Zen Quote

Actuality

"If the mind makes no discriminations, all things are as they really are."

  - Seng-T'san

Sporting Quote

The Power of The Sportsman's Mind

"Half this game is ninety percent mental."

  - Philadelphia Phillies manager Danny Ozark

Dr Patch Adams on a Speaking Tour With The Corporate Ninja

Laughter, Metaphysics and Healing In September, The Corporate Ninja will join forces with Dr Patch Adams and other speakers, Lynda Dyer, Wayne Pickstone, Richard Hill and Pauline Purvis on a two-city Australian tour. You will remember that Dr Adams was honoured in a movie that bore his name and starred Robin Williams. Click HERE for details.

Psychopath Test

Read this question, come up with the answer then go to the end of this newsletter for the result. This is not a trick question.

A woman, while at the funeral of her own mother, met a man whom she did not know. She thought this man was amazing. She believed him to be her perfect match so much that she fell in love with him immediately, but didn't ask for his number and could not find him.

A few days later she killed her sister.

Question: What is her motive for killing her sister?

We Have a Winner!

The Meditation CD Name

In the last newsletter we had a contest to find a name for the new meditation CD and we have a winner, Michael Norbat from Centrelink.

We will keep the name a mystery until it is produced. Some of the other interesting suggested titles were, "The Story of Zero", "The Inner Peace of the Successful Corporate Warrior", "Relax...Just Do It!", "Nothing is Best", Nod Off with The Ninja!", "Ommmmbiance", "Chilled Ninja", "Being The Field, Not The Daisies", "Relax - Breathe in and Breathe out", "The Voices only talk to Me", "Get a Life - Get a Pulse", "Tune In, Turn On Potential", "Can't get that Ninja out of my head!", "Being Flow" and "Paddling Downstream".

Congratulations Michael.

How to link up with anyone in the world at no cost to you

The key to global communication

According to recent research, the often quoted "six degrees of separation" has been reduced to 4.1.

To make the world smaller, we invite you to join LinkedIn, a global network by which you can, with their permission, contact almost anyone in the world. Please email us if you are interested, and we will link you in.

The Placebo Effect

Don't try this at home.

Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know yet.

Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 587). He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.

We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.

Psychopath Test Results

The answer

She was hoping the guy would appear at the funeral again. If you answered this correctly, you think like a psychopath. This was a test by a famous American Psychologist used to test if one has the same mentality as a killer.

Many arrested serial killers took part in the test and answered the question correctly.

If you didn't answer the question correctly, good for you.

If you got the answer correct, please let me know so we can take you off our email list.

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"The Corporate Ninja helps you to empower yourself to become what you need to become so you can do what you're meant to do."

Stay focused!

Ron Lee, CSP

The Corporate Ninja Pty Ltd