Stella

It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m... See more

Why Isn’t Art Counted Among Necessities?

The answer might be simple: we’ve forgotten. Art is so embedded into the fabric of life that we no longer see it. It’s in the curves of a chair, the logo on a soup can, the story behind a song. But because we don’t always call it “art,” we forget to recognize it as such.

Worse, we’ve been conditioned to see... See more

Some studies are beginning to show that burnt-out patients may have not only psychological burnout, but also physiological burnout: a flattened cortisol response and inability to respond to any stress with even a slight burst of cortisol. In other words, chronic unrelenting stress can change the stress response itself. And it can change other... See more

The nervous system and the hormonal stress response react to a stimulus in milliseconds, seconds, or minutes. The immune system takes parts of hours or days. It takes much longer than two minutes for immune cells to mobilize and respond to an invader, so it is unlikely that a single, even powerful, short-lived stress on the order of moments could

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Every minute of the day and night we feel thousands of sensations that might trigger a positive emotion such as happiness, or a negative emotion such as sadness, or no emotion at all: a trace of perfume, a light touch, a fleeting shadow, a strain of music. And there are thousands of physiological responses, such as palpitations or sweating, that

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By parsing these chemical intermediaries, we can begin to understand the biological underpinnings of how emotions affect diseases...

The same parts of the brain that control the stress response ... play an important role in susceptibility and resistance to inflammatory diseases such as arthritis. And since it is these parts of the brain that also

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Nostalgia need not be conservative, stultifying or sentimental. Rather, expressions of nostalgia are one way we communicate a desire for the past, dissatisfaction about the present, and our visions for the future. My version of nostalgia will be joyful, creative and progressive.

Victor Hugo once remarked, “Everything had already been said, but nobody listened, so it had to be said again” —and his wise words bear repeating.