Tag: Toastmasters

conventionIt took a while for me to find this, but Toastmasters has announced the availability of many convention events—the Golden Gavel Address, the Semifinal Contests, and the Speech Contest Finals—on video. It appears that the International Speech Contest finals will be available in live and on-demand versions so that you can attend our next meeting and watch the contest soon after you get home. The links you’ll need to get information aren’t working right now, but I’m sure they’ll be repaired shortly.

Neuro Stuff

Lourdes gave quite a talk today, and I was utterly fascinated by everything she said. Twenty years or so ago, I was introduced to a study of the effect of music on the brain. If we found music with all the right conditions—tempo, pitch, rhythm—we learned we could achieve a state of brain harmony, hemispheric synchronization, that would let us reach peak concentration. I was ready to dismiss the idea as New Age fluff until I found a piece of music that worked for me. Just as we heard, it’s Mozart, the Adagio from the Gran Partita Suite Number 10. The story is that Mozart wrote it as a wedding gift to his wife, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s sublime. When I really need to focus, concentrate, or just get something done, this is the music I play. It’s amazing how this music centers me and helps me concentrate or work without distraction.

I also had a strong memory of Magister Ludi by Hermann Hesse while Lourdes was talking. I haven’t been able find a citation this afternoon, but I remember that music is really important in the book, and there is some discussion of the primacy of Baroque composers because their preferred tempos matched the human heart rate. If you can help me out, leave a comment.

Lourdes also offered a chance to mention Jill Taylor again. Jill is a neuroanatomist who suffered a stroke. She describes the experience in the video below, in which she shows you exactly where the corpus callosum is and tells you what it’s like when the two sides of the brain can’t work together.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide if Coffitivity, which I found described at The New York Times this week, is a good example of hemispheric synchronization. I’m going to give it a try.

Toastmaster History You Probably Never Heard

We heard about the first women Toastmasters during yesterday’s meeting. I had to dig pretty deep in my archives to find this, but here’s an account of the first club run by women in Billings, Montana. I think I’ve got an appreciation of Helen Blanchard somewhere, but it hasn’t floated to the surface yet. Here’s the obituary that Toastmasters International published recently.

Susan Cain Named This Year’s Golden Gavel Recipient

Here’s the first announcement  that’s made me really excited about the International Convention in years: Susan Cain will be honored with The Golden Gavel Award this year. If I didn’t go to see in DC when she appeared here this year I don’t know why I think I’ll go to Cincinnati for the convention. Still…

Tutor Crowd

Click to visit The Tutor Crowd's web site

The Verge reports that “grammar nazis take on London’s graffiti artists to promote online English classes.”  Their work has become quite visible in London lately as they correct bad grammar wherever they find it. Fast Company also checked in with a version of this story, but they seemed to provide a stronger emphasis on the important point: calling attention to the offense creates a disincentive to repeat it. That’s supposed to be what the grammarian and ah counter do. I wonder if the The Tutor Crowd is recruiting?

Unplugging

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Gotta love this photo found at the National Day of Unplugging web site. The observance aims to help people “slow down lives in an increasingly hectic world.” It’s an outgrowth of ten principles that a Jewish non-profit, Reboot, calls the Sabbath Manifesto. It seems contrary to the spirit of this thing to be pecking away at a computer about it, but it’s a concept I’ve been interested in ever since I heard William Powers talk about it on the NewsHour. It’s been demonstrated to me over and over again, notably by Krista Tippett, who notifies her Twitter followers when her weekly observance is about to begin, and Metropolitan Opera conductor Daniele Gatti, who spoke during the intermission of last Saturday’s performance about the dizzying pace of modern life.

We’ll see if I’m ever able to adopt the practice (I keep telling myself that it’s best taken in small doses) and how my next presentation goes. For now, I’ve just started following the National Day of Unplugging in hope of not missing next year’s observance.