Tendon patellaire et marathon de Bruxelles

A une semaine du marathon de Bruxelles, j'ai toujours mal sur le bord extérieur du genou droit. Est-ce une tendinite du tendon patellaire ?

Mise à jour le 25 janvier 2020 : en fait il s'agit d'un petit oedeme osseux au niveau de la tête de fibula. L'analyse a pu être faite grâce à une IRM. Actuellement, je suis à ma sixième séance de kiné et j'ai fait refaire les semelles des chaussures. Le podologue a rectifié la semelle droite.


















Le parcours :

Le profil est plutôt difficile :

 

Le plan d'entrainement a été interrompu pendant quatre semaines à la suite d'une élongation au mollet droit.

Comprendre le Deep Learning

Une introduction aux réseaux de neurones
Prédicteurs et classifieurs

• Un prédicteur est une machine capable d’approximer un processus dont on ne connaît pas à priori le modèle. Le calcul de la sortie en fonction des données présentées en entrée est appelé une régression.
• Une fonction linéaire peut servir de prédicteur mais aussi de classifieur pour différencier des éléments appartenant à des catégories différentes lorsque ces catégories sont clairement séparables.
• Nous avons mis au point une méthode itérative, autrement dit un algorithme, pour ajuster le paramètre d’un classifieur linéaire en fonction de l’erreur qu’il commet entre la sortie souhaitée et la sortie obtenue grâce à des exemples : les données d’apprentissage.
• Georges Boole cherchait en fait à établir une théorie mathématique permettant d’expliquer la pensée humaine.
• Un classifieur linéaire n’est pas suffisant pour séparer des données qui ne sont pas elles-mêmes régies par un processus linéaire. L’exemple le plus simple est l’opérateur booléen “OU Exclusif” (XOR)
• Une solution possible pour contourner cette difficulté consiste à utiliser plusieurs classificateurs.

Les réseaux de neurones

• On estime que le cerveau humain comprend 100 milliards de neurones avec une moyenne de 7000 connexions par neurone.
• Modèle de neurone formel avec une fonction d’activation sigmoïde : McCulloch et Pitts.
• Construire un réseau de neurones formels est simple : il suffit de créer des couches de neurones tous identiques et de relier entièrement les sorties de neurones de la couche précédente aux entrées de la couche suivante.
• Le produit matriciel est très utile pour les réseaux de neurones.
• L’application de la fonction sigmoïde correspond à une unique opération.

L’apprentissage

• L’apprentissage dans un réseau de neurones à couche est réalisé grâce à une méthode appelée la rétro propagation de l’erreur.
• L’ensemble des équations nécessaires se résume à la fonction sigmoïde et quatre équations matricielles élémentaires.
• La procédure d’apprentissage pour un réseau de neurones à couches est effectuée en ajustant les poids synaptiques en propageant le gradient de l’erreur en sens inverse.
• Les formules donnant l’ajustement à effectuer sur les poids synaptiques restent simples.
• Il faut toutefois un jeu de données d’apprentissage adéquat pour le problème à traiter et régler empiriquement le taux d’apprentissage afin d’éviter des surajustements (overfittings)

Programmer un réseau de neurones

• Le problème : il s'agit de reconnaître certaines configurations d'une image réduite à la composition de quatre carrés noirs ou blancs. 00 pour les images n'ayant aucun ou tous les pixels noirs, 01 pour celles comprenant un pixel noir, 10 pour celles ayant deux pixels noirs, et 11 pour celles ayant trois pixels noirs.
• Le code: SimpleNet.html
• En résumé, un réseau de neurones est simple à comprendre et à programmer.

L’apprentissage profond

• Tout a commencé par une publication de l'équipe de Geoffrey Hinton en 2006. Celle-ci montrait comment préentraîner un réseau de plusieurs couches avec une approche non supervisée et progressive, c'est à dire en procédant couche par couche, puis en terminant l'apprentissage par une procédure de rétro propagation, supervisée cette fois.
• D'une part, il apparaissait qu'il valait mieux entrainer les réseaux sur de très grands jeux de données plutôt que de pratiquer des retraitements sur des jeux de données plus réduits.
• Google a embauché Geoffrey Hinton, et Facebook le français Yann LeCun, les deux chercheurs précurseurs et parmi les plus réputés du domaine.
• Ce n’est pas forcément celui qui a le meilleur algorithme qui gagne, c’est celui qui a le plus de données.
• Il vaut mieux multiplier les données afin de réduire la complexité des prétraitements.
• Sur des tâches très spécifiques, les réseaux de neurones profonds surpassent déjà une majorité de la population, pour ne pas dire tous les humains, ou presque.
• Nous sommes en pratique à des années lumière de la création d’un cerveau artificiel capable des mêmes prouesses que notre cerveau organique : apprendre sans cesse, effectuer un nombre incroyable de tâches différentes, s'adapter aux situations nouvelles, imaginer et créer, ressentir des émotions.

