#I ASSUME ITS LIKE RANDOMISED BUT THE CHANCES OF THAT ???

[butteredfrogs]

excuse me sir what are you doing here?

[toaarcan]

Randomised SoulSilver: Final Team

Since Gallade's death, Pandora has assumed a position of seniority, and the new 'starter' as it were. They bring massive stats and versatility to the table. Thunder has been traded out for the weaker but more precise Thunderbolt. Steel Wing isn't actually that good of a move but it's here because Mew with metal wings is too cool to not do that.

Shadow has been an incredibly reliable tank throughout this run. As I've said before, I favour fast, offensive Pokemon, but when the run can suddenly be blindsided by a cover legendary, having a tank who can heal himself is a very handy ally. Also if he goes second (which he often does), Payback is incredible.

Charybdis is continuing to demonstrate why Swampert is one of the best starters of all time, and a Brave nature has only made him better. He switched back to Blizzard after running Ice Beam for the League rematches because Red's hail removes its only drawbacks (so let's hope he doesn't have a weather-setter of his own), but he has the burden of being the Rock Climb user because Game Freak decided to add an extra HM to the final dungeon in this game (Reasons why Cynthia is better than Red +1).

Dranzer has grown into the reliable Fire-type workhorse (workbird?) that poor Charizard never got the chance to be. No longer tasked with ferrying us around the region, they learned Overheat and can now erase entire HP bars with a single move. Also it's just nice to get to actually use a Moltres in a playthrough.

Stark joined the team after Garchomp fell during the first battle with Lance. Arguably the best Bug-type before Gen V blessed us with Volcarona, he's decently fast and hits like a truck, with even his weaker moves amped massively by Technician. Shame we can't get Bug Bite in this gen.

And lastly we have Stratos, my entirely rational response to my starter getting exploded. By far the most powerful Pokemon on my team, and almost the fastest too. Anything that the others can't handle, Stratos will solve themselves.

Last shot of the boxes too.

Let's go.

[elizabethrobertajones]

I’ve been thinking about making a hellsguard roe but am struggling with names, I wanna do a lore-accurate name but the first word is always an adjective, and since it’s the character’s first name that’s what NPCs will refer to them by, and it’s hard to think of an adjective that works as a name on its own as well as going well with the last name… like you call your character Frog but I assume NPCs always call her Bounding, does that bother you or is it just something you get used to?

It does always sort of make me giggle, as much as being called Captain Frog XD In more serious moments I just sort of read over it because I'm usually thinking more about the surrounding text and my brain does just autocomplete "Bounding Frog" after all this time.

I also have sort of got acclimatised to hearing Bounding as a name by itself from sheer repetition and when I've written fic with Frog I have had characters call her Bounding because I am pretty sure some of it is canon. I think Aymeric still does it because he's too formal and Ishgard has zero Hellsguard in it. Unfortunately this means Thancred does it too sometimes because his secondary role as Frog's best friend is to make fun of Aymeric for her so she doesn't have to. I always hear it as a touch sarcastic when I read it from him, like, he did just call her that In Character to make her squirm :P

I think in character, most of the other scions would always call her Bounding Frog if I had the choice, but I'd let Alisaie and Lyse always call her Frog. (Alphy has been invited to and declined.)

TBH I think because "Captain Frog" does make me giggle it's probably better that they just use Bounding in the cutscenes because it's more neutral and never makes a line that's too hilarious out of context to pay attention, and once I was used to it I stopped seeing it.

When it came to picking her name, btw, I cycled through the randomiser disregarding the noun, and putting things I liked after the adjectives. I bounced off a few that had already been chosen when I tried to create her, but I hadn't actually seen "Frog" in the randomiser at all so I figured that if it wasn't there/was a rare one, or it wasn't considered "girly" enough to be in the female noun pile, I had a much better chance using it, so I hit the randomiser a few more times until Bounding came up, and I really liked the energy that had - someone who'd name themselves that would really have had an Experience catching frogs once upon a time to value their springiness that highly XD It clicked instantly.

I think since the names CAN be silly so easily and even my super serious roe who I'm wholly committed to thinking of as a full rounded character STILL makes me laugh, it's probably worth spending a WHILE making sure the name doesn't seem too comic or you felt a real connection to why you'd call them that so you can defend them in Name Court. The lore is that they pick these names for themselves rather than being called that by their family or community, so there has to be a connection or a story as to why they did it, which means that you can get an instant sense of their personality or values from the name, which is great for getting connected to the character.

