The Wisdom of Human Ritual; Don't Leave Home Without It

The ritualistic inclination is built into our species, as you can learn from the profound but simple experiment described below.

Imagine you are a five-year-old being led into a small office. A woman with a warm smile shows you an assortment of strange objects. Some of them are shiny. You feel like playing with them. That’s OK, that’s allowed. Soon the friendly lady takes the objects away and says she wants to show you a video. On the screen is another woman. She has an identical set of objects lined up neatly in a row and she’s doing odd things with them — she lifts one and taps it on another, then puts it back and takes something else, twirling it in a peculiar fashion before replacing it. This goes on for some time. Then the strange objects are pushed back towards you and the lady says: ‘It’s your turn.’ What would you do?

If you were a five-year-old, you would imitate at least some of the actions you observed in the video. No instruction would be necessary. And yet, the behaviour doesn’t appear to achieve anything. The psychologist Cristine Legare and I have been working together for several years trying to understand why young test subjects bother to copy it. Our starting point is that they treat it as a convention of some kind. That is to say, they adopt what we call ‘the ritual stance’, imitating without questioning the purpose of the actions.

In our experiment, however, the behaviour of the woman in the video is ambiguous. Children can't be sure it if is oriented to a goal or not. A surprisingly simple shift helps them to decide: we just alter the last move in the sequence. If the woman puts the last object into a box, it looks like the whole procedure was just a ‘funny’ way of putting an object away. We call this the ‘instrumental condition’. On the other hand, if the objects all end up back where they were originally placed, the whole action sequence appears not to have any tangible purpose. We call this the ‘ritual condition’. When the start and end states are identical, children are more confident that the demonstration on the video should be interpreted as a kind of ritual. And guess what? They copy it much more faithfully, and are less inclined to try out variations on their own initiative. _Harvey Whitehouse

Ritual Mosaic Humans value ritual from their earliest years. The need for human ritual only grows with the years. It seems to have always been that way.

Whether we consider the aborigines of Australia, the Native Americans, the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, or our own European ancestors, we find a world-wide preoccupation with ritual action that cuts across all races, religions, and cultures. We could even say that human culture is primarily a culture of ritual. _Culture of Ritual

Yet in our modern scientific world, the human need for ritual is typically denied and scoffed at, as an unnecessary residual of a more superstitious age.

But only a little thought and reflection should tell us that the further from religious belief and culture that we travel, the more necessary our grounding and passage of time rituals become.

Each culture, society, community, and family will have its own rituals based upon a unique history. Depending upon the ritual one is observing, one is either connecting with his family, community, society, culture, nation, or all mankind.

Rituals were once an unthinking part of daily life for every human living within a society or culture. In the modern scientific age, however, rituals must be consciously employed for their underlying purposes, or they become neglected and forgotten. The loss of grounding that occurs with the withering away of ritual is tragic -- for all that it is rarely noticed.

In The Dangerous Child Method of Education and Child-Raising, ritual is given a prominent role -- particularly in the toddler years, and in the years prior to puberty. Puberty itself is a passage, and deserves its own rite. And so on, through the years of passages that constitute human existence.

Daily rituals should also be utilised, from the earliest years. Here is a brief look at some "mindfulness rituals," meant to ground and vitalise one's daily existence.

1. Sit in the morning. When you wake up, in the quiet of the morning, perhaps as your coffee is brewing, get a small cushion and sit on the floor... I’ll ... just sit, and focus on my breathing going in and out. I’m an absolute beginner when it comes to meditation, but this always starts my day right.
2. Brush your teeth... Try fully concentrating on the action of brushing, on each stroke of each tooth, going from one side of the mouth to the other. You end up doing a better job, and it helps you realize how much we do on autopilot.
3. Eat mindfully. Turn off the TV, put away the computer and mobile devices, even put away the book or newspaper... unless you do this, you are not truly appreciating your food. I like eating... mindfully, paying attention to each bite. It makes the food taste better, and I eat slowly and with gratefulness.
4. Wash your bowl. When you’re done eating, wash your dish immediately. Do it while paying full attention to your washing, to the water and suds.
5. Drink tea... Make your own tea ceremony — prepare the tea carefully and mindfully, pour it slowly, sip it with thoughtfulness. See if you can set aside one time each day to do this, and it will transform your day.
6. Walk slowly. I like to take breaks from work, and go outside for a little walk. Walk slowly, each step a practice in awareness. Pay attention to your breathing, to everything around you, to the sounds and light and texture of objects.
7. Read in silence... Have no television or computers on nearby, and just immerse yourself in the world of the novel. It might seem contradictory to let your mind move from the present into the time of the novel, but it’s a great practice in focus...
8. Look at someone gratefully. Each day, find someone you care about. Instead of just seeing what you always see, really look at the person. Try not to do it creepily. See this person for the miracle that she is, and be grateful for her existence. If you’re feeling generous, tell that person how thankful you are for her.
9. Work with focus. Start your workday by choosing one task that will make a big difference in your work, and clearing everything else away. Just do that one task, and don’t switch to other tasks. _Leo Baubata

These particular "rituals" are based upon the practise of "mindfulness," which is usually associated with zen. But in Dangerous Child training, we incorporate mindfulness rituals without any particular trappings, other than those which might be particularly salient to the child.

