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The Afghanistan Memory Home is a growing online archive of testimonies of endurance by ordinary Afghans during years of conflict and repressive rule under the Taliban. The virtual museum is an example of the kind of community-led initiatives that Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has described as "healing spaces" – local sites of nation-building where the traumas and resentments of war are salved through traditional forms of civic engagement based on cultural values, spirituality, and listening. These projects in reconciliation quietly persist almost everywhere people seek freedom from conflict or repression, from Afghanistan to Yemen. They often supplant the work of national transitional justice initiatives stalled by political disagreements or lack of cooperation. They also underscore that "justice isn't just punishment or prosecution and presenting evidence against perpetrators," said Ruben Carranza, an expert on post-conflict community healing. In South Sudan, for instance, a local peace and reconciliation process called Wunlit gave grassroots strength to a 2018 national peace agreement. Led by tribal chiefs and spiritual leaders, the "peace to peace" dialogue defused cattle raids and abductions between the Nuer and Dinka communities. In Iraq, the Ministry of Human Rights has relied on tribal, religious, and civil society leaders to help forge local support for a national dialogue on reconciliation. History has "taught us that relying solely on military force will not bring about lasting peace and stability," Hodan Ali, a Somali presidential policy adviser, wrote. The more durable work of peace involves empowering individuals and communities to tell their own stories – and listen to each other.
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In the final bay of an old, mustard-colored mechanic's garage in the middle of the Hoopa Valley Reservation's main settlement is the headquarters of Acorn Wireless. This small, relatively young Internet service provider is owned and operated by the tribe's public utilities department–an unusual arrangement in the United States, where Internet service is more often the purview of predatory corporations like AT&T and Verizon, whose regional monopolies enable them to charge exorbitant rates for uneven service. Before the launch of Acorn, residents had to choose between a HughesNet satellite connection (more than $100 per month), a bare-bones Starlink kit ($600), unreliable wireless hot spots–or, as was often the case, nothing. Download speeds are nearly 75 percent slower in tribal areas, yet the lowest price for basic Internet service is, on average, 11 percent higher. Acorn's operation is based on the idea that local, democratic ownership can help address the coverage disparity by eliminating the profit motive. Because it is owned by the tribe and administered by the tribe's public utilities department, Acorn can focus on equity instead of revenue. Its premium service package is set at $75 a month, [but] most Acorn customers can get service at no personal cost. Hoopa's experiment in public broadband remains a work in progress, embodying hopes (and facing hurdles) that are shared on tribal lands all over the country.
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As war rages between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, it is hard to envision an end to the conflict. For decades, though, a growing movement of Palestinian and Israeli women has not only envisioned a peaceful coexistence, but also demanded it. Just three days before Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack, thousands of women from two peacebuilding groups gathered at Jerusalem's Tolerance Monument. Israelis from Women Wage Peace carried blue flags, and Palestinians from Women of the Sun flew yellow ones. Members of the two groups traveled to the Dead Sea–believed since ancient times to have healing qualities–and set a table. Women from both sides pulled up chairs as a symbol of a good-faith resumption of negotiations to reach a political solution."We, Palestinian and Israeli mothers, are determined to stop the vicious cycle of bloodshed," reads the preamble to their campaign, the Mother's Call. This campaign ... involved aligning around a single agenda that demands a political solution within a limited time frame. They set the table to show the importance of dialogue and women's involvement in decision-making. Ensuring women's participation isn't about equity or fairness. It's about winning the peace. A quantitative analysis of 156 peace agreements over time ... found that when women are decision-makers–serving as negotiators and mediators–the probability of an agreement lasting at least two years increased by 20 percent.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing the war machine.
Boogying the night away produces meaningful improvements in one's body mass and waist circumference in people who are overweight or obese, a new study found. Dancing was also seen to improve blood pressure, insulin sensitivity, physical fitness, cognitive disorders, hypertension, cardiovascular ailments, diabetes, and mental health–in other words, all the root causes of the non-communicable diseases that kill most people in the West. The researchers believed that dance would be a more ideal form of exercise because it is sustainable–it's a sociable, entertaining way of exercising that participants will enjoy, rather than a drudgery they have to push themselves through. "Dance is effective on fat loss in people overweight and obese and has a significant improvement on body composition and morphology," said Zhang Yaya, a Ph.D. student at Hunan University, China. To get their results, published in the journal PLoS ONE, the team studied data from 646 participants who were overweight and obese across ten different studies. They found that dance is very effective for improving body composition and showed that more creative dance types had the most pronounced body composition improvement when compared with traditional dance. Improvements were also found in overweight children and patients with Parkinson's disease.
