Mente jovem em corpo jovem / When you're mindless, you're mindless

“She’s one of the people at Harvard who really gets it,” Rediger told me. “That health and illness are much more rooted in our minds and in our hearts and how we experience ourselves in the world than our models even begin to understand.”
Mais, aqui
Sobre Ellen Langer

To This Day Project

 To This Day
When I was a kid
I used to think that pork chops and karate chops
were the same thing
I thought they were both pork chops
and because my grandmother thought it was cute
and because they were my favourite
she let me keep doing it
not really a big deal
one day
before I realized fat kids are not designed to climb trees
I fell out of a tree
and bruised the right side of my body
I didn’t want to tell my grandmother about it
because I was afraid I’d get in trouble
for playing somewhere that I shouldn’t have been
a few days later the gym teacher noticed the bruise
and I got sent to the principal’s office
from there I was sent to another small room
with a really nice lady
who asked me all kinds of questions
about my life at home
I saw no reason to lie
as far as I was concerned
life was pretty good
I told her “whenever I’m sad
my grandmother gives me karate chops”
this led to a full scale investigation
and I was removed from the house for three days
until they finally decided to ask how I got the bruises
news of this silly little story quickly spread through the school
and I earned my first nickname
pork chop
to this day
I hate pork chops
I’m not the only kid
who grew up this way
surrounded by people who used to say
that rhyme about sticks and stones
as if broken bones
hurt more than the names we got called
and we got called them all
so we grew up believing no one
would ever fall in love with us
that we’d be lonely forever
that we’d never meet someone
to make us feel like the sun
was something they built for us
in their tool shed
so broken heart strings bled the blues
as we tried to empty ourselves
so we would feel nothing
don’t tell me that hurts less than a broken bone
that an ingrown life
is something surgeons can cut away
that there’s no way for it to metastasize
it does
she was eight years old
our first day of grade three
when she got called ugly
we both got moved to the back of the class
so we would stop get bombarded by spit balls
but the school halls were a battleground
where we found ourselves outnumbered day after wretched day
we used to stay inside for recess
because outside was worse
outside we’d have to rehearse running away
or learn to stay still like statues giving no clues that we were there
in grade five they taped a sign to her desk
that read beware of dog
to this day
despite a loving husband
she doesn’t think she’s beautiful
because of a birthmark
that takes up a little less than half of her face
kids used to say she looks like a wrong answer
that someone tried to erase
but couldn’t quite get the job done
and they’ll never understand
that she’s raising two kids
whose definition of beauty
begins with the word mom
because they see her heart
before they see her skin
that she’s only ever always been amazing
he
was a broken branch
grafted onto a different family tree
adopted
but not because his parents opted for a different destiny
he was three when he became a mixed drink
of one part left alone
and two parts tragedy
started therapy in 8th grade
had a personality made up of tests and pills
lived like the uphills were mountains
and the downhills were cliffs
four fifths suicidal
a tidal wave of anti depressants
and an adolescence of being called popper
one part because of the pills
and ninety nine parts because of the cruelty
he tried to kill himself in grade ten
when a kid who still had his mom and dad
had the audacity to tell him “get over it” as if depression
is something that can be remedied
by any of the contents found in a first aid kit
to this day
he is a stick on TNT lit from both ends
could describe to you in detail the way the sky bends
in the moments before it’s about to fall
and despite an army of friends
who all call him an inspiration
he remains a conversation piece between people
who can’t understand
sometimes becoming drug free
has less to do with addiction
and more to do with sanity
we weren’t the only kids who grew up this way
to this day
kids are still being called names
the classics were
hey stupid
hey spaz
seems like each school has an arsenal of names
getting updated every year
and if a kid breaks in a school
and no one around chooses to hear
do they make a sound?
are they just the background noise
of a soundtrack stuck on repeat
when people say things like
kids can be cruel?
every school was a big top circus tent
and the pecking order went
from acrobats to lion tamers
from clowns to carnies
all of these were miles ahead of who we were
we were freaks
lobster claw boys and bearded ladies
oddities
juggling depression and loneliness playing solitaire spin the bottle
trying to kiss the wounded parts of ourselves and heal
but at night
while the others slept
we kept walking the tightrope
it was practice
and yeah
some of us fell
but I want to tell them
that all of this shit
is just debris
leftover when we finally decide to smash all the things we thought
we used to be
and if you can’t see anything beautiful about yourself
get a better mirror
look a little closer
stare a little longer
because there’s something inside you
that made you keep trying
despite everyone who told you to quit
you built a cast around your broken heart
and signed it yourself
you signed it
“they were wrong”
because maybe you didn’t belong to a group or a click
maybe they decided to pick you last for basketball or everything
maybe you used to bring bruises and broken teeth
to show and tell but never told
because how can you hold your ground
if everyone around you wants to bury you beneath it
you have to believe that they were wrong
they have to be wrong
why else would we still be here?
we grew up learning to cheer on the underdog
because we see ourselves in them
we stem from a root planted in the belief
that we are not what we were called we are not abandoned cars stalled out and sitting empty on a highway
and if in some way we are
don’t worry
we only got out to walk and get gas
we are graduating members from the class of
fuck off we made it
not the faded echoes of voices crying out
names will never hurt me
of course
they did
but our lives will only ever always
continue to be
a balancing act
that has less to do with pain
and more to do with beauty.

