Love really does hurt, just as poets and song lyric writers claim.
New brain scanning technologies are revealing that the part of the brain that processes physical pain also deals with emotional pain.
And in the same way that in some people injury can cause long-lasting chronic pain, science now reveals why some will never get over such heartbreak.
Emotional pain can take many forms; a relationship break-up or social exclusion, for example.
But it does not get any more extreme than losing a loved one, as Scottish broadcaster Mark Stephen did.
In July 1995 he was driving a tractor while hay-making and accidentally hit his young daughter. She died shortly afterwards
Mark’s grief was overwhelming, he says.
“When people talk about a broken heart, that for me was where it was seated, just below your sternum.
“It feels like your heart is leaking and you can’t run away from it because you are the source of that pain.”
Thinking he would go mad with grief, he sought help from David Alexander.
Professor Alexander is director of the Aberdeen Centre for Trauma Research. He led the psychiatric team that first responded to the Piper Alpha oil-rig disaster.
Since then, he has been involved in helping survivors of many disasters including the Asian tsunami, the war in Iraq and, most recently, the earthquake in Pakistan.
He also managed to get Mark Stephen through his darkest days.
‘My guts are aching’
Professor Alexander is not surprised about the link between physical and emotional pain:
“If you listen to people who are damaged emotionally, they will often translate their pain into physical similes: ‘My head is bursting, my guts are aching’ and so on. The parallel is very strong.”
But medical research has tended to concentrate on physical pain.
Neuroscientist Mary Frances O’Connor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is one of the scientists who have propelled emotional pain up the research agenda.
“We’re at a very new time when we can use technologies to look at the brain and the heart,” she says.
Naomi Eisenberger at UCLA has shown which parts of the brain are active when we feel emotional pain.
She devised an intriguing computer game in which participants were deliberately made to feel left out.
Simultaneous brain scanning revealed that the pain of being socially rejected was processed in much the same way in the brain as physical pain and in the same area, the anterior cingulate cortex.
‘Complex grief’
Why should physical and emotional pain be linked in this way?
Social relationships are crucial to our survival as a species. In dangerous situations, a lone human is in peril whereas a group may survive.
“The social attachment system is piggy-backed onto the physical pain system to make sure we stay connected to close others,” says Naomi Eisenberger.
“Being wrenched from another or rejected by a group is painful, so we avoid it.”
There is an increased risk of dying in the six months after bereavement Professor Martin Cowie, Brompton Hospital
Physical pain warns us not to do something, walk on a broken ankle for instance. And emotional pain too can be a warning - “don’t go near that sort of man again”, “avoid women like her”.
But sometimes physical pain can become chronic, long outlasting its original purpose, and emotional pain is the same.
Mary Frances O’Connor calls it “complex grief” and it occurs in about 10% of people after bereavement.
“They experience a lot of bitterness and anger, that their future is senseless. They don’t adapt with time as others do.”
There is a very strong suspicion that people who are not adapting to bereavement are also those who experience the greatest levels of physical pain.
But can we die from a broken heart?
Martin Cowie is professor of cardiology at the Brompton Hospital. He is very sure of the answer: “Yes, we can.
“There is an increased risk of dying in the six months after bereavement and it’s particularly marked amongst men.”
The bereaved are much more likely to be involved in accidents, which is perhaps understandable, but also to die from heart attacks and stroke. The hormones involved in the stress of bereavement make these events more likely.
This knowledge makes it essential to identify and treat those whose emotional pain is likely to become chronic, causing debilitating depression or even death.
That's exactly what billionaire American investment guru Jim Rogers and his wife Paige Parker are doing.
Like many Singapore parents, they have become parent volunteers so that their five-year-old daughter can stand a better chance of getting into Nanyang Primary School.
Rogers, 65, gives talks to teachers on topics such as education and his views on world matters, while Parker, 39, helps its English department by conducting enrichment classes.
Their daughter, Hilton Augusta, nicknamed Happy, is attending Nanyang Kindergarten, which is not affiliated to the primary school.
They also have a three-month-old baby girl, Beeland Anderson.
The couple sold their New York mansion and moved to Singapore last December so that Happy can learn Chinese in a Mandarin-speaking environment.
Rogers, who co-founded the Quantum Fund with legendary investor George Soros in the 1970s, has repeatedly said he believes China will be the next great country in the world.
"The best gift we can give our children is to let them learn Chinese and prepare them for the future," he tells The Straits Times, while carrying the baby in his arms.
