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With the deepening contradictions between the technocratic and spiritual development of humankind, the need for spiritual healing is becoming increasingly urgent. The path to spiritual healing is marked by the need to rethink the place and role of a human in the universe. The curing of spirituality is the valeological paradigm of the 21st century. Spirituality closely interacts with the so-called physical vacuum, on one side, and with the physical structures of the personality, on the other. By acknowledging the spiritual and physical structure of the personality, the conventional medicine seeks to restore only physical health, while neglecting its spiritual constant. Scientific evidence of the existence of a single energy system of the universe has already been revealed in the form of an experimentally substantiated theory of physical vacuum and torsion fields. If we want to get an adequate understanding of the fundamentals of health, disease, and personality development, we must certainly consider the spiritual aspect of being. The energy of thought directly controls health, stimulating it or, conversely, cau­sing illness. Human thoughts are the primary information carrier, where the energy potential is encapsulated. It does not seem possible to explain energy processes in a body by the laws of classical phy­sics. It is the domain of quantum physics. The domination of mind over matter is quantum reality. Some provisions of quantum physics are postulated by quantum biology. In particular, it concerns the corpuscular-wave duality of elementary biological objects, as well as the probability as a category related to the quantum essence of biological objects. Energy processes form the basis of human mental activity, and their laws describe the mechanisms of thinking and consciousness. There is a relationship between energy processes and body physiology, a correlation between substance and energy. In this way, consciousness and the energy of thought control health by stimulating it or, conversely, by causing illness. A spiritual person rises above his genetic destiny. Epigenetics studies the hidden impacts exerted on genes by multiple sources, including thoughts and beliefs. The power of thought changes a person’s genetic code. One should be willing to make changes in one’s thin­king and consciousness. We influence the healing processes with our consciousness. The power of thought and speech plays a major role in harmonizing the personality and maintaining a person’s health.

The 5 Big Questions survey of under-5s launched by the Duchess of Cambridge in January focused attention on early childhood. Dave Hancock looks at some of the activities of UK organisations working to improve infant mental health

The increasing frequency of multinational operations has heightened the importance of interoperability. While human and cultural factors are only two pieces of the interoperability jigsaw t...

The common treatment for postoperative pain is prescription opioids. Yet, these drugs have limited effect in preventing chronic pain from surgical intervention and have in part contributed to the opioid epidemic. Recently, preemptive analgesia and multimodal analgesia have been proposed with widely gained acceptance in addressing the pain issues. However, both analgesic approaches have been focused on pharmacological means while completely neglecting the psychological aspect. To address this epidemic, we have conducted a systematic review of preoperative educational methods to explore its application as both a preemptive and a preventive psychological approach to decrease postsurgical pain and improve outcome. Preemptive psychoeducation occurs before surgery and would include information about regional or neuraxial analgesia, while preventive psychoeducation occurs throughout the perioperative period. The content and presentation of preemptive psychoeducation can help patients form accurate expectations and address their concerns of surgical outcome, leading to a significant decrease in patients' anxiety levels. By addressing the psychological needs of patients through preoperative education, one can decrease postoperative recovery time and postsurgical acute pain. Reduced postsurgical acute pain results in fewer opioid prescriptions, which theoretically lowers the patient's risk of developing chronic postsurgical pain (CPSP), and potentially offers a novel concept using preemptive pain psychoeducation as a part of multimodal pain management solution to the opioid epidemic.

Simply changing your attitude could make you fitter, slimmer, less stressed and even younger, finds David Robson

Wellness—the balance of mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health for the overall health benefit of the individual—is a growing concern, particularly for professionals in the medical field. Although wellness is usually viewed in opposition to technology, more digital devices and mobile applications are emerging to support wellness for health consumers. This wellness technology seeks to improve the overall health of the user through increasing calm and decreasing stress. This column will explain what wellness technology is, concerns over its widespread application, examples of wellness devices on the market currently, and an overview of where it is being applied in libraries.

