Dream of writing the great American novel or become an acclaimed artist?

Then maybe you need to think about living abroad. 

According to a new research by the American Psychological Association, living abroad expands the mind.

This conclusion is based on 5 studies involving students at Sorbonne University, INSEAD and the Kellogg School of Management in the US. 

Of course, despite these findings, moving abroad does not guarantee a budding writer or artist will create the perfect masterpiece or manuscript.

But as an expat, it’s interesting to know that living overseas is possibly increasing my creativity.

One more reason to stay where I am!

(source and image source)
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1065698

Looking for somewhere different to eat?

Check out this restaurant in the Netherlands called Restaurant of the Future.

It looks like a restaurant. It acts like a restaurant. But it’s actually a living laboratory where scientists can monitor and study what and how people eat.

The scientists, thankfully, are not standing at the tables, clipboard in hand, watching the customers eat. Instead customer’s eating habits are monitored by cameras that are discretely in the ceiling.

In fact, the only way that customers even know that they are participating in an ongoing research project is because they are given a questionnaire and research waiver to sign when they arrive at the front door.

Unless they are looking closely, they probably won’t even notice the ceiling cameras or the black rubber scale at one of the cash registers that unobtrusively weighs each diners. Nor will they see how the staff weighs the food is thrown away to find out how much people are actually eating.

(image source)

Last month Dr Manny from Fox News enlisted the help of Chris Kilham (aka the Medicine Hunter) and went on a culinary quest to find some really strange health foods.

His first port of call was an ice cream factory in New York City’s Chinatown to sample dorian ice cream. Dorian, a fruit that’s has been cultivated in southeast Asia since prehistoric times, is loved by many Asian communities. It’s odd appearance (think football with spikes) and abhorent rotten garbage smell, though, has prevented the fruit from become popular in the western world. One look at Dr Manny’s face when he was trying this and it’s pretty obvious that the ice cream doesn’t kill the smell.

As for it’s health benefits, apparently it is thought to act as an aphrodisiac!!!

The next stop in Dr Manny’s culinary quest took him to a Japanese restaurant Morimoto to sample blowfish sperm (health benefits - a source of zinc and DHA which is good for the brain)

Personally I’d have stopped there but Dr Manny and the Medicine Hunter went on to try sea urchins (health benefit - rich in antioxident compounds, protein, and Vit B) and smelly Natto (health benefits - good for digestion, has compounds that inhibit tumors, and a source of Vit B).

It’s really worth checking out the videos of Dr Manny’s culinary quest just to watch the expressions on his face while tasting these strange health foods

In this case, a  picture paints a thousand words.

(image from flickr / soma-samui.com)

Think that beauty is only skin deep? Then you really need to check out this amazing talk by leading medical illustrator David Bolinsky and watch his stunning animations that show the bustling life inside a cell.

If you’re heading out into the wilderness for some nature-like fun (not my bag, but hey, to each his own), you may come across a bear at some point. You are in their habitat, after all. And while this is scarier than the release of Gigli, there are certain steps you can take to protect yourself and your family, since most black bears are not interested in people and can usually be scared away. Take a look:

1. Stand up as tall as you can

2. Hold out your arms to appear bigger (if you’re wearing a jacket and have the time, open it up)

3. Speak in a loud, deep voice (what you choose to say is up to you, though I imagine explicatives might be part of the package)

4. Back up slowly

If this doesn’t work and the bear starts charging at you, you should actually fight back - and hard. Try to hit him in the nose, which is a bear’s main sensory organ. However…DON’T RUN! Running will torment the bear, and heavens knows, he can outrun you.

Keep in mind, this advice is all true for black bears, not brown grizzlies (which are found west of the Rockies). If you come across a grizzly, it’s best to play dead.

Hey, I’d rather play dead than become dead, wouldn’t you?

Source: Parents magazine

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to ‘dance like no one is watching’.

Turns out it’s not such a bad idea. Dancing, it seems, has many health benefits. Besides the obvious - it is exercise and therefore should help you keep fit - dancing is also good for lowering the risk of dementia, helping those with depression, and improving balance for those with Parkinsons.

So I’m going to make good my resolution and ‘dance like no one is watching’. And for inspiration, I’ll follow the lead of Matt Harding, better known for his video ‘Where the Hell is Matt?’. He doesn’t care whether anyone is watching or not. He just keeps on dancing his way around the world. And it looks like fun…

(source)

What would you do if you felt your  life was falling apart? Most people would somehow pick up the pieces and carry on. But there’s this guy in Australia who has decided he doesn’t want to pick up the pieces. Instead, he wants to ’sell the pieces of his life’ and start a whole new life.

Sounds extreme. But is it really ? People have been starting over forever. Think Pilgrims. Think immigrants.

But Ian Usher’s way of starting over involves selling his life on e-bay…

From Sunday, June 22 for one week, Usher’s life is up for sale on eBay with the package including his $US420,000 ($NZ556,000) three-bedroom house in Perth, Western Australia, a trial for his job at a rug store, his car, motorbike, clothes and even friends.

