【推荐1】It's easy to spend all day searching for inspiration. You can find incredible videos, articles, and news stories, and email them out to your friends. But the best type of inspiration comes from applying those outside bits of motivation to your own goals.

Make no mistakes： It's important to be a learner. Successful people in all fields soak up （获取）new information.     1    

But here's the problem: consuming the success and ideas of others is passive inspiration. Every time you watch a video, read an article, or listen to an interview, you're practicing passive inspiration.     2     Hearing about other people's success isn't the same thing as creating your own.

    3     Watching someone else's success might leave you feeling excited for a few minutes, but taking action and applying a new idea to your life will inspire you more than anything someone else could say. Learning and listening can help you think about things in a different way.     4     Passive inspiration can give you ideas, but active inspiration will give you momentum（动力）.

In fact, we too often spend our lives consuming the world around us instead of creating it. Sure, there is some motivation in other people's ideas, but don’t forget about the power your actions have to inspire you.     5     So, if you come across a good idea, use it.

【推荐3】In a recent study of healthy volunteers, National Institutes of Health researchers discovered that our brains may replay memories of learning new skills when we rest.

NIH researchers have mapped out the brain activity that flows when we learn a new skill, such as playing a new song on the piano, and found that during short rest the volunteers’ brains rapidly and repeatedly replayed faster versions of the activity seen while they practiced typing a code. The more a volunteer replayed the activity the better they performed during subsequent practice sessions.

The study was conducted at the NIH Clinical Center. The team of Dr. Cohen, M.D. , senior investigator at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), used a highly sensitive scanning technique to record the brain waves of 33 healthy, right-handed volunteers as they learned to type a five-digit test code with their left hands. The subjects sat in a chair and under the scanner’s long, cone-shaped cap. An experiment began when a subject was shown the code “41234” on a screen and asked to type it out as many times as possible for 10 seconds and then take a 10 second break. Subjects were asked to repeat this cycle of alternating (交替的) practice and rest sessions a total of 35 times.

During the first few trials, the speed at which subjects correctly typed the code improved dramatically and then leveled off around the 11th cycle. In a previous study, Dr. Cohen’s team showed that most of these gains happened during short rests, and not when the subjects were typing. Moreover, the gains were greater than those made after a night’s sleep and were related with a decrease in the size of brain waves, called beta rhythms. In this new report, the researchers searched for something different in the subjects’ brain waves.

“We wanted to explore the mechanisms (机制) behind memory strengthening seen during wakeful rest. Several forms of memory appear to rely on the replaying of neural (神经的) activity, so we decided to test this idea out for procedural skill learning,” said Ethan R. Buch, Ph.D., a staff scientist on Dr. Cohen’s team and leader of the study. To do this, Dr. Buch developed a computer program which allowed the team to understand the brain wave activity associated with typing each number in the test code.

Interestingly, they found that the more a volunteer replayed, the better their performance was. “We were a bit surprised by these last results. Overall, our results support the idea that the replay activity during waking rest may be a powerful tool that researchers can use to help individuals learn new skills faster and possibly facilitate recovery from stroke.” said Dr. Cohen.