There is something trance-like in the observation of many rituals. But rituals can just as easily liberate one from a default state -- a "spinning of the wheels" trance which the brain can easily fall into. Mindfulness rituals in particular tend to help break us out of the many unthinking default trances into which our minds can easily sink.

If meaningful rituals are incorporated into our daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly lives, we are more likely to have a subtextual "soundtrack", mapping system, or system of life indexing, which helps us to better understand where we have been and where we may be going.

Most of us are somewhat familiar with religious ritualism. But many forms of pagan ritual preceded all forms of organised religious ritual as far back in time as we can go. And it is interesting to observe the return of much of this pagan ritual across various parts of modern societies.

As humans try to make sense of an increasingly secular existence, it is crucial for us to understand the importance of our underlying need for ritual -- both on a daily basis, and to mark critical events and transitions in our lives.

To make the most sense of this need, we must go back and understand how rituals naturally came about, and how these native rituals were modified and adapted to meet the needs of different cultures, civilisations, religions, and societies.

Meditation as Treatment for Schizophrenia, Autism, Alzheimer's?

Dr. Judson Brewer, medical director of the Yale Therapeutic Neuroscience Clinic, and his colleagues asked 10 experienced meditators and 13 people with no meditation experience to practice three basic meditation techniques: concentration, loving-kindness, and choiceless awareness.

...In a report published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Brewer and his team report that the experienced meditators had decreased activity in an area of the brain called the default mode network, a region that is usually at work when the mind wanders. Even when the meditators weren't meditating, this region of their brain was much quieter than in their inexperienced counterparts. _ABCNews

The areas shaded in blue highlight areas of decreased activity in the brains of meditators

The Yale team conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging scans on both experienced and novice meditators as they practiced three different meditation techniques.

They found that experienced meditators had decreased activity in areas of the brain called the default mode network, which has been implicated in lapses of attention and disorders such as anxiety, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, and even the buildup of beta amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's disease. The decrease in activity in this network, consisting of the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortex, was seen in experienced meditators regardless of the type of meditation they were doing.

The scans also showed that when the default mode network was active, brain regions associated with self-monitoring and cognitive control were co-activated in experienced meditators but not novices. This may indicate that meditators are constantly monitoring and suppressing the emergence of "me" thoughts, or mind-wandering. In pathological forms, these states are associated with diseases such as autism and schizophrenia.

The meditators did this both during meditation, and also when just resting — not being told to do anything in particular. This may indicate that meditators have developed a "new" default mode in which there is more present-centered awareness, and less "self"-centered, say the researchers. _MedicalXpress

In a similar vein the University of Wisconsin is planning a study early next year to investigate the neurological effects of meditation and yoga with veterans.

It is thought mindfulness meditation holds promise for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which provokes intrusive thoughts, emotional numbness and hypervigilance.

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), which combines meditation with orthodox 'thought training', is already recommended for depression in Britain and is available on the NHS. _DailyMail

Related research:

Fourteen meditation practitioners performed breath-focused meditation while undergoing fMRI scanning. When participants realized their mind had wandered, they pressed a button and returned their focus to the breath. The four intervals above were then constructed around these button presses. We hypothesized that periods of mind wandering would be associated with default mode activity, whereas cognitive processes engaged during awareness of mind wandering, shifting of attention and sustained attention would engage attentional subnetworks. Analyses revealed activity in brain regions associated with the default mode during mind wandering, and in salience network regions during awareness of mind wandering. Elements of the executive network were active during shifting and sustained attention. Furthermore, activations during these cognitive phases were modulated by lifetime meditation experience. These findings support and extend theories about cognitive correlates of distributed brain networks. _Abstract_Hasenkamp 2011 j. neuroimage Emory U.

Depression and the default mode network:

Major depressive disorder (MDD) has been characterized by excessive default-network activation and connectivity with the subgenual cingulate. These hyper-connectivities are often interpreted as reflecting rumination, where MDDs perseverate on negative, self-referential thoughts. However, the relationship between connectivity and rumination has not been established. Furthermore, previous research has not examined how connectivity with the subgenual cingulate differs when individuals are engaged in a task or not. The purpose of the present study was to examine connectivity of the default network specifically in the subgenual cingulate both on- and off-task, and to examine the relationship between connectivity and rumination. Analyses using a seed-based connectivity approach revealed that MDDs show more neural functional connectivity between the posterior-cingulate cortex and the subgenual-cingulate cortex than healthy individuals during rest periods, but not during task engagement. Importantly, these rest-period connectivities correlated with behavioral measures of rumination and brooding, but not reflection. _OxfordJournals

This is a lot of material to take in at once -- particularly if you are not familiar with the concept of the "default mode network." But understanding this concept can make a big difference in your life, and in those lives which you may influence along the way.

The default mode network is a "stand-by" brain network, which is active when you are not attending to anything. It is a state of the wandering mind, which all too often falls into repetitive thought patterns which are too often dysfunctional for many people.

The studies above reveal that meditation practise can change the circuits involved in the default mode network in a way that tends to reduce brooding, intrusive thoughts, and rumination -- even during times when one is not meditating. Self-monitoring and cognitive control during default mode activation was increased in meditators, although the overall intensity of default mode network function was decreased.

