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katherineharron

MSG in Chinese restaurants isn't unhealthy -- you're just racist, activists say - CNN - 0 views

  • If you've heard of the term "MSG," you might have also heard of its common -- but inaccurate -- connotations.For years, monosodium glutamate, a food additive known as MSG, has been branded as an unhealthy processed ingredient mainly found in Chinese food, despite a lack of supporting scientific evidence.
  • Now, activists have launched a campaign called "Redefine CRS." Headed by Japanese food and seasoning company Ajinomoto, the online campaign urges Merriam-Webster to change its entry to reflect the scientific consensus on MSG -- and the impact of misinformation on the American public's perception of Asian cuisine.
  • First off: what is MSG?Chances are, you've eaten it. It's a common amino acid naturally found in foods like tomatoes and cheese, which people then figured out how to extract and ferment -- a process similar to how we make yogurt and wine. This fermented MSG is now used to flavor lots of different foods like stews or chicken stock. It's so widely used because it taps into our fifth basic taste: umami (pronounced oo-maa-mee). Umami is less well known than the other tastes like saltiness or sweetness, but it's everywhere -- it's the complex, savory taste you find in mushrooms or Parmesan cheese.
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  • As the Ajinomoto campaign points out, the public scare over MSG unfairly placed the blame on Chinese food -- and is partly why many in the United States still think of Chinese food as processed, unclean, or unhealthy.
  • Some also pointed out that "ethnic" foods -- a controversy in itself, because what is "ethnic" anyway? -- hold stories that have been erased or unacknowledged completely. For many, "Americanized" Chinese food was born from desperation and adapted for American tastes -- a way for immigrant families to survive in a society that demanded assimilation. To have that food, and its history of immigrant struggle, dismissed as "icky" or "oily" felt like a slap in the face for many in the Asian American community.
  • Then there's Ajinomoto, one of the biggest voices in the MSG market and the leader of the Redefine CRS campaign. You can find Ajinomoto's MSG seasoning packets and spice mixes in many American supermarkets, and it has been working for years to raise awareness about both the safety of consuming MSG and the ways it can be used to add flavor to dishes.
  • Bourdain, who traveled the world and showcased an extraordinary diversity of cultures and cuisines, was more explicit. "I think (MSG) is good stuff," he said in a 2016 episode of "Parts Unknown" filmed in China. "I don't react to it -- nobody does. It's a lie."
  • "You know what causes Chinese restaurant syndrome?" he added as he walked through the streets of Sichuan. "Racism."
katherineharron

How to stop being annoyed by life - CNN - 0 views

  • Beyond improvements to your general mood and happiness, taming your anger can have important benefits to your health. Constant stress and aggravation is linked to a range of issues including overeating, insomnia and depression, and angry outbursts increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
  • Anger "is like a blazing flame that burns up our self-control," the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh wrote. I aimed to teach myself how to rob it of oxygen and snuff it out.
  • At the first moment you realize you are experiencing annoyance or anger, just breathe. Ten slow, deep, even breaths do wonders. Sometimes, the annoyance will have passed in just that time.
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  • If the breaths don't make a dent, try explaining what's happening to yourself. "I'm annoyed right now because ..." is a good sentence to finish. Articulating the issue changes your response from emotion to logic.
  • Make use of this step when another person is part of the reason you are upset. Try hard to see the situation from their reality and invent a subjective theory for why they did what they did.
  • Think beyond the annoyance, or annoying person, and focus on your own behavior. By thinking of how you can be a model for grace under pressure, you help yourself to become one.
  • If you've hit No. 10, it's time to talk about the frustration with someone you trust who is not involved in the situation. Start by telling them what you did in the previous steps and why they didn't fully work.
  • How important is the matter upsetting you? How does it stack up against the things in life that you know matter? What is important (loved ones are a good example) can be the antidote to what troubles you now -- as long as you can bring them to mind in this moment.
  • Whatever the annoyance, make a joke about it, even if it's a bad one. If you can find some grain of humor in the situation, smiling, laughing and even being silly can all defuse anger and annoyance. It's not psychologically possible to experience two emotions at once.
  • If you've made it this far up the steps and you are still really peeved, here's a good (if seemingly obvious) question to ask yourself: "Is there something I can do to make it better?" Even if the answer is a small step that may not seem that effective, just taking action gets you out into the frame of acting, not reacting.
  • In the future, it is possible that you will see this particular anger-causing situation differently. Look at past problems and see how they've been a catalyst for change or even a blessing in disguise. You may even look back at a difficult situation with fondness, humor or gratefulness (for having overcome it). It's worth keeping in mind that what seems bad now won't always be so.
  • Whatever it is that is getting your goat, it is temporary and manageable. You won't always feel this way. It's just a question of how long.
  • Beyond improvements to your general mood and happiness, taming your anger can have important benefits to your health. Constant stress and aggravation is linked to a range of issues including overeating, insomnia and depression, and angry outbursts increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
manhefnawi

