Science of the Spirit

Beginner's mind: You cannot learn what you think you already know

Patrick Allan
lifehacker
Wed, 14 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”

Welcome back to Mid-Week Meditations, Lifehacker's weekly dip into the pool of stoic wisdom, and how you can use its waters to reflect on and improve your life.

This week's stoic quote comes from the Greek philosopher Epictetus, who was born a slave and had his teachings written down by one of his pupils. Those writings would eventually become his Discourses and Enchiridion.

"It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows." -Epictetus, Discourses, Book II, ch. 17

Another translation:

"What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." -Epictetus, Discourses, Book II, ch. 17

Helping girls heal from trauma with yoga

Rebecca Epstein
The Conversation
Wed, 31 May 2017 14:13 UTC

Rocsana Enriquez started thinking about yoga again when she was pregnant. She was 19 and in an abusive relationship.

When she was younger, Rocsana, whom I interviewed as part of my research, had taken part in a yoga program in a San Francisco Bay Area juvenile hall run by The Art of Yoga Project. She began using the skills she learned on the mat to slow herself down when she got angry and to pause before reacting. She remembered the breathing techniques and poses that made her feel better about herself.

Now, seeking the same quietness she had been able to achieve in class back in juvenile hall, she reached out to the program, never expecting to hear back.

Childhood trauma has a devastating impact on both the mind and the body of children who experience it. But that mind-body connection also offers a path toward healing. A growing body of research demonstrates the effectiveness of addressing the mental and physical impact of trauma through yoga and other somatic, or body-based, programs.

Comment: An interview with Bessel van der Kolk: How yoga helps treat PTSD

Yoga helps regulate emotional and physiological states. It allows the body to regain its natural movement and teaches the use of breath for self-regulation. What is beautiful about Yoga is that it teaches us—and this is a critical point for those who feel trapped in their memory sensations—that things come to an end. While doing certain asanas, uncomfortable sensations may be evoked. But, by keeping time as they stay in a posture for a limited amount of time, they get to observe that discomfort can be tolerated until they shift into a different posture. The process of being in a safe space and staying with whatever sensations emerge and seeing how they come to an end is a positive imprinting process. Yoga helps them befriend their bodies that have betrayed them by failing to guarantee safety. Another important aspect of Yoga is utilizing the breath. It's very striking that there's nothing in western culture that teaches us that we can learn to master our own physiology— solutions always come from outside, starting with relationships, and if those fail, alcohol or drugs. Yoga teaches us that there are things we can do to change our brainstem arousal system, our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and to quiet the brain.

Oxytocin turns on a mother's protective instinct

Mae Chan
Prevent Disease
Wed, 14 Jun 2017 16:22 UTC

From birds to mammals, from fish to reptiles, the immediate reaction to an impending threat to the animal itself is usually to flee or to stop moving in an attempt to go unnoticed. However, when parents feel threatened in the presence of their young, their reaction is completely different: they seek to protect them. What happens in the brains of the parents for them to to be willing to sacrifice their own life in the interest of their offspring's safety?

A team lead by neuroscientists from the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, in Lisbon, Portugal, has discovered that this radical change in the parents' behavior (from self-defense to defending their young) depends on the action of the so-called "love hormone", oxytocin, on the neurons of the amygdala, a specific brain structure known for its crucial role in the processing of emotional reactions. Their results have been published in the journal eLife.

Oxytocin is responsible for the bonding between mothers and their young, and within couples. Its effects are not well understood; oxytocin probably has many functions, therefore making it difficult.

Comment: More on oxytocin:

An anthropologist's theory on shamanism and the origins of knowledge completely rewrites our understanding of DNA

Dylan Charles
Waking Times
Sat, 17 Jun 2017 13:57 UTC

The shaman's world is one of allegory, symbolism, metaphor and transcendence into the realms of energy and spirit. Their understanding of the universe and the abundant sentient beings which inhabit it is wildly foreign to the mind of the material scientist. Our best chance, therefore, at bridging the gap between science and spirit may lie in the anthropological study of those tribal cultures whose operating systems permit them to move freely in the metaphysical realms with the assistance of natural hallucinogenic substances.

