It is uncommon that we observe the background details of a well-produced film or notice the subtle masterpieces behind a state-of-the-art play. Aside from those that are very observant, these elements usually only come into view when production experiences a horrible mishap, perhaps if an actor’s costume is ruined or they forget their lines. The same can be said for the quiet mechanisms and systems, which our lives are dependent on, on a daily basis, namely our organs and their exceptionally complex makeup that we often take for granted. This issue aims to take a deep look at some of the processes that affect us every day that we usually do not think about.

Modern medicine is perhaps one of the greatest blessings of our time, as synthetic drugs are able to cure complex diseases in previously unknown ways. These medicines undergo intense research, testing, and scrutiny before being released to the general public. We quickly rush to the doctor’s office and pop a few pills when we feel ill, yet we rarely ponder over highly exhausting and costly process of developing these drugs.

Our hearts never rest from the moment we are born to the day we die. This organ we don’t usually think about pumps onwards multiple times per minute and allows us to perform our daily functions. In her piece in this issue, Ceyda Sablak reminds us how delicate the anatomy of this organ is and why we should maintain a healthy, balanced life of physical and spiritual activity, as many spiritual masters have seen a connection between our biological heart and our spiritual well-being.

Stem cell research has been a common point of discussion, debate, and controversy in the past few decades. Researchers argue that they possess an almost endless number of possibilities while advocates argue that they are derived in an unethical manner. The science behind them is fascinating, and the potential that they possess is undoubtedly inspiring.

Lastly, it turns out that our tears are integral to keeping our eyes healthy and itch-free. A lack of tears can result in a multitude of annoying and harmful disorders that can severely affect a person’s life. Searches have been underway to find the perfect “alternative tear” for those that suffer from tear related disorders. Who would have thought that something so simple contributes so much to our normal happiness and peace?

Biggest extinction in Earth’s history caused by global warming—and how it could happen again

Penn JL et al. Temperature-dependent hypoxia explains biogeography and severity of end-Permian marine mass extinction. Science, December 2018.

Some 252 million years ago, long before dinosaurs, the vast majority of species on Earth were wiped out in the “Great Dying,” the worst mass extinction in our planet’s history. Up to 96% of all marine species and 70% of land animals were killed off during this event. Scientists have been trying to find the cause for this catastrophic event, which marked the end of the Permian period. One study suggested that a type of microbe spouted large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Other studies suggested the event was triggered by a series of volcanic eruptions that released deadly amount of carbon dioxide into the air and led to cataclysmic ocean acidification. A new research study now claims that the Great Dying was primarily as a result of rapidly increasing temperatures. The researchers examined the marine fossil records and simulated the climate conditions to observe the effects of rising temperatures 252 million years ago. Researchers first ran a climate model with Earth’s configuration during the Permian period, when the tropical ocean temperatures at the surface had reached some 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) higher. The model then reproduced dramatic changes in the oceans; oceans lost about 80 percent of their oxygen and about half the oceans’ seafloor became completely oxygen-free. To investigate the effects of these paleoclimate changes on marine species, the researchers then analyzed the varying oxygen and temperature sensitivities of 61 modern marine species including crustaceans, fish, shellfish, corals and sharks. Their calculations predicted that many marine organisms went extinct under these conditions, especially the organisms that lived far from the tropics were most sensitive to oxygen levels and they were nearly completely wiped out. To test this prediction, researchers analyzed late-Permian fossil distributions from the Paleoceanography Database and confirmed that species far from the equator suffered most during the event. The agreement between the simulations and fossils strongly suggests that climate warming and oxygen loss was a primary cause of the extinction. By 2100, warming in the upper ocean is projected to approach 20 percent of warming in the late Permian, and by the year 2300 it will reach between 35 and 50 percent. This study highlights the potential for a mass extinction arising from a similar mechanism under anthropogenic climate change. It is also a clear warning that Earth is on the path to another devastating mass extinction. According to experts, Earth could already be undergoing a sixth mass extinction that would kill off most animal and plant species. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature predicts that 99.9% of critically endangered species and 67% of endangered species will be lost within the next 100 years.

New target for therapeutic brain stimulation to treat depression found

Rao VR et al. Direct Electrical Stimulation of Lateral Orbitofrontal Cortex Acutely Improves Mood in Individuals with Symptoms of Depression. Current Biology, November 2018.

Researchers have finally found an effective target in the brain for electrical stimulation to improve mood in people suffering from depression. Stimulation of a brain region called the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) reliably produced acute improvement in mood in patients who suffered from depression. In a recent study, researchers studied 25 patients with epilepsy who had electrodes placed in the brain for medical reasons to locate the origin of their seizures. Many of those patients also suffered from depression, which is often comorbid with epilepsy. With the patients’ consent, researchers took advantage of those electrodes to deliver small electrical pulses to areas of the brain thought to be involved in regulating mood. The researchers focused their attention and the electrical stimulation on the OFC, which is a key hub for mood-related circuitry. Moreover, they specifically induced a pattern of activity in brain regions connected to OFC that was similar to patterns seen when patients naturally experienced positive mood states. The researchers applied these stimulation regimes while collecting verbal mood reports and questionnaire scores. Analyses of these reports revealed that unilateral stimulation of the lateral OFC produced acute, dose-dependent mood-state improvement in subjects with moderate-to-severe baseline depression. There is still substantial work remains to be completed before the deep brain stimulation (DBS) treatments could enter routine clinical practice. One major challenge in this study is to see whether stimulation of OFC produces durable improvement in mood over longer periods of time. Biomedical engineers hope to develop a medical device for patients with treatment-resistant mood disorders that can monitor brain activity in OFC and stimulate only when needed to keep that activity within a healthy range. Ultimately, it would be ideal if activity in mood-related brain circuits could be normalized indefinitely without patients needing to do anything.

How screen time can disrupt sleep

Mure LS et al. Sustained Melanopsin Photoresponse Is Supported by Specific Roles of β-Arrestin 1 and 2 in Deactivation and Regeneration of Photopigment. Cell Reports, 2018

For most of us, the time spent staring at screens on computers, phones and tablets adds up to many hours in a day and can often disrupt sleep. In a recent work, researchers now have pinpointed how certain cells in the eye process ambient light and reset our internal clocks, the daily cycles of physiological processes known as the circadian rhythm. When these cells are exposed to artificial light late into the night, our internal clocks can get confused, resulting in a host of health issues. A protein called melanopsin in these light-sensitive cells helps them process ambient light. Prolonged exposure to light causes melanopsin to regenerate and continuous regeneration of melanopsin triggers signals to the brain that inform it about ambient light conditions. The brain then uses this information to regulate sleep, alertness, and consciousness. In this study, the researchers turned on the production of melanopsin in retinal cells in mice and found that some of these cells are able to sustain light responses, but others lose sensitivity. Further investigations found that proteins called beta arrestin-1 and beta arrestin-2 help keep the melanopsin sensitive when exposed to light. One arrestin does its conventional job of arresting the response, and the other helps the melanopsin protein reload its retinal light-sensing co-factor. When these two steps are done in quick succession, the cell appears to respond continuously to light. This research uncovers the mechanisms behind how cells being exposed to artificial light confuses the internal body clock, and the ability to regulate sleep. It is hoped that this discovery could lead to new targets that could counter the impact of artificial light, for example by finding ways to influence melanopsin to reset the internal clock. This could lead to new treatments for insomnia, jet lag, and migraines.

“Good grades pay off literally. Teachers have long said that success is its own reward. But these days, some students are finding that good grades can bring them cash and luxury gifts… Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso last week promised to spend more than $935,000 to give high school students as much as $110 each to improve their scores on state graduation exams… The most ambitious experiment began in September, when seven states-Arkansas, Alabama, Connecticut, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Virginia and Washington-won spots in an Exxon/Mobil-funded program that, in most cases, pays students $100 for each passing grade on advanced placement (AP) college-prep exams.” (USA Today, 01/27/2008)

The above is just one example of how some educators have developed additional incentives to motivate their students in hopes of them increasing their performance in school. A majority of students have gone through educational systems in which such rewards are present, albeit not as extreme as in the example above. In such systems, money, student awards, honorary degrees or advanced placement opportunities aim to improve student performance and motivation toward meeting expected goals through increased competition. Some of these rewards may not be tangible: simple praise, public appreciation and positive feedbacks are examples of intangible or verbal rewards. Both tangible and intangible rewards are advocated and implemented by many educators. Today they constitute a crucial part of our educational system. The reasoning behind rewarding or praising students is simple: If one reinforces a behavior by bestowing a reward for it, it is believed that behavior is more likely to be developed and maintained by the recipients of the reward, but is this really the case?

Some psychologists, known as behaviorists, believe that human nature is utilitarian: behaviors are influenced by their consequences. The use of reinforcement and punishment to control and manipulate human behavior reflects this view. The former allows educators to increase the likelihood of a behavior, while the latter is employed to decrease its likelihood. They argue that one can improve and nurture a particular behavior through reinforcement. An educator with a behaviorist point of view, therefore, believes that learning can be achieved in part by reinforcing desired behaviors with rewards, medals, degrees, grades or praises.

Even though these concepts have been valued and applied widely by many educators for decades, there are some psychologists and educators that do not agree with the current use of either tangible or verbal rewards for educational purposes. Their reasoning is based in part on motivation theory. According to motivation theory, people are motivated by either extrinsic or intrinsic drives. Extrinsic motivation is defined as any reinforcement to support, develop or maintain a behavior provided by external conditions, such as rewarding a student with money or an award. Intrinsic motivation, in contrast, implies doing an activity for its own sake because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable. The most important distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation lies in their source: an internal (intrinsic) versus external (extrinsic) source of motivation. Money, praise, awards or promotions are examples of external motivators, which are used to nurture some behaviors, while inner willingness and ambition, are sources of intrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000).