Le deep learning en pratique

• La librairie ConvNet.js
• Les classes de ConvNet.js :
• les couches d'entrée
• les couches totalement connectées
• les couches de sortie
• les couches de convolution: pour les applications de reconnaissance d'images, les couches de convolutions sont indispensables.
• les entraîneurs : le paramètre principal d'un entraineur est la méthode d'apprentissage. Les trois principales fournies par la librairie sont : sgd (stochastique gradient descent), adagrad, et adadelta.
• La régression consiste à faire calculer, prédire, au réseau de neurones des valeurs numériques réelles.
• Un réseau de neurones pour faire de la classification, autrement dit un classifier, est très proche d'un réseau pour faire de la prédiction. La différence essentielle réside dans la couche de sortie qui calcule des probabilités d'appartenance à des classes au lieu de valeurs numériques.
• Pour aller plus loin, une bonne approche consiste à expérimenter la libraire ConvNet.js avec les autres exemples proposés par son concepteur et ses contributeurs.
• Pour effectuer ces tâches de sauvegarde, le plus simple est d'utiliser les fonctions Javascript toJSON() et fromJSON(). Ainsi on transforme l'état courant du réseau en une chaîne de caractères qui peut être ensuite sauvegardée de multiples façons.
• Les outils et les librairies mis à dispositions par le laboratoire de recherche de Facebook : Torch, ou bien celui de Google : TensorFlow. Toutefois, auparavant, il vous sera nécessaire de vous initier au langage Python.

RANGE

• "And he refused to specialize in anything, preferring to keep an eye on the overall estate rather than any of its parts...And Nikolay's management produced the most brilliant results". Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
• "No tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors" Arnold Toynbee, A Study of history

ROVER vs. TIGER

• Ten-thousand-hours rule to expertise.
• Given explicit instructions about the best method, individually supervised by an instructor, supplied with immediate informative feedback and knowledge of the results of their performance and repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.
• Learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge.
• Learning about the advantages of breadth and delayed specialization has changed the way I see myself and the world.

THE CULT OF THE HEAD START

• Experts in a array of fields are remarkably similar to chess masters in that they instinctively recognize familiar patterns.
• Daniel Kahneman, studied human decision making the "heuristics and biases" model of human judgment.
• In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.
• Moravec's paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.
• Tactics are short combinations of moves that players use to get an immediate advantage on the board.
• Bigger-picture planning in chess - how to manage the little battles to win the war - is called strategy.
• The bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution. Our greatest strength is the opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.
• "AI systems are like savants." They need stable structures and narrow worlds.
• Noted the danger of treating the wicked world as if it is kind.
• "Having one foot outside your world"
• The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment.

HOW THE WICKED WORLD WAS MADE

• Exposure to the modern world has made us better adapted fro complexity, and that has manifested as flexibility, with profound implications for the breadth of our intellectual world.
• Where the very thoughts of premodern villagers were circumscribed by their direct experiences, modern minds are comparatively free.
• A city dweller traveling through the desert will be completely dependent on a nomad to keep him alive. So long as they remain in the desert, the nomad is a genius.
• Everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines.
• One good tool is rarely enough in a complex, interconnected, rapidly changing world. As the historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee said when he described analyzing the world in a technological and social change, "No tool is omnicompetent"
• "Fermi problems". Constantly made back-of-the-envelope estimates to help him approach problems. The ultimate lesson of the question was that the detailed prior knowledge was less important than a way of thinking.
• A rapidly changing, wicked world demands conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts.
• The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.

WHEN LESS OF THE SAME IS MORE

• You acquired the sound first. And then you acquire the grammar later.
• Children do not practices exercises to learn to talk...Children learn to read after their ability to talk has been well established.

LEARNING, FAST AND SLOW

• They were trying to turn a conceptual problem they didn't understand into a procedural one they could just execute. "We're very good, humans are, at trying to do the least amount of work that we have to do in order to accomplish a task."
• The concept of "desirable difficulties", obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower, and more frustrating in the short term, but better in the long term. excessive hint-giving, does the opposite; it bolsters immediate performance, but undermines progress in the long run.
• "Generation effect". Struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning.
• The more confident a learner is of their wrong answer, the better the information sticks when they subsequently learn the right answer. Tolerating big mistakes can create the best learning opportunities.
• Training with hints did not produce any lasting learning.
• "Spacing", or distributed practice.
• It is what it sounds like, leaving time between practice sessions for the same material.
• Space between practice sessions creates the hardness that enhances learning. Frustration is not a sign you are not learning, but ease is.
• The economists suggested that the professors who caused short-term struggle but long term gains were facilitating "deep learning" by making connections.
• Focusing on "using procedures" problems worked well forty years ago when the world was flush with jobs that paid middle-class salaries for procedural tasks like typing, filing, and working on an assembly line. "Increasingly jobs that pay well require employees to be able to solve unexpected problems, often while working in groups...These shifts in labor force demands have in turn put new and increasingly stringent demands on schools".
• Interleaving has been shown to improve inductive reasoning.
• Interleaving is a desirable difficulty that frequently holds for both physical and mental skills.
• Whether the task is mental or physical, interleaving improves the ability to match the right strategy to a problem.
• Kind learning environment experts choose a strategy and then evaluate; experts in less repetitive environments evaluate and then choose.
• Learning deeply means learning slowly.

