Octavia Butler on How (Not) to Choose Our Leaders

Again and again, Butler cautions against the blindness of choosing from a state of heightened emotion — the very blindness which political propaganda is aimed at blinkering over the eyes of the electorate with the constant stirring of our most reptilian fears:

When vision fails
Direction is lost.

When direction is lost
Purpose may be forgotten.

When purpose is forgotten
Emotion rules alone.

When emotion rules alone,
Destruction… destruction.

“Stress Hormone” Cortisol Linked to Early Toll on Thinking Ability

Working on the study “made me more stressed about not being less stressed,” Seshadri says, laughing. But, she adds, the bottom line is serious: “An important message to myself and others is that when challenges come our way, getting frustrated is very counterproductive—not just to achieving our aims but perhaps to our capacity to be productive.” …

Bruce McEwen, a neuroscientist and cortisol expert at The Rockefeller University who also was not part of the study, says he found it “frankly remarkable.” Cortisol, he notes, is necessary for life—so it is obviously not all bad. But stress can lead people to potentially problematic behaviors such as smoking, drinking and eating unhealthy food. “Cortisol is itself the tip of the iceberg of things that are going on in a person’s life and a person’s body,” he says.

The Cultural Formulation Interview: Progress to date and future directions

The Cultural Formulation Interview (CFI) developed for DSM-5 provides a way to collect information on patients’ illnessexperience, social and cultural context, help-seeking, and treatment expectations relevant to psychiatric diagnosis andassessment. This thematic issue of Transcultural Psychiatry brings together articles examining the implementation andimpact of the CFI in diverse settings.

These Scientists Just Completed a 3D ‘Google Earth’ for the Brain

Have you ever wondered: how well do those maps represent my brain? After all, no two brains are alike. And if we’re ever going to reverse-engineer the brain as a computer simulation—as Europe’s Human Brain Project is trying to do—shouldn’t we ask whose brain they’re hoping to simulate?

Enter a new kind of map: the Julich-Brain, a probabilistic map of human brains that accounts for individual differences using a computational framework. Rather than generating a static PDF of a brain map, the Julich-Brain atlas is also dynamic, in that it continuously changes to incorporate more recent brain mapping results. So far, the map has data from over 24,000 thinly sliced sections from 23 postmortem brains covering most years of adulthood at the cellular level. But the atlas can also continuously adapt to progress in mapping technologies to aid brain modeling and simulation, and link to other atlases and alternatives.

How Treating People With Brain Injuries Helped Me Forgive My Mother

“You might feel shocked the first few times you experience an inappropriate behavior,” she warned. “You’ll get used to it.”

But there wasn’t much “getting used to it” that I had to do. I had been raised by a woman who lacked inhibition, a woman who said what she felt and thought at all times, unaware of how it might make another person feel, including her children. I had survived her biggest impulsive act. I was more prepared for the job than I ever should have been.

This public US university has seen grades soar despite Covid. What’s it doing right?

A minority student from a mediocre high school and a poor family is now just as likely to cross the Georgia State graduation stage as a child of wealth and white privilege – a singular achievement. In the wake of the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis and the widespread calls for a national reckoning on race, it is also striking that Georgia State, once a segregated whites-only commuter school, boasts one of the country’s most diverse residential campuses and graduates more African Americans each year than any other university.