Neuroscience - Third Monk

Jan 5, 2015Jun 17, 2016

A Scientific Look at Orgasms (Video)

Orgasms for men and women have some differences and similarities. On a neurological level many of the same areas of the brain are affected.

Signals of pleasure are delivered by pumping us full of dopamine, we experience a decrease in the feeling of fear and anxiety as well as an increase in the feeling of love and connectedness with your mate.

Physically men’s orgasms do not last as long and women can achieve multiples, each lasting 20 seconds or more.

The bottom line of this article is that orgasms are often, captain obvious here — over and out!

Nov 19, 2014Jun 17, 2016

4 Scientifically Proven Positive Psychological Benefits of Meditation

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

Nov 11, 2014Jun 17, 2016

Power of Meditation Can Alter Human Cells (Video)

Recent studies in Canada are showing hard evidence that the power of meditation can change the body on a cellular level.

Scientist found that the protein caps at the end of our chromosomes that denote cellular aging had not diminished in cancer survivors that meditate. The mind-body connection is becoming more apparent with each study.

Scientist already know that meditation can help you strengthen connections in the brain; but this evidence takes us a step further, suggesting that meditation may be useful when treating terminal illnesses.

The Power of Meditation

Nov 5, 2014Jun 17, 2016

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

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

Oct 23, 2014Jun 17, 2016

How Does Cannabis Create the Munchies? (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

Oct 2, 2014Jun 17, 2016

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

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

Jul 17, 2014Jun 17, 2016

Consciousness Is Linked to a Trigger Deep Inside the Brain (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

Jun 25, 2014Jun 17, 2016

Do We Unconsciously Feel the Future Before it Happens? (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

Sep 3, 2013Jun 17, 2016

Stoner Intelligence? Cannabis Found to Boost Growth of Brain Cells (Study)

A new report offered by the Neurochemistry International Journal (Aug 2013) has discovered that cannabis’ CBC cannabinoid helps promote brain cell growth.

This study aimed at elucidating the effect of major non-THC phytocannabinoids on the fate of adult neural stem progenitor cells (NSPCs), which is an essential component of brain function in health as well as in pathology.

We tested three compounds: cannabidiol, cannabigerol, and cannabichromene (CBC), and found that CBC has positive effect on the cell viability of mouse NSPCs during differentiation in vitro.

We measured ATP levels as an equilibrium marker of adenosine and found higher ATP levels during differentiation of NSPCs in the presence of CBC. Taken together, our results suggest that CBC raises the viability of NSPCs while inhibiting their differentiation into astroglia, possibly through up-regulation of ATP and adenosine signalling.

– Endocannabinoid Research Group, Institute of Biomolecular Chemistry, Italy

Brain cell growth boosted by CBC is one of many studies that are exploring the relationship between cannabis and the brain. Scientists like Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman are known as some of the smartest stoners who admitted to smoking weed.

Cannabis Cannabinoids and Brain Function

Cannabinoid Profile – Cannabichromene (CBC)

> New Research: CBC Cannabinoid Sparks Brain Cell Growth | Marijuana Research

Apr 18, 2013Jun 17, 2016

Neuroplasticity, Meditation and Happiness – Willoughby Britton Ted Talk (Video)

Neuroplasticity: The brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment.

In this Ted Talk, Willoughby Britton focuses on neuroplasticity and mindful meditation through the scope of happiness.

The practice of meditation builds stronger and healthier neural pathways that lead to better habits.

Willoughby Britton – Neuroplasticity, Meditation and Happiness Notable Excerpts

If we get everything we want and get rid of everything we don’t want; we’ll be happy. It makes sense. Totally logical. Totally wrong. That’s just not the way the data has turned out to be. We’re one of the richest countries on the planet but we’re not really one of the happiest. And the people that are the richest in our country are not necessarily happier than the poorest people in our country.

Getting what we want doesn’t necessarily equal happiness.

Another thing that we know about happiness…it seems to be inextricably linked to the faculty of attention, or more specifically; our pervasive tendency or habit to not pay attention.

A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

Our brain changes with experience and we get good at what we practice…if you exercise your physical body certain muscle groups get stronger, certain movements get easier and they become effortless and automatic. The brain is no different. The neural networks that you exercise becomes stronger and the thought patterns and mental habits that are represented by those neural networks get stronger and become effortless and automatic…

The most powerful way to change your brain is not medication, it is behavior.

Tag: Neuroscience