Solidão

"A minha mãe tem 89 anos e é surda. Quando lhe pergunto alguma coisa, responde ao lado. Protesto contra a sua surdez, ela afirma que "como" as palavras. No fundo, conversa de surdos. Traz-me triste, esta questão da incomunicabilidade. Percebo que a inteligência tem consigo, uma obrigação moral, tal como é expressa na parábola dos talentos. O que nunca ninguém diz, porventura com medo de parecer vaidoso, é que a inteligência tem um preço: a solidão. Dizia o meu amigo Jacques Brel, (nunca o conheci, entenda-se), numa entrevista a que tive o privilégio de assistir: 'Recuso-me a ser inteligente.' Julgo perceber o que quis dizer, e no entanto…"

Nuno Lobo Antunes, in Sinto Muito

Platão e o Corpo

Participam:
Jonathan Lear, University of Chicago: "Ironic Eros: Notes on a Fantastic Pregnancy"
Gretchen Reydams-Schils, University of Notre Dame: "What Does the Body Have to Do with Becoming Like God in Middle-Platonism?"
David O'Connor, University of Notre Dame: "Ice Cold Feet"

Miss Anna O

"Considering that Breuer is the beloved, but it seems that he was also a lover pregnant in soul. It's clear from the case history that he was impressed with Anna O, as well he should have been. Quote: 'She was markedly intelligent with an astonishingly quick grasp of things and penetrating intuition. She possessed a powerful intellect, she had great poetic and imaginative gifts which were under the control of a sharp and critical common sense, one of her essential character traits was a sympathetic kindness.' Unquote. [...] And if we look back at these pair of lovers with the benefit of hindsight, and if we try to cut through the draws of social pretense, and ask what was ethically significant about their interaction, we see that one person was asking another person for help and the other person was trying to offer help. And everything was going along smoothly in the production of a false theory and a false understanding of their relationship until miss O's unconscious interrupted it. And in effect, her pregnancy (her unconscience) was saying, 'I'm pregnant. I'm giving birth. This is your baby!"
Jonathan Lear



"How does wonder provoke us to put together our bodies and our souls? Something transcendent with something mundane? [...] If Wagner can't stir your anxieties about the relationship between the sensuous and the transcendent, you are stone cold dead. [...] King Marke, the legitimate spouse of Isolde, has been unable, ever, to have sex with her because he respects her too much. He sings this in music of great nobility and control. Which contrasts with the ecstatic eroticism of the music that the true lovers Tristan and Isolde tend to express their love in. Marke loved Isolde too much to become her sexual partner. He had a fantasy (I'm tempted to say) of love that would be undisturbed by the turbulence of erotic desire. I think Plato, too, knew all about this fantasy of philosophy without turbulence.  [...] The fantasy of philosophy without erotic turbulence is enacted over and over again by Plato (it seems to me).A fantasy that he indulges but that he also chases. "
David O'Connor

Leituras Imaginadas

Tradução de Heusei Kestú.

"Possuía uma rapidez de processamento de informação visual e uma capacidade para discriminar detalhes essenciais de não essenciais, substancialmente acima da média. Coexistir com esta percepção em 'alta definição' restringia-lhe a comunicação com os outros, sob pena de sofrer comparações com lunáticos esquizóides, ou arrogantes sabichões.
O seu discreto, mas contínuo, isolamento levou a que se refugiasse na confortável ideia de que a indiferença dos outros era sinal de respeito e admiração.
Os seus amigos eram especiais. Eram como deuses que escrevem direito por linhas tortas. E quanto aos restantes, afinal de contas, ser para eles uma espécie de ódio de estimação, não é coisa que se descarte.
Costurava, assim, almofadas psicológicas nas quais se refugiava com leituras e bebidas quentes, aguardando ansiosamente a próxima chamada telefónica."

What I choose to put inside my body affects more than just me

Educational achievement has now been found to be heritable

mais aqui

A inteligência: uma das características mais hereditáveis!