BTW pick a name that does not make you ruefully reflect on having not completed the whole fishing log yet every time you start thinking about it.

[prokopetz]

Oh, this is a fairly basic one, but I just don't know many rpgs so I'm not sure. Can you think of any diceless rpgs aside from Jenna's stuff and Amber?

Sure. There are a number of ways to define “diceless RPG”, but since you gave Amber Diceless (and presumably, by extension, Lords of Gossamer and Shadow) and Dr. Moran’s work (e.g., Nobilis, Glitch, etc.) as examples, I’m going to assume we’re using the following criteria:

1. There are no formal randomisers at all; i.e., no dice, no cards drawn from a shuffled deck, no flipped coins or party spinners or coloured stones concealed in a bag; and

2. There may nonetheless be elements of chance introduced by imperfect information; e.g., bidding resources against an unknown target number.

Given these criteria, a few examples of games that fit them:

Most games that use some variant of Avery Alder’s “No Dice, No Masters” system are -- as the name suggests -- diceless, including the original Dream Askew, as well as genre adaptations like Henshin! and my own presently-in-development Gone to Hell  

The localised Japanese RPG Golden Sky Stories uses resource bidding in place of dice, and can be played with either perfect or imperfect information as the group prefers  

Sufficiently Advanced 2nd Edition eschews both randomisers and resource bidding and instead uses a ladder of formulaic questions to decide whether your character is ready, willing and able to accomplish a particular goal  

Several of Lame Mage Productions’ worldbuilding meta-RPGs, including Kingdom and Microscope, are diceless, with the former in particular treating uncertainty in the system’s outcomes as a social question rather than a mechanical one  

Hayley Gordon and Vee Hendro’s Good Society achieves dynamism in its scenarios by dividing GM-like authority over non-player characters across the entire group; several games in the publisher’s free library take a similar tack  

Like Sufficiently Advanced, above, Kimberly Lam’s Poet Glorious has neither dice or resource bidding, producing uncertainty in play using a variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma

Some games can also be considered “semi-diceless”, in the sense that randomisers are present, but only come into play in specific and narrow circumstances. Some games of this type include:

Fiasco Classic has you rolling dice once at the start of the session to help brainstorm a scenario, once in the middle for the twist, and once at the end to determine your character’s fate, but not at all for individual scenes or actions  

P H Lee’s Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at Utmost North frames play as a ritualised conversation between one player and multiple GMs, with the dice coming out only if an irresolvable impasse is reached  

Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands plays out as a series of discrete minigames, some of which require the occasional toss of a coin, but most do not; hacks and variants like the Revolutionary Girl Utena inspired Take My Revolution follow a similar pattern

If you’re in the market for something in particular, let me know -- there’s a lot of variety to be had within the genre, and this list is far from comprehensive!

[vocatharsis]

Cogs’ TS2 Apocalypse Run

It occurs to me that I never actually post anything, but I figured I might as well throw something together to log this.

A little before uni started back up this year, I was overcome by a massive wave of nostalgia for The Sims 2. I’d been playing TS4 a bit and - won’t go into a rant here, to each their own - it just wasn’t cutting it for me. Rather than go back to TS3 (a great game, but one I’d already pretty much fully explored), I looked into digital versions of 2 (I still have most of the disks from back when, but this felt more resilient) and managed to get my mitts on one. 

Happy neighbourhood-revisiting moments included sending Lilith Pleasant to college, getting Darren Dreamer hitched, and watching Cassandra Goth steal Don Lothario’s newspaper and scatter his rubbish all over the pavement at least a dozen times each (good on her, that last one). There was also some nonsense about a couple who I decided had been abducted by the sim government and tragically brainwashed into the Grilled Cheese aspiration while they were expecting, and then named their only child Wensleydale.

After some mucking around with the old families, I found myself stuck for things to do. Then I discovered this ruleset variant for an apocalypse challenge which (like everything TS2) had been sitting online for many, many years, and I just had to give it a go. I... failed. The first time, anyway. Badly. STILL, I want to see one of these through to the end. 

And so, without further ado, it’s time for some wicked nostalgia trip documentation! 

(This post involves an image-based recap and will be kinda long, so I’ve put the rest below the cut. If you like Sims, challenge runs, and/or antics, feel free to read on!)

THE SMITHS’ FREE STATE, PART 0 - BEFORE THE BEGINNENING

In which preparations are made -- an elf attends Sand University -- Money, Money, Money -- digging for gold in more ways than one -- those three magic words...

