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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

By Oliver Sacks

In his most extraordinary book, “one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century” (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.

If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sacks’s splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine’s ultimate responsibility: “the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject.”

(Sacks. Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: and Other Clinical Tales. (Summary) First Touchstone edition. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster,1998. IN: VILLA NOVA UNIVERSITY/ Falvey Memorial Library/ Books & Media (online) Disponível em: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1691762/Description#tabnav Acesso em: 4 março 2022.)

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(Disponível em: https://www.unhcr.org/ph/11063-education-refugee-children-focus-new-hm-foundation-campaing.html. Acesso em:

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Lessons of Hope from Afghan Schoolchildren, Six Years Later

September 4, 20218:02 AM ET

In the spring of 2015, NPR sent a team to embed with Afghan forces to witness the start of a new era. A few months prior, the Afghan military regained control over the country after the U.S. and NATO forces officially ended their combat missions.

Rebecca Hersher was there as a producer, with reporter Tom Bowman, photojournalist David Gilkey, and Afghan interpreter Zabihullah “Zabi” Tamanna."So here we were in Kabul, “Hersher says,” and it’s this really weird time in Afghanistan where, in theory, the Afghan government and military are in charge, in a way they haven’t been for a really long time. But the war is definitely still going.”

After three tough weeks embedded with Afghan forces, Bowman returned as planned to the U.S., but Hersher and Gilkey decided to stay in Kabul a bit longer to look for a different, more positive perspective to mark the country’s transition. So they set out to interview the cheeriest group they could think of: children.

“It felt, honestly, like it had been like a tough few weeks in terms of hope, “Hersher says.” And what better way to find that hope than speak to some kids? Tamanna found Tan-weer School in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Kabul. The headmaster welcomed the team, and Gilkey set up cameras. Some of the teens spoke English and Tamanna in-terpreted for the younger kids. The children talked about their dreams. Many of them said they wanted to be leaders for a peaceful Afghanistan, whatever their careers may be. Most of the girls, even as teens, already had more education than their mothers did.

The result was an immersive multimedia essay, entitled “Teenage Dreams,” which pub-lished on NPR.com later in 2015.

Watching the project now, in 2021 — with U.S. forces recently gone, the Taliban ruling the country, with citizens and special immigrant visa holders desperately try to evacuate, and as bombs kill and maim dozens of people — it’s a bittersweet time capsule.

“It’s very hard to look at this project now and feel hopeful about where these kids’ lives are headed in Afghanistan, “Hersher says. It’s been six years, so the kids are now teens and young adults. "There is no peaceful Afghanistan, there is no democratic Afghani-stan,” Hersher says.” And the country’s collapsing around them.”

There’s another layer of sadness to viewing the project now, that’s not immediately apparent. Tamanna and Gilkey were killed the following year while on assignment in Afghani-stan’s Helmand Province. You can see Tamanna in the “Teenage Dreams” video, wearing a blue shirt and directing the kids where to stand and where to look. And the beautiful visuals are quintessential Gilkey. “When I look at it from a personal place, “Hersher says,” what I see is the two of them doing really excellent work. And then a bunch of kids giving their honest selves to a bunch of strangers.”

And yet, there might still be a glimmer of hope to glean from watching the project now. “This is a new moment for the Taliban,” Hersher points out. “The population they are going to try to exert control over is very different.”

In particular, the women. The girls who were teens in 2015 are now well-educated adults, says Hersher and “who knows what they will be able to do with that.”

And it wasn’t as if the Afghanistan of 2015 was in a peaceful state; the country felt bleak back then too, Hersher says. And yet, the kids had dreams and plans for successful, peaceful, and happy lives.

“It does make you wonder, there’s such upheaval at this moment. But in two months or five months, what will it look like inside schoolyards?” says Hersher. “Will there be other kids who are expressing hope for their futures, despite everything?”

(Disponível em: < https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2021/09/04/1033500653/lessons-of-hope-from-afghan-schoolchildrensix-years-later>. Acesso em:)

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Lessons of Hope from Afghan Schoolchildren, Six Years Later

September 4, 20218:02 AM ET

In the spring of 2015, NPR sent a team to embed with Afghan forces to witness the start of a new era. A few months prior, the Afghan military regained control over the country after the U.S. and NATO forces officially ended their combat missions.

