Mindhacks

Here’s some research from the University of Chicago discussing how brainwaves pattern themselves after rhythms of nature. Jose Silva, founder of the Silva Method, was one of the first few proponents in using Alpha waves in order to achieve a relaxed and meditative state for learning and comprehension.

Brain waves pattern themselves after rhythms of nature

The same rules of physics that govern molecules as they condense from gas to liquid, or freeze from liquid to solid, also apply to the activity patterns of neurons in the human brain. University of Chicago mathematician Jack Cowan will offer this and related insights on the physics of brain activity this week in Boston during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“Structures built from a very large number of units can exhibit sharp transitions from one state to another state, which physicists call phase transitions,” said Cowan, a Professor in Mathematics and Neurology at Chicago. “Strange and interesting things happen in the neighborhood of a phase transition.”

When liquids undergo phase transitions, they evaporate into gas or freeze into ice. When the brain undergoes a phase transition, it moves from random to patterned activity. “The brain at rest produces random activity,” Cowan said, or what physicists call “Brownian motion.”

Although the bulk of his work involves deriving equations, Cowan’s findings mesh well with laboratory data generated on the cerebral cortex and electroencephalograms. His latest findings show that the same mathematical tools physicists use to describe the behavior of subatomic particles and the dynamics of liquids and solids can now be applied to understanding how the brain generates its various rhythms.

These include the delta waves generated during sleep, the alpha waves of the visual brain, and the gamma waves, discovered during the last decade, which seem related to information processing. “The resting state of brain activity seems to have a statistical structure that’s characteristic of a certain kind of phase transition,” Cowan said. “The brain likes to sit there because that’s the place where information processing is optimized.”

Cowan organized a session for AAAS on Mathematics and the Brain, which will take place from 8:30 to 10 a.m. EST Saturday, Feb. 16. He also will participate in a news briefing on the topic at 3 p.m. EST Friday, Feb. 15. Joining him at both events will be mathematician Nancy Kopell of Boston University and computational neuroscientist Tomaso Poggio of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At this stage of his research, Cowan said it would be premature and speculative for him to try to relate how phase transitions in the brain might relate to neurological conditions or states of human consciousness. “That’s for the future,” he said.

Another component of his latest research is the close relationship between spontaneous pattern formation in brain circuits and in chemical reaction networks. In this research, he shows how mathematics can help explain visual hallucinations and how the visual cortex obtained its stripes, which are visible to the naked eye when removed from cadavers.

“This line of research on pattern formation can be traced back to Alan Turing, who also founded the modern science of computation,” said Terrence Sejnowski of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., who is a leading specialist in computational neurobiology.

Cowan’s quest to understand the brain’s workings using numerical methods spans more than four decades. Along the way he has collaborated with a series of Ph.D. students and colleagues in physics, mathematics, biology and neuroscience.

In 1972, he and postdoctoral fellow Hugh Wilson, now of Canada’s York University, formulated a set of equations that could describe the dynamics of neural networks. Now called “Wilson-Cowan equations,” they became a mainstay of neural network research. “But I always knew that those equations were inadequate, so I kept thinking about them,” Cowan said.

Then in 1985, he ran across an article in a Japanese journal that described a statistical physics approach to chemical reaction networks. “It took me years to understand how to use these tools for biological networks,” he said. “It so happens that there is an analogy between the behavior of chemical reaction networks and neural networks.”

His research career began in 1962, when as a graduate student in electrical engineering, he worked with the founders of neural network theory. These included Norbert Wiener, who died in 1964, before they could work jointly on the problem that Cowan continues to address.

“I didn’t really understand what he was saying to me until I worked it out myself. He was one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century,” Cowan said.

Source : University of Chicago
Image Source: HERE

The Scene of Memories

I was taken aback recently by a memory I had of as a teenager learning how to bake. Recently, I was treated to a lunch at a local cafe that specialized in pastries and other wonderful carbohydrates. Suddenly, an overwhelming wave of nostalgia hit me as I recognized the delicious scent of lightly crusted apple pies freshly baked from my common dorm kitchen.

Now STOP. Look at the following picture:

What do you remember? (Leave me a comment and let me know!)