The shamanic explanation of the origins of life and of the intelligent nature of the plants and animals which inhabit the rainforest are quite unbelievable to most, but a rational approach to understanding their perspective lends extraordinary insight into some of the greatest mysteries of human consciousness.

Comment:

Why skeptics will never accept the existence of psi

Matt Rouge
Michael Prescott's Blog
Fri, 16 Jun 2017 17:44 UTC

I had been thinking about writing this post for awhile, and I begin to fight my standard inertia bit more when I saw this article on Slate, dated May 17, 2017: "Daryl Bem Proved ESP Is Real. Which means science is broken."

Then, in the comments on this blog, Leo MacDonald referred to a related post on NEUROLOGICAblog: "Follow Up on Bem's Psi Research."

We'll be talking about these in a moment, but first my thesis:

Skeptics will never be compelled to accept the existence of psi because laboratory research involves difficult statistics that can be argued about ad infinitum, and exceptional individual cases of psi can be dismissed as "anecdotes" one by one.

Let's look at both of these issues in turn.

Comment: The thing is, skeptic fundamentalists are probably a tiny minority: a collection of tenured, out-of-touch eggheads who don't get around much with actual people. Actual people are more open minded (sometimes too open minded, but still). And for those who are on the fence, there will always be people like journalist Leslie Kean to give them their first glimpse. Kean is the author of the 2017 book Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife, which covers a lot of the evidence, in the lab and out of it. Don't let the skeptics get you down: they're losers.

Do we all need a little time simply to sit and think?

André Spicer
Aeon
Wed, 14 Jun 2017 15:15 UTC

Not busy-work, ticking off to-do lists or keeping-up-with-stuff. Just sitting. And thinking. Is it so hard?

Pop-up philosophy. Stop, sit down and just think. That's what I wrote on a whiteboard - then I took it outside and propped it next to a small folding chair near the entrance to my office at City, University of London.

For a week, I had been traveling around London with two folding deckchairs and a whiteboard. My quarry was stupidity-intensive spots. I had set up outside the London Stock Exchange, a large bank that had been bailed out by the taxpayer, the Houses of Parliament, Oxford Street, St Paul's Cathedral and the BBC. Now it was time to reflect on the stupidities closest to home. So I set up my deckchairs outside my own university.

Students and faculty came and went, saw the deckchairs, looked at me, read my sign. Some seemed surprised. Others took a photo with their smartphones. Many laughed. A few sat down and joined me in a few minutes of quiet contemplation.

The understated nature of fatherly affection

Kory Floyd
The Conversation
Tue, 13 Jun 2017 03:23 UTC

Men may not be from Mars, but - compared to women - they do communicate in very different ways.

Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the relationships of fathers and sons. Outwardly, many father and son pairs may appear distant and disengaged. A guy who wouldn't think twice about hugging and kissing his mom might offer his father only a stilted handshake. Dads who shower their daughters with affection may go years without telling their sons they love them. Men are often chided by their wives or mothers for not being willing to show more affection to their dads or their sons.

Such criticisms overlook a larger truth, one that I've spent years exploring as a communication researcher: Often for men, showing affection is more about what they do than what they say. Their ways of communicating love can be subtle. And while to outside observers they may seem like weak substitutes for genuine affection, to many fathers and sons they're every bit as meaningful as words, kisses and hugs.

How brain circuits govern hunger and cravings

Science Daily
Wed, 14 Jun 2017 18:16 UTC

The urge to satisfy hunger is a primal one, but -- as any dieter knows -- choices about when and what to eat can be influenced by cues in the environment, not just how long it's been since breakfast. The fact that food-associated visual cues in television commercials and on highway signs can contribute to overeating is well-documented. But how exactly do these external signals trigger cravings and influence behavior?

By developing a new approach to imaging and manipulating particular groups of neurons in the mouse brain, scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have identified a pathway by which neurons that drive hunger influence distant neurons involved in the decision of whether or not to react to food-related cues. Their findings could open the door to targeted therapies that dampen food cue-evoked cravings in people with obesity. The research was published online today in the journal Nature.

