THANK YOU
Werner Bendorf
and
Richard Fletcher
and the many Scouts
of Boy Scout Troop 17,
such as
Rev. Don Graves,
Billy Graves,
(ALWAYS in my Prayers),
Allen Bendorf,
Sid and Bruce Curry,
and so many others.
What a Blessing
your precious Lives
have been to
me.
You have given me,
and many more,
a Gift beyond compare.
“The clearest way into the Universe
is through a Forest Wilderness.”
– John Muir
Passing Through the Love of God
Our Sacred Home,
our World,
has never lost its warm, inviting atmosphere.
Your experience,
your journey to the Natural World
will make you feel
totally
at Home.
My Dear Friends,
Life matters in a different way
that is impossible to describe.
Somehow,
we can feel Happy
and deeply relaxed
and at Peace.
.
We need to be
reminded of all the precious Life
that may be wasted
without spending Time
Passing Through the Love of God,
while wandering down the Sacred Pathways
of His Beautiful, Natural World.
.
Being Mindful
of His Blessings,
found in the REAL World,
of His Beautiful Creations
in Nature,
can give us a True Awareness
of the Reason
for Being.
Yes,
we are here
for a Reason –
to Love
and be Loved.
.
To feel the precious Love
of God,
escape the man made confinements
that evolve into such madness,
and return to your Home,
to the Love expressed by God,
in His Warm Embrace –
found in every cloud above,
in every Leaf of every Tree,
in every Living Thing
that Loves Life,
like you
and me.
Life
has new meaning,
when one realizes the Wonder
that is our Creation
and the Beauty that surrounds us.
Your Sacred Time
spent wandering in the Cathedral
of God’s Forests,
helps to reflect upon His Divine Blessings
and give Thanks
for HIS Immeasurable Love.
Remember
who you are,
and you are –
deeply Loved
by God.
He will never forget
you.
.
He WILL help you.
Do not look
into the darkness
and fear the night.
Trust and Believe
in the Light.
The Light of God’s
Love,
will always shine
Bright.
Be glad
that our brief Lives
intertwine
and share precious moments
in little ways
that Truly matter.
“There is nothing wrong
with Living a simple Life”
– J.R.R Tolkein
The Spirit
of your precious Being
will find Happiness.
Stop Looking
in all the wrong places.
You will find Joy
in your Heart,
in the smiles
reflected from those
around you,
in the Beautiful Leaves
fluttering in the wind,
to be
cast upon the Sacred Ground
and in the Beautiful Clouds
cast into the air we breathe,
in places where
you Truly belong,
in the Hearts of others,
and in Prayer.
Let Love in.
Let the Light in.
Let your Heart in
to the precious Lives
of others
in need.
Love is
the Golden Gate
that opens into Paradise.
Love
casts out fear.
It is invincible.
There is no difficulty
that enough Love
will not conquer,
no affliction or infirmity
that enough
Love
will not Heal.
There is no door
that enough Love will not
open.
“God is Love,
and He that dwelleth
in Love
dwelleth in God
and God In Him”
– 1 John 4:16
We are Special
and we are Blessed.
Let us bow
to the Divine
within,
and Give Thanks
to the Lord.
Goodnight.
to Improve Your Memory
This story is featured in BBC Future’s “Best of 2018” collection.
Discover more of our picks.
When trying to memorize new material, it’s easy to assume that the more work you put in, the better you will perform. Yet taking the occasional down time – to do literally nothing – may be exactly what you need. Just dim the lights, sit back, and enjoy 10-15 minutes of quiet contemplation, and you’ll find that your memory of the facts you have just learnt is far better than if you had attempted to use that moment more productively.
Although it’s already well known that we should pace our studies, new research suggests that we should aim for “minimal interference” during these breaks – deliberately avoiding any activity that could tamper with the delicate task of memory formation. So no running errands, checking your emails, or surfing the web on your smartphone. You really need to give your brain the chance for a complete recharge with no distractions.
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An excuse to do nothing may seem like a perfect mnemonic technique for the lazy student, but this discovery may also offer some relief for people with amnesia and some forms of dementia, suggesting new ways to release a latent, previously unrecognized, capacity to learn and remember.
A simple technique could boost our short and long-term memory.
The remarkable memory-boosting benefits of undisturbed rest were first documented in 1900 by the German psychologist Georg Elias Muller and his student Alfons Pilzecker. In one of their many experiments on memory consolidation, Muller and Pilzecker first asked their participants to learn a list of meaningless syllables. Following a short study period, half the group were immediately given a second list to learn – while the rest were given a six-minute break before continuing.
When tested one-and-a-half-hours later, the two groups showed strikingly different patterns of recall. The participants given the break remembered nearly 50% of their list, compared to an average of 28% for the group who had been given no time to recharge their mental batteries. The finding suggested that our memory for new information is especially fragile just after it has first been encoded, making it more susceptible to interference from new information.
Although a handful of other psychologists occasionally returned to the finding, it was only in the early 2000s that the broader implications of it started to become known, with a pioneering study by Sergio Della Sala at the University of Edinburgh and Nelson Cowan at the University of Missouri.
We could all do with fewer distractions in our lives.
