What Makes People Tick?

 In the past few weeks I've been watching all the Marvel superhero movies, starting with 2008's Iron Man. Two night ago I watched Avengers: Endgame. It feels like the cycle is complete right now. While I don't want to give away any spoilers, for those who do know the movie/the story I hope you will all agree: The ending is poignant and bittersweet. After watching that ending, I needed some time to process. So, on coming home from work yesterday, I chose to watch the season 2 finale of Star Trek: Picard instead of starting on the next movie in the Marvel universe. The next movie is a Spiderman story. Strangely enough, I've never really been a Spiderman fan. The X-Men? Yes, definitely! Batman too. Superman, of course! I loved the Captain Planet stories featuring teens from all around the world getting together to make the world a better place. Xena. Hercules. And then of course there was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Sarah Michelle Gellar's Buffy gave me a regular superhe...

 Have you ever met a woman who has never, not once in her life, had to deal with sexism? If you have, I congratulate you. I've never met one. Sexism, as the definitions below show, is when a person is treated a certain way or discriminated against based on their gender. The term is often used to refer to discrimination or prejudice against/about women, however can be applied to men equally. Every woman will have a different view of what words, actions or behaviour she sees as sexist. Two women, two people, might see an action or event differently, based on their life's experiences and their own frame of reference. What one might see or experience as sexism might just be a joke to another, might be a throw-away comment, or might be something that barely registers.  SEXISM: "Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination,  typically against women, on the basis of  sex: 'sexism in language is an offensive  reminder of the way the culture sees women' ...

 Traditionally, we think of ourselves as having five senses. Sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste. However, what about other senses? What about that elusive 'sixth sense' or other senses that we don't usually count? Apart from being a well-known movie, the sixth sense is sometimes named as proprioception, sometimes as sharper intuition and sometimes simply as a way of getting more in touch with your other regular senses. If you're not entirely keen on seeing dead people but would like to figure out more about the ways in which you experience the world, then this article is for you. How many senses do we have, really? And exactly what is our sixth sense? Have you ever considered balance as a sense? How about the before-mentioned proprioception, or the ability to know where your body is. Think about walking in between two parked cars and knowing you won't hit either. What about sensing things like pain, wetness, heat, air temperature? While perhaps pain or feeling i...

 Want a good reason to stress less and take more me-days every now and then? How about this one? A 22 June 2021 article on Neurosciencenews.com with the rather self-explanatory title " It’s True: Stress Does Turn Hair Gray (and It’s Reversible) " claims exactly what it says it does. The article explains that while previous studies using mice indicated the opposite, it's now been proven that it is possible to actually reverse the signs of ageing in hair. Now, what's important to remember is that hair that's already outside of your head won't magically change colour. However hair that will come out in the future can most certainly go back to your natural colour.   The Neurosciencenews article writes about a research study by Ayelet Rosenberg and co entitled " Quantitative mapping of human hair greying and reversal in relation to life stress " published on eLife, also on June 22nd. If you're interested in the full text of the study with proper expla...

In the fifties, when experiments of the kind no longer permissible today were still allowed, Curt Richter, a professor at Johns Hopkins university, did a famous psychology experiment using rats. As the World of Work Projec t website explains: " Curt’s experiments focused on how long it takes rats to die from drowning. He conducted his experiments by placing rats into buckets filled with water and seeing how long they survived. He introduced a range of variables into the experiment, that yielded some interested results. " Some of those different variables were to examine why domesticated rats swam and swam and swam, while wild rats gave up swimming and died, often within only a few minutes.  What makes the experiment noteworthy to me and why I'm writing about it is that, as Heartbeat Services' article Hope Floats explains: "I n a follow-up experiment, as the rats started to give up and sink, he pulled the drowning rodents to safety, dried them off, gave them a br...

 A long, long time ago when I was young and rather innocent, I thought I had my whole life ahead of me. Now, aged somewhere in my late-ish thirties I'm a lot less young and innocent, however starting up this blog again helped me realise something: I do still have my whole life ahead of me. Sure, about a third of that life is in the past by now. But all the rest of it, everything that's still to come, everything I can still do and see, think and share, write and learn, teach and accomplish... All of that is right here, just waiting for me to get there. Waiting for me to accomplish it and do it. I've heard people in their twenties refer to turning thirty as 'THE BIG THREE-OH,' as if turning thirty was something akin to 'this is the beginning of the end'. I can't speak for men, however as a woman I do identify somewhat with this feeling. While Western society has changed from when I was young, I still grew up believing that the best and most ideal & ama...

Recently, I wrote about how I realised that I needed some more happy moments, time in nature and quite simply, time to relax and just be. While I referenced and quoted several articles, there's a lot more information worth sharing and quoting.  For those actually following my posts as I write them (hmmm... maybe one day...), I can confirm that YES, I did it. I spent time in nature. And YES! - It was amazing. It was exactly what I needed. It's almost midsummer here in the northern hemisphere and the days are long. In winter, I sometimes feel lucky to catch even a ray of sunshine as like most people, I'm indoors working during the daytime and barely get (or make) time to go outside. Even then, the skies are grey and the days without snow, rain or hail are often dreary still. Yet now, this close to midsummer, it's light until about 10 pm and heading out into nature after work is actually possible. I'm no therapist or psychologist but honestly, I do very much recommend ...