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Cryptocurrencies represent the marriage of decentralized networks (what we commonly know as the internet today) and assets like money. [Cryptocurrency] uniquely enables new solutions to otherwise intractable technological and social problems. Users often lose control over their personal information online, either all at once through platform hacks or bit-by-bit in the opaque world of online advertising and data brokers. A major issue is that the business model of big tech firms is advertising, creating an incentive to aggregate data into a single database, creating a "honeypot" for hackers. Blockchains can enable a new form of digital identity document for the web. Using these credentials, users can authenticate for services without having to divulge as much personal information. Traditional payment systems are often slow, costly and inaccessible to many. Cryptocurrencies backed by real-world currencies, dubbed "stablecoins," provide an efficient alternative for global transactions. In 2023, stablecoins accounted for $4.5 trillion of crypto transaction volume on blockchain networks. Even digital payments giant PayPal announced the launch of its stablecoin earlier this year. Traditional humanitarian aid often suffers from inefficiency, lack of transparency and corruption, undermining its effectiveness and trustworthiness. Blockchain offers a solution by providing a transparent, traceable and secure system for humanitarian aid. A recent UN pilot [provided] aid directly to families affected by the war between Russia and Ukraine. The entertainment industry is famously concentrated, causing writers and actors to recently go on strike ... demanding better pay and new contract clauses. Blockchain technology enables more democratic digital economies through non-fungible token (NFTs) marketplaces like Zora, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) like CreatorDAO, allowing creators and artists to take advantage of online marketplaces and earn fair compensation for their contributions.
Note: Watch our latest video on the potential for blockchain to fix government waste and restore financial freedom. Explore more positive stories like this on technology for good.
Northwestern University's Prison Education Program welcomed its inaugural graduating class of incarcerated students on Wednesday, marking the first time a top-ranked U.S. university has awarded degrees to students in prison. Evanston, Illinois-based Northwestern ... runs the program in partnership with Oakton College and the Illinois Department of Corrections. It was a moving commencement ceremony for the 16 graduating men and their loved ones at the Stateville correctional facility in Crest Hill. "I have no words for this, (it's) otherworldly. Coming from where I came from, the things that I've been through and to be here is indescribable," said graduate Michael Broadway after the ceremony. Broadway attained his degree despite several setbacks, including battling stage 4 prostate cancer. "I'm just so proud of him," said his mother Elizabeth. "I really am. He looks so good in that gown." Due to ill health, she had not seen Broadway since ... 2005. Professor Jennifer Lackey is the program's founding director. "Twenty years ago, some of these guys were in rival gangs, and here they are swapping poetry with each other and giving critical engagements on sociology assignments," said Lackey. "The love and growth that we see in the community is really unlike anything I've experienced at the on-campus commencements." Around 100 students are enrolled in the Northwestern program across Stateville and the Logan Correctional Center, a women's prison.
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[Loretta] Ross has worked at the forefront of the movement for reproductive justice. But recently she has become better known for championing "call-in culture," a philosophy that approaches someone's wrongdoing with accountability and, most importantly, love. In the summer of 2020 ... I felt myself crumbling. I called out snide comments by alumni of my college about Black Lives Matter protests, demanded people boycott the college newspaper ... and used Twitter to call out the behavior of fellow students. Each tactic left no room for discussion. Calling in, by contrast, asks us to always be the bigger person, even in the most hateful and painful situations. I ask Ross: Whose well-being are we prioritizing here? And why isn't it our own? Ross tells me about another Black woman who asked the same question. "I'm confused," Ross recalls the woman saying. "I don't want to fall into the stereotype of the angry Black woman. But I feel like if I embrace the calling-in strategies you're talking about, then I'm ... giving a pass to all this injustice. What should I do?" Ross responds with a question of her own: "Well, who are you inside? Go deep inside and find out who you are. What's the emotion that you feel is true to you?" "Inside, I feel like I'm filled with love," the woman replies. "Then, why aren't you leading with your authentic self?" Ross asks her. Accountability and love are not mutually exclusive, Ross explains.
