[popokko-deactivated20210315]

reblog if ur gay and u don't go to bed on time

[toreachpoise-deactivated2018042]

Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you are a 22-year-old college student in Kampala, Uganda. You’re sitting in class and discreetly scrolling through Facebook on your phone. You see that there has been another mass shooting in America, this time in a place called San Bernardino. You’ve never heard of it. You’ve never been to America. But you’ve certainly heard a lot about gun violence in the U.S. It seems like a new mass shooting happens every week. You wonder if you could go there and get stricter gun legislation passed. You’d be a hero to the American people, a problem-solver, a lifesaver. How hard could it be? Maybe there’s a fellowship for high-minded people like you to go to America after college and train as social entrepreneurs. You could start the nonprofit organization that ends mass shootings, maybe even win a humanitarian award by the time you are 30. Sound hopelessly naïve? Maybe even a little deluded? It is. And yet, it’s not much different from how too many Americans think about social change in the “Global South.” If you asked a 22-year-old American about gun control in this country, she would probably tell you that it’s a lot more complicated than taking some workshops on social entrepreneurship and starting a non-profit. She might tell her counterpart from Kampala about the intractable nature of our legislative branch, the long history of gun culture in this country and its passionate defenders, the complexity of mental illness and its treatment. She would perhaps mention the added complication of agitating for change as an outsider. But if you ask that same 22-year-old American about some of the most pressing problems in a place like Uganda — rural hunger or girl’s secondary education or homophobia — she might see them as solvable. Maybe even easily solvable. I’ve begun to think about this trend as the reductive seduction of other people’s problems. It’s not malicious. In many ways, it’s psychologically defensible; we don’t know what we don’t know. If you’re young, privileged, and interested in creating a life of meaning, of course you’d be attracted to solving problems that seem urgent and readily solvable. Of course you’d want to apply for prestigious fellowships that mark you as an ambitious altruist among your peers. Of course you’d want to fly on planes to exotic locations with, importantly, exotic problems. There is a whole “industry” set up to nurture these desires and delusions — most notably, the 1.5 million nonprofit organizations registered in the U.S., many of them focused on helping people abroad. In other words, the young American ego doesn’t appear in a vacuum. Its hubris is encouraged through job and internship opportunities, conferences galore, and cultural propaganda — encompassed so fully in the patronizing, dangerously simple phrase “save the world.”

“The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems” by Courtney Martin (via dangercupcakemurdericing)

[ucresearch]

This is your brain experiencing a concussion

It may look like this model brain is made of Jell-O, but it’s the same consistency as a real brain.

As Dr. Christopher Giza from UCLA demonstrates, the brain is made of soft tissue and floats in fluid inside of the skull. When the skull moves quickly, the brain can jostle around a lot, which can lead to neurological symptoms.

“Most concussions are recoverable,” Giza said.

But concussions can be difficult to identify and some people suffer more serious symptoms, particularly after multiple concussions.

Lab studies have shown a “window of vulnerability” after a first concussion, Giza said. Concussed athletes are three to six times more likely to get another concussion. If they rush back to play, their reflexes, reaction time and thinking may be slower, putting them at risk of a second concussion and longer recovery period.

Six things parents and athletes need to know about concussions.

[neurosciencestuff]

Discrimination During Adolescence has Lasting Effect on Body

In both blacks and whites, everyday feelings of discrimination can mess with the body’s levels of the primary stress hormone, cortisol, new research suggests.

In African-Americans, however, the negative effects of perceived discrimination on cortisol are stronger than in whites, according to the study, one of the first to look at the biological response to the cumulative impact of prejudicial treatment.

The team of researchers, led by Northwestern University, also found that the teenage years are a particularly sensitive period to be experiencing discrimination, in terms of the future impact on adult cortisol levels.

“We found cumulative experiences matter and that discrimination mattered more for blacks,” said study lead author Emma Adam, a developmental psychologist at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy. “We saw a flattening of cortisol levels for both blacks and whites, but blacks also had an overall drop in levels. The surprise was that this was particularly true for discrimination that happened during adolescence.”

