Late Sunday reading

Or maybe for the week. :)

A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life: it's all about the love and your relationships.

Consciousness After Death: Strange Tales From the Frontiers of Resuscitation Medicine: what is death? When do you become dead?

How Ray Kurzweil Will Help Google Make the Ultimate AI Brain: living in intersections.

Arriving at Auschwitz, October 4, 1944: From the Diary of Helga Weiss: History will never forget. 

Helga's Diary: Holocaust survivor Helga Weiss relives her story (video)

In the dark: Dark matter is the commonest, most elusive stuff in the universe. Can we grasp this great unsolved problem in physics?

Exploring the therapeutic effects of yoga and its ability to increase quality of life

LIfe: just a thought

If you want to get somewhere in life, no one is going to do the pushing for you. You have to push yourself.

Anonymous.

Sunday reading

Silicon Is the New Ivy: is Stanford the Harvard of the 21st century? The catalyst power of universities. 

Eighth grader designs standardized test that slams standardized tests: she says it all. 

Man Brilliantly Quits His Job to Pursue Dream Job With Resignation Letter Written on a Cake: creativity and passion.

News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier: my take? Be conscious of the filter through which you're seeing reality. 

20 of the best bargain beach holidays for 2013: Portugal, of course.

There is no mental illness (or maybe there is)

Mad, or bad? : Even in the decade of dissent, Thomas Szasz stood alone when he attacked the concept of madness from the political right

The case of Szasz. Read it carefully.

The end of sleep?

Following other posts (here and here) about sleep and all that it entails, here's an excellent article on the illusion and trendable movement towards living without sleeping, kind of.

The end of sleep?: New technologies are emerging that could radically reduce our need to sleep - if we can bear to use them

Content citizens

Tao Te Ching by Stephen Mitchell

Reading suggestion

Another great piece about this that makes us humans. 

This is humankind: if my grandfather could survive the Siege of Leningrad and still distinguish between a German and a Nazi, then so can I

Liver disease in Canada: a crisis in the making

Here's a very interesting report on liver disease for the period of 2000-2007 in Canada.

Some striking figures:

The costs of treatment of liver disease are high. A course of treatment for hepatitis C may cost $20,000-70,000 depending on the subtype of the virus (genotype). Treatment of hepatitis B may cost between $7,000-9,000/year for 10-20 years or more. Drug treatment for hepatocellular carcinoma costs $6,000/month. Liver transplantation costs upwards of $100,000 per case with ongoing costs for medical care and immunosuppressive drugs.

Just a different perspective about austerity

Actually, is a lot smarter than that. And I love the Scottish accent. :)

Sunday reading

Here is a good selection - I'm biased, of course - of some really interesting articles on different topics.

An instant cure: The latest edition of the psychiatrists’ manual has decided that my personality disorder is not so bad after all.

Voices from Solitary: A Sentence Worse Than Death: I have served a sentence worse than death.

Don't worry - an anxiety wheel of misfortunate

This wheel of worry, violently copied from the last Brain pickings newsletter, explains how one individual organized his circadian states of anxiety. I find the wheel type of presenting the focus of anxiety during the day as a powerful instrument to reflect upon how we live our emotional states. 

There also a nice quote:

We should make ourselves stop trying to explain our own difficulties. Our first impulse is to try to account for them, figure out why what has happened. Sometimes such an effort is beneficial: more often it is distinctly harmful. It leads to introspection, self-pity, and vain regret; and almost invariably it creates within us a dangerous mood of confusion and despair. Many of life’s hard situations cannot be explained. They can only be endured, mastered, and gradually forgotten. Once we learn this truth, once we resolve to use all our energies managing life rather than trying to explain life, we take the first and most obvious step toward significant accomplishment.

My questions are:

• although it makes sense that we probably can't explain everything, we are lead to think that we should. Is that positive? Does it have to be explained as being positive or negative? Probably just a sign that we need to make sense of ourselves. 
• do we have to start to reason before we understand why a specific emotional state dominates us? What is anxiety and what are the emotions that characterize the way we position ourselves toward the Others, the World?
• Is this quote based on the assertion that thoughts are our experiences? There's no cognitive mark when experiencing events that have a significant impact; there's a bodily experience that modifies our emotional state, which we will use to create meaning of a specific event but also about ourselves, the fabric of our being. 

Sunday reading

Here is a good selection - I'm biased, of course - of some really interesting articles on different topics.

From the New York Times

Looking for a Lesson in Google’s Lavish Perks

Is There Life After Work?

Living With Less. A Lot Less.

And the Aeon Magazine

The science of love

Walking on oil

Losing my voice

Enjoy! 