Note: Smith College Professor and civil rights activist Loretta Ross worked with Ku Klux Klan members and practiced restorative justice with incarcerated men convicted or raping and murdering women. Watch Loretta Ross's powerful Ted Talk on simple tools to help shift our culture from fighting each other to working together in the face of polarizing social issues. Explore more positive stories about healing social division and polarization.
They are both bereaved fathers, of young daughters. Somehow, against the odds, both have resisted the urge for vengeance. Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, and Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, were once united by their anger and grief. Elhanan lost his 14-year-old daughter Smadar when she was killed in a Palestinian suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 1997. Aramin's daughter Abir was 10 when she was shot in the head and killed in 2007 by a bullet fired by an Israeli soldier as she stood outside her school with some classmates. Now they are close friends, refer to one another as "my brother" and share the belief that no amount of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians will lead to peace, just more killing in a "circle of blood." With Israel embroiled in a war with Hamas ... "We have the moral authority to tell people this is not the way," said Elhanan, 74, a former solider in the Israeli army whose father was an Auschwitz survivor. Elhanan has said he still struggles to explain his conversion to a "peace warrior." It coincided with a meeting of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families he was invited to by Yitzhak Frankenthal, one of the co-founders of the Parents Circle. "I saw an amazing spectacle. Something completely new to me," Elhanan said. "I saw Arabs getting off the buses, bereaved Palestinian families: men, women and children, coming towards me, greeting me for peace, hugging me and crying with me. ... From that day on ... I got a reason to get out of bed in the morning." For Aramin, the journey to nonviolence began as he was being beaten by Israeli prison guards. One day ... he was stripped naked and beaten until he could hardly stand. "As I was being beaten, I remembered a movie I'd seen the year before about the Holocaust. At the time I'd been happy that Hitler had killed 6 million Jews," Aramin has previously recalled. "But some minutes into the movie, I found myself crying and feeling angry that the Jews were being herded into gas chambers without fighting back," he said. "It was the first time I felt empathy."
Note: War destroys, yet these powerful real-life stories show that we can heal, reimagine better alternatives, and plant the seeds of a global shift in consciousness to transform our world.
Over hundreds of thousands of years, women have developed more sensitive noses (particularly around ovulation and pregnancy), finer hearing at high frequencies, extended colour vision, and longer life expectancy than men by an impressive half decade. Forget plasma exchange and supplementation – entrepreneurs trying to extend human life should be studying women, who comprise around 80% of today's centenarians. American academic and author Cat Bohannon asks how this came to be, tracing defining female features back to our "presumed true ancestors", our Eves as she calls them. Bohannon calls on her astounding disciplinary range to tell this epic tale. Her writing ripples with references from literature, film studies, biochemistry, cognitive science and anthropology. Evolution, as Bohannon emphasises, doesn't care about our contemporary preferences or sensitivities. This emboldens her to confront uncomfortable stereotypes, like whether women's brains have evolved to be inferior to men's (in fact, the sexes have strikingly similar cerebral equipment). The author's parting plea is that we learn more about women and girls. In the UK, unlike the US, there is still no regulation that insists women are included in medical research. Not everyone agrees with the ethical good of extending participation. Might they acknowledge that being specific about people's sex and gender leads to more rigorous and reproducible scientific results?
Note: Read more about author Cat Bohannon's fascinating take on a wide range of discoveries and differences between the male and female body.
