Lessons In Survival

Morgan's research—the first of its kind—produced some fascinating findings about who does the best job resisting the interrogators and who stays focused and clearheaded despite the uncontrollable fear. Morgan looked at two different groups going through this training: regular Army troops like infantrymen, and elite Special Forces soldiers, who are known to be especially "stress hardy" or cool under pressure. At the start or base line, the two groups were essentially the same, but once the stress began, and afterward, there were significant differences. Specifically, the two groups released very different amounts of a chemical in the brain called neuropeptide Y. NPY is an abundant amino acid in our bodies that helps regulate our blood pressure, appetite, learning and memory. It also works as a natural tranquilizer, controlling anxiety and buffering the effects of stress hormones like norepenephrine, one of the chemicals that most of us simply call adrenaline. In essence, NPY is one of the fire hoses that your brain uses to extinguish your alarm and fear responses by keeping the frontal-lobe parts of your brain working longer under stress

The science is cool, but reading about the SEAL training was freaky.

Interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today that talks about an experienced regiment being replaced by a new regiment unfamiliar with the situation on the ground.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121634483343864311.html?mod=hpp_us_pageone (subscription required, sorry).

The interesting part of the article for me is how the army is using a wiki to store, update and disseminate information about the region they are working in.

Well that is exactly what they did.

The Army also offers the troops an online reference source, Wiki-Afghan. It looks just like Wikipedia, except it's all about Afghanistan and much of it is classified. There are upwards of 10,000 articles, and any authorized soldier can click on an entry and add new information.

That's just cool, although I wonder if it has the same problem that wikis everywhere have: the 90-10-1 rule.  90% of the people do nothing but read it, 10% (or less) contribute VERY minimally (once or twice) and 1% (or less) are your main contributors.   The army deployed in Afghanistan may be of sufficient size that it can be a success.