Graham Chastney

My Brain Age according to Dr Kamashima at lunch time today is 34 – which is less than my actually age .

For those of you who don’t know whether this is a good thing or not: In Dr Kamashima you are aiming for a brain age of 20, that’s the optimum.

My Brain Age according to Dr Kamashima at lunch time today is 38 – the same as my age .

One of the questions I’ve been trying to answer on the subject of ‘my brain’ has been – can a brain get ‘better’?

I’m not really sure what I mean by ‘better’, but I have in mind something akin to a mussle becoming stronger.

Steve lent me a copy of Making a Good Brain Great by Daniel Amen. The title would suggest that he believes that a brain can be improved.

Having got to chapter 8 – ‘Yes, you can change your brain and change your life’ I’m starting to get the impression that Daniel believes that change is not only possible but also advantageous . The title of the chapter pretty much summarizes what it is saying.

Chapter 8 is only part way through the book and already I’ve picked up on things that I could make my brain better and that a number of things that I am doing are not good for my brain. One change has been to increase the amount of cardio-vascular exercise that I do. I’ve also switched to decaff as my primary coffee.

I can’t say that I’ve noticed any significant difference yet apart from sleeping better.

There’s a questionnaire at the beginning of the book which I only skimmed my way through, but having got this far I think I will get a couple of people to complete it for me and do it myself.

tags: brain, amen

I went to an excellent breakfast over the weekend where the speaker was Paul McGee – The SUMO Guy. Paul is a great speaker. There was 50 of us and he had us entranced, which is no easy task at 8:00am on a Saturday morning.

Paul was talking about using the S.U.M.O. (Shut Up, Move On) principles when trying to deal with burn-out.

Paul’s primary message was that most events don’t lead directly to an outcome. It’s the event + our reaction to it that normally creates the outcome.

He had a set of questions to ask yourself before reacting to a situation. All this week one of those questions has been ringing in my ears and I share it here:

Where is this issue on a scale of 1-10? (If 10 is death)

This week I have found myself in a number of situations where my reaction was going to be a 7 or 8, but having assessed them they were nothing more than a 2 and in most instance they were a .5 .

If you are interested in the other questions follow the link to a download of the cartoon:

You could even buy Paul’s book .

I think we’ll be inviting Paul back.

tags: SUMO, Paul+McGee, Burn-Out, Breakfast

Yesterday I wrote about the fun of learning the times-tables, and how important I believe fun is.

The sad part of this story is that Emily didn’t do great in her time-tables at school.

She did worse than she was doing at home.

Why?

Because being tested wasn’t fun. Being tested was stressful.

None of us, especially children, perform well when we are stressed.

So why do we test our children so much?

Does someone think it’s good for them?

Why can’t we make the testing part of the fun?

This year is going to be an especially test ridden one because it’s SATS. Having seen one child through it already it would appear, from a parents perspective, that for this whole year education is set aside so that the children can learn how to pass a test. The doubly-sad thing is that this test is all about the school looking good in league tables and has absolutely no value to the child.

The SATS themselves are only supposed to take a few hours, but that doesn’t stop them dominating the whole year.

tags: SATS, learning