The Orbitofrontal Cortex
This lowest region is believed to participate actively in that larger orchestration which assigns to incoming messages their particular positive or negative ''grade'' on the emotional motivational survival scale of values. What correlates with a reduction in orbitofrontal functions in normal subjects Highly trained monks have been monitored by fMRI while they were in a meditative state described as ''open presence.'' Once they enter this state, outside events no longer distract them, nor do...
LaidBack Nurturing Promotes LaidBack Limbic System Receptors
I'm not frightened of the darkness outside, it's the darkness inside houses I don't like. Maternal care during infancy serves to ''program'' behavioral responses to stress in the offspring by altering the development of the neural systems that mediate fearful-ness. Children's personalities are shaped by what happens in their early home environment. Researchers at McGill University asked How does the infant brain respond when the circumstances are either stressful or more nurturing In careful...
The Amygdala as a Gateway to Our Fears
Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. The name amygdala Latin, almond comes from its shape. Each amygdala is buried near the inside tip of the temporal lobe. As research on the amygdala has exploded during the past decade, so has its relevance to Zen. Even the amygdala's anatomical boundaries seem to have expanded. This more sizable extended amygdala might seem in keeping with our greater interest in understanding its...
The Lateral Septal Nucleus
The lateral septal nucleus receives its excitatory glutamate input from the CA3 nerve cells of the hippocampus. Serotonin influences its responsiveness to this hippocampal input, and lateral septal activities can be reduced in states of de-pression.13 The lateral septum then projects to the medial dorsal nucleus of the thalamus. The path from there can lead messages on to the orbitofrontal cortex Z 183, 236, 656 figure 6 . This circuit provides one way for items that have first registered in...
The Wide Variety of Cingulate Gyrus Functions
Why the anterior cingulate cortex is active in such a wide variety of cognitive and emotional tasks has become an important issue in recent research. Each cingulate gyrus lies next to the midline, just above the corpus callosum. It then extends down beyond it at both ends like the curves on a long, horizontal letter C see figure 4, chapter 23 . A glance at the numbered areas in figure 7 see chapter 40 suggests why some cingulate functions are diverse. Some five to seven different...
Responses of the Nucleus Accumbens in Human Subjects
It has been said that the nucleus accumbens behaves as though it doesn't like to be disappointed.'' Indeed, more fMRI signals develop in your ventral striatum if your rewarding drink of fruit juice doesn't arrive on time.8 This suggests that the accumbens is one part of a responsive system that signals when predictable rewards are late. Signals increase in the ventral striatum while subjects are anticipating the arrival of unpleasant electrical stimuli delivered to the skin, irrespective of...
Effects of Drugs
The public is learning that drugs and food can each be abused. As a general rule, any substance that is abused will release more dopamine into the nucleus accumbens and enhance its functional activity. Drugs of abuse have other effects on laboratory mice. They enhance both the rewarding effects of morphine and increase the mice's preference for a sugar solution.6 On the other hand, many antipsychotic drugs act by reducing the functional activity of DA. When this occurs, certain local GABA nerve...
Desire Advances during Retreats Vipassana Romance
Desire and anguish take many forms. During Zen training, both our urgent desires and our sufferings are grist for the mill of introspection. One form of acute romantic feeling can develop and has been given a name. The phenomenon is instructive, because when it arises in the course of a meditative retreat, its urgency can serve as the useful focus for self-analysis. If you can become sufficiently objective to do so, that is. I am referring here to a kind of short-term, powerful, affective...
PET Scans of Opioid Mu Receptors When Subjects Respond to Pain and to Aversive
The next studies illustrate the point made earlier pain messages do more than activate several parts of the brain. They also lead to the delayed, secondary release of the brain's own opioids and other messengers which then help relieve pain. Meditators already know from experience how their muscles can hurt. Pain researchers have devised other unpleasant ways to induce, and monitor, major degrees of muscle discomfort. One of these ways is to inject a concen trated salt solution into the large...
