Neuroscientist Greg Dunn decided to trade in his microscope to become a professional artist. 

He still uses a microscope in his art though. Meta much? What gives! Greg is an interesting dude, and his brain art offers deep food for thought when it comes to interconnectivity and the fractal nature of the universe.

The patterns of branching neurons he saw through the microscope reminded him of the aesthetic principles in Sumi-e art, which he admires. Dunn realized neurons could be painted in this sumi-e (minimalist ink wash painting) style to wonderful effect.

The microscopic world belongs in the world of Asian art. There’s no distinction between painting a landscape of a forest and a landscape of the brain. – Greg Dunn

Enjoy his beautiful creations!

 Sumi-e Style: Brain Art

Cortical Columns

It’s almost a zen quality to the branching pattern of a neuron that I was interested in capturing initially. – Greg Dunn

Basket and Pyramidals

Gold Cortex II

Cortical Circuitboard

Electron Micrograph of Micro-etching

Brainbow Hippocampus in Blue

The image above was inspired by the Brainbow process, a neuroscience technique for coloring neighboring neurons by combining colored fluorescent proteins.

Brainbow Hippocampus Variations

Glia and Blood Vessels

Glial Flare

Spinal Cord

 Art has the power to capture people’s emotions and inspire awe [in a way] that a lot of charts and graphs don’t have. – Greg Dunn

> Dazzling Images of the Brain Created by Neuroscientist-Artist | Live Science

Neuroscientist Paints Sumi-e Style Brain Art (Gallery)

Speeds Up Brain Processing Potential

According to a research journal article published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in February 2012, meditation can alter the geometry of the brain’s surface. There was a study done at UCLA involving 50 meditators and 50 controls that addressed a possible link between meditation and cortical gyrification, the pattern and degree of cortical folding that allows the brain to process faster. This study showed a positive correlation between the amount of gyrification in parts of the brain and the number of years of meditation for people, especially long-term meditators, compared to non-meditators.

This increased gyrification may reflect an integration of cognitive processes when meditating, since meditators are known to be introspective and contemplative, using certain portions of the brain in the process of meditation.

Loosens Our Neural Pathways

Rebecca Gladding, M.D. explains in an article published in May 2013 Psychology Today, how the brain functions better with meditation, and the positive affects it has on the brain, the longer you meditate.

Basically, Gladding explains how the brain can be molded by meditation. Specifically, the connection to our fear center and our “Me” Center (place where the brain constantly reflects back to you) wither away by meditating on a regular basis.

This loosening up lessens our feelings of anxiety, because the neural pathways linking our Me Center to our fear decreases. The unhelpful feelings of anxiety become regulated, meaning, sufficiently ignored, which enhances better neural pathways to form. New neural pathways include improved assessment and empathetic responses. The important thing that Gladding also mentions is that to maintain the benefits of meditation, you must keep meditating because:

the brain can very easily revert back to its old ways if you are not vigilant.

Reduces the Risk of Heart Disease

A large cardiovascular study was done and published in November 2012, in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.

There were 201 people with coronary heart disease given two choices:

(1) Take a health education class promoting improved diet and exercise.
(2) Take a class on transcendental meditation.

Researchers studied these participants for five years and discovered something interesting. Those that chose (2) the meditation class had 48% reduction to the overall risk of heart attack, stroke and death.

Meditations Improves Memory Recall

New research shows that meditation can further enhance the abilities of memory recall.

Catherine Kerr is a researcher at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and the Osher Research Center. She has found that those that practice meditation could adjust their brains waves better. They could screen out distractions and increase productivity faster than those that did not meditate. Less distractions gives room for the brain to integrate new information. This slight change in brain adjustment can dramatically aid in memory recall.