The Fascinating Way That Words Can Change How We Perceive Colors | Mental Floss - 0 views

  • The language we speak can impact the colors we recognize
  • If a language only has two terms, they are almost always related to black and white (dark and light). If they have three, that third color is almost always red. And so on into green, yellow, and blue.
katherineharron

Move over, 'sit still'! Why kids need to move in school - CNN - 0 views

  • A few years ago, when my girls were in the second and third grades, they raved about the dance breaks they would occasionally have during the school day.
  • My kids' teachers were certainly not alone. More teachers are incorporating some form of movement into the school day, especially as the research is pretty clear: Physical activity in school leads to better cognitive performance and fewer behavioral issues, not to mention cutting down on stress and anxiety.
  • It all seems like a no-brainer, especially as research shows that childhood obesity seems to be getting worse. As former first lady Michelle Obama advocated, let's get our kids to move.The challenge, though, is persuading school administrations to consistently make time for physical activity when they are pressed to meet stringent academic requirements and find the money to pay for some of the training.
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  • "When you exercise, you turn on the attention systems, so that means you're (paying) better attention, you're able to deal with more frustration, you're able to stay with it longer," he said. "You're able to manipulate information by turning ... on the front part of our brain to make it work better, and that's really key and important in terms of taking in information as well as performing with it."
katherineharron

In race for coronavirus vaccine, hurled insults and the wisdom of Spider-Man - CNN - 0 views

