Short Stuff: Pruney Skin

In The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, child psychiatrist Bruce Perry describes a series of child abuse and neglect cases to illustrate how trauma impacts the developing brain and explain how he and his colleagues established a more effective therapy model for traumatized children.

In our guide, we’ll explain the psychiatric principles that Perry discovered during his years of working with traumatized children, including the stress response, the effects of trauma in infancy versus trauma at a later age, dissociation in response to trauma, and the role that relationships play in the treatment of traumatized children. We’ll also look at specific case studies that contributed to Perry’s Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics. Our commentary explores research supporting and expanding on Perry’s ideas, as well as scientific and social context on how trauma can manifest and the nuances of treatment.

Do you feel overworked, exhausted, and constantly stressed? If so, you’re not alone.

In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, biologist and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that people today are more stressed than ever before, and it’s causing major physical and mental harm. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to reduce stress in your life and curb the damage caused by chronic stress.

In this guide, we’ll examine the evolution and biology of stress and describe why chronic stress is so harmful physically and psychologically. Then, we’ll look at what you can do to keep stress from causing you too much bodily and mental harm. Throughout the guide, we’ll provide additional context for Sapolsky’s ideas, focusing on the work and research of other scientists and psychologists regarding stress, how it affects us, and how we can manage it.

Do you struggle with ongoing pain that doesn’t seem to respond to treatment? In The Mindbody Prescription, physician and professor of rehabilitation medicine John Sarno explains that the Western world is experiencing an epidemic of disorders characterized by chronic pain with no clear cause. Doctors diagnose and treat these pain disorders as physical problems, but often, their treatments don’t provide any relief. Sarno explains that this is because the problem isn’t physical, it’s emotional—and the key to solving your pain is resolving your emotional tensions.

In this guide, we’ll explain the development and principles of Sarno’s theory and discuss what kind of person is most likely to develop these types of disorders. We’ll also explain the different physical ways in which emotional tension manifests, as well as Sarno’s treatment method. We’ll supplement Sarno’s ideas with scientific and social context as well as tips from other experts on dealing with chronic pain.

The current global pandemic has an unexpected side effect: skin hunger. In isolation, people are now understanding what happens when we don’t fulfill our biological need for physical touch.

Why do we get sick? Why hasn’t natural selection, over millions of years, prevented us from getting cancer, heart disease, and depression?

The science of evolutionary medicine says that our bodies have evolved over millions of years as a set of compromises, largely in pursuit of reproductive fitness. Put concisely, whatever gets you to survive and have kids is going to persist in the gene pool, even if it causes you lots of disease and pain in adult life. Learn more about the evolutionary roots of obesity, infectious disease, aging, and depression.

In The God Delusion, University of Oxford biologist and anti-religion activist Richard Dawkins seeks to demystify religion and discredit faith. He explores the unlikelihood of God’s existence; how evolution by natural selection explains the centrality of religion to the human experience; and how religion promotes immoral values, impoverishes the human mind, and provides justification for intolerance and persecution. He argues that ultimately, we as humans must free ourselves from our self-imposed shackles by destroying faith and religion and positively embracing the full potential of our species.

In his bestselling book The Sports Gene, David Epstein uses science to support the claim that our genes play a determining role in our success in sports. He opens by refuting the idea that enough practice is a virtual guarantee of success. He then spends the rest of the book citing research on genes and performance, taking the reader around the world and over evolutionary time, all to explain why the book’s title is an impossibility. There is no single “sports gene,” just as there is no “perfect athlete.” There are, however, fortuitous pairings of the right genes and the right circumstances in the right sports that together create the remarkable and diverse feats of athleticism that we see on the elite stage.

Our guide reorganizes the wealth of content in The Sports Gene by theme to help clarify Epstein’s major arguments. To provide more grounding, our commentary includes supplemental research as well as explanations of scientific concepts in the fields of genetics and evolution.