Look out your window and what’s the first thing you see? A leaf glistening? A wind bent tree? Or do you see an unkempt garbage can with litter nearby?

Have you considered how your attention to beauty can cut you a pathway across a difficult day? Likely as many pictures of beauty exist out there – as there are colors, shapes and textures. Loveliness, an expression of your brain’s aesthetic response to life, takes an awareness on your part, though, before it can transform your day.

You can cut a neural pathway through a difficult area of life, by focusing your attention on snapshots of beauty throughout your day. The brain uses your aesthetic focus as a sort of magnificent oasis in the face of madness from the world swirling around us.

We each possess an innate neurology of beauty, created from genes at birth and further developed and shaped by your perspectives. Your multiple intelligences , for example, link you to beauty in ways that can add well being and motivation for living - even when storm clouds linger in one area or another of your day. How does it work?

Beauty enters your mind as an asset whenever you throw a winning solution to a particular problem that disadvantages you. Let’s say you feel disrespected in a relationship. Beauty can help you make new decisions that add winning benefits for your next meeting with that person. Start by focusing more on one beautiful visual that you value, and your mind will create more serotonin, a chemical that enables you to overwrite mental scripts by rewriting your innate worth and value. Read the amazing story of an Amish community near where I live, rewired for beauty recently to forgive a man who broke into their school and murdered their children.

Their mental rewiring for the beauty of God, of forgiveness, and of life, activated more of your intelligences, and helped this community spot splendor in their surroundings, in spite of intense suffering from loss. That’s also how the mind operates in your favor, and hands you that Eureka solution when you need it most. Beauty can transform the most difficult part of your day and can add new shades of color with a zest for living.

Think of your home as a castle for a moment, and let’s look at how beauty could lift your day and boost your spirit for new solutions in … say … a difficult relationship, or health problem.

First, play inspirational music, and your mind opens to vibrant colors of leaves, and possibly even closer friendships to enjoy. For instance, I’m playing NPR classical station at the moment, and the orchestra moves my brain waves to capture new quiet for thought. If you saw these waves through an EEG you’d see them shift from fast to slower with this music.

Next, come down to my lower floor, and see an oak tree in the backyard, where a black capped, Peregrine falcon sat recently, and watched me work. Visualize the wonder of its 40 inch wingspan. He’s not there today – but I still see his saucy stance whenever I look for beauty out that window.

From my front window you’d see a Japanese Lilac I planted when my daughter and son-in-law married last summer. It’s leaves fell last week but it looks strong and ready to embrace a winter.

Move next to my side window and take in a young neighbor’s Canadian flag - flying alongside an American flag, as a symbol for our friendship and for my Canadian birth.

When I stand in my back window, and see the winding creek, I laugh. For awhile the small bridge kept tipping into the rising waters each time it rained. On one occasion I almost fell in - trying to retrieve the deceptively heavy bridge. Have you noticed beauty at times comes through laughter?

Windows from my home show how to open exquisite views from your castle cottage. The mind becomes a castle when you draw from the beauty of many perspectives. Look out a window for some form of beauty and see splendor in your view.

Do you create like Einstein did daily, or criticize like his eighth grade teacher - who called him a bonehead? Or do you create blogs into network magazines, like John Evans’ Syntagma, which moves at the cusp, and not without criticism from a few?

The human brain, at peak performance is hardwired to handle risk and criticism with innovative responses that critics only envy, but rarely reach. According to Danah Zohar’s research, the brain wires for peak performance simply based on what we do with a day.

It starts with curiosity - where you look at a problem - with a possibility in mind, that could solve it. Then, innovators ask the mind-bending question, ‘What if…?”

Google looked at its innovative search technologies, which connect millions of people around the world with information every day, and spotted a problem. Competitors were catching up. Their question, ”What if …? led them to purchase YouTube.

Many said it couldn’t work and others said it shouldn’t. What was Google’s response? The eight year old company and its Stanford Ph.D. leaders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, took their top web property behind closed doors and created their solution. They included a band of people who were mentally wired for innovation, and excluded distractions from nay sayers. And when they stepped out again, Google announced its purchase of YouTube for 1.65 Billion in stock.

Know any boomers taking risks lately, for the purpose of creating something new or improved? How about you? When experiences fuel new choices the brain revs up to leapfrog with the next generation. It makes me sad to see so many intelligent mid-lifers lagging behind lately as critics.

In the meantime, and without many years of experience, Google leaders simply gathered brainpower for change, through a circle of intelligent thinkers. Only eight years old, Google’s targeted advertising program offers businesses of all types a way to measure results, while sustaining a wider web experience for all users. Some of the smartest people in the world work at their headquarters in Silicon Valley and in offices across the Americas, Europe and Asia.

