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StillnessReflection

After a door closes behind someone, the room still has the same chairs, light and walls, yet its atmosphere can shift at once. Absence can reveal how much a presence was shaping a place.

Original reflection

Mind

The story behind the card

What changes is not the room but the cues a person's presence adds to it: small sounds, movement, warmth, the sense of being seen or heard. People pick up on these cues without consciously listing them, so the shift in atmosphere can register before anyone could say exactly what is different. It is the same reason a flat can feel empty the day a flatmate moves out, even when all the furniture stays.

Türkçe oku
Biri odadan çıktığında sandalyeler, ışık, duvarlar yerinde kalır. Yine de odanın havası bir anda değişebilir. Bazen birinin varlığını ne kadar hissettiğimizi, ancak o gidince fark ederiz.

Değişen aslında oda değil, birinin varlığıyla odaya giren küçük işaretlerdir: sesler, hareketler, sıcaklık, birinin seni görüp duyabileceği hissi. İnsan bu işaretleri tek tek saymadan algılar; bu yüzden neyin değiştiğini söyleyemeden havanın değiştiğini hisseder. Bir ev arkadaşı taşındığı gün, eşyaların hepsi yerinde dursa bile evin boş gelmesi de bundandır.

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While you sleep, the brain strengthens what you learned during the day. This process, called memory consolidation, works both on facts, such as names and dates, and on skills, such as playing a piece of music. After a short or broken night, the brain holds on to new learning less well.

Memory consolidation is the slow process that turns a fresh, fragile memory into a lasting one, and much of it happens during sleep. In 1997 the German researchers Werner Plihal and Jan Born showed that different parts of the night help different kinds of memory. Twenty healthy men learned lists of word pairs and practised mirror tracing, drawing a shape while watching only its reflection. Recall of the word pairs improved most over the first half of the night, when deep, slow-wave sleep dominates, while the drawing skill improved most over the second half, when REM sleep, the stage of vivid dreams, lasts longer. Researchers think that during sleep the brain replays the day's experiences and moves new memories from temporary storage in the hippocampus, deep in the brain, into longer-lasting networks in its outer layer, the cortex.

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Some benefits of exercise begin on the day you do it, according to US guidance promoted by the CDC. After a single session of moderate or vigorous activity, such as a brisk walk, blood pressure can fall, anxiety can ease, and sleep that night and some kinds of thinking can improve.

The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is the United States' national public health agency, founded in Atlanta in 1946. Its advice on exercise follows the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, whose second edition, published in 2018, drew on a review of the previous decade's research. Earlier advice had focused on preventing disease over the years; the new edition also listed benefits people can feel at once. Besides easing anxiety and lowering blood pressure, a single session helps the body respond to insulin, the hormone that moves sugar from the blood into cells. Most of these effects grow with regular activity, while others, such as fitness, strength and a lasting fall in blood pressure, take weeks or months. The guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate activity a week.

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Regular physical activity protects the heart, lifts mood, eases anxiety and improves sleep, according to the World Health Organization. These benefits do not depend on losing weight: people of every shape and size gain them, even when nothing changes on the scales or in the mirror.

The World Health Organization counts any movement that uses energy as physical activity: walking, cycling, sport, active play, housework and physical work. Its 2020 guidelines advise adults to do 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity a week, such as brisk walking, or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous activity, such as running, plus muscle-strengthening exercise on at least two days. In 2022 about 31% of adults worldwide, some 1.8 billion people, fell short of that. Weight is a poor guide to these benefits. The US Physical Activity Guidelines state that they are generally independent of body weight, and a 2014 analysis of ten studies found that fit people who were overweight or obese had death rates similar to fit people of normal weight, while unfit people had about twice the risk, whatever their weight.

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Kerb cuts, the small ramps where a pavement meets the road, were won by disabled campaigners for wheelchair users. They now help anyone pushing a pram, pulling a suitcase or wheeling a trolley.

Kalamazoo, Michigan, installed some of the first kerb cuts in the 1940s, in a pilot scheme proposed by the lawyer and war veteran Jack H. Fischer to help disabled veterans get to work. In the 1970s the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, California, a group run by disabled people and co-founded by Ed Roberts, pushed for cuts along Telegraph and Shattuck Avenues, creating one of the first continuous step-free routes through an American city. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 later made kerb ramps a legal requirement on new and altered streets across the United States. In 2017 the policy advocate Angela Glover Blackwell named the wider pattern the 'curb-cut effect': a change made for one group often ends up helping almost everyone.

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Braille is a writing system read with the fingertips: each letter is a pattern of raised dots within a small cell of six.

The system takes its name from Louis Braille, a blind French student who published it in 1829. Each cell has two columns of three dot positions, which gives 63 possible patterns in a space small enough to be felt with one touch of a fingertip. Besides letters, braille has contractions, short patterns for common words that make reading faster, and separate codes for mathematics, science and music. Today there are braille codes for more than 133 languages, including Turkish, which has its own signs for letters such as ç, ğ and ş. Many blind readers also use refreshable braille displays, devices whose small pins rise and fall to show text from a computer or phone. Since 2019 the United Nations has marked 4 January, Louis Braille's birthday, as World Braille Day.

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Next card in the archiveReturn to a childhood place and an old staircase may have far fewer steps than memory gave it. The stairs did not need to shrink; your body, stride and point of view changed.Read next →