Referred to as 'the Indiana Jones of finance' by Time Magazine, he retired at the age of 37 and rode a motorcycle around the world.
He has written four books, including Adventure Capitalist, which chronicles the journey he took with Parker in a custom-made Mercedes from 1999 to 2002 that took them to 116 countries. This is his third marriage.
Soon after Happy was born in 2003, they hired a mainland Chinese nanny in New York to teach her Mandarin. They also have a live-in nanny from Ningxia province here in Singapore.
This explains why the little girl is able to speak the language fluently, without the jarring accent that many non-native speakers have.
In fact, she is so confident in the language that she sang a Chinese song for this reporter and recited the national pledge in Mandarin, stumbling only towards the end as she forgot some parts of it.
"I like both Chinese and English lessons, but I like Chinese more," she says in Mandarin.
Her baby sister is also having an early start in learning the language--the nanny plays her Mandarin songs every day.
Parker says they agreed Nanyang Primary in Bukit Timah was the ideal school for Happy when they attended a talk given by its principal, Madam Heng Boey Hong, last year.
"She's such a dynamo. She talked about the discipline and the emphasis on Chinese and I said 'Jim, this is where we need to be. This is exactly what we want for Happy'," she recalls.
She adds that she was 'very impressed' when she heard the students speaking Mandarin to each other in the school corridors.
This was a huge relief for the couple, who realised after moving here that there are no Chinese schools in Singapore--Chinese schools were phased out in the early 1980s--even though the majority of its population are Chinese.
It was also after moving here that they found out that some Singaporeans speak 'bad English and bad Mandarin'.
Indeed, during the interview, Parker had to remind Happy to 'speak proper English please' when her daughter slipped into Singlish at one point.
While Singlish is frowned upon by the Rogers, who are all Singapore permanent residents, they have readily embraced other Singaporean traits, such as becoming parent volunteers.
A child whose parent has given at least 40 hours of voluntary service to a school is ahead of the queue during registration time.
But volunteering in school is not an alien concept to Parker, who used to be a head of marketing in the United States but is now a stay-at-home mother.
She had helped to raise funds to build a greenhouse for Happy's school in New York.
Instead, the biggest challenge for the Rogers has been finding a house within 1km of the school, as priority is given to children living within that distance of the school of choice.
She says most of the houses they have seen so far are 'priced too high', but they have until next June, when Happy is due for enrolment, to find their dream home.
Meanwhile, they are living in a serviced apartment at the exclusive Treetops in Orange Grove Road.
In fact, Rogers is so satisfied with life in Singapore that no one can change his mind--not even Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou.
Last week, he went to Taipei to give a speech and the newly minted Taiwanese leader tried to persuade him to move to Taiwan after learning about his passionate belief in the Chinese language.
"He said, 'Come, come to Taiwan, your daughters can learn Chinese here'," says Rogers.
"I told him, 'No, I'm happy in Singapore'. Even though things are different now in Taiwan with the new government, it's still not as ideal as Singapore as they use complex Chinese there."
China uses simplified Chinese characters while Taiwan uses the traditional form.
Rogers certainly knows what he is talking about, even if the only Mandarin words he can say are his daughters' Chinese names Lele (Happy) and Xiaomifeng (Little Bee), as well as ni hao (how are you), xiexie (thank you) and bing pijiu (cold beer).
Parker's grasp of the language is better, as she has been taking lessons here.
In the past few years, they have visited Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong many times to look for the perfect school for Happy, before deciding on Singapore.
"As much as we want to be in mainland China, the pollution there that you read about is real," says Parker.
"Singapore doesn't have that. It also has an extraordinary health-care system and great schools, and it's a wonderful place for a family."
Rogers says many people felt they were making a big mistake when they announced that they were uprooting to Asia.
"They thought we were crazy, because we were doing it voluntarily. Many people thought we moved to China. They don't know that Singapore is not China," he says.
"Some people told me I was smart to do it for my children, but they couldn't do it themselves."
Their plan is to "stay here forever, unless something else happens", he says, adding that he hopes to travel around China one day with his daughters as his interpreters.
When asked what his net worth is--believed to be billions of dollars--he replies: "I'm sorry, but I can't answer that."
After a pause, he adds, tenderly: "My net worth should not be measured in monetary terms, but it should be measured in how good a father I can be." (By MAK MUN SAN/ The Straits Times/ ANN)
• The US Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) issued an emergency order late on Tuesday, to curtail short selling in financial stocks. It will require traders to borrow or arrange to borrow shares of brokerages (eg Lehman), Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, Citigroup, JP Morgan, UBS, and other financial stocks totaling 19), before betting these shares will fall, and to deliver the shares by the settlement date. The temporary order, to take effect July 21, will bar so-called naked short selling, in which traders avoid the financial cost of borrowing stocks.