As I reflected on these events, I came across this article published recently in time on how emotions and your scent of smell mysteriously work together…

Emotion Makes Nose a Sharper Smeller

By AP/LAURAN NEERGAARD

Know how a whiff of certain odors can take you back in time, either to a great memory or bad one? It turns out emotion plays an even bigger role with the nose, and that your sense of smell actually can sharpen when something bad happens.

Northwestern University researchers proved the surprising connection by giving volunteers electric shocks while they sniffed novel odors.

The discovery, reported in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, helps explain how our senses can steer us clear of danger. More intriguing, it could shed light on disorders such as post-traumatic stress syndrome.

“This is an incredibly unique study,” said Dr. David Zald, a Vanderbilt University neuroscientist who studies how the brain handles sensory and emotional learning. “We’re talking about a change in our perceptual abilities based on emotional learning.”

Scientists long have known of a strong link between the sense of smell and emotion. A certain perfume or scent of baking pie, for instance, can raise memories of a long-dead loved one. Conversely, a whiff of diesel fuel might trigger a flashback for a soldier suffering PTSD.

Could an emotionally charged situation make that initial cue be perceived more strongly in the first place?

The research team recruited 12 healthy young adults to find out.

Volunteers repeatedly smelled sets of laboratory chemicals with odors distinctly different from ones in everyday life. An “oily grassy” smell is the best description that lead researcher Wen Li, a Northwestern postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience, could give.

Two of the bottles in a set contained the same substance and the third had a mirror image of it, meaning its odor normally would be indistinguishable. By chance, the volunteers correctly guessed the odd odor about one-third of the time.

Then Li gave the volunteers mild electric shocks while they smelled just the odd chemical. In later smell tests, they could correctly pick out the odd odor 70 percent of the time.

MRI scans showed the improvement was more than coincidence. There were changes in how the brain’s main olfactory region stored the odor information, essentially better imprinting the shock-linked scent so it could be distinguished more quickly from a similar odor.

In other words, the brain seems to have a mechanism to sniff out threats.

That almost is certainly a survival trait evolved to help humans rapidly and subconsciously pick a dangerous odor from the sea of scents constantly surrounding us, Li said. Today, that might mean someone who has been through a kitchen fire can tell immediately if a whiff of smoke has that greasy undertone or simply comes from the fireplace.

But the MRI scans found the brain’s emotional regions did not better discriminate among the different odors, Li noted. That discrepancy between brain regions is where anxiety disorders may come in. If someone’s olfactory region does not distinguish a dangerous odor signal from a similar one, the brain’s emotional fight-or-flight region can overreact.

Researchers say that is a theory not yet tested.

For now, Northwestern neuroscientist Jay Gottfried, the study’s senior author, says the work illuminates a sense that society too often gives short shrift.

“People really dismiss the sense of smell,” said Gottfried, who researches “how the brain can put together perceptions of hundreds of thousands of different smells. … Work like this really says that the human sense of smell has much more capacity than people usually give it credit.”

Find this article here.

(Image Source)

What Matter’s the Most Is What Your Mind Tells You

The holidays are finally over and your waistline is as overstretched as your credit card. It’s time to take action! What should you do?

A) Hit the gym.

B) Make a solemn pledge to never ingest another sweet for as long as you live.

C) Hit the gym and make a solemn pledge to never ingest another sweet for as long as you live, or …

D) Sit around on the couch eating chocolate bonbons while genuinely believing that you are getting a lot of rigorous exercise.

The answer to this multiple-choice quiz might not be as straightforward as you think. In fact, a recent study by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer seems to challenge our basic assumptions about the relationship between the physical body and the mind — and perhaps even our assumptions about the nature of objective reality itself. It certainly challenges our assumptions about the limits of the placebo effect.

Langer is a researcher who has published several important and provocative studies. In this study, she decided to look at whether our perception of how much exercise we are getting has any effect on how our bodies actually look. To do this, she studied hotel maids.

As any casual observer of the hospitality industry knows, hotel maids spend the majority of their days lugging heavy equipment around endless hallways. Basically, almost every moment of their working lives is spent engaged in some kind of physical activity.

