REFLECTIONS

 It was in the year  2019 that I injured my right knee. It started with me accepting a 100 day challenge run. One was required to run everyday for 100 days. The minimum distance to run was 3 km and so I thought, rather naively, that it would be easy. I ran for 100 days without much hassle. Even after the completion I continued running for another 25 days. This was when   I noticed some pain in my right knee. It was surprising as it was my  left knee which had always given me trouble.     After many failed attempts at running -I resigned to 'running-less' life and started looking around for alternates. Walking was one, as I could do that for long distances. But the time needed for walking was not available due to job pressures. During this time, 2021, I shifted to another location where there was a swimming pool. I thought of taking up swimming. But the pool was closed for major repairs. I waited for the next year and joined the pool in 2022 somewhere i...

    THUNDERSTORM AND WEATHER RADAR             My first aircraft, the De-Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter (1940s design which first flew in late 1951), was the simplest aircraft with few basic instruments. I flew it extensively, single pilot mostly, all across the Western and Northern sector of the country. Weather posed the greatest challenge where we had only our eyes and luck to rely upon. So I was very excited, on my conversion to AN-32 (1993), to have weather radar which would tell me, through color codes, the areas to be avoided. My joy, though, remained short-lived as I frequently got tossed around in weather which my radar showed as benign.   During those early days when I was still at sea with weather radar, I cannot forget a sortie from Agra to Jamnagar. The initial picture painted on the weather radar displayed a continuous 10 mile thick green arch followed by black (no weather) beyond 10 miles. I pressed o...

  METHODS OF VISUALIZING AND STIMULATING THE LIVING HUMAN BRAIN INTRODUCTION Remember Paul Broca (1824-1880), Patient Tan, Carl Wernicke (1848-1904), John Harlow (1819-1907), Phineas Gage (1823-1860)??   It was in mid-1800’s when Physician Paul Broca came across a 30-year-old French citizen named Louis Victor Leborgne, a patient who had lost his speech. His speaking ability was restricted to one single word “tan.” However, his other cognitive abilities like understanding instructions and words and intelligence were intact. John Harlow’s rise to fame was his association as a physician with Phineas Gage. Gage who is also recognized as the “man who began neuro science.” Carl Wernicke too had patients with language problems but quite different than the patients of Paul Broca. They had no problem in speaking but the words were disjointed and conveyed no meaning. Also, their understanding of instructions was severely restricted. They were unable to do even minor cognitive ...

  WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW: DUNNING AND KRUGER EFFECT   “The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it”- Osho              About three and a half decades back two young pilots, with limited experience were on takeoff roll at an international airport with the younger of the two (holding D/White) as captain. The Copilot (holding C/White) decided, for inexplicable reasons, to simulate Engine Failure after takeoff (EFATO). Short of unstick he reduced power on one engine and subsequently retracted the undercarriage prematurely causing the aircraft to sink and skid on the runway on its belly. The runway remained shut for a significant time. Why would someone do such a thing?            The copilot’s exposure to such simulations would have been limited to few in training exercises with instructors. He would have handled them well and concluded that the entire...

 This is part of my assignment for the subject "Stress and Health" MA Psychology 2nd Year. The Diathesis-Stress Model of Mental Illness The Diathesis-Stress Model of mental illness is used to explain the pathogenesis of mental illness (cause of mental illness or etiology). It is one of the most widely accepted theories for explaining the origin of mental disorders. It proposes that psychological disorders arise from the interaction between a person’s predispositional vulnerability (diathesis) and environmental stressors. Neither vulnerability nor stress alone is sufficient; rather, it is their combination that triggers illness. The term Diathesis comes from Greek word meaning predisposition or arrangement.   American Psychologist Paul Meehl, in his paper in 1962, applied this model to explain the origins of schizophrenia suggesting that a genetic vulnerability (schizotaxia) combined with stress could lead to the disorder. Since then, it has been applied to other mental di...