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Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves:
'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?'
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn't serve the world.
There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people around you won't feel insecure.
We are all meant to shine as children do.
We are born to manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.
And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically releases others.
Taken from Nelson Mandela's inaugural speech
Hurt feelings 'worse than pain'
The old adage "sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you", simply is not true, according to researchers.
Psychologists found memories of painful emotional experiences linger far longer than those involving physical pain.
They quizzed volunteers about painful events over the previous five years.
Writing in the journal Psychological Science, they said evolutionary brain changes which allow us to work better in groups or societies could be key.
The volunteers, all students, were asked to write about painful experiences, both physical and emotional, then given a difficult mental test shortly afterwards.
The principle was that the more painful the recalled experience, the less well the person would perform in the tests.
Test scores were consistently higher in those recalling physical rather than "social" pain.
Psychological scoring tests revealed that memories of emotional pain were far more vivid.
Social evolution
Researcher Zhansheng Chen, from Purdue University in Indiana, said that it was much harder to "re-live" physical pain than to recall social pain.
He said the evolution of a part of the brain called the cerebral cortex, which processes complex thinking, perception and language, might be responsible.
He said: "It certainly improved the ability of human beings to create and adapt, to function in and with groups, communities and cultures, and to respond to pain associated with social interactions.
"However, the cerebral cortex may also have had an unintended effect of allowing humans to relive, re-experience and suffer from social pain."
The researchers now plan to repeat the experiment in older people, who are more likely to have experienced chronic pain.
Michael Hughesman, a child psychologist based in Germany, agreed that it was likely that emotional pain was handled in a different part of the brain from physical pain, and likely to be longer-lasting.
He said: "There is something very intangible about emotional damage - with physical pain, you can see the bruise, but in emotional abuse there is often fear and anxiety which remains.
"If someone tells you in the playground that they are going to get you after school, then you tend to be anxious and afraid about it far more than if someone just punches you there and then."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/health/7587780.stm
Published: 2008/08/29 10:59:40 GMT
© BBC MMVIII
To Heal a Wound, Turn Up the Voltage
It may sound like something out of Frankenstein, but electric currents applied to the skin could potentially speed up wound healing. Ironically, though the phenomenon was reported 150 years ago by the German physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond, it has been ignored ever since.
Now Josef Penninger of the Austrian Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna and Min Zhao of the University of Aberdeen, UK, have demonstrated that natural electric fields and currents in tissue play a vital role in orchestrating the wound-healing process by attracting repair cells to damaged areas.
The researchers have also identified the genes that control the process. "We were originally sceptical, but then we realised it was a real effect and looked for the genes responsible," Penninger says. "It's not homeopathy, it's biophysics."
Cells and tissues essentially function as chemical batteries, with positively charged potassium ions and negatively charged chloride ions flowing across membranes. This creates electric field patterns all over the body. When tissue is wounded this disrupts the battery, effectively short-circuiting it. Penninger and his colleagues realised that it is the resulting altered fields that attract and guide repair cells to the damaged area.
The researchers grew layers of mouse cells and larger tissues, such as corneas, in the lab. After "wounding" these tissues, they applied varying electric fields to them, and found they could accelerate or completely halt the healing process depending on the orientation and strength of the field (Nature, vol 442, p 457).
Next, they set about finding which genes were involved. They looked at those already known to make repair cells migrate under the influence of chemical growth factors and attractants, and found that their level of expression could be influenced by electric fields. "We have not reinvented the cells' genetic migration machinery," says Penninger. "We have simply shown that electric fields switch them on too." The gene expression of several types of repair cells was affected, including neutrophils and fibroblasts.
They then focused on one particular gene known to prepare cells for migration, and another that halts the process. When the team knocked out the migration "promoter" gene, wounds exposed to electric fields healed more slowly. They healed faster when the migration "blocker" was knocked out.
The next stage is to investigate ways of manipulating the phenomenon to accelerate healing, says Mark Ferguson, a wound-healing specialist at the University of Manchester, UK. "For many years there have been anecdotal reports of the effects of electrical currents on wound healing," he says. "This paper not only demonstrates the effects of electrical currents on cellular migration to wound defects, it also provides a mechanistic understanding of how such signals alter cell behaviour."
26 July 2006
From New Scientist Print Edition.
Andy Coghlan