EVER FEEL A LITTLE OUT OF TOUCH OR just plain lost on certain parts of the guitar fingerboard? You’re certainly not alone. Consider this: A standard-tuned, 6-string guitar with a 22-fret ’board has a range just shy of four octaves and contains five middle Cs, while a full-size piano keyboard covers over seven octaves yet it has only one middle C. What’s up with that?!? It’s simply the nature of the instrument. By design, the keyboard relegates any given pitch to a single key, while the guitar fingerboard offers anywhere from one to five different string and fret locations for the same note. These multiple repetitions of the same pitch afford guitarists many options for where to play any given note, but they also cause considerable confusion for beginners or players who often feel lost above the 5th fret, particularly on the inside four strings.

Source: 10 Things You’ve Gotta Know About the Fretboard | LESSON

Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended. This “peak-end” rule of Kahneman’s is what we use to summarize the experience, and then we rely on that summary later to remind ourselves of how the experience felt.

Source: The 7 Step Evening Ritual That Will Make You Happy

From the Flip Wilson Show

This fast-selling memoir by an idealist neurosurgeon facing an early death from cancer gains power and poignancy from its detailed descriptions and reflections on mortality. The power of this book lies in its eloquent insistence that we are all confronting our mortality every day, whether we know it or not. The real question we face, Kalanithi writes, is not how long, but rather how, we will live – and the answer does not appear in any medical textbook. It brings him back, at last, to the books of poetry he left gathering dust when he entered medical school.

Source: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi review – how to live, by a doctor who died aged 37

“One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with World’s Fair, as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries. At a certain point, of course, you figure out what your premises are and what you’re doing. But certainly, with the beginnings of the work, you really don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Source: Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 94, E. L. Doctorow

Unfortunately we all are getting to know this one a little too well. …Fight it, fight it!

ONE evening early this summer, I opened a book and found myself reading the same paragraph over and over, a half dozen times before concluding that it was hopeless to continue. I simply couldn’t marshal the necessary focus.

I was horrified. All my life, reading books has been a deep and consistent source of pleasure, learning and solace. Now the books I regularly purchased were piling up ever higher on my bedside table, staring at me in silent rebuke.

Instead of reading them, I was spending too many hours online, checking the traffic numbers for my company’s website, shopping for more colorful socks on Gilt and Rue La La, even though I had more than I needed, and even guiltily clicking through pictures with irresistible headlines such as “Awkward Child Stars Who Grew Up to Be Attractive.”

During the workday, I checked my email more times than I cared to acknowledge, and spent far too much time hungrily searching for tidbits of new information about the presidential campaign, with the election then still more than a year away.

Source: Addicted to Distraction