Dopamine Systems
For his research on dopamine, Arvid Carlsson was a co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology in 2000. His studies showed that dopamine DA plays a prominent role in energizing the functions of the basal ganglia, and that these DA functions are enhanced by giving its precursor, L-dopa. Dopamine cell bodies reside in the midbrain, both in the substantia nigra and the ventral tegmental area Z 197-201 . Dopamine from their terminals energizes both the dorsal and the ventral striatum,...
Chapter 17 Some Gamma EEG and Heart Rate Changes during Meditation
1. T. Deshimaru. The Zen Way to the Martial Arts. New York, Arkana Penguin , 1982, 3. 2. A. Lutz, L. Greischor, N. Rawlings, et al. Long-term meditators self-induce high amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 2004 101 16369-16373. Muscle artifact can be a thorny problem. The methods used in this article to measure and reduce muscle artifact may interest other researchers who wish to study gamma activities. 4. R. Davidson and...
Previc 3d Space
When we started this research, more than three decades ago, no more than five papers were published in a year. Now, hundreds of important and exciting papers are published annually. Usually, we think that space is something empty. And, if we neglect something, it means we pay no attention to it. Who would want to pay attention to anything that was empty A lot of researchers would, and are doing so. They are intrigued by patients who neglect space.'' Why Because their patients' deficits...
Messenger Molecules Some New Data
Yin and yang in the harmonious brain, excitatory and inhibitory synaptic signals coexist in a purposeful balance. This chapter highlights new research on our brain's neuromessenger systems. The shorthand word systems refers here to the sequence of mechanisms which bring a messenger in touch with its specific receptors. It was the Monday after Easter, 1920. In the middle of the night, Otto Loewi had awakened with the design for his experiment. In his laboratory he would soon prove that when the...
Implications for Meditation and for Kensho
Kensho and satori are brief, transforming moments. Fresh ongoing perceptions are registered accurately, and they often remain indelible. In contrast, old maladaptive memory associations drop out instantly. So do all prior personal constructs and concepts of the self. This psychophysiological pattern is very distinctive. It does not suggest that one's hippocampal CA1 cells per se are malfunctioning. Nor does it imply that one's usual stream of messages must have stopped on their way to CA1 cells...
The Male Animal Libido and ExLibido
There it is, in us always, though it may be asleep. The male animal. The mate____All the male animals fight for the female, from the land crab to the bird of paradise. They don't just sit and talk. They act. James Thurber 1894-1961 and Elliot Nugent 1900-1980 , The Male Animal1 Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it. There it is that insatiable lusting to act. The instinctual drive to caress, to couple, to overcome any competition. Libido is not a male preserve....
Two PET Scan Studies of a Mu Opioid Agonist Drug
Agonist drugs activate receptors. Remifentinal is a synthetic opioid agonist that activates mu opioid receptors. It was given in clinically active dosages during two important pharmacological studies. The results of the first study suggest that both our higher-order endogenous opioid systems and our cognitive networks each participate not only in the way opioids relieve pain but also in the processes through which a placebo relieves pain.13 In this first controlled study, nine subjects received...
The Varieties of Presence
The particular presence associated with authentic teachers is an ongoing quality. Their followers recognize it readily and distinguish it from lesser forms of mere charisma see chapter 22 . The 1979 Hardy survey of religious experiences was based on subjects who grew up in our contemporary Western culture. 20 of them reported having experienced a different variety of presence. These were brief episodes that included a sense of presence described as though something nonhuman in nature were...
The Septal Region and the Nucleus Accumbens
The nucleus accumbens, a forebrain structure critical for reward and motivation, has a key role in reinforcing properties of drugs of abuse. Front and center in the limbic system are the septal nuclei. They lie just above and in front of the anterior commissure and third ventricle. Byzantine connections link the several septal nuclei with the rest of the brain. This makes their functions difficult to sort out Z 169-172, 234, 236, 608, 620, 821 . Because the nucleus accumbens is an active part...
EEG and Heart Rate Changes in Zen Meditation
When one goes into Zen meditation, one passes, as a usual process, through a psychic field, from the surface down to the depth, as if one were plummeting into a lake in a diving bell. Worldly ideas or irrelevant thoughts pass through the mind even in time of meditation. In this case I simply wait and allow these things to go through my mind until they naturally disappear in an instant. I do not dwell upon these experiences that pass through my mind. In Hirai's series, Zen monks who had trained...