FOOLED BY EXPERTISE

• And each continued to miss the value of the other's ideas.
• As each man amassed more information fo his own view, each became more dogmatic, and the inadequacies in their models of the world more stark.
• The average expert was a horrific forecaster.
• They were bad at short-term forecasting, bad at long-term forecasting, and bad at forecasting in every domain.
• The Danish proverb that warns "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future" was right.
• Their understanding was correct; the timeline was just a bit off.
• The more likely an expert was to have his or her predictions featured on op-ed (opposite the editorial page) pages and television, the more likely they were always wrong.
• What is the chance that a member will withdraw from the European Union by a target date?
• Bright people with wide-ranging interests and reading habits but no particular relevant background.
• Every team member still had to make individual predictions, but the team was scored by collective performance.
• In the face of uncertainty, individual breadth was critical.
• The most lofty ideal of teams: they became more than the sum of their parts.
• They continued to share information, challenge one another, and update their forecasts.
• "Active open-mindedness". The best forecasters view their hypotheses in need of testing.
• The aversion to contrary ideas is not a simple artifact of stupidity or ignorance.
• The most science-curious folk always chose to look at new evidence, wether or not it agreed with their current beliefs. Less science-curious adults were like hedgehogs, they become more resistant to contrary evidence and more politically polarized as they gained subject matter knowledge.
• "Depth can be inadequate without breadth"
• Forecasters can improve by generating a list of separate events with deep structural similarities, rather than focusing only on internal details of the specific event in question.
• In search of lessons, especially for predictions that turned out bad.

LEARNING TO DROP YOUR FAMILIAR TOOLS

• She's focusing on loss mitigation
• She's being risk adverse.
• A well-known cognitive bias, overemphasizing the importance of a single, dramatic memory.
• A simple statistical analysis, known as logistic regression.
• But it's often the case in groups meetings where the person who made the PowerPoint slides puts data in front of you, and we often just use the data people put in front of us.
• Is this the data that we want to make the decision that we need to make?
• A professor of organizational psychology wrote that the missed data was such a rudimentary mistake.
• Business professors around the world have been teaching Carter Racing for thirty years because it provides a stark lesson in the danger of reaching conclusions from incomplete data, and the folly of relying only on what is in front of you.
• NASA's real mistake was to rely on quantitative data too much.
• Only those seven data points were relevant to how the O-rings could be damaged or fail.
• "Unable to quantify", "supporting data was subjective", "hadn't done a good technical job"; "just didn't have enough conclusive data"; 
• Mission Evaluation Room: "In God We trust, All Others Bring Data"
• Qualitative assessment.
• Experienced groups became rigid under pressure and "regress to what they know best". They behaved like a collective hedgehog, bending an unfamiliar situation to a familiar comfort zone.
• Their silence was taken as a consent.
• Research on aviation accidents, for example, found that "a common pattern was the crew's decision to continue with their original plan" even when conditions changed. dramatically.
• If I make a decision, it is a possession, I take pride in it, I tend to defend it and not to listen to those who question it. If I make sense, then this is more dynamic and I listened I can change it.
• The process culminated with more concern for being able to defend a decision than with using all available information to make the right one.
• When you don't have any data, you have to use reason.
• Sometimes other guys are able to get really good questions out that I wouldn't normally think of. And you want to share as much information as possible, and there isn't a lot of time.
• It was outside the normal pattern.
• The objections he got were emotional and philosophical, not tactical.
• She found that the most effective leaders and organizations had range; they were in effect, paradoxical. They could be demanding and nurturing, orderly and entrepreneurial, even hierarchical and individualistic all at once. A level of ambiguity, it seemed, was not harmful. In decision making, it can broaden an organization's toolbox in a way that is uniquely valuable.
• Cultures can build in a form of ambiguity that forces decision makers to use more than one tool, and to become more flexible and learn more readily.
• Searching for a solution even if it deviated from standard procedure.
• Balancing the risks of mindless conformity and reckless deviation.
• Individualistic culture that encouraged content dissent and cross-boundary communication.
• Von Braun went looking for problems, hunches and bad news.
• The Columbia disaster engendered an even stronger ill-fated congruence between process accountability and group-focused norms.
• Allegiance to hierarchy and procedure had ended in a disaster.
• NASA was not functioning as "a learning organization".
• He wanted a culture where everyone had the responsibility to protest if something didn't feel right.
• The new administrator demanded the kind of individualism and opinionated debate that could serve as a cross pressure for NASA's robust process accountability.
• His expectations for teamwork: "I told them I expect disagreement with my decisions at the time we're trying to make decisions, and that's the sign of organizational health".
• I warned them, I am going to communicate with all levels of the organization down to the shop floor.
• I just cant't get enough understanding of the organization from listening to the voices at the top.
• The teams needed elements of both hierarchy and individualism to both excel and survive.
• Incongruence, as the experimental research testified, help people to discover useful cues, and to drop the traditional tools when it makes sense.
• No tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors.

