative work in this area is being funded by private philanthropies. And there’s a scope for additional private help here.

In the meanwhile we all have been waiting for all this to happen here’s what you can do for yourself

If you want to lower your risk of Parkinson’s disease caffeine is protective to some extent, and nobody knows why.

Head injuries are bad for you they lead to Parkinson’s disease.

And the Avian flu is also bad.

As fas as protecting yourself from Alzheimer’s disease, well it turns out that fish oil has the effect of reducing your risk for Alzheimer’s disease. You should also keep your blood pressure down, because the chronic high blood pressure is the biggest risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. Its also the biggest risk factor for& glaucoma, which is just Alzheimer’s disease of the eye.

And of course, when it comes to cognitive effects, “use it or lose it” applies so you want to stay mentally stimulated.

Thankyou

How do we survive? The brain theory.

Humans are a huge deposits of emotions and feelings. When emotions die, we die. So, to live, of course you gotta gather your internal feelings and observations from your surroundings to make an impact on your brain and let it work. The most important organ called C.P.U. right.

Brain

Brain is rightly regarded as CPU of the human body and its not just to say, it is of course, the major working unit, on which whole body functioning depends. It keeps whole body intact, functional and working.

The Survival Theory

Our body, human body is basically made up of cells. Cells die, multiply, increse in number and so on, this keeps on. They store energy, process energy, etc. But, what if they don’t get the proper directions from brain. How to work?

So the basic theory behind the working of our body is, our brain commanding our body. And the whole body works on electric signals.

What are these electric signals?

Whenever we experience something, we see, we observe, we feel, cells, do get to work. We start responding. Responding to hot, cold, good, bad, humble, we respond to everything. And that response is basically responsible for our survival.

What happens, when we observe?

When we observe, our cells get functional and send electric signals from sensory organs to commanding organ, The brain. And that makes brain work. It receives signal and start sending information to the organ to what to do next, in any situation. And brain works.

So this is the basic phenomenon in very easy words.

Lets, get to science

Scientists have evolved and we all know this very well, when we work, we grow and sitting idle makes us shrink. It shrinks our thoughts, our reception, our body, visualizations, i mean, every single thing got degraded.

So is with the brain. When, brain is at rest after day long tiring constant work, it grows, it rejuvenates its power. But, what if, it us kept non-functional for a long time. Say, we stop dreaming, thinking, making up, working, it starts to shrink, it ceases to grow.

Our body needs food to grow, and brain, continuously needs those electric signals that keep it awake and working. More work done, leads to more activity in cerebral cortex and more the activity, leads to increase in number of neurons and this the basic phenomenon of our brain activeness. And if brain is healthy and lively, we too are.

It would be shocking for you to know, that if brain doesn’t works well, it could lead to any problem, respiratory, breathing, paralysis, numbness ans so on. Because it is, The Brain that is making whole body and body parts functional.

Any activity, that lets brain to be fully involved in to, is very important for our better being. Let it be anything, the game you love play, the book you like to read, the music, the nature, the beauty, any thing that gives you immense pleasure in doing, observing, is, the only thing, that helps us survive.

Mental activities, sucess, failure, joy, and even stress anything that gives us reason to think deeply add up to our Survival.

Thanks for reading

Brain cell regeneration

Siddharthan Chandaran

brain repair by stem cells

After a traumatic brain injury, it sometimes happen that the brain cell can repair itself, building new cells to repair damaged ones. But the repair doesn’t happen quickly enough to allow recovery from degenerative diseases like motor neuron disease. Siddharthan Chandran walks through new techniques using special stem cells that allow the repair faster.

Before we talk about brain diseases lets discuss the brain. Here i am going to teach you what i have learnt in my medical school.

The brain is terribly simple. It’s made up of four cells.

Two of them are, a nerve cell and a myelinating cell or insulating cell. It’s called oligodentrocyte. And when these cells work together in health and harmony, they create extraordinary symphony of electrical activity, and it is this electric activity that underpins our abitity to think, to emote, to remember, to learn, move, feel and so on.

But equally each of these four cells alone or together, can go rogue or die, and when that happens you get damage. You get damage wiring. You get disrupted connections.

But, ultimately this damage will manifest sa disease, clearly.

And if the starting dying cell is a motor nerve cell for example, you will get motor neuron disease.

These disease are terrible these are devastating, numbers are rising, the costs are ridiculous and worst of all we have no treatment. Where’s the hope?

Well you know what, i think there is hope.

The brain amazingly can repair itself.

It just doesn’t do it well enough.

Here is the picture with damage and another one with one of these white masses on the left. But crucially the area that’s ringed red, the area that’s pale blue,was once white. So once damaged, that’s now repaired.

And that’s not because of doctors, that’s inspite of doctors, not because of doctors. This is spontaneous repair. It’s amazing and it’s occured and it’s because of stem cells even in the brain, even, which can enable new mylein and new insulation, to be laid down over the damaged nerves. And this repair on the whole can be termed as neurogenesis.

So, what is neurogenesis?

Neurogenesis is the process by which nervous cells better known as neurons are produced by neutral stem cells and it occurs in all species of animals except the porifera and placozoans.

This observation is important for two reasons,

first, it challenges one of the orthodoxies, which is that the brain doesn’t repair itself, unlike say the bone or the liver, but actually it does, but it just doesn’t do it well enough.

And the second thing it does, it gives us a very clear direction of travel for new therapies — you need not to be a rocket scientist to know what to do here, you simply need to find the ways to promoting, the endogenous, the spontaneous repair that occurs anyway.

Another way to think about this is, if your genes can change on sticking to a certain routine. Then brain cells can also be regenerative up to a certain extent.