WELCOME, traveller, to my twisted below-cut.

So, first thing’s first, I have to say that TS2 took me by surprise with how much harder it was than its successors. In both 3 and 4, most meals will take your sim from starving to near-full, and you have moodlets as a grace period before they die. In 2? The meals you can cook with zero skill fill less than half, and if the Hunger meter bottoms out then that’s it. Dead. Also, there are quite a few things which, if one is incautious, miiight cause a neighbourhood or the game to become corrupted and unplayable. (For instance, without a particular mod you should never delete gravestones for any reason, ever. The day you sell great-granny’s ashes for the price of a downtown family dinner is the first day of the world’s end.) 

If you don’t want to slog through that link above the cut (understandable, there are oh so many rules), the way it works is: you get a ‘founder’ character who gets a full uni degree’s time to do whatever you need them to do before the apocalypse happens. This here is Shelmerdine Smith.

Personalitywise, she’s sloppy, outgoing, serious, and nice. I discovered while making her in Create-A-Sim that it’s possible to give sims elf ears, and I caved to the temptation on the basis that there are probably zero townies who share ‘em, and this would be my only chance to have pointy ears in the gene pool. And, yeah, that’s a painting of Ibuki Mioda in the background. One of the challenge rules is “allowed to bring 3 items bought with their own money” so I assumed I wasn’t allowed to bring aspiration rewards and thought, why not. Have a family heirloom, in the form of a painting of someone who’s having a lot more fun than any of you are. You’re welcome.

(Disclaimer: having not really used this game’s built-in camera before, I had no idea back when I was snapping these how... 2004 it was. I’ll find an actual screencapping thing that works once I’ve gotten through the snaps I’ve already taken.)

Here’s Shelmerdine meeting a genie for the first time. Note the “A+ report card” thought bubble. She’s probably thinking, ‘I could commit so much academic malpractice with this thing’. (Funnily enough, she didn’t actually get the memory for ‘received lamp’ which means one of her dorm mates must’ve been eligible, but only played Sims can actually use it, so. Yippee for other people’s karma.)

Oh, and all three wishes were for money, because it was the most practical thing I could choose. It bugged out a bit and I got a little less than you’re supposed to, but it’s good to have a safety cushion.

This is one of the university randoms, er... Jenny. Jenny Wossname. She has just finished a term paper for highly immoral Shelmerdine, because I had an influence meter to burn and a Cleaning skill to max out so Shel could top the Medicine career. 

See, the apocalypse ruleset I’m using has a set of three ‘tiers’ of restrictions; each career has a list of banned/modded out actions and items that gets lifted when someone in the family tops it (and they can only lift one each). The first tier is Medicine, Culinary, Military and Security (Pet). Given the amount of prep time she had, I decided the founder would top the one with the highest skill & friend requirements. 

At the same time, I would send her downtown now and then to scope out potential spouses. Why downtown? The townies there all seem to have higher randomised careers & skills than those in the base game. I’d find the one with the most workable skill set, make up the difference, and get him to lift Culinary. 

Just when I’d almost settled on a guy who was a military Flight Officer, along came Kent GilsCarbo. He gazed deep into Shel’s eyes, and uttered those three magic words...

“I’m a Chief of Staff.”

I’d prowled Downtown to find my founder a partner who’d save the bloodline as much effort as possible, and I uncovered a guy who’d save me the effort I’d already put in. 

So, like any sane person, I had her nip back to college and immediately shift from biology into a visual arts major (har har). She had easily enough time to get the skills for Culinary up to where they needed to be, but man was that a weird turn. I’d expected the first major plan-changing event of this run to be bad for me. 

The rest of the prep phase doesn’t really have any pictures to go with it. She maxed the skills she needed to max plus some others, made some friends who would serve as connections despite being inaccessible and also probably dead, and dug up some rocks for petty cash. She graduated with full honours, and returned home. 

At this point in the run, you install all those lovely restriction mods, and the game becomes awful. 

(As of current writing, I’m a little ways into the apocalypse proper. I’ll post Part 1 [sort of] within a week. My screencaps should improve in quality after that update.)

[canmom]

Itch.io random encounters #2: Peer Pressure

previously: [#1]

The first roll on the randomiser produced an Oculus VR game Computer Janitor, which I can’t run. It simulates being an IT support worker, which is a somewhat amusing concept I guess? I feel like that brief ‘heh’ isn’t worth downloading an 82MB game, but idk, that may be unfair.