DELIBERATE AMATEURS

• At the moment, it's a Saturday morning theoretical experiment.
• He encouraged students to think laterally, broaden their experience, and forge their own path in search of match quality.
• Take your skills to a place that's not doing the same sort of thing. Take your skills and apply them to a new problem, or take your problem and try completely new skills.
• "Amateur" from the Latin word for a person who adores a particular endeavor.
• The principle of limited sloppiness (manque de sérieux). Be careful not to be too careful or you will unconsciously limit your exploration.
• The mental meandering along with the wisdom of deep experience.
• You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don't train people in thinking or reasoning.
• The system maintains you in a trench. You basically have all these parallel trenches, and it's very rare that anybody stands up and actually looks at the next trench to see what they are doing, and often it's related.
• In professional networks that ends as a fertile soil for successful groups, individuals move easily among teams, crossing organizational and disciplinary boundaries and finding new collaborators. Networks that spawned unsuccessful teams, conversely, were broken into small, isolated clusters in which the same people collaborated over and over.
• The entire network looks different when you compare a successful team with an unsuccessful team. The larger ecosystems that foster the formation of successful team.
• Wehther collaborators mixed and matched vibrantly.
• New collaborations allow creators to take ideas that are conventions in one area and bring them into a new area, where they are suddenly seen as an invention.
• Teams that included members from different institutions were more likely to be successful than those that did not, and teams that included members based in different countries had an advantage as well.
• Bring new skills to an old problem, or a new problem to old skills.
• He saw that creative explosions in domains from fiction writing and poetry to ceramics and medicine followed burst of immigration.
• Work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and the more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge.
• Cascade all leads by example.

EXPANDING YOUR RANGE

• So, about that one sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind.
• Compare yourself to yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you fell behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help.
• Mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head start are overrated.
• “It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment” Oliver Wendell Holmes
• "Ideas are not really lost, they are reactivated when useful"

The Science of Meditation

THE DEEP PATH AND THE WIDE

• While we had been isolated pioneers, we wanted to knit together a community of like-minded scholars and scientists who shared this quest. They could be supportive of each other’s work at distance, even if they were alone in their interests at their own institution.

ANCIENT CLUES

• Vipassana, the Theravadan meditation and root source of many now-popular forms of mindfulness.
• S. N. Goenka, a jovial, paunchy (bedonnant) former businessman recently turned meditation teacher.
• Goenka learned Vipassana from U Ba Khan.
• Twice-daily habit of twenty-minute meditation sessions, but this immersion in ten days of continual practice brought him to new levels. Goenka’s Method started with simply noting the sensations of breathing in and out- not just for twenty minutes but for hours and hours a day. This cultivation of concentration then morphed into a systematic whole-body scan of whatever sensations were occurring anywhere in the body.
• Undistracted concentration, samadhi in Sanskrit.
• Goenka’s instruction to « sweep » with a careful, observing attention head to toe, toe to head, through all the many and varied sensations of the body.
• He came away with a deep conviction that they were methods that could transform our minds to produce a profound well-being.
• Once we glimpse our mind as a set of processes, rather than getting swept away by the seductions of our thoughts, we enter the path of insight.

THE AFTER IS THE BEFORE FOR THE NEXT DURING

• While immersed in deep concentration, a meditator’s unhealthy state are suppressed.
• The true mark of a meditator is that he has disciplined his mind by freeing it from negative emotions.
• The after is the before for the next during. To unpack this idea, after refers to enduring changes from meditation that last long beyond the practice session itself. Before means the condition we are in at baseline, before we start meditating. During is what happens as we meditate.
• The nurture camp believed that our behaviour was shaped by our experiences; the « nature » camp says our genes as determining our behaviour.
• Neuroplasticity shows that repeated experience can change the brain, shaping it.
• Mastering a musical instrument enlarged the relevant brain centres. Violinists, whose left hands continuously fingered the strings while they played, had enlarged areas of brain that manage the finger work. The longer they had played, the greater the size.
• The brain can rewire itself in response to repeated experiences.
• Reinhold Niebuhr: 
• « God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
• Courage to change the things I can,
• And wisdom to know the difference »
• The more everyday mindfulness, the greater the subjective boost in well being.

THE BEST WE HAD

• Galvanise Skin Response (GSR) bursts of electrical activity that signify a dollop (une bonne cuillerée) of sweat. The GSR signals the body’s stress arousal.
• Today we know there are many aspects of attention, and that different kinds of meditation train a variety of mental habits, and so, impact mental skills in varying ways.
• Different types of meditation: focusing on breathing; generating loving-kindness; monitoring thoughts without getting swept away by them.
• One must be aware of the likely outcomes from a given meditation approach. They are not all the same.
• Mindfulness has become the most common translation of the Pali language’s word sati. « Awareness », « attention », « retention », « discernement »
• Some meditation traditions reserve « mindfulness » for noticing when the mind wanders. In this sense, mindfulness becomes part of a larger sequence which starts with a focus on one thing, then the mind wandering off to something else, and the the mindful moment: noticing the mind has wandered. The sequence ends with returning attention to the point of focus.
• John Kabat-Zinn definition of mindfulness: « The awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience. »
• When your mind wanders, your counting accuracy suffers.
• The four main neural pathways meditation transforms are:
• Reacting to disturbing events
• Compassion and empathy
• Circuitry for attention
• Our very sense of self.

