In its simplest form forest therapy, also called forest bathing, is just spending time in the woods as an antidote to the sometimes-jarring sounds, sights, and smells of city life. Of course, you can get that kind of respite on your own, but a more organized version of forest therapy has now been introduced in the U.S. The Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides and Programs, founded in 2012, is currently training forest therapy guides. The group hopes to raise awareness of the benefits among health care professionals, and programs are being established nationwide.

As you note, forest therapy originated in Japan, where researchers have been studying its physiological effects for many years. It appears that forest therapy does have measurable health benefits; for example, it can lower levels of salivary cortisol, the hormone that rises when we're under stress. One Japanese study showed that gazing at forest scenery for as little as 20 minutes reduced salivary cortisol levels by 13.4 percent. Forest therapy can also lower blood pressure and heart rate and trigger a dramatic increase in the activity of natural killer (NK) cells (produced by the immune system to ward off infection and fight cancer). Spending three days in the forest has been shown to increase NK activity by 50 percent, a beneficial effect that can last up to one month.

Most recently, researchers from UK's University of East Anglia analyzed 143 studies of forest therapy including data on some 290 million participants from 20 different countries. Not only was forest bathing associated with lower levels of cortisol, lower blood pressure and heart rate, it also lowered blood cholesterol and reduced rates of diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, asthma and death from heart disease. In addition, it was associated with decreased risk of preterm birth and lower all-cause mortality. Some studies suggested that forest therapy helped people sleep better and improved outcomes in those with cancer and neurological conditions. Finally, people exposed to forest therapy were found to be more likely to report that their overall health was good.

A fully integrated human is in touch with their wholeness, whether good or bad, light or dark, ugly or beautiful. Balancing these energies can be counterintuitive. Integrating the whole leads to the holistic experience of self-actualization. But it's not easy to achieve. It does not come naturally. Yet if we can practice such integration, no matter how counterintuitive, it can be the source of tremendous power and self-fulfillment.

1. Practical Grandiosity Over Grandiosity

"To learn to creatively live with the daemonic or be violently devoured by it. We will decide our own destiny. Let us choose wisely." ~Stephen Diamond

What is practical grandiosity? It's being honest about the fact that you are a unique being, but not going too far by imagining that you are better than others. It's taking your natural grandiose energy and channeling it into a real project rather than basing it on an unreal fantasy. It's about being honest with your limits and then having the wherewithal to stretch those limits through self-improvement rather than self-embellishment.

The modern way to develop a personality disorder.

Posting too many pictures to social media can turn you into a narcissist, new research reveals.

People posting pictures heavily to social media became 25% more narcissistic in the four months of the study.

The increase pushed many across the cut-off for having a narcissistic personality disorder.

Neuroscientists from the University of California San Diego observed spontaneous electrical activity that resembles human brain waves in a lab-grown "mini-brain" for the first time. They hope this breakthrough will allow researchers to study the early stages of brain disorders like epilepsy in infants, which is usually difficult or impossible due to the difficulty of analyzing a fetus in utero.

As detailed in a preprint research paper presented at the Society for Neuroscience Meeting earlier this month, a research team led by the neuroscientist Alysson Muotri used stem cells to grow hundreds of mini-brains, also known as brain "organoids," over the course of 10 months. Muotri and his colleagues grew these stem cells so that they would form cortical tissue, which is found in the region of the brain responsible for cognition and analyzing sensory data.

After the brain organoids had been growing in petri dishes for about six months, the researchers noticed that the electrical activity they were measuring was occuring at a higher rate than had ever been documented before in lab-grown organoids. Even more surprising, however, was that this electrical activity didn't resemble the synchronized activity seen in mature human brains. Instead, the electrical patterns were chaotic, a hallmark of a developing brain.

In 2003, a team of scientists in China managed to create embryos containing a mix of rabbit and human DNA. Most of the biological matter was human, while the rabbit DNA was present only in the mitochondria, the energy-generators of the cells. The aim was to try to find new ways of growing and harvesting the stem cells present in early human development, which were (and are) a promising avenue for medical study and treatment.