The study will be published in the December 2015 issue of the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology and is currently available online.

In times of stress, the body releases several hormones, including cortisol. Ideally, cortisol levels are high in the morning to help energize us for the day. At night, cortisol levels wane as the body prepares for sleep.

Previous research indicates that discrimination can affect the natural rhythm of this process. Work by Adam and others suggests that young adults from racial/ethnic minority groups who perceive more discrimination have higher levels of cortisol in the evening and less decline in cortisol levels across the day than those with lower discrimination.

Having flatter or dysfunctional cortisol levels throughout the day is linked with higher fatigue, worse mental health, cardiovascular disease and mortality, as well as cognitive problems, such as impaired memory.

The latest study suggests for the first time that the impact of discrimination on cortisol adds up over time. Using data collected over a 20–year period, the researchers showed that the more discrimination people experience throughout adolescence and early adulthood, the more dysfunctional their cortisol rhythms are by age 32.

“We’ve been trying to solve the mystery behind why African-Americans have flatter diurnal cortisol rhythms than whites,” said Adam, a faculty fellow at Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research.

“There’s a fair amount of research on how discrimination affects people in the moment. But we haven’t been sufficiently considering the wear and tear and accumulation of discrimination over lifetimes. Our study offers the first empirical demonstration that everyday discrimination affects biology in ways that have small but cumulative negative effects over time.”

Even after controlling for income, education, depression, times of waking and other health behaviors, they still couldn’t explain or remove the effects of discrimination, “making it unlikely that those other factors play a role,” Adam said.

The researchers measured discrimination from ages 12 to 32, prospectively. They also assessed adult cortisol levels over a seven-day period. Using modeling, they determined the age range during which discrimination most dramatically affected cortisol.

“Adolescence might be an important time period because there are a lot of changes in the brain and body,” Adam said. “When you experience perceived discrimination during this period of change, it’s more likely that those effects are built into the system and have a bigger impact.”

[ladybrun-deactivated20140111]

[muzahmat]

Zohra Sehgal, a South Asian actress par excellence, actually spoke multiple languages including Urdu, Hindi, English and German. She is one of the earliest international actresses who came from an aristocratic Muslim family in India. When her father insisted that she get married, she outright said, ‘I don’t want to get married,’  and announced that she might become a pilot. In 1917 she went to a boarding school in Lahore, after which, in 1930, she donned a burqa and set off for Europe by road — crossing Iran, Syria, Palestine and Egypt. She trained as a ballet dancer in Germany. Zohra was quite blunt when it came to expressing her opinions. She was an agnostic and defied all the stereotypes about a “Muslim girl from a traditional family”. She was unbelievably bold and confident and was known for her mischievous humor. She earned immense respect in British TV at a time when people were not accepting of ‘diversity’ and even the Asian roles were played by white people. When she had first arrived in Britain, “it was such that if we were sitting in the bus, the British did not sit next to us. Unconsciously in the minds of white people, there was a hesitation”. She defied cultural norms once more when she married her Hindu student eight years younger than her. She never felt welcomed in Lahore, so she left half her family in Pakistan after 1947 Partition and settled in Delhi where she taught a theater group. She raised her children on her own when her husband committed suicide at a young age. She was literally unstoppable and appeared consistently in British TV series like The Jewel in Crown, Mind Your Language and Doctor Who. She has acted in myriad Bollywood films and performed across Japan, Egypt, Europe and the US. She was a classical dancer, choreographer, cinema, theater and television actress whose career spanned over 8 decades. She was awarded Padma Shri and Padma Vibhushan, some of the highest civilian honors in India. She was a fighter all her life, she even defeated cancer. On her 100th birthday she said, “I want an electric cremation. I don’t want any poems and fuss after that. And for heaven’s sake don’t bring back the ashes. Flush them down the toilet if the crematorium refuses to keep them. If they tell you that I am dead, I want you to give a big laugh". Zohra aapa lived the life of a grand diva and passed away in 2014 at the age of 102.