A MIND UNDISTURBED

• Everything you, be it great or small, is but one-eighth of the problem whereas to keep one’s state undisturbed even if thereby one should fail to accomplish the task, is the other seven-eights. 
• As Epictetus, a Greek philosopher, put it centuries ago, it’s not the things that happen to us that are upsetting but the view we take of those doings. 
• Charles Bukowski: it’s not the big things that drive us mad, but the « shoelace that snaps with no time left »
• Vipassana course. Like Goenka, focus on your breath in order to build concentration for the first three days of the retreat, and then systematically scan the body’s sensations very slowly, from head to toe, over and over again for the next seven days. During the scan you focused only on the bare bodily sensations.
• Students vowed not to make any voluntary movement.
• MBSR: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
• The key point: it is possible to register and then investigate and transform your relationship to whatever you are sensing at a given place in the body, even it is highly unpleasant.
• Mindful walking, mindful eating.
• The standard eight-week MBSR program.
• Mindful Attention Training starts with full focus on the breath, then progressively refines attention top observe the natural flow of the mind stream and finally rest in the subtle awareness of awareness itself.
• The amygdala, which has the privileged role as the brain’s radar for threat: it receives immediate input from our senses, which it scans for safety or danger. If it perceives a threat, the amygdala triggers the brain’s freeze-fight-or-flight response, a stream of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline that mobilise us for action. The amygdala also responds to anything important to pay attention to, whether we like or or dislike it.
• So when something worries or upsets us, our mind wanders over and over to that thing, even to the point of fixation.
• Meditation, the theory goes, might mute our emotional response to pain and so make the heat sensations more bearable.
• Reappraisal of severe stress: thinking about it in a less threatening way.
• Burnout for those who care at home for loved ones with problems like Alzheimer’s.
• The capacity to refrain from acting on whim (caprice) or impulse.
• The Trier Social Stress test (TSST). That devilish test delivers a huge dose of social stress, the awful feelings we get when other people evaluate, reject, or exclude us. 
• While MBSR training did reduce the activity of the amygdala, the long-term meditator group showed both this reduced activity in the amygdala plus strengthening of the connection between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala. This pattern implies that when the going gets tough-for example, in response to a major life challenge such as losing a job- the ability to manage distress (which depends upon the connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala) will be greater in long-term meditators compared to those who have only done the MBSR training.

PRIMED FOR LOVE

• When we are rushing through a busy day, worried about getting to the next place on time, we tend literally not to notice the people around us, let alone their needs.
• The word compassion, the Dalai Lama pointed out, signifies the wish that others be well.
• In her definition this includes being kind to yourself instead of self-critical; seeing your failures and mistakes as just part of the human condition rather than some personal failing.
• During compassion practice, the amygdala is turned up in volume, while in focused attention on something like the breath, the amygdala is turned down.
• The amygdala’s circuits light up when we are exposed to someone feeling a strong negative emotion- fear, anger and the like.
• The amygdala acts as a neural radar detecting the salience of whatever experience.
• The brain seems primed to learn to love.

• When we witness the pain and suffering of someone else we activate networks which underlie these very same feelings in ourselves.
• Matthieu Ricard, a Tibetan monk with a PhD in science and decades of meditation practice.
• When he cultivated empathy, sharing the suffering of another, she saw the action in his neural networks for pain. But once he began to generate compassion - loving feelings for someone who was suffering - he activated brain circuitry for positive feelings, reward and affiliation.
• Meditation as a way to cultivate wholesome mental qualities such as attention, mindfulness, perspective taking, empathy and compassion.
• The scan increased body awareness and lessened mind-wandering.
• When you focus on someone’s else suffering, you forget your own troubles.
• Brain studies have long shown women are more attuned to other’s people’s emotions than are men. Women, on average, seem to be more responsive to other people’s emotions than men.
• The ultimate source of peace is in the mind - which, far more than our circumstances, determines our happiness.
• There are three forms of empathy - cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathic concern.
• Compassion and loving-kindness increase amygdala activation to suffering while focused attention on something neutral like the breadth lessens amygdala activity.

ATTENTION!

