No Act of Kindness Is Wasted - A Final Thought

Here's the Community Business College final thought for the week ending July 17, 2015.

As we ended the week of classes at Community Business College, we had a campus-wide student meeting where we could all just get together, share announcements and reviews of the week’s classwork and end with a “Final Thought For The Week.”
The college’s final thoughts can be profound, humorous, poignant, or, in the best cases, a combination of all three.

This week’s final thought was a simple and straight forward one – “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”

It comes from an ancient Aesop fable and the moral is a good one – to do kindness whether you are reward or not.

What was particularly interesting about this one was to see how many people were familiar with the tale, but not necessarily familiar with Aesop’s fable itself.

Some have heard the story of the lion and the mouse in the fable, but it has been told and re-told that some remember it differently than others.

Here is one common version of the fable as told through Wikipedia’s Wikicommons:

 

The Lion and the Mouse

Once, a long time ago, a large lion was awakened from sleep by a Mouse running over his face. Rising up angrily with a start, the lion caught the mouse and was about to kill him, when the Mouse piteously entreated, saying: “If you would only spare my life, I would be sure to repay your kindness.” The Lion laughed and let him go.

It happened shortly after this that the Lion was caught by some hunters, who bound him by strong ropes to the ground. The Mouse, recognizing his roar, came to his aid, gnawed the rope with his teeth, and set him free, telling the lion “You laughed at the idea of my ever being able to help you, to repay your favor; but now you know that it is possible for even a Mouse to provide an act of kindness to a Lion.”

The moral of the story is “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”

Now, some have heard that it was thorn in the lion’s foot, possibly mixing the classic tale of Androcoles and the Lion. Others have heard that the mouse did the favor first, with the lion then providing help to the mouse after.

However they initially heard it, the interesting thing about it all is almost all were familiar with the tale about the mouse and the lion in general.

Now, after we told the tale at the student meeting, one student laughed and said he thought there was going to be a cynical punch line to follow. Something like “no act of kindness ever goes unpunished.”

Or maybe something from a Banksy graffiti artwork. Maybe it demonstrates the snarky world we live in - it’s hard for people to express genuine positive attitudes without being sniffed at.

But the purpose of our final thought at the end of each week is to leave all of our students with something positive and uplifting. It’s a good way to wrap a good week of hard work and study and to kick off the weekend. The final thoughts have become so popular that one of the Community Business College instructors compiled them into a booklet called “Frana’s Collected Sayings” and hands them out at our graduation ceremonies.

That, in itself, is an act of kindness – spread good thoughts and hope they catch on like the next pop culture meme.

If you want to practice an act of kindness, you can contribute to the Community Business College crowdfunding project. More details can be found at: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-adults-finally-get-their-high-school-diplomasA good point to remember - No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

Is Tetris Good For The Mind?

During the student meeting today, one of the Community Business College adult students made the case that Tetris is good for the brain. Some people will lump Tetris in with all video games and say that it doesn't do much good but the question here is - can the game improve your mind?

This student grew up in the 80's when Tetris was big and freshly imported from the old Soviet Union. It quickly caught on and can be found on many all-time favorite video game lists. But since that time there have been so many video games available, its popularity has settled down.

That's not to say that Tetris hasn't made a huge impact in the culture. From video game consoles, to Halloween costumes and even videos of human Tetris, it's not hard to find Tetris references. But is it really a mental exercise?

Tetris Screen Shot- Somebody Needs More Practice

For those not in the know, the game is played with shapes of four squares stuck together. They're called "tetrominoes," or in the game, "tetriminos" as opposed to two-square "dominoes." The pieces drop one at a time down the matrix  with the player able to rotate the pieces 90 degrees at a time and slide them from side to side. The object of the game is to fit the pieces together without any gaps. When a horizontal line is filled in with no gaps, it disappears, making room for more pieces to fall and scoring the player some points. The second object of the game is to keep making those lines disappear because if the whole matrix fills up with game pieces, the game ends.
As the player "beats" each level by using up the game pieces, the following level drops them faster and, thus, increases the challenge.

But Can It Change Your Brain?
Of course, this is of interest to us at Community Business College because we are all about training brains. But can Tetris make a difference in your brain? After doing a little research, some (including our stalwart student today) seem to think so.

Researchers Dr. Richard Haier, Richard J Haier, Sherif Karama, Leonard Leyba and Rex E Jung found in 2009 that when a person first starts playing Tetris, brain function and overall activity increases, and the brain's metabolism increases along with the consumption of blood glucose. This means playing the game really gets the brain going.

As players of the game get better at it, their brain metabolisms showed improved efficiency.  Even moderate playing of Tetris (half-an-hour a day for three months) seemed to boost general cognitive functions such as "critical thinking, reasoning, language and processing" and increasing the thickness of the players' "grey matter."

There's even a syndrome called The Tetris Effect for those who overdo it and play the game so much that they start seeing common everyday objects as Tetris game pieces. So, walking down the street and looking at the skyline of a bunch of city buildings triggers the mind to involuntarily imagine how those shapes might fit together as if they were Tetris objects on the game board.

So maybe there's something to this.  Most people probably don't play the game excessively and develop a syndrome but Tetris seems to definitely make some changes in the brain.

Kudos to our student for making the case that games are not always just fun but can be beneficial to our minds, too. Plus it takes your mind off of the troubles of the day.