A pedir numa rua de uma cidade canadiana

Hoje vi um senhor com cartaz, a pedir. A pedir numa das ruas principais de Kingston, no Canadá. A pedir. Não é o primeiro, não será o último. Se fechasse bem os olhos, diria que estava algures num país pobre ou mais pobre do que o Canadá. Afinal de contas, todos os indicadores apresentam melhorias significativas relativamente ao ano passado, crescimento económico, qualidade de vida, enfim, basta olhar para eles.

Contudo, cada vez mais me apercebo da elevada disfuncionalidade que grassa nesta sociedade. Uma camada rasteirinha, que vive de subsídios e completamente encostada ao chão, totalmente ausente da sociedade. Uma classe média baixa que vive de part-time toda uma vida ou ainda um grupo de pessoas que fazem dos trabalhos relief, que mais não são do que trabalho temporário com uma pitada de fantasia, o auxílio para as despesas. Dessa forma, aniquilados numa qualidade de vida reservada a grupos da sociedade que fazem o seu trabalho das 8 às 5, sobrevivem. Fazem aleluia a um país fantástico. Por necessidade, por quererem acreditar, por não poderem mudar. Um sinal, importante.

Emotion-focused therapy: Les Greenberg and Robert Elliott talk about its features, influences, training and effectiveness

Les Greenberg (York University) Robert Elliott (Strathclyde University)

Adding two more videos from Robert Elliott. Note the good definition of Self in the second talk.
 

Sleep and memory consolidation

We all know that sleep is very important for our mental and physical health, as seen here and here. Now there is research that looks into the processes of consolidation of memory during sleep.

Authors have found out that...

the mechanism that enables the brain to consolidate memory and found that a commonly prescribed sleep aid enhances the process. 

Here.

A revolução de Vasco Lourenço

A democracia é uma coisa chata, principalmente quando os tempos são difíceis.

Haja revolução, pena não haver ideias nenhumas sobre nada. As políticas não prestam, as pessoas no governo não prestam, Vasco Lourenço presta. Quem mais iria para o Governo? E como se articula esse facto com o argumento de que os políticos são todos uns ladrões incompetentes? Quem iria formar governo? O PCP e o BE? Eles também não parecem entender-se...

Creio que na Irlanda estão também a preparar uma revolução...ou talvez tenha ouvido mal e estão só a tentar que o país consiga voltar a proporcionar melhores condições de vida aos seus habitantes.

Visto que o problema de Portugal é a incapacidade de a economia crescer e criar empregos e riqueza, espero que o capitão (Chávez era comandante, daí os melhores resultados) se refira a uma revolução que incida sobre esse problema. E que ao mesmo tempo, sem apoio do povo nem da Europa, que pague do seu bolso a diferença entre os rendimentos atuais e o valor para o qual descerão se a sua revolução for avante.

Estou em crer que ele está apenas sensibilizado com a morte de Chávez. Compreensível.

Compreendo as causas implícitas do comentário do Vasco Lourenço mas as pessoas têm que assumir alguma responsabilidade pelas afirmações que fazem. Qualquer dia o contexto é a substância e isso não faria muito sentido. 

A notícia do Jornal Público. 

Television and the effect of the end of the World

Just a thought:

Reality as watched by the filters of television is created for the maximum emotional shock value.

Projeto Depressao e Psicoterapia no ISMAI

Entrevista com o coordenador do projeto, Prof. Doutor Joao Salgado.

 

Sleep, knowledge and brain development

Now...

Sleep Reinforces Learning: Children’s Brains Transform Subconsciously Learned Material Into Active Knowledge

Studies of adults have shown that sleeping after learning supports the long-term storage of the material learned

Children's sleep or, to put it better, everyone should have enough sleep time so that our daily experiences are properly assimilated and organized in our brains.

Don't let yourself fool by the romantics.

“Six hours’ sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool,” Napoleon famously prescribed.

And...

This myth that early risers are good people and that late risers are lazy has its reasons and merits in rural societies but becomes questionable in a modern 24/7 society. The old moral is so prevalent, however, that it still dominates our beliefs, even in modern times. The postman doesn’t think for a second that the young man might have worked until the early morning hours because he is a night-shift worker or for other reasons. He labels healthy young people who sleep into the day as lazy — as long sleepers. This attitude is reflected in the frequent use of the word-pair early birds andlong sleepers [in the media]. Yet this pair is nothing but apples and oranges, because the opposite of early is late and the opposite of long is short.

Now we get it.  

We are Portuguese, We are Portugal, Nós somos Portugueses, Nós somos Portugal

Since 1139. 874 hundred years and counting. We are here to stay.