  • Ethicists and physicians are concerned that, amid a desire to put an end to the Covid-19 pandemic, developers of drugs and vaccines have become overly enthusiastic about the chances their products will work.
  • Oxford has recently walked back some of its optimism, but for months, it set a tone that its vaccine was the most promising, without any solid evidence that this was based in fact.
  • Third, one leader in the Oxford team has gone so far as to denigrate other teams trying to get a Covid vaccine on the market, calling their technology "weird" and labeling it as merely "noise." Such name-calling is highly unusual and aggressive among scientists.
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  • "At this point, the Oxford researchers have no idea whether they have something or not," Offit said. "You just get so tired of this 'science by press release.' "
  • There are currently 10 vaccines in human clinical trials worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Four of the teams are in the United States: Moderna, Pfizer, Inovio and Novavax.
  • Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel referred to the results as "positive interim Phase 1 data" and that "the Moderna team continues to focus on moving as fast as safely possible to start our pivotal Phase 3 study in July."
  • Moderna is collaborating on its vaccine development with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of NIAID, said while Moderna's numbers were limited, "it was good news" and he was "cautiously optimistic" about the vaccine.
  • Inovio and Moderna have said they expect their large-scale clinical trials, known as Phase 3 trials, to last around six months. Pfizer hasn't given a timetable for its Phase 3 trial.
  • "I've not seen anyone wrap up a Phase 3 trial in a month to six weeks," said Dr. Saad Omer, a Yale University infectious disease expert who's done clinical trials on polio, pertussis and influenza vaccines. "We need to benchmark this against realistic expectations."
  • "As vaccine researchers like to say, mice lie and monkeys exaggerate," Offit said.
  • One big stumbling block for any vaccine trial is that Covid-19 infection rates in many areas of the world are flattening out or declining.
  • The Oxford vaccine uses what's called an adenovirus vector. Adenoviruses cause the common cold, but in this case, the adenoviruses are weakened and modified to deliver genetic material that codes for a protein from the novel coronavirus. The body then produces that protein and, ideally, develops an immune response to it.
  • "Compared to previous vaccines, this method is more robust, more versatile, and yet, equally efficient," according to the blog, which notes that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested $53 million in a German biotech company that specializes in RNA vaccines.
  • Inovio's technology uses a brief electrical pulse to deliver plasmids, or small pieces of genetic information, into human cells. Inovio says those cells then produce the vaccine, which leads to an immune response.
  • On April 19, the BBC's Andrew Marr said he asked Gilbert "if it's guaranteed that a workable vaccine can actually be produced."
  • "Nobody can be absolutely sure it's possible. That's why we have to do trials. We have to find out. I think the prospects are very good, but it's clearly not completely certain,"
  • "It certainly worked in monkeys," Oxford's Hill told CNN's Burnett May 15. "That was quite an impressive impact and that was our first try, if you like, with a standard dose, a single dose of vaccine."
  • "I buy that this is a pandemic and we may need to show progress and show steps, and I'm OK with making forecasts if decision makers want that, but do it with a level of uncertainty, because that's what's warranted," said Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.
  • "Now researchers can't wait to step out to the microphone -- and there are so many microphones out there -- to say, 'I've got it! This looks really good!' " Offit said.
katherineharron

Trump takes his war on face masks to new lows - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • The simple act of wearing a mask to protect others during a pandemic is now a political and cultural flashpoint, underscoring the polarization afflicting every corner of American life.
  • Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, stood firm in his recommendation that people wear masks, telling CNN's Jim Scuitto Wednesday morning he wears a mask "for people to see that's the kind of thing you should be doing."
  • A political storm over a piece of cloth appears even more trivial since it comes at a moment when the United States, after one of the world's most mismanaged coronavirus responses, is on the cusp of passing the threshold of 100,000 deaths with the pandemic worsening in 17 states.
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  • Trump and his White House are mocking presumptive Democratic 2020 rival Joe Biden for wearing a mask in public as conservative commentators brand the practice as elite liberal fear-mongering. Biden, in his first in-person interview since the stay-at-home orders, lashed back at Trump in reply, telling CNN's Dana Bash that the President's "macho" and "falsely masculine" behavior was "stoking deaths" in comments that will only deepen national estrangement on the issue.
  • Many Republican governors who strongly support Trump in most areas are beseeching their fellow citizens to wear masks as they try to balance reopening with a desire to avoid a spike in Covid-19 cases.
  • The battle over masks may inject another heated note into Virginia politics. Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam said Tuesday that anyone within a public indoor space or who is on public transport in the state would be required to wear a mask.
  • Talk show titan Rush Limbaugh on Tuesday warned that masks have become a "required symbol on the left to promote fear, to promote indecision, to promote the notion that we're nowhere near out of this."
  • In a Quinnipiac University poll last week, 64% of Americans said everyone should be required to wear masks in public. But while 90% of Democrats said Trump should mask up, only 38% of Republicans agreed.
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends "wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission." It has not recommended Americans wear masks in their homes.
katherineharron

