http://www.neuroscientistnews.com/research-news/first-direct-evidence-ultra-fast-responses-human-amygdala-fear

First direct evidence for ultra-fast responses in human amygdala to fear

June 15, 2016 | by Editor

Brain image with amygdala (blue) and hippocampus (yellow). Credit: Stephan Moratti

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/15/technology/facebook-offers-tools-for-those-who-fear-a-friend-may-be-suicidal.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0

MENLO PARK, Calif. When Carrie Simmons opened her Facebook app one day in late 2014, she saw a status update from a high school friend she had not seen in years that alarmed her. It read like a suicide note.

“Thank you for everyone who tried to help me,” Ms. Simmons’s friend, whom she declined to name, wrote.

Ms. Simmons immediately called a mutual friend, a police officer, who reached out to the local authorities in their friend’s town in California. There, the police found the friend in a parked car with a pistol in his lap. He did not pull the trigger and is alive today.

“If I hadn’t already been educated in suicide prevention or hadn’t seen the post on Facebook, I don’t know that I would have picked up the phone and known to call,” said Ms. Simmons, who is a real estate broker in Seattle.

With more than 1.65 billion members worldwide posting regularly about their behavior, Facebook is planning to take a more direct role in stopping suicide. On Tuesday, in the biggest step by a major technology company to incorporate suicide prevention tools into its platform, the social network introduced mechanisms and processes to make it easier for people to help friends who post messages about suicide or self-harm. With the new features, people can flag friends’ posts that they deem suicidal; the posts will be reviewed by a team at the social network that will then provide language to communicate with the person who is at risk, as well as information on suicide prevention.

The timing coincides with a surge in suicide rates in the United States to a 30-year high. The increase has been particularly steep among women and middle-aged Americans, reflecting widespread desperation. Last year, President Obama declared a World Suicide Prevention Day in September, calling on people to recognize mental health issues early and to reach out to support one another.

Facebook has long thrust itself into major societal debates because of its vast reach and the enormous diversity of human behavior it sees. About 72 percent of Americans — and 77 percent of American women — use Facebook, according to a 2015 study by Pew Research.

Yet Facebook is walking a tightrope, trying to explore its role as an arbiter of social change without upsetting the hundreds of millions of people who regularly use its services. Some of the suicide prevention tools may trouble groups that have concerns about digital privacy. Many of those groups have already become wary of what they see as Facebook’s overreach in people’s personal lives.

In October 2014, the company was embroiled in a scandal after it emerged that Facebook researchers used its news feed feature to try to manipulate the emotions of its users. The incident resulted in an overhaul of its user research methodology. Last month, Facebook grappled with accusations of political bias and fears about how much it could influence the views of its members.

“The company really has to walk a fine line here,” said Dr. Jennifer Stuber, an associate professor at the University of Washington and the faculty director of Forefront, a suicide prevention organization. “They don’t want to be perceived as ‘Big Brother-ish,’ because people are not expecting Facebook to be monitoring their posts.”

Facebook said it had a role to play in helping its users to help one another. About a third of the posts shared on the site include some form of negative feelings, according to a study released in February by the company’s researchers. Posts with negative associations tended to receive longer, more empathetic comments from Facebook friends, the company said.

“Given that Facebook is the place you’re connected to friends and family, it seemed like a natural fit,” said Dr. Jennifer Guadagno, a researcher at Facebook who is leading the suicide prevention project. Facebook has a team of more than a dozen engineers and researchers dedicated to the project.

Facebook’s new suicide prevention tools start with a drop-down menu that lets people report posts, a feature that was previously available only to some English-speaking users. People across the world can now flag a message as one that could raise concern about suicide or self-harm; those posts will then come to the attention of Facebook’s global community operations team, a group of hundreds of people around the world who monitor flagged posts 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Posts flagged as potential self-harm notes are to be expedited and reviewed more quickly by the team members, who also examine posts that Facebook users have reported as objectionable. Community operations team members who evaluate potentially suicidal content are given special training, Facebook said.

The person reporting a suicide note is given a menu of options, including the ability to send a Facebook message directly to the friend in distress or to a mutual friend to coordinate help. Facebook will provide a suggested text message to send, or users can fill in their own words.

“People really want to help, but often they just don’t know what to say, what to do or how to help their friends,” said Vanessa Callison-Burch, a Facebook product manager working on the project. Users are also provided with a list of resources, including help lines and suicide prevention material, that they can click through to gain access.

If Facebook evaluators believe a post is a call for help or a distress signal, the person whose message was reported will be presented with a similar list of options the next time that person logs into Facebook and view the news feed, including tips and resources on what to do if the person feels suicidal. Such people are also prompted to reach out to friends who may be able to support them on Facebook.

