Neuroscience

Memories are not a true or false picture of the past; they are a Monet lily pond.

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

Your brain is locked in silence and darkness inside your skull, and all it is trying to do is understand the structures of the world so it can operate in it better. Whenever it encounters a surprise, it writes that down and it makes changes to your circuitry.

But as you go through life and your brain develops better models of the world, less and le

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Research published in Scientific Reports suggests how you perceive the passage of time is related to the amount of new perceptual information you absorb. When you're young, so many things seem new, and your brain has more to process. That makes the passage of time feel longer; as you get older, relatively little seems new, which means your brain ha... See more

Roshi Joan Halifax tells a story about witnessing a conversation in the early 1970s between Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, and Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist and systems theorist, about the mind. Bateson asked, “Where is the mind?” Salk pointed to his own head. Bateson chuckled, shook his head, and pointed to the space between them... 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

We build upon the key fact that the brain is (part of) the body and as such, like any other bodily organ, the brain is made of cells. The focus on cellular rather than neural, brain processing allows us to underscore the idea that flexible responses to changes in the environments requires flexible adjustments not only through neural, but also throu... See more

These fndings indicate that, while MBCT is a reliable and e

fcacious intervention,

there is a need to address the sustainability of treatment-related improvements in patients with

BD

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.

Together, wanting and liking encourage us to pursue rewards. But these sensations can also stand alone, creating situations where you might know that you enjoy something but don’t want to go after it, or where you might have a strong desire for something that you don’t get much pleasure from.