The US is asking other countries for everything from hand sanitizer to ventilators to help fight the coronavirus - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • The Trump administration is appealing to countries around the world to give or sell the US items as basic as hand sanitizer and as complex as respirators to combat the surging coronavirus pandemic.
  • The requests come as President Donald Trump touts his domestic response and declines to deploy the full power of the federal government's Defense Production Act to produce and funnel crucial supplies to struggling states and hospitals. It's not clear how many countries the US has appealed to.
  • The administration is making these private appeals as Trump is striking a starkly different note in public. At Tuesday's daily coronavirus briefing from the White House, not long after he had called the South Korean leader, the President veered into campaign-style rhetoric, declaring that, "America will never be a supplicant nation."
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  • "My job at the White House right now is to help find whatever the American people need and buy it from wherever we can, and if we need to send a plane to go get it, we'll get that done using the full force of government and private enterprise," Mr. Navarro said
  • "If China or any other country has some masks, gloves or other products we need for the American people, we welcome that with open arms," he said.
  • "Hopefully we can match up external suppliers, external sources with states and entities in the US that actually need them," they said.
  • New York alone had over 25,000 known infections on Tuesday and 210 dead. Its governor, Andrew Cuomo, angrily told reporters that he needed "30,000" ventilators.
katherineharron

Mars, already largely desert, is losing water quicker than expected, study says - CNN - 0 views

  • Once, Mars was a warm planet that could potentially support life and water on its surface. But something changed about 3.5 billion years ago and it lost most of its atmosphere.
  • A new study published this week in the journal Science reveals that more water vapor is accumulating in the upper atmosphere of Mars, allowing more of it to escape into space. This means that Mars is losing water more quickly than anticipated.
  • The accumulation of unprecedented amounts of water vapor is occurring about 50 miles up from the Martian surface. The orbiter revealed that parts of the atmosphere actually act like pockets, reaching supersaturated level. These pockets contain anywhere between 10 to a hundred times more water vapor than the atmospheric temperature should allow.
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  • "You wouldn't need a backhoe to dig up this ice. You could use a shovel," said Sylvain Piqueux, study author at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We're continuing to collect data on buried ice on Mars, zeroing in on the best places for astronauts to land."
  • Water exists on Mars in the form of ice beneath the surface, both at the poles and the planet's mid-latitudes. The polar ice is the most well-known because the orbiters have imaged it. Meteors even helped increase understanding of the polar ice because they impact it, allowing the orbiter to take pictures of the disturbed ice.
  • The new map reveals water ice less than a foot beneath the surface in a region of the northern hemisphere called Arcadia Planitia. There is also evidence of water ice two feet deep beneath the surface. The researchers want to learn more about the subsurface ice and if it varies across the Martian seasons. "The more we look for near-surface ice, the more we find," said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Deputy Project Scientist Leslie Tamppari. "Observing Mars with multiple spacecraft over the course of years continues to provide us with new ways of discovering this ice."
katherineharron

Biden says Democrats have 'had enough debates' after Sanders commits to April showdown - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • oe Biden said Wednesday that Democrats have "had enough" debates, suggesting he is unwilling to have another one-on-one showdown with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
  • "If there is a debate in April, he plans to be there," Sanders communications director Mike Casca said Tuesday.
  • "I think we need a good debate as to where we go, not only just now but in the future," Sanders told Cooper. "And to my mind, if there's anything that this unexpected moment in American history should teach us, we've got to rethink the basic structures of American society, and that is guaranteed health care to all as a human right, creating an economy that provides for all people not just the wealthy."
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  • But the pandemic has led some states to push their primaries into June, opening up the possibility that it could take more than two months for a candidate to cross the threshold needed to clinch the nomination.
katherineharron