Rebecca Hersher was there as a producer, with reporter Tom Bowman, photojournalist David Gilkey, and Afghan interpreter Zabihullah “Zabi” Tamanna."So here we were in Kabul, “Hersher says,” and it’s this really weird time in Afghanistan where, in theory, the Afghan government and military are in charge, in a way they haven’t been for a really long time. But the war is definitely still going.”

After three tough weeks embedded with Afghan forces, Bowman returned as planned to the U.S., but Hersher and Gilkey decided to stay in Kabul a bit longer to look for a different, more positive perspective to mark the country’s transition. So they set out to interview the cheeriest group they could think of: children.

“It felt, honestly, like it had been like a tough few weeks in terms of hope, “Hersher says.” And what better way to find that hope than speak to some kids? Tamanna found Tan-weer School in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Kabul. The headmaster welcomed the team, and Gilkey set up cameras. Some of the teens spoke English and Tamanna in-terpreted for the younger kids. The children talked about their dreams. Many of them said they wanted to be leaders for a peaceful Afghanistan, whatever their careers may be. Most of the girls, even as teens, already had more education than their mothers did.

The result was an immersive multimedia essay, entitled “Teenage Dreams,” which pub-lished on NPR.com later in 2015.

Watching the project now, in 2021 — with U.S. forces recently gone, the Taliban ruling the country, with citizens and special immigrant visa holders desperately try to evacuate, and as bombs kill and maim dozens of people — it’s a bittersweet time capsule.

“It’s very hard to look at this project now and feel hopeful about where these kids’ lives are headed in Afghanistan, “Hersher says. It’s been six years, so the kids are now teens and young adults. "There is no peaceful Afghanistan, there is no democratic Afghani-stan,” Hersher says.” And the country’s collapsing around them.”

There’s another layer of sadness to viewing the project now, that’s not immediately apparent. Tamanna and Gilkey were killed the following year while on assignment in Afghani-stan’s Helmand Province. You can see Tamanna in the “Teenage Dreams” video, wearing a blue shirt and directing the kids where to stand and where to look. And the beautiful visuals are quintessential Gilkey. “When I look at it from a personal place, “Hersher says,” what I see is the two of them doing really excellent work. And then a bunch of kids giving their honest selves to a bunch of strangers.”

And yet, there might still be a glimmer of hope to glean from watching the project now. “This is a new moment for the Taliban,” Hersher points out. “The population they are going to try to exert control over is very different.”

In particular, the women. The girls who were teens in 2015 are now well-educated adults, says Hersher and “who knows what they will be able to do with that.”

And it wasn’t as if the Afghanistan of 2015 was in a peaceful state; the country felt bleak back then too, Hersher says. And yet, the kids had dreams and plans for successful, peaceful, and happy lives.

“It does make you wonder, there’s such upheaval at this moment. But in two months or five months, what will it look like inside schoolyards?” says Hersher. “Will there be other kids who are expressing hope for their futures, despite everything?”

(Disponível em: < https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2021/09/04/1033500653/lessons-of-hope-from-afghan-schoolchildrensix-years-later>. Acesso em:)

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LEARNING LANGUAGE: NEW INSIGHTS INTO HOW BRAIN FUNCTIONS

For most native English-speakers, learning the Mandarin Chinese language from scratch is no easy task.

    Learning it in a class that essentially compresses a one-semester college course into a single month of intensive instruction --and agreeing to have your brain scanned before and after -- might seem even more daunting.

    But the 24 Americans who did just that have enabled University of Delaware cognitive neuroscientist Zhenghan Qi and her colleagues to make new discoveries about how adults learn a foreign language.

    The study, published in May in the journal NeuroImage, focused on the roles of the brain's left and right hemispheres in language acquisition. The findings could lead to instructional methods that potentially improve students' success in learning a new language.

    "The left hemisphere is known as the language-learning part of the brain, but we found that it was the right hemisphere that determined the eventual success" in learning Mandarin, said Qi, assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science.

    "This was new," she said. "For decades, everyone has focused on the left hemisphere, and the right hemisphere has been largely overlooked."

    The left hemisphere is undoubtedly important in language learning, Qi said, noting that clinical research on individuals with speech disorders has indicated that the left side of the brain is in many ways the hub of language processing

    But, she said, before any individuals -- infants learning their native language or adults learning a second language – begin processing such aspects of the new language as vocabulary and grammar, they must first learn to identify its basic sounds or phonological elements.

