Stendhal syndrome is a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly beautiful or a large amount of art is in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to other circumstances, as when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world.

The illness is named after the famous 19th century French author Marie-Henri Stendhal, who described his experience with the phenomenon during his 1817 visit to Florence, Italy in his book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio.

Although there are many descriptions, dating from the early 19th century on, of people becoming dizzy and fainting while taking in Florentine art, the syndrome was only named in 1979, when it was described by Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini, who observed and described more than 100 similar cases among tourists and visitors in Florence. The syndrome was first diagnosed in 1982. The term is also used when describing the reactions of audiences to music of the Romantic period.

It is similar but not identical to Paris Syndrome, a transient psychological disorder encountered by some people visiting or vacationing in Paris, France. The symptoms occur during a trip which confronts the traveller with things they had not previously experienced and did not anticipate. The symptoms did not exist before the trip and they disappear with a return to familiar surroundings.

In the metaphysical or conceptual sense, balance is used to mean a point between two opposite forces that is desirable over purely one state or the other, such as a balance between the metaphysical Law and Chaos – law by itself being overly controlling, chaos being overly unmanageable, balance being the point that minimizes the negatives of both.

More recently, the term balance has come to refer to a balance of power between multiple opposing forces. Lack of balance is generally considered to cause aggression by stronger forces towards weaker forces less capable of defending themselves. In the real world, unbalanced stronger forces tend to portray themselves as balanced, and use media controls to downplay this, as well as prevent weaker forces from coming together to achieve a new balance of power.

In constructed worlds, such as in video gaming, where nearly all-powerful corporate interests strive to maintain a balance of power among players, players tend to be extremely vocal about what they see as unbalanced mechanics, providing the unbalance negatively affects them. And though the strong and unbalanced or overpowered players are commonly vigorous in denial of any lack of balance, the comparative media equality among all player brings change quickly, to further a sense of balance.

The twentieth century saw the development of both law and chaos in art to the point that the end product became unintelligible at an instinctive or emotional level. Many composers saw one or other of these controlling trends as superior to the other. The truth may lie in a fundamental acceptance of balance as the controlling force in art. In time, we may even come to accept balance between structural and emotional as the essence of beauty.

Manuka or Tea Tree is a shrub or small tree native to southeast Australia and New Zealand. It is particularly common in Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales and on the drier east coasts of New Zealand. Manuka is the name used in New Zealand, and Tea Tree is a common name in Australia because Captain Cook used the leaves to make a tea drink. 

It is a prolific scrub-type tree and is often one of the first species to regenerate on cleared land. It is typically a shrub but can grow into a moderately sized tree, up to 40 feet in height. It is evergreen, with dense branching and small leaves. The flowers are white, occasionally pink, with five petals. The wood is tough and hard, and was often used for tool handles. Manuka sawdust imparts a delicious flavour when used for smoking meats and fish.

Manuka products have high antibacterial potency for a limited spectrum of bacteria and are widely available in New Zealand. Similar properties led the Maori to use parts of the plant as natural medicine. Kakariki parakeets use the leaves and bark of Manuka to rid themselves of parasites. Apart from ingesting the material, they also chew it, mix it with preen gland oil and apply it to their feathers.

Manuka honey, produced when honeybees gather the nectar from its flowers, is distinctively flavoured, darker and richer in taste than clover honey and has strong antibacterial and antifungal properties. The finest quality Manuka honey with the most potent antimicrobial properties is produced from hives placed in wild, uncultivated areas with abundant growth of Manuka bushes. However a very limited number of scientific studies have been performed to verify its efficacy.

Moxibustion is a traditional Chinese medicine therapy using moxa, or mugwort herb. It plays an important role in the traditional medical systems of China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Tibet, and Mongolia. Suppliers usually age the mugwort and grind it up to a fluff. Practitioners then burn the fluff or process it further into a stick that resembles a cigar. They can use it indirectly, with acupuncture needles, or sometimes burn it on a patient’s skin.

