RaMbLeS
Welcome to RaMbLeS, a collection of weekly musings on life and Scripture. It all began in 2005 on Google’s blogspot as the aBeLOG (a name now recycled), a semi-autobiographical devotional that attempted to keep well-wishers abreast of my activities as I relocated to Scotland for a few years. Since my return, I’ve continued my RaMbLeS, and here’s its most recent incarnation on Homiletix, as random reflections usually based on current news articles and travel experiences and whatever else takes my fancy!
Rhythm!
Apparently, not only do we have GPSs in our systems (last week’s blog), but they say we have an internal metronome, too.
A study published last year in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine argued that the human heart quietly marks the entire rhythm of our lives, not just that of blood flow. Whether it ticks at 40–100 beats a minute, in three-quarter time, or in triplets, or erratically, it’s influencing more than the red stuff in our arteries.
In “The Heartfelt Music
Oriented!
Your brain has a GPS! Yes, indeed! Two of them. Working in tandem.
One region in the brain, when travel is commenced, tracks the straight-line, as-the-crow-flies distance from A to B. The other, during travel, computes the precise, on-the-ground distance to get to B. The brain does both!
So declareth research funded by the Wellcome Trust and published in Current Biology: “A Goal Direction Signal in the Human Entorhinal/Subicular Region.”
Hugo Spiers and his team of scientists
Resolved!
The top New Year’s resolution for 2015 is apparently this: Lose Weight. Others include: Volunteer to Help Others; Quit Smoking/Drinking; Manage Stress; Eliminate Debt; etc.
Most of these noble resolutions will be abandoned within the first two weeks of January.
But this Lose Weight resolution is looking more and more tempting. What with a recent article in the Journal of Neurophysiology: “The Power of the Mind: The Cortex as a Critical Determinant of Muscle
Skin!
Prosthetics has come a long way. You have prostheses for the face both inside and outside the mouth, prostheses of the neck including substitutes for the larynx, prostheses for limbs both upper and lower and to fit a variety of limb losses or amputations, and prostheses for other body parts.
And some have been around for a long time. Herodotus, the 5th-century BC Greek historian, mentions a guy named Hegesistratus who had a prosthetic foot. Of course, there’s the Olympic
Smarter!
While I’m fast losing brain function as I get “wiser”—what a paradox!—I’m glad to report that I’m smarter than a mouse. So there!
Scientists from the University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY, have declared it so in a paper published last year, and in a recent companion study, “A Competitive Advantage by Neonatally Engrafted Human Glial Progenitors Yields Mice Whose Brains Are Chimeric for Human Glia” (The Journal of Neuroscience).
Let me attempt
Stillness!
Pico Iyer, the British writer of Indian origin, recently wrote a book, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere.
He bemoans our degree of busyness, the intensity of our distractions, the inability to be still.
We’ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off— our holy days, as some would have it; our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently
Temptation!
News flash: Conquer temptation by avoiding temptation!
Yup, that’s made the news.
Appropriate, perhaps, for this season, when the temptation to engorge, consume, imbibe, and devour is considerable.
I stand condemned! Rather than having a membership to a gym, I possess one to several bakeries and chocolatiers in town. (And if you haven’t had dulce de leche cheesecake, you’ve missed out on one of the singular pleasures of life!).
Anyhow, back to temptation …
Michael Ent
Abe Kuruvilla is the Carl E. Bates Professor of Christian Preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), and a dermatologist in private practice. His passion is to explore, explain, and exemplify preaching. 