We hear a lot about the psychological toll that traumatic experiences can have on people. Flashbacks, nightmares, lives ruined. Yet there is something about the personality and mindset of others that means they can endure awful adversity, somehow come through relatively unscathed, and in some cases even emerge strengthened by it.
Joh Foster is one of these people. Even before being diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer when she was 31, she’d already suffered a serious sexual assault, an abusive relationship, physical health challenges including a late diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and various mental health issues. Yet she always bounces back. She somehow managed to complete her psychology degree while undergoing chemo and radiotherapy, and raising her son, who was aged four at the time. “Partly it makes me feel sad that I seem to unwittingly attract these kinds of experience,” she says, “but in the main I choose to believe that I am a stronger, more resilient, open, empathetic person because of them.”
Psychologists call this ability to walk through bad experiences ‘resilience’. “It generally means adapting well in the face of chronic or acute adversity,” says neuroscientist Dr Golnaz Tabibnia, who studies the neurological basis of resilience at the University of California, Irvine.
Denne historien er fra October 2020-utgaven av BBC Focus - Science & Technology.
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Denne historien er fra October 2020-utgaven av BBC Focus - Science & Technology.
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Do We Finally Know How the Egyptian Pyramids Were Built? - A number of breakthrough studies are beginning to paint a picture of how these wonders of the world were built, but much of the story still remains a mystery...
A number of breakthrough studies are beginning to paint a picture of how these wonders of the world were built, but much of the story still remains a mystery...How the Egyptian pyramids were built has long been a mystery. Constructed as tombs for the pharaohs over 4,000 years ago, more than 100 of them remain. The largest one, the Great Pyramid of Giza, was originally 147m tall (482ft). It's made up of about 2.3 million stone blocks, each weighing between 2.5 and 15 tonnes, and would have had to be transported to the building site and lifted into place with techniques available at the time. To put this into context, it's akin to lifting a double-decker London bus to the top of St Pauls Cathedral a few million times.
An Artificial Heart Inspired by Plumbing - Mechanical circulation could revolutionise transplant design and reduce waiting lists
Mechanical circulation could revolutionise transplant design and reduce waiting lists. In July, this artificial heart was successfully implanted, for the first time, into a patient with end-stage heart failure. Built by The Texas Heart Institute (THI) and BiVACOR, the replacement organ has been dubbed the Total Artificial Heart (TAH). Although, being an implant rather than transplant, it's designed to temporarily support patients while they wait for a real heart transplant.
CHANGE THE (BODY) CLOCKS
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THE UNEXPECTED RETURN OF PNEUMATIC TUBES
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