Inspiring stories of bravery and courage
Every year, millions of people are affected by natural disasters, accidents, and global tragedies. These stories of bravery and courage show the world that even in the direst of situations our humanity shines through. We should all look to these individuals for inspiration as they strive to carry on when all hope seems lost.
Today we’re sharing with you some amazing stories from around the web that will give you goosebumps — or remind you of a time when your own courage was tested in a similar situation.
First, we have an article about how this woman lost her leg but has never let it hold her back: ""I'm not going to be defined by what happened to me"".
This next story may be a brief one, but it has made an impact on our readers. As we know, there have been many tragic events this past year, like the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman and the terrorist attack in Orlando. But this story about how a 9/11 survivor helped another person deal with her own struggles is heartwarming.
There are many stories of amazing survival from fires, floods, hurricanes and earthquakes. Some of these are incredibly personal — like this person who found a way to honor her late husband's memory by "living life to the fullest".
The next article is a "must-read" for our female readers today. It's about a man who was a true inspiration to all he met. This man's story was so inspirational that one woman drove 1,400 miles (24 hours) just to take him a hot meal after he was confined to his wheelchair for the gold star of losing his legs in the Iraq War.
Now this next one is amazing, especially if you're a mother. It talks about two teens who survived being trapped in an elevator with their friends. Not only did they survive, but they were able to teach others how important it is to stay calm and organized in emergency situations — and that no matter what happens, you must always stay strong and positive.
We're wrapping up our look at inspiring stories of bravery and courage with a story from the United Kingdom about how an entire community refused to give up fighting for their beloved pub. "The Landlady who wouldn't quit" proves that no matter what happens in life, you should never stop fighting for what you want and standing up for your beliefs.
Thanks for reading this edition of Daily Buzz. Visit our blog every day for more inspiring and uplifting stories from around the Web. This post was written by Joshua Katz, owner of Katz Marketing Group in White Plains, NY.
Source: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2Yruji/www.dramatica.com/blogadvice-inspiring-stories-of-bravery-and-courage/
2017 April 6 - What Is A Person? By George Dvorsky - Gizmodo io9 (http://gizmodo.com/)
Tags: Brain, Consciousness, Culture, Education, Evolution, Future, Humanity, Information Technology & Telecommunications
A new study may change the way we see ourselves - and possibly even consciousness itself.
If you think you're just a person—an intelligent being that thinks and feels—then you're wrong. You are nothing more than a special kind of animal. Welcome to the kingdom Animalia. All animals are essentially the same thing—a collection of cells organized into tissues and organs. Each cell is like an individual creature working in concert with all the other cells to keep "you" functioning. They do this by communicating using chemicals called signaling molecules or neurotransmitters. You are the emergent property that arises from the collective behavior of many different types of cells working together.
You are not a person—you're a colony. Your brain and your consciousness are like an ant colony, or bee hive, or even a club of termites. You're not single creatures; you're a colony made up of self-organizing cells working together to achieve some kind of purpose—to keep you alive. And these colonies "think" in much the same way that animals do, though they lack some aspects of conscious thought because they don't have to worry about language and communication.
This was the startling conclusion that scientists came to when testing ants for self-awareness, as reported in Scientific Reports . "We wanted to see whether there was a link between their behavior and the fact that they have such advanced cognition," said study author Daniel Beckmann, a neuroscientist at Iowa State University. "This is the first paper reporting evidence that there is a relationship."
Beckmann and his colleagues showed the ants a screen with shapes on it. The researchers recorded the ants' reactions to these shapes, and found that they responded to one particular shape in particular by "following" the other ants toward it. They then removed some of the ants from their colony so that they couldn't follow each other, and observed what happened. The trails on the screen began to change, showing the ants "following" each other in new directions. This is how the term "socially-oriented behavior" was coined.
When they tested these ants, they were found to have a sense of self-awareness and awareness of others; they knew that the shape on the screen was different from any other shape shown there before, and would respond accordingly. With further testing, they found that even without seeing another ant respond to a particular shape, some ants were able to form new trails in order to follow it. These are indications of an ability for social awareness—they know that other ants can see them act or react in certain ways.
This ability to recognize other individuals can also be observed in humans. We often refer to people as "members of our family," and can feel the loss of a loved one by seeing how the rest of the family reacts.
It would seem that we have similar social awareness as ants, which makes sense since there are millions if not billions of different types of them—either in the form of colonies or individual creatures. They all know they're different from each other, and some have more advanced social organization than others, just like different animals do.
Conclusion: We're Animals
The conclusion here is that we're not so special after all. The more you think about it, the more you realize that humans are just advanced animals with extra-special brains. Our brains—which are neurally connected to each other and can communicate over vast distances using a "language" called language—are what set us apart. But they might be doing so in such a way that we don't even realize it's happening.
"It's possible that we're really good at building thousands of mini societies inside our brains," Beckmann explained in a statement . "And our behavior is the result of the interactions between those mini societies.