Practitioners use moxa to warm regions and acupuncture points with the intention of stimulating circulation through the points and inducing a smoother flow of blood and qi. Research has shown that mugwort acts as an emmenagogue, meaning that it stimulates blood-flow in the pelvic area and uterus. It is claimed that moxibustion militates against cold and dampness in the body.

Medical historians believe that moxibustion pre-dated acupuncture, and needling came to supplement moxa after the 2nd century BC. Different schools of acupuncture use moxa in varying degrees. For example a 5-elements acupuncturist will use moxa directly on the skin, whilst a TCM-style practitioner will use rolls of moxa and hold them over the point treated. It can also be burnt atop a fine slice of ginger root to prevent scarring.

Practitioners consider moxibustion to be especially effective in the treatment of chronic problems. Bian Que, one of the most famous doctors of Chinese antiquity and the first specialist in moxibustion, discussed the benefits of moxa over acupuncture in his classic work. He asserted that moxa could add new energy to the body and could treat both excess and deficient conditions. On the other hand, he advised against the use of acupuncture in an already weak patient, on the grounds that needle manipulation would leak too much energy.

In North and South America, indigenous peoples regard mugwort as a sacred plant of divination and spiritual healing. Mugwort amongst other herbs were often bound into smudge sticks. Europeans placed sprigs of mugwort under pillows to provoke dreams, and the herb had associations with the practice of magic in Anglo-Saxon times.

Dreamworking differs from classical dream interpretation in that the aim of dreamwork is to explore the various images and emotions that a dream presents and evokes, while not attempting to come up with a single, unique dream meaning. In this way the dream remains “alive” whereas if it has been assigned a specific meaning, it is “finished”. Dreamworkers take the position that a dream may have a variety of meanings, depending on the levels that are being explored.

A tenet of dreamwork is that each person has his or her own dream language. Any given place, person, object or symbol can differ in its meaning from dreamer to dreamer and also from time to time in the dreamer’s ongoing life situation. Thus someone helping a dreamer get closer to her or his dream through dreamwork adopts an attitude of “not knowing” as far as possible.

When doing dreamwork it is best to wait until all the questions have been asked and the answers carefully listened to before the dreamworker (or dreamworkers if it is done in a group setting) offers any suggestions about what the dream might mean. In fact, it is best if a dreamworker prefaces any interpretation by saying, “if this were my dream, it might mean …”

In this way, dreamers are not obliged to agree with what is said and may use their own judgment in deciding which comments appear valid or provide insight. If the dreamwork is done in a group, there may well be several things that are said by participants that seem valid to the dreamer but it can also happen that nothing does. Appreciation of the validity or insightfulness of a comment from a dreamwork session can come later, sometimes days after the end of the session.

Thought Field Therapy, or TFT, is a fringe psychological treatment developed by an American psychologist, Roger Callahan. Its proponents say that it can heal a variety of mental and physical ailments through specialized tapping with the fingers at meridian points on the upper body and hands. 

Callahan gave his treatment the name Thought Field Therapy because he theorizes that when we think about an experience or thought associated with an emotional problem, we are tuning into a thought field, which he describes as the most fundamental concept in the TFT system and which creates an imaginary, though quite real scaffold, upon which we may erect our explanatory notions.

Perturbations are said to be precisely encoded information contained in the thought field, which become activated whenever a person thinks about a problem. Callahan maintains that these perturbations are the root cause of negative emotions and that each perturbation corresponds to a meridian point on the body. In order to eliminate the emotional upset, Callahan says that a precise sequence of meridian points must be tapped on. He theorizes that tapping unblocks or balances the flow of Qi.

