PCW: #Creative Hall of #Fame: Emma Lazarus; #Poet (1849-1887)

THE  NEW COLOSSUS

Emma Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus,” the poem for which she is best-known today, in 1883. It was created to sell at an auction to raise money to build the pedestal on which the Statue of Liberty would stand in New York harbor. (Although the statue was a gift from the people of France, American contributors paid for the platform.)

"Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Biography

Synopsis

Emma Lazarus was born on July 22, 1849 into a wealthy New York family that was descended from Sephardic Jewish Americans. She displayed an early talent for poetry, and attracted the notice of Ralph Waldo Emerson with her first book. Her poem "The New Colossus" was chosen to be displayed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. It features the famous lines "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

Early Life

Emma Lazarus was born on July 22, 1849 in New York City. She was the fourth of seven children born to Moses and Esther Nathan Lazarus. The family was descended from early Jewish settlers in America. Of Portuguese descent, the family was wealthy, earning its fortune in the sugar refining business. Emma received a classical education and the family moved in high society, which included owing a mansion in Newport, Rhode Island.

Poet & Translator

Emma’s parents supported her interest in poetry. In 1866, her father published a book of her poetry called Poems and Translations Written Between the Ages of Fourteen and Seventeen. Two years later, Emma sent her writing to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was sufficiently impressed to become her mentor. During her lifetime, Emma met with other famous writers, including Robert Browning, William Morris, and Henry James.

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#Harvard Business: What Makes #Entrepreneurs #Burn-Out?

 by Eva de Mol and 

Jeff Pollack and 

Violet T. Ho

By now we are all familiar with the risks of burnout. Research shows that it leads to work-related issues such as job dissatisfaction, absenteeism, inefficient decision making, and turnover, as well as health-related issues such as depression, heart disease, and even death. Research also reveals some of the common causes of burnout, such as lack of autonomy, engagement, motivation, and passion.

But since much of this research has looked at employees in large organizations, we know less about what burnout looks like for other types of workers. We wanted to study a group that seems to be more susceptible to burnout: entrepreneurs.

Some evidence suggests that entrepreneurs are more at risk of burnout because they tend to be extremely passionate about work and more socially isolated, have limited safety nets, and operate in high uncertainty. This has important consequences for economic growth — entrepreneurial firm failure and bankruptcy is likely to contribute significantly to the $300 billion that burnout costs the U.S. annually.

We conducted a study to see what factors lead to greater burnout among entrepreneurs. Specifically, we looked at whether job passion, job fit, and destiny beliefs (the belief that a successful entrepreneurial career is “meant to be”) make entrepreneurs more likely or less likely to experience burnout. These factors have been shown to affect important outcomes such as entrepreneurial stress and venture performance.

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How #Language Shapes Our Brains...and Our #Lives

Language and communication are as vital as food and water. We communicate to exchange information, build relationships, and create art. In this Spotlight feature, we look at how language manifests in the brain, and how it shapes our daily lives.

By Maria Cohut

We are all born within a language, so to speak, and that typically becomes our mother tongue.

Along the way, we may pick up one or more extra languages, which bring with them the potential to unlock different cultures and experiences.

Language is a complex topic, interwoven with issues of identity, rhetoric, and art.

As author Jhumpa Lahiri notes meditatively in the novel The Lowlands, "Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece — just different elements of belonging and not-belonging."

But when did our ancestors first develop spoken language, what are the brain's "language centers," and how does multilingualism impact our mental processes?

We will look at these questions, and more, in this Spotlight feature about language and the brain.

1. What makes human language special?

When did spoken language first emerge as a tool of communication, and how is it different from the way in which other animals communicate?

As Prof. Mark Pagel, at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, explains in a "question and answer" feature for BMC Biology, human language is quite a unique phenomenon in the animal kingdom.

While other animals do have their own codes for communication — to indicate, for instance, the presence of danger, a willingness to mate, or the presence of food — such communications are typically "repetitive instrumental acts" that lack a formal structure of the kind that humans use when they utter sentences.

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How Language Affects Thinking

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Want a Better #Brain? Learn #Music.

Want to 'train your brain'? Forget apps, learn a musical instrument

Musical training can have a dramatic impact on your brain’s structure, enhancing your memory, spatial reasoning and language skills 

The multimillion dollar brain training industry is under attack. In October 2014, a group of over 100 eminent neuroscientists and psychologists wrote an open letter warning that “claims promoting brain games are frequently exaggerated and at times misleading”. Earlier this year, industry giant Lumosity was fined $2m, and ordered to refund thousands of customers who were duped by false claims that the company’s products improve general mental abilities and slow the progression of age-related decline in mental abilities. And a recent reviewexamining studies purporting to show the benefits of such products found “little evidence ... that training improves improves everyday cognitive performance”.