The company said its work on suicide prevention started about 10 years ago, after a number of suicides in Palo Alto, Calif., the former location of Facebook’s headquarters and the city in which Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, lives. Palo Alto’s two public high schools have suicide rates between four and five times the national average.

Over the past year, Facebook has conducted a small test with suicide prevention tools in some countries, in conjunction with outside entities likeForefront, NowMattersNow.org and Save.org, a group of suicide prevention organizations. The company declined to share data on the early results.

“They’ve been very reluctant to release data on the project, even to partners like us, because of the privacy issues,” said Dr. Stuber of the University of Washington.

Facebook is becoming more forthcoming on other internal practices and how it conducts user research. On Tuesday, in a move separate from the suicide prevention tools, Facebook laid out its research review methods in a study conducted by two of its researchers. The company is hoping that the study, which is being published in Washington and Lee Law Review, will be used by other academics to help with their research methodologies.

Some nonprofit organizations and researchers that have pushed Facebook to be more aggressive in its suicide prevention efforts hope the changes push other tech giants to act similarly.

“We’re losing more people to suicide than breast cancer, car accidents, homicides,” said Dr. Dan Reidenberg, the executive director of Save.org. “We’d be fortunate for other companies to get on the bandwagon.”

My beloved uncle.

My handsome uncle.

A more recent picture of my uncle and aunt ❤ ❤

My cousin, my baby brother and me.

Me in the blue dress and my cousin in pants and brown jacket 🙂

After my mom got divorced in 1965, I was just about 5 years old and my baby brother Farooq was not even 1 years old yet. After her divorce from my father, we went and lived with my aunt (who was my mother’s oldest sister and her husband) my uncle and their two children. My uncle, what can I say about him? He took me and my brother in just as if we were his own children. He singled out my brother, who was very traumatized by all the divorce proceedings and showered him with love. He took him on his daily walks, my brother rode on his shoulders 🙂 He bought him ice cream cones and jokingly told my brother not to say anything to us other children, and the first thing my brother did when they came back was say he’d had ice cream! :-)) He favored my little brother and showered him with love and affection, as well as all of the three of us too. We played Scrabble with him, I, still to this day, love playing Scrabble because of our times with my uncle. He took us on long walks with him, he took us to work (he was a journalist) and as a reward for sitting quietly while he worked, he would take us to Lintott’s, a bakery where we would get our pick of delicious pastries. The first time I realized how handsome he was was when I was 13 years old and my 14 year old best friend saw him and exclaimed “Your uncle is so extremely handsome!” And I looked at him with new eyes and thought, Oh yeah, he is handsome! To me, until that day, he had simply been my extremely loving uncle… 🙂

I think there was no better man than the tall, dashingly handsome, über loving, super intellectual uncle that we were fortunate enough to have. Dearest Amma Begum, thank you for marrying him!

He is 89 years old now and has dementia, and lately his health has been failing, he was in the hospital for a few days. He is home now, but not doing very well at the moment. My heart is hurting to think of my dearest uncle not doing well. I love him very dearly and hope he will recover completely, and soon. Earlier this year when we were in Pakistan, I told everyones that we will be back to celebrate my uncle’s 90th birthday in January of 2017. May my words be heard by the gods and come to pass.

I have a mental illness, but I am so anti-gun that no matter what state I was in, as in geographical or mental, I would not be one to pick up a gun, EVER, to… to what? To take out my anger? To “solve” a problem? No I would not do it. But a lot of people would and have, and the fact that it is so easy to get a gun in the US only contributes to any other problem. Domestic violence, being a homophobe, being in a mentally unstable state, anger issues, suicide, crime. Any and all of the above problems without a gun are still problems, but WITH a gun, they are deadly. Please watch the video below and just have a look at how big the problem is here in the US. A problem that is perplexing, frustrating and deadly.

http://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417/gun-violence-united-states-america

Come together right now over me! Ameen/Amen.

What a gorgeous voice, what a sweet personality and flirting with Heidi Klum like a master! Hahaha, loved, loved, loved it!