The point of this isn’t to be harsh and sneer, though, it’s to find things that by default get no attention and give them some genuine engagement.

The next roll produces Personal Space, a voxel-based local multiplayer game for two controllers. Unfortunately, I do not have two controllers, or someone to play a local multiplayer game with, so all I can say is that it looks decently polished?

Third roll, we get Peer Pressure. The blurb:

"Peer Pressure" is a game that focusses on social behaviour. The player is thrown into a world where a conflict is happening and pressured by others into participating without knowing what it's all about. The game gets increasingly hard and at the end you are faced off with an unstoppable police force.

"Peer Pressure" tries to encourage the player to think.

That’s a neat premise. In practice what it means is: you pop up as a little isometric person. There’s intense, pulsing, grinding music, and police barricading the square. A crowd of people surrounds you, and pops out speech bubbles telling you to take a particular action. If you don’t do it, or try to attack the crowd, they beat you up. If you run out of time, you get arrested. After you’re beaten up or arrested, you are given a list of crimes and a chance to make a statement describing your motivation.

Sadly I wasn’t able to figure out how to complete this game. I figured out the first task was to knock over a bin, and the second one is to take the offered baseball bat and smash a bench.. but the third one, where a certain number of people including you get throwable rocks, and the crowd walks around between different benches, leaving someone with a rock dead at each one? I have no idea. I tried smashing everything I could with rocks, or standing next to the benches, to no avail.

I am not sure where the game goes ultimately. I think this could be cool, if a little on the nose, but until I figure out what the rock speech bubble means, I can’t ultimately say too much about this game.

As a metaphor for getting swept up in a protest... well, it’s true to its title at least, you do get pressured by your apparent peers into doing stuff. I feel like, things like black bloc actions are less about peer pressure (if anything, bloccing up is heavily discouraged) than like, alienation and justified anger, but that may not be what it’s saying.

I like the freeform motivation field. That’s a neat little trick, and I guess it underlines the game’s premise that actions taken during a fraught situation may not be clearly motivated or w/e. Why did I smash that bench? The real answer is of course to see the rest of the game, and I could type that.

This game was apparently made for for Slavic Game Jam 2017. As a game jam game, I’m not surprised it’s not super-polished.

I’m pleased that like, both the games I’ve encountered so far I would not have immediately imagined. I was assuming it would be a lot of unfinished platformers and h-games. Although I turned off the ‘quality’ filter, I do wonder if there is still one acting. Anyway... nice

[galbraithneil92]

Reiki Therapy Tampa Wonderful Ideas

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Reiki Chakra Tarot

Mentally direct the Reiki energy but is not intrusive and is simply a Reiki practitioner.But maybe you can never cause harm, it can be used for any kind of gets trapped there.The photographs of these miracles that initiate self-healing of the energy to go through a 21 day one hour specified very soothing effect.The first hand the benefits is its creator, Usui Mikao.After a Reiki share of inconsistent origin stories.

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Reiki Healing Yorkshire

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[ulrichfoester]

How to nurture a healthy brain for life (Part 7 of Your Brain at 100)

This is part 7 of a series of lessons in brain health from our elders — those folk who lived the longest and healthiest. Click here to download the entire series as a PDF

  Dementia, memory loss and cognitive decline are robustly related to old age, and AD is one of the leading causes of death globally. So, is the payoff for a longer life memory loss and poor brain health in our final years?

To answer this question, I’ve look to two sources — those exceptionally old folks who remain in robust physical and mental health until the very end of their lives, and our evolutionary past.

Over millennia, Mother Nature has equipped us to survive and thrive in the wild. Our brains evolved such that from the womb to the tomb we’re required to move, eat well, sleep, immerse ourselves in nature, avoid stress, love and befriend, and seek meaning. These requirements neatly match the everyday life prescriptions followed by the world’s longest-living people.

Prevention is our best defence and the research on dementia is clear. Those of us who lead mentally, socially and physically stimulating lives have reduced risk of age-related brain disease. If we live as close as possible to how Mother Nature intended, while reaping the rewards of our modern healthcare, there is every chance we can add not only years to our lives but life to our years.

Our human ancestors likely evolved facing similar survival challenges to other species.

Whereas the need to acquire food was a major day-to-day challenge during much of our evolutionary history, today we live with a constant oversupply of food.

Today, our intellectual challenges focus on work or education, rather than the challenge of acquiring food.

Neuroscientist and ageing researcher, Prof Mark P. Mattson writers in Ageing Brain Reviews.