While brain training games and apps may not live up to their hype, it is well established that certain other activities and lifestyle choices can have neurological benefits that promote overall brain health and may help to keep the mind sharp as we get older. One of these is musical training. Research shows that learning to play a musical instrument is beneficial for children and adults alike, and may even be helpful to patients recovering from brain injuries.

Playing a musical instrument is a rich and complex experience that involves integrating information from the senses of vision, hearing, and touch, as well as fine movements, and learning to do so can induce long-lasting changes in the brain. Professional musicians are highly skilled performers who spend years training, and they provide a natural laboratory in which neuroscientists can study how such changes – referred to as experience-dependent plasticity– occur across their lifespan.

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The #Science Behind #Yoga and #Stress

What does bending your body into yoga poses do to your brain chemistry and nerve connections?

By Dr M Storoni MD PhD 

There are two functional parts of the brain that play a key role in stress. These serve the functions of emotion and cognitive function. So I am calling them the ’emotional’ brain (amygdala and its connections and medial forebrain structures including the medial prefrontal cortex) and the ‘logical’ brain (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, other parts of the prefrontal cortex, parts of the cingulate cortex and parts of the hippocampus).

The emotional brain is able to initiate a ‘stress response’ via the sympathetic nervous system which culminates in adrenaline and cortisol racing through our circulation.The logical brain is always trying to ‘turn-off’ this stress response and it is also trying to restrain the emotional brain. The stronger our logical brain, the better it becomes at doing these two things. When the stress response is ‘turned off’, our parasympathetic nervous system signal is ‘turned on’. This signal ‘relaxes’ the body. So a strong logical brain goes hand in hand with relaxation.

“Everytime we are holding a posture our logical brain is being activated”

The stress response and ‘relaxing’ signals travel through the body along a particular route and parts of this route have little ‘switches’ which we can physically manipulate to turn the signals on or off. The neck is an example of where such switches are located (by the carotid arteries).

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The #limits of artificial intelligence.- #AI

When large amounts of data and many factors come together, artificial intelligence is superior to human intelligence. However, only humans can think logically and distinguish between useful and worthless AI advice.

  Marc Botha

“Teach us to think that we must die”

this is what the Luther Bible from 1912 says in Psalm 90. American tech stars such as Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos or the investor legend Peter Thiel do not believe in such humility, but instead, let billions of dollars go to decipher the mystery of why people age and die.

If the three business leaders blindly believed the computer, there would be a more pleasant way for them to at least postpone death: drink more champagne. Because the analysis of many data and influencing factors provides the clear connection that with increasing champagne consumption the life expectancy rises.

Although it is not well known how much Dom Pérignon the billionaires drink per week. What is certain, however, is that each of them ignores this connection. For it is not the supposedly protective effect of sparkling wine, but the prosperity of its drinkers, which promotes the consumption of the noble drink, paired with better health care, that makes the notorious friends of the sparkling wine live longer.

This champagne trap, as I call it, is characteristic of the misunderstandings and myths that circulate about artificial intelligence (AI), but also of its strengths and benefits that man can take advantage of. For artificial intelligence is nothing more than a very specific form of learning, namely machine learning.

This learning is limited and unlimited at the same time. Unlimited, because machine learning is vastly superior to the physical learning of the human brain, as more and more powerful computers can perform more and more operations in tiny fractions of a second. Thus, machine thinking provides people with patterns that they can never recognize or only recognize in an unacceptably long time. However, machine thinking is limited because a computer only detects patterns. The sense and logic behind it — see the champagne trap — can only be recognized by humans.

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#BrainCare: #Exercise Gives Older Men a Better #Brain Boost

Summary: According to a new study, men have a stronger positive correlation between cardiorespiratory fitness and brain function as they age.

Source: American Physiological Society.

Cardiorespiratory fitness is the measure of how much–and how well–oxygen is delivered to the muscles during exercise. Fitness level has also been associated with changes in the brain’s nerve-rich tissue, called gray matter, and better cognitive function in later life. Previous studies have also found cardiorespiratory fitness to be related to how the brain functions during periods of rest. Nerve connectivity in the brain during rest changes with age. These changes can negatively affect cognitive function. However, “the neural basis of sex differences in the relationship between fitness and brain function in older adults has not been directly explored,” wrote researchers from York University and McGill University in Canada.

The research team studied one group of men and one of women, both with an average age of 67. The volunteers self-reported their typical daily physical activity level. The research team recorded the participants’ height, weight, age, sex and resting heart rate to determine their cardiorespiratory fitness. They also administered imaging tests of the brain to record nerve function both within specific brain networks (local efficiency) and among all networks (global efficiency).

The men were found to have higher cardiorespiratory fitness levels than the women. NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.

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