Un Français scientifiquement déclaré l’homme le plus heureux du monde
Les moines boudhistes sont réputés pour leur méditation à laquelle certains y prêtent des pouvoirs surnaturels. Mais la science s’en est mêlée et a officiellement nommé l’homme le plus heureux du monde ! Pour les chercheurs de l’université du Wisconsin qui effectuaient des recherches auprès de personnes pratiquant la méditation, Matthieu Ricard est un homme à part… Cet homme est un moine boudhiste français qui a tout plaqué il y a quarante ans pour vivre dans l’Himalaya, il a donc passé quelques tests et les résultats sont étonnants… Après l’avoir affublé de 256 capteurs et lui avoir fait passer une IRM (Imagerie par Résonance Magnétique), les scientifiques ont observé une suractivité de son cortex préfrontal gauche et des rayons gamma en grande quantité que personne n’avait enregistré jusque là ! Photographies par : Jeff Miller (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Chez DGS, on va se mettre à la méditation à la pause du midi, peut-être qu’on sera encore plus heureux ?
What Writing Has in Common With Happiness
By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more. The final line of an enigmatic Jorge Luis Borges poem became the title for Yasmina Reza's latest book, Happy Are the Happy. Happy Are the Happy features 18 different narrators, each of whom gets to command the reader's attention for at least one chapter. Reza’s books—novels, plays, and an unorthodox book-length profile of Nicolas Sarkozy—have been translated into more than 30 languages. She lives in Paris and spoke to me in New York City. Yasmina Reza: Late in the process of finishing my new book, Happy Are the Happy, I started looking for a title. I was on a plane when the French phrase heureux les heureux, happy are the happy, came to mind. So when I went home, I took all my Borges off the shelf. Happy are those who are beloved, and those who love, and those who are without love. And we can never know.
Bayer and US Government Knowingly Gave HIV to Thousands of Children
By Matt Agorist REALfarmacy.com What if a company that you thought you could trust, knowingly sold you a medicine for your child that they knew had the potential to give your child HIV? How would you react? What if a government agency that claims the responsibility for protecting you from such treachery, not only looked the other way, but was complicit in this exchange? Everyone has heard of Bayer aspirin, it is a household name. In 1984 Bayer became aware that several batches of this Factor 8 contained HIV. Unable to sell their Factor 8 in the US, Bayer, with the FDA’s permission, (yes that’s right, the FDA allowed Bayer to potentially kill thousands) sold this HIV infected medicine to Argentina, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore after February 1984, according to the documents obtained by the NY Times. The result of this sale of HIV tainted medication ended up infecting tens of thousands and killing thousands. Original Source of the article Image Credits
Paula Davis-Laack: Dix choses que les gens heureux font différemment des autres
There's More to Life Than Being Happy - Emily Esfahani Smith
"It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness." In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished -- but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived. In his bestselling 1946 book, Man's Search for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, "Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation." Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, "Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?" Viktor Frankl [Herwig Prammer/Reuters] Peter Andrews/Reuters
American Dinosaurs: What's the Matter With Health Care and Education? - Marc Tucker
Welcome to America's biggest long-term challenge: Our medical and education industries are a two-headed hydra of economic inefficiency, over-eating our resources and under-serving our needy Reuters The problems with our nation's health care system are of course very different from the challenges facing our national education system. But when you look under the hood, you could make a strong argument that the problems are actually very much the same. Consider the structure of American health care over the past few decades. One can think of it as serving four levels of clients: those with no insurance, those with Medicare or Medicaid, those with employer-provided insurance, and those wealthy enough to pay for all their health care services in cash, including concierge services. Most of those who were uninsured went without any health care services much of the time. Now consider our public education system. Yet funding for our public education system works differently. So, what is to be done?
propager le Virus du Bonheur
Kierkegaard on Our Greatest Source of Unhappiness
by Maria Popova Hope, memory, and how our chronic compulsion to flee from our own lives robs us of living. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard memorably wrote in reflecting on why presence matters more than productivity. “On how one orients himself to the moment depends the failure or fruitfulness of it,” Henry Miller asserted in his beautiful meditation on the art of living. And yet we spend our lives fleeing from the present moment, constantly occupying ourselves with overplanning the future or recoiling with anxiety over its impermanence, thus invariably robbing ourselves of the vibrancy of aliveness. Kierkegaard, who was only thirty at the time, begins with an observation all the timelier today, amidst our culture of busy-as-a-badge-of-honor: Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. The unhappy one is absent. Consider first the hoping individual. Donating = Loving
Understanding Deafness: Not Everyone Wants to Be 'Fixed' - Allegra Ringo
When the police showed up, there were maybe 50 protesters, most of them Deaf, outside the Omni Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Officers stepped out of their squad cars — four in total — and spoke to the protesters through an American Sign Language interpreter. They soon left amicably, though, apparently having not found much that needed policing. The protesters were rallying against the Listening and Spoken Language Symposium, an annual event put on by the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (AGB). The protesters were angry, but acting peacefully. The AGB has a complicated history with members of Deaf culture. AGB’s reasons for their oral focus depends who you ask. Ruthie’s take is that AGB “[Makes] money...by miseducating the parents of Deaf children.” In the 1860s, Alexander Graham Bell was a prominent oralist, and to some, an important figure in the spreading of audism — the belief that it is inherently better to be able to speak and hear.