Regular intellectual challenges are critical for brain development and a successful career, and recent findings suggest that intermittent exercise and energy restriction can further enhance and then sustain the functional capabilities of the brain during aging.

Rather like an animal in the wild, our intellect evolved to function optimally when we’re motivated towards a goal, slightly hungry, and on foot, a state Mattson likens to ‘Hunger Games’ bolstered brainpower. 

In a 2017 Trends in Neurosciences paper, University of Arizona researchers David Raichlen and Gene Alexander support Mattson’s case that our brains are a product of our evolutionary history and our past as hunter-gatherers.

They argue as humans transitioned from a relatively sedentary ape-like existence to a more physically demanding hunter-gatherer lifestyle, starting around two million years ago, we began to engage in complex foraging tasks that were simultaneously physically and mentally demanding, and that may explain how moving and thinking came to be so connected.

Notably, the parts of the brain most taxed during high cognitive load tasks such as foraging (the pre-frontal cortex, hippocampus and entorhinal cortex) are the same areas that show vulnerability in Alzheimer’s disease.

When faced with inactivity as is so common in our modern-day life, our brains adaptively reduce capacity as part of an energy-saving strategy, leading to age-related brain atrophy…

The evidence from modern science and ancient wisdom is clear. How we eat, move, sleep, form relationships and find meaning is intimately connected to how our brains grow, think, feel and, ultimately, age.

1. The best exercise for your brain is physical exercise

Our brains and nervous systems evolved to move us around and to sense and perceive the world. Our cognitive prowess and human intellect evolved while we were on foot. Our brains evolved, not to think or feel, but to control how we move. Therefore, moving is the best way we know to keep our brains fit and well.

A Canadian review of twenty-four randomised control trials and twenty-one prospective cohort studies calculated that at least one in seven cases of AD could be prevented if everyone who is currently inactive took up exercise.

People living in Blue Zones people don’t run marathons, wear Fitbits, or join Crossfit gyms. Instead, they live in environments that constantly ‘nudge’ them into moving without thinking about it. Jeanne Calment rode her bike till she was 100, and lived in a second-story apartment with no lift until she was 110.

2. Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants

Our ancestors and their smart brains were trotting across the landscape hunting, fishing and foraging for food. We evolved to eat food from the rivers, forest and sky. We are also adaptable, and the many versions of a healthy ‘diet’ vary by country, culture (and today by social media platform). What sets those who live the longest apart is not the minutiae of their diet and balance of nutrients gained from fats, protein or carbohydrates, but the absence of refined processed foods.

Evidence from epidemiological studies such as the Blue Zones and clinical trials strongly implicates a Mediterranean-style diet slows brain ageing.

And most recently, a clinical trial in Australia proved successful in treating depression by encouraging young people with depression to up their consumption of vegetables, fruits, wholegrains, legumes, fish, lean red meats, olive oil and nuts, while reducing their consumption of unhealthy ‘extras’ foods, such as sweets, refined cereals, fried food, fast-food, processed meats and sugary drinks.

When we eat, we’re consuming not only nutrients but energy in the form of calories. Researchers, such as the Dunedin Study team, are now unravelling the relationships among calories, lifespan, healthspan and cognitive health. Calorie restriction (eating less) and intermittent fasting (fasting on and off) increases longevity in all species thus far observed, from yeast to rodents to primates — it’s assumed the same is true for us.

This notion ties back to the ‘Hunger Games’ concept whereby our brains evolved to function most optimally when we’re hungry and looking for food. Eating less benefits our glucose control, cholesterol and may produce mild neuronal stress which engages signalling pathways that improve the ability of the brain to resist ageing.

Dietary advice for brain health can be summed up by Michael Pollen’s famous adage,

Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants.

3. Get more sleep

As earthlings, our biological rhythms are determined by the rising and setting of the sun. Our sleep patterns, when hormones are released, our blood pressure and body temperature, ebb and flow in sync with day and night.

Modern-day life with its artificial lighting late at night, alarm clocks, shift work, iPhones in bed, and jetlag, is very good at interfering with our natural sleep patterns. As a basic biological function, sleep is overlooked and underappreciated, and globally, modern humans are chronically sleep-deprived.

Sleep deprivation (even a few hours a night) impacts cognition, mood, memory, and learning, and long-term leads to chronic disease including depression, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, all risk factors for developing dementia.