“Oh, my burqa was of lovely silk and I was so glad I made petticoats out of it!”

Zohra with her husband Kameshwar Sehgal in 1945.

“What actually makes brings out your beauty is the radiance of being content and you can only be content when you are employed in something you love.”

“You see me now when I am old and ugly, in fact you should have seen me earlier — when I was young and ugly!”

Zohra at her 100th birthday was quietly humming “Abhi To Main Jawan Hoon” (I am still young) by poet Hafeez Jullundhri, as she attacked the huge cake.

“Life’s been tough but I’ve been tougher. I beat life at its own game”

[godfearingwomanist]

She was in one of my favorite Bollywood movies, had no idea how bad ass this woman was…whoa!

[md-admissions]

The Secret World Of Women Surgeons You Had No Idea Existed

I am a woman in a man's profession, and it's certainly time that the prevalence of societal sex-stereotyping is publicly addressed. We begrudgingly accept this level of misogyny and anti-family sentiment when it's subtle, constitutive and mixed with praise for being tough. After all, this is surgery. And surgeons are tough.

For all my lady surgeons and future lady surgeons, can I just: you all rock so hard and the fact that this is the 21st century and you do not get the respect you deserve is not right. Internists and surgeons talk shit about each other sometimes, but it’s just talk and I will fight for my lady-surgeons

[psychotherapy]

“Because we are nothing special — on a par with ants and daffodils — it is the work of culture to make us feel special; just as parents need to make their children feel special to help them bear and bear with — and hopefully enjoy — their insignificance in the larger scheme of things. In this sense growing up is always an undoing of what needed to be done: first, ideally, we are made to feel special; then we are expected to enjoy a world in which we are not…When people realize how accidental they are, they are tempted to think of themselves as chosen. We certainly tend to be more special, if only to ourselves, in our (imaginary) unlived lives. 

So it is worth wondering what the need to be special prevents us seeing about ourselves — other, that is, than the unfailing transience of our lives; what the need to be special stops us from being. This, essentially, is the question psychoanalysis was invented to address: what kind of pleasures can sustain a creature that is nothing special? Once the promise of immortality, of being chosen, was displaced by the promise of more life — the promise, as we say, of getting more out of life — the unlived life became a haunting presence in a life legitimated by nothing more than the desire to live it. For modern people, stalked by their choices, the good life is a life lived to the full. We become obsessed, in a new way, by what is missing in our lives; and by what sabotages the pleasures that we seek.”               

-Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

[evansyrps]

give me someone surprising their primary partner with brunch in bed and snuggling up to their side as they share all the details about the night they spent with their secondary partner 

give me a married couple struggling to handle their new open arrangement and dealing with all the jealousy and possessiveness that they never expected themselves to feel 

give me a life-long straight dude starting to question his sexuality seemingly out of nowhere and nervously asking in his long-term girlfriend if he can explore those feelings on the side and work out what’s going on (or vice versa)

give me a quad going out for dinner acting like it’s a double date and confusing everyone around them by switching “partners” halfway through for shits and giggles 

give me two points of a vee becoming besties and having sleepovers where they get drunk and share embarrassing stories about their mutual partner

give me a monogamous person inviting their poly partner’s other partners over for a birthday dinner and enjoying their company far more than they expected

give me a little kid telling their friends about their mommies and daddies and their friends thinking their family is the coolest freaking thing no matter how much their parents frantically try to trick them into thinking that the kid just meant that they lived with their uncles and aunts

give me an unplanned but welcomed pregnancy and the frantic “is it mine is it his who looks after it whose name goes on the birth certificate how does this work holy shit” that follows

give me a tacky YA love triangle all crushing on each other like crazy and realising one day that it doesn’t have to end with one of them getting hurt when they can all just love on each other instead

give me a couple that married for money and reputation striking up this unexpected friendship and encouraging each other’s so-called “affairs” with their respective high school sweethearts 

giVE ME POLYAMORY

[ultrafacts]

Source For more facts follow Ultrafacts

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. Those are the countries. It will be drought-resistant species, mostly acacias. And this is a brilliant idea you have no idea oh my Christ

This will create so many jobs and regenerate so many communities and aaaaaahhhhhhh

[jumpingjacktrash]

more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall

it’s already happening, and already having positive effects. this is wonderful, why have i not heard of this before? i’m so happy!