• When we take active control of our attention- as when we meditate - we deploy this pre-frontal circuitry (self-control, happiness and compassion), and the amygdala (the brain’s Fight or flight center) quiets.
• Meditation can actually make you a happier and more compassionate person.
• Every aspect of attention involves the prefrontal cortex.
• Meditation impacts attention.
• Meditators who regularly practiced some form of « open monitoring » (a spacious awareness of whatever comes to mind) reversed the usual escalation of attentional blinks with aging.
• What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.
• Digital distractions claim another kind of victim: basic human skills like empathy and social présence.
• The symbolic meaning of eye contact, of putting aside to connect, lies in the respect, care, even love it indicates. A lack of attention to those around sends a message of indifference. Such social norms for attention to the people we are have silently, inexorably shifted.
• The brain does not « multitask » but rather switches rapidly from one task (my work) to others (all those funny videos, friends’ updates, urgent text...)
• Multitaskers are « suckers for irrelevancy », which hampers not just concentration but also analytic understanding and empathy.
• Cognitive control lets us focus on a specific goal or task and keep in mind while resisting distractions.
• Attention is crucial for working memory.
• « Response inhibition »
• Impulse inhibition went along with a self-reported uptick in emotional well-being.
• Cultivating stability by simply noticing rather than following those thoughts, impulses, desires, or feelings.
• During such unconscious mental processing, activity lessens in a key cortical area, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC for short. As you become more aware of being aware, the DLPFC becomes more active.
• The effect of an intensive mindfulness retreat where people meditated for more than eight hours each day for a month.
• Our experience is not based on the direct apperception of what is happening, but to a great extent upon our expectations and projections, the habitual thoughts and reactions that we have learned to make in response, and an impenetrable sea of neural processes. 
• We live in a world our minds build rather than actually perceiving the endless details of what is happening.
• Although the brain makes up only 2 percent of the body’s mass, it consumes about 20 percent of the body’s metabolic energy as measured by its oxygen usage, and that rate of oxygen consumption remains more or less constant no matter what we are doing.-including nothing at all. The brain, it seems, stays just as busy when we are relaxed as when we are under some mental strain.
• The PCC (PostCingulate Cortex), a node connecting to the lambic system.
• In short, our minds wander mostly to something about ourselves- my thoughts, my emotions, my relationships, who liked my new post on my Facebook page.
• Because the self ruminates on what’s bothering us, we fell relieved when we turn it off. One of the great appeals of high-risk sports like rock-climbing seems to be just that- the danger of the sport demands a full focus on where to put your hand or foot next. More mundane worries take backstage in the mind.
• Managing attention is an essential ingredient of every variety of meditation.
• Cognitive science tells us, our sense of self-emerges as a property of the many neural subsystems that thread together, among other streams, our memories, our perceptions, our emotions and our thoughts. Any of those alone would be insufficient for a full sense of our self, but in the right combination we have the cozy feel of being unique.
• Such a step out of the self, technically speaking, suggest weakening activation of the default circuitry that binds together the mosaic of memories, thoughts, impulses, and other semi-independent mental processes in to the cohesive sense of « me » and « mine ».
• Ancient meditation manuals say letting go of these thoughts is, at first, like a snake uncoiling itself; it take some effort.
• Common sense tells us that learning any new skill takes hard work at first and becomes progressively easier with practice.
• The brains of those with the most hours of meditation show little effort in keeping their focus one-pointed, even despite compelling distractions.
• Lessening the grip of the self, always a major goal of meditation practitioners.
• When the Dalai Lama once was asked what had been the happiest point in his life, he answered, « I think right now ».
• The relief comes in how people relate to their pain.
• Life’s stress can cause psoriasis.
• Epinephrine is an important freeze-fight-or-flight chemical, along with the stress hormone cortisol, which in turn raises the body’s energy expenditure to respond to the stressor.
• MBSR can help speed healing psoriasis.
• The benefits seem to show up even with juts four weeks of mindfulness practice (around thirty hours total), as well as with loving kindness meditation.
• What meditators say: it gets easier to handle life’s upsets. Constant stress and worry take a toll on our cells, aging them. So do continual distractions and wandering mind, due to the toxic effects of rumination, where ou mind gravitates to troubles in our relationships but never resolves them.
• The topic showing meditation seemed to help lower blood pressure.
• Sugar turns on the gens for diabetes; exercise turns them off.
• The meditators were breathing an average 1.6 breaths more slowly.
• A slower breath rate indicates reduced autonomic activity, better mood, and salutary health.
• Meditation slows the usual shrinkage of our brain as we age, at age fifty, longtime meditator’s brains are « younger » by 7,5 years compared to brains of non meditators of the same age.
• These experts, who had logged off-the-charts hours of meditation, being some of the most optimistic and and happy people.
• Consider the Dalai Lama, now in his eighties, who goes at bed at 7:00 p.m. and gets a full night’s sleep before he awakens around 3:30 for a four-hour stint of spiritual practice, including meditation. Add another hour of practice before he goes to bed and that gives him five hours a day of contemplative time.
• Better emotion regulation and sharpened attention.
• Meditation (in particular, mindfulness) can have a role in treating depression, anxiety, and pain - about as much as medications but with no side effects.
• The best outcomes were in those patients most able to « decenter , that is, step outside their thoughts and feelings enough to see them as just coming and going, rather than getting carried away by « my thoughts and feelings ». In other words, these patients were more mindful. And the more time they put into mindfulness practice, the lower adds of a relapse into depression.
• If I was getting angry, I could throw a little compassion and loving-kindness for myself and the other person.
• Although his chronological age was forty-one at the time, his brain fit most closely for those with chronological age was thirty-three.
• These adepts have shown remarkable mental dexterity, instantly and with striking ease mobilising these states: generating feelings of compassion, the spacious equanimity of complete openness to whatever occurs, or laser-sharp, unbreakable focus.
• Antoine Lutz, now a professor at the Lyon Neuroscience research center.
• Gamma, the very fastest brain wave, occurs during moments when different brains regions fire in harmony, like moments of insight when different elements of a puzzle « click » together.
• In the yogis, gamma oscillations are a far more prominent feature of their brain activity than in other people.
• PCC: Post Cingulate Cortex, a key area for self-focused thought.
• Develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions, and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockage.
• Learn to accept the pain rather than to try to get rid of it.
• « Anticipatory anxiety »
• One metric for effortlessness here comes down being able to keep your mind on a chosen point of focus and resist the natural tendency to wander off into some train of thought or be pulled away by a sound, while having no feeling of making an effort. This kind of ease seems to increase with practice.
• A word about the global significance of these yogis. Such people are are very rare, what some Asian cultures call « living treasures ». Encounters with them are extremely nourishing and often inspiring, not because of some vaunted status or celebrity but because of the inner qualities they radiate.
• « In the beginning nothing comes, in the middle nothing stays, in the end nothing goes »
• Matthieu Ricard: at the start of contemplative practice, little or nothing seems to change in us. After continued practice, we notice some changes in our way of being, but they come and go. Finally, as practice stabilises, the changes are constant and enduring, with no fluctuation. They are altered traits.
• This is why so many professional performers - in sports, theatre, chess, music, and many other walks of life - continue to have coaches throughout their career. No matter how good you are, you can always get just a bit better.
• We each have sat in meditation every morning four more than forty years.
• One important difference about meditation on retreat is that there are teachers available who can provide guidance.
• Experts on the other hand, practice differently. They do intensive sessions under the watchful eye of a coach, who suggest to them what to work on next to get even better. This leads to a continuous learning curve with involvement.
• MBSR program offers both cognitive and somatic practice (l’apprentissage de la conscience du corps en mouvement dans l’espace)
• At a practical level, all forms of meditation share a common core of mind training -e.g., learning to let go the myriad of distractions that flow trough the mind and to focus on the object of attention or stance of awareness.
• How does twenty minutes a day during commuting compare to twenty minutes a day sitting in a quiet place at home?
• All meditation methods at their root are practices in strengthening attention.
• Our society suffers from an attention deficit.
• We consider boosting attention skills to be nothing short of an urgent public health need.
• What if we could exercise our minds like we exercise our bodies?
• Participants did thirty minutes of focused attention meditation followed by thirty minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise two times a week for eight weeks. Benefits included improved executive function, supporting the notion that the brain was shaped positively.
• We envision a time when or culture treats the mind in the same way it treats the body, with exercises to care for our mind becoming part of our daily routine.
• An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The Miracle Morning