    It's during that process of distinguishing "acoustic details" of sounds where the right side of the brain is key, according to the new findings.

    Researchers began by exposing the 24 participants in the study to pairs of sounds that were similar but began with different consonants, such as "bah" and "nah," and having them describe the tones, Qi said.

    "We asked: Were the tones of those two sounds similar or different?" she said. "We used the brain activation patterns during this task to predict who would be the most successful learners" of the new language.

    The study continued by teaching the participants in a setting designed to replicate a college language class, although the usual semester was condensed into four weeks of instruction. Students attended class for three and a half hours a day, five days a week, completed homework assignments and took tests.

    "Our research is the first to look at attainment and long-term retention of real-world language learned in a classroom setting, which is how most people learn a new language," Qi said.

    By scanning each participant's brain with functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) at the beginning and end of the project, the scientists were able to see which part of the brain was most engaged while processing basic sound elements in Mandarin. To their surprise, they found that -- although, as expected, the left hemisphere showed a substantial increase of activation later in the learning process -- the right hemisphere in the most successful learners was most active in the early, sound-recognition stage.

    "It turns out that the right hemisphere is very important in processing foreign speech sounds at the beginning of learning," Qi said. She added that the right hemisphere's role then seems to diminish in those successful learners as they continue learning the language.

    Additional research will investigate whether the findings apply to those learning other languages, not just Mandarin. The eventual goal is to explore whether someone can practice sound recognition early in the process of learning a new language to potentially improve their success.

    "We found that the more active the right hemisphere is, the more sensitive the listener is to acoustic differences in sound," Qi said. "Everyone has different levels of activation, but even if you don't have that sensitivity to begin with, you can still learn successfully if your brain is plastic enough."

    Researchers can't say for certain how to apply these findings to real-life learning, but when it comes down to it, "Adults are trainable," Qi said. "They can train themselves to become more sensitive to foreign speech sounds." ( Source: University of Delaware. " Learning language: New insights in to how brain functions. "Science Daily. ).

( Source: University of Delaware. " Learning language: New insights in to how brain functions. "Science Daily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190508093716.htm).

THE SCIENCE OF SMILING

Smiles are calming. They’re contagious. And they have the power to transform our outlook.

[…] There’s a reason the tears-of-joy smiley face is the most popular emoji. A sunny countenance – the most frequent of all facial expressions – has the power to cheer up friends and make strangers feel at ease (predators don’t usually walk around with authentic smiles plastered on their mugs.) But can we actually smile ourselves happy […]? And if so, can we use this as a tool to transport ourselves into a more optimistic headspace? […]

Smiling starts in utero, and babies reward adults for feeding and caring for them by flashing a gummy grin. […] That, in turn, triggers the reward center in the brain of mothers, which may be a vital component in facilitating parent-infant attachment. […]

Smiling remains a powerful communication tool throughout the life cycle, with adults primarily relying on three types of smiles, which Niedenthal’s Emotions Lab has dubbed reward, affiliation, and dominance. Those baby beams fall under the reward umbrella, as do the smiles of joy that spontaneously happen when we’re happy to see someone or open a fabulous present. […]

Affiliation smiles (toothless, lips pressed together, corners of the mouth upturned) are used to acknowledge the presence of another person […] and they convey harmless intentions. […] Dominance smiles are more of a smirk or sneer, a way to negotiate status while conveying a feeling of superiority or defiance.

Reward smiles are the ones that elicit the most positive response from others, and, like yawns, they’re contagious, thanks to a phenomenon called facial mimicry. […] When you flash a friend an authentic reward smile, she automatically mirrors your expression. A happy side effect of this is she’ll likely feel a bit of your delight.

Smiley folks, then, are more likeable, according to research, in part because they make people around them feel better. That can translate into scoring a better job and being deemed more attractive.

[…] “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy”. […] Don’t be surprised if all that grinning makes you feel a bit more optimistic about life in general. […] “Smiling tells you something about a person’s disposition […] and happier people tend to take better care of themselves – they eat [healthier], exercise more.” Smiley people may have more and better relationships, and there is a rock-solid link between social connectedness and health.

By Leslie Goldman, Real Simple, Special Edition, The Power of Positivity, 2021