[jenniferrpovey]

Oh yes, acacia trees.

They fix nitrogen and improve soil quality.

And, to make things fun, the species they’re using practices “reverse leaf phenology.” The trees go dormant in the rainy season and then grow their leaves again in the dry season. This means you can plant crops under the trees, in that nitrogen-rich soil, and the trees don’t compete for light because they don’t have any leaves on.

And then in the dry season, you harvest the leaves and feed them to your cows.

Crops grown under acacia trees have better yield than those grown without them. Considerably better.

So, this isn’t just about stopping the advancement of the Sahara - it’s also about improving food security for the entire sub-Saharan belt and possibly reclaiming some of the desert as productive land.

Of course, before the “green revolution,” the farmers knew to plant acacia trees - it’s a traditional practice that they were convinced to abandon in favor of “more reliable” artificial fertilizers (that caused soil degradation, soil erosion, etc).

This is why you listen to the people who, you know, have lived with and on land for centuries.

[thatlupa]

^ The bold.

[uglyassprettyboy]

Oh wow!

[codeorg]

#ILookLikeAnEngineer

[braincraft]

Some wonderful ladies that look like Engineers. 

[socimages]

Luxury and the consumption of labor.

By Lisa Wade, PhD

I came across this fascinating poster advertising tea at The Coffee Bean in Irvine, CA. The ad features tea leaves balled up into small tea “pearls” and spilled into a person’s palm. It reads:

Three minutes to fragrant perfection.

It takes a full day to hand-roll 17 ounces of our Jasmine Dragon Pearl Green Tea.  But in just three minutes you can watch these aromatic pearls unfurl gracefully into one of the world’s most soothing and delicious teas.

This ad suggests that others’ toil should enhance one’s experience of pleasure.  The fact that it takes a significant amount of human labor to “hand-roll” tea leaves into balls — an action that is in no way asserted to change the taste of the tea — is supposed to make the tea moreappealing and not less.  We are supposed to enjoy not just the visual, but the fact that others worked hard to produce it for us.  A whole day of their labor for just three minutes of curly goodness.

This is a rather stunning value pervading U.S. culture.  Luxury may be defined not only as pleasure, or as the consumption of the scarce, but as the “unfurling” of others’ hard work.  What could be more luxurious than the casual-and-fleeting enjoyment of the hard-and-long labor of others?

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

[proudheron]

i saw this post like five years ago, and i still think about it weekly, literally, if not more often. luxury as the knowledge - and delight in the knowledge - that you’re undoing someone’s work.

[noircommejesuis]

the president of nigeria is about to fuck boko haram up and cut his own salary in half and criminalized female genital mutilation

the president of guinea built/is building infrastructure and school and wells all over the country and is decreasing youth unemployment exponentially

the president of cote d’ivoire made school mandatory of children ages 6-16 and banned plastic bags while also building ultra modern trasportation infrastructure

the future is for real in africa 

[incandescent-justice]

I think this should have a hell of a lot more notes on it than it does. This is what good news looks like folk, and the continent of Africa surely deserves a shed load of it.

[sorayachemaly]

How Sexism Affects Girls’ and Women’s Health

All over the world, women, for a variety of reasons, experience much higher rates of pain than men. More than 100 million Americans report living with chronic pain, and the vast majority are women. Yet, doctors discount women’s reports of pain. Both male and female doctors exhibit the same biases in treatment. 

1. People have a difficult time recognizing women’s pain. Not in an abstract sense, but in an actual, practical, “Does that expression on her face mean she is in pain?” way. People are much better at reflexively decoding pain when a man’s face reflects it than when a woman’s does.  This is also true when a white person is experiencing pain versus a black person. 