How you might use stem cells directly to repair damage.

And again there are two ways to think about this and they aren’t mutually exclusive.

The first in the long run, is, to think about those stem cells that are already in the brain, even the diseased brain, is to find ways you can activate and promote those stem cells in your brain to react and respond appropriately to the damage to repair it.

That will be the future, there will be drugs that will do that.

But the other way is to effectively parachute the cells, transplant them in, to replace dying or lost cells or even brain.

Here’s hope for the future. I do believe that the disruptive technologies, like stem cells do offer very real hope. And the day i think we might be able to repair the damaged brain is sooner than we think.

Thankyou.

What is so special about the human brain?

The human brain is puzzling– is it curiously large given the size of our body uses a a tremendous amount of energy for its weight and it has a Bizarrely dense cerebral cortex. But why; neuro scientist Suzana herculano–Houzel puts on her detective cap and lead us through the mystery.

Suzana Herculano- Houzel elaborating human brain.

What is so special about human brain? What’s this we study their brain, instead of they studying us? What does human brain have to do that no other brain does?

10 years ago, scientists thought they knew what different brains are made of. Though it was based on very little evidence, many scientists thought that all mammalian brains, including the human brain were made in the same way, with the number of neurons that was always proportional to the size of the brain. This means that two brains of the same size, like two brains with same weight should have similar number of neurons.

Now if neurons are the functional information processing units of the brain, then the owner of these two brains should have similar cognitive abilities.

And yet one is a chimp and other is a cow.

And we are will agree that chimps are capable of more elaborate and flexible than cows are.

This is the first indication that “all brains made in the same way scenario” is not quiet right.

But lets play along, if brains with the same size has same number of neurons then larger brains have larger number of neurons, than the smaller brains and the larger the brain, more cognitive its owner would be. But human brain not the largest.

The human brain is different in its ability. While human brain weighs only 2% of the body, but it alone uses 25% of all the energy, that your body requires to run per day.

So, the human brain is larger than it should be it uses more energy than it should, so its special.

May be the human brain actually has most number of neurons of any brain, regardless of the size of the brain, especially in the cerebral cortex.

Take for rodents and primates for instance, in larger rodent brains the average size of the neurons increaes, so the brain inflates very rapidly, and gains size much faster than it gains neurons. But primate brains gain neurons, without the average neuron increase in size, which is very economical way to add neurons to your brain.

The is that the primate brain will always more neuron than the rodent brain of the same size, and the larger the brain, the larger this difference will be.

It’s found that our brain, on an average has 86 billion neurons , 16 billion of which are in cerebral cortex, and if you consider that cerebral is the seat of the functions like, awareness, logical and abstract reasoning, and that 16 billion is the most number of neurons, that any cortex has.

This is the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities.

So the human brain may be remarkable but it is not special in its number of neurons. It is just a large primate brain.

Why does it costs so much energy then? Why is it so expensive?

Other people have figured out that how much human brain and that of other species costs

It has been found that all the brains costs same at an average of 6 calories per billion neuron a day. So simple reason why human brain costs so much energy is just because of larger number of neurons and because we are primates with many more neurons for a given body size, than any other animal, the relative cost of our brain is large, but just because we are PRIMATES, not because we are special.

Lets just ask; How did we come by this particular number of neurons?

And in particular, if great apes, are larger than we are, why don’t they have more neurons than we have?

Simply, they just can’t afford it.

We, as human eat cooked food that compacts its size as amount, but, certainly inceasing amount of energy and that a new fact.

So the cooked food gives us relatively more energy to manage high cost of neurons.

Thankyou

There’s nothing wrong in sharing about mental health.

What is mental health?

According to world health organisation, mental stress is being able to cope up with the mental stressors of life; to work productively and fruitfully; and to be able to make a contribution to your community. Mental health includes our social, emotional and physiological well being. Globally, 75 percent of all mental illness cases, can be found in low income countries. We have a severe shortage of psychiatrist.

A survey by United Nations tells us that, there’s a ratio of 1 to a million for psychiatrist to patient. This shows we have severe shortage of psychiatrist. Nigeria for example has a 200 to a population of almost 200 million. On an average, 73% of our people lack access to treatment. As a result,

we suffer in solitude, silenced by stigma.

We, as humans often respond to mental health with distance, ignorance, guilt, fear and anger.

In a study conducted by Alboreda Florez– directly asking, “What is the cause of mental illness?”

34% of the respondent cited to drug misuse; 19% said divine wrath and will of God– 12% witchcraft and spiritual possession.

But few cited other known causes of mental illness, like genetics, socio-economic causes, war, conflict or the loss of a loved one. The stigmatization of mental illness often results in ostracising and demonizing of sufferers.

So what the mental health really mean to society?

Did you hear, he has gone mad? He has gone crazy.

Derogatory, demeaning commentary about his condition– words we would never say about someone with cancer or malaria. Somehow, when it comes to mental illness, our ignorance eviscerates all empathy.

Knowing everything, after researching all we still can’t speak our own mental illness, so deep is our fear of being a madman. All of us need to realise strongly, that oir mental struggle donot detract form our virility, nor does our trauma taint our strength.

We need to see mental health as important as physical health. We need to stop suffering in silence. We must stop stigmatising disease and traumatising the afflicted.

Talk to your friends, talk to your loved ones, talk to your health professionals. Be vulnerable. Do so with the confidence that you are not alone. Speak up if you are struggling. Being honest about how we feel does not makes us weak; it makes us human.

Its time to end stigma associated with mental illness.

So next time you hear mental do not just think if a madman.

Thanks for reading