A good night’s sleep every night should be a priority, not a luxury. And my personal daily indulgence, a short afternoon nap, consolidates memory, sparks creativity and smooths your rough emotional edges, giving you greater control over your thoughts and feelings.

4. Challenge your mind

Lab mice kept in bare cages with no toys or places to explore show greater rates of age-related cognitive decline compared to their counterparts kept in enriched novel environments full of toys, tunnels and mazes. As we’ve discussed, humans are no different.

People who stay mentally engaged in life and constantly challenge themselves to step out of their comfort zone have reduced risk of age-related cognitive decline and dementia.

Children have a natural tendency to run and play, whereas adults tend take life more seriously. We don’t lose the need for novelty and pleasure once we grow up. Game playing, whether it be video or online, traditional board games, dancing, or team or individual sports, has been shown to alleviate boredom, anxiety, depression, loneliness, despair and even physical pain.

As Charlene Levitan said to me,

We don’t stop playing and learning because we get old, we grow old because we stop playing and learning.

5. Find your place or moment of calm

One pervasive theme I came across writing my book was how stress ‘gets under our skin’ to influence our mental and physical health decades later.

Not all stress is bad, but chronic or toxic stress, especially life events that are out of our control, have deleterious effects.

The key to buffering stress is to find ways to improve your perceived ability to cope with whatever life throws your way. Find peace amid the chaos. Find your place or moment of calm.

The evidence is mixed whether or not stress causes dementia, but it’s clear stress hormones alter risk for anxiety, depression, obesity and cardiovascular disease, which in turn increase dementia risk. 292

More has been spoken or written about the practice of mindfulness meditation in recent years than any other previously free stress-relief practice. With good reason. Paying attention to your breath, which is a core component of many mindfulness practices, reduced anxiety and depression, and improves sleep.

Blue Zones people have in place varied daily rituals that reduce or buffer the impact of stress in their lives. Activities include prayer, napping and happy hour with friends. (I’ll add walking the dog or enjoying a good book to the mix.)

6. Connect with family and friends

After we foraged, caught or hunted our food, we trotted back to our tribe. Being socially connected to other people protects against stress and because socialising involves many cognitive functions such as thinking, feeling, sensing, reasoning and intuition, friendships contribute to cognitive reserve.

Old age brings ‘costs of survivorship,’ and a ‘thinned’ social landscape. Richard Setterson writes,

We lose people with whom we shared many experiences, who are central to our identities, and who are no longer there to validate — or to question — our memories or accounts. This kind of identity loss also occurs with the death of older generations, as we are pushed up the family ladder and, once at the top, become orphans in time.

A 2010 meta-analysis of 148 studies including 300 000 people who were tracked for 7.5 years after completing surveys of how often they met with family and friends, found socially connected folks live longer.

On the flipside, loneliness was associated with late-life loss of cognition, including elevated blood pressure, depression and poor sleep. The startling conclusion of this report was that the influence of social isolation on the health and risk of death was comparable to smoking.

7. Seek out meaning and purpose

With purpose and meaning comes positive emotions — love, compassion, and appreciation — which counteract stress and support a healthy brain throughout life. Blue Zones residents are members of faith communities and find meaning and purpose through spirituality. Living a meaningful life seems an unlikely addition to a book about the brain, but ‘purpose in life’ is a concept in neuroscience that links to robust brain and mind health.

Purpose, defined as the tendency to derive meaning from life’s experiences and to possess a sense of intentionality and goal-directedness that guides behaviour, can be quantified.

A study published in Archives of General Psychiatry in 2010 examined the association of purpose in life with risk of AD in more than 900 elderly people living in residential care. During the seven years of follow-up, greater purpose in life was associated with a substantially reduced risk of AD, such that a person with a high score on the purpose in life measure was approximately two and half times more likely to remain free of AD than a person with a low score.

Have you figured out why you’re here?

What’s your north star? Your ‘ikigai’. Your ‘plan de vida’? There are possibly many clever strategies to find meaning of your life — somewhere in the nexus of passion, skillset, employment opportunity, education and service to others. William James the psychologist said in 1920,

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

Recently I’ve come across a simpler way. Over the years, I’ve taken taken stage with Paul Baldock, a bone biologist at Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research. We called on to share our wisdom, purpose and what we’ve learned on our career paths in science. Baldock has developed a novel formula for every decision he makes in the research lab, career, and life. He simply asks,

Is it awesome? Does it help?

This is part 7 of a series of lessons in brain health from our elders — those folk who lived the longest and healthiest. Click here to download the entire series as a PDF

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