At the highest point of Los Tres Miradores, a terrifyingly steep urban settlement with soaring views across Peru's capital, Lima, there is a curious set of large structures that resemble a fleet of ships in the sky. They are so-called "fog catchers." About 40 of these netted devices, made of high density Raschel polyethylene and spanning several meters wide, are lined up atop a misty mound and linked by a network of tubes that lead to storage containers. Home to a population of more than 10 million, Lima is one of the driest cities in the world. [The nonprofit] El Movimiento Peruanos sin Agua has helped install 600 fog catchers across Lima and a total of 2,000 across Peru, including in the regions of Arequipa, Iquitos and Cuzco. According to [founder Abel] Cruz, one man he supported is even able to raise 1,000 chickens thanks to fog catchers. In June, the project received a significant boost when it signed an agreement with the Mayor of Lima to install 10,000 more fog catchers in the hills surrounding the city in the next four years. The municipality ... said the project has the potential to "reforest, create ecological lungs, ecotourism and at the same time provide water for human consumption, for bio-orchards, botanical gardens, washing clothes, utensils and more." In Los Tres Miradores, the 40 fog catchers – which were installed in 2021 – provide enough water for 180 families, whether to bathe, clean, drink (after being filtered at home) or to irrigate crops on small garden patches.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
The psychedelic drug MDMA, also known as ecstasy or molly, has passed another key hurdle on its way to regulatory approval as a treatment for mental illness. A second large clinical trial has found that the drug – in combination with psychotherapy – is effective at treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In June, Australia became the first country to allow physicians to prescribe MDMA for treating psychiatric conditions. MDMA is illegal in the United States and other countries because of the potential for its misuse. But the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) ... has long been developing a proprietary protocol for using MDMA as a treatment for PTSD and other disorders. MAPS has been campaigning for its legalization. In 2021, researchers sponsored by MAPS reported the results of a study in which 90 people received a form of psychotherapy developed by the organization alongside either MDMA or a placebo. After three treatment sessions, 67% of those who received MDMA with therapy no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis, compared with 32% of those who received therapy and a placebo. The results of a second trial ... were similar: 71% of people who received MDMA alongside therapy lost their PTSD diagnosis. A MAPS spokesperson says that the organization plans to seek formal FDA approval before the end of this year, and that because the agency has already designated MDMA as a â€breakthrough therapy' ... it will be evaluated quickly.
Note: Read more about the healing potentials of mind-altering drugs. Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
Hollie Fallick looks over Brading on the Isle of Wight, at a patchwork of fields bordered by ancient oaks. She farms with her best friend, Francesca Cooper. The friends ... are part of a growing global movement practising regenerative agriculture – or regen ag for short. "Regenerative agriculture is nature-friendly farming," says Fallick. "It's thinking about the health of soil, animals, humans and how they all link together." On Nunwell home farm, which sits alongside land the pair manage for the Wildlife Trust and produces meat and eggs for their direct-to-consumer business, chickens peck away alongside belted Galloway cows, nomadic pigs graze on grass as well as kale and bean "cover crops" sown to boost nutrients in the soil. The idea is that by following the basic principles of regen ag – not disturbing the soil, keeping it covered, maintaining living roots, growing a diverse range of crops and the use of grazing animals – they can regenerate tired and depleted soil and produce nutritious food. The work, they argue, is urgent. Up to 40% of the world's land is now degraded by industrial and harmful farming methods, according to the UN. Barnes Edwards, co-director of the Garlic Farm ... argues that regen ag farmers recognise the "hideously negative impact" of badly managed livestock farming. But they also argue "it's the how, not the cow", and say that cows pooing and trampling in diversely planted fields boosts soil health, micronutrients and attracts insects, birds and butterflies.
Note: Don't miss Kiss the Ground, a powerful documentary on the growing regenerative agriculture movement and its power to build global community, reverse the many environmental crises we face, and revive our connection to the natural world. Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
It was once Latin America's largest landfill. Now, a decade after Rio de Janeiro shut it down and redoubled efforts to recover the surrounding expanse of highly polluted swamp, crabs, snails, fish and birds are once again populating the mangrove forest. "If we didn't say this used to be a landfill, people would think it's a farm. The only thing missing is cattle," jokes Elias Gouveia, an engineer with Comlurb, the city's garbage collection agency that is shepherding the plantation project. "This is an environmental lesson that we must learn from: nature is remarkable. If we don't pollute nature, it heals itself." The former landfill is located right by the 148 square miles (383 square kilometers) Guanabara Bay. Between the landfill's inauguration in 1968 and 1996, some 80 million tons of garbage were dumped in the area, polluting the bay and surrounding rivers with trash and runoff. In 1996, the city began implementing measures to limit the levels of pollution in the landfill, starting with treating some of the leachate, the toxic byproduct of mountains of rotting trash. But garbage continued to pile up until 2012, when the city finally shut it down. Mangroves are of particular interest for environmental restoration for their capacity to capture and store large amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide, Gouveia explained. Experts say mangroves can bury even more carbon in the sediment than a tropical rainforest, making it a great tool to fight climate change. Comlurb and its private partner, Statled Brasil, have successfully recovered some 60 hectares.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
A patient who was left almost completely paralyzed from a rare disease is now walking and talking again, after a music therapist prescribed mindful listening to his favorite song every night–in this case, a tune by The Carpenters. 71 year-old Ian Palmer was struck down with Guillain-Barr© syndrome last June, forcing him to spend seven months in a hospital where he was unable to walk or speak properly. The rare condition happens when a person's own immune system attacks their body's motor nerves, causing muscle weakness and sometimes paralysis. But when Ian was transferred to Sue Ryder Neurological Care Centre, a state-of-the-art care unit in Lancashire, England, clinicians used music therapy techniques to overcome 'near total paralysis of his body'. His specialist, Clare, taught him mindfulness techniques using his favorite records–and he began listening to The Carpenters each night. Ian was admittedly skeptical, but he can now walk 2 miles a day (3k) and have conversations with his family after the exercises "opened up" his brain. He's never been very musical, so when Sue Ryder first suggested music therapy he said, 'What good is that going to do?' "I'm a typical Northern man, and I thought, 'What's a girl with a guitar going to do for me–get me to the gym.'" "But it really worked. Clare sat me down and explained the process. I learned that music is very unlike other therapies, as it opens up all of the brain."
