Build Your Dog or Cat’s Mind Power

It may be hard to believe, but you can a change the actual physical aspects of your dog or cat’s brain — making them more intelligent, and giving their personality added resistance to stress.

These startling claims date back to the 1940’s when Canadian psychologist Donald O. Hebb took home a few lab rats and gave them to his children to keep as pets. The children played with these animals and let them run around and explore much of Hebb’s family home. The environments rats were free to explore were very rich and varied. When the animals were later tested for their learning ability, they proved to be much smarter than littermates raised in cages. 

Shortly later Hebb’s research associates repeated his experiments using dogs. They found that dogs raised in the more complex home environment not only learned faster, but seemed to be less fearful and considerably less stressed in lab testing situations.

Over the years researchers have proven that these behavioral changes are the result of actual changes in the physiology of the animal’s brains. The brains of animals that have lived in changing and complex environments actually become larger and more complex, just like the brains of humans.

The important aspects of the animal’s experience which cause these positive changes in their brains involves exposure to a wide variety of interesting places and things that novel, and exciting experiences. Recent research by psychologist Norton W. Milgram and his associates at the University of Toronto have shown that the benefits of such experiences are not restricted to growing puppies. Adults and even elderly animals, also benefit from having richer environments and even seem more resistant to the usual decline in mental efficiency seen in older dogs.

For those of us who want to give our pet dog  or cat the advantage of a more efficient brain, the trick is simply to keep their mind active, exposing them to new experiences, giving them new things to learn and puzzles to work out.

Some different experiences can come out of just taking the dog to new places and on different routes on daily walks, or including your dog or cat on day trips, or when out doing various chores.

Remember, you are not only building your relationship with your beloved pet, but actually building it a better brain.

Posted by a committed dog (and cat) lover

Is the Law of Attraction Failing You?

Are you having trouble getting the Law of Attraction to work in your life? Here’s a clue to what could be happening: Using the Law of Attraction to achieve certain goals often requires FAR LESS WORK than achieving other goals.

Why is that so?

Because it is much, much harder to believe in and create something you do not passionately desire. But when you  focus on something that is naturally interesting to you — your work then becomes play.

Are Your Law of Attraction Goals a Good Fit?
Take a few minutes to ask yourself an important question — am I pursuing the right goal for ME?

Here’s why that is so important: You’ll never really achieve your true potential as long as you pour your energy into something that doesn’t really fit your true passions and interests.

Does that seem too simple?

Think about it for a moment. It’s really very easy to automatically adopt someone else’s goal. We were trained to do this as children. Most of us were taught to value the goals our parents and educational system set for us.

Some of us gave in and tried to do so. Some of us rebelled and learned to fail instead. And some of us felt somehow inadequate because we did not have the natural interest and/or aptitude to do what we were expected to do.

If you never seem to get the Law of Attraction working for you,  you might be setting goals you don’t really desire or believe in for yourself.

This will never going to lead to Law of Attraction success. What it will lead to is one false start after another — and a tendency to want to quit after the first bump in the road. This is a major dead-end, and will do nothing but gradually erode your self confidence.

Make the Law of Attraction Work
Be sure your goal really is YOUR goal for YOUR life. If you feel resistance, take a serious look at that. Ask yourself WHO you might really be setting that goal for?

Then ask yourself if you really have a burning passion for that goal, and are willing to work through any so-called failures to achieve it. If your answer is no — this may be a good time to revisit your goal. Two things will happen if you focus on a Law of Attraction goal that fits your natural talents and passions:

1. First, you will be happier, less stressed, and far more productive.
2. Second, you will be far more likely to hang in as you hit those jarring bumps in the road.

Action Point
If you HAVE set the right goal and the Law of Attraction is STILL not working in your life, come discover a way to get what you want — faster.

Don’t Invite Memory Loss

At one time or another nearly everyone over the age of 30 has received a birthday card joking about their declining memory or other common ailments of old age.

Now a study suggest that such negative portrayals of old age actually help bring about the  problems they joke about, such as  memory loss in old age.

In one part of the study Harvard University researcher Bacca Levy, Ph.D., asked volunteers aged 60 or over to press either the up or down arrow on a keyboard each time a word was flashed on a computer monitor. Some participants were shown words with negative connotations about aging, such as senile and incompetent, while other folks saw terms with more positive associations, such as wise or alert

Each word was visible for such a brief period of time–anywhere from a tenth to a twentieth of a second–that the participants couldn’t actually read them. Even so, subjects shown words that reinforced negative views of the erderly later performed more poorly on memory loss tests than folks who saw the positive words, Levy reports in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

So negative stereotypes may become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially if we’re not conscious that we’ve been exposed to them. This shows how insidious our views of aging are, Levy says. Maybe it’s no coincidence that in an earlier cross-cultural study Levy found that views of aging are particularly positive in China–where elders far outperform their American counterparts on memory tests designed to measure memory loss in old age.

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