There are educators who advocate motivation theory but disagree with the idea of rewarding their students since they believe that external rewards undermine intrinsic motivation. As students are extrinsically rewarded, they are more likely to lose their intrinsic motivation to sustain their behavior. Empirical studies have shown that students who did not receive any tangible rewards previously will begin to associate their behavior to rewards they have been given, eventually leading students to neglect performing an activity for its own sake when there is no reward present.

Amabile, Hennesey and Grossman (1986) examined the influence of rewards and perceptions of activity on creativity. In their study, children were rewarded with the opportunity to take pictures with instant cameras after they completed a task requiring creativity. For young children this reward was pretty attractive. The perception of the activity was manipulated by calling the activity “play,” “work” or by not specifying its nature. They found that children with the perception of play but without the promise of a reward showed a higher degree of creative performance than other children who were promised a reward. It appears that the “label” of the activity and the existence of rewards influences the creative performance of children. Another phenomenon considered in this study was the variation of the children’s behavior in activities in which they were given choice and no choice at all. The authors showed that in activities where participants were not given options, rewarded participants outperformed non-rewarded participants while non-rewarded participants were superior to rewarded participants in choice situations. There were three educational implications discovered as a result of this study:

1. The way a teacher presents an activity or responsibility counts! The presentation of an activity as “play” is correlated with higher performance than if it is presented as “work” or if its nature is not specified.
2. Rewards may undermine activities requiring intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is important for creativity. Biographies of inventors show that inventions are the result of perennial attempts and thus require a high degree of intrinsic motivation. Therefore, educators need to think twice about whether rewarding their students encourages or suppresses creativity in a given situation.
3. Rewards are detrimental when people have intrinsically chosen to do something, but not necessarily when an action is required of them. This point leaves some room for rewarding students. A good portion of the educational curriculum might be outside of students’ interests. For those kinds of activities, rewards may work to motivate them to participate in these activities, however, if students choose an activity, and if they have already had the motivation to do it, rewards will most likely not improve their performance.

This study shows that educators need to answer the following three questions before deciding whether rewards should be used:

1. Do the students already have intrinsic motivation to complete this activity?
2. Did the students choose to complete this activity?
3. Has someone else already asked or encouraged them to complete this activity?

Another study by Mueller and Dweck (1998) revealed the influence of praise on performance. In a culture of appreciation, praise is expected to encourage people and motivate them to be more successful. This study questions whether praising students is necessary and how praise can affect students. The authors of this study designed six experiments to examine the effects of praise for intelligence and praise for effort and how they influenced the participants. The authors discovered that when praising students for their intelligence the students’ achievements and motivation were lower than those students who were praised for their effort. Children whose intelligence was praised cared more about performance goals while children whose effort was praised cared more about learning. Moreover, the students whose intelligence was praised displayed lower levels of task persistence and enjoyment, increased low-ability attributions, and worse task performance when they experienced failure than children praised for their effort. Another crucial result of the study concerns the concept of intelligence. The same group of students, who were praised for their intelligence, considered their intelligence to be a fixed trait whereas the other group considered it a flexible trait. While the first group (students who were praised for their intelligence) tried to look smart even by sacrificing learning, the second group (students who were praised for effort) attempted to learn new things even if doing so was difficult or risky. Another interesting result was in the discrepancy in performance between the two groups of students when they encountered difficulty in their tasks. The study found that the performance of the students in the first group was impaired in comparison to the second group whose performance increased.

Considering the controversy surrounding rewarding versus not rewarding, the authors of this study focused on the issue of “what to praise.” Praising some traits such as intelligence, ability or creativity might be detrimental for the traits’ continuity in students while praise for endeavoring towards utilizing their intelligence; creativity or any other ability appears to increase the likelihood of learning. This issue raises some serious questions about the current practices of gifted education. Today, most education systems in the United States and other countries “identify” gifted students through tests and other means of determining intelligence, some even group students in separate classes. These students are well aware why they are being treated in this way. In other words, the system itself is continuously providing implicit rewards for the students identified as gifted. From Dweck’s point of view, this policy would impair learning because the student’s performance is not rewarded, while their “intelligence” is.

Another important question raised in this study is the “appropriate time of rewarding.” In research by Kamins and Dweck (1999), the influence of praise and criticism was observed in several ways: when directed variously toward the person performing an activity, toward the process of the activity itself, and toward the activity’s outcome. In their research some of the participants were praised with “I’m very proud of you”; some as “That’s the right way to do it,” whereas others were told: “You found a good way to do it, can you think of other ways that may also work?” When these groups were compared, the researchers found that the process-praised group was superior in rating the products of their work in comparison to the outcome-praised group. It was also noticed in that participants that were members of the process-praised group had increased self-esteem and were more persistent than the other groups. Those findings were the same when criticism was used in place of praise. The lesson to take from this research is clear: we should provide feedback, praise or criticism, about the process rather than the person and the end product.

There are other side effects of rewarding students. When we reward, we actually teach two different things in a very subtle way. First, we teach the student to do something for the purpose of another thing rather than for its own sake. Second, we teach the student not to do anything for free. Both of these have important drawbacks: we kill their enthusiasm and intrinsic motivation because they have been given another reason to do their activities and we implicitly redirect their valuation to external things that then could cause them to undervalue the task itself. This means that they will no longer repeat the same behavior when the rewards are discontinued. There is a paradox here. On the one hand, behaviorist psychologists defined learning as an overt change in behavior. Since the behavior (or learning) fades away later along with the rewards, we cannot argue that rewards did make a permanent influence on behavior. On the other hand, by using these methods we teach students to be independent individuals who do not care about others. Especially in today’s conditions, when many jobless, homeless, and hungry people are trying to survive all around the world, self-centered individualism should not be the desired outcome of education. Infusing people with seemingly innocent notions of “money talks” or “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” might function as a rationale for unethical and socially irresponsible behaviors. Educators should not bolster a self-centered individualism by excessively rewarding students. Such rewarding may contribute to the kind of irresponsibility that allows for the kinds of unwise decisions that lead us to the current recession.

The overall point that I have advocated in this article is not an argument strictly against rewarding. Rather, knowing more about the individual, the conditions, and possible consequences related to rewards are vital for an effective education. How can this be achieved? An example is the treatment of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) toward a child who was making fun of the Adhan (the Muslim call to prayer). He approached one of them and praised one of them by saying, “What a beautiful voice that you have.” Caressing his hair, he continued by asking the boy “Would you mind to give the call to the prayer in the masjid with such a beautiful voice?” He took the child to the masjid and this child, known as Abu Mansura, later became a well-known muezzin (the individual who makes the Muslim call to prayer). This example stands as evidence of the importance of rewarding. On the other hand, in traditional Sufi thought, the purpose of praying and good works is not merely entering Heaven or avoiding Hell, instead, acquiring the acceptance and approval of God is seen as the ultimate goal for a person. Such a purpose may not apply to everyone, because the majority of people may need a tangible reward to do something, just like majority of students want to achieve a certain goal primarily in order to gain rewards, however, higher levels of spirituality can be developed toward an overarching goal that can be achieved by only a select few. Therefore, these two examples do not in fact conflict. The messages derived from educational and psychological literature, as well as religious teachings, seems to converge, even though rewards may help most people to perform better, rewarding is not helpful and even detrimental to a minority group of people who already display high levels of motivation and ambition to achieve.

As a result, rewarding is not necessarily helpful or detrimental. Educators should give up applying their ready-made methods to all students. Ideally, intrinsically motivated students should not receive external rewards because this would switch their focus to material prizes. When needed, educators should try to provide feedback directed toward the process rather than the outcome or the person. Also, they should foster student’s efforts rather than their ability. The decision about rewarding should be based on knowledge regarding the person to be rewarded, the target or direction, and even the timing of the reward. Otherwise, for some individuals the rewards might produce an effect diametrically opposed to its intended purpose.

References

• Skinner, B. F. 1953, Science and Human Behavior. New York: The Free Press.
• Kamins, M. L. & Dweck, C. S. 1999. “Person versus process praise and criticism: Implications for contingent self-worth and coping.” Developmental Psychology, 35, 835-847.
• Mueller, C. M. and Dweck, C. S. 1998. “Intelligence praise can undermine motivation and performance.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 33-52.
• Ryan, R. M. & Deci, E. L. (2000). “Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions.” Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25, 54-67.
• Amabile, T. M., Hennessey, B. A. & Grossman, B. S. (1986). “Social Influences on Creativity: The Effects of Contracted-For Reward.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 14-23.

Original Article: Ichinohe T. et al., PNAS (published online before print 2011).

Influenza, also known as seasonal flu, affects up to 5 million people annually. Flu viruses infect and damage the animal respiratory tract, especially the lungs. Upon flu virus infection, a life or death battle between an animal’s immune system and the flu virus begins. To defeat the flu virus, the animal’s immune system synthesizes important flu-fighting molecules. Researchers at Yale University discovered that mice on the antibiotic regimen, a treatment that wipes out certain bacteria which normally live in the guts of the animal hosts, showed deficiency in immune responses against flu virus in the lungs compared to mice that had not been treated. This finding suggests an unexpected link that the bacteria living in the animals seem to control the production of these flu-fighting molecules. These commensal bacteria, or good bacteria, prime the immune system in making flu-fighting molecules even before infection, and this priming is important for subsequent flu-fighting strategies. The exact bacterial species that helps fight the flu are yet to be identified. It is interesting to contemplate why the immune system trusts bacteria with such an important job. Whatever that reason might be this finding warns against misuse or abuse of antibiotics. We don’t want to kill the good bacteria that might just protect us in the next flu season.

2- Less talking with longer words

Original Article: Piantadosi S.T. et al., PNAS 108, 3526 (2011).