Turns out Usher’s not the first one to try and sell his life on e-bay. According to this Reuters article….

• Australian philosophy student Nicael Holt, 24, offered his life to the highest bidder last year to protest mass consumerism.
• American John Freyer started All My Life For Sale (www.allmylifeforsale.com) in 2001 and sold everything he owned on eBay, later visiting the people who bought his things.
• Adam Burtle, a 20-year-old US university student, offered his soul for sale on eBay in 2001, with bidding hitting $US400 before eBay called it off. Burtle admitted he was a bored geek.

Unlike Burtle, Usher appears to be the real deal. The homepage of his website A Life 4 Sale says it all…

Hi there, my name is Ian Usher, and I have had enough of my life! I don’t want it any more! You can have it if you like!

No, I’m not contemplating suicide, I am going to sell my life!! I have my reasons, for further details click the “Why” tab below. However, I am still not sure whether this is inspired madness, complete foolishness, or just some sort of mid-life crisis.

Whatever it is, it’s all going up for sale in one big auction. Everything I have and everything I am.

On the day it is all sold and settled I intend to walk out of my front door with my wallet in one pocket and my passport in the other, nothing else at all, and get on the train, with no idea where I am going or what the future holds for me.

He’s got me intrigued. What about you?

I just spent the last 5 days on a road trip (along the stunning West Coast of New Zealands’ South Island) and it got me thinking about cars. In particular, it got me thinking about how cars affect our health.

So I did a little checking and it seems that cars (especially new ones) might not be all that good for our health.

According to an article originally published in Men’s Health, we have numerous invisible hitchhikers inside our new cars. To be exact, there are chemicals lurking in the interior of the car. A study conducted by the Ecology Center found that the two prime suspects - phthalates and bromiated flame retardants (such as deca) - are toxins known to lead to liver, kidney, brain, and thyroid damage in rodents.

But wait, there’s more. The same year that the Ecology Center did their study, Japanese scientists…

‘…sampled the air inside 101 newer cars and found that each vehicle contained 241 different airborne toxins(also known as volatile organic compounds, or VOC’s), including a class of carcinogens called aromatic hydrocarbons.’

And the next year, Taiwanese scientists

‘…analyzed the air in 20 new vehicles, including coupes, compacts, sedans, and SUVs. Once again, the results revealed significantly elevated VOC levels in all of the cabins. Worse, one sedan contained 200 times more xylenes, toxic aromatic hydrocarbons, that human beings can safely inhale.’

So what does this mean to you?

None of the studies could provide conclusive evidence that these toxins would poison the car occupants.

But if I was thinking of buying a new car, I’d be heading over to HealthyCar.org first and read their The Consumer Guide to Toxic Chemicals in Cars. It’s got the fact not only on the cars but also on child car seats.

The Most Dangerous Personality Type on an Expedition, and How to Avoid It

I was aboard a wooden raft with an unstable man once, just a few years ago, and as we drifted and sailed on the open sea this strange man began to radiate a mania, a dark, venal paranoia, a malaise that today terrorizes me sometimes, in my nightmares. There were five men on this expedition, living in a little bamboo house on top of the raft, and as the days passed this hideous man, whom I will here call “Frederick,” began to obsess over what he called a “rare tropical disease.” He believed that something unseen — some aggressive microbe — had crawled under his skin and was now eating his flesh. Each day, during this time, he would try to eradicate this crawling thing by tearing his own tissues out with a pair of surgical pliers (hemostats). For example, if he got a cut or a scrape on the back of his hand he would declare that the disease had made “a hole” in him, and then spend hours picking and pulling and jerking little bits of his own flesh out, slowly extracting the phantom microbe from his own meat until there was, indeed, a gaping hole. These holes were horrific, roughly the size of a coin — like, say, a quarter — and sometimes half an inch deep.

All things threatened Frederick. He believed that any course we sailed on was the course of doom, and so he felt his duty to always change it …without telling us. Each night when we’d put this frenetic man on watch, he would change the course of the raft, so that in the morning when we looked at the GPS we would find ourselves in a completely unexpected part of the Pacific Ocean. As the weeks passed on the barren sea Frederick’s mania incubated and mutated. Anything, no matter how small, could send him into raging fits of blood-faced, vein-bulging chaos. He would sometimes scream and shriek and appear to be trying to claw his own face off. And the very smallest of things were the very greatest threats. When he became obsessed with our little rubber dinghy, which we towed behind our raft, and when that obsession could not be satisfied, he simply cut the dinghy free and let it drift away in a rainstorm, an act of sabotage.

Broadly speaking, these are the effects isolation and confinement on an unstable personality. The term Isolation and Confinement applies to the types of environments found inside submarines, remote polar stations, and spacecraft. The data on this dangerous psychological phenomenon is still scanty, and mainly anecdotal, but after a good deal of study most scientists agree on one basic idea: if the person is not unstable before they go out there, then being out there probably won’t destabilize him or her. I believe this to be true. I have made other long voyages aboard rafts, like the horrific one that I was just describing, where I drifted on the open sea for months sometimes, and recently a friend of mine asked me, “Wouldn’t you go mad out there?”