• In traditional short selling, traders borrow stock through a broker and hope to profit by selling shares at a higher price and later buying them back at lower prices. Naked short sellers do the same thing, with one difference: they don’t borrow the shares, which means they can drive down prices by flooding the market with orders to sell shares they don’t have.
• Yesterday, the new rule seemed to be working, as evidenced by the large gains made by financial stocks: Wells Fargo (which was credited as the trigger because of its better-than-expected Q2 performance) + 33%; Fannie +31%; Freddie +30%; Washington Mutual +25%; Bank of America +22%; JP Morgan +16%; Citigroup +13%; all of which helped push up the S&P Financials by 12%, the best single day gain in percentage terms.
COMMENTS
1. The continued weakness of the US market, especially financial stocks including Freddie, Fannie and Lehman in the 2 days after Henry Paulson’s proposal on the morning of Monday July 14th (Asian time), as well as the “open defiance” of hedge fund managers in betting against these, suggest that more is urgently needed.
2. One such action is to “catch” the shorts, which is what the SEC has done, which as warned, could be extended to the entire US market. The only concern is that the scheme may only work for a short period of time.
3. Another action, which SEC is open to, would be to reintroduce the uptick rule, which makes shorting possible only in a rising market (this was removed in2007)..... The US government could also emulate the HK government in setting up a Tracker Fund, as the latter did during the Asian Crisis, to mop up key blue chip stocks. But this is unlikely to carry the surprise element as the HK experiment had, given the need for Congressional approval..... The Treasury could also speed up the purchase of shares in Freddie and Fannie at say a discount to market, which could help preempt them from collapsing, as was the case with Bear Stearns (which hit a low of US$2.84 on Mar 17th, from US$30 close on the preceding Friday Mar 14th). JP Morgan first offered US$2 per BSC share, before raising it to US$10.
3 comments:
How emotional pain can really hurt
By Vivienne Parry
Love really does hurt, just as poets and song lyric writers claim.
New brain scanning technologies are revealing that the part of the brain that processes physical pain also deals with emotional pain.
And in the same way that in some people injury can cause long-lasting chronic pain, science now reveals why some will never get over such heartbreak.
Emotional pain can take many forms; a relationship break-up or social exclusion, for example.
But it does not get any more extreme than losing a loved one, as Scottish broadcaster Mark Stephen did.
In July 1995 he was driving a tractor while hay-making and accidentally hit his young daughter. She died shortly afterwards
Mark’s grief was overwhelming, he says.
“When people talk about a broken heart, that for me was where it was seated, just below your sternum.
“It feels like your heart is leaking and you can’t run away from it because you are the source of that pain.”
Thinking he would go mad with grief, he sought help from David Alexander.
Professor Alexander is director of the Aberdeen Centre for Trauma Research. He led the psychiatric team that first responded to the Piper Alpha oil-rig disaster.
Since then, he has been involved in helping survivors of many disasters including the Asian tsunami, the war in Iraq and, most recently, the earthquake in Pakistan.
He also managed to get Mark Stephen through his darkest days.
‘My guts are aching’
Professor Alexander is not surprised about the link between physical and emotional pain:
“If you listen to people who are damaged emotionally, they will often translate their pain into physical similes: ‘My head is bursting, my guts are aching’ and so on. The parallel is very strong.”
But medical research has tended to concentrate on physical pain.
Neuroscientist Mary Frances O’Connor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is one of the scientists who have propelled emotional pain up the research agenda.
“We’re at a very new time when we can use technologies to look at the brain and the heart,” she says.
Naomi Eisenberger at UCLA has shown which parts of the brain are active when we feel emotional pain.
She devised an intriguing computer game in which participants were deliberately made to feel left out.
Simultaneous brain scanning revealed that the pain of being socially rejected was processed in much the same way in the brain as physical pain and in the same area, the anterior cingulate cortex.
‘Complex grief’
Why should physical and emotional pain be linked in this way?
Social relationships are crucial to our survival as a species. In dangerous situations, a lone human is in peril whereas a group may survive.
“The social attachment system is piggy-backed onto the physical pain system to make sure we stay connected to close others,” says Naomi Eisenberger.