The aim of the paper is to identify the characteristic features of jokes about Polish highlanders and analyse them to isolate the comic script of a highlander. This group of jokes is treated as a good illustration of Christie Davies’s ethnic jokes theory concerning canny versus stupid and centre versus periphery oppositions, as well as mind over matter. A particular type of reasoning and the use of regional dialect are distinctive features of the joke targets that make it possible to perceive these jokes as a culturally specific phenomenon. The head shepherd (called baca) is the key character of the cycle. He is a very down-to-earth person, who is proud of his practical wisdom and has a very relaxed attitude to life—a wise fool in some jokes, thus even resembling Good Soldier Švejk in some respects. His lifestyle is usually contrasted with that of ceper—a town dweller, coming to the highlands as a tourist—treated as a kind of intruder who asks stupid questions and does not know how to appreciate life and what really matters in it. The jokes about highlanders are analysed within the paradigm of General Theory of Verbal Humour, and particularly its reasoning and reversal Logical Mechanisms. Even though Christie Davies treated the Logical Mechanism with some scepticism, claiming it is of no use in the GTVH (Davies 2004, 2011b), he would not probably mind the logic of highlanders’ utterances and behaviour being analysed. We believe he may even have enjoyed that.

In order to examine hypnotherapy, the psycho-physiological science underpinning the practice is an important issue and is significant for the use of hypnotherapy by women in labour and birth. Contemporary literature regarding hypnotherapy and its’ side effects and limitations focuses on the culture inherent in hypnotherapy ideology, whilst the pertinent ethical issues that arise and question its alignment with the contemporary midwifery perspective are an important factor within midwifery care. While it is possible for women to undertake hypnotherapy through self-taught measures, this paper will focus on women purchasing the CAM therapy, including the services of a supportive hypnotherapist who trains and partners with women antenatally and through their labour and birth.

The aim of this study was to highlight the vulnerability of the aging brain to surgery and anesthesia, examine postoperative cognitive outcomes, and recommend possible interventions.Surgeons are facing increasingly difficult ethical and clinical decisions given the rapidly expanding aging demographic. Cognitive function is not routinely assessed either preoperatively or postoperatively. Potential short and long-term cognitive implications are rarely discussed with the patient despite evidence that postoperative cognitive impairment occurs in up to 65% of older patients. Furthermore, surgery may accelerate the trajectory of cognitive decline and dementia.An electronic search was conducted using Pubmed/Medline. References from selected studies were cross-referenced and relevant articles retrieved. Data were summarized in a narrative format.There is a hidden epidemic of cognitive dysfunction in the perioperative setting. Up to 40% of patients who develop postoperative delirium (POD) never return to their preoperative cognitive baseline. POD can lead to postoperative cognitive dysfunction (POCD), a more prolonged cognitive impairment associated with longer length of hospital stay and cost, premature withdrawal from the workforce, and greater 1-year mortality. Standardized perioperative cognitive assessment is needed to enable progress. Improving outcomes will depend on a multifaceted approach, including correction of modifiable preoperative risk factors and prompt treatment of POD. Risk factors are discussed and possible interventional strategies are presented.Closer preoperative collaboration between surgeons, geriatricians, and anesthetists will enable identification of complex at-risk older patients. A paradigm shift in the approach to management of the older surgical patient is critical to improve postoperative cognitive outcomes in modern surgery.

Argument is presented of the impossibility of the world to exist without a conscious observer and illustrated by examples from developmental psychology and cosmology. A corollary of the inseparable unity between subject and object is that in certain circumstances a subject can directly affect inanimate matter. Cases of this kind of direct mind over matter link (voluntary movements, the quantum Zeno effect, the quantum eraser effect) are discussed. The experiments on remote viewing and psychokinetic effects, which illustrate the possibility of mentally affecting random events, are described. The decline and locality of mind over matter effects are discussed and illustrated with experimental evidence.

As a physicist, I have been privileged to intersect with the world of ethnomusicology through my research on the acoustics of the didjeridu, the highlight of which was to meet and work with Joe Neparrŋa Gumbula. This is a brief account of my perspective on that journey, the research undertaken, and the role that Joe played in it.