Gavin Newsom takes new tone with Trump as he steers California during coronavirus crisis - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • For California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the call that triggered state's full crisis response came in the middle of the night on March 6, and he was waiting for it.
  • The state's lab had been working through the night, and one of his cabinet secretaries was on the line telling him 21 of the 42 crewmembers and passengers tested for coronavirus aboard the Grand Princess Cruise Ship, which was idling in international waters off California's coast, had tested positive.
  • Newsom hung up and immediately called Donald Trump, his frequent adversary, reaching the President around 4 a.m. PT to discuss the alarming results and their next steps, according to California aides involved in the response. By 6 a.m., Newsom had fully activated the Golden State's emergency operations center in the outskirts of Sacramento and begun orchestrating the unloading of more than 2,000 passengers -- diverting them to hospitals, into quarantine and back to their home countries.
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  • n the past, the pair has sparred in public over everything from the cause of California's wildfires to the state's stringent environmental regulations. Last year, Trump mocked the 52-year-old Newsom as the "do-nothing governor in California"; Newsom, for his part, has insisted his state will stand up to "a bully."
  • "We are clearly operating under a different set of assumptions," Newsom said when asked about Trump's desires during a recent briefing. He added that in their "many" conversations in recent weeks, it has been clear to him that the President understands the "unique challenges" faced by states like New York, California and Washington state.
  • As of 2 p.m. Wednesday, California had 3,006 cases of coronavirus and 65 dead. As the state has ramped up its testing capability the number of people who had been tested rose exponentially midweek, to 77,800, with results pending on more than 57,400 tests.
katherineharron

Did '13 Reasons Why' lead to a spike in adolescent suicides? Researchers are divided - CNN - 0 views

  • When Netflix debuted "13 Reasons Why" in 2017, some mental health experts argued the show was "dangerous" for its depiction of teen suicide.
  • Research Director Daniel Romer of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania reanalyzed the data while adjusting for the broader increase in suicide between 2013 and 2017. His study was published in PLOS One, a peer-reviewed journal published by the Public Library of Science.
  • "When you have a jump in suicides starting in March and going into April, it's hard to say it's because of the show," he said.Meanwhile, for 10- to 17-year-old girls, Romer said there was a small increase, though so small, that it's not actually statistically significant. It could have been because of the show, but because the jump isn't statistically significant, they can't say for sure, he said.
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  • "13 Reasons Why" is based on bestselling author Jay Asher's 2007 young adult book of the same title, following the story of a teenage girl who leaves behind 13 audio recordings on cassette tapes before killing herself. Each tape is addressed to a person who she says played a role in her decision to die.
krystalxu

The Psychology Of 'Everything Happens For A Reason' - Evolution Counseling - 0 views

  • People who believe that everything in life happens for a reason have very little tolerance for existential anxiety.
  • A superstructure takes on total responsibility so that the individual doesn’t have to, and with the transfer of responsibility existential anxiety is diminished.
  • We can think of the psychology of everything happens for a reason as the psychic equivalent of taking a powerful sedative, of sort of descending into a happy stupor where there’s no need to face existential anxiety squarely.
tongoscar

How does mother tongue affect second language acquisition? - Language Magazine - 0 views

  • Because cues that signal the beginning and ending of words can differ from language to language, a person’s native language can provide misleading information when learning to segment a second language into words.
  • “The moment we hear a new language, all of a sudden we hear a stream of sounds and don’t know where the words begin or end,” Tremblay said. “Even if we know words from the second language and can recognize them in isolation, we may not be able to locate these words in continuous speech, because a variety of processes affect how words are realized in context.”
  • Other cues, such as intonation, are harder to master and are more likely to be influenced by a speaker’s native language.
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  • One of the more interesting findings is that when languages share more similarities but still have slight differences, it can be harder for second language learners to use the correct speech cues to identify words.
  • “For English speakers, the differences between English stress and French prominence are so salient that it ought to be obvious and they ought to readjust their system,”
  • Researchers also found that native French speakers who lived in France did better than native French speakers who lived in the U.S. at using French-like intonation cues to locate words in an artificial language.
katherineharron

Ben & Jerry's statement on white supremacy is so extraordinary. Here's why - CNN - 0 views

