Neuroscience

So here is the take-home lesson. We have to seek novelty, because this is what lays down new memories in the brain.

Research has shown a staggering number of health benefits associated with dispositional optimism, from improvements in cardiovascular health, to how quickly wounds heal, to slower disease progression.

neural pathways we don’t use die off over time. What makes our brains hold on to these pathways — and create more — is not simply repeating the same things we’ve learned over and over again, but continually taking on difficult problems.

The precuneus is involved in mental imagery concerning the self, episodic memory, and modeling other people’s views—all of which are main components of the DMN. Benedek and Jauk, psychologists specializing in research on creativity, note that “higher creativity is consistently associated with higher gray matter density in DMN regions, especially... See more

We now know that the brain’s capacity to learn, to adapt, to change in response to experience is so fundamental that it strikes the wrong note to say that an activity (like meditation) ‘changes the brain’ as if such change is special or unusual. In fact, everything we do changes the brain on some level. Or rather, the brain is constantly changing,... See more