Over the past 10 years, there has been limited progress for the treatment of brain cancer and outcomes for patients are not much improved. For brain cancer researchers, a major obstacle to biomarker driven research is limited access to brain cancer tissue for research purposes. The Mark Hughes Foundation Brain Biobank is one of the first post-mortem adult brain banks in Australia to operate with protocols specifically developed for brain cancer. Located within the Hunter New England Local Health District and operated by Hunter Cancer Biobank, the boundaries of service provided by the Brain Bank extend well into the surrounding regional and rural areas of the Local Health District and beyond. Brain cancer biobanking is challenging. There are conflicting international guidelines for best practice and unanswered questions relating to scientific, psychosocial and operational practices. To address this challenge, a best practice model was developed, informed by a consensus of existing data but with consideration of the difficulties associated with operating in regional or resource poor settings. The regional application of this model was challenged following the presentation of a donor located in a remote area, 380km away from the biobank. This required biobank staff to overcome numerous obstacles including long distance patient transport, lack of palliative care staff, death in the home and limited rural outreach services. Through the establishment of shared goals, contingency planning and the development of an informal infrastructure, the donation was facilitated within the required timeframe. This experience demonstrates the importance of collaboration and networking to overcome resource insufficiency and geographical challenges in rural cancer research programmes.

In this chapter, the author shifts gear to a whole different level of ‘mind over matter‘, postulating that there is such thing as the principle, overarching root cause of Africa’s underdevelopment: the people’s ‘mindset’. He draws on the Korea’s experience, and the parallels between the Korean experience and the circumstances of Sub-Saharan African countries, to make the case appealing and pertinent. The problematic mindsets or the ‘syndromes’ that are counterproductive to development are identified and explained. These include the dependency syndrome, ‘backtracking syndrome’, ‘what’s-in-it-for-me syndrome‘, lack of action and implementation, the commission culture, etc. This chapter offers a rare look into the mindset issue from an analytical context.

As the late great Mark Twain purportedly said “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” I wholeheartedly agree with him. The mind is a collective of all of our experiences. No matter what a person’s chronological age might be, it is not all-encompassing compared to one’s psychological age, which is based on their experiences. In my estimation a person’s age is not a constant. It is continually in flux shifting from moment to moment. We can feel different ages depending upon a multiplicity of experiences with individuals or interpersonal interactions. At times, we may feel like a teenager and at others beyond our years. How we feel depends upon whom you are interacting with and what factors different people tap into from our wellspring of life experiences.

Stroke is currently the fifth highest cause of death in the United States and a leading cause of long-term disability.1 While physicians, patients, and their families crave answers regarding potential prognosis immediately after infarct, few tools currently exist for such predication, especially in the acute setting. For many years, the recovery literature focused on improvement in motor function. More recently, attention has shifted toward cognition, which can be substantially impaired after even minor stroke.2,3 This dysfunction can be progressive4 and may therefore affect long-term prognosis and reduce quality of life.2,3,5 Cognitive dysfunction, however, not only may be an important component of a poor long-term outcome but also may serve as a predictor for those at highest risk of functional decline after stroke.

The neuroscientist and engineer, Jose M. Carmona begins this dialogue describing research in the field of brain-machine interface (BMI) and neurotechnology led by his own laboratory in UC Berkley. He outlines how his neural engineering research group works, defining it as a fusion of neuroscience with the main engineering disciplines, and how disciplines are balanced in your laboratory. He moves on to discuss the “hard problems” in AI (Artificial intelligence), which is one of the fields that drew him toward his current scientific activity. Later, he talks about how two-way interaction in the brain-machine interface works and how, through mathematical algorithms, the movement intentions are “decoded”, and the motor intentions are “translated” in an attempt to get the mind to control and feel ‘the machine’, or the prosthesis, in order to provide paraplegic people with mobility based on the huge plasticity of the brain. Next, he discusses the revolutionary ultrasonic technology—“Neural dust”—which he is developing with colleagues at Berkley. Finally, he explains his vision of "artificial consciousness”, and why the Brain-machine interface will play an important role in the search to understand how the brain creates the mind.