2. Gender bias and stereotypes infuse the way doctors treat women’s pain. A 2014 survey of more than 2,000 women, conducted by the National Pain Report and For Grace, a non-profit devoted to finding solutions for women in pain, found that three quarters of the women surveyed were told at least once by a doctor that nothing could be done for them and that they would just have to live with chronic physical hurt.

57% report being told by a doctor, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you.”

51% report having doctor’s say, “You look good, so you must be feeling better.”

45% reported that they were told, “The pain is all in your head.”

My personal favorites? “You are too pretty to have so many problems,” and “You can’t be too sick because you have makeup on and you are not in your sweatpants.”

3. Men and women experience different kinds of pain differently, but women report feeling more intense pain. However, when men report pain, they are treated more seriously. Doctors, for example, are more likely to prescribe painkillers for men, but sedatives for women. One study showed that men are also more likely to be sent to intensive care units. In an extensive essay on pain last year, Judy Foreman shared research showing that women are far less likely to get hip or knee replacements and that doctors are disinclined to think that women have heart problems, even when they have symptoms. Women are more likely to seek treatment for chronic pain, but are also more likely to be inadequately treated by health care providers.

4. Despite the fact that men have higher rates of recognized trauma leading to post traumatic stress disorder, women are more than twice as likely to have anxiety disorders and to report fatigue than men. Women’s higher rates of symptoms for PTSD has puzzled doctors, who frequently write the effects off to women’s nerves or over-emotionality. However, researchers have documented the link between concerns about physical safety and psychological harm. Consider, for example, that before puberty, boys and girls experience depression and anxiety at similar rates, but, upon puberty, when street harassment, awareness of physical vulnerability and rape begin, girls’ are up to six times as likely to suffer from anxiety as teenage boys.

Researchers have now concluded that women are more likely to have a whole host of physical problems due to the accumulated effects of hyper-vigilance, sexual objectification, and harassment. Recently, scientists at the University of Mary Washington’s Psychology Departmentshowed the effects of sexual harassment on women, effects that are even stronger in women who have been sexually abused. They concluded that women are experiencing “insidious trauma,” something most doctors are oblivious about.

Lastly, medical research continues to fail to take sex-specific issues into account, mistakenly assuming that male, mostly white male, test subjects sufficiently represent all of humanity. This discriminatory skewing of research, in favor of male physiology, has considerable impact on women’s health, including pain and pain mitigation.

For entire article read Role/Reboot. 

[micdotcom]

Shukria Barakzai has endured a miscarriage from Taliban attacks, a secretly polygamous husband, street beatings by extremists, an aggressive opposition campaign from that same husband and multiple assassination attempts. Just one of these would stop most normal people in their tracks.

But Barakzai is not normal people. She is a feminist politician reshaping the social and political landscape of Afghanistan.

[p-3a-s-life-resources-blog]

Atypical Autism Traits

The [ original source ] for these is highly gendered.

Under the cut, I am retyping the original source in gender-neutral language, as atypical autism traits do not only appear in girls.

If you are Autistic and your autism matches this profile, it does not mean that you must be a girl; it just means your autism is a kind that often gets missed by traditional diagnostic profiles. These traits were commonly found by researchers in cisgender girls, but they are by no means exclusive to cisgender girls.

The traits are split into four categories.

Keep reading

[themedicalstate]

[themedicalstate]

neuromorphogenesis:

The Brain That Heals Itself: Neuroplasticity and Promise for Addiction Treatment

A woman sits at her piano, practicing a five-finger exercise. For two hours a day, she practices the exercise over and over, her finger movements growing sharper, more precise and fluid. Another woman sits in a chair, hands still, and imagines playing the same five-finger exercise. For two hours a day, she practices in her mind and she can visualize herself getting faster, more melodic, more purposeful. After five days, the motor cortex corresponding to these finger movements has flourished in the brain of the woman playing the piano, proving that behaviors physically alter the brain. But what is more fascinating is that these neural changes also occurred in the woman who was simply imagining playing the piano. In other words, we can change the structure of our brains simply by thinking.

