Mind Space

Being Intellectually Stimulated Can Delay Dementia

- Adam Clare

More and more studies seem to be coming out that all conclude that keeping your mind active can be helpful to all sorts of health issues. Speaking more than one language and certainly help and so can just keeping your mind intellectually stimulated through various tasks:

Examples of activities the researchers considered cognitively stimulating (if performed at least three times per week) included reading books and magazines, playing games and music, and participating in arts and crafts.

All participants then underwent a battery of neuropsychological tests designed to measure a variety of cognitive skills, including executive functioning, language, and memory.

“Higher levels of educational, occupational, and cognitive activity are independently associated with a lower risk of dementia,” they report. Among people with the APOE4 variant, who are at relatively high risk for dementia, the difference is huge: The onset of cognitive impairment was delayed, on average, by more than eight and one-half years for people who ranked in the top 25 percent in terms of lifetime intellectual enrichment, compared to those in the bottom 25 percent.

Read more here.

Abolish The Week

- Adam Clare

People who aren’t slaves to the 9-5 world (or worse the 8-8 crowd) may not understand the tyranny of the week. Those poor folks who are forced by their managers and bosses to slave away at set hours and times. Sometimes the best time to do something may not be during the working window.

There are many benefits to having varying work schedules. For one, rush hour wouldn’t be so bad for those suffering from commuterism. There are plenty of other reasons too, which are addressed in a recent article from Slate:

But there’s nothing inevitable about the ceaseless repetition of six days of work, one day of rest. As labor has become both more productive and more organized, the week has evolved. The writer Witold Rybczynski traces the emergence of the weekend to 19th century England, when the British agricultural revolution made land and labor more productive. At first, Rybczynski relates, this allowed workers extra leisure, which they enjoyed spontaneously—not according to any ironclad schedule. As the Industrial Revolution became a driving force in trans-Atlantic civilization, the push for greater efficiency demanded standardization of this extra leisure. In 1926, Henry Ford began shutting his factories on Saturdays in a bid to crystallize an American convention of a two-day weekend full of recreation (that he hoped would involve driving). It worked.

Read more here.

Watch Sustainability Illustrated

- Adam Clare

Alex Magnin is an illustrator who likes making the world a better place and over the last six months he’s been illustrating sustainability. The video above is about explaining sustainability with science and is a good example of what the sort of videos he illustrates. The videos are 4-7 minuets in length and make for a good quick and informative break.

I have been working as a sustainability advisor for almost 10 years (with the international non-profit The Natural Step) and have seen first-hand the power of innovative sustainability practices to transform lives, businesses, and communities for the better.
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As an artist and an illustrator, I have also witnessed the power of illustrations and multimedia to help people understand and learn more effectively. So I decided to combine my skills and share, through animated illustration, what I have learned about sustainability over years of helping businesses and communities become more successful, sustainable, and resilient.

Read more here.
Watch all the videos here.

The Young Adults Are More Than Alright

- Adam Clare

Baby Boomers are just like their parents – they complain about all the problems they think the youth are causing (as if it’s the youth fault the planet is experiencing irreversible climate change and the economy was maladjusted a few years back). The older generations often accuse younger people to be lazy and doing everything “wrong” – well, those Boomers couldn’t be more wrong. It turns out that young adults today are kinder, more ambitious, more caring, and are looking for more satisfying lives than their parents.

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett recently wrote a great piece on what it’s been like studying and working with the 18-29 year old demographic for the last couple decades. It shows that the future is in good hands!

The ‘selfish’ slur also ignores how idealistic and generous-hearted today’s emerging adults are. In the national Clark poll, 86 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds agreed that: ‘It is important to me to have a career that does some good in the world.’ And it is not just an idealistic aspiration: they are, in fact, more likely to volunteer their time and energy for serving others than their parents did at the same age, according to national surveys by the US Higher Education Research Institute.

Read more.

Restorative Justice and Neuroscience

- Adam Clare

In this TED talk, Daniel Reisel examines how neuroscience backs up the (already obvious) reasons that restorative justice works better than punitive justice.

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