Kerr explained more in an article called, Meditation’s Effects on Emotion Shown to Persist, published in June 2013 at Psych Central

Mindfulness meditation has been reported to enhance numerous mental abilities, including rapid memory recall. Our discovery that mindfulness meditators more quickly adjusted the brain wave that screens out distraction could explain their superior ability to rapidly remember and incorporate new facts. – Catherine Kerr

> Proven Benefits of Meditating | Thinking Humanity

4 Scientifically Proven Positive Psychological Benefits of Meditation

Psilocybin is a chemical found in shrooms that causes a sensory overload of saturated colors and patterns. Recent research has found that this effect happens because the brain becomes “hyperconnected” and allows for increased communication between different brain regions.

Prior studies have found that shrooming doesn’t just create a colorful, psychedelic experience for a couple of hours; it can cause positive neurological changes that last over a year. These changes resulted in a personality that was more open to the creative arts and became happier, even 14 months after receiving the psilocybin.

Psychedelic Connections

The study used 15 participants with prior positive experiences with hallucinogens to avoid a bad trip inside the enclosed machine. Some of the participants received saline placebo (a), while the other half received psilocybin (b) .

Surprisingly, the researchers saw that upon receiving psilocybin, the brain actually re-organized connections and linked previously unconnected regions of the brain. These connections were not random, but appeared very organized and stable. Once the drug wore off, the connections returned to normal.

We can speculate on the implications of such an organization. One possible by-product of this greater communication across the whole brain is the phenomenon of synesthesia (subconscious pairing of two things) which is often reported in conjunction with the psychedelic state. – Giovanni Petri, Lead Researcher at ISI Foundation

The mechanism of how psilocybin is creating these changes is not yet known and will require further study. The researchers believe that in understanding the drug’s mechanism for temporarily re-wiring the brain and altering mood, it could potentially be manipulated into making a functional treatment for depression or other disorders.

> How Magic Mushrooms Change Your Brain | IFL Science

Shroom Awareness – Tracking Activity of the Sober Vs Psychedelic Brain (Study)

Researchers from the Université De Bordeaux suggest that the desire to consume food after ingesting cannabis stems from how THC, the herb’s psychoactive compound, meshes with the olfactory bulb in the brain.

Weed magnifies our sense of smell, which in turn stimulates the appetite (munchies) and makes food more attractive – a major benefit for those patients suffering from eating disorders.

Marijuana can be salvation’s wing for people inflicted with conditions like anorexia nervosa, which has a tendency to contribute to the perception that food is evil.

However, by using cannabis to put a patient’s sense of smell into overdrive, they experience an increased appreciation for food that is typically lost with these types of disorders.

– Lead Researcher Giovanni Marsicano, Marijuana and Food – Nature Neuroscience

The study monitored several groups of stoned and sober mice by watching how they reacted to the presence of almond and banana oils. The stoner mice consumed a lot more oil than their sober counterparts.

In a special group of stoner mice genetically engineered without olfactory bulbs, THC did not cause them to crave food anymore than the sober mice.

> Why Does Pot Make Food Smell and Taste Better? | High Times

How Does Cannabis Create the Munchies? (Study)

Exercise is the catalyst to learning and high brain function. Kids need to move around and activate the brain but these days schools have kids sitting for ridiculously long periods of time causing an uptick in the diagnosis of ADD-ADHD.

Children get fidgety and stop paying attention when they have not had enough movement. 20 minutes a day of movement is not enough. Exercise directly correlates to the way our brain functions.

Movement is beneficial throughout a humans life. Lack of exercise and movement may lead to a lack of motivation and depression in adults.

These two Ted Talks explore the importance of movement and exercise in school children and adults, as well as the benefits to the brain, its affect on learning and its affect on behavior.

The Importance of Movement and Exercise

Run, Jump, Learn! How Exercise can Transform our Schools: John J. Ratey, MD

Wendy Suzuki – Exercise and the Brain

The Psychological Importance of Movement and Exercise – Ted Talk (Video)

A consistent flooding of noise in the ears mutes out thoughts and places us into a deeper, introspective state.

Sift through the colored noise below, find a comfortable place, close your eyes, and listen to the static din for an introspective boost.

Click here for more audio highs.

How Colored Noise Works

Though noise is defined as a random signal, it is often classified into areas: environmental noise, industrial noise, occupational noise, etc. It is also further classified into colors.