This is crucial: The idle mind may not be a quiet or relaxed mind. In fact, it is often a tortured or depressed mind, which over time can make chronic diseases of the brain and mind more likely to set in. If you want your mind to be relaxed when it falls into its inevitable periods of default mode, you may want to consider meditation training.

What? Meditate??? Have You Lost Your Mind!!??!

People meditate for many reasons, but most commonly to relax and feel at peace. Your personal peace, harmony, and clear-headedness are a serious threat to most of the powerful special interests in modern society. To the ruling classes, you are simply "a member of the herd," and need to obey orders and respond in a knee-jerk manner to commands from above.

Sometimes we need to "lose our minds" -- at least small parts of them, for brief periods of time. Other times we are able to achieve peace by finding parts of ourselves that we have subconsciously "lost" out of self-protection.

Peace of mind is achievable, but it is not a permanent condition. Wise people take advantage of different strategies for different situations. Only you can determine what kinds of meditation work for you. Here are some that Al Fin uses:

Yawning:

The process of yawning activates multiple neuro-chemical substances, including dopamine, which sets in motion a chain of reaction of other neurochemical substances. The result is that areas of the brain that contribute to improved memory, conscious control, temperature control, joy, sensuality and social activities, is activated.

"Conscious yawning" may take a little practise, but given how contagious yawning seems to be, most persons can bring themselves to yawn reasonably easily.

Stretching and relaxing when accompanied by deep steady breathing, can be as effective as traditional "tensing and letting-go" step-by-step relaxation of the body. Start at your toes and work up.

Movement Meditations

Dancing

Be totally in the dance, because division can exist only if you are not totally in it. If you are standing aside and looking at your own dance, the division will remain: you are the dancer and you are dancing. Then dancing is just an act, something you are doing; it is not your being. So get involved totally, be merged in it.

Walking

Walking Meditation is a wonderful initiation for beginners into the art of Meditation. It is easy to practice, and enhances both physical, mental and spiritual well-being. It is especially effective for those who find it difficult to sit still for long periods of time. Some people enjoy practicing in a beautiful outdoor setting, like a park. Others prefer to practice indoors, due to poor weather, or desire for privacy.

Walking Meditation should generally be practiced for between 15 minutes to 1 hour. A 20 minute walking meditation can also be used as a break between two 20 minute sitting meditations, allowing 1 hour of meditation without placing undue demands on the practitioner.

Tai Chi:

In the early 1970's my Tai Chi Chuan master, Cheng Man-Ch'ing, was asked if he meditated. His answer was that he did Tai Chi Chuan. When pressed if he did seated meditation, he answered that he did not. He stated that Tai Chi Chuan was all the meditation that he ever needed. While I never again heard Professor Cheng mention meditation as such, he would occasionally tell us to keep our minds empty of thought during our practice of Tai Chi Chuan. To keep one's mind empty, you will recall, is by definition, yin meditation.

Conscious Emoting

Laughing:

Breathing is one of the few bodily functions which, within limits, can be controlled both consciously and unconsciously. Conscious attention to breathing is common in many forms of meditation, specifically anapana. In music, breath is used to play wind and brass musical instruments and many aerophones. Laughter, physically, is simply repeated sharp breaths.

Crying

If you have ever had a good howling session, you know that once it passes, you feel elated, refreshed and powerful or totally relaxed and calm. While crying is thought to be an experience of pain and discomfort, the release that is felt afterwards actually makes it into a positive. Too often, people are scared of their emotions and will do anything they can to escape the possibility of losing control.

You probably know something that will bring you to tears. A certain song, a particular memory, a photograph, a scene from a book, a letter . . . looking in the mirror ;-)

Gratitude:

To develop an attitude of gratitude creates contentment, true happiness and bliss. Gratitude makes us feel good and meditation helps us to a state of deep relaxation and contemplation.

Gratitude is one of the "softening" emotions. Being on-guard all day against a wide range of perceived threats can make us oblivious to much of what is going on around us and inside us. We need to find places where it is safe to let down our guards.

Sentic Cycles were useful cycles of emotional experience discovered by neuroscientist / musician Manfred Clynes. The sentic cycler is to experience the following in sequence, repeating as necessary:

No emotion
Anger
Hate
Grief
Love
Sexual Desire
Joy
Reverence

Tapes and kits are available to assist in practise, but Al Fin discovered that it is possible to experience the benefits of sentic cycles without the tapes or kits, just by internally emoting the cycle as needed. It can even be combined with walking.

The key to the cycles is the early strong experiencing of negative emotion, then easing into an intense grief -- which acts as a very effective "pivot" into the positive emotions.

Actors often go through emoting exercises prior to a performance, which helps them to express themselves more cleanly and persuasively on the stage.

Al Fin's favourite meditation is tantra, with a willing and accomplished partner. But since such partners can be difficult to find, you may want to become good at the underlying practise on your own.

To understand tantra meditation, you need to be aware of three main ingredients for consideration: Mantra, Meditation and full body cosmic orgasms. Mistakenly, many people are under the misconception that deliberation in tantra meditation involves performing a sexual act, but this is usually not the case.

...Through the use of breath work, visualizations, mantras, music and sacred geometry the energy and effectiveness is amplified. It is also believed that performing group tantra meditation sessions increases the effectiveness, as everyone's energy works together as a reflection to unlock the kundalini for the whole group.