Intelligence is a core construct in differential psychology and behavioural genetics, and should be so in cognitive neuroscience. It is one of the best predictors of important life outcomes such as education, occupation, mental and physical health and illness, and mortality. Intelligence is one of the most heritable behavioural traits. [...] Assortative mating pumps additive genetic variance into the population every generation, contributing to the high narrow heritability (additive genetic variance) of intelligence. 
mais aqui

...

20th Biennial World Conference Keynote

da História

Lev Tolstoy

For, as Lev Tolstoy told us himself, history is a deaf man who answers questions nobody wished to ask in the first place. As he also said, history – the Napoleonic stuff, leaders, generals, great conflicts, revolutions and grand destinies – isn't true history at all. That's lived in the heart and home, in happy and unhappy families, among the trivialities and the dull domestic detail. in the end it is lived only in the self, the only place where anything's really ever lived. Yes, Tolstoy was an annoying old prophet, who died in his eighties at an obscure railway station, following the fate of his most famous character, as if that too were written in the Book of Destiny above.
Malcolm Bradbury, in To the Hermitage

The House of Levi

The House of Levi from Istvan Horkay on Vimeo.
Mais aqui

...

assim como a Hermione, Emma também é muito inteligente

Mais aqui

directamente do céu

...

Reflexões do Desterro

Não acredito que os criminosos estão a "ser quem são". Só nos voltamos para a destruição quando perdemos o sentido de orientação e nos afastamos demasiado da ideia de sabermos a verdade sobre quem somos. Os criminosos perderam o seu centro e o que fazem aos outros é, na verdade, um reflexo do que sentem por si mesmos. Gostamos de pensar sobre os responsáveis por crimes e as vítimas como "eles" e "nós", mas não existem "eles". Só nós!
Anita Moorjani, Nascer de Novo

Depois de ter lido isto, um pensamento atravessou-se-me na cabeça:

— Diz-me qual o tamanho do meu eu que existe em ti, que dir-te-ei o tamanho do teu eu que existe em mim.

Pardon my thoughts

Ilustração de Edmund Dulac

O que a rainha não sabia, era que a questão entre a princesa e a ervilha prendia-se mais com uma overexcitability do que com o facto de ela ser princesa!

What you think is what you are

"There’s a traditional saying that the mind takes the shape it rests upon; the modern update is that the brain takes the shape the mind rests upon.  For instance, you regularly rest your mind upon worries, self criticism, and anger, then your brain will gradually take that shape – will develop neural structures and dynamics of anxiety, low sense of worth, and prickly reactivity to others.  On the other hand, if you regularly rest your mind upon, for example noticing you’re all right right now, seeing the good in yourself and letting go…then your brain will gradually take the shape of calm strength, self confidence, and inner peace."
Aqui

COLD

"Why don't we talk to one another? Why don't we huddle together against the cold wind that blows down the empty streets of this city."
Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

The burdens of talent

"Even as adults, the great must continue taking risks and are often misunderstood and ostracized by others. [...] They may be attacked by the wrong people for the wrong reasons, further pushing them into a life of loneliness."
aqui

Too Many Aptitudes Problem

"Among the clearest psychological effects of having many talents are problems of focus. TMAs are drawn in many different and conflicting directions. It is like being an engineer, a lawyer, a cook, a teacher and a musician — all at once, with all of them demanding their share of time and energy. Self-structuring thus becomes a major problem for TMAs. Unable to use themselves well, they usually end up as employees — and resent it. [...] TMAs are powerful people. They are competent in many ways. They tend to be either domineering or overwhelming in relationships with others — only strong people aren't threatened by them. TMAs often develop considerable informal power at work or in groups. At work a strong manager is thus likely to require more submission gestures from a TMA than from others. That invites covert (or overt) retaliation and TMAs often find themselves in conflict with authority."
aqui

RIP

Robin Williams, The Fisher King

 "The insanity of the tragic minority is just the price that society has to pay in order to boast exceptional advancements and rarities in history: Beethoven, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Copernicus and Edison to name a few. And for those that stand on the edge of emotional stability, derangement may just be the key to presumably reach genius."
mais, aqui

O que é uma opinião?

Plato distinguished between opinion or common belief (doxa) and certain knowledge, and that’s still a workable distinction today: unlike “1+1=2” or “there are no square circles,” an opinion has a degree of subjectivity and uncertainty to it. But “opinion” ranges from tastes or preferences, through views about questions that concern most people such as prudence or politics, to views grounded in technical expertise, such as legal or scientific opinions. You can’t really argue about the first kind of opinion. I’d be silly to insist that you’re wrong to think strawberry ice cream is better than chocolate. The problem is that sometimes we implicitly seem to take opinions of the second and even the third sort to be unarguable in the way questions of taste are. Perhaps that’s one reason (no doubt there are others) why enthusiastic amateurs think they’re entitled to disagree with climate scientists and immunologists and have their views “respected.”
o resto está aqui.

Que língua bonita