Engineers originally developed colored noises to use as guides for electric, acoustic, and audio equipment experiments. Each noise was named after the color it most closely resembled in frequency. Different colors vibrate at a different frequencies, which is how the human eye distinguishes them. Interestingly. in the early 1970s, colored noises were used to test for extrasensory perception.

Dr. Charles Honorton, among other parapsychologists, believed white and pink noise played through headphones could mute out the senses and make a person more amenable to subconscious thought. In Ganzfeld Anomalous Information Transfer experiments, extended exposure to white or pink noise was often successful in inducing in subjects hypnagogic and other altered states of consciousness. At a minimum, a few minutes of white or pink noise placed people into a deep state of meditation.

Brown Noise

Pink Noise

Violet Noise

Blue Noise

White Noise

> Audio High | Get High Now

Increase Introspection with Colored Noise (Audio High)

This is the first brain-scan study published on porn users, and it was published in one of the most prestigious medical journals, JAMA Psychiatry. Researchers found several brain changes, and those changes correlated with how much porn was consumed. The subjects were moderate porn users, not classified as addicted.

Your Brain on Porn

The more porn the subjects used, the less gray matter in the striatum. The striatum is a complex set of structures. It includes the reward center (ventral striatum) and the dorsal striatum, which also goes by several names. Less gray matter means fewer nerve connections (dendrites and axon terminals) in reward-related areas. Put simply, less gray matter in the striatum mean less reward activity, and a decline in dopamine signaling (desensitization).

That could mean that regular consumption of pornography more or less wears out your reward system. – Simone Kühn, Lead Author

A second finding…

The connection between the striatum and prefrontal cortex worsened with increased porn watching. This may indicate hypofrontality (a weakening of the impulse control circuits).

A third finding…

The more porn used the less reward activation when viewing sexual images. A possible explanation is that heavy users need more stimulation, confirming desensitization.

We assume that subjects with a high porn consumption need increasing stimulation to receive the same amount of reward. Existing psychological, scientific literature suggests consumers of porn will seek material with novel and more extreme sex games. That would fit perfectly the hypothesis that their reward systems need growing stimulation. – Simone Kühn

The above findings dismantle the two primary arguments put forth by porn addiction naysayers:

• That porn addiction is a sign of high sexual desire. Reality: The heaviest porn users had less response to sexual images, exhibiting less “sexual desire.

• That compulsive porn use is driven by habituation, or becoming easily bored. Reality: Habituation is a temporary effect that doesn’t involve measurable shrinkage of actual brain structures.

Keep in mind that the results of this study are consistent with over 60 recent brain studies done on internet and video game addicts by addiction neuroscience experts. In these studies, the results demonstrate profound brain changes from over consumption of internet stimuli.

 Porn On The Brain – Channel 4 Documentary

Your Brain on Porn: How Porn Consumption Changes Your Brain Structure and Functional Connectivity (Study)

For more than a century, scientists have been trying to figure out exactly what consciousness really is, how it works and where it comes from. And while many questions remain to be answered, it appears some researchers have now discovered what they call an “on/off switch” for human consciousness.

A group of scientists at George Washington University say they were able to switch off a woman’s consciousness by electrically stimulating a single area of the brain.

The study published in the Journal of Epilepsy & Behavior, Aug 2014 claims the scientists discovered the “switch” on accident while working to pinpoint the cause of the patient’s seizures.

New Scientist reports the research group was targeting the claustrum, “a thin, sheet-like structure that lies hidden deep inside the brain”, with electrodes.

Gizmodo explains that’s when the women unexpectedly lost consciousness:

​Unlike a seizure, where a person’s activity immediately stops, the patient seemed to ‘slow down,’ speaking more quietly and moving more slowly until she was silent and still, unresponsive to voice or visual stimulation.

Once the electrical stimulation was turned off, she regained full consciousness but with no memory of what just happened.