Al Fin learned another intriguing form of group meditation, providing more intellectual rewards than emotional or physical payoffs, while visiting the late philosopher, inventor, and author John David Garcia at his home in Oregon. Garcia called his technique "autopoiesis." It is a form of amplification of creative problem - solving which utilises multiple male-female pairs seated opposite, but touching. Using counter-intuitive methods of guided visualisation, it was possible to generate some remarkably creative ideas which would not normally be accessible to the participants. It takes practise, and cooperation among participants.

The number of ways individuals might successfully achieve meditative rejuvenation is almost endless. No religious or quasi-religious paraphernalia is necessary. The ability to consciously let go is generally helpful, although some forms of meditation involve "holding on" as hard as one can until fatigue forces relaxation of the "grip."

Most persons fail to understand how much of their life is lived unconsciously, in a quasi-automatic trance. That is the default state, which few people ever truly escape. The many forms of meditation have evolved -- or been discovered -- to help persons to "wake up" out of the trance, at least for a little while.

The idea is to find one or a few approaches which feel natural to you, and which can be adapted for use at various times and in differenc situations. But do be careful about meditating while driving or operating hazardous machinery . . .

Problem Solving with Sudden Creative Insight

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Most of us have solved problems using trial and error, slogging our way through the possibilities until we hit on the right answer. Some of us have solved problems through a sudden flash of insight -- an epiphany or eureka! moment. Of the two methods of problem solving, most of us who have experienced both, would prefer the epiphany. Northwestern University researchers have looked at these two methods of problem solving in an attempt to better understand how to achieve the more preferred sudden insight.

In a just completed study, researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.

“What we think is happening,” said Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist who conducted the study with Karuna Subramaniam, a graduate student, “is that the humor, this positive mood, is lowering the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections” to solve puzzles.


...For almost a century scientists have used puzzles to study what they call insight thinking, the leaps of understanding that seem to come out of the blue, without the incremental drudgery of analysis.

In one classic experiment, the German psychologist Karl Duncker presented people with a candle, a box of thumbtacks and the assignment of attaching the candle to a wall. About a quarter of the subjects in some studies thought to tack the box to the wall as a support — some immediately, and others after a few failed efforts to tack wax to drywall.

The creative leap may well be informed by subconscious cues. In another well-known experiment, psychologists challenged people to tie together two cords; the cords hung from the ceiling of a large room, too far apart to be grabbed at the same time.

A small percentage of people solved it without any help, by tying something like a pair of pliers to one cord and swinging it like a pendulum so that it could be caught while they held the other cord.

...creative problem-solving usually requires both analysis and sudden out-of-the-box insight.

“You really end up toggling between the two, but I think that they are truly different brain states,” said Adam Anderson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto.

At least, that is what brain-imaging studies are beginning to show. At first, such studies did little more than confirm that the process was happening as expected: brain areas that register reward spiked in activity when people came up with a solution, for instance..

Yet the “Aha!” moment of seeing a solution is only one step along a pathway. In a series of recent studies, Dr. Beeman at Northwestern and John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University, have imaged people’s brains as they prepare to tackle a puzzle but before they’ve seen it. Those whose brains show a particular signature of preparatory activity, one that is strongly correlated with positive moods, turn out to be more likely to solve the puzzles with sudden insight than with trial and error (the clues can be solved either way).

...The punch line is that a good joke can move the brain toward just this kind of state. In their humor study, Dr. Beeman and Dr. Subramaniam had college students solve word-association puzzles after watching a short video of a stand-up routine by Robin Williams. The students solved more of the puzzles over all, and significantly more by sudden insight, compared with when they’d seen a scary or boring video beforehand.

This diffuse brain state is not only an intellectual one, open to looser connections between words and concepts. In a study published last year, researchers at the University of Toronto found that the visual areas in people in positive moods picked up more background detail, even when they were instructed to block out distracting information during a computer task.

The findings fit with dozens of experiments linking positive moods to better creative problem-solving. “The implication is that positive mood engages this broad, diffuse attentional state that is both perceptual and visual,” said Dr. Anderson. “You’re not only thinking more broadly, you’re literally seeing more. The two systems are working in parallel.”

The idea that a distracted brain can be a more insightful one is still a work in progress. So, for that matter, is the notion that puzzle-solving helps the brain in any way to navigate the labyrinth of soured relationships, uncertain career options or hard choices that so often define the world outside. _NYT

This line of thought takes me back to the difference between hypnosis and meditation. With hypnosis, the attention is focused so narrowly that the mind becomes progressively unaware of anything except the object of focus. With meditation (mindfulness mediation), the attention becomes softened progressively, so that the mind seems to become aware of everything all at once -- but without anxiety. An ongoing fMRI study comparing hypnosis and mindfulness meditation may help to answer many of the questions which have been asked when comparing the two states of mind.

The Northwestern researchers above discovered that humour tended to soften the attention, and make the mind more prepared to receive a flash of sudden insight for solving a problem. Parallels between humour and meditation have been drawn many times -- specifically by the late philosopher and Zen enthusiast Alan Watts.

Using various metrics including psychological testing and brain imaging, researchers have found that mindfulness meditation tends to lend toward a more youthful and flexible brain -- including the preservation of cortical thickness in older individuals who practise mindfulness, comparable to brain thickness of much younger persons.