But Langer found that most of these women don’t see themselves as physically active. She did a survey and found that 67 percent reported they didn’t exercise. More than one-third of those reported they didn’t get any exercise at all.

“Given that they are exercising all day long,” Langer says, “that seemed to be bizarre.”

Perceptions Matter

What was even more bizarre, she says, was that, despite the fact all of the women in her study far exceeded the U.S. surgeon general’s recommendation for daily exercise, the bodies of the women did not seem to benefit from their activity.

Langer and her team measured the maids’ body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, blood pressure, weight and body mass index. They found that all of these indicators matched the maids’ perceived amount of exercise, rather than their actual amount of exercise.

So Langer set about changing perceptions.

She divided 84 maids into two groups. With one group, researchers carefully went through each of the tasks they did each day, explaining how many calories those tasks burned. They were informed that the activity already met the surgeon general’s definition of an active lifestyle.

The other group was given no information at all.

One month later, Langer and her team returned to take physical measurements of the women and were surprised by what they found. In the group that had been educated, there was a decrease in their systolic blood pressure, weight, and waist-to-hip ratio — and a 10 percent drop in blood pressure.

One possible explanation is that the process of learning about the amount of exercise they were already getting somehow changed the maids’ behavior. But Langer says that her team surveyed both the women and their managers and found no indication that the maids had altered their routines in any way. She believes that the change can be explained only by the change in the women’s mindset.

Essentially, what Langer is talking about is a placebo effect. She says that if you believe you are exercising, your body may respond as if it is. It’s the same as if you believe you are getting medication when you are actually getting a sugar pill — your body can sometimes respond as if a placebo is actually working.

The implication is that the “objective reality” of the physical body is not as immovable as we might have assumed. Hence, the theoretical possibility that, if done with genuine conviction, one might be able to sit around eating chocolate and still lose weight.

Placebo Effect Limited?

But Martin Binks, director of behavioral health at the Duke Diet and Fitness Center in North Carolina, is skeptical of Langer’s conclusion, even though he is impressed with the physical changes in the maids.

“There’s a very high likelihood that [the maids] behaved differently after they received that information,” he says, “and they were being more active and eating more healthfully. And that resulted in their improvements in health.”

But Binks has a more substantive criticism. He does not believe that placebos are capable of producing the kind of objective change in the physical body that Langer is claiming.

“Generally what placebos work on is subjective types of findings,” he says.

In other words, a placebo can help change something like your perception of pain or perhaps your sense of whether you feel depressed, but it can’t do something objective like shrink a tumor or cut three pounds off your waistline.

Or can it?

Howard Brody has spent years looking at this issue. He says that a number of relatively new studies challenge the old assumption that the placebo effect alters only subjective perception. He is the director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch and the author of the book, The Placebo Response.

For example, Brody notes one study where researchers gave asthmatic patients a drug that actually makes asthma worse. When they gave the drug to the patients, they told them that it relieves asthma.

“A significant number of those patients said that my asthma got better when you gave me the drug,” Brody says, “and they measured better when you measured the lung findings.

“So the idea that the placebo effect applies only to subjective things is really one that we have to dismiss.”

So maybe it really might be possible to sit on the couch eating chocolates and lose weight. I, for one, am certainly willing to sacrifice and give it the old college try.

(reference)

Did you know it’s possible to synthesise your own happiness?. Dan Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard, discusses modern man’s pursuit of happiness in this scintillating video. He first shares Sir Thomas Browne’s view written way back in 1642:

“I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me.” – Sir Thomas Browne 1642  

We think happiness is something we find, BUT it’s something we synthesise for ourselves. Take the example of Pete Best – if you don’t remember who he is or was or could have been – he was the original drummer in the Beatles that got dropped on tour for Ringo Starr.

“I’m happier than I would have been with The Beatles” – Pete Best

Dan also shares the story of a guy who was falsely imprisoned for 37 years for a crime he didn’t commit. Moreese Bickham, 78 years old when when he was released Speaking of his experiences in prison the guy says . .  .

“I don’t have one minutes regret, it was a GLORIOUS experience”

GLORIOUS, I repeat GLORIOUS! Dan goes on to back up these remarkable findings . . .

