Dan Erwin

Immune to Fraud?

With my extensive educational background in communication, up to and beyond a PhD, a breadth of work experiences in the church and the seminary, a college class for prisoners in a maximum security prison, and years in an international consulting business with leaders from some of the finest companies in the world, I thought I was smart enough to evade the fraudulent tricksters of the internet world. Especially since I’m a specialist in the arts of persuasion and influence.

I was wrong. 

As a supportive Dad, I decided to buy a fine Bose headphone for one of my daughters. So, I went online and found what I thought was the Bose site, noticing that their $350 headphone was on a special, week-end sale for just $200. Now, I’m also no computer or internet innocent. I’ve been computer literate since 1983, the first year of the desktop. And I was educated to the intranet by some 3M clients before the internet and the world wide web came into existence. In 1992, some Pillsbury techies educated me to the web just a few months after it was opened to public use.

But this smart, well-educated guy really got suckered by some Chinese fraudsters who had created a Bose look-a-like website and was making a great offer. I bought! The “Bose” never came. How did that happen? Simple. My emotions got in the way of my well-educated brain. And the “opportunity” was just a spur-of-the moment gift for one of my daughters. Something dads like to do.

Don’t get emotional.

How To Improve Personal Intelligence with Exercise

All kinds of advertising and web stuff out there says that this exercise will do that to your intelligence—or that AI tool will do this for your brain. Tough to identify expertise from fads when they’re being thrown at you from every angle on a regular basis. But here’s the well-researched big stuff that pulls everything together and includes brain stuff for everyone.

Research published just this year reveals the positive impact of aerobic exercising on brain smarts for middle-aged and elderly. It takes just 150 minutes per week when working out at moderate intensity levels. That’s not much of a surprise. We’ve known this was true for younger adult cohorts, but we lacked the sampling of middle-aged and older adults. The growth relationship between the physical and the mental was spelled out years ago—and no one questions that conclusion. But now we know that conclusion applies to both middle-aged and the elderly. Why did it take so long to get the research for the last two groups? It’s easy to get a sample for younger people while they’re in an education program. In contrast, getting a consistent sample from adults not in an education program is more difficult. Adults outside education systems start the research program, drop out for numerous reasons, making it difficult to develop a long term consistent sample. But this time the researchers were successful. Here’s their conclusion.

This randomized clinical trial demonstrates the efficacy (the desired result) of aerobic exercise for cognition in adults age 20–67. The effect of aerobic exercise on executive function was more pronounced as age increased, suggesting that it may mitigate age-related declines. Increased cortical thickness suggests that aerobic exercise contributes to brain health in individuals as young as age 20. (Thomas, Tanzi and Westover: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-17

What was most intriguing to me were the measurable improvements among middle and elderly adults in all three specific areas for which positive impact of aerobic exercising was already known in younger adults: fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence and total cognitive performance.

Swearing Is Actually a Verbal Shortcut

In my previous posts on swearing, I took the easy route in talking about the left and right hemispheres, saying that the right hemisphere is the emotional side and the left is the reasoning side. To a significant degree, that’s just pop psychology. It’s very clear that the two hemispheres work in tandem. They’re closely connected—they’re interconnected and they collaborate. Both hemispheres automatically talk to each other.

If you’ve had some science courses in college, you know that you have an amygdala on both sides of the brain and that they’re connected and that they talk to each other. The two are a major processing center for the entire brain, including both hemispheres.

It’s been hypothesized that one of my grandsons has thinner connections between the two amygdala and that’s why he’s had some difficulty with abstractions and interacting with people. However, with a lot of support, counseling and coaching, he’s gone on to graduate from college and interact fairly easily with people.