Stress. It makes your heart pound, your breathing quicken and your forehead sweat. But while stress has been made into a public health enemy, new research suggests that stress may only be bad for you if you believe that to be the case. Psychologist Kelly McGonigal urges us to see stress as a positive, and introduces us to an unsung mechanism for stress reduction: reaching out to others.
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1. You Are Creative Artists are not special, but each of us is a special kind of artist who enters the world as a creative and spontaneous thinker. While creative people believe they are creative, those who don't hold that belief are not. After acquiring beliefs about their identity, creative people become interested in expressing themselves, so they learn thinking habits and techniques that creative geniuses have used throughout history. 2. Creative Thinking Is Work You must show passion and the determination to immerse yourself in the process of developing new and different ideas. The next step is patience and perseverance. All creative geniuses work with intensity and produce an incredible number of ideas -- most of which are bad. In fact, more bad poems were written by major poets than by minor poets. Thomas Edison generated 3,000 different lighting system ideas before he evaluated them for practicality and profitability. 3. You Must Go Through the Motions When producing ideas, you replenish neurotransmitters linked to genes that are being turned on and off in response to challenges. Going through the motions of generating new ideas increases the number of contacts between neurons, and thereby energizes the brain. Every hour spent activating your mind by generating ideas increases creativity. By painting a picture every day, you would become an artist -- perhaps not Van Gogh, but more of an artist than someone who has never tried. Traumatic brain injuries have ended countless careers in professional athletics before they began, but few of these injured athletes were forced to make the decision right as their dreams were coming true.
Adrian Coxson was an undrafted free agent rookie from Stony Brook signed with the Green Bay Packers in May and was preparing for his shot at the big time, but instead he found himself being carted off the Packers’ practice field in early August with a brain injury that would put an end to all of his plans. It was only the third day of training camp in his rookie season when Coxson suffered a Grade 3 concussion that would make him decide to retire before more severe damage was done. “I’m retiring because I’m still having symptoms and my health is more important to me than the game of football,” Coxson said in a telephone interview with the National Football Post. “It’s been recommended to me by two neurologists and two doctors to retire from football. The next hit to my head could possibly kill me or be life damaging. This last one could be life damaging. It has taken a great toll on me. This concussion was a bad one. A Grade 3 concussion is real serious.” Coxson told the National Football Post that he has no regrets. “I take pride in that, I take pride in being able to function right now from this injury,” he said. “I’m concerned about my health and I’m concerned about how healthy I am and I want to get to as close to 100 percent as I can get. I’m concerned about the outcome of this whole injury. It was a bad one.” It’s always up to the athlete to decide whether the reward is worth the risk from brain injuries, but incidents like Coxson’s are not uncommon and it is important to know when the risk becomes too great. Traumatic brain injury is the skeleton that the NFL has tried to keep in its closet for far too long. Now that's coming to light on the brightest stage possible. Will Smith's new movie Concussion will expose people who don't care about football to the plights of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. Dr. Bennet Omalu, the former NFL and NCAA doctor who first identified chronic brain injury common factor in the deaths of several former NFL players, including Junior Seau following his death in 2012. The trailer presents the NFL as a dangerous syndicate working to discredit, disavow and coerce a doctor into hiding his research, while Omalu strives to present the truth.
Only 10 percent of concussions involve a loss of consciousness, but the other 90 percent can still produce symptoms! Children who exhibit the following warning signs should be stopped, evaluated, and followed by a physician until symptoms resolve.
