Dexway English Magazine: C1 – Edition 8
Being mindful to avoid stress
SLOW DOWN
It´s 2 a.m. and you´re in pain… moving hurts…breathing hurts…doing nothing hurts. Now what? There is a popular revolution happening that is said to be the secret to health and happiness. It uses the psychological concept of being mindful to help people deal with pain, chronic illness and be more at ease. It is also said to help with migraines, anxiety, stress and depression. Clinical trials show it has been as effective as prescription painkillers. In a nutshell, it uses a variety of meditation techniques which help people to focus on their breathing and awareness of their body.
Now this concept is far from new as it was first introduced in 1979 by Jon Kabat-Zinn. He is an American Professor of Medicine and a founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Cen-ter for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society in Massachusetts. His practice of yoga and studies with Buddhist teachers has enabled him to meld this with Western science and medical practices. In essence, these techniques help so we no longer feel pain to the same intensity by soothing brain patterns. Teachers and medical professionals of this practise are quick to dispel any myths. It is not a religion, meditation is easy, it is not a matter of tricking your brain and they are not trying to give you a fake “positive” outlook.
Road Rage
80% of UK drivers admit to being victims of road rage. Road rage, a term coined in 1988, is a product of our modern time and most likely has its roots in the mid 80s when families moved from the city to the new suburbs. This in turn led to more people commuting into city centres, with more cars on the roads and (in the UK) an aging infrastructure led to longer traffic jams, longer waiting time and an overall feeling of being a slave to the commute.
Being inside our cars leads to a feeling of superiority over our fellow road users, in our cars we are untouchable and when faced with a traffic jam we fall back on survival of the fittest, so primal desire to dominate those around us, and to win at any cost. In the US, therapists have been working to certify road rage as a medical condition.
Road rage is defined as an uncontrollable anger which only visits us while behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, in some ways this anger is a flash, somebody crosses our path we sound our horn, shout and swear and then continue with our journey. However when added to other pressures road rage can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and drive us to do things that normally we wouldn’t think of doing. Currently in the UK just the intention to cause harm to another drive can land you a heavy fine, actually taking action can land you in jail. It is seen as an endangerment of public safety.
Sustainable Gardening
It´s a fact that humans use biophysical resources faster than nature can replenish them. Sustainable gardening can be one way to help the environment and humans alike. Essentially it is gardening practices that causes no harm to the earth or to people living there and trying to enhance it, showing good environmental stewardship. Many places all over the world are planting fruit trees and vegetable plants for the environmental benefits but also for the human factor.
The website for the company “Falling Fruit” lists locations where people can access these trees or plants, with permission if on private property, and you pick fruits and vegetables for free. There is a lot of food wastage, it´s a shame when starvation is a global problem. Falling Fruit’s founders, Caleb Phillips and Ethan Welty said on their website “Foraging in the 21st century is an opportunity for urban exploration, to fight the scourge of stained sidewalks, and to reconnect with the botanical origins of food,”.
The city of Seattle in the United States has gone one step further. They are now offering what they call an “Urban Food Forest”. It´s set to become the world’s largest forgeable space by recreating the ecosystem of a real forest. It´s been named Beacon Food Forest covering seven acres of land, within city limits, donated by Seattle Public Utilities and a $100,000 grant from the city. It has a teaching space, community gardening plots, a place to barbecue and recreational areas. The aim is that visitors will practice “ethical harvesting” – so they take only what they need.
Taking risks
Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin have conducted a study correlating brain activity with people who engage in risky behaviour. They are looking at people who drink and drive, drive recklessly or get into fights. They have concluded that it’s not the brains´ desire centre that is overactive, it is that their self-control systems are underactive. They scanned the brain activity of 108 subjects using an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machine while they were playing a video game that simulates risk taking.
What they were testing were the patterns in the brain that preceded choices that could be risky or safe in one set of people. The software would then predict the second set of people´s choices based on their brain activity. It was accurate 71% of the time. Russell Poldrack, the director of the Austin´s Imaging Research Center said, “These patterns are reliable enough that not only can we predict what will happen in an additional test on the same person, but on people we haven’t seen before”.
The video game they used is called Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) that correlates with risk-taking such as driving without a seatbelt, stealing or gambling. Throughout the game subjects are asked if they want to make a risky choice (inflate the balloon and earn a few cents) or a safe choice (to cash out). If the balloon bursts, then they lose everything from that round. If it inflates and is ok, then they continue to the next round in the game.
In a related study done in the UK of people aged 9-35 years old, they found teenagers around age 14 had the riskiest behaviour in the video game. How often do you take risks?
Literacy
A new report from the United Nations has just come out saying that 250 of the 650 million children in primary schools could not read, write or do basic maths. This is billions of dollars wasted in education funding. A spokesperson for the UN, Vibeke Jensen, said there is a global “learning crisis”. She said in third world countries, 75% of school teachers do not have enough training.
One in four children in developing countries cannot read a single sentence. In poor countries there are wide disparities be-tween the rich and the poor. They found about 150 million students are not going to school and many of them girls. In 2011, there were 774 million of illiterate adults in the world and they believe that by 2015, it will fall to about 743 million. The report also stated that countries should spend 6% of their gross national product (GDP) on education.
Literacy is a fundamental human right. It is very important for social and human needs that people are able to communicate by writing and being able to read. Many policy analysts measure literacy rates as a value of human capital. The knowledge, social and personalities embodied by individuals to perform tasks. Exchange of knowledge and information is essential in our modern world.
Emerging technologies like texting and social media has made it important, especially to young people, to be able to communicate with friends and be part of a social circle. How important is literacy in your life?
Faradays cage
Electricity is essential in our technological life. In the 1836, an English scientist called Michael Faraday created the Faraday Cage. The theory and today’s reality is that the Faraday cage allows engineers to work on high tension electric cables without having to turn off the power, this saves time and money.
The cage works because the electrical current is channelled around the outside of the cage rather then into the cage. In many ways, this is like a hollow insulator. It is used to protect electronic equipment from lightning strikes and electrostatic discharges. Microwave ovens, Magnetic Resonance Imaging machines (MRI) are examples of modern day Faraday cages. In 2013, one was used around the Sistine Chapel to block electronic eavesdropping when they selected the next pope. Very interesting!
It cannot block the Earth’s magnetic field, so a compass will still work inside of it. But with a Faraday cage, we can block mobile phone and radio wave signals, if you sit inside a the cage you can be completely 100% disconnected from the world. Now that does sound nice! An Australian company created their own version of Faraday’s amazing cage and called it the ON/OFF. Literally they invited people into the ON/OFF to experience “Total disconnectedness” The people behind ON/OFF have noticed an increase in people panicking when they are disconnected from the world.