The risk involved adding another winning element before others bought it. Around only since February 2005, YouTube adds a cutting edge consumer media company to Google, where people can view and share original videos worldwide across the internet.

With YouTube’s reputation to easily upload and share video clips through websites, blogs, and e-mail, and Google’s gift for search technologies, they both increased their investment. YouTube currently sends out over 100 million video views daily with 65,000 new videos uploaded each day. Through its own innovation, it quickly become the leading destination on the Internet for video entertainment.

Critics are now asking, … But can Google sustain this creative edge? What do you think? It will likely mean more innovation in how Google organizes its 9000 employees. Critics say they cannot continue to sustain their organized chaos approaches with this new addition. But then that’s a critic’s job – to complain. Google’s job seems more rewarding to me … they continue to expect their engineers to create daily, even while others are gunning for them.

Do you spend at least 20% of your day creating something new, as Google engineers are encouraged and expected to develop their own ideas? Start with the question… “What if… and your brain will do the rest. It’s already hardwired for peak performance - whenever you draw on its creative parts as Google just did when it bought YouTube.

No question - nay sayers will complain that they need more money to create like Google…. Using resources you already possess, do you see any possibilities for something new in your day?

If you know the person in charge of international holidays, I’d like to propose a yearly celebration to repair our aging brains. Call it “Reboot Your Brain Day,” or something similar, but it would show Mother Nature’s fountain of fixes for the human brain. We’d start with showcasing chemical and electrical systems that nurture and sustain brain cells.

For instance, I’d hire a few gifted musicians to show how favorite tunes can move and track your brain waves into better moods and creative adventures. Don Campbell could come to tell us how to …”Tap the power of music to strengthen the mind and unlock the creative spirit.”

I’d enlist sleep experts too. They’d show how we stay awake better during the day, by sleeping better at night. I’d enlist Gilio Tononi’s ideas from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to help the brain rewire during a good sleep.

My global holiday would also gather respected comedians to help us link laughter and intelligence to liven up a boring calendar. It’s easily done – whenever we laugh together to improve the chemical and nerve cell communications across the brain. Scientists see it like data flows between high-performance computers, routers and servers to fly magically across the internet. Laughter adds the high-performance parts to healthy brains.

Then, an Olympian star would lead us in a series of movements that draw from kinesthetic intelligence. The idea is to improve mental function in every area of our lives. It could be done from deep breathing exercises to taking up a fun new sport. Encouragement to take on a kinesthetic adventure to boost the brain’s output through a fun new routine that fits into what you already like to do.

Finally, an naturalistic expert would stop by to help unlock naturalistic parts for a healthier brain. It could happen through showing nature as the playground for the mind it was intended to be, to rethinking how rivers near you impact a fix for the brain.

By the way, who’s in charge of creating international holidays anyway? Think they’d go for in one day a year to reboot the brain for global benefits?

Scientists recently came up with new connections between how your brain operates and what your body does in a day. Turns out … the human brain works far more magic for those who act on what they learn. Not everybody will benefit though. Why so?

Traditionally we’ve viewed cognition as an input and output process – where your brain inputs information, processes it, and then outputs a response. That is partially true, but not the whole story, and scientists have a new robot to prove it.

Recently, an Indiana University and University of Tokyo roboticist discovered how to support the fact that it takes all types of sensory information to help us benefit more from any environment.

Philosophers and learning reformers such as John Dewey argued all along, that to learn means to do, and now this Indiana University study affirms that anything short of doing is cheating your brainpower. That’s so because human brains continually interact with and are shaped by our unique environments. Think about it.

This newly discovered interaction can lead to better learning and more successful lifestyles, simply by drawing on unused resources already found and conditioned in your brain.

So what’s the problem? Why have we been so slow to act on brain based ideas that trigger more mental health, and keep us smarter - well past the golden years?

Here’s the problem…. Quantifying this neural-behavioral relationship, has been difficult, until recently. This study takes quantum leaps through mathematical advances that helped researchers create critical measurement tools. You’ve got it – that’s where robots and the raw boned proofs come in - to stop nay-sayers. Well, at least, to slow skeptics down a bit.

Robots, like the one pictured here, were used in the study to measure the information flow from the environment to themselves, and then from their robotic brains back to the environment. They also recorded data about what they saw and did.

You can read the details in the journal, Public Library of Science Computational Biology on October 27. You’ll enjoy how measurements help researchers to view the brain interacts, as a vital part of the body, and of your daily environment.

I suspect this research could help drive a few more nails into the coffin of lectures that bore brains to death - literally. Who knows? Maybe they’ll help us to envision a few brilliant new approaches to communicate insights from the arts and from some of the best thinkers out there. I’m thinking of boomers like you … who connect what you learn and do, to benefit the coming generation. Now that would make this post worth its words in intelligence - yours.