Mindfulness should be taught rather early in life, and should become a lifelong practise -- although either is rare, and both together are almost unheard of. Enhanced problem solving and preservation of cortical thickness into old age would both be welcome side benefits to the main effect of an ongoing enhancement of day to day awareness.

More bits and pieces:

The functional M.R.I. images reveal that when people are emotionally distressed — anxious, angry, depressed — the most active sites in the brain are circuitry converging on the amygdala, part of the brain's emotional centers, and the right prefrontal cortex, a brain region important for the hypervigilance typical of people under stress.

By contrast, when people are in positive moods — upbeat, enthusiastic and energized — those sites are quiet, with the heightened activity in the left prefrontal cortex. _Goleman

The difference between concentration/hypnosis and meditation is really more about expansive versus contractive awareness. Many hypnotic induction techniques encourage the subject to shrink their focus down to just one thing such as the hypnotist's voice or watching a small spot on a wall so that all other points of awareness are temporarily pushed out of awareness. In most hypnosis there is initially an increase in Beta brainwaves as the subject engages their thinking mind to start blocking out things. As they physically relax into the experience of concentration the Alpha waves begin to arise.

When you enter into hypnosis much of the racing mind gets pushed out of awareness leaving you with far less mental chatter than usual. Superficially, you might think that sounds just like meditation, and in a way it is, and in another way it isn't. In meditation we transcend racing thoughts whereas in rigid concentration or hypnosis we repress them. The result is less thinking, but the mechanisms work on opposite principles. _ProjectMeditation

Relaxation

When studied in psychology, relaxation refers to a focusing on the mind and a relaxing of the body's muscles. Research has shown that being too tense and/or living with too much stress has a significant negative impact on our lives. It can lead to physical illnesses such as high blood pressure, ulcers, fatigue, and headaches and many psychological issues, including inappropriate or misdirected emotions, confusion, difficulty concentrating, and burn-out. People utilize relaxation, in combination with stress management, to improve their quality of life, reduce the physical components of stress, and improve their psychological functioning.

There are different forms of relaxation, including breathing exercises, deep muscle relaxation, progressive muscle relaxation, imagery, meditation, and yoga. Although each of these has different components, the main goal in each is to relax the body's muscles and focus the mind. Since the body and the mind cannot be separated, most agree that both of these components must be present for any relaxation technique to work.


Hypnosis

Hypnosis is very similar to relaxation in that the same two components of physical and mental must be addressed together. Most professionals agree that hypnosis is a very deep state of relaxation where your mind is more focused and the connection between your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are more clear. _Psych101

This last comparison appears to contradict what I said above about hypnosis and meditation. But remember, there are many forms of meditation. Some of them are virtually indistinguishable from many forms of self-hypnosis.
You could also watch your favourite comic or comedy show, and achieve much of the benefit of meditation. Alternatively, you could just belly laugh. Interestingly, that also works.

Human or Zombie? The Answer May Surprise You

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Can you focus your mind on the things that need doing, or does your mind seem to focus itself on whatever pops up? Humans spend most of their lives immersed in everyday trance states -- almost indistinguishable from the mental states of zombies. It happens when the mind goes on auto-pilot, and may occur on the road, at work, in a lecture, or almost anywhere the mind feels safe enough to "zone."

Mindfulness is the opposite of a trance zone. Mindfulness is on the human end of the spectrum, with trance zones being on the zombie end. If a child is raised well, she will be the master of her attentional apparatus rather than the zombie slave. But if she is like most children, she will grow up to join the zombie horde of like-minded consumers of the trite and stylish fads of the mainstream.

In fact, most people fall into a number of destructive thought patterns and habits. Once the instigating thought or event occurs, it can be almost impossible to turn the mind away from the compelling grip of the habitual pattern. Mental exhaustion can easily set in after just a few seconds of such struggle, leaving the person defeated, falling once again into the same pattern.

It is possible to learn self-control, even as an adult who was not carefully trained as a child. But it generally takes more work than most people are willing to put in. The challenge for therapists and counselors is to make such late training of attention and executive functions fun. The alternative is a life of zombie trance zoning, leading to self-defeating habits.

Interestingly, the brain wave patterns of persons in hypnotic trance are different from the wave patterns of someone in a deep meditative state (PDF). I suspect that the wave pattern would be even more complex for persons specifically trained in mindfulness meditation.

We all have brains, but they do not all work the same. Very rarely do they work at optimal levels, regardless of the genetic and environmental advantages we may have been given.

Are you human or zombie, in the way you spend most of your time? What about your children? Would you spend $200,000 to send a zombie child to university, to concentrate on queer ethnic studies and semiotic basket weaving -- between binge drinking, fornicating, and academic lobotomising? If you did, what sort of person would he turn out to be?

Focus and Drift: A Secret Path to Brain Power?

Image Source: Magic Trance
"Generate and test" is the secret to prolific creativity for both humans and nature (natural selection). Another powerful pairing may be "focus and drift", for building mental facility -- perhaps even brain matter. First, focus:

In the study, Luders and her colleagues examined 44 people — 22 control subjects and 22 who had practiced various forms of meditation, including Zazen, Samatha and Vipassana, among others. The amount of time they had practiced ranged from five to 46 years, with an average of 24 years.