The Pursuit of Happiness

About Dan Gilbert

Daniel Gilbert is the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research with Tim Wilson on “affective forecasting” investigates how and how well people can make predictions about the emotional impact of future events.

Dan has won numerous awards for his teaching and research—from the Guggenheim Fellowship to the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology. However, he says that his greatest accomplishment is that he appears just before Dizzie Gillespie on the list of Most Famous High School Dropouts.

Dan’s research has been covered by The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, Money, CNN, U.S. News & World Report, The New Yorker, Scientific American, Oprah Magazine, Psychology Today, and many others.
He lives in Cambridge Massachusetts with his wife and a lack of pets.

Read More Information:

- Stumbling Upon Happiness Named #1 on Amazon for category Mind, Body and Soul >>

- Buy the Book >>

We’ve all heard the phrase ‘mind over matter’ before; it’s such a valuable thing to practice and really shows us that anything is possible. Many lessons teach us the power of positive thinking; and the law of attraction has never been more in the public spotlight. Controlling your thoughts is a phenomenon that we have to take advantage of.

Now some of the best researchers from around the world are revealing that it’s actually possible to think away pain. This is a massive development for anyone who is suffering from chronic pain, where the usual methods such as traditional medicines and drugs fail.

 I found this great article that uncovers these findings and shows what great impact this could have on so many people’s lives.

Think Away The Pain

by Rachel Metz

Pain can be mysterious, untreatable and debilitating, and its causes can be unknown. But if you could see the pain — or, at least, your brain’s reaction to it — you might be able to master it.

A study from researchers at Stanford University and MRI technology company Omneuron suggests that’s possible, and the results could lead to better therapies for those suffering from crippling chronic pain.

The researchers asked people in pain to try to control a pain-regulating region of the brain by watching activity in that area from inside a real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, machine. Initial results showed subjects could reduce their pain, some quite dramatically.

It’s the first evidence that humans can take control of a specific region of the brain, and thereby decrease pain, said Stanford professor Sean Mackey, who co-wrote the paper, which was published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“(Similar to) going to a gym and working muscle using weights, here we’re using the real-time fMRI technology to exercise a certain brain region,” he said.

Study co-leader and Omneuron CEO Christopher deCharms said for many people with chronic pain, available treatments like medication or surgery simply don’t work. But this exercise, which researchers have termed “neuroimaging therapy,” could one day help some of the millions of Americans who suffer from untreatable chronic pain.

In the study, eight healthy subjects who’d been subjected to a painful stimulus and eight chronic pain patients underwent a series of fMRIs. The images tracked activity in the brain’s rostral anterior cingulate cortex — an area deCharms said is related to pain. Subjects watched this area on a monitor in real time during the procedure. Prompted by researchers’ suggestions of trying to lessen their own pain by ignoring it or imagining it as benign, they set out in a mental game of hot-and-cold to lessen their discomfort.

Twenty-eight healthy subjects and four pain patients were also put into control groups that tried to control pain by viewing other patients’ brain data or using other mental strategies, but no fMRIs. These tactics didn’t show a significant reduction in pain, deCharms said.

The pain patients reported that the fMRI helped them decrease their overall pain 64 percent. Healthy subjects said they saw a 23 percent increase in their ability to control the strength of their pain, and a 38 percent increase in their ability to master its unpleasantness.

“I think most people found it very exciting to be able to watch the activity in their own brain, moment by moment, as it took place,” deCharms said.

• - Read more here >>

People are realizing more and more the importance of developing their spirituality. People try to reach a higher state by preparing their souls with prayers and meditation. However, some people complain about not seeing results from their prayers.

What they don’t realize is that they may have been putting their energy in the wrong areas. They are focusing in the fruit not in the root of the problem. Sometimes what we want is not what we need to be fulfilled. What we really need to achieve is a greater spiritual state.

What should we pray for?

People pray for many different things. Pray can be a form of desire. We pray for material comforts or release from physical pain. However prayer can be more than just praying for the satisfaction of our material needs. The highest prayer is merely to become one with the highest spiritual realisation.