Miracle Morning - Hal Elrod 

• “L’histoire de l’espèce humaine est celle des hommes et des femmes qui se sous-estiment”. Abraham Maslow.
• Je veux aimer mon travail et aimer les personnes qui partagent ma vie personnelle et professionnelle.
• Le syndrome du rétroviseur.
• Pour aller au-delà de votre passé et dépasser vos limites, vous devez arrêter de toujours scruter votre rétroviseur.
• Mon passé n’est pas égal à mon avenir.
• Ne fixez pas de limites inutiles à ce que vous souhaitez accomplir dans la vie.
• Sachez clairement ce que vous voulez.
• Avoir un but dans la vie.
• Devenir la meilleure version de nous-mêmes en poursuivant nos rêves.
• La manière dont on fait chaque chose est la manière dont on fait toutes les choses.
• Lorsque vous faites ce qu’il faut et respectez vos engagements, surtout si vous n’en avez pas envie, vous développez la discipline nécessaire pour obtenir des résultats extraordinaires.
• Les sportifs de haut niveau sont extrêmement responsables.
• La recherche a montré que nous finissons pratiquement tous par ressembler à la moyenne des cinq personnes avec lesquelles nous passons le plus de temps.
• Si tous vos amis sont, d’une manière générale, des gens heureux et optimistes, le simple fait de les côtoyer vous rendra naturellement heureux et optimiste.
• Si la plupart des personnes constituant votre entourage se plaignent constamment et ne voient que le verre à moitié vide, vous risquez d’en faire autant.
• Malheureusement, de nombreuses personnes essaient de rendre leur vie meilleure mais sont tirées vers le bas par leur entourage. Cela peut être particulièrement difficile s’il s’agit des membres de sa famille.
• Améliorer en permanence et de manière proactive votre cercle d’influence est l’un des engagements les plus importants que vous prendrez dans votre vie.
• Notre niveau de succès dépassera rarement notre niveau de développement personnel, car le succès est une chose que nous attirons selon la personne que nous devenons.
• Retenez cette vérité : le moment présent est le plus important que n’importe quelle période de votre vie, car c’est ce que vous faites aujourd’hui qui conditionne l’individu que vous devenez.
• “Pour se coucher satisfait, il faut se lever chaque matin de façon déterminée” George Lorimer.
• “Votre premier rituel de la journée est de loin le plus influent, car il a pour effet de déterminer votre état d’esprit et de donner le ton pour le restant de la journée” Eben Pagan.
• “Sleep smarter: 21 proven tips to sleep your way to a better body, better health, and bigger success” de Shawn Stevenson.
• Nombre d’entre nous ont du mal à se rendre à la salle de sport, mais tout le monde adore la sensation éprouvée après la séance. Se lever tôt, surtout avec un but en tête, vous fait démarrer la journée plein d’énergie.
• L’essentiel est donc de créer délibérément chaque soir une attente positive pour le lendemain matin.
• “Le succès est une chose que vous attirez selon la personne que vous devenez” Jim Rohn
• “Une vie extraordinaire, ce sont des progrès quotidiens dans les domaines les plus importants” Robin Sharma.
• « Le sage commence par demander pourquoi »
• Demandez-vous pourquoi toutes choses que vous souhaitez sont importantes à vos yeux.
• Programmez des plages de trois à cinq heures ou des demi-journées, consacrées à UN seul projet ou activité, ai lieu d’essayer de changer de tâche toutes les 60 minutes.
• Développer une confiance en soi extraordinaire.
• « Voyez les choses comme vous souhaiteriez les voir  et non comme elles sont » Robert Collier.
• « Les gens ordinaires croient uniquement à ce qui est possible. Les gens extraordinaires visualisent non pas ce qui est possible ou probable, mais l’impossible. Et en visualisant l’impossible, ils commencent à le considérer comme possible » Cherie Carter-Scott.
• Représentez vous la détermination qu’affiche votre visage alors que vous passez ces appels téléphoniques.
• « Quoi que vous écriviez, coucher des mots sur le papier est une forme de thérapie qui ne coute pas un centime » Diana Raab
• « Des idées surgissent de toute part et à tout moment. Le problème de la prise de notes mentales, c’est que l’encre a tendance à disparaître très rapidement » Rolf Smith.
• Le temps et la discipline nécessaire
• Consigner vos rêves, votre régime alimentaire, vos séances de sport.