More than half of all the meditators said that deep concentration was an essential part of their practice, and most meditated between 10 and 90 minutes every day.

The [UCLA] researchers used a high-resolution, three-dimensional form of MRI and two different approaches to measure differences in brain structure. One approach automatically divides the brain into several regions of interest, allowing researchers to compare the size of certain brain structures. The other segments the brain into different tissue types, allowing researchers to compare the amount of gray matter within specific regions of the brain.

....The researchers found significantly larger cerebral measurements in meditators compared with controls, including larger volumes of the right hippocampus and increased gray matter in the right orbito-frontal cortex, the right thalamus and the left inferior temporal lobe. There were no regions where controls had significantly larger volumes or more gray matter than meditators. _PO

The discipline of meditation provides the brain with more "staying power" when confronting a problem, situation, or challenge. That is focus. Now, drift:

“Mind wandering is typically associated with negative things like laziness or inattentiveness. But this study shows our brains are very active when we daydream – much more active than when we focus on routine tasks,” Christoff, who has also been the lead author of the study, says. The experts used an observation technique known as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) for their study. This machine has the ability to show brain areas basically “lighting up” or “turning off,” depending on whether they are active or dormant. In addition, it allows for almost real-time observations on a test subject's brain.

As a reference point, the researchers employed readings recorded while the patients sat in the fMRI machine, and pushed a button when numbers appeared on a screen. Their brain activities were monitored second after second, and stored for comparison.....Christoff says that daydreaming, a contemplative state in which the brain wonders, occupies about one third of every individual's life, and, as such, merits more investigation.

For example, the study has revealed that the “executive network” in our brains, usually dealing with high-level, complex problem-solving, is also highly active in daydreaming. This network consists of the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. In addition to these regions, the wondering mind also activates the “default network,” which is made up of the medial PFC, the posterior cingulate cortex and the temporoparietal junction. The later network has been thus far believed to be the only segment of the brain active during daydreaming. _Softpedia

Competence in using the "focus and drift" cycle can provide a greater potential for problem-solving and creativity, in addition to a better ability to cope with routine challenges. There are many useful approaches to meditative focus. And quite a few methods have been developed to facilitate highly productive daydreaming "drift." Combinatorial sorting suggests an enormous range of potential "systems" for using focus and drift in a highly personal manner.

Be sure to remember to throw in a generous mix of exercise, creative play, good nutrition, and stimulating social interaction.

It may not be long before we develop "smart drugs" and smart therapies that are capable of building intelligence and executive powers to amazing levels. The humans who are already familiar with their mental and emotional powers will be best able to take advantage of an artificial boosting of intelligence and EF. Most people -- the academically lobotomised psychological neotenous narcissistic zomboids of our day -- will only grow more warped and dysfunctional. Technology can only accomplish so much, if humans lack wisdom in applying it.

Brain Stimulation Preserves Brain Cells, Zen Training Restores Distracted Attention

In Parkinson's disease, certain dopamine secreting cells in the substantia nigra die off, leading to the loss of fine control of motion. But deep brain stimulation with implanted electrodes in the brains of rats preserves dopamine cells by causing increased levels of BDNF (brain derived neurotrophic factor), suggesting a similar therapy in humans may halt progression of Parkinson's. Remember that BDNF can also stimulate the differentiation of neural stem cells into mature neurons.

During the DBS study, researchers implanted high-frequency stimulating electrodes in the subthalamic nucleus, an area of the brain associated with movement, in rats and then induced dopamine neuron loss. When the rats had experienced a 50 percent loss of dopamine neurons, the researchers initiated brain stimulation in half of the group. Measurements of surviving, functioning dopamine neurons in rats implanted with active stimulators were then compared to a control group implanted with inactive stimulators. While the control group’s loss of dopamine neurons increased to 75 percent after two weeks, the rats implanted with active stimulators experienced no further loss of cells during that time.

Subsequent tissue analysis revealed that in rats implanted with active stimulators the trophic factor BDNF had tripled in the striatum, a part of the brain that houses dopamine terminals and “receives” the dopamine neurotransmitters that are produced in the substantia nigra. _SD

In other research, it was found that persons with Zen training are able to refocus their attention more quickly after being distracted, than persons without such training.

The study compared 12 people from the Atlanta area with more than three years of daily practice in Zen meditation with 12 others who had never practiced meditation...While having their brains scanned, the subjects were asked to focus on their breathing. Every once in a while, they had to distinguish a real word from a nonsense word presented at random intervals on a computer screen and, having done that, promptly "let go" of the just processed stimulus by refocusing on their breath....

After interruption, experienced meditators were able to bring activity in most regions of the default network back to baseline faster than non-meditators. This effect was especially prominent in the angular gyrus, a region important for processing language. _SD

Scientists have also created an animal model of chronic stress by boosting levels of corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) in a specific part of an animal's brain. Drugs to modify the effect of CRF in humans have been in the pipeline for some time. Perhaps eventually a non-addictive treatement for chronic anxiety and over-stress will be developed. Meditation, exercise, and avoiding bad habits can also do wonders.

Remember the wonder drug Dimebon, being studied as a treatment for Alzheimer's? Pfizer has acquired the rights for the drug from Medivation. Scientists are also beginning to zero in on the specific protein-protein interactions that lead to damaging neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, etc.