The human brain has historically been a mysterious thing, a slippery and elusive being. For years it was thought that the brain completed its development early and then sat fixed, immutable, and vulnerable to damage from which it could not heal. Then an opera singer with MS regains his soaring voice. A blind man teaches himself to see. A man with Parkinson’s cures his symptoms by walking. And research begins to teach us that the brain is not static, but a flexible organ with the ability to form itself to behavior, reorganize itself to accommodate change, and compensate for damage. The brain is inventive, responsive, and, through careful modulation, full of promise.

The Changing Brain

As you think new thoughts, practice new skills, and participate in new behaviors, neural pathways form. As these thoughts and behaviors are repeated, the pathways strengthen, habits emerge, and the brain is rewired to invite the use of these roads. Like a well-worn forest trail we walk every day, we know them by feel, the memory of their twists is imprinted on us, their turns sewn into our consciousness. Meanwhile, pathways we no longer use weaken, become impassable and hostile in comparison to their more popular, open alternatives. This plastic nature of the brain – or neuroplasticity – opens up a world of potential for people to optimize their minds through improved cognitive function, memory, language skills, and guard against age-related decline. It also gives us a new way of conceptualizing addiction, and the promise of treatment possibilities to guide users to recovery using the innate resources of their own brains.

Addiction As A Brain Disorder

For years, debate has raged between schools of thought that frame addiction as a choice versus addiction as a disease. Through an understanding of the brain as an adaptable organ, we can reach a more sophisticated model, describing addiction as a reorientation of the brain that creates new neural pathways and perpetuates addictive behavior. Rather than arbitrary choice, the addict’s brain has remapped itself to make feeding addiction the most natural course of action.

When a person indulges in addictive behavior, their brain floods with dopamine. Dopamine release is not only highly rewarding, it also increases the ability to learn, and tells the brain, “Remember how this happened so you can feel this way again.” As the behavior is performed again and again, the level of dopamine release decreases, and new extremes must be reached for the same effect. Eventually, tolerance may build to such a point that the addictive behavior no longer provides pleasure at all–merely avoidance of withdrawal. But even in the face of diminished rewards, the neural pathways beg for the repetition of the behavior; the brain is now built for addiction.

The Power of Neuroplasticity

While neuroplasticity may be a culprit in the creation of addiction, it also holds the key to recovery. By harnessing the moldability of the brain and abandoning the neural connections fed by addictive behaviors, new pathways can be formed via the development of healthy behaviors and thought processes. Through carefully created treatment plans, people suffering from addiction can be released from its grip to move toward stability, insight, and self-awareness.

Meditation in particular is proven to engage the brain and expand its potential. Applying the principles of meditation to treatment addiction, Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention (MBRP) modulates brain activity to create new neural responses to distress and cravings. Through mindful meditation, people with addiction can learn to tolerate discomfort and stressful situations with decreased reactivity, allowing them to be in control of their actions and behave in thoughtful, deliberate ways. Even more significantly, MBRP allows addicts to experience distress without increased cravings, interrupting self-destructive impulses and replacing them with healthy coping mechanisms.

Toward Recovery

By embracing the potential of neuroplasticity and integrating neural modulation into therapeutic practice, addiction treatment programs can harness the healing powers of the brain and relieve suffering. This nuanced understanding of the brain offers hope for the millions of people suffering from addiction as we forge new paths to lasting sobriety. 

Put together by Alta Mira, an addiction treatment center in Los Angeles, California. 

[brainsandbodies]

He didn’t know it, but one of the most common times brain aneurysms bleed is during sexual activity. Many people don’t exercise, so sex is the most stress their circulatory system experiences…upon bursting, blood pours out of the aneurysm at high pressure, filling the low pressure brain cavity [often causing significant damage].

Gray Matter. By David Levy, M.D. (via brains-and-bodies)