How Apps Are Harnessing Music’s Healing Powers - Nice piece about how entrepreneurs are using music to treat a wide variety of ailments. I believe this is how startups should work - take something people in academia have been working on, and expedite its exposure to the general public.
NMT (Neurologic Music Therapy) as practiced today is based on two main principles. The first is music’s ability to stimulate a whole range of different parts of the brain. “There’s no other stimulus on earth that provides such a global activation of our brains as music,” Harris says. The second is that music helps with neuroplasticity, that is, the way our brains constantly create new connections and strengthen old connections throughout our lives.
Golesworthy is neither a doctor nor any kind of medical researcher. He’s an engineer. But with characteristic self-belief he reckoned he could devise a simpler and safer way of fixing his problem. And he did. He then persuaded a surgeon to take him seriously, became the guinea pig for the first operation, and now runs a company set up to manufacture implants like the one buried in his own chest. It’s been there for a decade, and it’s keeping him alive.
A Souvenir Smuggled Home From Cuba: A Cancer Vaccine - Cimavax is a vaccine developed in Cuba thad doesn’t prevent cancer, but it halts its growth and keeps it from recurring in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer. With it awaiting a long clinical trial in the US, patients aren’t willing to wait so long. They travel to Cuba to avail themselves of Climavax, and are saving their own lives in the process.
When the Devil Enters - Thoroughly enjoyed reading this piece about a town in Sicily that has been plagued by regular yet unpredictable fires. Nobody knows why. Everything’s been blamed, earthquakes, faulty electrical connections, and even Satan.
[Commencement Address] George Saunders - I’m a big fan of commencement addresses, and I find that there’s much more than meets the eye in each one. I’ll probably share one good one every week for the next few issues. Here’s George Saunders’ (one of my favourite storytellers) speech at Syracuse University in 2013.
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
I then asked my wife for permission to spend five hundred and sixty dollars for a flight that I already had a free ticket for. She told me I was insane. But I wasn’t insane. I knew others similarly afflicted. I had Global Services Maintenance Anxiety Disorder.
The People Who Can’t Stop Grieving - There are people who suffer from what’s called ‘complicated grief’; their grief doesn’t get lighter as time goes on. Scary? You bet.
