Mcewen Quotes

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking the arts and sciences are at odds with one another. That is a recent, stupid, and damaging idea. You don’t have to be unscientific to make beautiful art, to write beautiful things. If you need proof: Twain, Adams, Vonnegut, McEwen, Sagan, Shakespeare, Dickens. For a start. You don’t need to be superstitious to be a poet. You don’t need to hate GM technology to care about the beauty of the planet. You don’t have to claim a soul to promote compassion. Science is not a body of knowledge nor a system of belief; it is just a term which describes humankind’s incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome.

Her own hair was a glory of copper fire that morning, shining like a whisky still, long and loose in gentle flames down her back.

Fear accompanies only the possibility of death. Calm ushers its certainty.

She was downstairs now in the living room watching TV' with a mug of hot chocolate and a fried egg and pineappel pineappel? yes pineappel- sandwich.

Walking, talking, reading, drawing, praying, telling stories: the nourishment is there, as close as our own breath. We only have to pause a moment, notice, and enjoy.

She gave a low and delighted chuckle. Her eyes were black as a moonless December night and reflected the electric lights like stars.

Miss Warrender's 'selfish' inner quest was to find a 'purpose in life and give it all I have got'. This instructive, amusing, dramatic and bravely candid account is an answer in itself. She also took the photographs, reproduced in black and white, that adorn an already pleasing book. All together, this is an essential addition to the canon. -John McEwen book critic

She's not dead, Henry kept telling himself. But her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked.

It took a day to dismantle Lily's existence . . .striking the set of a play, humble, one-handed domestic drama, without permission from the cast. . . But her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked. . . Objects became junk as soon as they were separated from their owner and their pasts . . . As the shelves and drawers emptied, and the boxes and bags filled, he saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end.

As the famed stress researcher Dr. Bruce McEwen has pointed out, a key determining factor triggering the stress response is the way a person perceives a situation.3 We ourselves give events their meaning, depending on our personal histories, temperament, physical condition, and state of mind at the moment we experience them.

because the ends justified the means. Drago’s

the ranch to the south.

God of War is a fickle son of a bitch, his father had always been fond of saying. Don't ever trust his ass.

Looking up at the stars and smoking in silence.

your first idea is unlikely to be the best, so you should be optimising for speed of iteration rather than quality of prototype.

I am your bridge. I am offering you a way to walk out of this hole and cross over into freedom.

As you begin a life of service to your nation, your family, and your god, may your experience at Valor be like the sharpening stone. A blunt and hard movable object that is used to bring an edge to a blade.

The fabrication work was first rate and did not appear jerry-rigged in the slightest.

his men will betray you in the end—you

The “chemical imbalance” theory of depression, for example, also known as the catecholamine, monoamine, or serotonin deficiency hypothesis, was based on the chemical action of the first generation of antidepressants, which were discovered serendipitously and found to act on monoamine pathways to increase monoamine concentrations (López‐Muñoz & Alamo, 2009). We now know that the “chemical imbalance” hypothesis of depression is false. First, the fact that drugs that increase monoamine concentrations also reduce depressive symptoms (O'Donnell, 2011) is not strong evidence that depression is caused by a deficiency of monoamines. Aspirin reduces headache symptoms but headaches are not caused by an aspirin deficiency. Second, antidepressant drugs increase monoamine concentrations almost immediately (within minutes), but their antidepressant effects only appear after a few weeks (Frazer & Benmansour, 2002; Harmer, Goodwin, & Cowen, 2009). Third, other drugs, such as cocaine, increase monoamines (Kalsner & Nickerson, 1969; Kuhar, Ritz, & Boja, 1991) but are not effective antidepressants. Fourth, some antidepressant drugs, such as tianeptine, decrease monoamines (Baune & Renger, 2014; McEwen et al., 2010). Fifth, depletion of monoamines does not induce depression in non‐depressed individuals (Ruhé, Mason, & Schene, 2007). In summary, although monoamines might play some role in depression, there is no evidence that depression is caused by a simple imbalance of serotonin, norepinephrine, or any other neurotransmitter or biochemical (Kendler, 2008; Lacasse & Leo, 2015, and references therein).