There is a disagreement in place-based research regarding whether objective indicators or individual perceptions of environments are better predictors of well-being. This study assessed environmental influences on well-being for 373 individuals with psychiatric disabilities living independently in 66 neighborhoods in the southeastern United States. Three questions were examined utilizing random effects models: (1) How much variance in personal and neighborhood well-being can be explained by neighborhood membership? (2) What is the relationship between participant perceptions of neighborhood quality and researcher ratings of neighborhood quality? and (3) What is the relative influence of individual perceptions, perceptions aggregated by neighborhood, and researcher ratings of neighborhood quality in predicting personal and neighborhood well-being? Results indicate that individual perceptions of neighborhood quality were more closely related to well-being than either aggregated perceptions or researcher ratings. Thus, participants' perceptions of their neighborhoods were more important indicators of their well-being than objective ratings made by researchers. Findings have implications for measurement approaches and intervention design in placed-based research.

The fantasy of a human being who is, or becomes, human to the extent they move away from animal nature is stubbornly persistent in western cultural formations. This article (see Acknowledgements) works with, and against, recent materialist moves within Cultural Geography to critically engage the idea that the human is in some sense irreducible to nature. It considers how comparative anatomists of the early 19th century – in explicitly departing from the 18th-century Cartesian dualism that had identified the human with an immaterial notion of soul or mind – looked to the human body, and above all the head, in order to establish that people were categorically different from all other animals. More specifically, the paper considers how it was to ‘race’ that scientists turned, in order to provide an anatomical foundation for a specifically modern strand of humanism. The discourse of humanism is thus considered, not – as many would have it – as an otherworldly or flawed myth, irremediably upheld by blind human faith and vanity. It is not the bearer of an idealism set up in (often shrill) negation to the task of ‘re-materializing’ Cultural Geography. Instead it is, itself, a worldly mix of ideas, practices and technologies. Eliciting humanism’s instability via this (overlooked) historical episode is to render it more vulnerable to precisely the scrutiny demanded by the earth’s current state of ecological fragility. It also enables a more rigorous interrogation of the notion of mind – humanist but also colonialist – that has been disowned in recent efforts to decentre the human in Human Geography. For, as this article demonstrates, re-imagining humanity’s place in nature extends to its co-habitation with all manner of others: human as well as nonhuman.

Psychogenic movement disorders (PMD) mimic known movement disorders, yet cannot be attributed to an underlying neurological substrate. PMD has been reported to affect up to 15–25% of patients who v...

Mental Toughness (MT), which refers to an inner focus and commitment to rise above challenges when facing adversity, is viewed as one of the most important psychological attributes in determining success in sport. However, there is little consensus on key components of MT, and existing measures vary greatly while focusing on elite athletes. The purpose of this research was to develop a measure of MT for use with college athletes. Collegiate and noncollegiate athletes (N = 271) completed the original 54-item Mental Toughness Scale (MTS) in study 1. Factor analysis (PCA) results reduced the scale to an 11-item scale, with good reliability and validity as demonstrated by its positive correlations with self-esteem and flow. A second study of college basketball players (N = 143) was conducted to establish the psychometric properties of the MTS. Study 2 demonstrated convergent, divergent and criterion validity through correlations with related measures, and a CFA provided moderate support for the MTS as a one-dimensional measure of mental toughness in sport.

Using the background of cold war politics and the growing toxic environmental concerns of the 1950s, this article reevaluates the film The Incredible Shrinking Man in the context of Donna Haraway's cyborg manifesto. The hero of the film undergoes a transformation into a reflection of Haraway's cyborgs.

As Mark Twain said, “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.” But with the demographic shifts in our population, it is time for us to mind and pay more attention to the physiology of aging. In 2014, >46 million people in the U.S. (14.4% of the population) were

In 1983 the New York artist Barbara Kruger released a photomontage showing the face of a female model, resting on a grassy background, with her eyes closed and covered by two leaves. Kruger completed the piece by adding the statement, “We won’t play nature to your culture.” In many ways, this image marked a turning point in America’s popular and intellectual response to the issue of the environment. Twenty-one years earlier, in 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had launched a new era in the environmentalist movement, prompting many Americans to begin associating their own physical health with that of the environment. But whereas the publication of Silent Spring and the establishment of Earth Day in 1970 contributed to a far-reaching shift in the ways both scholars and laypersons thought about the practical implications of humanity’s physical engagement with nature, Kruger’s statement represented yet another approach to considering this relationship.

