How to Trick Your Brain for Happiness. This month, we feature videos of a Greater Good presentation by Rick Hanson, the best-selling author and trailblazing psychologist. In this excerpt from his talk, Dr. Hanson explains how we can take advantage of the brain’s natural “plasticity”—it’s ability to change shape over time. gobyg There’s this great line by Ani Tenzin Palmo, an English woman who spent 12 years in a cave in Tibet: “We do not know what a thought is, yet we’re thinking them all the time.”
It’s true. The amount of knowledge we have about the brain has doubled in the last 20 years. In recent years, though, we have started to better understand the neural bases of states like happiness, gratitude, resilience, love, compassion, and so forth. Ultimately, what this can mean is that with proper practice, we can increasingly trick our neural machinery to cultivate positive states of mind.
But in order to understand how, you need to understand three important facts about the brain. So, how do we actually do this? 1. 2. 3. Message. World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia. Contribution to the new Encyclopédie Française, August, 1937 It is probable that the idea of an encyclopaedia may undergo very considerable extension and elaboration in the near future.
Its full possibilities have still to be realized. The encyclopaedias of the past have sufficed for the needs of a cultivated minority. They were written "for gentlemen by gentlemen" in a world wherein universal education was unthought of, and where the institutions of modern democracy with universal suffrage, so necessary in many respects, so difficult and dangerous in their working, had still to appear.
Throughout the nineteenth century encyclopaedias followed the eighteenth-century scale and pattern, in spite both of a gigantic increase in recorded knowledge and of a still more gigantic growth in the numbers of human beings requiring accurate and easily accessible information. At first this disproportion was scarcely noted, and its consequences not at all. This is no remote dream, no fantasy. Brain Explorer. Scientists discover how the brain encodes memories at a cellular level.
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have made a major discovery in how the brain encodes memories. The finding, published in the December 24 issue of the journal Neuron, could eventually lead to the development of new drugs to aid memory. The team of scientists is the first to uncover a central process in encoding memories that occurs at the level of the synapse, where neurons connect with each other. "When we learn new things, when we store memories, there are a number of things that have to happen," said senior author Kenneth S. Kosik, co-director and Harriman Chair in Neuroscience Research, at UCSB's Neuroscience Research Institute.
Kosik is a leading researcher in the area of Alzheimer's disease. "One of the most important processes is that the synapses –– which cement those memories into place –– have to be strengthened," said Kosik. This is a neuron. (Photo Credit: Sourav Banerjee) Part of strengthening a synapse involves making new proteins. Brainwave/Cymatic Frequency Listing. This is a listing of frequencies that various parties have claimed can affect the human mind or body in some way.
The following sorts of frequencies are included : Brainwave Frequencies - These are frequencies associated with various mental states. Using brainwave entrainment, you can coax your brainwaves to a certain frequency, and in doing so, achieve the mental state associated with that frequency. "Healing" Frequencies - These are frequencies that various parties claim could be used to heal illnesses of different kinds, or stimulate some region of the body (chakras). The medium used to do this varies - some of these parties used devices that generated EM fields which were applied to a precise part of the body, while others used vibration and sound. The original page that I began building this compiled information from is (*archived copy*) The information in green is from this original page. Sincerely, Michael Triggs Disclaimer!!
The benefits of meditation. Studies have shown that meditating regularly can help relieve symptoms in people who suffer from chronic pain, but the neural mechanisms underlying the relief were unclear. Now, MIT and Harvard researchers have found a possible explanation for this phenomenon. In a study published online April 21 in the journal Brain Research Bulletin, the researchers found that people trained to meditate over an eight-week period were better able to control a specific type of brain waves called alpha rhythms.
“These activity patterns are thought to minimize distractions, to diminish the likelihood stimuli will grab your attention,” says Christopher Moore, an MIT neuroscientist and senior author of the paper. “Our data indicate that meditation training makes you better at focusing, in part by allowing you to better regulate how things that arise will impact you.” A 1966 study showed that a group of Buddhist monks who meditated regularly had elevated alpha rhythms across their brains.
Home page. NOVA Its Elemental. The Human Protein Atlas. The Whole Brain Atlas.