A Little Story

There is a story of two great Spiritual figures, Sri Ramakrishna and his beloved disciple Swami Vivekananda. Due to the death of his father Swami Vivekananda’s family were living in extreme poverty; his mother started to criticise Vivekananda, saying why did he spend his time praying to God when God could not even provide for the family’s basic needs.

Vivekananda felt cut to the bone, so he went to his Spiritual Master Sri Ramakrishna and explained his family’s dire financial predicaments. Sri Ramakrishna compassionately replied to Vivekananda and said if he went to the Temple of Mother Kali and prayed for the boon of financial wealth all his family’s financial problems would be solved.

Encouraged by his master’s promise Vivekananda went to the temple of Mother Kali to pray for money. However Vivekananda was a seeker of the highest order.

His inner nature yearned for God. When he entered the temple of the Mother, Vivekananda became absorbed in the spiritual vibrations of the Temple. He felt his consciousness soar as he became enamoured of the bliss of the Mother.

In such an exalted spiritual state Vivekananda forgot his desire for financial freedom. His only prayer was

“O Mother, please give me Jnana (wisdom) and Bhakti (devotion).” – Vivekananda

After praying and meditating Vivekananda returned to his Master and told him he had forgotten to pray for money in the Presence of Kali. Ramakrishna smiled and advised him to go back into the temple but this time to pray for money.

Vivekananda returned but again he became so absorbed in his meditation that he could not bring himself to ask for money. 3 Times Ramakrishna sent Vivekananda into the temple to pray but each time Vivekananda couldn’t bring himself to pray for money. Eventually Ramakrishna compassionately said he would pray on his disciple’s behalf.

He would pray that his family would always have enough to pay for the basic essentials of life. After this his family’s dire financial hardship was removed, although they never experience material prosperity. Vivekananda was a great seeker, who eventually became a spiritual Master in his own right.

 What bring us real hapiness?

This story is illustrative of how the human mind often doesn’t know the best thing to pray for.

On many occasions we feel that if our desires for more money and wealth can be fulfilled, all our problems will be solved.

However no matter how much money we may have we will never attain lasting satisfaction.

Real happiness comes from our oneness with God. When we attain oneness with God everything else seems unimportant

The highest prayer uttered by Jesus Christ was

”not my will but thine be done” – Luke 22:42

Through this prayer Christ surrendered his personal will to the will of God. Christ knew that our human prayers might not be in our best interest, the greatest prayer is merely to become with God.

Later Sri Ramakrishna offered Vivekananda all his occult powers. Ramakrishna even tempted Vivekananda by saying he would be able to use these powers to help others. Vivekananda only replies will this help me realise God. Ramakrishna replied it wouldn’t and so Vivekananda turned down the opportunity to gain occult powers. -Vivekananda – Heart Life

It is brings to mind the immortal quote of the Upanishads

” What shall I do with the things that cannot make me immortal?” - Brihadaranyaka Upanishada

Read more  information:

Neovedanta

Vivekananda

Click here for original article>>

This remarkable story is testament that anybody in life can achieve anything they set their mind to no matter what their circumstances are. This video will give you such a warm feeling – it’s not to be missed!

In this video an autistic high school basketball manager, who is used to feeling different his whole life, gets his shot in the limelight by coming off the bench for the last 5 minutes of a ballgame.

The events that unfold are nothing short of staggering as he stuns his high school friends by shooting 6 three pointers in the space of 4 minutes. Witness the jubilation of the whole hall as a kid with hardship and learning difficulties throughout his life reaches the top of the world!

What do think of the Video? Share Your Thoughts

A friend of mine has recently launched an excellent new site on Remote Viewing.

Remote Viewing is the art of using your mind to transcend distance and time and “view” information. The term was coined by the scientist Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff, who studied it at the Stanford Research Institute.

Remote Viewing is a growing field and the number of articles appearing on the net about Remote Viewing seems to double every year.

Blog.LearnRemoteViewing.com compiles the top stories, videos, training, tests and articles on Remote Viewing and serves them up for your entertainment and education.

Here’s a screenshot of the site. Visit it today and add it to you must-read list.

My particular favourite part of this site is the video section. Listen and watch these amazing videos by Remote Viewing pioneers.