“Being wrenched from another or rejected by a group is painful, so we avoid it.”
There is an increased risk of dying in the six months after bereavement
Professor Martin Cowie, Brompton Hospital
Physical pain warns us not to do something, walk on a broken ankle for instance. And emotional pain too can be a warning - “don’t go near that sort of man again”, “avoid women like her”.
But sometimes physical pain can become chronic, long outlasting its original purpose, and emotional pain is the same.
Mary Frances O’Connor calls it “complex grief” and it occurs in about 10% of people after bereavement.
“They experience a lot of bitterness and anger, that their future is senseless. They don’t adapt with time as others do.”
There is a very strong suspicion that people who are not adapting to bereavement are also those who experience the greatest levels of physical pain.
But can we die from a broken heart?
Martin Cowie is professor of cardiology at the Brompton Hospital. He is very sure of the answer: “Yes, we can.
“There is an increased risk of dying in the six months after bereavement and it’s particularly marked amongst men.”
The bereaved are much more likely to be involved in accidents, which is perhaps understandable, but also to die from heart attacks and stroke. The hormones involved in the stress of bereavement make these events more likely.
This knowledge makes it essential to identify and treat those whose emotional pain is likely to become chronic, causing debilitating depression or even death.
We Want Our Kids To Learn Chinese
MySinchew
2008.07.19
When in Singapore, do as Singaporeans do.
That's exactly what billionaire American investment guru Jim Rogers and his wife Paige Parker are doing.
Like many Singapore parents, they have become parent volunteers so that their five-year-old daughter can stand a better chance of getting into Nanyang Primary School.
Rogers, 65, gives talks to teachers on topics such as education and his views on world matters, while Parker, 39, helps its English department by conducting enrichment classes.
Their daughter, Hilton Augusta, nicknamed Happy, is attending Nanyang Kindergarten, which is not affiliated to the primary school.
They also have a three-month-old baby girl, Beeland Anderson.
The couple sold their New York mansion and moved to Singapore last December so that Happy can learn Chinese in a Mandarin-speaking environment.
Rogers, who co-founded the Quantum Fund with legendary investor George Soros in the 1970s, has repeatedly said he believes China will be the next great country in the world.
"The best gift we can give our children is to let them learn Chinese and prepare them for the future," he tells The Straits Times, while carrying the baby in his arms.
Referred to as 'the Indiana Jones of finance' by Time Magazine, he retired at the age of 37 and rode a motorcycle around the world.
He has written four books, including Adventure Capitalist, which chronicles the journey he took with Parker in a custom-made Mercedes from 1999 to 2002 that took them to 116 countries. This is his third marriage.
Soon after Happy was born in 2003, they hired a mainland Chinese nanny in New York to teach her Mandarin. They also have a live-in nanny from Ningxia province here in Singapore.
This explains why the little girl is able to speak the language fluently, without the jarring accent that many non-native speakers have.
In fact, she is so confident in the language that she sang a Chinese song for this reporter and recited the national pledge in Mandarin, stumbling only towards the end as she forgot some parts of it.
"I like both Chinese and English lessons, but I like Chinese more," she says in Mandarin.
Her baby sister is also having an early start in learning the language--the nanny plays her Mandarin songs every day.
Parker says they agreed Nanyang Primary in Bukit Timah was the ideal school for Happy when they attended a talk given by its principal, Madam Heng Boey Hong, last year.
"She's such a dynamo. She talked about the discipline and the emphasis on Chinese and I said 'Jim, this is where we need to be. This is exactly what we want for Happy'," she recalls.
She adds that she was 'very impressed' when she heard the students speaking Mandarin to each other in the school corridors.
This was a huge relief for the couple, who realised after moving here that there are no Chinese schools in Singapore--Chinese schools were phased out in the early 1980s--even though the majority of its population are Chinese.
It was also after moving here that they found out that some Singaporeans speak 'bad English and bad Mandarin'.
Indeed, during the interview, Parker had to remind Happy to 'speak proper English please' when her daughter slipped into Singlish at one point.
While Singlish is frowned upon by the Rogers, who are all Singapore permanent residents, they have readily embraced other Singaporean traits, such as becoming parent volunteers.
A child whose parent has given at least 40 hours of voluntary service to a school is ahead of the queue during registration time.
But volunteering in school is not an alien concept to Parker, who used to be a head of marketing in the United States but is now a stay-at-home mother.
She had helped to raise funds to build a greenhouse for Happy's school in New York.