• Lister ce qui me rend reconnaissant, énumérer mes réussites, clarifier les domaines dans lesquels je souhaite m’améliorer, planifier les mesures que je m’engage à prendre pour progresser.
• Silence
• Affirmations
• Visualisation
• Exercice Physique
• Reading
• Scribing
• Se couchant systématiquement à 21 heures.
• Il est également important de commencer à apprécier, autant que le goût, les bienfaits pour la santé et la valeur énergétique des aliments que nous mangeons.
• Miracle Morning Super-food smoothie offrant des acides aminés, des anti-oxydants anti-vieillissement, des acides gras essentiels oméga3.
• Fruits frais et légumes permettent d’améliorer la concentration et le bien-être émotionnel, de rester en bonne forme et de vous préserver des maladies.
• Le maca : produit adaptogène des Andes prisé pour ses effets sur l’équilibre hormonal.
• « Vous êtes ce que vous mangez »
• Vaincre la procrastination : commencer par le plus dur. Exécuter de bon matin les tâches les plus importantes, ou les moins agréables.
• « La motivation vous fait démarrer, mais c’est l’habitude qui vous fait persévérer ». Jim Rohn.
• « Être brillant n’est pas une qualité innée. Le succès arrive en prenant l’habitude de faire les choses que les autres délaissent. Les personnes ayant réussi n’aiment pas toujours faire ces choses, mais elles vont de l’avant et s’exécutent. » Don Marquis.
• Programme d’exercices physique, améliorer le régime alimentaire, tenir un budget.
• ...a terminé son deuxième marathon. « Hal, c’est vraiment incroyable...Désormais, j’ai vraiment le sentiment que plus rien n’est impossible »
• Choisir de relever des défis en dehors de notre zone de confort.
• « La vie commence à la fin de votre zone de confort ». Neale Donald Walsch.
• « Se construire une vie extraordinaire, c’est progresser chaque jour dans les domaines les plus importants » Robin Sharma.
• Niveau extraordinaire de discipline, de clarté et d’épanouissement  personnel.
• « Chaque matin, quand vous vous réveillez, dites-vous que vous avez la chance d’être en vie, que votre existence est précieuse, que vous n’allez pas la gâcher, que vous allez utiliser toute votre énergie pour évoluer, pour vous ouvrir aux autres et leur faire le plus de bien possible » Dalaï-lama.
• Adopter une telle position de vulnérabilité.
• Remplacez vos jugements par de l’empathie, préférez l’empathie aux plaintes permanentes et échangez la peur contre l’amour.
• La vie, ce n’est pas souhaiter être ailleurs ou quelqu’un d’autre. C’est apprécier où vous êtes et améliorez constamment ces deux états.
• Ne vous évertuez pas à impressionner les autres. Attachez-vous simplement à enrichir leur existence.
• Aujourd’hui est le jour le plus important de votre vie, quand vous déciderez que le moment présent est le plus important de tous les moments.
• “Il n’existe que deux façons de vivre votre vie. L’une comme si rien n’était pas un miracle. L’autre comme si tout était un miracle”. Albert Einstein.
• “La vie commence chaque matin”. Joel Olsteen.
• “Le désespoir est la matière première d’un changement radical. Seuls ceux capables de laisser derrière eux tout ce à quoi ils ont toujours cru peuvent espérer y échapper”. William Burroughs.
• “Pour opérer de profonds changements dans votre vie, vous avez besoin d’inspiration ou de désespoir”. Anthony Robbins.
• La peur et l’incertitude m’enveloppaient tellement que mon seul réconfort quotidien était de me mettre au lit.
• Ce matin-là j’ai fait quelque chose de différent. J’ai suivi le conseil d’un ami et suis allé courir, pour me vider la tête.
• « Votre niveau de succès dépassera rarement votre niveau d’épanouissement personnel car le succès est une chose que vous attirez selon la personne que vous devenez ».
• La méditation, les affirmations, la tenue d’un journal, la visualisation, la lecture et l’exercice physique.
• Silence : assis dans le silence à prier, à méditer et à me concentrer sur ma respiration pendant dix minutes.
• Affirmation : j’ai noté ce que je voulais, qui je m’engageais à devenir et ce que je m’engageais à faire pour que ma vie change.
• Le simple fait de coucher par écrit les choses qui me rendaient heureux m’a remonté le moral.
• Avec mon nouveau degré d’énergie, de motivation, de clarté et de concentration, j’étais en mesure de me fixer facilement des objectifs, de créer des stratégies et d’exécuter un plan afin de sauver mon activité et d’accroître mon revenu.