What factors affect the length of a word? Do we prefer to use short words or long words while we are talking? For many years, researchers believed that the most frequently used words tend to be short in order to make the language more efficient. It is intuitive when we think of words such as “a,” “the,” “but” and their popularity in our everyday life. However, according to a recent study done by Piandatosi and coworkers in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, the length of a word reflects the amount of information it contains. They observed that people use many words in predictable sequences along with other words in their daily life. Most of the time a short word may not contain information per se, but carry information as a collection with other familiar words. This observation led the researchers to look at the problem from an ‘information content’ perspective. A word is said to have more information if it is less predictable in a sequence. An analysis was done on the Google text database in 11 different languages. The results show that word length closely correlates to information content. Once again, it is not important how much you talk. It is important how much you mean.

3- Ups and downs of sleep with alpha waves

Original Article: McKinney S.M. et al., PLoS One 6, e17351 (2011).

Why do we randomly wake up in the middle of the night? Searching for an answer for this question, researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) discovered a brain rhythm that determines one’s susceptibility to disturbance by the outside world while asleep. Scott McKinney and his colleagues conducted a study where they analyzed the electroencephalographs (EEGs) of 13 volunteers, who spent 3 nights in MGH’s Sleep laboratory. EEG devices use electrodes on the scalp to detect electrical activity in the brain. There are four major brain waves that can be detected by EEG: alpha, beta, delta and theta waves. Alpha waves usually emanate from the back of the head during relaxed wakefulness, particularly when your eyes are closed, and they are thought to gradually disappear when a person goes to sleep. Researchers developed a special computational method that can probe EEGs in much deeper data resolutions. Their analyses revealed that alpha waves never disappear during sleep; they just go below conventional detection levels. Moreover, when alpha wave activity spikes just before an obnoxious auditory stimuli (e.g., loud talking or traffic noise) is played, volunteers seems to wake up more easily than when alpha wave activity was low. These findings suggest that maybe the alpha wave activity is the brain’s way of keeping us aware of our surroundings during sleep, and perhaps it enables us to wake up quickly in case of danger. Of course, too much alpha activity might also have a downside: it can make you a light sleeper and give you restless nights.

4- Killer whales imitate enemies and friends

Original Article: Wei B.M. et al., Marine Mammal Science (published online before print 2011).

In marine mammals, as individuals frequently cannot see each other, sound is particularly important for communication. Killer whales live in groups or clans, and these different clans have their own dialects. A recent study showed that whales can do more than just talk in their own language: they can mimic calls from other groups with a different dialect. While analyzing the social behavior of wild orcas living near Vancouver Island in British Colombia, a group of researchers from the University of Vienna discovered that resident whales occasionally produce call types from the repertoires of other vocal clans. The calls resemble the calls of foreign groups that the original group interacted with before. When different clans are in close proximity, it is quite challenging to reliably distinguish original calls from resembling calls. For this reason, researchers recorded calls that resemble call types of a different clan in the absence of that clan and compared them to the originals of the respective call types by analyzing their sonograms. Sonograms reveal distinctive information about the structure of the sound waves, i.e. the spectral density of these signals, and this information can be used to classify animal sounds. The comparative analysis clearly shows that killer whales can imitate calls from other groups even when members of that group are not around. Researchers suggest that this could be a way of labeling outsiders or keeping tabs on their location. Maybe by impersonating the calls of a group, they are conveying a message about that group to their own family members. It is exciting to see that vocal mimicry is not limited to songbirds and dolphins, and that killer whales have more complex social lives than we previously thought.

In this treatment, radioactive iodine atoms are administered to the patient. These are absorbed only by cells of the thyroid gland which are then eliminated by the radiation; as a result of this process, the over-activity of the thyroid gland is prevented. By the divine will of God, the All-Healing, the All-Wise, iodine is absorbed only by thyroid cells but not by any other cell-a truly wonderful phenomenon. This treatment is known as the “bloodless thyroid operation.”

After he began this treatment, my brother-in-law visited us one day. As soon as she saw him, my small daughter, who loves her uncle very much, ran to him and sat on his lap where she fell asleep after a very short while. But then she woke up within half an hour and suddenly started vomiting. We later understood that the unseen radiation being emitted from the radioactive substance in her uncle’s body first caused my daughter to fall asleep quickly as if she was anesthetized and later had negative effects on her.

Then, an article in a scientific magazine attracted my attention. The concepts of atomic (or nuclear) energy and radiation are usually perceived negatively because of the atomic bombs which were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima or the accident which occurred at the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl. This negative perception has been caused by the sudden deaths of living species, great destruction and the permanent devastating effects observed in the environment after these events. However, the energy within the atomic nucleus also has many potential advantages for humankind. It is just as possible, with this energy, to illuminate houses and work places everywhere as it is to exterminate all the living beings in a city.

Negative effects of radiation

Radiation energy may directly affect molecules within a cell by causing structural disorders especially in its DNA. It also causes ionization of water molecules within a cell and releases free radicals which are harmful to the cell. Damage to molecules and genetic material within a cell may consequently trigger a process that can cause the death of that cell. Thus, it is strongly advised for pregnant women especially to stay away from sources of radiation and also not to expose the body to frequent radiation even for diagnostic purposes, such as X-rays.

Positive effects of radiation

As we consider its beneficial aspects, we realize that nuclear radiation is just one of the innumerable blessings of God. In the field of medicine, for instance, radiation is used to cure diseases like cancer, a disease which, ironically, it sometimes causes. Blood products and medical equipment may be effectively sterilized by the use of radiation. It is also useful in radiological visualization techniques.

Atomic nuclei with unstable composition (radionuclides), which disintegrate without any external interference, display features of radioactivity. The diffusion of energy-bearing rays α, β, γ as a result of this disintegration is called radioactivity and the energy-bearing rays are called radiation. The radioactive substances which are used for the diagnosis and cure of illnesses are known as radioactive medicines or radiopharmaceuticals. This kind of medicine may be composed of pure radioactive nuclei, or they may be compounds which are radioactivated by synthesizing them with radioactive nuclei.

Compared with other radioactive substances, the radiopharmaceuticals used in radiotherapy must have some specific features in terms of radiation type and energy level. Radiopharmaceuticals should be fully absorbed by diseased organ or tissue to be cured and should be applied in such a way that it disseminates the least possible radiation to the rest of the body (so as not to contaminate the body with radiation). That is, the half-life of the radioactive substance should be such that it maintains the correct level of radiation in the tissues to effect the required cure. God has created radioactive substances which emit pure β-rays so that they are ideal for curative purposes.

Radiotherapy

Radioactive nuclear therapy is a treatment for diseased human tissue, usually by the intravenous injection of a suitably formulated radioactive composition. In this treatment, the radioactive composition, when diffused within the body, is held more intensely within the diseased organs, and a kind of radiotherapy at cellular level is thus achieved. The most outstanding example of this kind of therapy is radioactive iodine treatment. This therapy is most frequently applied in cases of excess activity of the thyroid gland in patients with thyroid cancer. As iodine is mostly consumed by the thyroid gland in our body, radioactive iodine (I-131 which is the radioisotope of the element iodine) is particularly suitable for this treatment. The thyroid gland’s feature of absorbing and retaining more iodine than other organs, makes it feasible to treat this organ exclusively by this method when it is diseased. Other peptides marked with particular radioactive nuclei are used in the treatment of other types of cancer and success is observed in some cases. Nuclear therapy is also used in treatment of bone cancers and of pain caused by certain joint diseases.

Radiopharmaceuticals in palliative treatment of bone pain from metastases

The spread of cancerous cells from the diseased organ of the body to other organs is called metastasis. Damage and pain originating from osseous (bone) metastases may cause losses in activity and function for the patient. Radiotherapy has long been used particularly in the treatment of limited bone lesions. However, the side effects of radiotherapy are greater since the body areas exposed to X-rays must be increased where there are widespread osseous metastases.

Radiopharmaceutical therapy is useful for patients who have painful metastases throughout multiple osseous zones. In this therapy the patient receives an intravenous injection of suitably formulated radiopharmaceuticals. In this therapy a radioactive substance is used which rapidly leaves the blood circulation system and concentrates within the skeletal system and especially within metastized zones. Radioactive phosphorus has been used for more than thirty years for this purpose.

Radiopharmaceuticals in therapy for joint disease

Rheumatoid arthritis, also known as inflammatory joint rheumatism, is one of the most widely seen (approximately 1–2 %) of connective tissue diseases.

In this disease, medication in some cases can become ineffective in the long run and can even be the cause of serious side effects. Radionuclide synovectomy (or radiosynovectomy), which is used in some advanced cases of this disease, yields results close to those obtainable by surgical intervention. It has the additional advantages of being less costly, not necessitating the patient’s hospitalization following the therapy and being repeatable.

It can be seen that the use of this blessing for either favorable (good) or unfavorable (bad) purposes depends on human choice, as is the case for all other divine blessings. Thus, it should be our top priority to use for humanitarian causes the blessing of radiation, which has been bestowed on us for our benefit, but which can seem as if it is harmful at first sight.

Notes

1. Al-Bukhari, “Tawhid,” 55; Muslim, “Tawba,” 14-16, Ibn Maja, “Zuhd,” 35.
2. Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn ‘Uthman al-Dhahabi, Siyar ‘Alam al-Nubala’, 25 vols. (Beirut, 1992), 1:150.
3. Al-Qushayri, Al-Risala, 133.
4. In other words, one should regard Him as an All-Merciful and All-Forgiving Lord, rather than as an All-Punishing One.
5. Al-Bukhari, “Tawhid”, 15; Muslim, “Tawba,” 1; Al-Tirmidhi, “Dawa’at,” 132.
6. Al-Qushayri, Al-Risala, 134.

Four principles emerge as we examine the life of the Prophet Muhammad from a time management perspective [Canan 1994]. Interestingly, these are also the principles agreed upon by most contemporary experts of time management [Taylor 1998, Jasper 1999, Covey, Morgenstern 2000]. These are:

1. Appreciation of the value of time and, consequently, making the best use of every piece of available time.

2. The guidance of a mission, a set of values, and priorities in planning every activity.

3. Establishment of a time policy or a time budget.

4. The scheduling and completion of activities within allocated time slots.

Now we will give examples of how these principles were put to practice in the prophetic tradition.

