Susan Cole, Advocate for Traumatized Children, Dies at 72
Attorney Susan Cole recognized the toll that trauma can take on children:
She began a decades-long examination of the links between education and childhood trauma, using her accumulating experience to identify “broader systemic failures that could not be addressed on a case-by-case basis,” as her husband, David Eisen, put it.
Constant stress and fear were more than just a distraction for students; their effect, she learned, was neurological, activating the fight-or-flight survival instinct permanently.
The 66 Most ’60s Things About 1966
“The year 1966 found America at a crossroads, as the nation faced war abroad and turmoil at home.”
To refresh your memory about this pivotal year in American history, here’s a “look at the music, movies, TV shows, headline-grabbing news stories and pop culture events of 1966.”
TV Viewing Habits in Midlife Could Exacerbate Cognitive Decline
This is probably not the news most of us want to hear after 15 months of sitting on the couch watching TV: “new research shows that middle-aged to older adults reporting high levels of television-viewing experience greater cognitive decline.”
Here are suggestions for changing TV-viewing habits into something that will stimulate the brain:
When looking for something to scratch the TV itch, opt for documentaries on subjects you’re interested in, YouTube videos that teach you something new or game shows that test your knowledge. These provide more stimulation than, say, a reality show or action movie.
The Classicist Who Killed Homer
Most of us learned a long time ago that the Iliad and the Odyssey were originally oral epic poems composed by a blind poet named Homer. Here Adam Kirsch tells the fascinating story of how, in the early 1930s, “a young Harvard professor named Milman Parry published two papers, in the journal Harvard Studies in Classical Philology” that proved that the Homeric epics “were products of an oral tradition, performed by generations of anonymous Greek bards who gradually shaped them into the epics we know today.”
Part of Parry’s research included traveling to remote areas in Yugoslavia to record “local singers, whose improvised songs offered clues about how the Homeric epics might have been performed millennia earlier.”
‘We’re Going to Publish’
“An Oral History of the Pentagon Papers”
“This article is part of a special report on the 50th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers.”
Many People Have a Vivid ‘Mind’s Eye,’ While Others Have None at All
My husband says that he doesn’t have a mind’s eye, that he cannot picture things in his head.
Here’s a story of scientists studying both ends of the spectrum of the ability to conjure up pictures of objects or people in their imagination. The lack of this ability is called aphantasia, and the condition of experiencing extraordinarily strong mental imagery is called hyperphantasia.
“This is not a disorder as far as I can see,” said Dr. Zeman, a cognitive scientist at the University of Exeter in Britain. “It’s an intriguing variation in human experience.”
© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown
Retreading for Retirement 