Here's a report of more research into stimulating replacement neurons in the brain for treating neurodegenerative disorders.

Remember: All of this research is made possible by the excess wealth generated by market economics. The more of that excess wealth (profit) that government sucks up through taxation, or prevents by excess regulation or counter-productive tort laws, the less research that can be done. Government and foundation funding through NIH etc. is only possible when there is excess wealth available to begin with. Have you ever wondered why most of the research is being done in non-socialist countries?

Laughing More

A long list of benefits goes to those who learn to laugh well and laugh often. Perhaps that is why more people are beginning to use laughter as a form of recreation, amusement, and regeneration. Around the world, you can find laughter clubs, and centers for laughter yoga.

...laughter yoga (also known as hasya yoga) can provide many health benefits:

* Help to reduce stress
* Enhance the immune system
* Strengthen cardiovascular functions
* Oxygenate the body by boosting the respiratory system
* Improve circulation
* Tone muscles
* Help with digestion and constipation

“Kids laugh about 400 times a day, and adults only about 15,” notes Barb Fisher, a certified laughter yoga leader...As developed by laughter yoga creator Madan Kataria, a family physician from India,

....these laughing exercises can include many varieties, such as:

* Hearty laughter: Laughter by raising both the arms in the sky with the head tilted a little backwards.
* Greeting laughter: Joining both the hands and shaking hands with at least four or five people in the group.
* Appreciation laughter: Join your pointing finger with the thumb to make a small circle while making gestures as if you are appreciating your group members and laughing simultaneously.

...“The biggest effect that I’ve gotten from laughter yoga is what it’s done for me mentally, and that it has lightened up my day and my week,” says Deborah Slosberg. “I also think it has improved my breathing.”

“It gives me a relaxed feeling, and yet I actually feel like I worked out,” says Ann Twork. “You get back some of the child in you.”
__SciDaily

Laughter has been used as meditation for centuries, and as modern medical therapy for decades. In my experience, laughter serves as a re-balancing of the brain and body tension settings.

All of us know of people who seem without humour, without any sense of lightness. You may find persons like that at work, but you certainly are impacted by politicians, journalists, and activists of all stripes who are without the depth and perspective that comes from being able to see the funnier side of life.

This is one part of your life where you are almost completely on your own, unless you were born into a large family rich with humour, or married well in levity and truth. You can find help, if you need it, from the clubs and yoga centers near you. Can't find one? Start one yourself.

The best laughter I have had is the kind that wakes me up from dreams. But there is also benefit to be had from designed laughter.

The next time someone comes along trying to convince you of the truth and importance of a cause--any cause--look for the humour that may be there. The more intent and zealous the cause, the harder you may have to look. That's fine. The payoff will be worth it by the look on the zealot's face when you burst into the deepest belly laugh of your life.

Brain Calibration

Baseball pitchers warm up with practice pitches before every appearance. Basketball players shoot practice hoops before games. Actors practice emoting before acting, singers practice intervals and runs, surgeons go through the sequence of a major surgery before scrubbing. All of these preliminaries are examples of mental calibration.

Calibrating the brain is a priming operation. The brain can be prepped for specific types of performance. But it is not just professional performers and practitioners of high risk procedures who need to calibrate. Every morning when the brain wakes up, it falls into a new dynamic state. If the brain has to achieve a certain level of performance each day, it must be calibrated for that performance. Otherwise, the level of achievement from day to day is left to chance. That is how most people live, by chance. When has popular culture ever offered anything else?

In Palestine the children are calibrated daily to hate the Jew, as they are in Hizballah controlled Lebanon, and much of the arab muslim lands. Hatred of the proper enemy is too important to be left to chance. If a society wants a ready supply of suicide bombers and guerilla fighters, it must begin calibrating minds at an early age.

Christian fundamentalists begin calibrating the minds of their children quite early as well. Sunday School and church, religious schools, camps, bible schools, and so on. Maintaining the proper religious way of thinking is too important to be left to chance. Early morning mass, confession, liturgy, prayer meetings, revivals. If a group wants the next generation to carry on the traditions of the current one, it must begin calibrating minds very early.

But then, those examples are not really the same thing as calibrating for top performance. They are more like brainwashing. But why do so many parents leave the cultivation of the minds of their children to chance and a largely indifferent culture? Affluent societies so often breed listless and goalless children. Decadence is what happens when one generation leaves the minds of the next generations to chance.

People think in basic metaphoric "thought concepts", and combinations of concepts called "thought patterns."

A thought-pattern is always subjectively created, and successively "objectified" by different calibration procedures. The state of consensus (= collective agreement on validity) of any though-pattern is represented by its corresponding calibration history. Since the thought-patterns presented here lack an attempt to describe this history, they are to be considered basically my own. That does not mean, however, that I consider them all as having originated with me. On the contrary, I have often tried to express how I conceive the thought-patterns of others. This is of course an important part of the group-consensus forming calibration process.

Source.

Brain calibration can take many forms--from meditation to mental imaging to neuromuscular practice to estimating distances or calculations, then checking the estimates. More complex forms of calibration are needed for more complex thought patterns. Unfortunately, modern educational practices have not kept up with current findings in neuroscience, but have instead regressed to conform with current whims of "political correctness."