Note: Watch a profoundly touching documentary about a man who takes on the broken healthcare system to demonstrate music's ability to heal, combat memory loss, and awaken the soul and the deepest parts of humanity. Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
Entrepreneurs in Jordan have created a sophisticated machine that pulls water from the desert air at a rate that could cure the country's water woes. 1,000 units of their flagship device have already been pre-ordered by the Jordanian government, and the success of the invention has allowed the innovators to attract dozens of promising scientists who can hopefully expand on their success and bring water resources up to speed in the relatively-stable Near Eastern nation. Aquaporo [is] a relatively straightforward, air conditioning-sized machine that can harvest 35 liters of water every day in a desert climate of 20% humidity. Aquaporo CEO Kyle Cordova and engineering director Husam Almassad got their start at Jordan's Royal Scientific Society. Their invention looked a bit like a chest freezer. Inside, rows of nanomaterials formed into tubes and other shapes act like a sieve that filters water out of the air. The physics behind it are much the same as those found in this Classical Indian architectural feature and takes advantage of air's tendency to speed up as it moves through a narrow passageway; called the Venturi Effect. It leaves behind the heavier water vapor, which condenses, drops into a collection apparatus, and is fed then into a reservoir. Research on the efficacy of Aquaporo's invention shows it can achieve levels of water purity greater than Nestle brand bottled water, and collects it from the air at double the rate of existing moisture capture technology.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
No one chooses medical debt. Many Americans who fall ill have no choice but to rack up debt in order to stay healthy or, in some cases, stay alive. For the underinsured and uninsured, incurring debt is inevitable. In a June 2022 survey, 40% percent of adults said they were burdened with medical debt. But progress on this issue is already underway. A recent report found that medical debt has fallen by almost 18% since 2020. This change is no coincidence, rather it points to the real impact that relief programs ... have had on everyday Americans. One such program comes out of my city of Toledo, Ohio. In November, Toledo City Council passed a community-scale medical debt relief initiative in partnership with Lucas County. We partnered with the national charity RIP Medical Debt and devoted $800,000 of Toledo's ARPA funds (and $800,000 of the matched commitment from Lucas county) to medical debt relief. The way it works is simple: RIP Medical Debt purchases debt for pennies on the dollar and then relieves the debt. Our groundbreaking program will wipe out as much as $240 million in medical debt for as many as 41,000 people at a cost of only $1.6 million. There are no administrative hurdles for community members to overcome. Instead, relief recipients are simply sent a letter informing them their debt has been canceled. Two-thirds of Americans (67%) would support the Toledo model for medical debt relief being adopted in their community, including strong majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.
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"Nelson Mandela – I'd never heard the name before in my life," a former prison guard to the South African icon recalls. Christo Brand casts his mind back to 1978, and his first night guarding one of the most influential people of the past century. He was just 19 years old. A sergeant informed him the ageing man sleeping uncomfortably on the floor of the Robben Island jail cell was "a terrorist trying to overthrow your country". Mr Brand ... soon became close with Mandela. He began to spend days and nights with Mandela, who he says remained charming even after some 16 years as prisoner 466/64. In time he saw virtue in the older man's crimes. Reflecting after years at Mandela's side, years in which he saw his friend slowly but surely topple the old order, Mr Brand says: "Mandela was fighting for the freedom of the country, he was prepared to go to the gallows for freedom for his people". "When Mandela was in prison," Mr Brand says, "he studied Martin Luther King and Gandhi, he tried to follow their footsteps and try to bring a change." In his memoir Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela hints at why he kept his prison officer at his side even after being freed. Mr Brand, he writes, "reinforced my belief in the essential humanity even of those who had kept me behind bars". Mandela emerged from prison in 1990 already negotiating with South Africa's leadership for the changes that would see the country's first democratic election a few years later.