Appreciation of the value of time

The value of time is emphasized in many verses of the Qur’an and in many prophetic sayings. In particular, God swears by time at the beginning of the chapter Asr in the Qur’an, meaning “time through the ages” or “afternoon.” It is the general opinion of the interpreters of the Qur’an that such references are intended to draw attention to those concepts and emphasize their importance. The remaining two verses of this short chapter reinforce this view: “1. By the (token of) time (through the ages)! 2. Verily man is in a state of loss. 3. Except those who believe and do righteous deeds, and exhort one another to truth and exhort one another to steadfastness.” Another such oath is to be found at the beginning of Chapter 93, Ad-Dooha or “The Morning Hours”: “(1) By the morning hours, (2) And by the night when it is still.” (*) The particular translation we have adopted here is by Uzunoglu [Uzunoglu 2003]. Other contemporary translations of the Qur’an include Abdel Haleem [AbdelHaleem 2004] and Cleary [Cleary 2004].

In the prayer books attributed to the Prophet Muhammad we see that there are prayers for every occasion [Gulen 2000]. Examples include prayers for beginning an activity, beginning a meal, ending a meal, leaving for a journey, returning from a journey, during the journey, looking in a mirror, during ill health, for rain, against excessive rain, against cold or extreme heat, when entering the bathroom, when exiting the bathroom, and countless others. From these prayers we learn that there is almost no time slot in the Prophet’s life that was not occupied with a useful activity or a prayer. It was observed on one occasion that the Prophet refused to greet a person who was sitting idly. He greets the very same person on his way back upon seeing them occupied with an activity. The following Prophetic saying summarizes his attitude: “The majority of humanity is at a loss as they do not recognize the value of two of God’s gifts: Health and (discretionary) time.” [Bukhari, Riqaq, 1997]

Guidance of a mission

After receiving the divine call, the life of the Prophet Muhammad was focused on living and conveying the message. His ultimate goal was to fulfill his mission as a servant and messenger of God. This involved two aspects: On the personal front a spiritual ascension towards the state of being a perfect human (insan-i kamil) as a servant of God and on the social front sharing the faith and practicing conduct that was pleasing to God and others. His values and priorities were shaped completely by the scripture as well as by the other communications of God that he received, which did not become part of the scripture. In his farewell sermon during his last pilgrimage, he is reported to have asked the present audience, which numbered in the tens of thousands: “Do you bear witness that I have fulfilled my mission as God’s messenger?” Of course the answer was a resounding yes, accompanied by tears [Gulen 2000].

Weekly time policy

In a weak prophetic tradition narrated by Ibn Abbas [Canan 1998, Harf 2000], the cousin of the Prophet, the regular activities of his days are listed: “Sunday is the day for planting seeds and construction. Monday is for travel. Tuesday is for giving blood. Wednesday is for acquisition and alms giving. Thursday is for bringing community matters to the governor. Friday is for weddings and spending time with your family. Saturday is for hunting for livelihood.” The authenticity of this narration is weak and therefore we cannot conclude that it is obligatory to perform these duties on these days. However, it does give the idea of designating specific days of the week for specific projects or activities. In another, stronger prophetic tradition, the Prophet was heard to say, “Seek knowledge on every Monday” [Fayz al-Qadr 1/543]. Other prophetic sayings emphasize the importance of Friday as a day of festivity and the early part of Friday as the time to clean the body and care for one’s clothing. Another established prophetic tradition is to fast voluntarily on Mondays and Thursdays. From the observations of his companions it has been firmly established that the Prophet, peace be upon him, established a weekly schedule with preferred activities on each day.

Daily time policy

The most detailed information about the time management of the Prophet Muhammad is available concerning his daily schedule. Two types of activities occupied his time: The spontaneous (un-programmed) activities and the regular (programmed) activities. The spontaneous activities included giving an audience to an envoy or a representative group, the meeting of an urgent need, or helping a stranger who spontaneously sought help. Such activities were accommodated within the time slots that were not dedicated to programmed activities. Furthermore, if a representative body were to arrive in Medina for a one-off meeting, then it would be scheduled at the first available time. However, if the group was to stay in Medina for a while, then the meetings with this group were included in the regular plan of activities. An example of such accommodation can be seen in the case of the representative group from the tribe of Thaqif. As the group was to stay in Medina for a while, the Prophet visited them and talked with them after each night prayer. When one evening he delayed his visit, the group asked him: “O Messenger of God, you did not come at the time you used to come today; you were late, what is the reason for this? [Usd al-Gaba 1/168].

Regular/scheduled activities

Regular prayer times form the framework around which all other regular activities are scheduled. Two aspects of the Prophet’s daily schedule were (1) The same activities were scheduled in the same time period every day, and (2) each activity had a designated time limit.

Regular daily prayers are ordered by God at specific times [The Qur’an 4/103] and the start and end times for each prayer were taught to the Prophet Muhammad by the Archangel Gabriel. In authentic prophetic traditions we learn that Archangel Gabriel asked the Prophet Muhammad to join him in performing each prayer at the beginning of the time period time throughout one day. The next day, they performed each prayer at the very end of the period that was dedicated to that prayer. The Prophet said “The best of deeds in God’s sight is the prayer that is performed in time” [Bukhari, Mawaqit al-Salat; Muslim, Iman]. While the beginning time for each prayer period is preferred, the prayer can be done anytime between these limits. If the time limit is exceeded even by a minute, the prayer is invalidated and the person has to perform a makeup prayer in the next period. It is easy to see that regular observation of these prayer times gives a person a high level of time consciousness. It also reveals the fallacy of the view that precise timing and punctuality are modern traditions.

Various accounts of the Prophet’s daily life tell us that he was very careful in the observation of his daily schedule. We understand this particularly from the observation that when the Prophet changed his schedule, this was a cause for worry in the community. For instance, one companion relates: “The Messenger of God (upon whom be peace and blessings) left his home at a time when normally nobody saw him outside.” [Usd al-Gaba 1/168, cited in Canan 1994]. Another one is: “The Messenger of God (upon whom be peace and blessings) ascended to the pulpit. He was never seen on the pulpit except on Fridays before.” [Ibnul Maja, Fitan, 33, cited in Canan 1994].

Night activities

The narrations from his companions tell us that the Prophet used to divide his night into three segments. One segment was dedicated to worship, one to his family and one segment to his personal matters. At times, he is seen as giving his personal time to his community in meeting with them and trying to address their needs.

The Prophet was observed to halt his daily activities after sunset [Mustadrak: 3/461, cited in Canan 1994]. This does not mean, however, that he rested for the remainder of the evening; he sometimes held meetings after evening or night prayer. As a general principle, he did not like sleeping before the night prayer or talking after it [Bukhari, Mawaqit, 13/23, cited in Canan 1994]. His wife Aisha (may God be pleased with her) reports that the Prophet, upon whom be peace and blessings, used to sleep during the early part of the night and wake up for worship during the later part [Ibn Maja, Iqama, 182, cited in Canan 1994]. On exceptional circumstances, the Prophet was observed to stay awake and deal with community affairs until late hours of the night.

The night stances (qiyam al-layl), the hours he spent in worship, reflection and prayers all occupy an important place in the Prophet’s life. He is reported to have spent on average between 2/3 to 3/4 of each night in worship, remembrance, reflection, and supplication. This corresponds to a period of 4 to 7 hours each night, depending on the season. He explains this emphasis on night prayers in the following way: “God descends to the first heaven of the earth every night and announces, ‘Is there anyone who repents; I will forgive, is there anyone who prays; I will accept,’ and this continues until early dawn” [Usd al-Gaba: 6/91; Ibn Maja, Iqama, 182, cited in Canan 1994]. He also likened his night stances to those of the Prophet David: “The best nightly prayer in God’s sight is that of David. He used to sleep during the early part of the night, then wake up and spend a third of the night in prayers and sleep a little again before dawn” [Bukhari, Tahajjud, 7; Muslim, Siyam, 189; Nasai, Qiyam al-layl, 14, available in Harf 2000].

Daytime activities

The Prophet prohibited his companions from sleeping after the morning prayer. He used to stay at the mosque until sunrise and have group conversations with his companions. The subjects of these conversations were both religious as well as entertaining, for example, poetry would be read or the dreams of the previous night would be related. It is understood that these hours were spent in a felicitous way, with companions laughing at times and the Prophet smiling [Nasai, Sahv, 98, Muslim, Ruya, 23, cited in Canan 1994]. The Prophet underlines the significance of these hours held for him with the following saying: “Sitting together with a group of companions and remembering God with them after the morning prayer until the sunrise is more valuable to me than fighting in the cause of God. The same is true for the hours after the afternoon prayer before sunset” [Usd al-Gaba: 2/466, cited in Canan 1994].

Following the conversation with his companions, the Prophet would then spend time with his family. On days when he was not fasting, he would have breakfast during this period. He is known to have eaten two meals each day, a late breakfast and a dinner. Towards noon, he would take a nap and encourage others to do the same, as this would help them to stay awake at night for prayers [Mednick 2002]. After the noon prayers came the time for community matters. The afternoon prayer was followed by time for the family once again. In the Meccan period, the Prophet was married to Khadeeja for 25 years, his only wife during this time. His multiple marriages occurred after she had passed away, when he was already over 50. The reasons and occasions for these marriages form the subject of a separate article. But suffice it to say that in general these marriages could be categorized into three types: (1) Marrying the widow of a martyr to take care of her and to honor the family. (2) Marrying the daughter or other relative of a community leader to establish family ties with that community to avoid armed conflicts. (3) Marriage with a woman of a special status so that woman could become a teacher and role model for Muslim women. This third function was especially important, as the aspects of faith that pertain to special circumstances of women could only be taught by the experience of the wives of the Prophet. The Prophet was observed to visit and spend equal, fixed times with his wives during his family time. Figure 1 depicts the time allowances in a regular day of the Prophet as estimated by this author.