​​This study is incredibly intriguing but it is one brick in a large edifice of consciousness that we’re trying to build … Ultimately, if we know how consciousness is created and which parts of the brain are involved then we can understand who has it and who doesn’t. –  prominent American neuroscientist Cristof Koch – Huffington Post

While the presence of this on/off switch has only been recorded in one patient, this discovery has potential to help people with epilepsy or who are in a semiconscious state.

> Scientists Find ‘On/Off Switch’ For Human Consciousness | Newsy

Consciousness Is Linked to a Trigger Deep Inside the Brain (Study)

Can your brain detect events before they occur?

That was the stunning conclusion of a 2012 meta-analysis of experiments from seven independent laboratories over the last 35 years, which found that the human body can apparently detect randomly delivered stimuli occurring 1-10 seconds in the future.

In the studies, physiological readings were taken as participants were subjected to unpredictable events designed to activate the sympathetic nervous system (for example, showing provocative imagery) as well as ‘neutral events’ that did not activate the nervous system. These readings showed that the nervous system aligned with the nature of the event (activated/not activated) – and what’s more, the magnitude of the pre-event response corresponded with the magnitude of the post-event response.

Rebuttal? Not so fast…

In a recent paper, researchers have critically analysed these findings, considering possible mundane explanations for the results and also the implications of the results if they truly do point to a paradigm-shaking discovery.

The key observation in these studies is that human physiology appears to be able to distinguish between unpredictable dichotomous future stimuli, such as emotional vs. neutral images or sound vs. silence. This phenomenon has been called presentiment (feel the future).

In this paper we call it predictive anticipatory activity or PAA. The phenomenon is “predictive” because it can distinguish between upcoming stimuli; it is “anticipatory” because the physiological changes occur before a future event; and it is an “activity” because it involves changes in the cardiopulmonary, skin, and/or nervous systems.

Neither questionable research practices (bias) nor physiological artifacts seem to be able to explain PAA, the evidence indicates that there is a temporal mirroring between pre- and post-event physiological events, so that the nature of the post-event physiological response is correlated with the characteristics of the PAA for that event. – Study

The authors of the paper also point out fascinating aspects of the research, such as the fact that “PAA is an unconscious phenomenon” that “appears to resemble precognition (consciously knowing something is going to happen before it does), but PAA specifically refers to unconscious physiological reactions as opposed to conscious premonitions”.

There must be a necessity for PAA to remain non-conscious most of the time, if some part of our nervous system can obtain information about events seconds in the future, wouldn’t we have evolved to make this information conscious? – Study

How is this possible…

A metaphor may help to provide an intuitive feel for this effect – watching a river move past a stick.

Imagine that the direction of the water’s current is the conscious experience of the flow of time (temporal flow), and imagine that an intrusion in the flow (the stick) is an emotional, arousing, or otherwise important event. The largest disturbance in the water made by the intrusion is downstream (in the “forward” time direction), which is analogous to our conscious reaction to experiencing the important event.

But if one examines the flow of water near the stick, one will also see a small perturbation upstream, anticipating the intrusion in the water downstream due to the back pressure. Similar to PAA, this upstream perturbation is a hint of things to come. It is not normally part of our conscious awareness and, as with disturbances in a flow of water, the majority of the effect of an intrusion is downstream of the intrusion.

Nevertheless, the authors of the recent paper urge caution until more extensive research is undertaken:

Until there is a gold standard experiment that is replicated across laboratories using exactly the same experimental procedure, physiological measures, and statistical analyses, there remains the possibility that multiple analyses could influence the body of evidence supporting PAA.

I look forward to seeing the results of these future investigations. Or do I already know what they are going to be?

> We Unconsciously React to Events Up to 10 Seconds Before They Happen | Earth We Are One

Do We Unconsciously Feel the Future Before it Happens? (Study)

Despite the fact that the U.S. government deems many hallucinogenic or psychedelic substances to be dangerous, classifying them as Schedule I drugs with “no currently accepted medical use,” various scientists have dared to study their effects.

What they’ve found over the years paints a startling, promising and powerful picture of potentially game-changing medicines.

LSD Mitigates End-of-Life Anxiety

The results of the first clinical study of the therapeutic use of LSD in humans in more than 40 years were published. They show that LSD can promote statistically significant reductions in anxiety for people coming to terms with their own impending demise.

