One question that has baffled mankind is "after-death experience" or the experience after the heart stops beating. There have been anecdotal reports of a person being able to understand and hear what is happening around them even after they have been declared dead. A team of researchers have found that the brain works for a while after the heart has stopped. The research is reported in an a journal paper titled, 'AWARE-AWAreness during REsuscitation-A prospective study.'
The team of scientists from New York's Stony Brook University of Medicine, looked at patients with cardiac arrests in Europe and the US. They noted that those of the patients who were successfully resuscitated after their heart had stopped beating could recall the conversations around them between the healthcare personnel and were aware of their surroundings.

They say you should never meet your heroes. There's plenty of reasons why, but in the case of your creative heroes, it might be because they're jerks.

The idea of the "cantankerous creative" has likely been around since the first arrogant caveman learned to make fire. Pablo Picasso carried around a revolver loaded with blanks that he'd fire at people he disliked. H.P. Lovecraft was a staggering racist, even for his time. Thomas Edison happily electrocuted an elephant to discredit his rival, Nikola Tesla. It seems like creative people - whether gifted in the visual arts, science, writing, or what have you - are often thoroughly unpleasant people.

While creative success may make one bigheaded, an emerging stream of research is showing that creativity and being a real jerk may actually have a more intimate relationship. In fact, for some people, being a bit of a psychopath might nudge one toward creative success.

Brain changes, visible on scans, are also associated with Alzheimer's precursors

The stresses of everyday life may start taking a toll on the brain in relatively early middle age, new research shows. The study of more than 2,000 people, most of them in their 40s, found those with the highest levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol performed worse on tests of memory, organization, visual perception and attention.

Higher cortisol levels, measured in subjects' blood, were also found to be associated with physical changes in the brain that are often seen as precursors to Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, according to the study published in October in Neurology.

All institutions stagnate over time. But if the original inspiration contains enough universal truth, it can survive the centuries. This seems to be the case with Christianity. Despite millions of Christians who believe all they have to do is verbally profess their faith in their Lord Jesus Christ, a much deeper understanding of the human condition and each individual's capacity for transformation remains just waiting to be rediscovered. Troels Engberg-Pedersen is just one of the scholars of early Christianity to have mined Christianity's earliest texts - the letters of Paul - for insights into what they actually meant - and still mean - for those with eyes to see.

The shape of Paul's thought has much in common with the philosophy of Stoicism. Not only does it provide a pathway of transformation - it presents a vision of the world imbued with meaning and responsibility. In a time when identity politics is on the rise, perhaps it is time to rediscover the values at the root of our civilization. Paul's Christianity was the anti-identity politics of its time. His message was simple, practical, and effective: bear your suffering, act with responsibility and meaning, and consider others interests, not just your own. In short, crucify your old self so that a better self can be born.

Today on the Truth Perspective we look at the Stoic-like roots of Paul's thought and how it fits into a wider worldview where meaning is not only possible, but real.

Running Time: 01:28:09

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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

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