【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障8系列】【8-2】文史哲

Threesu

额~今天的速度是我看到的一篇比较有意思的文章~~跟大家一起分享哇~相信正面力量带来的改变，相信自己一定行！~~

速度

Self-Help For Skeptics

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Donna Talarico sat at her computer one morning, stared at the screen and realized she had forgotten -- again! -- her password.

She was having financial difficulties at the time, and was reading self-help books to boost her mood and self-confidence. The books talked about the power of positive affirmation -- which gave her an idea: She changed her various passwords to private messages to herself, like 'imawe$some1' or 'dogoodworktoday.'

'It's something so simple,' says the 34-year-old marketing manager at Elizabethtown College, in Pennsylvania. 'It just reinforces that you're a good person. You can do a good job at whatever you are trying to talk yourself into.'

In times of stress, even people with close social networks can feel utterly alone. We're often advised to 'buck up,' 'talk to someone' (who is often paid to listen) or take a pill. Wouldn't it also make sense to learn ways to comfort and be supportive of ourselves?

Think of it as becoming our own best friend, or our own personal coach, ready with the kind of encouragement and tough love that works best for us. After all, who else knows us better than ourselves? If that sounds crazy, bear in mind it sure beats turning to chocolate, alcohol or your Pekingese for support.

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Experts say that to feel better you need to treat yourself kindly -- this is called 'self-compassion' -- and focus on the positive, by being optimistic. Research shows self-compassionate people cope better with everything from a major relationship breakup to the loss of their car keys. They don't compound their misery by beating themselves up over every unfortunate accident or mistake. Car broke down? Sure, it's a drag, but it doesn't make you an idiot.

'They are treating themselves like a kind friend,' says Mark Leary, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. 'When bad things happen to a friend, you wouldn't yell at him.'

In 15 studies conducted over the past seven years, Dr. Leary has found that self-compassionate people are happier. Three of the studies, soon to be published, examine how self-compassion affects people over age 65. The studies found that people who accepted memory lapses, arthritis and other difficulties of getting older, and who treated themselves extra nicely on tough days, reported more positive emotions and were coping better with the aging process.

Self-compassion helps people overcome life's little, and not-so-little, stressors, such as public speaking. In another study, Dr. Leary asked people to stand in front of a videocamera and make up a story starting with the phrase, 'Once there was a little bear. . .' Then he asked them to critique their performance, captured on videotape.

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People whom the study had identified as being high in self-compassion admitted they looked silly, recognized the task wasn't easy and joked about it. People low in self-compassion gave harsh self-criticism.

Experts say you can learn self-compassion in real time. You can train your brain to focus on the positive -- even if you're wired to see the glass as half empty. A person's perspective, or outlook, is influenced by factors including genetic makeup (is he prone to depression?), experiences (what happened to him?) and 'cognitive bias' (how does he interpret his experiences?). We can't change our genes or our experiences, but experts say we can change the way we interpret what has happened in the past.

Everyone has an optimistic and a pessimistic circuit in their brain, says Elaine Fox, visiting research professor at the University of Oxford, England, and director of the Affective Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex. Fear, rooted in the amygdala, helps us identify and respond to threats and is at the root of pessimism. Optimism, in contrast, is rooted in the nucleus accumbens, the brain's pleasure center, which responds to food, sex and other healthy, good things in life.

'The most resilient people experience a wide range of emotions, both negative and positive,' says Dr. Fox, author of 'Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain.' To enjoy life and feel good, people need roughly four positive emotions to counteract the effect of one negative emotion, she says. People who experience life as drudgery had two or even one positive emotion for every negative one, Dr. Fox has found.

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It's possible to change your cognitive bias by training the brain to focus more on the positive than on the negative. In the lab, Dr. Fox showed subjects pairs of images, one negative (the aftermath of a bomb blast, say) and one either positive (a cute child) or neutral (an office). Participants were asked to point out, as quickly as possible, a small target that appeared immediately after each positive or neutral image -- subliminally requiring them to pay less attention to the negative images, which had no target.

