Word: particular
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Drug Administration ultimately declared the drug ineffective, and the patient died. All that may be necessary for the placebo effect to kick in is for one part of the brain to take in data from the world and hand that information off to another part that controls a particular bodily function. "The brain appears to be able to target the placebo effect in a variety of ways," says Newberg. There's no science proving that the intercessions of others will make you well. But it surely does no harm - and probably helps - to know that people are praying...
American businesses have a particular interest in personal health, since worker illness costs them billions each year in insurance claims, sick days and high staff turnover. A 2008 survey of major U.S. employers found that 64% consider their employees' poor health decisions a serious barrier to affordable insurance coverage. Now some companies are tackling the motivation problem head on, using tactics drawn from behavioral psychology to nudge their employees to get healthy...
Handzo: Well, certainly some work is pure research in order to fathom things better. There are no particular interventions that come from picking up rocks on the moon, but we do it because it teaches us more about the world around...
Newberg: I think trying to define it is absolutely one of the areas that we really need to get a handle on, because one of the mistakes that is often made in the medical context can be that, oh, somebody is this particular religion, so they believe in these things. We have to be careful about how we define and slot everybody into these different categories. Atheists as well...
...demonstrate how hilariously inadequate they were for describing the world around us. In "Paraguay," for example, he employs the language of industrial production as art criticism: "Sheet art is generally dried in smoke and is dark brown in color. Bulk art is air-dried, and changes color in particular historical epochs." (Barthelme quotes lose some of their magic out of context, like a colorful shell removed from a tide pool.) In Snow White--to which the New Yorker devoted almost an entire issue in 1967--the heroine sighs, "Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were...