Category: Body & Mind

Reading for Faster Freedom in Brazil

Prisoners in Brazil may be able to shorten their stay in jail by reading and writing. It’s only 48 days but it can make a difference, the prisoners need to read from a collection of philosophy, science, literature, or the classics then reflect on them in a submitted paper.

Educational programs like this are a good way to help people returning to society restart with more focus and support.

Prisoners will have up to four weeks to read each book and
write an essay which must “make correct use of paragraphs, be
free of corrections, use margins and legible joined-up writing,”
said the notice published on Monday in the official gazette.

…

“A person can leave prison more enlightened and with a
enlarged vision of the world,” said Sao Paulo lawyer Andre
Kehdi, who heads a book donation project for prisons.

“Without doubt they will leave a better person,” he said.

Read more.

Google to Catalog Languages

The Endangered Languages Project is a new initiative run by Google to catalog languages that are threatened because of globalization. As nice as it is that the people on the planet are finding more languages in common, we still need to encourage people to embrace languages that aren’t as popular.

“We have so many languages which are in danger of dying, and though there has been work done by linguists to document these languages, there are nowhere near enough linguists to do that,” said Anthony Aristar, professor of linguistics and co-director of the Institute for Language Information and Technology at Eastern Michigan University, which helped create the site.

“It’s not just a matter of documenting the languages, it’s also a matter of revitalizing them if we possibly can.”

As part of the effort to revive dying languages, the website will use video, audio and social media tools to connect speakers with each other and with those who want to learn their language.

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Daydreaming is Good for You

I’m a fan of daydreaming so finding out that it helps one process information and be more creative has made my day!

Here’s where things get interesting: those students assigned to the boring task performed far better when asked to come up with additional uses for everyday items to which they had already been exposed. Given new items, all the groups did the same. Given repeated items, the daydreamers came up with forty-one per cent more possibilities than students in the other conditions.

What does this mean? Schooler argues that it’s clear evidence that those twelve minutes of daydreaming allowed the subjects to invent additional possibilities, as their unconscious minds pondered new ways to make use of toothpicks. This is why the effect was limited to those items that the subjects had previously been asked about—the question needed to marinate in the mind, “incubating” in those subterranean parts of the brain we can barely control.

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A Good Book Review on Health

Drop Dead Healthy by A.J. Jacobs (Simon & Schuster, April 2012) acts as the conclusion to the author’s bestselling “humble quest” trilogy.  As with The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs takes his readers on a wild and crazy journey, this time into the world of health.

We all see the ads on tv and the billboards that simultaneously berate and encourage us to optimize our lifestyles with a kind of paternalistic best-friend’s-secret style condescension.  ‘Exercise more’, ‘eat this’ have given way to ‘exercise THIS way THIS often’ and ‘eat THESE foods in THESE portions THIS frequently’.  How to sift through it all and figure out where to start?

Jacobs has had the same crisis of conscience and so he undertakes a two-year-long fore into the health world, testing all the theories and new food options that leave the rest of us stuck in limbo.  From his first afternoon, we see how complex and involved this undertaking will be.

He first tackles the issue of want in a first world consumerist society when he visits Paul McGlothin, director of research for the Calorie Restriction (CR) Society, who offers him a blueberry… but not to eat.  At least, not yet.

Blueberries are notoriously good for you.  Full of antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals, they’re the Vanderbilts of the berry world.

Continue reading “A Good Book Review on Health”

Coffee Drinkers Have a Lower Death Risk

I’m writing this as I sip my first coffee of the day and it makes me feel good to do both activities at once because coffee drinkers have a lower risk of death than non-coffee drinkers.

Coffee drinkers were less likely to die from heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, injuries and accidents, diabetes, and infections, although the association was not seen for cancer. These results from a large study of older adults were observed after adjustment for the effects of other risk factors on mortality, such as smoking and alcohol consumption. Researchers caution, however, that they can’t be sure whether these associations mean that drinking coffee actually makes people live longer. The results of the study were published in the May 17, 2012 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.
…
The researchers found that the association between coffee and reduction in risk of death increased with the amount of coffee consumed. Relative to men and women who did not drink coffee, those who consumed three or more cups of coffee per day had approximately a 10 percent lower risk of death. Coffee drinking was not associated with cancer mortality among women, but there was a slight and only marginally statistically significant association of heavier coffee intake with increased risk of cancer death among men.

Read more here.