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How Terror Hijacks the Brain
TIME: Fear short circuits the brain, especially when it hits close to home, experts say— making coping with events like the bombings at the Boston Marathon especially tricky. “When people are terrorized, the smartest parts of our brain tend to shut down,” says Dr. Bruce Perry, Senior Fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy. (Disclosure: he and I have written books together). ... Every loud sound suddenly becomes a potential threat, for example, and even mundane circumstances such as a person who avoids eye contact can take on suspicious and ominous meaning and elicit an extreme, alert-ready response. Such informational triage can be essential to surviving traumatic experience, of course.
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Feeling Powerful Will Make You Smarter
Business Insider: Successful leaders often seem to have sharper minds than the rest of us—isn't that how they got to the top in the first place? While we often assume that people become powerful because of their superior thinking skills, research shows that the relationship flows in the other direction as well: power changes the way a person thinks, making them better at focusing on relevant information, integrating disparate pieces of knowledge, and identifying hidden patterns than people who are powerless. ... A sense of power "has dramatic effects on thought and behavior," writes Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia Business School, in 2011 article in the journal Psychological Science.
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Anxiety is normal, but PTSD may simmer in children who’ve seen Boston Marathon bombing
CBS: The graphic nature of the attack at the Boston Marathon can be difficult for many to process, and that includes young people. Whether or not they were physically there at the bombing, children can be profoundly affected by what they hear and see. It can be normal to notice some anxiety and fear after an event like the marathon bombing, Dr. Alan Hilfer, director of psychology at Maimonides Medical Center in New York, explained to CBSNews.com.The most important thing is that someone will be there for them -- because they'll be turning to the adults in their life and their peer for answers and support. ...
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The Teenage Brain: How Do We Measure Maturity?
The Huffington Post: Holden Caulfield is the archetypal American teenager. Or at least he was, way back in the 20th century. His misadventures, narrated in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, may seem quaint by today's standards, yet the 17-year-old reveals many of the worrisome traits that we still associate with adolescence. He acts and speaks impulsively, then regrets his actions. He is unfocused, a poor student who gets himself expelled from school. He gets into fights, drinks way too much, solicits a prostitute and gets beat up by her pimp in his seedy hotel room. The best life plan he can come up with is moving west to live as a deaf-mute.
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Boston Marathon’s Heroes And The Science Behind Compassion
Nature World News: The acts of heroism seen even within seconds of the detonation of the bombs at Boston Marathon included people who seemed to utterly forget fear for their own wellbeing in order to protect that of others. However, Tuesday's events were not first time the world's seen such selflessness before: firefighters and policemen and women during the 9-11 attacks, for example, come to mind for many. Emma Seppala, the associate director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University, is just one of several pioneers in this relatively new field of study.
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“Consult your physician immediately if . . .”
It’s difficult to turn on the TV today without seeing an advertisement for one drug or another. That’s not surprising, since drug makers spend billions of dollars each year to promote their treatments for depression, low testosterone, osteoporosis, incontinence, erectile dysfunction, and more. The ad spots are aimed not at physicians but at patients themselves. These ads are required to list the most serious side effects for the prescription drugs they promote, and some are indeed serious—nausea and bleeding and blindness and suicidal thoughts, even death. The warnings are so dire that they must scare some consumers away, yet drug marketers continue to flood the airways.