  • The ice cream maker has called on Americans to "dismantle white supremacy" and "grapple with the sins of our past" as nationwide protests against racial injustice stretch into their eighth day.
  • Ben & Jerry's describes the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, at the hands of a white police officer as the result of "inhumane police brutality that is perpetuated by a culture of white supremacy."
  • "What happened to George Floyd was not the result of a bad apple; it was the predictable consequence of a racist and prejudiced system and culture that has treated Black bodies as the enemy from the beginning," said the brand, which is owned by Unilever (UL).
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  • the statement from Ben & Jerry's is unusually comprehensive and direct, addressing the historical roots of discrimination in the United States and calling out systemic racism, while advocating specific policies to prevent further police abuses and redress racial inequality.
  • Ben & Jerry's, which also publicly supported the Black Lives Matter movement, called on President Donald Trump to disavow white supremacists and nationalist groups that "overtly support him."
  • The ice cream maker also called for the US Department of Justice to reinvigorate its Civil Rights Division, and for Congress to pass H.R. 40, a bill that would create a commission to study the effects of discrimination since African slaves first arrived in North America in 1619 and recommend remedies.
  • The company's sale to British-Dutch consumer goods giant Unilever (UL) in 2000 has not prevented it from speaking out on issues such as racial injustice, climate change and refugee rights. As part of the deal, Ben & Jerry's kept an independent board of directors. "We're a wholly owned subsidiary [of Unilever], but we still act according to Ben & Jerry's mission, vision and values," a spokesperson told CNN Business.
  • "Unless and until white America is willing to collectively acknowledge its privilege, take responsibility for its past and the impact it has on the present, and commit to creating a future steeped in justice, the list of names that George Floyd has been added to will never end. We have to use this moment to accelerate our nation's long journey towards justice and a more perfect union," the statement concluded.
tongoscar

Violence in Mexico peaks as cartels fight over drugs and avocados - Los Angeles Times - 0 views

  • Mexico’s multibillion-dollar avocado industry, headquartered in Michoacan state, has become a prime target for cartels,
  • More than a dozen criminal groups are battling for control of the avocado trade in and around the city of Uruapan,
  • After seizing control of the forest in March, the Viagras announced a tax on residents who owned avocado trees, charging $250 a hectare in “protection fees.”
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  • Homicides are at an all-time high in Mexico, which has long been home to the world’s most powerful and violent narcotics traffickers. Yet much of the killing today has little to do with drugs.
  • In Mexico City, bar owners in upscale neighborhoods must pay taxes to a local gang, while on the nation’s highways, cargo robberies have risen more than 75% since 2016.
  • Compared with drug trafficking, a complex venture that requires managing contacts across the hemisphere, these new criminal enterprises are more like local businesses. The bar to entry is far lower.
  • Mexican forces, with strong U.S. support, focused on capturing or killing cartel leaders. But that strategy backfired as the big cartels fractured into smaller and nimbler organizations that sought criminal opportunity wherever they could find it.
  • Security has become so tenuous that in June a group of avocado producers bought ads in several national newspapers warning of an “irreparable impact” to the industry unless officials address the problem.
  • In August, the U.S. Department of Agriculture temporarily suspended its avocado inspection program in a town near Uruapan after threats to some of its employees.
blythewallick