Aldous Huxley famously made use of LSD as a way to ease his own passing.

Swiss psychiatrist Peter Gasser and his colleagues conducted the double-blind, placebo-controlled study, sponsored by the non-profit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). They tracked 12 people who were near the end of life as they attended LSD-assisted psychotherapy sessions. In his report, Gasser concluded that the study subjects’ anxiety “went down and stayed down.”

Psilocybin – Magic Mushrooms Actually Calms Certain Brain Functions

The common conception is that psychedelics do something extra to cause their effects – like increase activity, add hallucinations, promote awareness, etc.

A study that examined brain scans of people under the influence of psilocybin found that it reduces activity in certain areas of the brain. That reduction of activity leads to the drug’s effect on cognition and memory.

Psychedelics, and psilocybin in particular, might actually be eliminating what could be called the extra “noise” in the brain.

MDMA Promotes the Release of Oxytocin – Helping to Treat PTSD and Severe Social Anxiety

Before being classified as a Schedule I substance, therapists experimented with MDMA beginning in the 1970s to help reduce moderate depression and anxiety among their adult patients.  Recent research primarily supported by the MAPS has continued to turn up positive results for the drug’s potential therapeutic use.

Various clinical trials and statistical research have confirmed that MDMA can successfully treat post-traumatic stress in military veterans and others.

A 2009 study offers a plausible explanation for MDMA’s effectiveness in treating PTSD. The double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study of 15 healthy individuals confirmed that MDMA causes the brain to release oxytocin, which is the human hormone linked to feelings of love and compassion.

MAPS recently received government approval to launch a new study examining MDMA’s potential for treating social anxiety in autistic adults. Based on the known effects of MDMA, as well as individual reports, this exploratory study will focus on enhancing functional skills and quality of life in autistic adults with social anxiety.

Psilocybin Can Help You Quit Smoking

Psychiatry Professor Matthew Johnson, who works at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, presented the preliminary results of a pilot feasibility study looking at the ability of psilocybin to treat smoking addiction.

For the study, five cigarette-addicted participants underwent placebo-controlled psilocybin treatment with a psychiatrist. All five completely quit smoking after their first psilocybin session. At all followup visits, which occurred up to one year later for the first four participants, it was biologically confirmed that the participants had abstained from cigarettes.

Ayahuasca Can Treat Drug Addiction

Ayahuasca is a brew prepared with the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, originally used for spiritual and healing purposes in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. The vine is usually mixed with leaves containing the psychedelic compound DMT.

Gabor Mate, a medical doctor from Vancouver who is a prominent Ayahuasca researcher, contends that therapy assisted by psychedelics, and ayahuasca in particular, can untangle complex, unconscious psychological stresses. He claims these stresses underlie and contribute to all chronic medical conditions, from cancer and addiction to depression and multiple sclerosis.

The results of the first North American observational study on the safety and long-term effectiveness of Ayahuasca treatment for addiction and dependence were published in June 2013 in the journal Current Drug Abuse Reviews.

All of the participants in the study reported positive and lasting changes, and the study found statistically significant improvements “for scales assessing hopefulness, empowerment, mindfulness, and quality of life meaning and outlook subscales. Self-reported alcohol, tobacco and cocaine use declined, although cannabis and opiate use did not.”

The reported reductions in problematic cocaine use were also statistically significant.

Taking DMT Can Naturally Simulate Death

DMT causes hallucinogenic experiences and is conveniently made up of a chemical compound that already occurs within the human body (as well as in a number of plants). This means our brains are naturally set up to process the drug, because it has receptors that exist specifically to do so. Cannabis is another illegal drug that occurs endogenously.

Some research based on near-death experiences points to the fact that the brain releases DMT during death. Some researchers have also conjectured that DMT is released during other intense experiences, including orgasm.

> 5 Things Scientists Have Discovered About Mind-Altering Drugs | Alter Net

6 Amazing Things Scientists Have Discovered About Psychedelics