Many professors of educational trends are willing to destroy a society in order to see their methods of social engineering "tried out" on new generations of hapless students. Fortunately, there are others who pay attention to scientific findings, who are outside the reach of the fashionable trendsetting PC social engineers.

There is a lot of need for reform in education, thanks to the PC professors who currently rule the universities and schools of education. Whether they like it or not, this reform is coming.

Laughing Too

It feels good to laugh. Some of the wisest people in the world consider laughter to be one of the best forms of meditation. Recent research indicates that just expecting to laugh will trigger the release of endorphins.

In a paper being presented in an American Physiological Society session at Experimental Biology 2006, Lee S. Berk of Loma Linda University, reports that not only is there real science and psychophysiology, but just the anticipation of the "mirthful laughter" involved in watching your favorite funny movie has some very surprising and significant neuroendocrine/hormone effects.
According to Berk: "The blood drawn from experimental subjects just before they watched the video had 27% more beta-endorphins and 87% more human growth hormone, compared to blood from the control group, which didn't anticipate the watching of a humorous video. Between blood pulls, the control group stayed in a waiting room and could choose from a wide variety of magazines," he explained.

....Berk said that the strong difference between the two groups in terms of human growth hormone (HGH) and beta-endorphin blood levels was maintained from just prior to the beginning of video watching, throughout the hour of viewing and afterwards, also.

"We believe the results suggest that the anticipation of a humor/laughter eustress (positive stress) event initiates changes in neuroendocrine response prior to the onset of the event itself," Berk said. "From our prior studies, this modulation appears to be concomitant with mood state changes, and taken together, these would appear to carry important, positive implications for wellness, disease-prevention and most certainly stress-reduction," he noted. Read more here.

Norman Cousins anticipated these findings in his book Anatomy of an Illness. Likewise, Zen teacher Alan Watts featured laughter prominently in his approach to Zen meditation.All of the emotions should be exercised regularly, in a thoughtful manner--we need to own all of ourselves. Mirth is one emotion that we especially should not neglect.

Laughter is contagious. A contagious agent that should be shared as often as possible.

Laughing

Laughter may have the power to unlock the genes. Geneticist Kazuo Murakami has been studying the effects of laughter on humans.

His latest experiment with the entertainment firm spotted at least 23 genes that can be activated. Eighteen of them are designed to work for immune response, signal transduction and cell cycle, while functions of the remaining five are still unknown.

Hat tip Biopsychology.com.

In a previous posting I mentioned psychoneuroimmunology, and Norman Cousins' approach to his own illness.

Zen teacher Alan Watts had a high regard for laughter. One of the most enlightening moments of my life was watching a video of Alan Watts laughing. I have accumulated a few meditation methods for my own use, out of the many dozens I have been exposed to. None of them are more effective than a good, timely belly laugh.

Enter the Chakra

The East, land of mysticism, oriental land of subtlety and enigma. Yogic mind and body control, buddhist meditation, acupuncture, subtle body energies and chakras. Exquisite control of motion in the tea ceremony, or the aikido throw. Mastery of the self.

Westerners scoff at anything that cannot be seen, measured, and visibly manipulated. That attitude has served the west in its dominance of the planet. Yet westerners are running headlong into the fractal nature of reality. Getting from here to there is no longer accomplished by traveling a straight line. Brute force cannot accomplish many of the necessary intermediate and long term goals. More subtle means of sensing the flow of knowledge may be necessary.

Information science and other problem solving disciplines utilise indirection and lateral thinking in solving complex logic problems. Such methods begin to stray from the stereotypical western "straight-on" approach. Chronic pain has so burdened employees of western enterprises, that western physicians finally accepted acupuncture as a valid discipline. Acupuncture lacks the dependency problems that often come from the pharmaceutical treatment of chronic pain.

Western music has often been a path to the mystical, from medieval monastic chants, to modern new age and trance music. Manfred Clyne, a neuroscientist and musician, discovered a path to spiritual regeneration when researching emotions and their connection to music. For westerners, Clyne's method of exercising and purging the emotions would be an extremely useful practise.

The eastern concept of chakra is another portal through which westerners might possibly step into fractal reality. The act of visualising various energy centers within one's body could conceivably tap into the body's proven [PDF]neuroendocrine axis. Since white blood cells carry neurotransmitter and hormone receptor proteins, the immune system is part of the same axis. Norman Cousins explored the territory in his own battles with serious disease.

Western civilisation has developed amazing tools for analysis and exploration. The overwhelming dominance of the western world attests to this. Even China, center of the eastern world, has only been able to shake itself partially out of its age-old slumber through adopting many western methods in finance, engineering, and science. It is past time to admit that the western world is capable of learning from other civilisations. Matter without energy is inert. Energy without mind is blind. Mind without spirit is futile. Spirit without freedom is despair. Update: Aristides
demonstrates that freedom without spirit is also despair. Many thanks.

Reality is fractal. To understand and deal with reality, the west needs the east. The straight on, brute force approach must be supplemented with indirection and subtlety. The mind must make peace with the body, and emotions, each working with the others. Together they must reach out to something higher: a possibility, a dream.

By embracing a larger complexity of life and possibilities, humans can incorporate a larger portion of enchantment into their realities.