Want to try this at home? Write down, in a journal, the positive and negative things that happen to you each day, whether running into an old friend or missing your bus. Try for four positives for each negative. You'll be training your brain to look for the good even as you acknowledge the bad, Dr. Fox says.

When I asked, I was pleasantly surprised by the number and variety of ways people said they treat themselves with compassion, care and kindness. Anittah Patrick, a 35-year-old online marketing consultant in Philadelphia, celebrated her emergence from a long depression by making herself a valentine. She covered an old picture frame with lace and corks from special bottles of wine, and drew a big heart inside. Using old computer keys, she spelled out the message 'Welc*me Back.' Then she put it on her dressing table, where she sees it every morning. 'It's a nice reminder that I'll get through whatever challenge I'm facing,' she says.

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If Kris Wittenberg, a 45-year-old entrepreneur from Vail, Colo., starts to feel bad, she tells herself 'Stop,' and jots down something she is grateful for. She writes down at least five things at the end of each day. 'You start to see how many negative thoughts you have,' she says.

Kevin Kilpatrick, 55, a college professor and children's author in San Diego, talks to himself -- silently, unless he is in the car -- going over everything positive he has accomplished recently. 'It helps me to hear it out loud, especially from the voice that's usually screaming at me to do better, work harder and whatever else it wants to berate me about,' he says.

Adam Urbanski, 42, who owns a marketing firm and lives in Irvine, Calif., keeps a binder labeled 'My Raving Fans' in his office. Filling it are more than 100 cards and letters from clients and business contacts thanking him for his help. 'All it takes is reading a couple of them to realize that I do make a difference,' Mr. Urbanski says.

He has something he calls his '1-800-DE-FUNK line.' It's not a real number, but a strategy he uses when he is upset. He calls a friend, vents for 60 seconds, then asks her about her problems. 'It's amazing how five minutes of working on someone else's problems makes my own disappear,' he says. Sometimes, as a reality check, he asks himself, 'What Would John Nash Think?' in honor of the mathematician, Nobel laureate and subject of the film 'A Beautiful Mind,' who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.阿

Are things really as dire as he thinks? Is he overreacting? 'It always turns out that whatever keeps me down isn't really as bad as I thought,' Mr. Urbanski says.

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越障



Odd bedfellows
New rows about circumcision unite unlikely friends and foes


ON SEPTEMBER 9th hundreds of Muslims and Jews marched side by side along the streets of Berlin in protest at a new local ordinance requiring circumcision to be carried out in a sterile environment, with “as little pain as possible” (assumed to mean with local anaesthesia) and only with both parents’ consent. For both faiths, that was an attack on religious freedom.

The merits and costs of circumcision are under scrutiny as never before, in rows involving religious leaders, human-rights activists and health professionals. Some stress the medical benefits. Others invoke religious and cultural autonomy, and parents’ rights. Opponents cite risks (including botched cutting). They want ritual infant circumcision banned as a traumatic and anachronistic abuse of babies’ bodies.

A court in another German city, Cologne, ruled three months ago that circumcision of infants and young boys was the illegal infliction of bodily harm. Though the case involved a four-year-old Muslim boy, it aroused fury among Germany’s 120,000 Jews—and others around the world. It was “hard to think of a more appalling decision” Britain’s chief rabbi, Jonathan Sachs, fumed. Angela Merkel, the chancellor, said Germany risked becoming a “laughing stock” if Jews were no longer allowed to practise their rituals. Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and former head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, who has spent her life promoting German-Jewish reconciliation, wondered whether “this country still wants us”.

Roughly a third of the global male population, including half of all American men, are circumcised. In orthodox Judaism the procedure is mandatory eight days after a baby’s birth, carried out by a mohel, a specially trained rabbi, without painkillers. Removing the foreskin is a core part of both identity and faith: a sign of belonging, and of God’s covenant. Though common among some Muslim traditions, the Koran does not mention it and no specific rules govern the practice; most Muslim circumcisions are thought to be carried out by relatives. In many African countries, male circumcision is a rite of passage, sometimes with dire or lethal results.