Human biorhythm and activity changes

Researchers on human biorhythms tell us that multiple periodic biorhythms operate within the human body with different cycle times, changing from 90 minutes (ultradian) to daily (circadian), to longer than a day [Smolensky 2001]. As the human body operates with chemicals, hormones, and electrical signals, it needs to replenish these resources once in a while [Chafetz 1992]. One mechanism for achieving this is having a short break such as a nap [Rossi 1991, Mednick 2002] and another is to change one’s activity when feeling tired. the Prophet Muhammad points to this important fact by saying “Relieve us O Bilal!” Bilal was the chief caller to prayer. The Prophet was indicating that they were tired and less productive in the activity in which they were involved and that it was a good time to take a break and pray. “Relieve us” means “Please make the call to prayer” so the community will gather in the mosque for a congregational prayer. The interweaving of different activities in his daily schedule is another indication that the Prophet was cognizant of the effect of the biorhythm on one’s productivity.

Conclusion

The popular mental picture of the Prophet Muhammad in the non-Muslim world depicts a person who spent most of his time in the battlefield or enjoying the spoils of war. Nothing can be further from truth. In this article we examined the life of the Prophet Muhammad from a time management perspective. The picture that emerges from this analysis is very different from the popular perception in the west. We learn that the Prophet spent most of his time engaged in worship, prayer, remembrance, and supplications. The next two most important activities in his life were community matters, including spreading God’s message and family matters. We also learn that the Prophet was a very punctual time keeper. He did not waste even the smallest amount of time and admonished those who did. We learn that he kept a tight daily schedule to the extent that his companions became worried when this schedule was not observed. He designated certain days and hours of each day for certain activities. He encouraged staying awake after dawn and having a short nap at noon. He practiced such principles as eating moderately, sleeping moderately, and talking moderately, all of which ultimately help with better time management. He took advantage of every discretionary moment in life for remembering God and offering prayers. Every activity in his life was guided by his main goal of living and sharing God’s religion for a happy life on the Earth and in the Hereafter. Interestingly, many of these practices are now recognized and recommended by modern experts of time management. In summary, we witness a life that was lived fully and productively, yet opportunities for smiling were not neglected.

Yuksel A. Aslandogan is the Vice President of Institute of Interfaith Dialog, Houston, Texas.

References

• Abdel Haleem, M.A.S., The Qur’an: A new Translation, Oxford University Press, 2004.
• M.M. Khan, Sahih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Meanings, Darussalam Publishers, 1997.
• Ibrahim Canan, Islam’da Zaman Tanzimi (Time Management in Islam), Cihan Publications, Istanbul: 1994.
• Ibrahim Canan, Kutub-i Sitte, Muhtasari Tercume ve Serhi (The Six Books of Hadith, Translation and Commentary), Akcag Yayinlari, Ankara: 1988.
• Chafetz, Michael D., Smart for Life, Penguin Books, NY: 1992.
• Cleary, T., The Qur’an: A New Translation, Starlatch LLC, 2004.
• Cleary, T., The Wisdom of the Prophet: The Sayings of Muhammad, Shambala Publications, Boston, MA: 2001.
• Stephen R. Covery, First Things First. Simon & Schuster Ltd, 1999.
• Fethullah Gulen, Prophet Muhammad: Aspects of His Life, The Fountain Publications, VA, 2000.
• M. Hamidullah, Introduction to Islam, Kitab Bhavan, New Delhi, 1992.
• M. Hamidullah, The Prophet of Islam, S. Muhammad Ashraf Publishers, Lahore, Pakistan.
• [Hart 1978] Michael H. Hart, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, Hart Publishing Company, Inc., New York: 1978.
• [Harf 2000] Harf Information Technology, Hadith Encyclopedia, contains 9 books of Hadith in Arabic, namely: Sahih Al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Sunan Al-Tirmidhi, Sunan Al-Nasa’i, Sunan Abu Dawud, Sunan Ibn Majah, Musnad Ahmad bin Hanbal, Muwatta’ Al-Imam Malik and Sunan Al-Darimi, Cairo, Egypt, 2000.
• [Jasper 1999] Jan Jasper, Take Back Your Time, St. Martin’s Press, NY: 1999.
• [Mednick 2002] Sara Mednick, Ken Nakayama, Jose L. Cantero, Mercedes Atienza, Alicia A. Levin, Neha Pathak & Robert Stickgold. ” The restorative effect of naps on perceptual deterioration.” Nature Neuroscience, published online May 28, 2002.
• [Morgenstern 2000] Julie Morgenstern, Time Management from the Inside Out. Henry Holt & Co., September 2000.
• [Rossi 1991] Ernest Rossi, The Twenty Minute Break, The Ultradian Healing Response, Zeig, Tucker & Co., 1991. http://home.earthlink.net/~rossi/ultradia.htm.
• [Smolensky 2001] Smolensky, Michael, and Lamberg, Lynne, “Body Clock Guide to Better Health,” Henry Holt and Co., NY: 2001.
• [Taylor 1998] Taylor, Harold L., Making Time Work for You, Harold Taylor Time Consultants Inc, North York, Ontario, Canada: 1998.
• [Uzunoglu 2003] Nurettin Uzunoglu, The Holy Qur’an: Translation and Commentaries, Islamic Publications for the Holy Qur’an Association, Istanbul: 2003.

Despite many theories we still do not fully understand the purpose of sleep, nor do we know the functions of different kinds of sleep. There are two main kinds of sleep that possess markedly contrasting physiological characteristics and mechanisms, and both of them occur normally in any extended period of sleep. One of these is known as activated sleep or rapid eye movement (REM) sleep that may also be referred to as “dreaming sleep” because it seems to be the stage where dreaming takes place.1 This state is characterized by a high degree of central nervous system (CNS) activity, a suppression of peripheral motor activity, and a temporal association with the vivid, hallucinatory experiences we call dreams. Brainwaves speed up, heart rate and breathing increases, blood pressure rises and the eyes dart around behind closed lids. Research has shown that if a person is awakened every time REM begins, preventing them from dreaming, after about three nights the individual will begin to show signs of having a nervous breakdown. Clearly dreams are an inner release mechanism which helps provide us with emotional balance and maintain our sanity. Dreams can be considered as guardians of our mental and emotional well-being.

The significance attributed to dreams will be presented here from a historical perspective starting from ancient times, passing through the Abrahamic religions and finally compared with contemporary psychological evaluations.

In most ancient cultures, consideration and even veneration of dreams played a great part. Some groups felt that dream life was more real and important than waking life. Not only were dreams looked to for information about hunting, as in Eskimo and African groups, but also for ways of healing physical and psychological ills, as seen in the Greek Dream Temples of Asclepius.2

Sources for information about dream divination in the ancient pagan world range from Homer in the eighth century bce to Artemidorus in the second century ce and the Greek Magical Papyri, some of which were written in the fourth century ce. Artemidorus’ five books are a compilation of dream interpretations that he collected from a variety of sources and then classified in a system. The system represented a synthesis of knowledge of dream interpretation at the time.3

Even though dreams are still a mystery, religious traditions value dreams and acknowledge that they can be used by God for divine revelation. Although the three Abrahamic religions differ on many other topics, they find substantial agreement on this particular point: dreaming is a valuable source of wisdom, understanding, and inspiration. In the Qur’an, as in the Jewish Torah and the Christian New Testament, dreams serve as a vital medium by which God communicates with humans. Dreams offer divine guidance and comfort, warn people of impending danger, and offer prophetic glimpses of the future.

Dreams have long been considered a legitimate form of divine revelation, particularly in Jewish mysticism. In Judaism information about dream divination is found in the Torah and the Babylonian Talmud. In the Torah dreams play an important part in the history of the

Jews, particularly as the motif of Jewish dream interpreters in a foreign court. Solomon, peace be upon him, received a dream from Yahweh who asks what he may give him (Kings 3:5). Solomon asks for the wisdom for which he became famous. Jacob, peace be upon him, dreams of the gates of Yahweh’s heaven and Yahweh promises Jacob land and blessedness for his people (Genesis 28:12). Joseph’s dreams in Genesis are prophetic and play an integral role in his brothers’ anger and conspiracy to kill him, peace be upon him. The brothers say “Here comes the dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits, then we shall see what will become of his dreams” (Genesis 37:19–20).

Daniel’s dream visions illustrate how faithfulness to Jewish practice brings divine aid to triumph over enemies. In Joel, Yahweh declares that dreams are a valid form of spiritual information, “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams and your young men shall see visions. . .” (Joel 2:28) In Numbers, Yahweh declares that he speaks to prophets in visions and dreams; however, this story is singling out Moses, peace be upon him, as a leader because God speaks to him “face to face.” In the Talmud, there are 217 references to dreams covering the origin of dreams, their purpose and meaning, wish-fulfillment in dreams, the relation of dreams to reality, and the technique of dream interpretation.3

The New Testament is full of dreams that are explained by prophets. There are constant references to communication between humankind and God, between humankind and the angels, and between the human being and his or her higher self through the medium of dreams. The moral standards of the individual are exactly reflected in the clarity and degree of quality of his or her dreams. Joseph, the eleventh son of Jacob, peace be upon them, had the ability not only to remember and interpret his own dreams, but to interpret those of others.4

God has chosen to communicate with humankind through dreams and visions according to the New Testament (Acts 2:17). He guides and counsels us through our dreams (Psalms 16:7). He establishes covenants with us through our dreams as in the dream of Abraham (Genesis 15:12, 13, 18). He grants us supernatural gifts in our dreams, like that given to Solomon (I Kings 3:5, 9, 12, 15). He has utilized dreams from Genesis to Revelation, and declared that He will continue to use them in the last days.

Islam has historically shown greater interest in dreams than either of the other two Abrahamic traditions, and has done more to weave dreaming into the daily lives of its followers. From the first revelatory visions of Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, to the myriad dream practices of present-day Muslims, Islam has developed and sustained a complex, multifaceted tradition of active engagement with the dreaming, imagination, origins, functions, and meanings of dreaming. Muslim scholars and theologians have followed the prophetic path in dealing with dreams, and have judged dreams according to the Qur’an and the Sunna, examples from the Prophet’s life.