Note: Read more on Nelson Mandela's powerful capacity for empathy, and how he served as a striking role model for addressing the hearts, not minds, of people we deem as opponents or oppressors.
Polarization is widely recognized as one of the most pressing issues now facing the United States. Even as polarization has increased in recent years, survey research has consistently shown that many Americans think the nation is more divided than it truly is. Meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans think they dislike each other more than they actually do. Social media companies are often blamed for driving greater polarization by virtue of the way they segment political audiences and personalize recommendations in line with their users' existing beliefs and preferences. Given their scale and reach, however, they are also uniquely positioned to help reduce polarization. Jamie Settle's work demonstrates, through a combination of surveys and experiments, that affective polarization is likely to rise when social media users encounter content with partisan cues, even if the content is not explicitly political. A 2020 study by Hunt Allcott and colleagues echoes these concerns. The authors asked some participants to refrain from using Facebook for four weeks. Afterward, these participants reported holding less polarized political views than those who had not been asked to refrain from using Facebook. Deactivating Facebook also made people less hostile toward "the other party." When people interact with someone from their social "outgroup," they often come to view that outgroup in a more favorable light. Spreading more examples of positive intergroup contact ... could go a long way.
Note: Read the full article to explore what social media platforms can do to reduce polarization. For more, read how the people of Taiwan created an online space for debate where politicians can interact with citizens in ways that foreground consensus, and not division.
Correctional systems throughout much of Scandinavia are guided by a general set of philosophical principles. In Norway, core values of safety, transparency and innovation are considered fundamental to the idea of creating normality in prison, the feeling that life as part of a community continues. Incarcerated people can wear their own clothes, work in jobs that prepare them for employment and cook their own meals. Cells in Norway are also for a single person – not multiple people, as in most cases in the U.S. Importantly, correctional officers have at least a two-year, university-level education and are directly involved in rehabilitation and planning for the incarcerated person's re-entry into the world outside of prison. In the U.S., most officers receive just a few weeks of training. Recidivism rates in Scandinavia are low. In Norway ... less than half of people released from prison are rearrested after three years. In Pennsylvania, that figure is closer to 70%. In State Correctional Institution Chester, known as SCI Chester, a medium-security prison located just outside of Philadelphia, a correctional officer-guided team has worked since 2018 to incorporate Scandinavian penal principles into its own institution. Six men in SCI Chester – each sentenced to life in prison – were selected to participate. They then moved on to the new housing unit, which had come to be known as "Little Scandinavia." SCI Chester shows that it is, in fact, possible to adapt Scandinavian-style penal philosophies.
Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
Our brains are made up of billions of cells that work together to create our every ability. Wipe out those cells, through a stroke or other brain trauma, and you may no longer be able to read, but you might still be able to speak, sing or write. It's all about where the brain is damaged – which systems of cells are traumatized and which are not. The three-pound mass of neurological tissue that we call the brain has the power not only to create every ability we have but also to manifest our perception of reality. Our brains have a two-pronged defense mechanism that kicks in when brain trauma occurs. Not only are we able to grow some new neurons – a process called neurogenesis – especially in the sites where physical trauma has occurred, our brain cells are capable of neuroplasticity, which means they can rearrange which other neurons they are in communication with. That's why, whenever I meet someone who has experienced a brain trauma of any sort, I don't focus on what abilities that person has lost, but rather I marvel at what insights that person might have gained because of the experience. Few things have greater impact on how people choose to live their lives than neurological trauma or near-death experiences. And when we find ourselves to be neurologically impaired, we become vulnerable and need others to support us rather than criticize or judge us. I became a much more compassionate and empathetic person following my stroke and recovery. Perhaps I am not the only one.
Note: The above was written by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist and the author of "My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey." Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
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