The film Mystical Brain reveals the exploratory work of a team from the University of Montreal who seek to understand the states of grace experienced by mystics and those who meditate.
Filmmaker Isabelle Raynauld offers up scientific research, which proposes that mystical ecstasy is a transformative experience and could to contribute to people’s psychic and physical [...]
Chocolate could be more than just a welcome distraction, especially from holiday stress. It may have a calming effect on our anxiety.
An ounce and a half a day keeps the stress away
According to Dark Chocolate: The New Antianxiety Drug, by Dr. Mercola, “the use of chocolate as a cure for emotional stress has gotten new [...]
From Your brain on Tetris, The Week magazine, Sep 25, 2009
Playing Tetris, the classic computer game, actually enlarges your brain, scientists say.
The game, which turns 25 this year, calls on players to rapidly fit together colored puzzle pieces as they fall from the top of the screen.
In a recent study, neuroscientists asked two dozen adolescents [...]
[From a Dana Press Blog:]
At the recent Learning and the Brain Conference in Washington D.C., Nancy C. Andreasen, M.D., Ph.D., discussed the importance of providing students with a “liberal education” that combines the study of the arts and the sciences.
She asked: How important are the arts for optimal development of the mind and brain? How [...]
An autistic savant, Daniel Tammet can recite more than 22,000 digits of pi from memory. He believes such astounding abilities are based on an associative form of thinking and imagination, not due to some cerebral or genetic fluke.
He thinks differences between savant and non-savant minds have been exaggerated, to the detriment of how most of [...]
A new Eide Neurolearning Blog post refers to studies on attentional style and creativity, including a study that notes, “…psychometric measures of creativity and measures of real-world creative achievement are associated with a habitual tendency toward diffuse rather than focused attention, which results in ineffective filtering of distracting or irrelevant environmental stimuli.”
From the Highly Sensitive [...]
From soft winds to software
A flickering candle, the sound of surf, beating drums, psychotropic plants – those can all be seen as early “devices” for altering mental states and consciousness. Now, there is a wide range of much more sophisticated devices, software and smart drugs designed to enhance awareness and cognitive abilities, which may or [...]
The image is from the book Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge, by B. Alan Wallace, founder and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. The book notes “There are certainly kinds of neuronal activity that causally contribute to the emergence of specific states of consciousness and mental activity.”
Bill Harris, Director of [...]
