We may be familiar with the concept of electrical/chemical signals relating to neural communication. So, now imagine of every synapse branching out from every neuron - like an antenna, is tuned to a different frequency signal with a specific optimal point and this optimum frequency point depends on the location of the synapse on a neuron. The farther away the synapse is from the neuron’s cell body, the higher the optimum frequency was found to be.  And it seems the more rhythmically synced the frequencies were - the stronger the connection for memory and learning synapses.

 The researchers found that not only does each synapse have a preferred frequency for achieving optimal learning, but for the best effect, the frequency needs to be perfectly rhythmic — timed at exact intervals. Even at the optimal frequency, if the rhythm was thrown off, synaptic learning was substantially diminished.

Their research also showed that once a synapse learns, its optimal frequency changes. In other words, if the optimal frequency for a naïve synapse — one that has not learned anything yet — was, say, 30 spikes per second, after learning, that very same synapse would learn optimally at a lower frequency, say 24 spikes per second. Thus, learning itself changes the optimal frequency for a synapse.

As well as possibly strengthening and enhancing learning and memory, learning-induced re-tuning and de-tuning could be have “important implications for treating disorders related to forgetting, such as PTSD disorder”. Read more here.

That doughnut shape decorated with bright green spots, some connected by red pathways, amidst sky blue neighbors could be an artist’s creation, but is the result of a creative scientific attempt to grow an active brain in a dish, complete with memories. Really.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh published this stunning study in the journal Lab on a Chip {the full paper can be accessed here.} When I first learned how to grow cells in a lab, the technique of tissue culture, the idea of even growing brain cells was a far-fetched dream, much less brain cells capable of forming networks, complete with biological signals.

Hey, no big deal. Just gon’ make this brain real quick. Read more here.

The self in Western psychology is viewed as that function of the mind that helps us to organize our experiences. It takes raw sense data, memories, and other cognitive functions and turns them into recognizable narratives. It is critical for everything that we do. Without a strong sense of self, we literally could not make sense of anything that happens to us.

What is fascinating is that in the western psychological view, the “self” or the “executive function” is actually a process and not really a thing. It waxes and wanes all the time, goes into the foreground and background of awareness depending on how much we need it, disappears when we sleep, is not the same as it was when we were little, much less the same as it was last year, and is even subtly different than it was last week.

So far, this should make a lot of sense to both psychologists and meditators. But here is where things get interesting: we all know that processes are not solid and change all the time, yet in this particular process there is a nagging sense that there is a solid permanent “me” hiding in that process somewhere. As if the process itself were a real solid thing in the same way that a table or chair is.

It is this unshakable sense of a solid “me” in the midst of this process that is the “self” that is referred to in the Dharma. When we talk about “no-self” in Buddhism, we are pointing to this sense of a solid self in and calling it an illusion. The process of “selfing” is real, the belief that it is somehow a permanent “me” is not.

- Psychological Self vs. No-Self, Ron Crouch for Buddhist Geeks

Buddhist Geeks is just awesome. This post does a very good job of explaining the difference between the ‘self’, as in the narratives and processes our brain which creates our personality and places importance on experiences, and the ‘no-self’, the Buddhist concept of an illusory, solid ‘me’ — and exactly how to move between the two. A super complex issue that this author really got down in a few succinct paragraphs. 

The study is the world’s first investigation of how real-time functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) feedback from the brain region responsible for higher-order thoughts, including introspection, affects our ability to control these thoughts. The researchers find that real-time brain feedback significantly improves people’s ability to control their thoughts and effectively ‘train their brains.  (…) 

 The findings also raise hope for clinical treatments of conditions that can benefit from improved awareness and regulation of one’s thoughts, including depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorders, the researchers says. For example, with increased availability of fMRI technology, real-time brain feedback represents a potentially important complement to feedback provided by a therapist or a patient’s own self-monitoring ability.

I’ve seen other articles (can’t find them now) where this type of study is going on with drug addicts and sexual offenders. Laying in the MRI machine, they get to see live feedback on their unwanted thoughts in the form of a bar graph. The objective is to make that bar on the graph go down, by thinking of other things. I suppose this ties into strengthening new neural pathways while older, stronger and negative ones atrophy from non-use. That’s the theory anyway.

“If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things.” - Daniel C.Dennett

One of the enduring changes in the brain of those who routinely meditate is that the brain becomes thicker. In other words, those who routinely meditate build synapses, synaptic networks, and layers of capillaries (the tiny blood vessels that bring metabolic supplies such as glucose or oxygen to busy regions), which an MRI shows is measurably thicker in two major regions of the brain. One is in the pre-frontal cortex, located right behind the forehead. It’s involved in the executive control of attention – of deliberately paying attention to something. This change makes sense because that’s what you’re doing when you meditate or engage in a contemplative activity. The second brain area that gets bigger is a very important part called the insula. The insula tracks both the interior state of the body and the feelings of other people, which is fundamental to empathy. So, people who routinely tune into their own bodies – through some kind of mindfulness practice – make their insula thicker, which helps them become more self-aware and empathic. This is a good illustration of neuroplasticity, which is the idea that as the mind changes, the brain changes, or as Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb put it,neurons that fire together wire together.

- Neuropsychologist, Rick Hanson for Noetic Now

This isn’t new to me, but the idea that our behaviors (contemplation related, or otherwise) directly change our brains, therefore our future behaviors is wonderous. Now just to figure out that pesky free-will problem…

 

Robert kicks things off with a beautiful re-telling of a 2400-year-old love story from Plato, by way of Aristophanes, about the longing many of us feel for another half to make us whole. This ancient yearning gets us wondering whether the world around us is deeply and fundamentally symmetric, or…not. Zoe Keating’s looping, lyrical cello scoring spurs us on our quest.

After looking for soul mates in Greece, we head to Princeton’s Neuroscience Institute, where Lauren Silbert uses brain scans to try to zero in on what happens when two people click. In the process, she stumbles upon a subject who seems to be her brain double—and we go on a hunt for an Aristophanes-inspired happy ending. Joy Hirsch, a neuroscientist at Columbia, weighs in on our desire to pinpoint love in an fMRI lab.

“Time isn’t like the other senses, Eagleman says. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing are relatively easy to isolate in the brain. They have discrete functions that rarely overlap: it’s hard to describe the taste of a sound, the color of a smell, or the scent of a feeling. (Unless, of course, you have synesthesia—another of Eagleman’s obsessions.) But a sense of time is threaded through everything we perceive. It’s there in the length of a song, the persistence of a scent, the flash of a light bulb. “There’s always an impulse toward phrenology in neuroscience—toward saying, ‘Here is the spot where it’s happening,’ ” Eagleman told me. “But the interesting thing about time is that there is no spot. It’s a distributed property. It’s metasensory; it rides on top of all the others.”

The New Yorker’s profile of David Eagleman is outstanding.