The episodes about Prophet Joseph, peace be upon him, in the Qur’an are similar to those in the Old Testament (Genesis 37–50), and these episodes combine to make a clear point: dreams, and the ability to interpret them, are an important sign of God’s favor (Yusuf 12:4–100). In chapter 37, The Ranks (Saffat), the Qur’an retells a story found in the book of Genesis. Here the main subject is Prophet Abraham, peace be upon him, whose life is recounted in Genesis 12–25. The Qur’anic version focuses specifically on God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his only son.

Prophet Abraham is true to his dream, not by literally enacting it in the physical sacrifice of his son (which is finally prevented by God); rather, he “fulfills his vision” by a demonstration of his absolute obedience to God. There is a very important point here which is worth noting. It is the unquestioned assumption by both Prophet Abraham and his son that the dream is a command from God, peace be upon them.

In addition there are narratives about the dreams of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, in Qur’an, in chapter 8, The Spoils (Anfal). After the Muslim victory at Badr (March 15, 624 ad), where some three hundred and fifty believers vanquished close to a thousand non-believers, the Prophet received a revelation in which God affirms that He brought to pass the encounter which, without His contriving, neither of the parties would have sought. In this context the Prophet was told: “When God showed them to you in your dream as few; and if He had shown them to you as many you would certainly have become weak-hearted and you would have disputed about the matter, but God saved (you); surely He is the Knower of what is in the breasts ”(Anfal 8:43).5

Muslim scholars have ruled that true dreams are from God-some warn and others bring glad tidings. Ibn Mas’ud narrated, “The Prophet said, ‘Prophecy is finished but tidings remain.’ People asked, ‘What are these tidings?’ He replied, ‘A true dream which a man sees, or others see for him’” (Bukhari and Maalik). These tidings could be good or bad as God says in the Qur’an, which says, “So give them tidings of a painful doom” (Inshiqaq 84:24). These dreams are the ones about which the truthful and trustworthy Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said, “At the end of time, the believer’s dream will rarely be incorrect; the more truthful a person is, the truer his dreams are; and the dream of a faithful believer is a part of the forty-six parts of Prophecy” (Bukhari and Muslim). What people see in their sleep is one of the three types. As narrated by Awf Ibn Maalik, the Prophet said, “Dreams are of three types: some are from Satan to sadden the son of Adam, some are the result of what a person thinks about while he is awake so he sees it in his sleep, and some are one of the forty-six parts of prophecy” (Ibn Majah).

Although dreams are not considered decisive, especially when there is an apparent contradiction with common sense, there is a very strong tradition on dreams in Islam, and there have been several scholars who have put a significant effort into composing books about dreams and their interpretations. Looking in more detail at Muslim teachings, the first example to consider comes from the scholar Ibn Arabi (1164–1240). His classification of dreams establishes the basic framework used throughout later Muslim history. According to Ibn Arabi, there are three basic types of dream. The first is an “ordinary” dream, produced by the imagination when it takes experiences from daily life and magnifies them as in a mirror, reflecting in a distorted symbolic fashion our wishes and desires. The second and much more significant type of dream draws its material not from daily life but from the “Universal Soul” (Preserved Tablet), a source of knowledge closely associated with the faculty of abstract reasoning. “Universal Soul” dreams reveal fundamental truths about reality, although, like the first type of dream, these are distorted by the imperfect mirror of the human imagination. Interpretation is therefore required to discover what the symbolic images mean. The third and final type of dream involves a direct revelation of reality, with no distortion or symbolic mediation-a clear vision of divine truth. Ibn Arabi’s typology portrays a wider range of dream experience than is usually acknowledged in Western psychological thinking, which focuses its attention almost exclusively on his first category, the “ordinary” dreams of daily life.

A further elaboration of this classification appears in the monumental Muqaddimah (“An Introduction to History”) written by the scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332–1402). Briefly, he emphasizes the idea that in sleep, people are liberated from their senses, freeing their rational souls to gain glimpses of transcendent truth. The distinctive feature in Ibn Khaldun’s theory is that he asserts the divine wisdom of creating sleep could be that it is an opportunity for humans to “lift the veil of the senses” and gain access to divine realities and higher forms of knowing. Dreaming appears in this light as one of God’s gifts to humankind, a “natural” means of spiritual insight potentially available to all people.

Having said this much about the dreams and their significance in the history of Abrahamic religions, let us turn now to psychology for a contemporary evaluation of dreams. Freud looked upon the dream as a somewhat disturbed form of mental activity, or as a form of psychic activity that, if it worsens, would tend to become pathological-an activity that is not significant in itself and at the very most manifests a more or less infantile desire. Freud insisted that one’s dreams were one’s earliest mental images and memories. He regarded the brain as a sponge.6 He said one’s primal evolutionary impulses were catalogued in dreams. Freud believed these were held in one’s memory for interpreting events that occurred later in life. Freud explained the dream as a picture-word puzzle.7

Jung completely abandoned such prejudices against the dream. He sees the dreams as a spontaneous, normal, creative expression of the unconscious in the form of images and symbols.1 Jung believed that dreams speak in symbols, images and metaphors, a language that is the unconscious mind’s natural way of expression. For Jung the dream world was just as rich, as diversified, and as polymorphic as the conscious world. One is not able to understand this “language” right away because the images are different from the language in one’s everyday life.6 Jung divided dreams into two levels. The first level is the objective level, when dreams illustrate the relation with the external world. This would be a thing such as people, events or activities. The second level is the subjective level. This level deals with the thoughts and feelings of the person.7

Many religious traditions still “believe that the ability to receive visions through dreams and in the waking state is a faculty that is latent in human beings, whose attachment to material things clouds their receptivity to impulses from the spiritual realm.”8 What has changed our view of dreams as divine revelations? Could it be simply our strong desire for worldly and material things that is blocking our divine communication channels?

Muhammed Toprak is a research fellow at The Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.

Notes

1. Grunbaum, Gustave Von, Roger Caillois. The Dream and Human Societies, University of California Press, 1966, p. 85.
2. Crisp, Tony. Dream Dictionary: An A to Z Guide to Understanding Your Unconscious Mind, Gramercy Books, 2005.
3. http://www.sonoma.edu/users/h/holmstrl/DIVINATION.html
4. Virkler, Mark and Patti Virkler. Hear God Through Your Dreams, Communion with God Ministries, New York.
5. Translation of the Qur’an by M.H. Shakir.
6. Lohff, David C. The Dream Directory. Philadelphia: Running Press Book Publishers, 1998.
7. Bulkley, Kelly. “Dreams of Social Transformation.” Association for the Study of Dreams. 27 Nov. 2001.
8. Hoffman, Valerie J, “The Role of Visions in Contemporary Egyptian Religious Life.” Religion (1997) vol. 27, no. 1, p. 53.

A person draws meanings from, or gives meanings to, events and experiences. That is, experiencing starts to make sense as the person performs his or her psychological functioning of translating it into how he or she thinks and feels. It is the individuals’ subjectivity, or phenomenological world, that forms the very core for meaning origination and evolvement. People have the freedom to choose meaning (McArthur, 1958) through their interactive experiencing with various internal and external contexts (Chen, 2001). As such, meaning is the underlying motivation behind thoughts, actions and even the interpretation and application of knowledge. Meaning is also arrived at through the learning process.

As a convert to Islam, how I construct meaning represents perhaps the greatest difference between my worldview prior to Islam and my post-conversion Islamic worldview. My Islamic worldview facilitates meaning through the tawhidic (God’s Unity) paradigm by connecting everything in life – every word, act, thought, and event – to the highest source of all, the ultimate reality, God. This means that everything that happens in life is to be responded to according to that which is pleasing to God and in line with His revealed laws. We do not make decisions based solely on our feelings, desires and appetites. Rather, we employ the intellect, which is grounded in knowledge of religion and God, to decide that which is pleasing and acceptable to the Creator, and, as such, optimal for us on all levels. The goal, the ultimate success, the ultimate happiness, and contentment, is transformed into a spiritual one and is manifested in a life of closeness and intimacy with the Divine, detailed by God-consciousness in every act and thought.

How this differs from my pre-Islamic worldview is that it, ideally, removes the lower self as a guide, so decisions are not made according to appetites and selfish desires, but according to that which we believe is best for us, for our lives both here and in the hereafter. We cease following the direction of the lower self and instead open our hearts to the guidance of our higher self, the one in tune to the divine will. For what is best for us cannot be left to the lower self to decide; that self can only lead us to spiritual destruction. Thus, all of our trust and hope is placed in God and our conviction that He is the best one to guide us as the Creator of all things, the Loving, the Merciful, and the one who wants the best outcome for us, an outcome which is closeness to Him in this world and a direct vision of Him in the life after death.

The making of meaning, therefore, takes on a whole new form from this worldview. The lens – our cognitive schema – of how we see the world changes. We begin to see with the eyes of the spirit, the eyes of the heart. We judge not according to what we find pleasing or desirable, but according to the knowledge of what God finds pleasing and desirable. As such, we begin the striving, the journey toward the acquisition of the divine attributes. We live a life of effort to reform our own personalities to reflect the attributes. As a real-life example, the one who most perfectly manifested these attributes, we follow the way and life of Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace and blessings, and his successors. In so doing life becomes one of ongoing self-purification, self-perfection and self-improvement. The making of meaning, therefore, is spiritualized. We become highly tuned to everything happening around us. When I came to Islam, however,I learned that even eating could be a spiritual activity when undertaken with the right intention. According to the Islamic world view, every morsel of food is a blessing, a gift, sustenance that comes from God.