There is long-standing debate about superiority of mind over brain, in other words about superiority of mind over matter. And outcome of this debate is going to decide future of psychiatry. The psychiatrists believing in materialism may say that brain is all and by changing neurotransmitters level with new molecules of drugs would cure all illnesses. On the other hand, antipsychiatry activists and some psychotherapists oppose all types of treatment despite of convincing evidence that drug therapy is effective (although sometimes it is not as effective as it claims to be). However, truth lies somewhere in between. Pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy are like two legs of psychiatry and psychiatry cannot walk into a future on one leg. The studies have shown that judicious use of pharmacotherapy along with psychotherapy gives better outcome than any one of them used alone. We must heal dichotomy between mind and brain before we heal the patients.

Aim: This exploratory study investigates the coping resources used by six women diagnosed with cancer. Objective: The purpose of this study was to provide these women with the opportunity to discuss their cancer experiences along with the specific coping methods they found to be helpful throughout their journey. Methods: The participants, ranging in age from 25 to 63, completed a background questionnaire, followed by either a semi-structured interview (n=3) or an interview via written response (n=3). Results: Several key coping methods were described as being helpful to these women, and these methods fell into three major categories: intrapersonal, interpersonal, and extrapersonal coping resources. Although each of these resource categories had a direct influence on overall well-being itself, the interpersonal and extrapersonal resources also influenced the intrapersonal category, offering an alternate means by which they could influence overall well-being. These findings highlight the many coping resources used by these women when navigating their cancer journey.

The basic point I advocate in this chapter is that the WTO dispute settlement system aims to curb unilateral punishment. Sanctions can be imposed only in accordance with the outcome of a multilateral process that has been established in order to decide on the (il)legality of actions by WTO members, and the legal consequences thereof. The purpose of this process is to ensure that reciprocal commitments entered should not be unilaterally undone through the commission of illegal acts. There are good reasons though, to doubt whether reciprocity, its statutory underpinnings notwithstanding has also been observed in practice. The insistence on calculating remedies prospectively, and not as of the date when an illegality has been committed, and the ensuing losses for everybody that could or could not be symmetric lend support to the claim that the WTO regime serves “diffuse” as opposed to “specific” reciprocity. Still, WTO members continue to routinely submit their disputes to the WTO adjudicating fora, showing through their behavior that, if necessary, they would rather live in a world where punishment is curbed, than in a world where punishment acts as deterrent.

1. Mind over Matter, 2. Field Guide to Megaproject Interpretation, Part I: Time in Suspension, 3. Past as Prologue, 4. Engineering between the Fault Lines, Part II: A Race Against Time, 5. Shockwaves by Design, 6. Ground Motions when Pedalling for a Pathway and Train Tracks, Part III: Hurry Up and Wait...and Wait, 7. Freefalling to Vertigo, 8. Back to the Future: the 'Big One' of Skyrocketing Costs, 9. Aftershock: Hubris and Shadowboxing with Nature

The author, a professor at the University of British Columbia, outlines the foundations of macroappraisal theory within the Canadian federal government’s records acquisition program, placing Terry Cook’s 1992 essay “Mind Over Matter: Towards a New Theory of Archival Appraisal” at the heart of his students’ analysis of theoretical writings. In addition to reflecting on the importance of case studies on the application of macroappraisal theory and methods, he concludes by touching on the applicability of macroappraisal to elements outside the public sphere.

This article examines the work of recent Frenchrock artists, male and female, and their problematic relation to representations of the body and gender. Intent on articulating an ‘alternative’ identity to the commodification of the body dominant in ‘mainstream’ pop music, French rock artists principally posit a ‘protest body’ by emphasising ordinariness, privileging group performance and attempting to neutralise their gender identities. The ‘under-performance’ of their personal corporeality is, however, contradictory since these artists, as representatives of the music industry, constantly appear on stage, in the media and on record covers. The construction of an ‘authentic’ visual identity is thus meaningful as a series of ideological statements, but reinforces the patriarchal mind/body polarisation, re-asserting the male prestige of ‘protest’ over physicality and making for some dull performances. This analysis is underpinned by theories of stardom in film and popular music studies, while evidence is drawn from concerts, videos, photographs and interviews.