Out-Of-Body Experiences: Mine Is Finally Explained | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • Sleep deprivation had disturbed my vestibular system, making me feel drifting or floating, and had especially interfered with my right TPJ and with it my body schema (Chee & Chua 2007, Quarck et al 2006). Nearly four hours of holding out my arm for the Ouija board had confused my body schema even more. My attention kept wandering and my short term memory was reduced by cannabis (Earleywine 2002).
  • With my hyperexcitable cortex (Braithwaite et al 2013) already disinhibited by the combination of sleep deprivation and cannabis, it went into random firing, producing an illusory central light and the form constants of spirals and tunnels (Cowan 1982). Disinhibited motion detectors produced illusory movement and as the light grew bigger I seemed to move towards it
  • My auditory cortex was similarly hyperactive, producing random low-frequency repetitive sounds that drowned out the music. It sounded to me like the pounding of horses’ hooves. I was galloping fast down the tunnel towards the light.
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  • ‘Where are you, Sue?’ I was brought up short. I tried to picture my own body and where it really was, but my prefrontal cortex was deactivated as the brain hovered on the edge of sleep (Muzur et al 2002). With my TPJ disturbed it was impossible to combine a body schema with vestibular and sensory input to give a firm sense of an embodied self (Blanke et al 2002).
  • The roofs, gutters and chimneys I saw were just as I imagined them, not as they were. So were the cities, lakes, oceans and islands I saw. I laughed at the vivid ‘star-shaped island with a hundred trees’, believing it was a thought-form in the astral plane (Besent 1896, Findlay 1931) because that was the only theory I knew.
  • I was too tired to do more than glimpse this new vastness. In exhaustion, I seemed to face a choice, to stay in this marvelous, right-seeming, perfect state, or return to ordinary life. The choice made itself and the struggle began. After more than two hours of serious disturbance, this brain took some time to reinstate both body schema and self-image and even then confused my own body with others. When I opened my eyes I felt and saw greyish body-shapes around the others as well as myself; displaced body schemas that gradually faded until I was (more or less) back to normal. Yet nothing was ever quite the same again.”
  • But that’s the joy of doing science at all. I have not, in these posts, covered the tunnel experience, the silver cord and several other features more commonly found during near-death experiences, but I may return to them in future. For now I hope you have enjoyed this series of OBE stories.
blythewallick

Opinion | Trump's Gut, and the Gutting of American Credibility - The New York Times - 0 views

  • President Trump has given a master class in the unhappy link between his “gut” and the gutting of American credibility.
  • From Trump’s sort-of green light to Turkey’s assault on northern Syria, to his threat to “totally destroy and obliterate” the Turkish economy, to his Chamberlain-like dismissal of Kurds’ fate (“We are 7,000 miles away!”), he has played the clown in chief.
  • Europeans now shrug when they don’t laugh. The consensus is the United States has lost it. There’s nobody home. A child-president in the Oval Office writes a letter to the Turkish leader who appropriately tosses it in the garbage.
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  • America’s word is worth less today than at any time since 1945. Trust is not an easily recoverable commodity. Solemn accords entered into by the United States, like the Iran nuclear deal, are ripped up — and replaced by empty threats. Friends like the Kurds who have shed blood to inflict great harm on the Islamic State are betrayed. Day after day a president for whom facts don’t matter dismantles the idea of truth.
  • A recent report from Patrick Wintour in The Guardian quoted the Saudi ambassador to Britain calling Trump a “tweet monster” and saying the abrupt American troop withdrawal from northern Syria “does not give one incredible confidence.”
  • Sure, but this Middle East demeans the sacrifice of the thousands of Americans who died for something better, and makes a nonsense of the nearly trillion American dollars spent to that end. Trump is not cutting losses; he’s perpetuating them. Iran could not have asked for American chaos more conducive to its interests. Nor could Putin, al-Assad and Erdogan.
  • Trump folded to Turkey’s Kurd Derangement Syndrome. Even the plankton known as the Republican Party were so appalled that some lawmakers developed sufficient backbone to protest.
  • “Foreign policy is what I’ll be remembered for,” Trump has said. Damn right.
blythewallick