We find meaning and make meaning of every experience through self-examination. We start by looking inwardly at ourselves and examining how we react to situations around us. We take stock of our feelings, our frustrations, our likes and our dislikes. We examine our minds and look at what we spend time thinking about. We constantly look for ways to improve ourselves. In sum, everything means something because according to our worldview, God sees everything, knows everything, and everything we do is counted either for us or against us. Every moment thus contributes to our success or failure. This means that as Muslims, we must acquire the attribute of awareness, of always knowing what is happening around us and within us at all times.

Islam helps us to construct meaning on the premise that everything is purposeful because it directly determines our fate both in this world and in the eternal world after death. We approach life as an opportunity having been given the knowledge that every moment can either help us or hurt us, depending on what we choose to do with it. In this way, the Islamic worldview puts the making of meaning in our own hands through the gift of free will, and links the process with the development and refinement of the self.

The spiritualized Islamic worldview brings energy to life and a balance that I did not previously have. The key to it is consciousness and remembrance of God. When we are conscious of God, of His omnipotence, greatness and mercy, we are always aware of ourselves. We are constantly in a state of humility because of the knowledge that He created us out of nothing for no other reason than that His love be known, He be worshipped and trusted by us. We are also aware that God’s mercy will always help us along on our path when we make a sincere effort to dedicate ourselves to Islamic self-improvement. This awareness includes the belief that heaven is not only the goal for the hereafter, but for this life as well, achieved by closeness to God. As such, by remaining conscious of God, we invite and invoke goodness from both the earthly and spiritual realms, and light a way for ourselves to engage in continuous self-refinement.

An example of how Islam contributes to the making of meaning is my initial understanding of how a Muslim is to approach something as seemingly mundane as eating. According to my pre-Islamic worldview, eating was an activity undertaken to satisfy hunger. It was never much more than that. Although I understood food as a blessing, I did not approach eating as a spiritual act. How could I? The only knowledge I had of it was that it was an activity undertaken to satisfy a physical need. When I came to Islam, however, I learned that even eating could be a spiritual activity when undertaken with the right intention, in accordance with Islamic law, by way of the Prophet’s example and with a deeper understanding of the act itself.

According to the Islamic worldview, every morsel of food is a blessing, a gift, sustenance that comes from God. The food we eat is usually also a blessing for those who grow it, manufacture it, process it and sell it – those who derive their livelihood from it. Food, when consumed with consciousness of God can be a source of barakah, blessings and divine grace. Therefore, we are more inclined to be less wasteful in our eating, to take less and think of others who also want to eat. Through the spiritual practice of fasting, the Islamic worldview also teaches us what it is like to be unable to find food. This alone is enough to make most people appreciate food and increase their gratitude to God when they eat. In addition, there are so many forms of etiquette (adab) of the Prophet on how to approach and eat food that help us to understand its spiritual role in our lives, such as the proper way of sitting, chewing, handling food, passing it to others, the prayers to recite before eating it, while eating it, after eating it, the way to conduct oneself while eating, the way to wash ourselves after eating, etc. As we can see, something as fundamental to our lives as food, or eating, when approached from the Islamic worldview becomes a highly meaningful activity that is intimately linked to our personal sense of mission as Muslims.

So what about something as spiritually rich as formal worship? If eating as an activity can be approached with spiritual intelligence, an act of God consciousness and worship, then what about something like our prayer (salat), which to the Prophet was not only a comfort, but an ascension to heaven every time he engaged in it? What does prayer mean to us? Do we approach it as a heavenly ascension, so powerful as to move us to a higher state, or is it just something we have to get through to achieve a place at the heavenly table when it is all over?

Meaning of Islam is cultivated in us through the knowledge and wisdom found in our tradition, and through teachers that have been blessed with it and continue to pass it on. We must seek them and their works to help us develop meaning in our lives as Muslims. It is an important time for us to make meaning from this way of life. All around us meaninglessness and its culture are fueling the spiritual suicide that is engulfing the world and victimizing people from every race and religion.

Ultimately, meaning of Islam must be individualized and owned by each of us uniquely, based on our individual relationship with God. We must find intimacy with Him, strive to love Him, rely on Him, to seek Him, and depend on Him, trusting Him completely. Lasting and real meaning of Islam cannot come from a movement or someone’s agenda it can and must come from the knowledge of Truth, and submission to it through the way of life based on it. It must be spiritual, not political. Our uniqueness as an ummah is that our purpose, our basis for deriving meaning in all of life is spiritually grounded in heavenly laws and aspirations. When we read the beautiful supplications of our Prophet to his Lord, we can feel the intimacy that he had with the All-Merciful. This is the spring of meaning for those who have surrendered themselves, and an important element of our way of life that helps us persevere through difficult times.

References

• Chen, C.P. 2001. On Exploring Meanings: Combining Humanistic and Career Psychology Theories in Counselling. Counselling Psychology Quarterly 14:4.
• Dewey, J. (1933). How We Think. New York, NY: Heath Books.
• Frankl, V. 1963. Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press.
• Lofland, J. and Lofland, L. 1996. Analyzing Social Settings. Third Edition. Wadsworth
• McArthur, H. 1958. The Necessity of Choice, Journal of Individual Psychology, 14, 153-157.

Increasing brainpower

We can improve our brain’s memory, creativity, and intelligence by our own conscious effort and free will. Even though our brain is made of nerve tissues, it can grow if it is used, just like a muscle. Scientists are constantly amazed at its plasticity “ the ability to grow. Even for people over 80 years old, significant life-quality improvements can be achieved through intellectual activity.

Researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles studied the brains of 20 dead people. After examining the dendrites (tree-like communicating arms between muscles), they discovered that their length increased proportionally with a person’s education and lifestyle. Those with a college education and a mentally active lifestyle had longer dendrites than those with less education and an intellectually inactive lifestyle.

Animal studies seem to confirm the same result. For example, rats exposed to maze learning show an increase in dendrite growth and enhanced problem-solving ability. They form new synapses between neurons, which facilitates further learning. When they are moved to dull, non-challenging environments, dendritic material decreases and synapses regress. Neurons can grow and change throughout one’s life.

French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes (1596-1650) once said: It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.(1) In this ever-changing information society, successful adaptation depends on expanding our minds through learning and creativity. Knowledge helps us advance to happiness, because happiness usually is tied to less stress (in our career or daily life), gives us greater travel and leisure opportunities, more autonomy and even more money. Love grows in a relaxed and happy atmosphere, so even emotional well-being depends on improving our brainpower.

By stimulating our brain more intensively, a curious thing happens: The inter-connections between neurons increase by developing new dendrites. These surplus connections make our brain work better, improve our memory, and protect us against diseases like Alzheimer’s by providing alternative connections.

Learning and brainpower

An increased sense of self-confidence and awareness originates from a large fund of knowledge. Even the number and variety of friends we have is directly proportional to the number of topics of interest and discussion we acquire. Knowledge also improves our ability to foresee future political, economic, and historical trends. Moreover, an improved understanding of history and cultures help us avoid the hazard of prejudice.

Understanding the world is like a jigsaw puzzle. The more pieces that we can fit in, the clearer the image and the greater the urge to learn and fill in more pieces. The more we learn, the more we wish to continue learning. Increasing knowledge is like an avalanche; for it gains a momentum of its own once it starts. Perseverance and some initial prompting are required, but the rewards soon pay off. Minds are kept young by continual use, and mentally active people tend to live longer. Learning is as important to our brain as exercise is to our body. Hence the process of learning should not cease right after graduating from high school or college.

Students are presented with an enormous amount of information to learn and memorize during the academic year. During vacation time, however, they shy away from reading or learning even about non-curricular topics because of the mistaken notion that the brain has a limited capacity and that new information will overwrite previous information. The brain has a virtually unlimited capacity to absorb, sort, and retain information. But stimulation is required. An athlete improves by exercise and training; the brain gets into shape the more it is used.

According to Life magazine’s July 1994 feature article on Brain Calisthenics, Golden claims that exercising your brain may do as much for your health as exercising your body. Research on an elderly group of nuns in Minnesota revealed that a daily diet of brain games kept them healthy, youthful, and relatively free from Alzheimer’s and other degenerative brain disorders. And, they were happy, active, and mentally sharp well into their nineties. Researchers attribute this to the brain’s capacity to grow new connections after receiving the proper kind of stimulation. Although the connection between continued brain activity and health remains unclear, we can say that neural stimulation seems to have a direct role in keeping the brain and body balanced, energetic, and healthy. And, it is surmised that increased brain stimulation provides more pronounced and long-lasting benefits.

We can increase our dendrites by engaging in newer activities. When we learn something, we use our whole brain and build new brain circuits. But once something becomes a routine, we only use a small portion of our brain, leaving the rest to atrophy. To prevent the loss or actually to increase the number of dendrites, they must be stimulated. In a Life magazine interview published in July 1994, Arnold Scheible, head of UCLA’s Brain Research Institute, suggested: The important thing is to be actively involved in areas that are unfamiliar to you. Anything that’s intellectually challenging can probably serve as a kind of stimulus for dendritic growth, which means it adds to the computational reserves in your brain.

However, the article pointed out a caveat for the occasional brain developer. It seems that although learning a new skill creates more neural dendritic connections, the growth stops once the skill is learned and the new connections may actually atrophy. Thus, the brain needs random and interactive exercise so that it cannot learn the exercise so well that it becomes a routine and so that it can better learn new things continually.

Learning is an art that requires practical tools to gather a broad knowledge base. For example, Dr. S. Ray has an interesting suggestion: Look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary and then write a reminder by the word indicating where you encountered it, whet-her in a book, a newspaper, or a conversation. If you saw it in Newsweek, write NW beside the word. If your professor mentioned it, write his name next to the word. If you come across a word in this article, put a smiling face near it. Next time you encounter this word, your previous annotation will help you form a better association and you will remember the word better.

Once you start learning new words, it is a pleasant surprise to encounter them again. Each new word becomes a personal friend that reinforces a memory. Consider the dictionary one of your most interesting friends. The more words we learn, the more we become aware of our surroundings. Words enrich our memory. Words form the thread on which we string our experiences, said the British philosopher Aldous Huxley (1894-1963).