It wasn't long, however, before controversy erupted over these so-called 'chimeras', as they were dubbed by some researchers. Were they human? What would happen if they were allowed to develop? Soon activists mobilized to restrict or quash the research. In 2005, the US outlawed patents on human embryos; in 2007, the Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act was proposed in Congress (although ultimately it failed to pass into law). According to the bill, research into hybrids was said to compromise 'human dignity and the integrity of the human species'. Pig heart transplants or the administration of animal-based insulin were acceptable, but the threat of potentially viable, cellular hybrids was too strong, despite the myriad social benefits it could yield.

Every single individual varies along a range of five personality traits. We don't know why, or how, only that we do. Agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, openness: these five traits, and the variations within them, capture the range of human personality, and they do it quite well. They capture differences between men and women, between liberals and conservatives, between emotionally unstable artists and hard-working manager types, and everyone in between.

Not only do the traits help us know ourselves a bit better - like what careers or environments are best suited to our personality and what aspects of our personality are most likely to bring us into conflict with others - they help us gain a better understand of just how different other people can be from us, and why. And they point out the aspects of our personality that might need some work: like when to be more assertive, harder-working, kinder, cautious, or adventurous.

Today on the Truth Perspective we discuss all this and more, with reference to Jordan Peterson's Big 5 personality test: Understand Myself.

Running Time: 01:17:45

Download: MP3

Sound and silence have a direct, powerful influence on emotions. We seldom acknowledge this fact, yet it is self-evident - we become anxious when we hear sirens or people arguing, sleepy when we hear a lullaby, focused by the hypnotic repetition of chanting.

Most people are unaware of the effects of sound and silence on the body and mind, even in the midst of the noise pollution so characteristic of cities. It is vital for your emotional health to take control of the soundscape that surrounds you. If you cannot escape disturbing sounds, the new technology of noise cancellation gives you a way to protect yourself from them. Noise-canceling headphones detect environmental noise with built-in microphones and generate signals that neutralize it; they are readily available and affordable.

The trances and healing powers of shamans are so widespread that they can be counted a human universal. Why did they evolve?

Shamanism is as varied as those who practice it. Its practitioners range from indigenous lineages who have passed down their craft over thousands of years to the modern 'plastic shamans', who represent no specific culture but have adapted shamanism to meet the demands of metropolitan markets. However, there is a common theme to shamanism wherever it is practised: the use of spiritual (or shamanic) trance to facilitate journeys to a non-ordinary reality. Here, in this non-ordinary reality, the shamans do their work. According to the historian of religion Mircea Eliade writing in 1951, shamanism is the 'technique of ecstasy', involving the purposeful invocation and use of dreams and visions to solve problems.

By this definition, shamanism is the landscape of the spirit-journey, populated by good and evil spirits and the souls of the deceased and yet-to-be-born. It is the place where mountains speak and Grandmother Skeleton points out which plants to eat when the dry season lasts too long. In this form, shamanism is everywhere in the old ways of humans. Every tribal culture - alive or dead - has some broker of spiritual capital. The Indonesian Mentawai have their sikerei. The Inuit have their angakok. The Columbian Desana have their paye. The Mongolian Buryat have their böö. The American Sioux have their heyoka.

'Dehumanization appears to be at the core of schadenfreude'

Schadenfreude, the sense of pleasure people derive from the misfortune of others, is a familiar feeling to many -- perhaps especially during these times of pervasive social media.

This common, yet poorly understood, emotion may provide a valuable window into the darker side of humanity, finds a review article by psychologists at Emory University.

New Ideas in Psychology published the review, which drew upon evidence from three decades of social, developmental, personality and clinical research to devise a novel framework to systematically explain schadenfreude. The authors propose that schadenfreude comprises three separable but interrelated subforms -- aggression, rivalry and justice -- which have distinct developmental origins and personality correlates.

Mice yanked out of their community and held in solitary isolation show signs of brain damage.

After a month of being alone, the mice had smaller nerve cells in certain parts of the brain. Other brain changes followed, scientists reported at a news briefing November 4 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

It's not known whether similar damage happens in the brains of isolated humans. If so, the results have implications for the health of people who spend much of their time alone, including the estimated tens of thousands of inmates in solitary confinement in the United States and elderly people in institutionalized care facilities.

The new results, along with other recent brain studies, clearly show that for social species, isolation is damaging, says neurobiologist Huda Akil of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "There is no question that this is changing the basic architecture of the brain," Akil says.