"The main question we were asking is: how do evolutionarily ancient hunger-promoting neurons at the base of the brain, in the hypothalamus, influence 'cognitive' brain areas to help us find and eat calorie-rich foods in a complex and changing world?"

said co-corresponding author Mark Andermann, PhD, an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at BIDMC and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School (HMS).

"To put it simply, when you're hungry, the picture of a cheeseburger may be extremely appealing and effective in influencing your behavior," explained lead author Yoav Livneh, PhD, postdoctoral fellow at BIDMC. "But if your belly is full after eating a big meal, the same cheeseburger picture will be unappealing. We think that the pathway we discovered from hunger-promoting neurons to a region of the brain called the insular cortex plays an important role here."

Therapeutic benefits of mindfulness practices for mood disorders

Ali Le Vere
Greenmedinfo.com
Sun, 04 Jun 2017 23:39 UTC

Thoughts become things.

This isn't just some hippie-dippy, crunchy-granola, new-age construct (and don't get me wrong, I live for all things hippie-dippy). This is scientifically validated fact, well established in the peer-reviewed literature.

Mindset is instrumental to healing, since our thoughts influence our tendency towards inflammation, our propensity to develop pathology, the density of our brain matter, and our attainment of allostasis—the adaptive activation of neural, neuroendocrine and neuroendocrine immune mechanisms to maintain stability in the face of stressful challenges (McEwen, 1998). A meta-analysis of over three hundred articles by Segerstrom and Miller (2004) elucidated that physiological reactions to acute stressors serve adaptive functions, whereas chronic stress perturbs the finely orchestrated balance in the immune system and down-regulates both cellular and humoral (antibody-mediated) immune measures (Segerstrom & Miller, 2004).

Specifically, perceived stress increases hyper-coagulability and adhesion molecule expression making blood more 'sticky', creating a pro-atherogenic, pro-inflammatory environment conducive to the development of cardiovascular disease, immune imbalance, and a depressive mental state. In contrast, these pathophysiological changes are reversed by increased perception of uplifts (Jain, Mills, von Kanel, Hong, & Dimsdale, 2007).

Different cultures lie in different ways

Milla Bengtsson
Reliawire
Mon, 12 Jun 2017 14:27 UTC

People's language changes when they lie, depending on their cultural background, psychologists have discovered. The researchers asked participants of Black African, South Asian, White European and White British ethnicity to complete a Catch-the-Liar task in which they provided genuine and false statements.

They found the statements of Western liars tend to include fewer first-person "I" pronouns than the statements of truth-tellers. This is a common finding and believed to be due to the liar trying to distance themselves from the lie.

Professor Paul Taylor of Lancaster University in the UK said:

"Science has long known that people's use of language changes when they lie. Our research shows that prevalent beliefs about what those changes look like are not true for all cultures."

However, the researchers did not find the difference when examining the lies of Black African and South Asian participants. Instead, these participants increased their use of first person pronoun and decreased their third person "he/she" pronouns—they sought to distance their social group rather than them self from the lie.

Quote of the Day

State power has its own limits defined by the fact that it is authority that reaches people from outside. State power cannot oversee and dictate the creative states of the soul and mind, the inner states of love, freedom and goodwill. The state cannot demand from its citizens faith, prayer, love, goodness and conviction. It cannot regulate scientific, religious and artistic creation. It should not intervene in moral, family and daily private life, and only when extremely necessary should it impinge on people's economic initiative and creativity.

- Ivan Ilyin

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Science of the Spirit

Beginner's mind: You cannot learn what you think you already know

Helping girls heal from trauma with yoga

Oxytocin turns on a mother's protective instinct

An anthropologist's theory on shamanism and the origins of knowledge completely rewrites our understanding of DNA

Why skeptics will never accept the existence of psi

Do we all need a little time simply to sit and think?

The understated nature of fatherly affection

How brain circuits govern hunger and cravings

Therapeutic benefits of mindfulness practices for mood disorders

Different cultures lie in different ways

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