Wow! This is fascinating! Stem cells are cells that have not differentiated and are capable of becoming any other cell in our body. They studied all the tissues and cells of this incredibly healthy and once the oldest woman on earth. What did they see? Stem cells become old and die and then seemingly we die. Hmmm, should be saving our stem cells for our later years? Perhaps, but according to this article, it will only work for our blood, for regenerating blood cells, not other organs.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25458-blood-of-worlds-oldest-woman-hints-at-limits-of-life/?utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=SOC&utm_campaign=hoot&cmpid=SOC%7CNSNS%7C2016-GLOBAL-hootDeath is the one certainty in life – a pioneering analysis of blood from one of the world’s oldest and healthiest women has given clues to why it happens.
Born in 1890, Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper was at one point the oldest woman in the world. She was also remarkable for her health, with crystal-clear cognition until she was close to death, and a blood circulatory system free of disease. When she died in 2005, she bequeathed her body to science, with the full support of her living relatives that any outcomes of scientific analysis – as well as her name – be made public.
Researchers have now examined her blood and other tissues to see how they were affected by age.
What they found suggests, as we could perhaps expect, that our lifespan might ultimately be limited by the capacity for stem cells to keep replenishing tissues day in day out. Once the stem cells reach a state of exhaustion that imposes a limit on their own lifespan, they themselves gradually die out and steadily diminish the body’s capacity to keep regenerating vital tissues and cells, such as blood.
Two Little Cells

In van Andel-Schipper’s case, it seemed that in the twilight of her life, about two-thirds of the white blood cells remaining in her body at death originated from just two stem cells, implying that most or all of the blood stem cells she started life with had already burned out and died.

“Is there a limit to the number of stem cell divisions, and does that imply that there’s a limit to human life?” asks Henne Holstege of the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, who headed the research team. “Or can you get round that by replenishment with cells saved from earlier in your life?” she says.
The other evidence for the stem cell fatigue came from observations that van Andel-Schipper’s white blood cells had drastically worn-down telomeres – the protective tips on chromosomes that burn down like wicks each time a cell divides. On average, the telomeres on the white blood cells were 17 times shorter than those on brain cells, which hardly replicate at all throughout life.
The team could establish the number of white blood cell-generating stem cells by studying the pattern of mutations found within the blood cells. The pattern was so similar in all cells that the researchers could conclude that they all came from one of two closely related “mother” stem cells.
Point of exhaustion
“It’s estimated that we’re born with around 20,000 blood stem cells, and at any one time, around 1000 are simultaneously active to replenish blood,” says Holstege. During life, the number of active stem cells shrinks, she says, and their telomeres shorten to the point at which they die – a point called stem-cell exhaustion.

Holstege says the other remarkable finding was that the mutations within the blood cells were harmless – all resulted from mistaken replication of DNA during van Andel-Schipper’s life as the “mother” blood stem cells multiplied to provide clones from which blood was repeatedly replenished.
She says this is the first time patterns of lifetime “somatic” mutations have been studied in such an old and such a healthy person. The absence of mutations posing dangers of disease and cancer suggest that van Andel-Schipper had a superior system for repairing or aborting cells with dangerous mutations.
Opportunity in mutation
The study is novel because it is the first to investigate the accumulation of somatic mutations within the tissues of an old individual, says Chris Tyler-Smith of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK. “This contrasts to the germ-line mutations [present at birth] measured in previous studies,” he says.

“When there is mutation, there’s an opportunity for selection and some somatic mutations lead to cancer,” says Tyler-Smith. “Now we see the range of somatic mutations in normal, non-cancerous tissues like blood, so we can start to think about the health consequences.”
Tantalisingly, Holstege says the results raise the possibility of rejuvenating ageing bodies with injections of stem cells saved from birth or early life. These stem cells would be substantially free of mutations and have full-length telomeres. “If I took a sample now and gave it back to myself when I’m older, I would have long telomeres again – although it might only be possible with blood, not other tissues,” she says.
Next, Holstege hopes to hunt for clues to genes that protect against Alzheimer’s disease by comparing van Andel-Schipper’s genome to that of people who succumb abnormally early to the disease.

All You Need Is Love And Gun Control!

No matter how much hate is in someone’s heart, no matter how disturbed they are and how much they want to do violence, UNLESS guns and machine guns are available, how can they do anything? Could this man named Mateen have killed 49 people if he had not been able to stride into a gun store and purchase a machine gun? The answer is NO!

Despite being on an FBI list for terrorists, despite beating his wife for not doing the laundry, despite his coworker reporting him for hate speech and violent thoughts, he could walk into a store and legally purchase a weapon! Incredible! Why? Because the NRA made sure that even a person on a list as a suspected terrorist is able to purchase guns.

Read the article below to see how much more common gun deaths are in the US as compared to other civilized Western countries. Why? Lack of gun control because of the NRA lobby. This needs to change, here and now!

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/14/upshot/compare-these-gun-death-rates-the-us-is-in-a-different-world.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=span-abc-region&region=span-abc-region&WT.nav=span-abc-region&_r=0

“Gun homicides are a common cause of death in the United States, killing about as many people as car crashes (not counting van, truck, motorcycle or bus accidents). Some cases command our attention more than others, of course. Counting mass shootings that make headlines and the thousands of Americans murdered one or a few at a time, gunshot homicides totaled 11,961 in 2014, according to the F.B.I.

