Category: Neuroscience of Mindfulness

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Neuroscience of Mindfulness: Sugar, Drugs, & Dopamine

Let’s imagine that you were to give up sugary sweets for a month like I recently did as part of a requirement for a nutrition class. The first few days might be relatively easy...

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Take a Deep Breath: The Physiology of Slow Deep Breathing

Take a slow, deep breath. “I am large, I contain multitudes.” ~ Walt Whitman The physiological mechanisms that make up a single breath could fill an entire book. And yet, for an event that...

OTIS MUGSHOT

Animal Consciousness: Can Animals Think?

Dig, dig, dig, bite! Dig, dig, dig, bite! Like an inmate who chips away at the same square foot of floorboard day after day with the hope of tunneling to freedom, Otis returns to...

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The Neuroscience of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

My own diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) precludes my impartiality in writing a scientific article on this particular disorder. Rather than attempt to claim objectivity, I will embrace my subjective bias. I have found...

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The Neuroscience of Anxiety Disorders

Anxiety is a native language to all humans. Let’s imagine anxiety as a 100-floor skyscraper with a metaphorical elevator capable of containing the entire world’s population (sorry if you’re claustrophobic or afraid of heights)....

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Neuroscience of Mindfulness: How Do We Know What We Know

“To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.” ~ Confucius We have thus far examined The Neuroscience of Mindfulness & Anxiety and The Default Mode Network, Meditation,...

MRI by Nevit Dilmen / [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL]

Neuroscience of Mindfulness: Default Mode Network, Meditation, & Mindfulness

“Ipsa scientia potestas est.” ~ Sir Francis Bacon        Translated as, “Knowledge itself is power,” this quote by Sir Francis Bacon appeared in his 1597 essay, Meditationes Sacrae (“Sacred Meditations”). Bacon has been credited as...

brain X-ray

The Neuroscience of Mindfulness & Anxiety

“The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.” ~ Michio Kaku When we were...