The team was interested in discovering whether reduced interference might improve the memories of people who had suffered a neurological injury, such as a stroke. Using a similar set-up to Muller and Pilzecker’s original study, they presented their participants with lists of 15 words and tested them 10 minutes later. In some trials, the participants remained busy with some standard cognitive tests; in others, they were asked to lie in a darkened room and avoid falling asleep.
It seems to benefit young and old people alike
The impact of the small intervention was more profound than anyone might have believed. Although the two most severely amnesic patients showed no benefit, the others tripled the number of words they could remember – from 14% to 49%, placing them almost within the range of healthy people with no neurological damage.
The next results were even more impressive. The participants were asked to listen to some stories and answer questions an hour later. Without the chance to rest, they could recall just 7% of the facts in the story; with the rest, this jumped to 79% – an astronomical 11-fold increase in the information they retained.
Della Sala and Cowan’s former student, Michaela Dewar at Heriot-Watt University, has now led several follow-up studies, replicating the finding in many different contexts. In healthy participants, they have found that these short periods of rest can also improve our spatial memories, for instance – helping participants to recall the location of different landmarks in a virtual reality environment. Crucially, this advantage lingers a week after the original learning task, and it seems to benefit young and old people alike. And besides the stroke survivors, they have also found similar benefits for people in the earlier, milder stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
Our memory for new information is especially fragile just after it has been encoded.
In each case, the researchers simply asked the participants to sit in a dim, quiet room, without their mobile phones or similar distractions. “We don’t give them any specific instructions with regards to what they should or shouldn’t do while resting,” Dewar says. “But questionnaires completed at the end of our experiments suggest that most people simply let their minds wander.”
Even then, we should be careful not to exert ourselves too hard as we daydream. In one study, for instance, participants were asked to imagine a past or future event during their break, which appeared to reduce their later recall of the newly learnt material. So it may be safest to avoid any concerted mental effort during our down time.
The exact mechanism is still unknown, though some clues come from a growing understanding of memory formation. It is now well accepted that once memories are initially encoded, they pass through a period of consolidation that cements them in long-term storage. This was once thought to happen primarily during sleep, with heightened communication between the hippocampus – where memories are first formed – and the cortex, a process that may build and strengthen the new neural connections that are necessary for later recall.
The brain might use downtime to cement what it has recently learnt.
This heightened nocturnal activity may be the reason that we often learn things better just before bed. But in line with Dewar’s work, a 2010 study by Lila Davachi at New York University, found that it was not limited to sleep, and similar neural activity occurs during periods of wakeful rest, too. In the study, participants were first asked to memorise pairs of pictures – matching a face to an object or scene – and then allowed to lie back and let their minds wander for a short period. Sure enough, she found increased communication between the hippocampus and areas of the visual cortex during their rest. Crucially, people who showed a greater increase in connectivity between these areas were the ones who remembered more of the task, she says.
Perhaps the brain takes any potential down time to cement what it has recently learnt – and reducing extra stimulation at this time may ease that process. It would seem that neurological damage may render the brain especially vulnerable to that interference after learning a new memory, which is why the period of rest proved to be particularly potent for stroke survivors and people with Alzheimer’s disease.
Other psychologists are excited about the research. “The effect is quite consistent across studies now in a range of experiments and memory tasks,” says Aidan Horner at the University of York. “It’s fascinating.” Horner agrees that it could potentially offer new ways to help individuals with impairments to function.
Scheduling regular periods of rest could help us all hold onto new memories.
Practically speaking, he points out that it may be difficult to schedule enough periods of rest to increase their overall daily recall. But he thinks it could still be valuable to help a patient learn important new information – such as learning the name and face of a new carer. “Perhaps a short period of wakeful rest after that would increase the chances that they would remember that person, and therefore feel more comfortable with them later on.” Dewar tells me that she is aware of one patient who seems to have benefitted from using a short rest to learn the name of their grandchild, though she emphasises that it is only anecdotal evidence.
Thomas Baguley at Nottingham Trent University in the UK is also cautiously optimistic. He points out that some Alzheimer’s patients are already advised to engage in mindfulness techniques to alleviate stress and improve overall well-being. “Some [of these] interventions may also promote wakeful rest and it is worth exploring whether they work in part because of reducing interference,” he says, though it may be difficult to implement in people with severe dementia, he says.
Beyond the clinical benefits for these patients, Baguley and Horner both agree that scheduling regular periods of rest, without distraction, could help us all hold onto new material a little more firmly. After all, for many students, the 10-30% improvements recorded in these studies could mark the difference between a grade or two. “I can imagine you could embed these 10-15 minute breaks within a revision period,” says Horner, “and that might be a useful way of making small improvements to your ability to remember later on.”
In the age of information overload, it’s worth remembering that our smartphones aren’t the only thing that needs a regular recharge. Our minds clearly do too.
David Robson is a freelance writer based in London. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.
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There is
no gulf that enough Love will not bridge;
no wall that enough Love will nit throw down;
no sin that enough Love will not redeem!
It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble,
how hopeless the outlook, how muddled the tangle,
how great the mistake;
a sufficient realization of Love will Dissolve it All!
If only You could Love enough
You would Be The Happiest and The Most Powerful Being
In The World!
– Emmey Fox
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closes a prison. “
– Victor Hugo
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Peace.
.
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