Scherezade Siobhan

Alright who is on Instagram?

you were right, back then.

Another fMRI study found that those high on the HSP scale were higher in empathy. Highly sensitive people had a greater reaction to photos of both happy and sad faces, compared with neutral faces, and to photos of a spouse’s happy or sad facial expressions, compared with strangers with the same expressions. Of special note: increased activation could be found not in brain regions associated with specific or pure emotion but rather in sensorimotor areas with mirror neurons, associated with empathy (for instance, the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and the precuneus).

Hell Loops of Chronic Depression

The language of pain, stretching back to antiquity, conflated the emotional and the physical. The overlap of grief, anguish, despair and sorrow with physical pain lies at the heart of vernacular expressions of suffering in Ancient Greek, Latin, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi and Chinese, as well as in English and other European languages. For thousands of years, the statement ‘I am in pain’ was an emotional as well as a physical claim. While this semantic overlap seems consistent, the precise conceptualisation has varied enormously, from ὀδύvη (odúnē, Ancient Greek) to dolor (Latin), to wajaʿ (Arabic), to dard (Farsi, Hindi and Urdu), to tòng (Chinese). Moreover, there is a rich history of the iconography of the ineffable: representations of pain that, while it could not be uttered, was nonetheless expressed. By documenting the historically situated processes of experiencing and expressing types of pain, it is possible to show both an enormous variety while insisting upon a long history of the braiding of the emotional and the physical. This has the effect, in turn, of implicitly de-naturalising and situating present-day experiences of pain and of disrupting two centuries of modern medical expertise.

now that twitter is dying, who is back in this hellscape?

Organising a poetry reading in Scotland next month. Scottish poets/writers based in Stirling, Edinburgh and Glasgow please drop me a message. We want a fun, lively and all-encompassing evening!

Monster” is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, “divine portent,” itself formed on the root of the verb monere, “to warn.” It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening.