Warning: This Tune Unsafe for Listening While on Zombie Guard Duty

...women were connected to sensors and given challenging puzzles to complete against the clock in order to induce a level of stress.

They were then played different songs as their heart rate, blood pressure, breathing and brain activity were recorded.

Studies found Weightless was 11 per cent more relaxing than any other song and even made many of the women 'drowsy' in the lab.

It induced a 65 per cent reduction in overall anxiety and brought them to a level 35 per cent lower than their usual resting rates.

The song features guitar, piano and electronic samples of natural soundscapes. It is pierced throughout by buddhist-like chants that induce a trance-like state. _DailyMail

"Weightless" is reputed to be the "most relaxing tune ever (mp3)." People are advised not to listen to it while driving, so it goes without saying that it should not be on your playlist while transiting zombie zones.

A British band and a group of scientists have made the most relaxing tune in the history of man (mp3)....

Sound therapists and Manchester band Marconi Union compiled the song. Scientists played it to 40 women and found it to be more effective at helping them relax than songs by Enya, Mozart and Coldplay.

Weightless works by using specific rhythms, tones, frequencies and intervals to relax the listener. A continuous rhythm of 60 BPM causes the brainwaves and heart rate to synchronise with the rhythm: a process known as ‘entrainment’. Low underlying bass tones relax the listener and a low whooshing sound with a trance-like quality takes the listener into an even deeper state of calm. _ShortList

Here is a top-ten list of most relaxing songs taken from a recent study, see if you agree:

The study - commissioned by bubble bath and shower gel firm Radox Spa - found the song [Weightless] was even more relaxing than a massage, walk or cup of tea. So relaxing is the tune, apparently, that people are being...advised against listening to it while driving.

The top 10 most relaxing tunes were: 1. Marconi Union - Weightless 2. Airstream - Electra 3. DJ Shah - Mellomaniac (Chill Out Mix) 4. Enya - Watermark 5. Coldplay - Strawberry Swing 6. Barcelona - Please Don't Go 7. All Saints - Pure Shores 8. AdelevSomeone Like You 9. Mozart - Canzonetta Sull'aria 10. Cafe Del Mar - We Can Fly _ShortList

Of course each person has his own grouping of tunes which elicit the greatest relaxation. But the list above serves as an example.

Using modern brain monitoring and imaging, scientists can test the relaxation effects of different types of brain inputs to all of the senses, as well as effects of internal inputs such drugs or electrical impulses via implants.

Audio relaxation utilising binaural beats and other subliminal effects are likely to grow ever more popular, as their effectiveness improves. When used in combination with complementary electromagnetic and advanced visual stimulation, it is likely that such non-invasive and time controllable mood control methods could become more popular than recreational drugs, among a certain smart set.

But when combined with structured mental training, meditations, and advanced neurofeedback, such an approach might revolutionise psychotherapy. For maximum effectiveness, such avant-garde psychotherapy would need to bring out a full range of emotions in an appropriate sequence -- much like the Sentic Cycles of Manfred Clyne. The deep relaxation segment would likely occur near the end, with a finishing touch of rejuvenatingly brisk wakeup to finish.

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 . . .

Sex and Jazz: The Improvisational Brain

Improvisation is central to jazz. Every performance is unique, a musical flight of the creative moment. How does the brain accomplish such an intricate and instantaneous crystallization of near-chaotic sublime balance?

Spontaneous improvisation was in each case associated with a highly congruous pattern of activations and deactivations in prefrontal cortex, sensorimotor and limbic regions of the brain. In addition, the majority of these regions showed functionally reciprocal patterns of activity. That is, activations during improvisation were matched by deactivations during the control tasks, and vice versa, when each condition was compared to the resting baseline.

...The changes in the prefrontal cortex consisted of a deactivation in the lateral parts and activation in the medial parts of the prefrontal cortex. The medial part is thought to play a role in the complex phenomenon of the self, internally motivated self generated content and as such this activation can be explained by the fact that improvisation is also a way of expressing one’s own musical voice or story. The deactivation of the lateral part is explained by the occurrence of free floating attention, permitting spontaneous expressions without interference of self-monitoring. _Dr.Shock

Compare what happens in the frontal cortex of a jazz improvisationalist with what happens in the frontal cortex of a female brain in orgasm -- a "sexual improvisationalist".

But when a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain went silent. Some of the most muted neurons sat in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which may govern self-control over basic desires such as sex. Decreased activity there, the researchers suggest, might correspond to a release of tension and inhibition. The scientists also saw a dip in excitation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which has an apparent role in moral reasoning and social judgment—a change that may be tied to a suspension of judgment and reflection. _SciAm

Areas of the pre-frontal lobes that govern judgment, self-control, and self-vigilance tend to be shut down in both improvising jazz musicians and in orgasming women. Other areas of the brain having to do with body sensations experience amplified activity during both jazz and sex.

You may ask, "so what?" Well, consider this: what if the proper test of human level consciousness has more to do with the ability to orgasm or to "feel jazz" than it does with playing chess or algorithms?

The human brain and the human body work together. Separate them, and neither one can function well. The mind is embodied within the brain, but in a sense the brain is co-embodied along with the physical organism. The idea that one can create a human equivalent mind without taking into account how the brain and body improvise our reality, moment by moment, is irrational.

Becoming More Fully Human: Music Training

Most children are being short-changed in brain development. Much of the potential of that multifunctional tool for survival -- the human brain -- goes undeveloped due to neglect by parents, teachers, communities, and entire societies. One important human brain function -- emotional competency -- can be more fully incorporated into the developing brain via music training.

Musicians heard an emotion-packed, complex sound with an enhanced sensitivity, and they also were less distracted by simple sounds, according to the study, published in the current issue of the European Journal of Neuroscience.

"What we found in this study is both an enhancement and an economy of resources varies as a function of the extent of musical experience," Kraus said. "The more years the person has been playing an instrument, and the earlier the person began musical training, the larger the effect."

Although many other studies have tried to show the beneficial effects of musical training, the researchers said their findings "provide the first biological evidence for behavioral observations indicating that musical training enhances the perception of vocally expressed emotion." The findings have implications far beyond the world of music.

"The same neural transcription process that is enhanced in musicians is found to be deficient in some children with language disorders such as dyslexia and autism," Kraus noted.

The research suggests that something as basic as musical training may be a useful therapeutic device, along with other more traditional techniques.

..."Our results provide evidence for a subcortical role in the processing of emotional cues by showing that auditory brainstem responses to emotionally salient vocal sounds are dynamic, shaped by life-long, multisensory experience with auditory signals," the researchers note. "These responses are not hardwired but malleable with extensive auditory training."

In other words, we aren't just who we are. We're also what we have done. _ABCNews

The brain goes through very rapid growth and modification in the first few years of life. By the time a child's brain is 5 years old, most of his brain is already shaped by early experiences. But important developmental windows will open and close over the next several years -- and a child's mind is not fully matured until the middle 20s.

We know that infants not exposed to sight or sound in early infancy will lose much of their brain's ability for fine distinction of auditory and optic stimuli if later restored. Children who are not exposed to language in the early years will never develop any language skill. Children not exposed to music before the age of 10 or 12 will find it difficult to achieve mastery from later training. The same opening and closing of developmental windows applies to frontal lobe functioning: the best time to teach a child pre-frontal executive functions that are so vital to life success, is between the ages of 4 and 6-7. Waiting any later will doom a child to lesser degrees of success than he would have otherwise been capable of.

The brain has its own schedule of development and maturation. If caretakers of children are not willing to work within those developmental windows that are constantly opening to some functions and closing to others, too bad for the child.

Emotional Calibration

Our emotions are powerful tools for evaluating the world around us quickly, and at levels we may not be able to describe verbally. Cognitive scientists are just now starting to tackle the complexities of emotions in their more advanced machines and programs.

Human emotions need calibrating, just as our cognitive systems and mind-body controls need calibration.

I was first exposed to conscious calibration of emotions when taking drama class and musical theatre class. A good actor needs to express a wide range of emotions, without having to reach too far for them. Likewise, a good singer in a musical play needs to find the emotions within himself that the song is expressing.

Everyday life can also be emotionally demanding, with the threat of an emotional boobytrap being tripped at any time. By "calibrating" our emotions regularly, we keep our emotions tuned and ready for appropriate responses.

We are all actors on the stage. We need to utilise methods of emotional priming that are just as sound as what actors use.

The best everyday method for exercising and calibrating emotion that I have found, is the Sentic Cycle method, developed by neuroscientist and musician Manfred Clynes.

Sentic Cycles lets you generate and express your emotions in a series, as a spectrum, your emotion 'symphony', so you tend to become free from emotional rut - being stuck in one emotion- and be in touch with your real self - not overwhelmed by single emotion (yet able to savour them all as in music).

It takes only 10 minutes to learn to do it - and then you may benefit from doing it anytime the rest of your life - as long as human nature does not change! Anyone can do it.

It uses only your own natural expressions of emotion to generate and to enjoy them.

....We all tend to be prisoners of emotion more than we may wish to be. Emotions make life enjoyable and meaningful, but not if you are in an emotional rut, where a particular, most often negative, emotion takes over, and makes it hard to get out of, even temporarily. Often such negative emotions are suppressed, but still interfere with function and freedom of experience.

Sentic Cycles allow you to experience and express all such emotions more constructively, without being overwhelmed by them.

Source.

Emotions are powerful and fast, compared to other types of cognition. But they have to be kept toned and in shape, like our bodies.

A satisfying play or movie is one that exercises our emotions skillfully, so that usually we are not even aware of what is being done to us subconsciously. Most people go through life being manipulated emotionally, without realizing it. How much better it would be to become well acquainted with our emotions on a regular basis, so that they are seen more like friends than potentially dangerous strangers.

Hat tip Pastorius.

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.