The brain’s foundation, frame, and walls are built in the womb. As an embryo grows into a fetus, some of its dividing cells turn into neurons, arranging themselves into layers and forming the first synapses, the organ’s electrical wiring. Four or five months into gestation, the brain’s outermost layer, the cerebral cortex, begins to develop its characteristic wrinkles, which deepen further after birth. It isn’t until a child’s infant and toddler years that the structures underlying higher-level cognition—will power, emotional self-control, decision-making—begin to flourish; some of them continue to be fine-tuned throughout adolescence and into the first decade of adulthood. Dr. Pat Levitt, a developmental neuroscientist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, he has become interested in another sort of neurotoxin: poverty. As it turns out, the conditions associated with poverty — “overcrowding, noise, substandard housing, separation from parent(s), exposure to violence, family turmoil,” and other forms of extreme stress--can be toxic to the developing brain, just like drug or alcohol abuse. These conditions provoke the body to release hormones such as cortisol, which is produced in the adrenal cortex. Brief bursts of cortisol can help a person manage difficult situations, but high stress over the long term can be disastrous. In a pregnant woman, the hormone can “get through the placenta into the fetus,” Levitt told me, potentially influencing her baby’s brain and tampering with its circuitry. Later, as the same child grows up, cortisol from his own body may continue to sabotage the development of his brain. New research shows that the more people think they know about a topic, the more likely they are to state facts that are completely false — a process called "over-claiming," according to the study, published in Psychological Science. For the study, researchers designed a series of experiments to assess people's claims to knowledge, with the goal of seeing how people perceived their own knowledge. In one set of experiments, for example, researchers tested whether participants who believed they were experts in personal finance would be more likely to claim they knew about "fake" financial terms. One hundred participants were asked to rate their knowledge of personal finance in addition to noting how familiar they were with 15 financial terms. Most of these terms were real, such as inflation and home equity. But there were also made-up terms, such as "pre-rated stocks" and "annualized credit," which were intended to blend in with the rest. As the researchers predicted, those who believed they knew the most about finance were the most likely to claim they knew what the fake terms were. "The more people believed they knew about finances in general, the more likely they were to over-claim knowledge of the fictitious financial terms," said Stav Atir, study author and psychological scientist at Cornell University, in a statement. Some children recover more slowly from concussion and other types of traumatic brain injury because they have extensive damage to the protective coating around brain nerve fibers, a new study says. Researchers looked at 32 patients, aged 8 to 19, who had suffered a moderate to severe brain injury in the previous five months. The kids underwent tests to assess how fast they could process and recall information. The researchers also recorded electrical activity in the patients' brains to determine how quickly their brain nerve fibers could transmit information. And imaging scans assessed the structural condition of the youngsters' brain wiring. "Just as electricians insulate electrical wires to shield their connections, the brain's nerve fibers are encased in a fatty tissue called myelin that protects signals as they travel across the brain," Dr. Christopher Giza, a professor of pediatrics and neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles, explained in a university news release. "We suspected that trauma was damaging the myelin and slowing the brain's ability to transmit information, interfering with patients' capacity to learn," he explained. Half of the patients had widespread damage to the myelin. They did 14 percent worse on the mental skills tests, and their brain wiring worked three times more slowly than healthy children. The other 16 brain injury patients had nearly intact myelin. Their brains processed information as quickly as healthy children, and they did 9 percent better on the mental skills tests than those with more myelin damage. The study, published in the July 15 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, offers possible indicators that doctors could use to identify higher-risk brain injury patients who require closer monitoring, the researchers said. Traumatic brain injury is the single most common cause of death and disability in American children and teens, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
Shortly after Braylon was born, doctors amputated his lower legs to give him the best chance possible for mobility with the use of prosthesis. Today, Braylon has two sets of legs: One for walking and the other for running. Both allow the precocious and energetic youngster to play baseball, golf and other sports.
"We always talk about how he's special, not because his legs are different, but because of how he chooses to live his life with his legs," Kelli said. "And it's really that spirit, I think, at least as a mom, what makes him so special to us. And I think to others." His father, Mike O'Neill, said his son continues to teach him and others around them about putting things in perspective.
1. What are some things you feel you do well? Think about the talents you already know you have, and ask friends and family what they think you’re good at. You might be surprised by what they say. 2. What challenges you? The things that challenge you might be opportunities to improve and move toward your goals — and they might suggest areas of study and work that will keep you interested long into the future. 3. What do you like to do for fun? Think about the reasons you enjoy your favorite activities, the things they have in common and the strengths they bring out in you. 4. Who do you look up to? The people you admire — whether they’re celebrities, historical figures or people you know personally — can tell you something about who you are and what you value. Consider what it is about them you like and whether those qualities are worth reaching for. 5. What’s something you’ve always wanted to try? Consider your reasons for wanting to do this — and why it is you haven’t done this yet. Do you find it exciting? What do you expect to get out of it? 6. What accomplishment has made you most proud? Your answer might have nothing to do with a hard-won A or a trophy — it might be the time you stuck up for someone who needed your help. What you’re proud of can help you see what matters most to you. 7. What’s your favorite class? Don’t limit yourself to the subjects that come easiest to you. Think about which classes make you lose track of time. Is it the teacher or the subject matter that holds your interest? 8. What do you read about in your free time? The kinds of stories you follow in the news, your favorite books and websites — these can help you figure out what really makes you curious. 9. If you could do any job for a day, what would it be? Think about which careers you want to try on. What is it about them you find so appealing? What would you change to make them fit you better? 10. As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? Even if your childhood dreams seem silly now, remembering them may show you what’s always been important to you. |
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