What the hell has theology got to do with Spurs?
What the hell has theology got to do with Spurs?
I do like to educate you lot, whether you wish to be educated or not.
I have an education, I read articles, I read books, it helps improve the brain.
I'm a problem solver, I'll look at something and take it all in before I come up with solutions the rank and file don't.
A positive brain has been proven to see more than a negative brain, sees more solutions, sees more opportunity, see more ways of achieving something.
Today I'm going to take you into the theological world and brain research to a field called neurotheology.
Did you know that scientists have found that the brains of people who spend large parts of their time in prayer and meditation are different from the man in the street.
They study this by injecting a dye and observing the results.
Andrew Newberg is a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of several books.
Newberg has been studying the brains of religious people for more than a decade.
"The more you focus on something, whether that's maths or auto racing or football or God, the more that becomes your reality, the more it becomes written into the neural connections of your brain."
This is the issue with the anti crowd, their reality is not the reality, it is a reality they have created for themselves, that they inhabit and anything that takes them out of their reality is immediately rejected.
It isn't helpful to them as it doesn't reinforce their their reality.
There is a world beyond those realities, a bigger world, the world the rest of us inhabit with greater reality possibilities.
You ask a vicar and they will tell you that we are meant to 'sense' a world beyond our senses.
Following Tottenham is a bit like following a religion, it's based on a faith.
Someone else is pulling the strings, yet with limited knowledge of what those strings are and even what strings exist, each individual things they know how to successfully run a multi-million pound organisation.
They don't of course because they are only focussing on an objective in such a manner that it would destroy everything in a belief that anything off the field would look after itself with their theoretical unlimited and everlasting income.
Michael Baime is a doctor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Tibetan Buddhist who has meditated at least an hour a day for the past 40 years.
Putting him through a SPECT scanner, which create an image of which parts of Baime's brain light up and which go dark while he meditates, showed his parietal lobes went dark and his frontal lobes lit up.
Meditation is basically intense concentration.
"Parietal lobes is an area that normally takes our sensory information, tries to create for us a sense of ourselves and orient that self in the world."
Meditation (concentration) dulls that and allows us to enter another state where we can solely focus on that which we are meditating.
Now apply that to playing football, intense concentration allows the player to focus solely on that without outside distractions.
Players though, often interact with the crowd, they want their support, they want their adulation for their ego's.
Really before a game they should be meditating, as Pele used to do, as Glenn Hoddle used to do, as Didier Drogba used to do.
Football meditation though, running through a successful game in their heads, seeing, feeling, the emotions of a success piece of skill and taking that positivity into the game.
Monks, Franciscan Nuns, Sikhs chanting, the same phenomena was observed in all of them.
Neuroscientist Richard Davidson (Professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, founder and chair of the Center for Healthy Minds) says you can change your brain with experience and training.
"You can sculpt your brain just as you'd sculpt your muscles if you went to the gym. Our brains are continuously being sculpted, whether you like it or not, wittingly or unwittingly."
It's called neuroplasticity.
Tottenham should be tapping into this to improve every player at the club, we should be stealing a march on the opposition and catch up with other sports.
This is used for individual sports, why not individuals in a team sport, they have to perform at their very best for the benefit of the team.
This sort of focus is something Harry Kane is in need of right now, he has to shed his feeling of injustice and get back onboard.
Spurs, however, are merely hoping he does.
Is that good enough from the coaching staff, I don't think it is.
The attention and compassion monks show is finely tuned and quite frankly meditation would probably cure the problems of people with low self-esteem.
A reporter undertook a sample session where they sat in a comfy chair with a meditation CD playing and being asked to imagine showing someone compassion, be it someone they knew or a total stranger.
No problem there.
The problem arose when they were asked to show compassion to someone whom they had had difficulty with in life.
The reporter became surly and ill-tempered.
They put a mental barrier up.
This is exactly how the anti crowd behave, they have a mental barrier to anything the club do that is good.
They can't see good being done, they can't see opportunity, forward paths, positivity only that which reinforces an entrenched view of their perceived reality.
That outlook could so easily be changed but they don't want it changed, they don't see the need, thus don't.
That is the exact same problem players have with their mentality and why it should not be left up to an individual to choice whether they see a football orientated psychologist on a regular basis or not.
If a player doesn't see a problem he isn't going to seek help, even though others can see it's needed, the opportunity and the value of it.
The tests that the reporter sampled showed mental changes to students undertaking the full course within two weeks.
There was another study in America, where employees at a high-tech firm were asked to meditate for a few minutes each day over just a few weeks, which produced more dramatic results.
"Just two months' practice among rank amateurs led to a systematic change in both the brain as well as the immune system in more positive directions.
"For example, they developed more antibodies to a flu virus than their colleagues did, who did not meditate."
Well I'll leave it there for you today, some of you will see the possibilities and benefits of improving the brain, some will not.
Positivity has mental and physical benefits, the evidence is there to prove it so why adopt a negative outlook?
It isn't good for you or anyone else and it achieves nothing of benefit.
Buck your ideas up people.
Well that's it for this morning's offering folks.
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1 comment
COYS!!