Be Humble, and Proudly, Psychologists Say - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Humility is not the boldest of personality traits, but it’s an important one, studies find. And it’s hard to fake.
  • In a paper published in the latest issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a team of researchers reviewed studies of a once-widespread personal trait, one “characterized by an ability to accurately acknowledge one’s limitations and abilities, and an interpersonal stance that is other-oriented rather than self-focused.” Humility.
  • The word “humble” travels so often now as a verb that embodying its gentler spirit, the adjective, can be an invitation to online trolling, professional invisibility or worse. Oscar Wilde wrote that, before he found humility, he spent two years behind bars experiencing “anguish that wept aloud” and “misery that could find no voice” — which sounds more like defeat than victory.
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  • Humility is a relative newcomer to social and personality psychology, at least as a trait or behavior to be studied on its own. It arrived as part of the effort, beginning in the 1990s, to build a “positive” psychology: a more complete understanding of sustaining qualities such as pride, forgiveness, grit and contentment.
  • In another, ongoing study, Dr. Krumrei Mancuso had 587 American adults complete questionnaires intended to measure levels of intellectual humility. The participants rated how much they agreed with various statements, including “I feel small when others disagree with me on topics that are close to my heart,” and “For the most part, others have more to learn from me than I have to learn from them.” Those who scored highly on humility — not that they’d boast about it — also scored lower on measures of political and ideological polarization, whether conservative or liberal.
  • “These kinds of findings may account for the fact that people high in intellectual humility are not easily manipulated with regard to their views,” Dr. Krumrei Mancuso said. The findings, she added, may also “help us understand how humility can be associated with holding convictions.”
  • Now that humility is attracting some research attention, Dr. Van Tongeren said, there are a number of open questions, including whether it can somehow be taught, or perhaps integrated into psychotherapy. “One of the thorny issues is that the people who are the most open and willing cultivate humility might be the ones who need it the least,” he said. “And vice versa: Those most in need could be the most resistant.”
  • Between 10 and 15 percent of adults score highly on measures of humility, depending on the rating scale used. That’s at least 25 million humble people in this country alone.
blythewallick

What the brains of people with excellent general knowledge look like: Some people seem to have an answer to every general knowledge question; why? -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

  • "Although we can precisely measure the general knowledge of people and this wealth of knowledge is very important for an individual's journey through life, we currently know little about the links between general knowledge and the characteristics of the brain,"
  • This makes it possible to reconstruct the pathways of nerve fibres and thus gain an insight into the structural network properties of the brain. By means of mathematical algorithms, the researchers assigned an individual value to the brain of each participant, which reflected the efficiency of his or her structural fibre network.
  • The participants also completed a general knowledge test called the Bochum Knowledge Test, which was developed in Bochum by Dr. Rüdiger Hossiep. It is comprised of over 300 questions from various fields of knowledge such as art and architecture or biology and chemistry. The team led by Erhan Genç finally investigated whether the efficiency of structural networking is associated with the amount of general knowledge stored.
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  • "We assume that individual units of knowledge are dispersed throughout the entire brain in the form of pieces of information," explains Erhan Genç. "Efficient networking of the brain is essential in order to put together the information stored in various areas of the brain and successfully recall knowledge content."
  • To answer the question of which constants occur in Einstein's theory of relativity, you have to connect the meaning of the term "constant" with knowledge of the theory of relativity. "We assume that more efficient networking of the brain contributes to better integration of pieces of information and thus leads to better results in a general knowledge test,
blythewallick

Can Artificial Intelligence Be Creative? | JSTOR Daily - 0 views

  • Machines can write compelling ad copy and solve complex “real life” problems. Should the creative class be worried?
  • Rich breaks down some “abstract” problems into their fundamental parts and shows how, with comprehensive enough data and well-structured enough logical programming, AI could be suited to tackle creative problems. In one case, she offers a “real world” example about a manufacturing company’s new line of products and their plans, goals, and expectations for marketing the new line to a specific city. Weekly Newsletter Get your fix of JSTOR Daily’s best stories in your inbox each Thursday. Privacy Policy   Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message.
  • almost all problems rely (or ought to rely) on an understanding of the nature of both knowledge and reasoning. Humanists are trying to solve many of these same problems. Thus there is room for a good deal of interaction between artificial intelligence and many disciplines within the humanities.
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  • There is much to be said, however, for art’s ability to evoke emotion based on common experience, sincerity, talent, and unique skill. Rich proves that AI can be used to answer complicated questions. But what we think of as creative work in the humanities is much more often about asking questions than it is about answering them.
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