If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
We may not necessarily be hardwired for mystical experiences, but we are hardwired to benefit from a robust belief system shared by our peers and a contemplative spiritual practice, even if not necessarily a theistic one.
The human brain is an extraordinary information processing system. It is brilliant at executing certain tasks, particularly physical tasks that can be codified like playing an instrument or driving a car.
When it comes to matters of the heart, love has less to do with the heart and more to do with the brain.
Genuine self-realization leads us to see ourselves in others. We take pleasure in their self-realization as well as our own.
Rest and joy are two things that can help us assess our ideas before we try to transform them into reality. And those two aspects are what define one of Judaism's signature contributions to the world -- Shabbat.
When we encounter someone, usually the mind automatically slots the person into a category: man, woman, your friend Tom, the kid next door, etc. Watch this happen in your own mind as you meet or talk with a co-worker, salesclerk or family member.
Women want to know the magic cure to keep their minds going and going and going. But the truth is that all this going and going and going is why you feel like you're losing your mind.
In addition to the brain giving rise to thoughts, hopes, beliefs and emotions that add up to this thing we call the mind, could it be that the mind also acts back on the brain to cause physical changes in the very manner they were initiated?
We hold hard and fast to a lot of ideas when it comes to love and sexual behaviors. But does science actually back them up? Neuroscience, the study of brains and behavior, is offering us a new lens to view love, sex and parenting.
One of the many frameworks for understanding the human brain is as a prediction machine. We evolved to be able to model, most unconsciously, complex future scenarios in our brain and to generate predictions about which of these scenarios is likely to occur.
Ultimately, dieters who are plagued by chronic overeating flare-ups may be able to diminish their severity because they learn from past experience how to handle the situations that are causing them to stop following a calorie-conscious food plan.
Let's stop calling ourselves right- or left-brained, bad at art, bad at math; we share every capacity, albeit to varying degrees. Categorizing yourself just gets you off the hook.
A vibrant new field blending meditative insights and tools with current neuroscience, contemplative psychotherapy represents a turning of the modern tide away from contemplative methods.
I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with the brain disorder schizophrenia. But as irony would have it, I woke up one morning to discover that I had a brain disorder.
There are a host of new studies that show that as your weight goes up, the actual size and function of your brain goes down. It appears that if you get serious about being healthy, you can reverse the brain damage. But now is the time to start.
Over time, insights get simplified for non-scientists, and translated into the plain language of introductory textbooks. So it is with the amygdala, otherwise known as the brain's "fear center."
Our simian relatives, particularly chimpanzees and bonobos, like nothing better than to keep a watchful eye on what other members of their troop are up to. But our species has taken this preoccupation one step further.
The use of drug treatment for Alzheimer's and CTE is critical. Without treatment catching up to diagnostic technologies, the waiting rooms for PET scans screening for the first tangled threads of these diseases will be essentially empty.
We are part of a process, not its goal or final state. Just a branch point, a distal twig, on a continuously branching limb of the tree of life. Some may feel this perspective diminishes us. I don't.
We love to look at good-looking people. Hardly an earth-shattering conclusion, I know. But it's a well-documented one: Attractive people grab our attention.
