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The Darker Side

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Excerpt from:
The Command Post – Global Recon – The Darker Side
Amidst all the stories of heroism and humanity by the relief workers, there are some stories showing that we’re a very imperfect species.

Concerns have been raised in Indonesia that children orphaned by the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Aceh are being taken away by unidentified adults claiming to be relatives, or wanting to adopt them.
[…]
Last Friday, Raja, a 5-year-old boy who lost his parents in the earthquake was among hundreds of Acehnese on board a Hercules transport plane that landed at an Air Force base in the North Sumatra provincial capital of Medan, where many have taken refuge.

He has become a focus of attention, his story appearing on the front pages of local newspapers in the past few days.

Soon after his arrival, a couple who claimed to be his parents tried to take him away but they were stopped by Ms Mutiara, who noticed that the couple did not look Acehnese.

Suspicious of their intentions, Ms Mutiara put several questions to them.
[…]
Under questioning, the couple finally confessed they were not Raja’s parents, but claimed they lived next door to his family.
Ms Mutiara suspected that the couple had in fact been paid by someone, perhaps a member of a child-trafficking syndicate, to collect the child.

You 2.0

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It’s never too late to reinvent yourself.

Imagine someone holds a gun to your head and demands that you tell him what you really wish you were doing in your life. Now imagine he tells you that if you don’t start taking steps toward making that happen, he’ll kill you. He knows where you live, and he’ll be watching.

That scenario is one my favorite scenes in Fight Club.

And thanks to the overwhelming new brain research, we now know that it’s virtually never too late to reinvent yourself. To start something totally new. To learn, even master, something completely different from what you’ve been doing for the past five, ten, forty years.

From my current favorite brain book,The New Brain, Richard Restak puts it this way:

“As recently as only a few years ago, most neuroscientists believed that brain plasticity largely ceased by adolescence or by early adulthood at the latest. At this point the brain became fixed in its structure and function–at least that was the prevailing assumption. But this assumption, too, turned out to be wrong.”

He goes on to talk about how people–regardless of age–can still achieve superior, even expert-level performance in things they haven’t done before.

The more we lear

…excerpt from: headrush.typepad.com…