This level of violence makes the United States an extreme outlier when measured against the experience of other advanced countries.”

This little tiger cub was screaming till I put my arms around her!

I didn’t ask to be abandoned, I didn’t ask for abandonment issues, but I do accept the challenge of overcoming them. I’ve been reading extensively and trying to put all that I learn into practice. Below are a few of the extremely positive passages in some of the webpages and websites I’ve been reading. I have been trying to get over these issues since the beginning of this year and I do believe I’ve made great strides. Before January of this year, I wasn’t even aware that I had abandonment issues and that I could be re-triggered. But now I know, and knowledge is power. I have always stood tall and strong even though I’ve been through some pretty hellish things. I have never given up and I do not intend to give up now 🙂 With my customary strength and persistence, I am sure I will overcome these abandonment issues and their re-triggering. As I said, since I realized this is something that is happening in January, I have made progress. I don’t react or get re-triggered as much I did when I was unaware that it was happening. Now even if I do get re-triggered, it is for a short time and recovery back to my normal self is quicker. I firmly believe that total recovery is not only possible, but forthcoming. So dear readers, if you are suffering from this issue as well, I wish you and myself all the luck and send you and myself all the positive thoughts I am able to send. Godspeed and good luck, dear readers.

11)The power is within you to turn this experience into an opportunity for profound positive personal growth. Vow to benefit from abandonment rather than be diminished by it. The abandonment recovery program helps you find greater life and love than before. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-anderson/how-i-survived-abandonmen_b_6598014.html

A therapist will help overcome fears of abandonment by changing the emotional reaction associated with abandonment. This can help the person separate the past from present day and work toward correcting their negative and false beliefs. It also helps the person by teaching him or her to develop more positive and realistic reactions to events in his or her life.

True healing from abandonment occurs when a person who has fears of abandonment leans that the fear is in the past and cannot control the present-day relationships providing he or she maintains healthy perspectives about life. 

Because of a lack of validation and security as a child, the abandonment issues grow. However, by addressing these feelings, it is possible to break the cycle. http://www.bandbacktogether.com/abandonment-resources/

A therapist or counselor can often help a person learn to separate fears of the past from the reality of the present. It may be possible for individuals to achieve cognitive transformation through this process and thus develop more positive reactions and realistic expectations for their lives. When individuals are able to recognize their fears are rooted in the past, they can often begin to develop the ability to minimize the way fear controls their emotional responses to current relationships and events and achieve healing from past experiences. 

Many types of therapy, from eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) to dialectical behavior therapy, can address abandonment issues. Psychotherapy for abandonment often focuses on helping a person address and tend, in a self-compassionate way, to the parts of the self holding on to the memories and feelings associated with abandonment trauma. This form of self-exploration might include distinguishing the vulnerable, helpless child of the past from the stronger, more capable adult. Simply pursuing treatment with an attentive, empathic therapist can often help soothe a person’s abandonment fears.

Abandonment issues can be overwhelming, but individuals challenged by these fears can frequently learn to manage them in ways that are healthy and productive. Methods of addressing and overcoming abandonment issues might include:

• Exploring ways to care for the self
• Developing the ability to access a safe and calm “center” when fears threaten one’s sense of safety or security
• Learning to successfully communicate needs in intimate relationships
• Building a sense of trust in others

http://www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/issues/abandonment

I got these pictures from a brilliant post I read from Rosiesmrtiepants: https://rosiesmrtiepants.wordpress.com/2016/06/08/the-very-real-possibility-of-happiness-contentment-almost-joy-and-semi-stability/

So much wisdom and strength in these simple pictures. They inspired me and reminded me that I am strong and continue to grow and change, despite setbacks. I am truly hopeful that I learn and change and daily become a better version of me, that’s pretty incredible! And letting go is the way to freedom and peace of mind.

You could be re-triggered, things may look bleak in your re-triggered state, then it goes away, and you realize that you over reacted due to the triggered emotions. You use your strength to get back up, you use your experience to help you grow and learn how to stay calm and peaceful. Every time it happens, the intensity of the negative emotions is less and less severe, until one day, it doesn’t happen anymore. You are free of those old emotions that sabotage your life and happiness and peace. Your strength pulls you through, your intellect and logic save you and your hope lets you go on. And letting go of negative emotions, of anything that disturbs your peace allows you to live in happiness, peace and normalcy! Yes, it happens, it really does! Sometimes it happens so quickly that you are surprised by it, but it’s the knowing that the re-triggering has happened, it’s the knowing that saves you.

So, just know you are strong and be proud of your strength as you grow, have a hopeful mindset, and let go. Brilliant advice if you want to be happy, I am taking it 🙂