Instead, the biggest challenge for the Rogers has been finding a house within 1km of the school, as priority is given to children living within that distance of the school of choice.
She says most of the houses they have seen so far are 'priced too high', but they have until next June, when Happy is due for enrolment, to find their dream home.
Meanwhile, they are living in a serviced apartment at the exclusive Treetops in Orange Grove Road.
In fact, Rogers is so satisfied with life in Singapore that no one can change his mind--not even Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou.
Last week, he went to Taipei to give a speech and the newly minted Taiwanese leader tried to persuade him to move to Taiwan after learning about his passionate belief in the Chinese language.
"He said, 'Come, come to Taiwan, your daughters can learn Chinese here'," says Rogers.
"I told him, 'No, I'm happy in Singapore'. Even though things are different now in Taiwan with the new government, it's still not as ideal as Singapore as they use complex Chinese there."
China uses simplified Chinese characters while Taiwan uses the traditional form.
Rogers certainly knows what he is talking about, even if the only Mandarin words he can say are his daughters' Chinese names Lele (Happy) and Xiaomifeng (Little Bee), as well as ni hao (how are you), xiexie (thank you) and bing pijiu (cold beer).
Parker's grasp of the language is better, as she has been taking lessons here.
In the past few years, they have visited Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong many times to look for the perfect school for Happy, before deciding on Singapore.
"As much as we want to be in mainland China, the pollution there that you read about is real," says Parker.
"Singapore doesn't have that. It also has an extraordinary health-care system and great schools, and it's a wonderful place for a family."
Rogers says many people felt they were making a big mistake when they announced that they were uprooting to Asia.
"They thought we were crazy, because we were doing it voluntarily. Many people thought we moved to China. They don't know that Singapore is not China," he says.
"Some people told me I was smart to do it for my children, but they couldn't do it themselves."
Their plan is to "stay here forever, unless something else happens", he says, adding that he hopes to travel around China one day with his daughters as his interpreters.
When asked what his net worth is--believed to be billions of dollars--he replies: "I'm sorry, but I can't answer that."
After a pause, he adds, tenderly: "My net worth should not be measured in monetary terms, but it should be measured in how good a father I can be." (By MAK MUN SAN/ The Straits Times/ ANN)
Catch The Shorties べ_べ
17 July 08
• The US Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) issued an emergency order late on Tuesday, to curtail short selling in financial stocks. It will require traders to borrow or arrange to borrow shares of brokerages (eg Lehman), Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, Citigroup, JP Morgan, UBS, and other financial stocks totaling 19), before betting these shares will fall, and to deliver the shares by the settlement date. The temporary order, to take effect July 21, will bar so-called naked short selling, in which traders avoid the financial cost of borrowing stocks.
• In traditional short selling, traders borrow stock through a broker and hope to profit by selling shares at a higher price and later buying them back at lower prices. Naked short sellers do the same thing, with one difference: they don’t borrow the shares, which means they can drive down prices by flooding the market with orders to sell shares they don’t have.
• Yesterday, the new rule seemed to be working, as evidenced by the large gains made by financial stocks: Wells Fargo (which was credited as the trigger because of its better-than-expected Q2 performance) + 33%; Fannie +31%; Freddie +30%; Washington Mutual +25%; Bank of America +22%; JP Morgan +16%; Citigroup +13%; all of which helped push up the S&P Financials by 12%, the best single day gain in percentage terms.
COMMENTS
1. The continued weakness of the US market, especially financial stocks including Freddie, Fannie and Lehman in the 2 days after Henry Paulson’s proposal on the morning of Monday July 14th (Asian time), as well as the “open defiance” of hedge fund managers in betting against these, suggest that more is urgently needed.
2. One such action is to “catch” the shorts, which is what the SEC has done, which as warned, could be extended to the entire US market. The only concern is that the scheme may only work for a short period of time.
3. Another action, which SEC is open to, would be to reintroduce the uptick rule, which makes shorting possible only in a rising market (this was removed in2007)..... The US government could also emulate the HK government in setting up a Tracker Fund, as the latter did during the Asian Crisis, to mop up key blue chip stocks. But this is unlikely to carry the surprise element as the HK experiment had, given the need for Congressional approval..... The Treasury could also speed up the purchase of shares in Freddie and Fannie at say a discount to market, which could help preempt them from collapsing, as was the case with Bear Stearns (which hit a low of US$2.84 on Mar 17th, from US$30 close on the preceding Friday Mar 14th). JP Morgan first offered US$2 per BSC share, before raising it to US$10.
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