YOUR THOUGHTS REALLY DO MOLD YOUR BRAIN

A bit of change of theme in today’s blog. Of course you know I like to send you daily postings that motivate, inspire and encourage to you to live your best life, but sometimes it can be just as motivating, inspiring and encouraging to learn about the science of how we work physically. I am not a religious guy (although I am very connected with my spiritual side) but I am sometime so awe struck by the incredible nature of the human brain that it does often seem miraculous.

I love it when science and spirituality come together. I have spent years developing myself and studying various self improvement philosophies but I always like to know there is logic behind my beliefs. It has never been good enough for me to just jump on the band wagon of a self-help or spiritual theory without rigorously challenging its practicality. I guess I am a bit of a spiritual scientist in that respect.

It is wonderful that more often we are seeing collaborations between leading scientists and spiritual teachers, and the trend is that both sides are beginning to learn more and more from each other.

I came across this text on Wikipedia about how Buddhist monks have helped neuroscientists understand the physical impact that thinking has on the brain. It would appear that your thoughts really do shape you!!!


Source Wikipedia:

The Dalai Lama invited Richard Davidson, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior to his home in Dharamsala, India, in 1992 after learning about Davidson's innovative research into the neuroscience of emotions. Could the simple act of thinking change the brain? Most scientists believed this idea to be false, but they agreed to test the theory. One such experiment involved a group of eight Buddhist monk adepts and ten volunteers who had been trained in meditation for one week in Davidson's lab. All the people tested were told to meditate on compassion and love. Two of the controls, and all of the monks, experienced an increase in the number of gamma waves in their brain during meditation. As soon as they stopped meditating, the volunteers' gamma wave production returned to normal, while the monks, who had meditated on compassion for more than 10,000 hours in order to attain the rank of adept, did not experience a decrease to normal in the gamma wave production after they stopped meditating. The synchronized gamma wave area of the monks' brains during meditation on love and compassion was found to be larger than that corresponding activation of the volunteers' brains. Davidson's results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November, 2004 and TIME recognized Davidson as one of the ten most influential people in 2006 on the basis of his research.