Check out www.LearnRemoteViewing.com

Editor’s Note: I came across this wonderful article on the blog RealitySeeds.com. I’m republishing the intro here. I really enjoyed the RealitySeeds blog and hope to link to more articles on it shortly. This article of one of several about How to “Consciously Create and Manifest Any Reality”. In this case,  Health.

For thousands of years humans have been trying to cure illnesses afflicting body and mind. Endless types and strands of disorders seem to be ever changing and constantly mutating into more complex forms.

We try hard to study and understand them with a scientific methodology, but we often have hard time making progress because our scientific models fail to describe much detail of how the human body works. While the science of health is making great steps forward, there is still a lot of guess work involved in applied medicine that often is more like a form of art based on the experience and gut feelings of the doctors, than a science with clear rules.

When we study illness, we notice the symptoms and we explore them; this research gives us clues on how to fix the symptoms, and often we discover possible causes and we attemp to attack these as well. This approach is similar to the approach we take when a car breaks, except that it is much more difficult given how complex the physical body is. It often works, but often doesn’t fix the cause, and the illness comes back to hunt us again. Many times things just resolve themselves and we have no idea what the problem was, and why it is gone.

I remember when I was a teenager I started having troubles breathing at night. I was a young and healthy, much into all kinds of sports and always active. Nevertheless, this night breathing problem was bothering me a great deal. I went to my doctor. He asked me if I had that problem only at night, which I did. He also asked me if I had that problem while in vacation somewhere else, or if I had any known allergies. I answered “no” to both questions. In fact, I could sleep just fine while in vacation, and I had no known allergies. He asked me if I spent much time in my room, which I did. That’s all he needed to hear. His prescription was “Change your room around! Move the furniture, take whatever is on the walls and change it with something new, paint the room with a different color.

In short, make it feel new”. I thought it was an odd cure for my problem, but he is a very experienced doctor and I trusted him. Well, believe it or not, that “cure” fixed my problem, which never came back again. Later he explained that I had problems breathing because I was associating my room with something bad that happened in my life, putting me in a negative state of mind and stress. Changing the room around was a way to deactivate these negative memories.

He didn’t really understand all the details of why that negative state of mind was causing the problems with the breathing; he just knew that it worked that way.

What is the real cause of illness? Most important, why is the body sometimes unable to fix itself?

We know that parts of the body completely regenerate themselves every day, some parts every few weeks, others every few month and a handful every couple of years. In other words, today you have a completely different body that you had a couple of years ago. It completely regenerated itself.

The body is able to regenerate because it has a complete description of itself stored in the DNA, which is spread across all of its parts. If that description is there, and if the body can regenerate so well, why is it often not able to fight illnesses? It seems like the diseased areas should just be discarded and regenerated. Also, if your have a completely new body every few years, why do we carry physical conditions sometimes for a lifetime?

The reason is that the source of all illnesses is not inside the body, and is not in some external agent. All of these supposed causes are really just the symptoms of the real issue. The source of illness is in the mind. The Law of attraction teaches us that your thoughts create your reality, including all illnesses.

To be more specific, what causes illness is stress. When I say “stress” don’t imagine a busy day, or an exhausting run to catch a bus. That’s not stress, but just a high level of activity; in fact, you can be very busy and tired and also in a positive mental status at the same time. So, what is stress? Stress is a temporary or a prolonged coexistence of active contrasting beliefs, activated by the current situation, and clashing one against the other.

Contrasting beliefs have the effect of pulling your sub-conscious in two or more directions. The result is stress and, as a consequence, the development of physical illness.

Contrasting beliefs become stress only when the current life situation makes them active concurrently. In these cases, the sub-conscious finds itself wiuth two contrasting rules that is trying to apply at the same time, and it ends up not knowing what to do. It goes in a vicious loop that creates a negative and confusing conscious state of mind directed inward, into the body. The super-conscious takes note of this negative attention inwards and does what you are asking: it creates a negative and confusing reality inside your physical body. In other words, it generates illness.

I’ll tell you a fantasy story, as an example of how it works.

Read the Full Article on RealitySeeds.com >>