The empty block at the end of my street is probably the best hang-out spot of the lot. While these places aren’t that exciting, they’re all we’ve got, and we make the most of them. It only takes a little imagination to navigate Merri like it’s our own secret world and only we have the keys. The empty block isn’t just a dusty patch of land; it’s a meeting place, a safe haven to share secrets among the tall grass, a blank canvas for whatever projects Claire forces us into next.

sewing their lips together in protest,

Whenever stress experiences are chronic and/or complete recovery is not possible because an individual lacks control over a given stressor or lacks the resources to adequately cope with it, McEwen and Gianaros explained that “a proliferation of recursive neural, physiological, behavioral, cognitive, and emotional changes that increase vulnerability to ill health and premature death by several chronic medical conditions” can occur.  To put it plainly, chronic stress creates brain changes that ultimately jeopardize our very survival.

One useful model for how variability works is the idea of the “allostatic load,” a term coined in 1993 by Bruce McEwen, a neuroendocrinologist at Rockefeller University, and Eliot Stellar, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, to denote the weight of the wear and tear on a body as it tries to retain equilibrium in a taxing and stressful world. The lower an individual’s allostatic load, the easier it is for that person’s body to stay healthy. The higher it is—because the person lives in a polluted area, has an infection, suffers food insecurity, or lives with a chronic stressor such as systemic racism—the likelier you are to get sick with various diseases. But in the early years of a disease process, the system’s metabolic strain may not appear in lab work as abnormal results. It takes a discerning doctor to interpret early variations that are signs of disease and to point out the trajectory the patient’s body is on.

The God of War is a fickle son of a bitch, his father had always been fond of saying. Don't ever trust his ass.

The only easy day was yesterday.

Some people think good friends see the world the way you do, so they agree with you and cheer you on, and to some extent Olivia thinks this is true. But really good friends know your insanities even better than you do yourself.

Just before the girls arrive, I decide to stop being such a sook and try to put myself in a better mood. I want to have a good time tonight.

I ken who you are! You're Strathfearn's granddaughter. Julie Stuart, is it? Och, aye, Lady Julia! Well then, Lady Julia, tell me -- who don't you deserve a glass of water?

Logic is cheap, however some people are broke.

How to choose the right platform for your Internet of Things device is as easy a question to answer as working out the meaning of life.

The fastest way to get over anything in your life is by revisiting it and giving it a different meaning

Every emotion, every feeling I have can be expressed with a word. But poetry isn’t just words muddled in a sentence. It gives us beauty even when the world seems ugly. That is why I love it so much.

As I stated in Chapter 4, and justified in Chapters 5–8, I believe the genetic assimilation hypothesis is at odds with the evidence from cognitive science. Time and again the evidence indicates wealth, not poverty, of the stimulus: covariation between the development of distinctively human cognitive mechanisms and opportunities for learning (Chapter 2). This covariation does not rule out, in principle, the possibility that genetic evolution has speeded up the relevant learning processes. However, I have not been able to find positive evidence that this kind of genetic assimilation has occurred—for ex­ample, evidence that learning is faster in natural than unnatural conditions, or that identical twins are more alike than fraternal twins. Indeed, in cases where positive evidence of genetic influence has been sought, the signs have pointed in the opposite direction. For example, people are not slower to associate body movements with unnatural stimuli, events that our ancestors would not have encountered, and identical twins are no more alike in their imitative ability than fra­ternal twins (McEwen et al., 2007; see Chapter 6). So, the current evidence suggests that our cognitive gadgets have not been genetically assimilated. But if this is true, why is it true?

They were all changing, and the skills and strengths they brought to Valor were were becoming clearer.

Wyatt sat by the fire and silently and secretly prayed, thanking God for giving him the strength he did not have.

Many disciplines and epistemological domains now acknowledge that our neurobiology is intimately marked by the social, cultural, and environmental circumstances in which our lives take shape. Indeed, a range of disciplines and approaches – including, most prominently, social neuroscience (Cacioppo 2002), environmental epigenetics (see Niewöhner 2015; Pickersgill et al. 2013), and social epidemiology (Krieger 2001) – have lately emerged, or redefined their already-existing mission, in order to trace the multiplicity of ways in which, to use the cliché du jour, the social ‘gets under the skin’ (e.g. see Ferraro and Shippee 2009; Hertzman and Boyce 2010; Hyman 2009; McEwen 2012).