Callahan states that the process can relieve a wide variety of problems including psychological trauma, phobias, anxiety, panic, obsessive-compulsive disorder, addictive urges, and depression, by treating the blockage in the energy flow created by a disturbing thought pattern. He has also said in a 2006 interview on National Public Radio that TFT can successfully treat physical illnesses such as Malaria in as little as 15 minutes. In an article on his website, Callahan has also stated that TFT can successfully prevent heart problems that may lead to sudden death, and that TFT has successfully stopped atrial fibrillation. In 1985, in his first book on TFT, he said that specific phobias could be cured in as little as five minutes.

Callahan also asserts that his most advanced level, Voice Technology (VT) can be performed over the phone using an undisclosed technology. Training for the advanced VT is provided by Callahan. The fee listed on Callahan’s website for this training is $100,000. Trainees must sign a confidentiality agreement not to disclose the trade secret behind VT.

Type physicalism is a theory in philosophy of mind which asserts that mental events are type-identical to the physical events in the brain with which they are correlated. The thesis of type physicalism is that mental event types such as pain are identical with specific physical event types in the brain.

It is also called type identity in order to distinguish it from a similar but distinct theory called the token identity theory. The type-token distinction is easily illustrated by way of example. In the phrase “yellow is yellow is yellow is yellow”, there are only two types of words (”yellow” and “is”) but there are seven tokens (four “yellow” and three “is” tokens).

According to U.T. Place, one of the popularizers of the idea of type-identity in the 1950s and 1960s, the idea of type-identity physicalism originated in the 1930s with the psychologist E. G. Boring and took nearly a quarter of a century to gain acceptance from the philosophical community.

The barrier to the acceptance of any such vision of the mind was that philosophers and logicians had not yet taken a substantial interest in questions of identity and referential identification in general. The dominant epistemology of the logical positivists at that time was phenomenalism, in the guise of the theory of sense data. Indeed Boring himself subscribed to the phenomenalist creed, attempting to reconcile it with an identity theory and this resulted in a reductio ad absurdum of the identity theory, since brain states would have turned out, on this analysis, to be identical to colors, shapes, tones and other sensory experiences.

The revival of interest in the work of Gottlob Frege and his ideas, along with the discrediting of phenomenalism through the influence of Wittgenstein, led to a more tolerant climate toward physicalistic and realist ideas. Logical behaviorism emerged as a serious contender to take the place of the Cartesian “ghost in the machine” and, although not lasting very long as a dominant position on the mind/body problem, its elimination of the whole realm of internal mental events was strongly influential in the formation and acceptance of the thesis of type identity.

Remoras or suckerfish are elongated brown fish that grow to 1–3 feet long. Their distinctive first dorsal fin takes the form of a modified oval sucker-like organ that creates suction and takes a firm hold against the skin of larger marine animals. Remoras sometimes attach to small boats. They swim well on their own, with a sinuous motion.

Some remoras associate primarily with specific host species. Remoras are commonly found attached to sharks, manta rays, whales and turtles. Smaller remoras also fasten onto fish like tuna and swordfish, and some small remoras travel in the mouths or gills of large manta rays, ocean sunfish, swordfish, and sailfish.

The relationship between remoras and their hosts is most often taken to be one of commensalism. The host they attach to for transport gains nothing from the relationship, but also loses little. The remora benefits by using the host as transport and protection and also feeds on materials dropped by the host. For some remora and host pairings the relationship is closer to mutualism, with the remora cleaning bacteria and other parasites from the host.

Some cultures use remoras to catch turtles. A cord or rope is fastened to the remora’s tail, and when a turtle is sighted the fish is released from the boat. It usually heads directly for the turtle and fastens itself to the turtle’s shell, and then both remora and turtle are hauled in. Smaller turtles can be pulled completely into the boat by this method, while larger ones are hauled within harpooning range.

Because of the shape of the jaws, appearance of the sucker, and coloration of the remora, it sometimes appears to be swimming upside down. This probably led to the older common name “reversus”, although this might also derive from the fact that the remora frequently attaches itself to the tops of manta rays or other fish, so that the remora is upside down while attached.