No. You wouldn’t.

There’s nothing out there to make you go mad. Yes, people will decline emotionally — their morale will go down — but that is not instability. Isolation and confinement alone should not cause a person to destabilize or to adopt abnormal, pathological behavior.

The best way to avoid this catastrophe is to trust your intuition during the selection process. We often second-guess ourselves; don’t, because in trying times, it may cost you. This was the genius of the legendary English explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton selected his expedition team by considering the type of person they were first, much more than worrying about their credentials, and he never took anyone with him that violated his intuition. Trust your intuition completely. The moment I met Frederick I felt that despite his qualifications there was something wrong with him, but I ignored my conscience. This was the beginning of disaster: you simply cannot go on an expedition with someone who violates your intuition. Many people can have friends of that sort for years, perhaps even live with them and sleep with them — and that’s fine — but don’t ever take them with you on an expedition.

- This is a guest post from professional expeditioner and author John Haslett. Last week, John wrote about the four things you must know if you’re stranded on a life raft in the middle of the ocean. Next week, we’ll be learning about whether or not you can drink salt water, why your own urine might save your life, and other pleasantries of survival. Stay tuned!

(Haslett’s kick-ass memoir of survival on the open sea aboard a wooden raft is called “Voyage of the Manteño: The Education of a Modern Day Expeditioner”.)

Should you ever find yourself suddenly stranded and traumatized in an inflatable raft, with a barren sea all around you and with the plastic walls of the little boat crinkling and crackling in your ears, you are going to need to:

1. Be prepared for an emotional explosion from one or more of the group in the raft. It can come sometimes in the form of an unadulterated panic, but it is much more likely to manifest itself in recrimination, blame, indignation at being put in this situation, and it is going to come in the form of volcanic rage. A friend of mine once stalled a boat’s outboard motor on the open sea, and instead of working to solve the problem calmly, his two companions exploded into a childish shoving match that knocked the motor overboard. The three men spent another nine days adrift and survived only by sucking the blood out of a turtle. This happens a lot. Try to let the person who’s ‘losing it’ blow off their steam in the most benign way—let them vent, but keep it under control.

2. Know that you can sink your only hope in two seconds. All modern inflatables boast tremendous resistance to tearing and puncturing, and this is no doubt true, but I have seen rafts, hard ones, sliced-through like butter. My cinematographer and I once glanced an inflatable boat off a sharp metal edge and then found ourselves suddenly treading water in towering seas, with our raft deflated underneath us like a dead animal. When you are in your raft you must quickly probe for sharp objects or protrusions among your fellows: Check for purses with metal latches or ornaments, belt buckles, earrings, snaps with jagged edges, even ballpoint pens.

3. Know that it is exceptionally difficult for anyone to see your little raft. Objects that shine are now your life. Don’t use flashlights for simple tasks; you must conserve them exclusively for signaling. Anything, cosmetic mirrors, belt buckles, even the plastic laminate on the cover of a book, if polished, can be of help. CDs are excellent; they are like beacons on the sea. But be advised: In certain seas, tiny wavelets can twinkle just like your mirror or CD, so you must signal in a pattern. Be consistent. People will see your pattern and realize that someone is signaling. And always be persistent. Never assume that they’ve spotted you. An aircraft or sea vessel may appear to be coming for you when in fact they’ve simply made a course correction. Continue signaling until you’re dead sure they’ve indeed come for you. Take nothing for granted, brothers and sisters, KEEP SIGNALING.

4. Know that people will give up quickly, and therefore you must make up your mind to stay alive. All experts agree that attitude is usually the deciding factor. I have seen strong men lay down and give up on the sea. If there are others in your raft who are determined to stay alive, make a quick alliance with them, even if they don’t appear to be “the strongest.” Always keep in mind that human beings decline at an uneven rate, and that you, the one who is not declining, will have to give those others a little spark—a little push, for FREE. Every single human being, without exception, has a reserve that exists deep down, stored in a place that they’ve never been to. It is real, but it has to be brought out. It has to be encouraged, coaxed, cajoled, pushed, and basically convinced of its own existence, to come up. But everybody’s got it.

This is a guest post from expeditioner and author John Haslett. He’ll be dropping in next week with “The Most Dangerous Personality Type on an Expedition, and How to Avoid It”. You do not want to miss it. (I know, I know, I’m a tease.)

This is John. (Sorry, ladies, he’s taken.)

John Haslett’s memoir of survival on the open sea aboard a wooden raft is called “Voyage of the Manteño: The Education of a Modern Day Expeditioner”. John is kinda like a modern day Thor Heyerdahl, except cooler and not Thor. I’m a rabid reader and I can say as a heavy consumer of “Holy Bat Balls!” content, this memoir totally kicks ass. Two words: shark fights. Oops, four more: a joy to read. Unlike most of the braggadocio adventure genre, this is genuine, inspiring, and engaging literature. Not only can the guy do cutting-edge world expeditiony stuff, he can write. You know I don’t normally talk about buying stuff, but this is a great book.

This is John’s book.