EverPresent Awareness 1
Chapter 48 introduced this topic and chapter 56 will continue to discuss it. The ultimate development of this third category of ongoing conscious awareness would occur only in some extraordinary person who continues to experience this level of awareness, and to an extraordinary degree, throughout each 24-hour period. The Buddha serves as an exemplar, and more. He was said permanently to have maintained not only this same special quality but also to have gone beyond this to the unique level of...
Landmarks Brain in Overview
The average adult brain weighs about 1400 grams 3 pounds , or approximately 2 percent of the total body weight. The brain weighs about the same as the liver. But, information is what it's designed to digest and resynthesize, not meals. Keep referring to this chapter as the rest of the book unfolds. The simplified version of the brain in figure 3 shows major landmarks on the outer surface as viewed from the left side. At left, the prefrontal cortex occupies most of the convex portion of the...
Daio Kokushi On Zen
Daio Kokushi 1235-1309 traveled to China for his early training. He returned to Kamakura and Kyoto, bringing back a pure strict, traditional Rinzai style of Zen. Daito Kokushi was his dharma heir, and became the first abbot of Daitokuji, founded in 1324. The following lines, suggestive of the important influence Taoism had on Zen, are adapted from D. T. Suzuki's translation in Manual of Zen Buddhism.1 A reality exists, even before heaven and earth It has no form, much less a name. Eyes fail to...
What is the most important thing to understand about Zen and the brain
I'd sum up briefly in the following way Zen training is an agency of character change. It's a program designed to point the whole personality in the direction of increasing selflessness and enhanced awareness. To this end, the Path of Zen implies a long-range program of systematic training. It proceeds within a restrained and culturally acceptable established meditative tradition. The whole setting encourages each aspirant to engage in a series of meditative retreats. There, one shares their...
The Extraordinary Scope of Migraine The Hildegard Syndrome
Migraine is a multisystem disorder of neuronal hyperexcitability. Daniels Pietrobon and Jorg Striessnig1 The awareness that migraine is an expression of the genetics, personality, and way of life of an individual is only very recently being proclaimed. Migraine is a common disorder, so common that everyone assumes doctors know all about it. I didn't. I had no lecture on migraine in medical school. I had to pick up my information about its brief quickenings later, at random, as I went along....
Neural Pathways to and from the Insula
The insula does more than help process smell, taste, touch, emotional and vestibular information. By following the course of various paths leading up to the insula we can understand how some of its functions are derived from messages relayed up by other small autonomic sensory fibers that ascend from different internal parts of our body.14 Several modest caveats apply to what most such small fiber pathways can accomplish 1 They conduct their messages relatively slowly. 2 The information they...
Serotonin Systems
The third group of biogenic amine nerve cells releases serotonin ST . Serotonin nerve cells are buried deep along the midline core of the brainstem. Here, they cluster into the several raphe nuclei Z 205, 208 figure 7, 198 . The human brain contains only some 235,000 ST nerve cells, but each terminal network also ramifies extensively.15 Most interest in these pages focuses on the dorsal raphe nucleus because its slender axons rise up to innervate various parts of the cerebrum. Recent research...
The Insula and the Sense of Smell
One fMRI study monitored subjects who were inhaling odorants that generated intense feelings of disgust. On a later occasion, they viewed video clips which showed other persons' faces evidencing disgust. The evidence suggested that our anterior insula is processing envisoning, mirroring both our own disgust and our recognizing another person's expression of disgust.5 Subjects in a different fMRI study were responding either to very disgusting odors animal feces or to merely unpleasant odors cat...
Is There Some Common Ground between Zen Experience and the Brain
The coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important event in the twentieth century. Experience never errs. Only your judgment errs by promising itself results which your experiments didn't produce. Toynbee believed that religion exerted a major regenerative influence in human affairs. Da Vinci warned us not to expect too much from our experiments. Some of the common ground we now seek between religion and neuroscience begins when we set sail toward that experimental...