Now legal worries are making doctors in Germany and elsewhere nervous. In the Austrian province of Vorarlberg the authorities have ordered state hospitals to stop all non-therapeutic circumcision pending legal clarification. The Royal Dutch Medical Association has called for the practice to be discouraged. In Finland a right-wing lawmaker has called for it to be criminalised. In California last year, proposals to let local governments ban circumcision made it onto the ballots in some cities, including San Francisco.

Even in New York, the city’s health board is poised to adopt rules that some Jews complain will allow officials for the first time in American history to dictate details of the ritual. The ordinance will require mohelim to warn parents of the risks involved, including infection, brain damage or even death, in carrying out an ultra-Orthodox practice in which the mohel briefly sucks blood from the baby’s wound before applying a dressing. City officials say that in the past ten years 11 newly circumcised babies contracted herpes from the procedure; two died and two suffered brain damage.

Hassidic rabbis claim the statistics are flawed and that no risks are run. Some 200 say they will ignore the new ordinance. But Rabbi Gerald Skolnik, the head of Rabbinical Assembly, an international association of Conservative rabbis, has praised the city’s move. Suction by mouth, originally designed to prevent illness at a time of little medical knowledge, was not required by Jewish law, he said. The “serious health risk” involved clashed with Judaism’s “pre-eminent concern with life and human health”.


The medical aspects of mainstream circumcision are under review too. Maimonides, a revered Jewish medieval philosopher and physician, wrote of “the wish to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question.” Victorian England believed circumcision stopped boys from masturbating. This, says Toby Lichtig, a British Jewish writer on the subject, was probably what caused the practice to spread to non-Jews in Britain and America.

Modern medicine has reached a somewhat different conclusion. Last month the American Academy of Paediatrics changed its stance, taken in 1999, that the risks of circumcising infants outweighed benefits. Now it recommends that the procedure be covered by insurance (though it stops short of backing routine circumcision of babies). The shift came after research showed that circumcision reduces the risk of urinary-tract infections in the baby’s first year, giving a medical reason for carrying it out as early as possible. In addition, the academy reckons that for every 909 circumcisions one man will be spared penile cancer. In sexually active males, it cuts the transmission of HIV; of HPV (viruses that cause cervical cancer); and of other infections. Furthermore, the research found no harmful effect on male sexual function or satisfaction.

These arguments about health may justify conducting a procedure without the child’s consent. But medicine only partially helps those who defend circumcision as a religious ritual. They also have to justify what critics see as amateur surgery. That could mean dealing with calls for mohelim to undergo medical training (many already do) or licensing. Forswearing the use of painkillers for religious reasons is also a hard sell in secular societies. That the baby is too young to remember what happened is for many child-rights advocates an unpersuasive argument. For all that, many Jews and Muslims will not willingly change the practices of generations.
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fightfor700

谢谢threesu，速度部分很励志啊。
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越障：07:11. 又一次的，没怎么看懂…………

spencerX

thx for sharing. the speed passage really told me how to boost my morale!

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miffyhui

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rhesusmonkey

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kathy0911

感谢楼主！！！


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cocoobear

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puffywhite

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thx~~下午就把最近开心的事记下来 =v=

obstacle: 06''53
recently a city in German banned circumcision and resulted in a large protest by Muslims and Jews.
the trandition has been practiced for a long time but now is discouraged or banned in many cities, rendering Jew's fury.
1/3 male are circumcised and many of them  circumcised several days after birthed without painkiller.
no relevant rules have been made and the religious rite sometime caused babies dead.
many doctors are worrying about this practice now even those in NY.
however, many Jew argue that this religious rite is not harmful to babies while a head of an International organization praised those cities' bans.
modern medicine also claims that the risks of circumcision outweigh the benefits.

sparklelynn

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flyoceanwu

楼主，辛苦了.励志部分确实很有启发,也会学习的.

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越障:6"20 有关于CIRCUMCISIM的话题.