Physical activity and brainpower

Physical activity increases mental function. Exercise induces the growth of capillaries (tiny blood vessels) in the brain. Aging can lead to the brain receiving less blood. Exercise throughout life works against the decreased mental functioning associated with old age. Yet, one must not overemphasize physical exercise.

In their book Healthy Pleasures, Ornstein (a psychologist) and Sobel (a physician) argue that our current health practices should be shifted toward a more intellectual approach. They claim that diets and physical exercises can punish and even harm the body, and that they might have side-effects and only a limited effectiveness. They opine that some of the rigorous body controls we tend to practice are more linked to the Protestant work ethic than real health benefits. Hence going to the gym is a work-out.

Stress and brainpower

One side-effect of stress is dullness in the brain. Therefore, whatever removes stress increases brainpower. There are several relatively new methods to improve brainpower (intelligence, creativity, learning ability). For example, listening to a precise combination of audio signals embedded on a cassette or CD beneath soothing music and environmental sounds can give the brain a very specific audio stimulus that gently creates deep meditation, removes stress, and creates emotional healing at a deep level. This causes new connections to be created in the brain.

This is accompanied by a deep, trance-like meditative state in which the brain produces a whole host of pleasurable neurochemicals, such as endorphins. Such a trance or meditation can be attained easily during deep and concentrated prayer. A soothing and relaxing atmosphere can be achieved during chanting, remembrance, or reciting holy texts and hymns.

The new pathways caused by these meditative states connect and synchronize the brain’s hemispheres, thereby causing whole brain functioning. The improvements in brainpower include learning, intuition, mental clarity, creativity, focus and concentration, and intelligence. This research is backed by Centerpointe Institute, which has a commercial product (Holosync) based on the above principle.

Stress also is tied to the burdens we are obliged to carry. Usually we think that we control our lives entirely and thus can control everything around us. As this is not even near the truth, the resulting condition is stress accompanied by depression. Again, a fine balance between faith in destiny and free will help us remove this stress and live an alleviated and spiritually relieved life. Said Nursi analyzes this concept in his Twenty-sixth Word.(2)

In addition to removing stress, the nervous system’s reorganization of itself to a new and higher level increases the stress threshold. At that point, many uncomfortable, dysfunctional feelings and behaviors go away, even if they might have been persistent until then. This is a deep and dramatic change in mental health: the release of anger, fear, and sadness, as well as the release of self-defeating behaviors, childhood traumas, and limiting decisions. Once these are gone, we can expect better relationships to emerge.

Thus it is like a virtuous cycle, because people who reach higher levels want to move to deeper meditation levels, just as athletes increase their mileage after mastering a certain distance. In these in-creased levels, the mind expands, grows, and becomes self-aware to a greater extent. Perhaps it also experiences a deeper meditative experience.

Health and brainpower

Adding years to your life and life to your years have always been challenging. The first one has been achieved for some, as life expectancy in developed countries increased by 30 years during the twentieth century due to improved food supply, housing, medicine, and many other factors. However, research in the last few decades proves that one can become even smarter by dendrite generation. At first, researchers told us that life-long physical training was one way to keep in good health. Now, since scientists know that the brain can be developed and enlarged, brain calisthenics have become even more important. The age-old dilemma of mind over matter has been resolved in favor of the mind.

A group of researchers has demonstrated that pleasure and positive states of mind are better for our health. This new intellectual approach to health is not only more powerful, but also has no side effects. Central to this claim are recent findings that even getting an education may add as much as 10 years to your health. That is why National Geographic featured John de Rosen in its 1986 book The Incredible Machine, which discussed old age. De Rosen, an artist, continued to paint until the week he died at age 91. The book notes: Some scientists believe that retirement to a sedentary lifestyle initiates or aggravates medical problems, thus shortening life. According to a study of retired people, adults over 65 can learn a creative skill, like oil painting, as readily as younger students. So retiring from a job in a sense means retiring from life unless supplemented by some other (preferably new) activity.

Investigating mental processes and brain efficiency

With their new imaging machines, scientists literally look into the brain and photograph the paths of mental processing to learn how the brain handles information. Each of the 100 billion neurons has dendrites (receptors), a central processor, and a cable to send the messages to the next neuron. Some years ago, scientists thought that these physical aspects were fixed at birth. Then Marion Diamond, a pioneer brain researcher who dissected Einstein’s brain, published Enriching Heredity. In it, she claimed to have found that the key areas of Einstein’s brain were very rich in dendrites due to the increased usage, and thus established that the brain is not fixed by heredity.

Another aspect of brainpower is efficiency. Dr. Richard Haier, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, used PET (positron emission tomography) scan images of brain metabolism to indicate mental efficiency. Newsweek (29 February 1988) reported his finding that smarter brains use less energy. Wired (May 1994) introduced to the general public his first works using PET to analyze the brain changes of Tetris players. In this article, he revealed the importance of neural efficiency. In other words, give a smart brain a hard cognitive task, like Tetris, and it will quickly learn to solve it using less of the brain and less rigorously. Less efficient brains seem to have difficulty localizing the task to the most appropriate processing centers. Therefore, there is wasted brain energy and needless redundancy (noise) in neural-net processing activity.

Newsweek (27 March 1988) featured Haier’s PET scans of SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) takers. The outcome seemed to differentiate be-tween sexes. Smart men who scored above 700 on the SAT math section worked their brains harder (less efficiently) than smart women. The PET images reveal how efficiently the brain works when processing a cognitive task. Therefore, before and after PET images may show how smart the brain, or neural-cognitive system, is as a function of how fast it learned how to minimize extraneous brain processing areas and focus energy on smaller, more productive areas.

We have been led to believe that we use very little of our brain. Ironically, the smarter the person is, the less of his or her brain seems to be involved in any particular task. It seems that dendrites use the shortest or most feasible path possible, and that the more numerous and longer the dendrites are, the more likely they are to have shorter paths between the nodes in the brain’s neural network. When the mind starts to process a task, it apparently engages a greater area of the brain to feel it out. However, the smarter brain-mind system will narrow in on the brain’s most appropriate processing area(s). Then, the rest of the brain is released to do something else, such as noisy chatter or just rest (which is rare). A less intelligent system might use more of the brain than is necessary. This may create a source of noise on the neural-net that distracts, disrupts, or derails the fast and efficient (consistent and accurate) data processing by the appropriate brain center(s).

Brain efficiency seems to be highly correlated with intelligence (or brainpower). Apparently, the less moving parts the less friction and noise! This would agree with certain research findings of meditators whose quieter and more alpha- and theta-dominant brains appear to be better at various cognitive and mental reflex tasks.

Conclusion

In conclusion, brainpower depends on many things: daily diet, physical and mental exercise, emotional state, stress, heredity and so on. It is not fixed or static, but has the ability to change and progress, so one can improve it by a combination of techniques that suit the individual. The discovery of new or improving existing techniques is open for further research in cognitive science.

Footnotes

1. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/Descartes.html#Descartes.
2. The Words is available online at:www.sozler.com.tr/risnur/warning_word.htm.

References

• Centerpointe Institute, Holosync, http://www.trans4mind.com/holosync/.
• Diamond, Marion. Enriching Heredity: The Impact of the Environment on the Anatomy of the Brain. Free Press: 1988.
• Ornstein, R. and D. Sobel. Healthy Pleasures. Addison-Wesley, 1989.
• Poole, R. M. (ed.) The Incredible Machine. National Geographic Society: 1992.
• Report from the Biomedical Newsletter. Lippincott-Raven Publishers, n.d.
• Sahelian, Ray. Be Happier Starting Now: A Medical Doctor Explores the Fascinating Field of Happiness. Longevity Research Center: 1995. See Chapter 9.
• www.brain.com.

Unpreparedness played an unquestionable role in this tragedy. Even if American officials had been sufficiently informed in advance about how the attacks would occur and that the targets were the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and other sites, they would never have given the slightest credit to the idea that œAmerican pilots would launch a kamikaze attack from the air. Nor would they have increased all security measures in the area.

Take any strong country, none of which has a direct enemy. One type of enemy probably is not happy with a strong countrys policies. Another enemy would be participating in a counter-activity with a regional motivation. A third enemy would wage a direct attack on the strong country so that it would be top-listed on the global agenda. In addition, it would seek an opportunity to express its criticism to the world. A fourth enemy would organize acts of terror throughout the world in order to realize its short- and long-term political and other goals.

Terrorists aim to scare people, to obstruct the governments authorized arms, and to challenge the federal government in the political and military arenas. However, these reasons are not enough to explain what we are facing today. The modern world confronts more than ordinary internationalterrorism, for the terror we see today is new and has large dimensions. Its operational and philosophical characteristics are now under investigation.

Recently, American society has observed murders committed by students at schools, collective suicides of families, kidnappings, Timothy McVeighs Oklahoma bombing, mail bombs, poisoned letters, and so on. In my opinion, such activities cannot be coincidental and are not very favorable developments in this great country.

This most cruel and violent terrorist activity seems to have been planned to the smallest detail. Also, its perpetrators benefited from the methods of previous attacks: the psychological training of kamikaze pilots, how to hijack airplanes and use them like rockets, obtaining information about the air defense system and target weaknesses, and how the attacks would be directed were all carefully analyzed.

It is impossible to understand this tragic attack completely without a clear assessment of its perpetrators goals. Perhaps the driving motivation could be an emotional factor of punishing America for one of its acts or for being what it is today. This basic assumption was surely a significant incentive.

The perpetrators obviously wanted to create a shocking psychological effect on governmental officials as well as on the entire society, to defeat the opponents active defense power, to display international terrorism as if equipped with vast facilities, and especially to ensure that the American government changes its current policies. Another option also could be a type of adventure-seeking insanity or just a furious mob, both of which have found no place for themselves in this world but nevertheless wanted to draw the worlds attention to themselves.