Sometimes all you need to do is look up to the sky

                                                  Costa Rica, Puntarenas, 2011

A beautiful day upon Alhambra

A photo taken from the Mirador San Nicolas a few years ago, modified in PicsArt. The Alhambra Palace of Granada, Spain, had a particularly spendid air that day. 

A beautiful way to rememorate your travels is to play around with the pics of your favorite trips ;) 

The direct link between Rememorating and Building the Future

                                 
One of the most remarkable and evolutionarily essential elements of experiencing time through human consciousness is something cognitive scientists and psychologists call mental time travel — a combination of episodic memory, which allows us to draw on our autobiographical experience and call up events, experiences, and emotions that occurred in the past, with the ability to imagine and anticipate future events, writes Maria Popova on Brain Pickings.

According to Dan Falk in “In Search of Time: The History, Physics, and Philosophy of Time”:

“The capacity for mental time travel gave our ancestors an invaluable edge in the struggle for survival. They believe there is a profound link between remembering the past and imagining the future. The very act of remembering, they argue, gives one the “raw material” needed to construct plausible scenarios of future events and act accordingly. Mental time travel “provides increased behavioral flexibility to act in the present to increase future survival chances.” If this argument is correct, then mental time travel into the past — remembering — “is subsidiary to our ability to imagine future scenarios.” Tulving agrees: “What is the benefit of knowing what has happened in the past? Why do you care? The importance is that you’ve learned a lesson,” he says. “Perhaps the evolutionary advantage has to do with the future rather than the past.”

Modern neuroscience appears to confirm that line of reasoning: as far as your brain is concerned, the act of remembering is indeed very similar to the act of imagining the future, according to Popova.

Traveling keeps the brain sharp and the hearth healthy

            

“Research shows that travel helps build vital neural pathways”, says Dr. Gary Small, director of the UCLA Longevity Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, quoted by the Natural Society. 

The value of novelty is particularly high for our brains, as challenging new experiences of any kind help the brain develop parts of nerve cells called dendrites, which are like branches of a tree.  “Navigating unfamiliar places, tasting new foods, or learning even just a few words of another language delivers the brain-building effect”, affirms Dr. Small.

While the new and complex situations encountered while traveling can help keep the brain sharp, travel has been found to lower the risk of heart attack and death from coronary disease in certain groups, points out Elizabeth O’Brien on the Market Watch.

She quotes the result the long-running Framingham Heart Study, which studies residents of Framingham, Mass., in which women aged 45 to 64 were asked how often they took vacations. In a 20-year follow-up study, researchers found that women who vacationed every six years (or less frequently) had a significantly higher risk of developing a heart attack or coronary death compared with women who vacationed at least twice a year, even after adjusting for traditional risk factors such as blood pressure.

According to the same author, a separate, nine-year study found that annual vacations reduced the risk of death from any cause, and specifically death from heart disease, in a group of men at high risk for coronary heart disease. 

                                              

A journey might require less than you think

"Happiness is a journey, not a destination"